Not necessarily.

Jobs' brilliance wasn't in his management, it was in his design sense, personal charisma, and knowing when to throw his company behind developing and pushing a new product (OS X, iPod, iTunes, Tablets).

Tim Cook doesn't have the same epic level of charisma but that could change, and he clearly hasn't screwed up the management part, but we've yet to see his signature on the design and product fronts. I think you can call Apple Pay and the iWatch products of the Tim Cook era so their success will be the first real test of whether he can keep the Apple innovation machine turning.

Oh fuck that. I can plug my Nexus into my Windows machine, create folders, copy files, view any video format I want. Or I can have an iDevice, have to use the evil that is iTunes, convert to formats that Apple has decreed as sacred, and basically give up all control of the device. IOS devices are good for people who never want to go beyond the parameters Apple sets.

I think you would have a hard time figuring out what Occupy WASN'T protesting about. That's why the Tea Party has succeeded to some extent, and Occupy has failed. The Tea Party, by and large, set the parameters for what it was fighting, and stuck to them. Occupy was all over the map.

Can't speak for the iPad, because the only real interaction I had with one was a day with an iPad 2, which I found a bit heavy. Further, I really do dislike IOS and have since even abandoned my iPhone for a Nexus 5.

That all being said, I do use my Nexus 7 a lot. For me it is the perfect form factor. A 10" tablet is really too big, and my phone is on the smallish size. I pretty much do all my recreational reading, and a fairly large portion of my work-related reading on my Nexus 7, and it's small enough to be rather book-like in size, but large enough that it renders PDFs, ePubs and most web pages fairly well. I'm not going to get that readability out of a smartphone, and a 10" tablet or notebook is just too big.

Which kind of begs the question, how did "clearly inferior hardware" become such a status symbol? Microsoft and Samsung would give their respective left testicles to do the same, but haven't quite been able to replicate the recipe.

Certainly part of it is effective marketing, but I think the other part is good execution -- regardless of what you think of the hardware (which is hidden inside the case and visible to the customer only through the device's observed behavior), the devices, as consumer products, work really, really well.

I think you have to give a lot of the credit credit to high-quality software.

Rand Paul for ScrumMaster 2016!

Dunno about obsolescence per se, but Scientology does have a policy of forced yearly upgrades, each more expensive than the last. Seems similar :)

Indeed. I once read that the limiting factor on how high we can build skyscrapers is not structural engineering but the explosion in space occupied by elevator shafts as you try and go higher and higher whilst preserving reasonable wait times.

Don't worry, you can buy a $500 phone from my non-profit, $400 will be my for salary and $100 for a junk Android phone. Profit is an indication that you're delivering more value relative to cost than the competition, after all sales price is just a number you decide. They're not competing against some imaginary non-profit, the day Google, Microsoft etc. deliver a competing product forcing them to lower prices they will. Until then, keep blaming the one delivering what people want and not the ones who don't.

If your electric motor is powerful enough, you can dispense with the counterweight. It might not be very efficient, but it's possible.

Many posts suggest doing away with the cable by putting the motor on the elevator car; but this overlooks the fact that the elevator needs to be connected to a counterweight for efficiency reasons.

However, here's a thought: you put motors on the elevator *and* the counterweight. As the elevator goes up, the counterweight goes down and uses its motors as generators to partly power the elevator's motors. And vice versa.

Sure, you're not going to break even due to electrical losses; but it'll be a damn sight better than no counterweight.

And how do you handle the counterweight? What's that? You don't actually understand how an elevator works?

GRBs clearly haven't prevented life in *our* galaxy, so the Fermi Paradox still stands.

The caluculations probably rule out life in the core of our galaxy, but systems further out would be exposed even less often than ours is. And even though GRBs can periodically sterilize a planet, their directionality means that one burst would not likely sterilize all the planets in an intercellar civilization simultaneously.

So, to modify what someone said above, we can add another term to the Drake equation, but this doesn't do much to answer Fermi.

I hated Netscape in 1997... I kept picking up the phone to see if my modem was still connected before hitting ctrl-alt-delete.

It's a shame "Internet Explorer" was taken...