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Bletchley Park Finds a Saviour In Google
hypnosec noted that Google has stepped up to try to help fundraising for Bletchley Park. From TFA: "The point is that all of us have heroes. At Google our heroes are Alan Turing and the people who worked on breaking the codes at Bletchley Park. It was probably the most inspiring and uplifting achievement in scientific technology over the last hundred years. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that without Alan Turing, Google as we know it wouldn't exist."
They did donate $100K.
FTA: Google already played a crucial role at Bletchley - the company contributed an hefty amount of some $100,000, which was used to assist in securing the papers of Alan Turing- a leading seminal computer scientist and code breaker who worked at the venue.
The British Army should never be referred to as the "Royal Army" - it's the only one of the three armed forces in the UK *not* to have "royal in its title.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/British_Army (5th paragraph)
There are legitimate questions to be asked about how many resources we should spend commemorating/preserving the past, vs. letting the past be past and spending forward; but to the degree that comemmoration/celebration/recognition of the past is a worthwhile enterprise, Bletchley park has always seemed mysteriously neglected.
The work done there was extraordinarily vital in terms of signals intelligence and cryptography, and not having that done would have hampered the Allied war effort significantly. The fact that that work also included some groundbreaking CS and early computing machine work is just icing on the cake. There are other WWII sites with many more casualties; but the only other WWII R&D developments that can even fall in the same order of magnitude are the Manhattan Project, Penicillin mass-production, and possibly Radar(The cavity magnetron: defeated Hitler and produces delicious popcorn in minutes!).
Letting the past keep to itself is a self-consistent position, albeit not one I endorse; but any sort of historical preservation of WWII stuff that doesn't have Bletchley park well up there seems downright ill-formed...
There's a bit of difference though. As far as I can tell, Microsoft mainly "donates" to charity when it's their software and training that is being given to help further their brand. I may be incorrect in this, but Google isn't donating time and mandating/installing Chrome/ChromeOS on all the PCs in the place or training people how to search efficiently.
IE:
Microsoft Donates $344 Million in Software To Worldwide Initiative to Train 400,000 Teachers (...to train their students in Microsoft software)
Microsoft donates cash, software to help military vets get IT skills (... to use their software to encourage businesses to buy more)
Microsoft Donates $250,000 of Software to Create IT Jobs for Youth in Kenya (... again, for Microsoft's overall benefit)
Heck, software is still a cheap donation. They can put any self-assessed value on it and print off a new copy for a dime a dozen to inflate their charitable donation amount.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Microsoft has a matching program for employee donation. It matches dollar by dollar and even donates $17 per hour if you do volunteer work. Microsoft also have the Giving Campaign (October in the US). Here different groups compete about raising the most donations (cash). There are fund raising events like breakfast with your Senior VP being your server, or auctions (dinner at home with Bill Gates is typical a top draw ~$50,000). In 2009 the Giving Campaign raised $70 million (cash) in the US. That is $35 millions from employees (about $500 per employee) and $35 millions from MS.