Letter from Arthur C. Clarke and Dan Werthimer
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Letter from Arthur C. Clarke and Dan Werthimer
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 Es99  Send message Joined: 23 Aug 05 Posts: 10874 Credit: 350,402 RAC: 0 
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Out of curiosity I tried to make a donation. I couldn't use Paypal from the UK but the credit card seemed to work fine. Which is a bit of a shame because that's the money I had set aside for the Romanian orphans. Reality Internet Personality ID: 265904 ·  |
kev1701e  Send message Joined: 28 Dec 99 Posts: 138 Credit: 10,216,553 RAC: 0 
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It works like you'd use a normal credit/debit card, but you are limited to the amount of money you have in your PayPal account. On the US site, the Debit Bar info is found on the Help page under 'Features/PayPal Debit Card/Debit Bar'. You access it at www.paypal.com/VDEBIT. I can't confirm non-US usage since I get redirected to the paypal login when I try the Canada or UK sites. kev kev X2 4400+,4200+ @2.75GHz, XP1800+ @1.65GHz, P4 @1.6GHz 
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Fuzzy Hollynoodles  Send message Joined: 3 Apr 99 Posts: 9659 Credit: 251,998 RAC: 0 |
Yep, this feature is in my PayPal also. I didn't know there was a difference between US and non-US, as I created it to use at ebay. Thanks Kev. :-) "I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me 
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Geek@Play  Send message Joined: 31 Jul 01 Posts: 2467 Credit: 86,146,931 RAC: 0
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I have to make a criticism relating to this topic of funding, they ask for donations but they don't open it up to everybody. Perhaps it's time to think "outside the box". Does Boinc/Seti really need UCB? Seems to me that other than offering a little floor space for this project they just suck money out of it. Having the donations set up so that only North American users can contribute is a SEVERE restriction for an international project. Does being affiliated with UCB bring in enough funding on it's own to offset the above donations issue? Then again I probably don't know all there is to know in this area! Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....Boinc.... ID: 275442 · |
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Joseph03051971 Send message Joined: 8 Sep 03 Posts: 43 Credit: 1,909,093 RAC: 0
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Couldn't someone working with Seti@Home set up a 501c3 for the sole purpose of contributing the money collected through Paypal. Call it Friends of Seti@home or something like that. ID: 275459 · |
Pappa  Send message Joined: 9 Jan 00 Posts: 2562 Credit: 12,301,681 RAC: 0
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A protion of is the legal paperwork and filing... Then an Accountant to audit the funds as they come and go... So it not easy... Everytime a hand touches soemthing it cost money... My only suggestion is you have a Team Captain that is Trustworthy, send them money and let them send a larger Donation... If they are not trustworthy... Well that will show up in a hurry... Or if you can find someone that has a PayPal account that has a Visa Logo... Pappa Couldn't someone working with Seti@Home set up a 501c3 for the sole purpose of contributing the money collected through Paypal. Call it Friends of Seti@home or something like that. Please consider a Donation to the Seti Project. ID: 275489 · |
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River~~ Send message Joined: 25 Dec 05 Posts: 28 Credit: 87 RAC: 0 
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I'd venture to say that it's not the postal rates but the bank charges to send funds internationally. On one end of the transaction or the other, a small donation would be eaten up by the foreign exchange fees. MJ[/quote] To send small amounts of money internationally, often it is cheapest to send cash. Common sense says you send it registered, but international registered post is only around £4. (~ $7 ). And for that fee, if the money does not arrive the Post Office replaces it. Again for small amounts a bureau de change will often charge less commission than your bank, and ther are no transmission charges. Of course the university may not want to accpet cash - a dollar bill is legal tender for all debts but not necessarily for all donations ;-) I agree with previous posts - the uni should accept paypal and Matt has my sympathy for having tried to win round the bureacrats. River~~ ID: 276165 · |
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River~~ Send message Joined: 25 Dec 05 Posts: 28 Credit: 87 RAC: 0
