Oh, I'm sure; this is a corporation we're talking about, they wouldn't be doing anything that doesn't stand to extract some money from somebody. But it does prove that Xerox at the very least thought that there was legal grounds to sue Apple over patent theft- something they wouldn't have bothered with if stories of "they sold their technology legally and fairly" were strictly true.
That's not how patents works. You either have a patent on something, or you don't. Either something has been done already (hence prior art) or it hasn't. It doesn't matter if you sell 10 or 10 million of your patented invention, the patent stays valid. And patents can be invalidated by ideas that haven't even been created in practice (such as the patent on communications satellites being quashed by A.C. Clarke's writings).
Copyright is the same. If I publish a book, that book is my intellectual property; you can't copy any section of it without my permission. It doesn't matter if I don't sell even a single copy of it, or if it's a best seller- the rules stay the same either way. Trademarks do work differently, but I've not heard anyone claim that Apple is using trademark law to protect their "rounded corners" design.
And they're your only options in a legal setting. If you can't prove that an opponent is violating one of your patents, copyrights or trademarks, the courts shouldn't care. Even if you look at a rival product and think "gosh, that's very similar to my product", that isn't grounds for a legal infringement.
None of those things are indicative of intrinsic value. Something is not valuable only because it is rare- my teeth are very rare (only 52 ever made!), but no-one would ever buy one off me for anything like a good price. Nor is being portable or storable all that's required (otherwise Lego bricks would be a fantastic currency), or divisibility. I don't necessarily buy it's use as jewellery as a good reason either, seeing as that's basically dependent on it remaining in fashion (which admittedly it always has, but there's nothing intrinsic about that as a quality- it's entirely externally dependent, and could theoretically be replaced at any time by some other shiny substance).
You could say (and people do) that gold has intrinsic value due to it's industrial uses (which are all because of it's actual intrinsic physical properties). But a quick visit to Wikipedia tells me that industrial consumption accounts for only 10% of gold consumption worldwide (the rest being either jewellery or financial/investment use), so if you strip out its other uses its value would collapse.
The "thing of actual value" that backs up a dollar (/pound/euro) is the fact that it is legal tender. This means that if you ever owe a debt, the creditor will always accept that currency to settle it. Importantly, this applies to taxes- if you owe taxes, your government can insist on only being paid in their legal tender (which they will- governments don't barter), and if you don't pay your taxes, you go to jail.
You're free to trade in things other than legal tender. If you want to offer US dollars to a UK shopkeeper, and he accepts, you can. If you want to offer him Bitcoins, and he accepts, you can. If you want to offer him payment in goats, that's fine too. But if he says that he'll only accept pounds sterling, then that's all he will accept.
You can't demand to exchange a pound for silver any more, that's true. But then you can't demand to exchange silver for anything either- so even if you do exchange your GBP for silver, you still don't have anything of inherent value unless you can convince someone to trade you something else again for it.
See what I mean? Unless it's something you are actively interested in, it's easy to get them wrong. If you are trying to change peoples' priorities, you have to start with something they know. Then you can move on to things they might be unfamiliar with.
It may not be strictly helpful (in a chicken & egg sort of way), but one very good way of getting people to care about Saturnine moons would be to find life on them. See how many people remember the name Enceladus after THAT headline.
Unless you believe that map-making started with GPS in 1994, then obviously not.
Most map making is done with aerial photographs mixed with good-old-fashioned triangulation-based surveying, which is then reconciled with GPS. The error ratios in GPS are well understood, as the system has been used to check against other methods in this way almost continuously since it came online. If GPS positioning was throwing up 18 metre errors left and right it would have been noticed many many times.
It is possible to be popular in spite of serious bad design. But to claim something is only accessible by geeks, or impenetrable for older people, when the fact is that it has extremely widespread mainstream appeal is clearly daft. It's even more daft to hold up one of the most popular websites (and most profitable companies) in the world as an example of what your company should avoid (as per the rant).
Amazon.com might not have Apple style "magic" appeal (etc.), but clearly its design (which is more or less the classic website design) does well enough to keep hold of customers in a world with almost infinite variety of competitors. From my own experience, I can think of countless online shops which are considerably less usable than Amazon.co.uk, and yet I still do use them (and presumably so do enough others to keep them afloat)
I'm confused. Are talking about the same Amazon? The "probably the biggest online retailer in the world" Amazon, with 65 million US customers a month (god only knows globally)? The one with the website where you type "Romeo & Juliet" in the search bar, and you get presented with a list of items with that in the title, filterable by item category, sortable by price or popularity?
