Apologies for replying to my own post, but I think I may have been a little *too* cryptic.
What I mean is that we all know Twitter can't keep on keepin' on as they have been. Limiting the extent of a user's tweets to some determined-by-proprietary-algorithm subset of followers would be the first step. The second step would be a fee to make sure a tweet reaches x number of users. The more followers a user/brand has, the more money to reach that brand's followers.
The result of
such attempts at blending is stuff that is annoying and awful to use and
it is an insult to a user who has a modicum of intelligence. QUIT THIS
SHIT, Tim Cook, or your legacy will be that of the guy who fucked up
a good thing, and that is not a legacy anyone with honor wants.
Rationalizing action or inaction with the fact that everyone and everything will one day be dead always fails to convince. The fact of our mortality and the eventual end of everything we know is obvious to anyone who is alive to contemplate reality.
The more interesting course of behavior is to strive even in the face of such facts, precisely as so many of us do.
I always wondered why no one has tried a 2nd amendment challenge to those laws. The US officially recognizes 'cyberwarfare' so these "hacking tools" can now be classified as arms in digital warfare.
The Second Amendment "Right to Bear Arms" might be applied profitably to unconventional weapons such as software, sure.
The Second Amendment does not specify the conditions for the legal use of such arms. The legality of the use of legally owned weapons is something determined on a case-by-case state-by-state basis in local courts, and I think the issue is whether the OP's use of security scripts would be determined to be legal.
The point is, though, that if you are trying to map your current Midwestern (for example) lifestyle to the Bay area or Boston or NYC or whatever, then you are always going to reach ridiculous conclusions like you need to make 3x your salary. That's about as ridiculous as me saying that it would cost me much more to live in Ohio than it does in NYC because I'd have to pay for airfare every weekend to see Broadway shows and I'd have to install my own subway line to have a convenient no-car commute.
Your comparison is exactly on target. In Ohio I had a mortgage for a small 2-bedroom house that had maybe 1400 sq feet or so. My one-bedroom rent in SF is just about double that mortgage and I have about 300 sq feet. It's not much space and I do wish I had a bigger kitchen, but the other things I enjoy as a result of living in the city are, for me, well worth the trade off.
Of course, there are things on my wish list (e.g. quieter neighborhood), but those things will come in time. That said, if I had a family I probably would not have been able to just split town for SF.
According to an online Cost of Living Comparison Tool, if I wanted to accept a job at Google they'd need to more than double my salary.
I think comparison tools are very inaccurate about what things actually cost and obscure the value of things that are usually summed up with the phrase "quality of life".
I live and work in SF after having come from Athens, OH, and your comparison tool is telling me that if I moved this year I would need need 117% more money than I did in Athens. I actually make about fifty percent more than I did when I lived in Ohio and I have much more money than I did when I lived in Ohio.
More importantly, there are some things no amount of personal compensation could provide: ethnic diversity, world class cuisine, sublime landscape, beautiful weather year round, municipal infrastructure (no boil orders for septically contaminated water), and a dozen other things even 50 years of economic development could not deliver to places like the one I lived in in Ohio.
"Cost" of living is not just about money and direct comparisons based on money equivalence don't capture the whole picture.
Our Sillicon Valley startup has about 50 employees and the average engineering salaries are north of $150,000.
I suppose there are some start-ups that do pay developers the value of the labor, but my own experience is a bit different in that it was more stereotypical of Silicon-Valley startup compensation packages. That is, my salary was shamefully low (I was new to the profession), just about unlivable for the Bay Area, and was offset with a very accelerated stock options plan.
Even though the company was purchased and I ended up with some real, live tradable stock, the final calculation (dividing the value of my options over the length of my employment) revealed a still cripplingly low annual salary (~75K/year). So, unless your startup is going to hit it BIG big, direct compensation may be a better deal than equity.
Good on your company for paying their workers the full(er) value of the labor in cash.
Statistics can be interpreted in many many ways.
