From what I understand he had two places in Belize. On located in the mainland off of the New river (which I saw) and the other on Ambergris Caye which I probably was within a couple miles of. I think it was the latter which burned down. It was on a quiet part of an island otherwise filled with tourists and American expatriates. It's not as remote as you're thinking it is. The place I grew up in the states probably had a worse road and was located next to a smaller town.

Oh and if your candybar phone was anything like mine, using its hobbled browser to download music from Amazon would have been pretty painful if would have worked at all.

You have to remember that we're talking about 7 or 8 years ago when Intel opted not to work with Apple on a processor for the iPhone. Amazon wasn't selling MP3s at the time and wouldn't start until after the iPhone was released. And then only with a much smaller list of available titles compared to the iTunes store.

As for ripping CDs, when's the last time you actually bought a music CD? I haven't in a long time. Why? Because downloading is so much easier and convenient. This is one of the things the iPhone offered that other phones of that era didn't.

Where did these mp3s you played on your candy bar phone come from and what steps did you have to go through to get them on the phone itself? Could you browse through a library of millions of songs (on the phone) and download them individually or by album? Could you do it legally? What about your non-techie friends and relatives? Even if their phones could play mp3s, did they have any clue as to how to do it?

To be completely accurate, the ability to download songs from the iTunes store straight to the iPhone itself wasn't there at launch. It took a few months but that does point out another advantage of the iPhone over what was available at the time, - frequent software upgrades.

More and more it's becoming apparent to me that many of us in the tech industry have a huge blind spot. We want faster GPUs and processors. We want more storage capacity, more bandwidth, and more pixels, but we really only care about ease of use to a point. We like gadgets and playing with software so if getting some music on our phone takes some fiddling with software and hardware, it's just part of the fun. On the other hand, if everyone can do it, it takes away from our techie mystique. ;-)

Yes, iTunes was vendor locked but it was apparent well before 2007 that vast majority of the public didn't care.

When it comes to specifics we probably agree. I will add some caveats though. Technology moves quickly and career wise if we want to be relevant in our 40's and 50's we need to move with it. It's not only good for your career, learning new skills is good for your brain.

There's been plenty of times in my career where I've chosen to use a particular technology for a given project primarily because I wanted to learn it or I wanted a member of my staff to learn it. Yes, it costs more, but it pays off down the road.

My current example is a backend text processing system for one of our data analysis applications. I started it about 12 years ago and chose perl. Python seems to be the language of choice now for scripting and I'm contemplating doing a conversion. It will be time consuming and expensive. Further there's nothing I foresee needing to do with this system that I can't do with perl. The problem is that the system continues to grow and as expensive as it would be to convert now, it will be even more expensive in 2 years.

Great advice and I will add that as far as your brain and career goes, sometimes change for change sake is good. You really should be ensuring that you're learning new stuff on a regular basis. Keeps your brain healthy. I've seen too many posts on Slashdot from tech folks in their 40's or 50's wondering what they should learn in order to have relevant skills again because the demand for the skills they had dried up.

You're applying your techie values and missing some things. You may see iTunes and associated DRM as a disadvantage but the larger group of consumers doesn't (or didn't). It was a hugely positive aspect and only the iPhone had it. Further, the app store wasn't there at day one but it really helped push the iPhone ahead of everybody else when it did come. This in spite of the fact that lots of techies don't like the walled garden aspect of it. The world is filled with people who don't really care about that.

The touch input just didn't replace the keyboard and navigation keys. It allowed for much better navigation than what was available before, especially on a small device. Pinch and Zoom was what really made web pages designed for large screens workable on a small one, so no the web browser you had was not nearly as good in comparison even though it may have been decent for its time and good enough for you.

How many PDAs or smart phones in 2007 could leverage the tremendously popular iTunes store? How many had web browsers that could actually display most sites as intended (flash notwithstanding)? To me there were other things that the iPhone brought to the table that could have been used to evaluate its potential.

