Yes, it was overwhelmingly the result of marketing and glitter. As I said, pre-iPhone 1, most of the people I knew had cell phones capable of playing mp3s (and doing so for longer than the iPhone 1's battery life could keep up with), but almost none of them knew how to do so. Being able to listen to MP3s your phone was a huge reason a lot of people bought the thing. Doesn't matter that they already could do so on their second gen RAZR or their Symbian phone. Apple's thing was shinier. And hell, a depressingly large number of people didn't understand what "MP3 player" even meant. 'iPhone==>a phone that's like an iPod', though... they understood that.

(Incidentally, if you bring up visual voicemail most people will look at you blankly. The amount of people who understand what that means, let alone bought a particular phone because of it, is vanishingly small.)

This is just ass-backwards ahistorical nonsense reasoning though. You look at the very short, almost nonexistence list of new stuff that the iPhone 1 brought to the table and you go ahhhh, capacitive touchscreen! That must've been it!

Well, no, sorry, that wasn't it. The iPhone 1 was an EDGE phone for crying out loud. Its web browsing was for that reason alone abysmal.

Pinch to zoom was a nice incremental improving features, but zoom simply wasn't that much more difficult on resistive screens and no one in their right mind would've given up 3G speeds (available on the G1, the N900 as well as many, many mid to high tier phones that PREDATED the EDGE-only iPhone 1) simply in order to gain pinch to zoom. I used desktop sites all the time on my N900. Spiral to zoom was perfectably usable. But EDGE was *not* a perfectly usable replacement for 3G.

I mentioned this in another post. Yes, capacitive touch was different and somewhat innovative.

It was NOT some ultra-revolutionary thing that suddenly made web browsing usable:

1) First and foremost, the N900 (and its non-cellphone predecessors... which came out BEFORE the iPhone 1) used resistive touchscreen and spiral to zoom with its webbrowser. Spiral to zoom was really easy to use. Is it as quick and precise as pinch to zoom? No, not *quite*, but very close. It was perfectly usable and is easier to do than pinch to zoom while holding the phone one-handed. Resistive touchscreens have and had a higher precision than capacitive for a very long time, and in a lot of ways this make up for a lack of multitouch. I used my N900's spiral-to-zoom extensively, after a year of using a G1 with pinch to zoom, and after just a day or two I didn't even notice it any more.

(In practice, resistive touchscreens are also much sturdier since most companies refuse to produce plastic capacitive screens... which do exist and are lighter and cheaper and much much sturdier, but Apple and Apple-inspired) companies would much rather phone displays be prone to shattering to urge people to stay on the upgrade treadmill.)

2) There were mobile versions of many major websites years before the iPhone came out.

3) In case you haven't noticed, "apps" have been replacing websites for 10+ years now, and this was spurred on by Android's open app marketplace ecosystem, which Apple was forced to ultimately copy (and then crow about with their horrendously cynical "there's an app for that!" ad campaign.)

Those features were in Android from the moment the first Android phone, the G1, first hit the shelves. The first Android phone had a capacitive screen, just like the iPhone.

Simple stuff with variables in math is taught in a middle school class known as "pre-algebra". High schoolers generally take algebra 1 and 2 (and sometimes precalc), which as I recall involved memorizing the quadratic formula and a variety of other rules, graphing, simple derivatives problems, etc. I guess the concept of a variable is important to wrap your head around, but it's introduced pretty early and comprises a small part of the curriculum.

Read my post. As per TFS and as per what Trump had been saying since day one, this isn't disrupting anything. The ability to sell off Tik Tok was always on the table and was always the most probable course of action.

Trump's "staunch ally" is not going to shut down political Tik Tokers between now and the election. Even if it were shut down, it' s also rather dumb to assume it would "disrupt youth political organizing" given the fact that the youth are pretty adept at being able to install new apps.

It's all just nonsense hyperbole. I don't want the CCP spying on Americans. I don't care about Trump's secret or not so reasons for opposing it; he's fundamentally right in principle. Go attack him on the fifty thousand things he's wrong in principle about.

Except no, this is dumb orange man bad conspiratorial bullshit as evidenced by the fact that Tik Tok is NOT being shut down, but is merely changing hands.

