The uproar was that with computers long term storage the IRS could do things like make you pay taxes on something your parents did 60 years ago, or use the power of tagging to harass specific organizations based on political leanings. What absurd notions those people of ancient times had!

Chuckle.

What could be worse than food!?

Taco Bell

So, the more appropriate method is to ask (nicely, or send some guys with guns) the cell service providers to shut down all towers in the required area.

They are not going to do that because a cell tower covers a lot more area than any protest.

Consider the protest in Nevada recently over the Bundy Ranch cattle being taken by armed federal agents. If you shut down cell access for that group, you are shutting down cell access for a potentially very large area of I-15. That's just not going to happen.

The reason why the kill switch would be used is that it cuts off video/image feeds from newer devices, the older phones that still might work would not be as much of a concern. As long as the government can prevent video and images escaping real time they have a lot more latitude in dealing with civilians.

That may be true in some countries, but not in America.

In America you have to actively refuse help in order to be in continual pain or homeless.

I HAVE been poor, there is no excuse for hunger or suffering in the US, there are programs to help.

The problem is not that they are poor, its that they don't want to be helped, the reason for this could be any number of things from simple depression to severe mental disorders, but it IS NOT because help is unavailable.

A severe tooth abscess can be handled by the ER if its that bad and no publicly funded ER will turn down you down, its illegal. I know, I've been in EXACTLY that spot. And for reference, alcohol does pretty much nothing at all for tooth pain, you're far better off packing clove powder around it to numb it and treat the infection than drinking yourself silly, unless you drink enough to pass out ... in which case you have to stay drunk or the sobering up process will be FAR worse.

In San Francisco you "have to see the poor" daily as well. Hows that working out for them?

The trouble with the homeless is that they are not just poor, there are usually multiple problems at work including mental issues... so seeing them and giving them money is usually not helping much.

If you really want to help the poor I suggest going to Modest Needs, that is the best place I've found to help the truly poor directly before they fall off the bottom rung of the ladder.

So please take your "standard" USB on one

I do every day and charge iOS devices with it all the time. The cable hardly matters, and in fact it's easier to find an Apple cable in a store if you've forgotten one than the "wrong" kind of Micro-USB cable (since there are a few different types).

You are on the wrong side of standards on this one.

The fact that you can plug anything into USB is enough.

If you think about the tech from the time, you'd realize they were shitty.

Battery life ... would have been crappy
Display tech ... would have been crappy
Touch screen ... would have been crappy, resistive touch if at all
Processing power ... would have been crappy
GUI hardware acceleration ... would have been nonexistent from a practical perspective.
Connectivity ... bad wifi or ridiculously over priced cellular modems that killed the batteries even faster.

As soon as the non-techie guys in the company saw it, though would have canceled it in a heart beat, it would have been an embarrassment ... much like pretty much EVERY tablet before the iPhone/iPad era. Android may be fine now, but before they iPhone, pretty much every mobile device was asstastic. A few die-hard geeks (myself included) had things like old high end nokia smartphones or windows ce devices, but they were entirely the realm of high end geeks who would put up with the quirks

That is a big reason, but it also mattered that the device itself was not OSX shrunk to a touch-screen tablet (some people thought that's what it would be instead of using IOS). That was the mistake Microsoft made.

But it's also related, Apple had the luxury of not just plopping desktop OSX on a tablet because they knew iOS developers could produce a good range of software out of the gate. Microsoft apparently never trusted in the development community enough to take that leap of faith.

Firefox was initially released in 2002, you weren't seeing a gecko based tablet in 2001, try again.

There were many tablets released before the iPad that did not sell that well.

Yes, Microsoft made them, they ran Windows, and since applications were not designed for touch they sucked compared to laptops.

What Apple did was not marketing, but make a tablet that was usage because everything from OS to software was made for a tablet, not a PC.

It also relied heavily on many IPhone developers being able to quickly write software for the tablet before it was even launched - we could only test apps on the simulator before they went into the iPad App Store on day one! Kind of insane if you think about it, but it generally worked because the devices were similar in OS. If there had not been a good base of software from day one, sales would probably not have been as good... oddly parallel to a console launch come to think of it.