I'd take it further than that. To like something because it's easier to use than another product isn't just an emotional response, it's a very practical one. The iTunes store made it easy to get the music you wanted. There were smartphones before the iPhone and even ones with touch screens. There were PDAs, There were mp3 players. There were cameras. Apple created a device that from a sheer hardware and software standpoint was perhaps not the best of breed in any of those categories but was by far and away the best at combining them. It was also easy to buy which is part of the process.

I agree that hindsight is 20/20. However, he may have actually had an inclination that he decided to ignore and instead make a decision "based on the data he had available"

The problem is that we sometimes look at all the relevant reports, trend studies, and specs we've been presented with and figure that constitutes the data that's available. It's not. I believe that what we often call "gut instinct" or "intuition" is really our mind's way of combining various bits of information from throughout our lifetime and merging it with our sense of the current situation to form an opinion. THAT is data too.

Many techie people seem to be confounded by Apple's success because the just look and the hardware specs and think there's better stuff available. Lot's of folks in the tech industry thought the iPad was going to be a huge flop.

They seem to have a hard time grasping that numbers aren't all that matter and more data needs to be considered. The game changers are often the people who know how to look beyond the numbers.

It's only easy to know that the other hills in the area are ruins if you've been told that. I saw the temples at Lamanai and maybe eventually on my own I would have figured out that the other hills are ruins but it wasn't obvious to me at first. They were completely unremarkable to me and looked very much like the limestone hills and outcroppings I'd see around here near some rivers and streams.

Nohmul might be different.

It brings up a good question. There's an old fort near where I live. Up until after WWII it served the military in various ways, primarily as place for training in it's later years. Now it's mostly a living museum. The main buildings and walls have been restored and are maintained, but a lot of the supplemental buildings on the edges of the complex have stood empty for decades. They've become dilapidated and would be increasingly expensive to repair. At what point do you say we have enough examples of buildings like this, we don't need to keep all of them?

Mayan ruins are different of course. They're much older and could provide valuable information about that culture and that time period that has been lost. Still, it's very unlikely that all the ruins will be ever excavated or studied in any detail. In fact excavating them would probably just hasten their erosion. I'm sure that many of the structures are very much like a lot of the other ones.

A good road in Belize however, might have much more practical value to the local population. But I don't really understand the whole context of this. I'm sure there are lesser ruins that could have been used instead. Further, I'm pretty sure that limestone is a pretty common material in Belize (hence its use by Mayans) so is it really that hard and that expensive to get it some place else? Would the local population have been better off had the tourism potential of the ruins been realized? I don't now. I do know that it's pretty easy to sit here and judge when shown a picture of an impressive ruin which is not in fact the one that was destroyed and when we can take roads for granted.

I'll try putting it a little differently. I have a hard time believing they knew exactly what they were doing because if they did they'd know there'd be hell to pay. There are lots of completely un-excavated buildings of lesser importance that they'd have a much better chance of destroying and getting away with. In fact that may be exactly what they were supposed to do. Somebody picked the wrong hill.

I'm sure they knew what they were getting even if they didn't realize it was a Mayan temple (which as I said is a stretch). The limestone was visible through the vegetation. I'm not suggesting that people commonly dig up random hills to use as road fill.

However, even if total ignorance of the significance of the site is a stretch, what I also find unbelievable is that someone thought they could tear down the most prominent feature of a major archaeological find and figure that nobody would notice.

So the truth is probably somewhere in between. The picture in the linked article was a deliberate misrepresentation of what was destroyed in order to fan outrage. If they'd shown a picture of the actual temple readers wouldn't be nearly as upset because frankly it didn't look like much. Now again, the fact that it didn't look like much doesn't mean it's not an important site. I'm not condoning what happened. But tearing down something like the high temple at Laminai is a much different sort of crime that what we have here.

You're still assuming that the government is in possession of land both valuable enough and in sufficient quantity to swap with landowners that have ruins on their property. Belize has ruins everywhere. It's a largely rural country anyway. The largest city has less than 80,000 people and it's much bigger than any other town in the country.