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it could be better. But it's just a perfectly normal, conventional website as far as I can tell, which has proved extremely popular with a huge demographic.
Well, last time around (WW2), it basically replaced the marine economy with a war economy- that is, manufacturing lots of materiel, military conscription, etc.
This isn't vigilantism. "any person who takes the law into his or her own hands, as by avenging a crime. "
This is not avenging (judge, jury), this isn't even crime prevention. This is people stopping actual crimes in progress. If you try to break up a fight, is that vigilantism? If you stop a robbery is that vigilantism? If you stop a little girl from being kidnapped?
If you're walking down the street getting about your normal business and you happen to see a crime in progress, I don't think anyone would call you a "vigilante" for trying to be a good citizen and helping out the victim.
If you get together with a few friends, make an armour-plated uniform with "Dennis the Avenger" stitched on the front, equip yourself with an electric stun baton, taser, and tear-gas sprays, and go strolling around bad neighbourhoods looking for "wrongdoers" to use your new toys on, then that makes you a vigilante. I honestly can't think of a single more text-book example of a vigilante. Hell, the dictionary definition I've just looked up is:
noun A member of a self-appointed group of citizens who undertake law enforcement in their community without legal authority, typically because the legal agencies are thought to be inadequate. http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/vigilante
If you don't believe that this is at least a mild example of vigilante behaviour, then I struggle to believe what you *would* classify as vigilantism. Would it make a big difference to you if he were carrying a (completely legal and registered) firearm instead of a stun baton? What if he and his friends patrolled together, rather than separately? What, basically, is the line to you?
. You complain about vigilantes using grossly disproportionate force, but apparently you're perfectly OK with cops doing the same thing?
Of course I'm not. But at least *in theory* these groups are tightly monitored, new members vetted, procedures in place to catch misconduct, etc.
Obviously it doesn't always work. But that's like saying you approve of people torching houses with flame-throwers because, heck, we allow them to own toasters and they set fire to houses all the time...
I think you misunderstood the last point (hint- he was being snarky). He's saying that the wait time is infinitely long for 50 million Americans- which is to say, 50 million Americans will never ever get to see a doctor, because they do not have health insurance. The fact that 50 million people in the US do not have health insurance is more or less fact. I'm not American and have no idea how good your free healthcare system is (medicare/medicaid and whatnot), but I'd be curious to know if it really is just as good as private healthcare.
Assuming that medicare/medicaid isn't all inclusive, I'd assume that your son either has access to a health insurance policy, or you or he have the money to pay for medical appointments on an ad hoc basis.
* Realistically,m how many jobs can NASA create? * How much does it cost to create each of those jobs? (NASA doesn't do cheap stuff) * What's the intersection between "people who are qualified to work for NASA" and "people who are having trouble finding work"?
OK, I'll give this one ago:
* Best answered by the NASA website: Who Works for NASA? NASA's Headquarters is in Washington, D.C. The agency has ten field centers and seven test and research facilities located in several states around the country. More than 18,000 people work for NASA. Many more people work with the agency as government contractors. Those people are hired by companies that NASA pays to do work for it. The combined workforce represents a wide variety of jobs. Astronauts may be the best-known NASA employees, but they only represent a small number of the total workforce. Many NASA workers are scientists and engineers. But people there hold many other jobs, too, from secretaries to writers to lawyers to teachers.
* Economic theory would say "trickle down effect" to that- if the government spend $100 million on shiny widgets, that $100 million has to go somewhere- into the pockets of other people; either the workers salaries, or the company balances of suppliers, dividends to shareholders, whatever. That money keeps on moving from place to place as its new owners spend it, and that's an economic stimulus.
Vigilantism is illegal for a good reason. Vigilantism in a funny costume is still vigilantism.
Generally the people who get involved in vigilantism are either crazy or thugs just looking for an excuse (my guess is our Marvel/DC friends are the former). They either target the wrong people, or end up abusing their position of power, or end up using grossly disproportionate force. In areas policed by vigilantes (and counting militias, religious zealots, and lynch mobs, this is still common in many places in the world) you're often as likely to fall foul of a vigilante as a "criminal". We get around this problem in civilized society by handing out specific powers to specific people (police, rentacops, private eyes, bounty hunters, etc.), and tightly monitoring these groups to keep them in check.