Deaths per mile are higher, deaths per hour on the road are much lower
So I get to spend more time going less distance and have a higher risk of death? Sounds like a win-win situation!
So I get to spend more time going less distance and have a higher risk of death? Sounds like a win-win situation!
[The Failure Group (now Exponent)] looked at a variety of activities and determined that the number of fatalities per million hours of exposure was 0.26 for biking, 0.47 for driving, 1.53 for living (all causes of death), and 8.80 for motorcycling. In other words, they found that the risks of biking were about half that associated with driving and a sixth of that associated simply with being alive.
Regarding fewer miles traveled that's actually a feature, not a bug. For longer distances (greater than 15 miles) I use car share or public transportation. If the destination is still out of range, I simply don't go. I personally think of forgoing needless travel as carbon-footprint budgeting.
The same reason you see most Harley Davidson Motorcycle Riders always out in their costume. It's Fashion, trying to look good and impress their other bike riding friends. Some wear their fashion all the time.
I started riding a street-bike this year. I've always worn regular clothes (sometimes shorts) while cycling.
I'm in my mid-forties and am athletically fit but my normal clothes bind my legs and arms which I've found is simply neither as efficient nor safe as when I'm wearing running clothes (7 to 14-inch shorts or running tights, wicking shirt, form-fitting windbreaker, and slim athletic shoes).
The geometry of my street bike (track style) as well as the musculature of my body simply make athletic clothes a much safer and more performant choice than regular clothes. The clothes I wear biking do make me look a bit like "biking dork" but I prefer that to being less safe. I bring a change of clothes for work and special dates.
Specialized clothing is not (always) only about fashion and, even if it were, there's nothing wrong with that.
I've been thinking for some time that all the quantum weirdness down at the bottom of things could be, in essence, lazy evaluation. Whatever computational substrate we're running on, to this way of thinking, simply never determines many of the answers, using approximations instead. It's only when a specific answer actually matters that the computation is fully carried out, and, if necessary, any other retroactive adjustments to spacetime are also implemented. That's why quantum measurements taken in the future are always consistent with entangled ones taken in the past -- the simulation goes back, and edits everything that way. [. ..]
Interestingly, simply watching for 'hot spots' in the simulated universe, areas that are taking lots of computation time, should inevitably lead the implementors to interesting things happening in that universe.... our particle accelerators, if we're running on a simulation, would be producing some very, very strange requests for 'CPU time'. That would be a flashing neon light that the entities running the simulation should check out that third planet orbiting that unremarkable sun in that rather plebian spiral galaxy.
[. ..]
Another thought I just had: the fundamental quantum randomness might be very deliberate, a damping effect on perturbations. If the GodComputer has to go back to earlier frames and change the results of computations to match later measurements, the ripples from that change could potentially mean everything within that event's light cone would have to stop, return to an earlier frame, and restart -- a missed branch prediction, in CPU-speak. The random quantum oscillations could function as a field reducing the spread of butterfly-wing effects to a local area, so that scientists doing weird crap in a laboratory, instead of making a huge chunk of a galaxy miss a couple of beats, might just force a recomputation of their local laboratory... eventually, the ripples of difference would be swallowed by quantum noise.
If I'm in Santa Cruz you can be sure that a cyclist will do something arrogant and stupid, like using the whole lane when they don't actually need it. This is why I extra-specially like owning diesels. Approach slowly, mash pedal, laugh.
Maybe you should stop being so selfish and stop "punishing" cyclists for exercising what is their prerogative within the law. But judging from your posting history, I'm probably wasting my time because "selfish and arrogant" pretty much sums you up.
What I find really uncanny is that from one perspective this is an example of life imitating art.