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Couldn't someone working with Seti@Home set up a 501c3 for the sole purpose of contributing the money collected through Paypal. Call it Friends of Seti@home or something like that. This is not the most useful way to do it. People outside the US can most easily donate to bodies in their own countries. The way to keep bank fees down, so that SETI rather than the banks get the biggest share is to set up a Friends of SETI@home in any country that is likely to have large numbers of donors. An added advantage is tax based. A UK donor won't get any advantage donating to a 501c3 because Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs don't recognise the US tax code, funny that. But if we got charity status in the UK, then the UK government would add 28% to most donations. (That is how it works here - donations are not tax deductible, instead our Govt adds a bonus to all "Gift Aid" donations). I do not know whether our Charity Commision would recognise Friends of SETI@home as qualifying for this status - I do know that they offer free advice to people setting up new trusts about whther they count as charitable. The rule will be different in every country. Sorry, The EU does not count as a single country for this (not yet, may not ever). It makes tax sense to have a separate Firends group in each country where there is a tax advantage for donations. By having a donation collector in each country, donors save on bank charges, can send cheques if the prefer, do not have curency conversion charges on donations by card, and can donate by any means that country's collector wishes to provide. Perhaps once per month, funds could be transferred to SETI@home. Because the funds would be aggreagted together, transmission charges and postage would be a smaller fraction of the whole. Against this would be the fact that there wouild be fees - bank fees, postage, cost of sending out receipts to donors who need them, auditing costs (auditing is essential for charities and to avoid accusations of fraud and generally for the confidence of donors). There would be set up fees, and these would come out of donations. Advice would be needed (eg in the UK: is the group a trust or a comany limited by guarantee?). If SETI@home folded, what would the group do with funds still in its hands at that time? However in the UK it is fairly cheap to set up a small trust, much less than (I think) it costs to do a 501c3 in the US. Personally I think it would be worthwhile, if one or more folk in that country were willing to donate the time to get it going. In the UK you'd need at least two people to be trustees or directors - and I would suggest that would be prudent anyway even if your local law do not require it. I would suggest that if you have ten or more people willing to donate monthly, or a hundred or more willing to donate annualy it would be worth someone's time putting this together. And finally, if you did not get a group in your own country, you would only need one country to offer a PayPal a/c Fuzzy: how many donors do you think you'd get from Denmark? Would it be enough to justify a Danish Friends of SETI@home? Then you could set one up. If not, and if (say) there was an Irish collector with a PayPal facility, you could recommend other Danish people to use PayPal to donate there if they could not uyse a credit card. Nation-based teams (BOINC Australia, Dutch Power Cows, etc etc) would you like to take on the role as a service to all crunchers in your country? You have the advantage of having a core user base to start out from. If any of this takes off, perhaps the donations page would have a set of flags for the different countries' donations so that prospective donors would click on the one that best suited their needs. It is just an idea. Personally my own priority would be with a UK Friends of Orbit@home, and I am not personally up for taking a lead role in Friends of SETI@home. If anyone *else* in the UK is up for it, I'd be happy to offer them moral support, amateur advice (I have a law degree but am not a practising lawyer). Maybe later on I'd copy what you've done for Orbit, especialy if UK Friends of SETI went well... SETI blazed the way for massive distributed computing. Perhaps too you can blaze the way for funding it by distributed collection? River~~ ID: 276213 · |
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Fuzzy Hollynoodles Send message Joined: 3 Apr 99 Posts: 9659 Credit: 251,998 RAC: 0 |
Hi River~~! :-) I don't know, I don't really see the reason for doing this, as most people here have Dankort, which very easily and for a very small fee can be transfered into a VISA card. Many banks here are offering Mastercards also, which I have myself. As Kirsten, teamleader of BOINC Denmark, stated here, using a Euro card, a VISA card, or a Mastercard, the donation can be performed with a very small fee. These cards are easy to get here. The other option of having a bank check issued and sent with snailmail I have used myself several times in the past, both to USA and to India. Yes, you pay the exchange fee to the bank, which is the standard for exchanges. And as we here pay exchange fees anyway, if we want any foreign currencies for e.g. travels and vacations, as we're not participating in the EMU, we still have our own currency, there's no differences in whether you exchange for a check to send or for travelmoney. I'm not familiar with other ways of transfering money. But of course, using a creditcard is easier and the cheapest. So people here are able to donate also without PayPal. As things are at the moment I'm not interested in founding a Danish Friends of Seti@Home with the purpose to collect money in PayPal and having them sent to Berkeley, but if others want to, they are wellcome to do so. "I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me