It's all very amusing when it's some deluded guy dressed as a Green Lantern, but it doesn't make it any different- you've still got some (probably mentally ill) guy roaming around the streets with weaponry and "martial arts training", looking for people to fight.
Not that I need to persuade you (Slashdot is the choir on this one), but we all know that 70 doesn't mean 70 in this context- it means forever. In a decade, they'll up it to 80. Another decade, it'll be 90. Frankly at this point I don't know why they don't just cut the crap and make it an eternal copyright period; who do they really think they're kidding?
It is definitely new. I'd say Siri is the magical part of the 4S, not the camera, but the camera is no slouch.
Oh, please don't describe Apple features as "magical". Really, really don't.
I'm no Apple hater or anything like that (I mean, I wouldn't kick an iPhone out of bed or anything), but that's just letting the marketing executives win. Hearing it is like the slow realisation that the speaker is a pod person.
I'm not really sure what you mean, but my first netbook (a 9" Asus eeePC) had an SSD hard drive. Unfortunately they seem to have gon out of fashion a bit now (I guess it's a tough sell compared to a 250 GB spinning disk drive, what with peoples' attitude to "bigger numbers are better" for PC specs), but that netbook set me back only £200. It had an Atom processor and a full-featured OS too.
You're probably wrong there. If you work minimum wage, you're probably short of cash. The money you have is probably spread pretty thinly amongst your necessities (food, rent, utility bills, transport). People in this situation will probably be willing to do a little evening "work" to make their money go further; whether it be mending something that's broken (instead of just buying a new one), washing their car themselves (instead of going to a car wash), home cooking (rather than take-away food).
It might take 5 minutes to find the latest Lady Gaga song on Amazon, 10 minutes to find a torrent of it (although I debate that- for popular things it's no more difficult to Google "[title] torrent" than it is to navigate to Amazon and find it using their internal search), so that means if it were £3 a song, that's £3 for 5 minutes work. Which is no small change when the minimum wage is £5.50 or so.
That said, I really admire your attitude. There's no point worrying about the people who will pirate your works- it's going to happen, so be zen about it. If you price your work sensibly (and $2 seems very reasonable to me), and don't act like a dick with DRM or licences, then the people who can buy from you legitimately WILL buy from you legitimately.
The big problem is if those letters manage to scare some poor kids into sticking a cheque for settlement in the post. As you say, the cases would never survive a court hearing- but that doesn't stop the threat of a court appearance sounding very scary. It amounts to little better than extortion, and I hope the Australian authorities take as firm a line with it as the UK authorities did with MediaCAT/ACS:Law.
I was under the impression that Silk had a "conventional" mode too; at the click of a button, you can run it locally, without using the EC2 service.
As long as this remains the case, I can't really get excited about it in an apocalyptic "end of the internet" sort of way. For those of us who care (and for everyone, if Amazon start acting restrictive), it can just be turned off.
What I want to know is what other computers one can get for 349 pounds.
I honestly can't believe they're selling a Samsung "chromebook" for £350. I literally read TFA just to check you hadn't got that wrong. I'm completely flabbergasted that they would be selling what is basically a "thin client" Atom laptop with a 12" screen for that. I mean, you can get a real Samsung-brand laptop for less than that.
I MIGHT have been interested in Chromebooks if they had massively undercut conventional netbooks, or had fantastic new hardware features (epic battery life, for example). But for just a crippled version of a perfectly ordinary netbook, that's an absurd price.
Customers do care about hardware specs- they just don't necessarily know they do. They don't know they care about screen aspect ratios- but they will say "hey that looks great" if you show them a device with a screen perfectly suited for movie viewing. They don't know that they care about RAM or GPU, but they care about things loading quicker and jittering less.
The Slashdot crowd are just the same- it's just that they know the technical terms, so we can have proper discussions about it rather than just banging on about things "feeling magical".
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I'm sure; this is a corporation we're talking about, they wouldn't be doing anything that doesn't stand to extract some money from somebody. But it does prove that Xerox at the very least thought that there was legal grounds to sue Apple over patent theft- something they wouldn't have bothered with if stories of "they sold their technology legally and fairly" were strictly true.