The somewhat infamous and critically celebrated Stelarc has conducted a few experiments on his body to attach new sensory organs to his body and connect his body to larger networks. Ping body is a pretty famous one, but the one I have in mind is his "Ear on Arm". Partially quoting:
The EAR ON ARM has required 2 surgeries thus far. An extra ear is presently being constructed on my forearm: A left ear on a left arm. An ear that not only hears but also transmits. A facial feature has been replicated, relocated and will now be rewired for alternate capabilities. Excess skin was created with an implanted skin expander in the forearm. By injecting saline solution into a subcutaneous port, the kidney shaped silicon implant stretched the skin, forming a pocket of excess skin that could be used in surgically constructing the ear. The body is a living system which isn't easy to surgically sculpt. And recovery time is needed after the surgical procedures. There were several serious problems that occurred: a necrosis during the skin expansion process necessitated excising it and rotating the position of the ear around the arm. Ironically, this proved to be the original site that the 3D model and animation was visualized. Anyway, the inner forearm was anatomically a good site for the ear construction. The skin is thin and smooth there, and ergonomically locating it on the inner forearm minimizes the inadvertent knocking or scraping of the ear.
Apple right now are still selling the 3GS iOS 6 runs badly, Admittedly with features stripped. According to you will still be receiving updates in September 2015. It won't.
So, I clicked through and found the initial presentation funny, but if you try to click on the Vimeo link and actually type in a "desired" user name, you are forwarded to a TedX talk by Lisa Kristine, a photographer who has documented the existence of slavery in Nepal, Ghana, and India to name a few.
Kristine's message is quite compelling and worth a look on its own merits. I hope the +5 mod ends up getting the featured abolitionists, "Free the Slaves", the funds to free these inhumanely treated people.
When I lived there I could drive to work including parking in fifteen minutes or take bus, light rail, and a bus for over an hour.
If you're telling the truth, your data/anecdote is of times past because there is nowhere in SF you can drive and park in 15 minutes that would take over an hour by public transit. To be honest, your story doesn't pass the smell test.
But disregarding that, I think what many SF commuters overlook is the speed of foot power.
I used to walk 25 minutes one-way to work. One of my co-workers was surprised I'd walk from Polk Gulch to the Financial District. He kept remarking how far that was. I could have taken public transit (MUNI) but that would mean waiting for the bus (5-10 minutes), taking the bus (10-15 minutes), and walking the rest of the way (5-7 minutes) for a boundary total of 20-32 minutes. Much faster (and fun) walking.
But now I ride my bike. I obey the traffic signals but because I don't have to queue behind automobiles (which even motorcycles have to do) my commute is 4 minutes to work (downhill) and 6 minutes back.
Buy DEET, 50-90% concentration, apply liberally. The higher concentration stuff is rather strong, but you can spray it on your clothes (ie. Socks, shoes, sleeves).
That's it. Toxify your local environment and expose yourself to biochemically active substances...
Why not just move the fuck away from places with mosquitoes?
One of the main reasons "suburbs" is such a dirty word is that suburban living is considered unsustainable for large populations and that suburban denizens consume a disproportionate amount of resources (energy, land, and water) per capita than city dwellers.
Another reason suburban dwelling is considered environmentally undesirable is sprawl. Cul-de-sac development, automotive thouroughfares, and pedestrian unfriendliness are major features of suburban development and all inhibit the higher social densities that characterize a more environmentally sustainable urban lifestyle.
A great place to start when trying to understand contemporary models of urban planning (which includes suburban planning) is Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
The story about "packaging fetishists" is just as much about doing something wrong as it is about doing it right. Why not just make packaging that is easy to open and recycle, and let the consumer enjoy just the product instead of worrying about the box? Or, at least, make the box in a form factor that is easy to actually reuse instead of inspiring Apple fans to collect shelves and shelves of meaningless cardboard.
Many people don't understand packaging is very important and your post, unfortunately, is no exception.
In the case of tablets and phones, packaging is the first personal encounter with what is intended to be a personal device. Getting this step right is crucial to shaping how a consumer perceives the product and too many companies neglect this simple but ineluctable point.
It's not fetishism to want a consumer's experience of "getting at the device" to be quick, obvious, and easy. Furthermore, packaging that is easily opened and which is not damaged upon opening makes that packaging reusable.
