First off, I hate Bill Gates. He has prospered and profited through the use of illegal and unethical means, by illegally crushing and restricting competition, while at the same time giving the world an unstable, easily-exploitable product. And he knows it. Vista is the worst, with it's built-in obsolescence mechanism (being that Vista needs to "phone home" every so often, or else it thinks it's a pirated copy; how long will Microsoft keep that "phone home" server operational once the next version of Windows is released?).

Yes, Bill has more money than god. He has more money than he knows what to do with. He has more money than he'll ever be able to spend.

All of that being said, it's still good to see that at least some of the money is going to try to help people. of course, if he sold Windows at a reasonable price, I'd gladly and voluntarily donate the difference to the charity of my choice.

As for the Vanderbilt/Rockerfeller comment, my take on that is that the only way anyone can give a gift of that magnitude is if they are insanely rich. And you can only get insanely rich by (in effect) stealing from other people. The size of gifts/donations doesn't mean anything to me when trying to judge how generous a person (or company) is. It's the percentage of their income/worth that matters to me. A person making $25,000 a year who gives $2,000 to charity is more generous (in my eyes) than a person making $1.6mil a year who gives $100,000.

Lastly, I agree that the environment, wildlife, and animal rescue need more support. We humans have this obsession of strip-mining every morsel of land we find, and then moving on to strip-mine more. We destroy everything in our path. At the rate we are heading, it is only a matter of time before we make this earth uninhabitable. Though while it would be sad to see the earth and the wildlife die off, it would be a blessing in disguise for mankind to force itself into extinction.