That's not how patents works. You either have a patent on something, or you don't. Either something has been done already (hence prior art) or it hasn't. It doesn't matter if you sell 10 or 10 million of your patented invention, the patent stays valid. And patents can be invalidated by ideas that haven't even been created in practice (such as the patent on communications satellites being quashed by A.C. Clarke's writings).
Copyright is the same. If I publish a book, that book is my intellectual property; you can't copy any section of it without my permission. It doesn't matter if I don't sell even a single copy of it, or if it's a best seller- the rules stay the same either way. Trademarks do work differently, but I've not heard anyone claim that Apple is using trademark law to protect their "rounded corners" design.
And they're your only options in a legal setting. If you can't prove that an opponent is violating one of your patents, copyrights or trademarks, the courts shouldn't care. Even if you look at a rival product and think "gosh, that's very similar to my product", that isn't grounds for a legal infringement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghandi#Accusations_of_racism
Plenty to be found via Google too.
None of those things are indicative of intrinsic value. Something is not valuable only because it is rare- my teeth are very rare (only 52 ever made!), but no-one would ever buy one off me for anything like a good price. Nor is being portable or storable all that's required (otherwise Lego bricks would be a fantastic currency), or divisibility. I don't necessarily buy it's use as jewellery as a good reason either, seeing as that's basically dependent on it remaining in fashion (which admittedly it always has, but there's nothing intrinsic about that as a quality- it's entirely externally dependent, and could theoretically be replaced at any time by some other shiny substance).
You could say (and people do) that gold has intrinsic value due to it's industrial uses (which are all because of it's actual intrinsic physical properties). But a quick visit to Wikipedia tells me that industrial consumption accounts for only 10% of gold consumption worldwide (the rest being either jewellery or financial/investment use), so if you strip out its other uses its value would collapse.
The "thing of actual value" that backs up a dollar (/pound/euro) is the fact that it is legal tender. This means that if you ever owe a debt, the creditor will always accept that currency to settle it. Importantly, this applies to taxes- if you owe taxes, your government can insist on only being paid in their legal tender (which they will- governments don't barter), and if you don't pay your taxes, you go to jail.
You're free to trade in things other than legal tender. If you want to offer US dollars to a UK shopkeeper, and he accepts, you can. If you want to offer him Bitcoins, and he accepts, you can. If you want to offer him payment in goats, that's fine too. But if he says that he'll only accept pounds sterling, then that's all he will accept.
You can't demand to exchange a pound for silver any more, that's true. But then you can't demand to exchange silver for anything either- so even if you do exchange your GBP for silver, you still don't have anything of inherent value unless you can convince someone to trade you something else again for it.
You would be assuming that Slashcode can handle displaying a Greek letter. I'm not going to try, but that's probably a ropey assumption to make...
See what I mean? Unless it's something you are actively interested in, it's easy to get them wrong. If you are trying to change peoples' priorities, you have to start with something they know. Then you can move on to things they might be unfamiliar with.
It may not be strictly helpful (in a chicken & egg sort of way), but one very good way of getting people to care about Saturnine moons would be to find life on them. See how many people remember the name Enceladus after THAT headline.
Unless you believe that map-making started with GPS in 1994, then obviously not.
Most map making is done with aerial photographs mixed with good-old-fashioned triangulation-based surveying, which is then reconciled with GPS. The error ratios in GPS are well understood, as the system has been used to check against other methods in this way almost continuously since it came online. If GPS positioning was throwing up 18 metre errors left and right it would have been noticed many many times.
It is possible to be popular in spite of serious bad design. But to claim something is only accessible by geeks, or impenetrable for older people, when the fact is that it has extremely widespread mainstream appeal is clearly daft. It's even more daft to hold up one of the most popular websites (and most profitable companies) in the world as an example of what your company should avoid (as per the rant).
Amazon.com might not have Apple style "magic" appeal (etc.), but clearly its design (which is more or less the classic website design) does well enough to keep hold of customers in a world with almost infinite variety of competitors. From my own experience, I can think of countless online shops which are considerably less usable than Amazon.co.uk, and yet I still do use them (and presumably so do enough others to keep them afloat)
I'm confused. Are talking about the same Amazon? The "probably the biggest online retailer in the world" Amazon, with 65 million US customers a month (god only knows globally)? The one with the website where you type "Romeo & Juliet" in the search bar, and you get presented with a list of items with that in the title, filterable by item category, sortable by price or popularity?
