Google donates millions to help end slavery

Yes, there are still millions of slaves in the world:

[quote]
Google is on course to smash the £30bn annual revenue barrier by the end
of this year, so - in time-honoured fashion with it be Christmas 'n' all
- the company has plonked just over 0.1 per cent of this cash on the
philanthropic pile.

The world's largest ad broker isn't just fretting about educating girls,
empowering people through technology and bigging up science, tech,
engineering and maths skills, it also wants to do something about
modern-day slavery, too.

Google has set aside $11.5m from its $40m charity fund for 2011 to help
"free more than 12,000 people" from serfdom.

"The bad news: there are more slaves today than at any other point in
history," the company said in a blog post on its Google.org website.

"The good news: by returning to their villages and helping educate
others, freed slaves protect hundreds of thousands of at-risk people
from being tricked or forced into similar misery."

Google went on to claim that the support it was offering would not only
"save" thousands of people from slavery, but that it would also "prevent
millions more from being victimised."
[/quote]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/1...e_slavery/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery#Present_day

Of course that's just the tip of Google's philanthropic iceberg:

[quote]
These grants, which total $40 million, are only part of our annual
philanthropic efforts. Over the course of the year, Google provided more
than $115 million in funding to various nonprofit organizations and
academic institutions around the world; our in-kind support (programs
like Google Grants and Google Apps for Education that offer free
products and services to eligible organizations) came to more than $1
billion, and our annual company-wide GoogleServe event and related
programs enabled individual Googlers to donate more than 40,000 hours of
their own volunteer time.
[/quote]

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011...-2011.html

Meanwhile, Apple, which earlier this year was briefly the world's
biggest company, and a keen proponent of Intellectual Slavery, donated
precisely zero, to anyone, ever, mainly thanks to the narcissistic
principles of its former leader, Steve Jobs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...story.html
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08...ic-giving/

However, now Jobs in firmly planted in a ditch, Apple is free to behave
like decent human beings again:

[quote]
Jobs' personal attitude towards philanthropy is said to have trickled
down through the ranks of Apple over the years. But all of that is
changing now, as Apple adopts an impressive corporate matching policy
for charitable contributions. It might feel like a small change, but
make no mistake: this is Cook starting to leave his mark as CEO and he's
moving in a direction that no one expected from Jobs.
[/quote]

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2...-apple.ars

Now if only they'd stop behaving like a bunch of patent extortionists,
the transformation would be complete.

K. | "UNIX is basically a simple operating
http://slated.org | system, but you have to be a genius
Fedora 8 (Werewolf) on šky | to understand the simplicity"
kernel 2.6.31.5, up 206 days | ~ Dennis Ritchie