Apple's packaging of phones and tables is exemplary in this regard. The only thing that must be permanently damaged in the unboxing process is the shrink wrap, and even that can be preserved so that it can be reused. This means that when I upgrade my tablet I can sell the old device on eBay in its original packaging and allow my buyers to have a very-close-to-new out-of-box experience. I've sold quite a few phones, tablets, and laptops on eBay and people really appreciate the out-of-box experience, so much so that I mention that the item has all the original packaging intact.
Style, simplicity, and reusability are not shallow but deep. It's the failure to appreciate the work that goes into making something simple that is shallow.
The reason blacks in the United States and scholars of race are particular about naming is because historical usage is often inaccurate and/or racist.
Negro is a mistaken identification of race, and scientists are in general agreement that race has no biological basis.
In the contemporary context, "black" is perfectly acceptable as is "African-American", though "black" has problems with precision and specificity as does "African-American". For example, many "black" people are actually less black in their skin-tone than some non-blacks (including some whites). African-American confuses nationality and obscures color in order to be historically accurate and, for better or worse, is the term generally accepted by educated and cultured people in the United States.
The real issue is that racism is often not even conscious. People don't even recognize how they have been subtly trained by media and culture to hold a racist bias.
What I find curious is how you mush together a discussion of how to refer to mentally impaired people and people of black African ancestry. Why these two? Why not Jews and blacks, or Indians and blacks? What are your unconscious presumptions about these populations that makes you link them together when thinking about how to name them?
Slashdot Mirror
...that people can't get their free domains because co.cc has been cut off.
Or is that what this story is about?
Apologies for replying to my own post, but I think I may have been a little *too* cryptic.
What I mean is that we all know Twitter can't keep on keepin' on as they have been. Limiting the extent of a user's tweets to some determined-by-proprietary-algorithm subset of followers would be the first step. The second step would be a fee to make sure a tweet reaches x number of users. The more followers a user/brand has, the more money to reach that brand's followers.
This seems like sound business sense to me.
So compare this to Twitter where I can send verbal diarrhea all day long for next to nothing and we now have a supply/demand curve.
Thus is revealed Twitter's forthcoming business plan.
Can you imagine writing an article as a series of tweets?
Sounds very unprofessional.
A few months back (August 2012), Cassian Elwes (an independent film producer) posted a series of tweets about his interaction with a distraught veteran on a flight from New York to Los Angeles. (Sorry for the Buzzfeed link, it came from MetaFilter, I swear!)
While it's not Pulitzer-level journalism, the story does emerge reasonably well from Elwes's tweets.
Well expressed. Thank you.
The result of
such attempts at blending is stuff that is annoying and awful to use and
it is an insult to a user who has a modicum of intelligence. QUIT THIS
SHIT, Tim Cook, or your legacy will be that of the guy who fucked up
a good thing, and that is not a legacy anyone with honor wants.
Speaking of fecal matter, take a look at this comic's prescient 13th item! Dun dun DUN
In the long term, we're all dead anyway.
Rationalizing action or inaction with the fact that everyone and everything will one day be dead always fails to convince. The fact of our mortality and the eventual end of everything we know is obvious to anyone who is alive to contemplate reality.
The more interesting course of behavior is to strive even in the face of such facts, precisely as so many of us do.
I always wondered why no one has tried a 2nd amendment challenge to those laws. The US officially recognizes 'cyberwarfare' so these "hacking tools" can now be classified as arms in digital warfare.
The Second Amendment "Right to Bear Arms" might be applied profitably to unconventional weapons such as software, sure.
The Second Amendment does not specify the conditions for the legal use of such arms. The legality of the use of legally owned weapons is something determined on a case-by-case state-by-state basis in local courts, and I think the issue is whether the OP's use of security scripts would be determined to be legal.
