It only benefits the retailers. They have silly requires like SS number and driving licence which I assume is for tracking you but I certainly don't trust that info who companies that have been in the news for questionable security. Plus by excluding credit cards consumers lose the protections they get from credit cards should their phone get lost and on top of being a clunky system of scanning bar codes what stops anyone from using it if they can guess my pass code? Android phones especially are easy to unlock if they're using the finger dragging symbol drawing. Not that iPhones are much harder given its only 4 numbers in most cases.

Most people don't need to do that and unless you're doing serious 3d modelling GIS data processing / interpretation or gaming most desktop apps do not need a core i7 and 16gb of memory. I have an old thinkpad (one of the last IBM labelled ones) and with an SSD and ubuntu is does everything I want except gaming (though it will play TF2 but gets hot at fuck) and it doesn't need all the memory or CPU to do the job. So while that's good that you can do that but for like 99% of people it's unnecessary.

That said you can do 3d modelling, video conversion and 3d gaming on an iPad so of course the hardware will be used to do those things though But most people don't want to do those things on a desktop let alone on an iPad and it doesn't change the fact there are a lot of tasks people want to do and can do on the iPad. Some of them it does better and some things desktops do better. Different tools for different jobs.

The hardware the original ipad had in it would be more of a problem than the software but unless you're obsessive about apps it still works as a device for reading books, surfing the net, watching videos, etc. I suspect the main reason the 1st iPad has a shorter support lifespan was because the hardware was a bit poor but even with that in mind and even if you are totally into apps the idea of having the buy every version of the iPad is entirely unnecessary. It received OS updates for just over 2 years and would have had app support at least until the 2013 which means you could have went from the 1st iPad to a 4th gen one (released end of 2012) and been fully supported which the exception of course where apps would require more power or memory.

For most people it is just a toy but that doesn't mean those who do more should go without. Everything you said applies to the vast majority of desktops too. You don't need to upgrade. My iPad air didn't magically turn to shit. It'll be a viable device for years to come.

I wouldn't even consider this a average trolling. You didn't try at all. Did you post from a samsung tablet which didn't give you enough battery life to write something better?

A lot of them are but they've always been that way. I think the bigger problem is simply accessibility to newsgroups. You have to know about them and possibly buy into a service. A lot of ISPs don't bother with servers or if they do you wouldn't know it unless you went hunting through their help pages. I'm not sure why ISPs care. I would have thought the bandwidth would be better (if they exclude pirating groups) so part of me would not be surprised if the likes of Google and other companies who make a living off tracking people and selling ads are encouraging ISPs to drop newsgroups. It is a far superior way to communicate I think simply because it's like email and the data is removed from the view (as it should be). No need to worry about a website being viewable in mobile browsers and desktops. Let the application deal with that. Its downside, if you want to call it that, is a company can't own it and monetise it. Even ISPs can't honestly find a way to add a further expense on top of it. Even if they did there would be so many other choices in providers.

Or newsgroups. Sell them as government-proof decentralised forums for a new age twist.

Just leave email alone. It works just fine which is why no company has been able to replace it with a proprietary alternative. I know googke is desperate to control email but it won't happen.

You're only allowed to speak out because they allow it. Huge chunks of the population technically don't have constitutional rights thanks to the constitution free zone around the border. Technically no one in Florida is covered by the constitution. The U.S. government just does a better job at making people think they're free.

Agreed. They're very basic and don't work offline. The only reason I could see that someone would prefer web apps is because they want the NSA to have their data.

It doesn't use Java for me (no Java but I can play the sounds). Maybe you've done something to cause that.

He's a weird guy with a creepy fish fetish. Talking to the fish isn't a super power. I thought superhero films would have been dead by now.

A camel seems really inefficient. I'd say eat camel for lunch while riding your jeep around the desert.

Yeah, most popularity contests seem to be based on what start-ups use like the only programming done is making novelty shit for middle class westerners and their 1st world problems. But once you get into something a bit more intelligent and long lasting then you find these people stick with what works because their company can't afford to spend all its time converting to the new shiny thing nor are they some short lived dumb start-up that can ignore the long-term implications of their decisions.

Ruby never fully took off like PHP or Perl. It gained popularity but then was quickly replaced by node / JS. Now about the only people I see advertising Ruby jobs are Yammer in London or the odd company that was horribly stuck in the past and decided to move forward to 2007.