I was slow to upgrade my iPhone 4, and never did upgrade to iOS 7. I had the option, but it was never forced.

If you noticed, Jobs was fond of saying that "nobody needs X" until Apple figured out how to do X right. He was not the most open and truthful of men.

The iPod. iTunes. The iPhone. The iPad.

He didn't do the technical work, but they were all his vision. He knew how to create electronic products so much easier for the average person to use than their predecessors. He knew how to give them style.

That is creativity.

You don't understand what Jobs was doing.

Jobs's idea was to make stuff that non-geeks could use easily. He had style and taste, so he made stuff that looked distinctive. Not counting what he did to the Mac lines when coming back, he revolutionized three markets by introducing products that were far better in many respects than their predecessors. They allowed ordinary people to use them easily.

He had several traits. He could come up with ideas for things that normal people would like, unlike a very large amount of techies. He had taste, also unlike a very large amount of techies. His technical abilities were enough to make him able to see when a certain product could be produced and sold. He was a perfectionist in some ways, and refused to release a substandard product. He was enough of an asshole to ram his ideas through despite what other people said.

He was good at marketing, but he was pushing the best products. The iPod, in conjunction with iTunes, was an easy way to arrange and carry music. There were MP3 players with better technical specifications, but harder to use. The iPhone was a smartphone with a good web browser, among other things. The iPad was very different from anything resembling a predecessor, and easy to use. No marketing campaign will last that many years without good products.

He knew what to leave out, and how much it would be missed. The earlier iPhones lacked copy-paste, since Apple didn't know how to do it to his standards, but I never found that to be a problem. They didn't have app development for a while, but he pointed out that websites could do a whole lot of useful things on the iPhone. Techies, in general, don't leave things out, and would rather implement a feature clumsily than leave it out.

In other words, he was an artist, with enough technical know-how and force of personality to get what he wanted. That was the biggest reason behind his success.

Before WWII, the US had no armaments industry? Pull the other one. The US Army in WWI used a lot of foreign equipment, but that was an exception.

Generally a good idea. A language that isn't available as free software will be much slower to build up a community, and could go away at any time. If it gets popular, there will be a free implementation. You don't necessarily have to use the free version, but having it available is a good sign and a safety net.

Given that this is for somebody who wants to occasionally get some programming done, what do threads have to do with it? Threads are problems waiting to happen, unless you know what you're doing.

I'd suggest that concurrency support is one of the last things the OP needs. Concurrency is hard to do right, and I'd rather people left it to the professionals. It's also unnecessary, since anything that can be done simultaneously can be done sequentially. It's primarily to improve performance, and somebody looking at Python or Ruby probably doesn't care that much about raw execution speed.

A professional or dedicated amateur can learn several different languages for different purposes, and learn them well. Somebody who wants to do casual now-and-then programming isn't going to want to put that amount of prep work in, or spend the time to keep proficient in them. For such a person, one-size-fits-all is the way to go, even if the fit is pretty odd in some cases.

C is not a good language for casual use. It has limited abstraction abilities, and programs in C will probably take longer to write than in other languages (assuming equally skilled programmers). It also has quite a few ways to make subtle mistakes. While it has a great many advantages in skilled hands, I'd recommend almost anything else for a non-professional programmer.

You aren't going to learn those languages in a few hours. You can understand that basic structures in that time. You are likely not to know the details of the base languages, and are certain not to have a good knowledge of the more esoteric parts of the language or the standard libraries.

To get work done, you need to know how to write programs in the language, and that's harder. You can copy-paste a program that works and try to modify it, but that'll be about it. To get useful work done, you need to have a feel for how the language works. To use it professionally, you need to be able to write reasonably idiomatic programs and know where the dangerous parts of the language are. This is in addition to knowing the runtime, IDEs, etc.

On the plus side, one of the big effects on student performance is parental involvement, and home-schooling is heavy on that. As long as they have to pass the same sort of tests as their public-school counterparts, it's probably fine.

Your numbers don't work. If we have a vaccine that's 80% effective 33% of the time, and absolutely worthless otherwise, it's still 26.4% effective, not 16%. If I get to skip the flu once, that'll make a whole lot of vaccine injections worth it.

Actually, they're addressing at least a symptom of the real problem, which is that all of the users are of species Homo Sapiens. There's no point in complaining that your users are stupid when (a) they aren't, and (b) you're not going to be able to trade them in on new users that do understand these things (and will need to be paid more, without adding more value to the company). Figure out how to help actual people, not some subset of them.

When I'm doing meal planning for tonight on my phone over lunch, it's very convenient to be able to query my pantry and refrigerator. That way, I know if I need to pick up anything on the way home. Also, if I'm looking for a new recipe, I can grab one off the web that will use what's in the kitchen already. There's plenty of reasons why net access would be useful for my refrigerator.