disney has actually been accused of adding dirty things into its films before. a more accurate impossitude would be: "disney relinquishes IP rights to 500-year old fairy tales".

The Feeding America website is really cool. There's a map called Hunger at Home that highlights the population of each state (and PR) and the unemployment rate, poverty rate, child poverty rate, etc. It was interesting to look at each state and see just how many people are struggling, even if it's in the form of interactive clicking and photos of adorable children nomming pasta.

For us os x and linux and for people who don't want to download IE8, just give Feeding America some money...according to their website, $1 will provide 10 pounds of food.

As somebody who's been testing IE 8 for work, I recommend not downloading, and just donating money yourself, it'll save you aggravation and headaches.

@pecan 3.14159265: I just really want to know what kind of food you can get 10 pounds of for a dollar. I know its probably some subsidized, government backed charitable write-off setup, but just the idea kinda scares me.

I'd download IE 8 if Bill Gates made a large cash donation to me.

@Radi0logy: I think part of what you can get is pre-chopped stuff, like a 10 pound bag of mixed vegetables that you can just throw into the steamer - and voila, you have variety and nutrition for X number of people. It's more efficient than to buy 2 pounds of carrots, 2 pounds of celery, etc. and put it together.

I honestly don't think it's bad food - I've never eaten at any of these places, cause I would feel bad doing that just to see what it tastes like..but when the alternative is no food at all, or eating someone's leftovers from a dumpster, I'm pretty sure 10 pounds of beans will go a long way.

@Radi0logy: Ramen. Delicious ramen.

Say I automate the download to repeat every single time it finishes...I wonder if they would they honor that? I am sure I could fire that up on a couple of our lab machines to jack up the numbers.

@Alex Chasick: Amen. Brother amen.

Apparently the inner grad student in me is still alive and procastinating. I still eat ramen atleast once a week just to "remember where i came from".

@Radiology: I also assume buying in bulk helps with the cost as well. and i agree with what walnut pi said.. that i am fairly certain the food is decent enough. It might not be the best tasting fare around, but i bet it is adequately nutritious.

And thanks walnut pi, donating directly is a good idea. I was almost considering downloading IE8 just to get people some food.

FYI, if you read the fine print you will note that Microsoft will donate up to $1,000,000 to FeedingAmerica. Download away!

@B: Done. And since I already blew my "discretionary spending" quota this month on a new monitor, the amount will be deducted from my monthly food budget. For added empathy. Helpless starving kids make me very sad.

@mac-phisto: *Wooooooooooooooosh*

This would have been a better promotion if it had been released when IE8 was first released. I downloaded and installed IE8 before it was pushed as part of the Recommended (but still voluntary) Windows Update patch. At this point I have IE8 on all of my machines, so they just lost out on 5 downloads. Maybe that was their plan all along.

@MostlyHarmless: Also that $10 is probably tossed into a huge fund used for bulk food purchases. Most things are significantly cheaper per unit when purchased in large quantities.

@b01000100: i recommend readin this post [consumerist.com] before you end up on the business end of a $750,000 lawsuit.

@TheWillow: ah, yes. i see it now.

It's about time that tease Snow White puts out.

Maybe instead Microsoft could just lower the retail price of the upcoming Windows 7, and consumers could decide where they want to donate the money they've saved, if at all? Nah, that would give too much power to the consumer.

Anyway, as pointed out above, MS has already set their maximum donation at one million dollars... isn't it kind of asinine of them to set aside money to donate to charity and then only donate an amount determined by some completely unrelated action on the part of the public? What happens if there aren't enough downloads to meet their maximum donation?

"Gosh, we had a million bucks that we were going use to give food to the hungry, but people just didn't download enough copies of our crappy web browser. Sorry, starving people, I guess the world only loves you $400,000 worth."

I'd download IE8 on to my computer but everytime I do, I lose my internet connection and need to go back to a previous restore point. This only happens on one PC though. If anyone has any ideas, I'd be happy to download it, and then continue to use Chrome and Firefox as usual.

@RandomHookup: Now you know why there's a Grumpy Dwarf.

@mac-phisto: If they re-releaqse The Rescuers, it would happen.

@John Henschen: Don't know if this would be relavent in your case, but a quick internet search seems to point to some incompatability between Norton Antivirus and IE8. People recommend if you have Norton to stick with IE7...I would recommend dumping Norton.

I think this is a ridiculous notion. Putting the burden of guilt on people to download Internet Explorer 8? Beautiful. Why don't they just GIVE the food bank the money? It seems they might have already budgeted out a certain amount for this campaign anyway, in my opinion that would be better than using guilt on people.