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River~~ Send message Joined: 25 Dec 05 Posts: 28 Credit: 87 RAC: 0
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... I don't really see the reason for doing this, as most people here have Dankort, which very easily and for a very small fee can be transfered into a VISA card. Many banks here are offering Mastercards also, which I have myself. If most people can get Visa/MC then that reason is not so important in Denmark. Does Denmark have special tax rules for gifts? In the US gifts to SETI would be tax deductible, in the UK direct gifts to SETI would not be, but gifts to a UK friends organisation would attract Gift Aid - which is similar to tax relief only it enlarges the gift instead of shrinking the donors tax bill. I don't know whether your country has anything similar or not, you'd be in a better position to find out than me. I do know that if anyone did this in the UK, the gifts would be worth 28% more, more than enough to cover the professional fees for auditing etc. River~~ ID: 277078 · |
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Fuzzy Hollynoodles Send message Joined: 3 Apr 99 Posts: 9659 Credit: 251,998 RAC: 0 |
... I don't really see the reason for doing this, as most people here have Dankort, which very easily and for a very small fee can be transfered into a VISA card. Many banks here are offering Mastercards also, which I have myself. We pay tax on everything here!!!!! ;-) And donations to charity is only tax deductable, if you donate an amount above a certain limit, and only with the amount minus the limited amount. Gifts is an area of itself, you don't give gifts here of any value above the triviality limit, as the reciever will be taxed for the value of it. And donating to a university in a foreign country is certainly not tax deductable!!! We don't pay tuition here; even the foreign students don't pay tuition, we pay taxes! So sending money to an American university is not something you usually do, unless you really want to, as we do. My guess is that the tax authorities will say, that you don't have to, so it's your own responsibility and money. I can send money to Berkeley as well to anybody else, it's a private matter. Unless I send big amounts of money, then I think the tax authorities will start question it, as sending money out of the country also can reduce your capital, which also is taxed! Hope this answer your questions. "I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me
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River~~ Send message Joined: 25 Dec 05 Posts: 28 Credit: 87 RAC: 0
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:-( ok fair comment. as you say there'd be no advantage to a friends of organisation in you country. It was just an idea, and it might work in some countries... R~~ ID: 278600 · |
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Fuzzy Hollynoodles Send message Joined: 3 Apr 99 Posts: 9659 Credit: 251,998 RAC: 0 |
Don't say :-( to our taxes here, as we have all the benefits of living in a country where we have access to social benefits and wellfare, free healthcare, free hospital stays and treatment, good cheap childcare, free education, good libraries etc. Yes, we pay for it through our taxes, but I'll say that having the benefits of the goods, it compensates for the high taxes. But Matt told me and Pappa in a mail that campus actually have realized after having seen how they have raised these money themselves, that a PayPal solution should be available. I presented your suggestion to him and asked him if he thought this was something I should look further into, like creating a PayPal account with the sole purpose of offering the opportunity to donate to Seti, and he responded that I could save myself the efford by waiting. But he also said it will take a long time, before they'll have this done. So it won't be happening in the nearest future. But, as he said in the Donation thread in Numbers, they're learning through this first drive, and they'll correct the mistakes and flaws in the next drive. "I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me
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Darth Dogbytes™ Send message Joined: 30 Jul 03 Posts: 7512 Credit: 2,021,148 RAC: 0
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How would they have ever gotten along without you? Keep up the good work... Account frozen... ID: 278660 · |
David@home  Send message Joined: 16 Jan 03 Posts: 755 Credit: 5,040,916 RAC: 28
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SETI search faces shutdown: the news has reached the UK computer press. Link to post describing the details: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ forum_thread.php?id=26991#280483 ID: 280484 · |
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