I think MS is following Gandhi's quote:
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
With MS the steps seem reversed. Going back to when MS was so entrenched the US DOJ convicted them of monopoly abuses:
1. First you win.
2. Then they fight you.
3. Then they laugh at you.
4. Then they ignore you.
The point is, though, that if you are trying to map your current Midwestern (for example) lifestyle to the Bay area or Boston or NYC or whatever, then you are always going to reach ridiculous conclusions like you need to make 3x your salary. That's about as ridiculous as me saying that it would cost me much more to live in Ohio than it does in NYC because I'd have to pay for airfare every weekend to see Broadway shows and I'd have to install my own subway line to have a convenient no-car commute.
Your comparison is exactly on target. In Ohio I had a mortgage for a small 2-bedroom house that had maybe 1400 sq feet or so. My one-bedroom rent in SF is just about double that mortgage and I have about 300 sq feet. It's not much space and I do wish I had a bigger kitchen, but the other things I enjoy as a result of living in the city are, for me, well worth the trade off.
Of course, there are things on my wish list (e.g. quieter neighborhood), but those things will come in time. That said, if I had a family I probably would not have been able to just split town for SF.
According to an online Cost of Living Comparison Tool, if I wanted to accept a job at Google they'd need to more than double my salary.
I think comparison tools are very inaccurate about what things actually cost and obscure the value of things that are usually summed up with the phrase "quality of life".
I live and work in SF after having come from Athens, OH, and your comparison tool is telling me that if I moved this year I would need need 117% more money than I did in Athens. I actually make about fifty percent more than I did when I lived in Ohio and I have much more money than I did when I lived in Ohio.
More importantly, there are some things no amount of personal compensation could provide: ethnic diversity, world class cuisine, sublime landscape, beautiful weather year round, municipal infrastructure (no boil orders for septically contaminated water), and a dozen other things even 50 years of economic development could not deliver to places like the one I lived in in Ohio.
"Cost" of living is not just about money and direct comparisons based on money equivalence don't capture the whole picture.
Our Sillicon Valley startup has about 50 employees and the average engineering salaries are north of $150,000.
I suppose there are some start-ups that do pay developers the value of the labor, but my own experience is a bit different in that it was more stereotypical of Silicon-Valley startup compensation packages. That is, my salary was shamefully low (I was new to the profession), just about unlivable for the Bay Area, and was offset with a very accelerated stock options plan.
Even though the company was purchased and I ended up with some real, live tradable stock, the final calculation (dividing the value of my options over the length of my employment) revealed a still cripplingly low annual salary (~75K/year). So, unless your startup is going to hit it BIG big, direct compensation may be a better deal than equity.
Good on your company for paying their workers the full(er) value of the labor in cash.
Statistics can be interpreted in many many ways. Deaths per mile are higher, deaths per hour on the road are much lower So I get to spend more time going less distance and have a higher risk of death? Sounds like a win-win situation!
So I get to spend more time going less distance and have a higher risk of death? Sounds like a win-win situation!
You say that sarcastically, but you're reading it wrong. Hour for hour, bicycling is less deadly that being in an automobile. In fact, according to this source, biking is half as dangerous as driving:
[The Failure Group (now Exponent)] looked at a variety of activities and determined that the number of fatalities per million hours of exposure was 0.26 for biking, 0.47 for driving, 1.53 for living (all causes of death), and 8.80 for motorcycling. In other words, they found that the risks of biking were about half that associated with driving and a sixth of that associated simply with being alive.
Regarding fewer miles traveled that's actually a feature, not a bug. For longer distances (greater than 15 miles) I use car share or public transportation. If the destination is still out of range, I simply don't go. I personally think of forgoing needless travel as carbon-footprint budgeting.
The same reason you see most Harley Davidson Motorcycle Riders always out in their costume. It's Fashion, trying to look good and impress their other bike riding friends. Some wear their fashion all the time.
I started riding a street-bike this year. I've always worn regular clothes (sometimes shorts) while cycling.
