And this is why all my personal donations are in cash and anonymous. It's no one else's business, I'm not going to be pretentious about it, and receiving "services" from an organization will not be predicated on how much I give.
How do you know it wouldn't have the reverse effect, and make others think, "Oh, now I don't need to bother, Gate's has this..."?
I don't have the source handy, but I remember reading about when Gates and Buffet went to Germany with their giving pledge. One of the German billionaires they approach replied something to the effect of: "Why should I give money to support life-saving research or to feed the poor? Isn't that the job of the government? If I give the money on my own, then that removes the incentive for government to figure out how to take care of societies ills."
It seems unlikely that by giving $X we reduce the government's giving by even 1/4 $X. There's a huge amount of room for funding, and I don't think the apparent need the government sees decreases much as private charity increases.
What is with the SJ worship on reddit/HN? Apple continues to make overpriced hardware (compare to T and W series thinkpads xD) which almost always sacrifices form for function. Want to put an esata/fibre/ port on your laptop? - only one MBP allows it. OS X is a toy os for people who don't want to run windows (excell/MSVS) or linux. Sure, put the iWhatever in the museum of modern art, but just about any business-clas laptop will run linux.
For smartphones, sure. For desktops this is not going to happen for a long time if ever. When will AutoCAD, UGS-NX, MAYA, Photoshop, Quark Express, MatLAB, Mathematica (other than wolfram alpha), and even more specialized medical/industrial/scientific software be available for android? Will there even be decent gaming under java? (angry birds does not count)
> Will there even be decent gaming under java? (angry birds does not count)
Minecraft is written in Java.
> When will ... even more specialized medical/industrial/scientific software be available for android?
Presumably when the people buying the software begin to express an interest in moving to android. I'm not saying that it will happen, just that the software will be ported over, or new software written, when people start wanting it.
I don't think that anyone seriously believes that android is going to replace OS X and Windows on desktops, just that, as time goes on, people will be spending more and more time on tablets and smartphones and less on traditional desktops and laptops. I find it a bit sad, mostly because I refuse to believe that I'll ever be able to type as quickly on a tablet as I do on a keyboard.
Tablets are distinctly different from smartphones, and although the iPad dominates this market segment at present there is a android invasion taking place even as we speak. That's just the first wave; with NVidea's Kal-el chip already sampling and supposedly reaching consumers by October, the tablet market seems poised to go into overdrive. between increased competition and the availability of networking facilities on large-screen TVs, I'm not certain that consumers will really need desktops for much longer.
Now, what you are talking about - computationally-intensive tasks that traditionally require workstations - Android does not perform nearly as well. But the people who really need that kind of processing power and can't satisfy it with a tablet, game console, or other home-oriented system are only a small segment of the overall market.