The GOP does a lot of really evil shit. It should go without saying, so does Trump. This isn't one of them, and people like you (along with the good writers at the NYT) make the anti-Trump left look like weak, blithering, conspiratorial, fact-denying fools when you try to spin it like this.

There are fifty thousand things you can (and should) be attacking Trump for. Taking steps (however halfassed they might be) to prevent the Chinese Communist from profiling and spying on tens of millions of Americans isn't one of them.

If Biden (or his advisors) have any sense at all, they should respond by saying Trump didn't go far enough, that American privacy and our electoral process must be secured from outside interference. Roll it up into the Russia issue, call Trump weak on China (as well as Russia), charge resolutely forwards and not give him the slightest bit of a chance to claim this as a victory for himself or as evidence of the left's weakness.

As I said at the very end of my OP you first replied to:

Fuck me, can we please just stop this shit? I said it four years ago, I'll say it again now: the man gives us an unfathomable amount of ammunition to use against him. Why do this shit?

I don't want China spying on us. I don't want Facebook, GOOG, AMZN, etc. or the three letter organizations spying on us, either, but China is clearly a larger threat (they are capable and perfectly willing to sell data to US corporations at the same time they use it for their own purposes.) I don't know if the details of this deal are stupid or not, but they're clearly not just quibbling over the details; they're calling out the whole thing as fundamentally wrong. Trying to stop the Chinese Communist Party from profiling/spying tens of millions of Americans is wrong. Tell me, if it's later found out that they're using this power to influence our elections (like Russia has tried), will it still be wrong to try to stop them? Is it only wrong to stop them if and when we think they're helping the Rs more than the Ds? Jesus Christ.

What the fuck is the New York fucking Times doing trying to attack Trump on one of his precious, precious few strong points, some really painfully and laughably naive "Imagine There Are No Countries--I Wonder if You Can" logic, instead of, oh, I don't know, reminding us all how Trump abolished the Office of Pandemic Response that Obama had set up?

How can it be that four years have passed and people are still doubling down on this "Orange Man Bad" volume-stuck-on-11 strategy that totally drowns out the actual key issues that matter?

Except no, no he didn't do it "first". That was my whole point. As I recall, the Android G1 came out over a year before the 3GS you used.

The iPhone 1 was, as I just said, a piece of shit. The Android and N900, both of which were in the works at the time and came out about a year later (maybe closer to 2 years for the N900), were much nicer. Most importantly, they were 3G (as were many phones *predating* the iPhone 1.) They let you send and receive picture texts (this was back when MMS was the main method of doing this over cell phones.) They let you create custom ring tones. They had removable batteries (which I still count as a big plus; maybe you don't.) Android had great app marketplace back when Apple was stifling the shit out of their own marketplace.

Jobs gave us something very much halfassed and overpriced "first". Competition with Android (which, again, was in the works prior to the iPhone 1's release) led to them offering something usable years later.

The only genuinely sorta-innovative thing the iPhone 1 brought to the table was the capacitive screen, which I (as a former N900 owner) believe has been somewhat overrated. It's especially overrated since they refuse to make plastic ones, thus making phones far, far more fragile (I've used a plastic capacitive touchscreen phone and it worked fine, the only issues were increased friction--but that can be dealt with--and the need for a film screen protector if you're worried about scratches.)

And not to sit here repeating myself but once again, the iPhone 1 was released the same year social media exploded. (Within a year of the release of Youtube and public access Facebook, as I recall.) It's ridiculous to give Apple credit for that. Other platforms could watch Youtube vids as well (often MUCH more effectively, for the 3G phones); Apple got all the glory simply because their brand awareness was exploding at that point.

I agree that people treating this as an immediate death knell is a bit silly. I don't see any rush to abandon or replace it.

That said, Mozilla has been cavalier about breaking extensions in the past and there could be bugs (security or otherwise) moving forward. Bit rot is a thing. It's not an immediate threat, but it is a long term threat.

Algebra? Algebra is and should be a "first programming language" ? What? As someone who's taken math through calc 3 / ordinary differential equations / linear algebra and gone on to do a fair bit of programming in the workplace, that sounds like a lot of nonsense.