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it could be better. But it's just a perfectly normal, conventional website as far as I can tell, which has proved extremely popular with a huge demographic.
Um...no, it isn't.
Either look it up, or if you prefer go to Google Maps and pay attention to the Scale at the bottom left corner.
Well, last time around (WW2), it basically replaced the marine economy with a war economy- that is, manufacturing lots of materiel, military conscription, etc.
This isn't vigilantism. "any person who takes the law into his or her own hands, as by avenging a crime. "
This is not avenging (judge, jury), this isn't even crime prevention. This is people stopping actual crimes in progress. If you try to break up a fight, is that vigilantism? If you stop a robbery is that vigilantism? If you stop a little girl from being kidnapped?
If you're walking down the street getting about your normal business and you happen to see a crime in progress, I don't think anyone would call you a "vigilante" for trying to be a good citizen and helping out the victim.
If you get together with a few friends, make an armour-plated uniform with "Dennis the Avenger" stitched on the front, equip yourself with an electric stun baton, taser, and tear-gas sprays, and go strolling around bad neighbourhoods looking for "wrongdoers" to use your new toys on, then that makes you a vigilante. I honestly can't think of a single more text-book example of a vigilante. Hell, the dictionary definition I've just looked up is:
noun
A member of a self-appointed group of citizens who undertake law enforcement in their community without legal authority, typically because the legal agencies are thought to be inadequate.
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/vigilante
If you don't believe that this is at least a mild example of vigilante behaviour, then I struggle to believe what you *would* classify as vigilantism. Would it make a big difference to you if he were carrying a (completely legal and registered) firearm instead of a stun baton? What if he and his friends patrolled together, rather than separately? What, basically, is the line to you?
. You complain about vigilantes using grossly disproportionate force, but apparently you're perfectly OK with cops doing the same thing?
Of course I'm not. But at least *in theory* these groups are tightly monitored, new members vetted, procedures in place to catch misconduct, etc.
Obviously it doesn't always work. But that's like saying you approve of people torching houses with flame-throwers because, heck, we allow them to own toasters and they set fire to houses all the time...
I think you misunderstood the last point (hint- he was being snarky). He's saying that the wait time is infinitely long for 50 million Americans- which is to say, 50 million Americans will never ever get to see a doctor, because they do not have health insurance. The fact that 50 million people in the US do not have health insurance is more or less fact. I'm not American and have no idea how good your free healthcare system is (medicare/medicaid and whatnot), but I'd be curious to know if it really is just as good as private healthcare.
Assuming that medicare/medicaid isn't all inclusive, I'd assume that your son either has access to a health insurance policy, or you or he have the money to pay for medical appointments on an ad hoc basis.
You think this is about jobs?
Please ponder the following:
* Realistically,m how many jobs can NASA create?
* How much does it cost to create each of those jobs? (NASA doesn't do cheap stuff)
* What's the intersection between "people who are qualified to work for NASA" and "people who are having trouble finding work"?
OK, I'll give this one ago:
* Best answered by the NASA website:
Who Works for NASA?
NASA's Headquarters is in Washington, D.C. The agency has ten field centers and seven test and research facilities located in several states around the country. More than 18,000 people work for NASA. Many more people work with the agency as government contractors. Those people are hired by companies that NASA pays to do work for it. The combined workforce represents a wide variety of jobs. Astronauts may be the best-known NASA employees, but they only represent a small number of the total workforce. Many NASA workers are scientists and engineers. But people there hold many other jobs, too, from secretaries to writers to lawyers to teachers.
* Economic theory would say "trickle down effect" to that- if the government spend $100 million on shiny widgets, that $100 million has to go somewhere- into the pockets of other people; either the workers salaries, or the company balances of suppliers, dividends to shareholders, whatever. That money keeps on moving from place to place as its new owners spend it, and that's an economic stimulus.
* Can only speak from a UK perspective on this one, so disregard if you know better for a US perspective, but:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14758464
Vigilantism is illegal for a good reason. Vigilantism in a funny costume is still vigilantism.
