"Library"? What's that?

That is indeed what he said, but I suspect that was just spin.

I'm about 99% sure it wasn't. As evidence, I cite the fact that the head of the iPod team left Apple for Palm and started an OS that was web-based just like iOS was originally going to be. I think it was more that the people Rubinstein left behind clung on to the iPod mentality of a closed architecture that allowed only a handful of developers to write code for it for a very long time before finally giving up.

I think the iPhone was successful before they supported 3rd party apps.

Not particularly. The pre-app-store iOS market coincides precisely with the original iPhone's sales. Apple sold only 6.1 million of them over the course of about a year. The iPhone 3G sold a million in the first three days. And yes, the original iPhone hardware was behind the times, so that contributed to the difference somewhat, but there's little doubt that the App Store is a big part of why iOS is a success.

Want to know how I know this? Palm WebOS. Notice where Palm's top engineering management came from. Yup, you guessed it. Apple. They followed Apple's original plan, and they completely cornered the market... no, wait, that other thing... tanked.

Chromebooks have the advantage of four more years of improvements in web browser technology. With that said, remember that the #1 thing people do with their phones is play games, and that games are pretty high on the list for laptops as well. Without native apps, gaming isn't very practical, which is why the Chromebook is still just a low single-digit percentage of laptop sales, and why a web-only phone would be pretty much DOA even in today's market, with today's technology.

It wasn't Apple that killed Nokia; it was Android. Their big niche was cheap feature phones. When Android came along, suddenly, there were cheap smartphones, and nobody wanted cheap feature phones when they could get cheap smartphones. To be fair, Apple had a lot to do with forcing the UI changes in Android that made it popular, but the mere existence of Android in any form would have pretty much cut the legs out from under Nokia.

As for Blackberry, Apple didn't really start killing them until much later, as iPhone hardware wasn't really all that welcome in the business world until after Apple started adding stuff like mobile device management. I always found it odd that they were a hardware manufacturer, given that their hardware was fairly boring, and most of their interesting creations involved software and services. I'd expect them to reinvent themselves as a software and services company fairly handily, and freed from the shackles of having to build their own hardware, I'd expect them to do fairly well.

Ericsson got bought out by Sony, who still builds plenty of phones and other devices. Given Sony's size, I wouldn't count them out just yet. But if somebody does drive them out of the market, it will be Samsung, by undercutting them.

Want to see real change and justice? Talk to the actual owners of Uber and see if you can convince them to make a better company.

Uber is run by libertarian psychopaths. Their thought process - though they would obviously never say it in public - is "nobody made you get into the taxi, tough luck".

Even the slightest voluntary attempt to try and ameliorate the risk involved would be an anathema - "nanny state regulation" or some such bullshit - to them.

Probably better because who can say how many cab drivers make it in via political favors?

Given the life and pay of a taxi driver, I'd go with "sweet fuck all".

People calling in "political favours" to be a *taxi driver* ? Did you even think about that before you wrote it ? Do you think garbage collectors get jobs through "political favours" as well ?

The problems in the taxi industries worldwide have nothing to do with regulations around safety, and everything to do with the regulations around taxi plates (or "medallions" I think they call them in the states).
Uber vehicles should be required to carry the same safety facilities as a taxi, including video/audio recording and driver duress buttons.
This sort of situation and the absurdly trivial solutions for reducing its risk (what's the cost of a few dash cams ?) were entirely predictable and the only reason Uber did not act proactively was because it's a company run by libertarian psychopaths who think rules shouldn't apply to them.

Global Warming is a theory. So is gravity. Are you worried about suddenly flying off into space ?

All the AGW models have failed, miserably.
If that were true it would not be getting hotter (or getting colder).
"It's not getting hotter as quickly as predicted, but it is getting hotter as expected" is not "miserable failure".

of course, its people who dont use X who always want to raise taxes on X
Similarly, the people who can easily afford the things taxes pay for are always in favour of eliminating them

And why I keep saying ALL Taxes are regressive. Please, tell me more about how a taxes that only targets the top 1%, 0.1% and 0.01% would be "regressive".

An "assumption" is another way of saying "take it on faith". :P

I read Books 1, 2, and 3 all pretty much around the same time. Five years later, when Book 4 came out, I'd forgotten who most of the characters were and found I didn't really care about them when I read it; I skipped Book 5.

The Hugo Award Nominees reading package last year includes the entire Wheel of Time series (which I thought was a classy move by the publisher, and a nice contrast to Orbit Books including only excerpts for their three nominees.) (If you're a member of the appropriate Worldcon, you're eligible to vote for the Hugos, and in recent years they've provided an electronic package of most of the written and graphical works that are nominated.) The bad part about this is that the tablet I use for reading has the bloody entire bloody Wheel of bloody Time series on it, and I'm about 90% of the way through :-)

I hadn't read it before Jordan died, and probably that wasn't my birthday anyway, so for me it wasn't the worst birthday present ever; for that one I'll have to thank my little brother for giving me chicken pox when I was 10. There wasn't a vaccine for it back then, but there is now, and if your parents didn't give you the vaccine and other kids didn't give you the disease, trust me, it's one of the vaccines you want to get. (I also got measles the hard way, but I was young enough I don't remember it very well. Got the polio vaccine, though, unlike a neighbor's kid who was a couple of years older and had to use crutches.)

@NeilHimself wrote a nice, sensitive blog post about the position writers are in with their stories and their lives, but the tl;dr punch line is (rot13 for spoiler) Trbetr E.E. Znegva vf abg lbhe ovgpu.