I'm in my mid-forties and am athletically fit but my normal clothes bind my legs and arms which I've found is simply neither as efficient nor safe as when I'm wearing running clothes (7 to 14-inch shorts or running tights, wicking shirt, form-fitting windbreaker, and slim athletic shoes).
The geometry of my street bike (track style) as well as the musculature of my body simply make athletic clothes a much safer and more performant choice than regular clothes. The clothes I wear biking do make me look a bit like "biking dork" but I prefer that to being less safe. I bring a change of clothes for work and special dates.
Specialized clothing is not (always) only about fashion and, even if it were, there's nothing wrong with that.
Metafilter recently had a thread discussing an interview (alas, poorly written) with Rich Terrile, a NASA scientist who speculates that our universe is a computer simulation.
The article is somewhat thought-provoking, but the discussion at Metafilter is really entertaining.
In particular, I liked what one user (Malor) had to say:
I've been thinking for some time that all the quantum weirdness down at the bottom of things could be, in essence, lazy evaluation. Whatever computational substrate we're running on, to this way of thinking, simply never determines many of the answers, using approximations instead. It's only when a specific answer actually matters that the computation is fully carried out, and, if necessary, any other retroactive adjustments to spacetime are also implemented. That's why quantum measurements taken in the future are always consistent with entangled ones taken in the past -- the simulation goes back, and edits everything that way. [. . .]
Interestingly, simply watching for 'hot spots' in the simulated universe, areas that are taking lots of computation time, should inevitably lead the implementors to interesting things happening in that universe.... our particle accelerators, if we're running on a simulation, would be producing some very, very strange requests for 'CPU time'. That would be a flashing neon light that the entities running the simulation should check out that third planet orbiting that unremarkable sun in that rather plebian spiral galaxy.
[. . .]
Another thought I just had: the fundamental quantum randomness might be very deliberate, a damping effect on perturbations. If the GodComputer has to go back to earlier frames and change the results of computations to match later measurements, the ripples from that change could potentially mean everything within that event's light cone would have to stop, return to an earlier frame, and restart -- a missed branch prediction, in CPU-speak. The random quantum oscillations could function as a field reducing the spread of butterfly-wing effects to a local area, so that scientists doing weird crap in a laboratory, instead of making a huge chunk of a galaxy miss a couple of beats, might just force a recomputation of their local laboratory... eventually, the ripples of difference would be swallowed by quantum noise.
Gotta love this stuff.
my Ranger has a Vulcan V6 that only gets around 16 MPG
Your sense of proportion is completely busted.
If I'm in Santa Cruz you can be sure that a cyclist will do something arrogant and stupid, like using the whole lane when they don't actually need it. This is why I extra-specially like owning diesels. Approach slowly, mash pedal, laugh.
In San Francisco, bicycles have the right to the use of full lane. Turns out some places in Santa Cruz also allow bicyclists use of full lane.
Maybe you should stop being so selfish and stop "punishing" cyclists for exercising what is their prerogative within the law. But judging from your posting history, I'm probably wasting my time because "selfish and arrogant" pretty much sums you up.
What I find really uncanny is that from one perspective this is an example of life imitating art.
The somewhat infamous and critically celebrated Stelarc has conducted a few experiments on his body to attach new sensory organs to his body and connect his body to larger networks. Ping body is a pretty famous one, but the one I have in mind is his "Ear on Arm". Partially quoting:
Apple right now are still selling the 3GS iOS 6 runs badly, Admittedly with features stripped. According to you will still be receiving updates in September 2015. It won't.
3 years since debut you fucking ignoramus.
So, I clicked through and found the initial presentation funny, but if you try to click on the Vimeo link and actually type in a "desired" user name, you are forwarded to a TedX talk by Lisa Kristine, a photographer who has documented the existence of slavery in Nepal, Ghana, and India to name a few.
Kristine's message is quite compelling and worth a look on its own merits. I hope the +5 mod ends up getting the featured abolitionists, "Free the Slaves", the funds to free these inhumanely treated people.
When I lived there I could drive to work including parking in fifteen minutes or take bus, light rail, and a bus for over an hour.