Generally the people who get involved in vigilantism are either crazy or thugs just looking for an excuse (my guess is our Marvel/DC friends are the former). They either target the wrong people, or end up abusing their position of power, or end up using grossly disproportionate force. In areas policed by vigilantes (and counting militias, religious zealots, and lynch mobs, this is still common in many places in the world) you're often as likely to fall foul of a vigilante as a "criminal". We get around this problem in civilized society by handing out specific powers to specific people (police, rentacops, private eyes, bounty hunters, etc.), and tightly monitoring these groups to keep them in check.
It's all very amusing when it's some deluded guy dressed as a Green Lantern, but it doesn't make it any different- you've still got some (probably mentally ill) guy roaming around the streets with weaponry and "martial arts training", looking for people to fight.
Not that I need to persuade you (Slashdot is the choir on this one), but we all know that 70 doesn't mean 70 in this context- it means forever. In a decade, they'll up it to 80. Another decade, it'll be 90. Frankly at this point I don't know why they don't just cut the crap and make it an eternal copyright period; who do they really think they're kidding?
Maybe only themselves...
It is definitely new. I'd say Siri is the magical part of the 4S, not the camera, but the camera is no slouch.
Oh, please don't describe Apple features as "magical". Really, really don't.
I'm no Apple hater or anything like that (I mean, I wouldn't kick an iPhone out of bed or anything), but that's just letting the marketing executives win. Hearing it is like the slow realisation that the speaker is a pod person.
I'm not really sure what you mean, but my first netbook (a 9" Asus eeePC) had an SSD hard drive. Unfortunately they seem to have gon out of fashion a bit now (I guess it's a tough sell compared to a 250 GB spinning disk drive, what with peoples' attitude to "bigger numbers are better" for PC specs), but that netbook set me back only £200. It had an Atom processor and a full-featured OS too.
You're probably wrong there. If you work minimum wage, you're probably short of cash. The money you have is probably spread pretty thinly amongst your necessities (food, rent, utility bills, transport). People in this situation will probably be willing to do a little evening "work" to make their money go further; whether it be mending something that's broken (instead of just buying a new one), washing their car themselves (instead of going to a car wash), home cooking (rather than take-away food).
It might take 5 minutes to find the latest Lady Gaga song on Amazon, 10 minutes to find a torrent of it (although I debate that- for popular things it's no more difficult to Google "[title] torrent" than it is to navigate to Amazon and find it using their internal search), so that means if it were £3 a song, that's £3 for 5 minutes work. Which is no small change when the minimum wage is £5.50 or so.
That said, I really admire your attitude. There's no point worrying about the people who will pirate your works- it's going to happen, so be zen about it. If you price your work sensibly (and $2 seems very reasonable to me), and don't act like a dick with DRM or licences, then the people who can buy from you legitimately WILL buy from you legitimately.
The big problem is if those letters manage to scare some poor kids into sticking a cheque for settlement in the post. As you say, the cases would never survive a court hearing- but that doesn't stop the threat of a court appearance sounding very scary. It amounts to little better than extortion, and I hope the Australian authorities take as firm a line with it as the UK authorities did with MediaCAT/ACS:Law.
I was under the impression that Silk had a "conventional" mode too; at the click of a button, you can run it locally, without using the EC2 service.
As long as this remains the case, I can't really get excited about it in an apocalyptic "end of the internet" sort of way. For those of us who care (and for everyone, if Amazon start acting restrictive), it can just be turned off.
What I want to know is what other computers one can get for 349 pounds.
I honestly can't believe they're selling a Samsung "chromebook" for £350. I literally read TFA just to check you hadn't got that wrong. I'm completely flabbergasted that they would be selling what is basically a "thin client" Atom laptop with a 12" screen for that. I mean, you can get a real Samsung-brand laptop for less than that.
I MIGHT have been interested in Chromebooks if they had massively undercut conventional netbooks, or had fantastic new hardware features (epic battery life, for example). But for just a crippled version of a perfectly ordinary netbook, that's an absurd price.
Customers do care about hardware specs- they just don't necessarily know they do. They don't know they care about screen aspect ratios- but they will say "hey that looks great" if you show them a device with a screen perfectly suited for movie viewing. They don't know that they care about RAM or GPU, but they care about things loading quicker and jittering less.
The Slashdot crowd are just the same- it's just that they know the technical terms, so we can have proper discussions about it rather than just banging on about things "feeling magical".