If anything, schools should drop the algebra emphasis in favor of statistics. A good statistical grounding (the concepts much more than equation memorization) would benefit society much moreso than algebra. But that doesn't have anything to do with programming, either.

Unless you're talking about some ultra-fancy and mathematically rigorous version of purely functional programming, I have a hard time seeing how high school algebra helps at all. Being able to understand and design algorithms isn't a lot like memorizing a bunch of algebriac rules. (Maybe it can sometimes be a little bit like the pattern recognition and problem solving involved in solving integrals and differential equations, but the majority of high schoolers do not get that far and the similarity isn't very deep.)

I've heard some people talk about using NoScript for similarly fine-grained control beyond what uBlock Origin offers, though I think it's just for JS stuff, not domain access in general.

If I were a user (personally, I'm not motivated enough to go beyond uBlock Origins, though perhaps I should've, at least for my most heavily-visited websites), I'd continue to stick with uMatrix and hope someone forks it at some point. Assuming it wasn't discontinued due to imminent compatibility issues--and it didn't sound like it was--I'd assume it would continue to work for at least a few more years. And regarding security bugs, I doubt its attack vector potential is very high, especially vs. the security gains its offers.

For that matter, what exactly are Jobs' accomplishments other than being able to market stuff to convince people (including, apparently, legions of hypersensitive nerds) that he invented / perfected it?

You can like the walled garden for legitimate reasons. You can like specific hardware for all sorts of legitimate reasons. But the iPhone 1 (for example) was such a massive pile of shit, but the marketing/fanboy RDF plus the fact that it came out pretty much right as Youtube and Facebook-for-the-masses were being launched made hundreds of millions of people sit up, take note, and associate the whole concept of of a smartphone with Apple and Apple alone. (Despite the fact that the damned thing wasn't even 3G, had a significantly worse app environment than Android, couldn't send pictures using the most widely supported standard of the day, MMS, etc.)

It's really one of Apple's worst products, but because of their incredibly fortuitous timing, their glitter (though sadly-delayed N900 was better, even with resistive touchscreen) , their marketing and their unusually loyal fanbase it became the most important and successful product line they ever make. I mean hell, pre-iPhone, most people I knew didn't even realize they could use their existing phones as MP3 players (e.g., the second generation RAZRs could), and with a far longer battery life than the iPhone could manage. Jobs deserves credit for being able to alter consumer's knowledge, perceptions and behavior, sure. But that's not how his accomplishments are typically described.

1984 and Brave New World.

Determining which one is which is left as an exercise to the reader.

Really? ...really? There's more than one of you? And you're being modded up to +5?

...

I've just sat here for 10 minutes straight, trying to think of a way to satirize this. I can't. I simply can't. There's really nothing I can think of that is so obviously wrongheaded as trying to replace asphalt with solar panels. You just don't do that. It's at an inefficient angel and there are shadows and oh by the way it's going to get scratched to hell and back by debris and then fall apart because, oh hey look, there are thousands of multiton vehicles driving over it every day.

Asphalt is designed to be nothing but be cheap and tough (it doesn't need to be transparent or conduct electricity or anything) and it *still* costs millions and millions of dollars to build even a modest length road and it *still* eventually cracks and falls apart under the weight.

You just don't use solar panels as a paving surface. You just don't. You don't for the same basic reason you don't use ming vases for roofing shingles. You don't do it for the same basic, intuitive reason you don't suggest people turn the interstate into farmland (whilst still allowing cars to drive over it.)

Why didn't someone at least try suggesting that the comparatively cost of poles to suspend the panels high *above* the road would instantly raise the chances of success by a million percent, would lower the long term costs massively and raise efficiency dramatically? Because that defeated the purpose? Because they honestly believed that by driving on top of the solar panels, they could save money that otherwise would've been wasted on expensive, expensive asphalt? I mean... I just... what?

This was not worth it even as a long shot idea. It was terminally wrongheaded and as cynical as I am, I'm still astonished people actually managed to convince lawmakers to piss away 5 million euros. If you're going to ignore basic common sense and the warnings of all engineers everywhere, please next time just give the money it to a random stranger in the street and tell them invent something cool. That is a less risky use of the money. Honestly, no hyperbole. The expected value of such an crapshoot investment is so, so much higher than it was with this project.