If you're telling the truth, your data/anecdote is of times past because there is nowhere in SF you can drive and park in 15 minutes that would take over an hour by public transit. To be honest, your story doesn't pass the smell test.
But disregarding that, I think what many SF commuters overlook is the speed of foot power.
I used to walk 25 minutes one-way to work. One of my co-workers was surprised I'd walk from Polk Gulch to the Financial District. He kept remarking how far that was. I could have taken public transit (MUNI) but that would mean waiting for the bus (5-10 minutes), taking the bus (10-15 minutes), and walking the rest of the way (5-7 minutes) for a boundary total of 20-32 minutes. Much faster (and fun) walking.
But now I ride my bike. I obey the traffic signals but because I don't have to queue behind automobiles (which even motorcycles have to do) my commute is 4 minutes to work (downhill) and 6 minutes back.
Buy DEET, 50-90% concentration, apply liberally. The higher concentration stuff is rather strong, but you can spray it on your clothes (ie. Socks, shoes, sleeves).
That's it. Toxify your local environment and expose yourself to biochemically active substances...
Why not just move the fuck away from places with mosquitoes?
One of the main reasons "suburbs" is such a dirty word is that suburban living is considered unsustainable for large populations and that suburban denizens consume a disproportionate amount of resources (energy, land, and water) per capita than city dwellers.
Another reason suburban dwelling is considered environmentally undesirable is sprawl. Cul-de-sac development, automotive thouroughfares, and pedestrian unfriendliness are major features of suburban development and all inhibit the higher social densities that characterize a more environmentally sustainable urban lifestyle.
A great place to start when trying to understand contemporary models of urban planning (which includes suburban planning) is Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
The story about "packaging fetishists" is just as much about doing something wrong as it is about doing it right. Why not just make packaging that is easy to open and recycle, and let the consumer enjoy just the product instead of worrying about the box? Or, at least, make the box in a form factor that is easy to actually reuse instead of inspiring Apple fans to collect shelves and shelves of meaningless cardboard.
Many people don't understand packaging is very important and your post, unfortunately, is no exception.
In the case of tablets and phones, packaging is the first personal encounter with what is intended to be a personal device. Getting this step right is crucial to shaping how a consumer perceives the product and too many companies neglect this simple but ineluctable point.
It's not fetishism to want a consumer's experience of "getting at the device" to be quick, obvious, and easy. Furthermore, packaging that is easily opened and which is not damaged upon opening makes that packaging reusable.
Apple's packaging of phones and tables is exemplary in this regard. The only thing that must be permanently damaged in the unboxing process is the shrink wrap, and even that can be preserved so that it can be reused. This means that when I upgrade my tablet I can sell the old device on eBay in its original packaging and allow my buyers to have a very-close-to-new out-of-box experience. I've sold quite a few phones, tablets, and laptops on eBay and people really appreciate the out-of-box experience, so much so that I mention that the item has all the original packaging intact.
Style, simplicity, and reusability are not shallow but deep. It's the failure to appreciate the work that goes into making something simple that is shallow.
The reason blacks in the United States and scholars of race are particular about naming is because historical usage is often inaccurate and/or racist.
Negro is a mistaken identification of race, and scientists are in general agreement that race has no biological basis.
In the contemporary context, "black" is perfectly acceptable as is "African-American", though "black" has problems with precision and specificity as does "African-American". For example, many "black" people are actually less black in their skin-tone than some non-blacks (including some whites). African-American confuses nationality and obscures color in order to be historically accurate and, for better or worse, is the term generally accepted by educated and cultured people in the United States.
The real issue is that racism is often not even conscious. People don't even recognize how they have been subtly trained by media and culture to hold a racist bias.
What I find curious is how you mush together a discussion of how to refer to mentally impaired people and people of black African ancestry. Why these two? Why not Jews and blacks, or Indians and blacks? What are your unconscious presumptions about these populations that makes you link them together when thinking about how to name them?