It's not quite that simple. Why do you think he goes on the news and tries to make the coal industry look good? Why do you think he's suing anyone who points out his company's questionable practices?
The main issue is government regulation. If the government prohibits coal companies from putting their employees in dangerous situations, and prohibits coal companies from damaging the environment, *that* will cost them a lot of money. Whether that kind of regulation gets passed is entirely based on the level of public support. Preventing public support depends on nobody shining too bright a spotlight on his company's business practices.
Therefore, he's going to sue anyone who publicizes his company's business practices.
Well... because then you'd have malware. A big part of my point was that malware authors have already been able to include a headless browser if they wanted to, so it doesn't seem like this really changes their ability to have their malware perform click-fraud. It just means that, if you're unfortunate enough to get click-fraud malware, it won't also download their headless browser.
But I don't even know if it'll have that effect. If you're writing malware and you want it to be effective, you probably don't want to rely on specific 3rd-party software already being installed. They'll probably keep bundling their own headless browser anyway.
The adware won't need to include or download any extra tools and could use locally installed software to perform most of its malicious actions. In the past, there have been quite a few adware families that used headless browsers to perform clickfraud.
My first reaction to this is, I don't see why I should be concerned. Malware authors had the option of including a headless browser of their own to enable this, and now they can use the already-installed browser instead. So... if I do get this kind of malware, it'll install less crap on my system? Seems like a win to me.
Yes, limiting deductions and removing loopholes would help to solve the problem.
However, it's worth noting that conversations about a "flat tax" often conflate two different issues. Sometimes when people are talking about a "flat tax", they're talking about removing (or severely limiting) deductions, and just taxing people a set percentage of income. Even then, it's complicated. Are the tax rates for corporate taxed and capital gains also taxed? If not, you may be opening some loopholes already.
However, some people are not advocating a "flat tax" in that sense, but instead they're suggesting that income tax be made "flat" in terms of being non-progressive. That is, every American pay the same percentage in income tax, and there are no income brackets.
Some people will argue in favor of a no-deductions tax structure, but are fine with progressive taxes. Some will argue in favor of a no-tax-bracket structure, but are fine with deductions. Some people want a no-deductions and no-tax-bracket structure. And all of these groups use the term "flat tax" to describe what they're advocating for.
So I don't necessarily have a problem with a no-deductions tax structure, assuming experts/economists think it through and don't find too many adverse effects. However, a no-tax-bracket system that allows for deductions is really a way to give the wealthiest people a huge tax cut without calling them "a tax cut".
He's not looking for money in this lawsuit. He's trying to intimidate people, to make them afraid of broadcasting information about him and his business practices.
This is a classic straw man when talking about taxes on the wealthy. Nobody is talking about taxing the top 0.01% at 100%. Nobody is talking about taxing *only* the top 0.01%. Nobody is talking about violence.
But tax money is used to build infrastructure, provide security, and maintain a stable society. If you do those things off the backs of the middle class and don't ask the rich to pay their fair share, it is "giving". If those rich people don't want to contribute, then fine, let's take away the protections they derive from our society. Let them try to build a product without an educated and healthy workforce. Let them try to sell that product without customers. Let their businesses survive without infrastructure. Let them try to hold onto their money without government protected banks. Let's do that for a while, and see how it turns out.
Billionaires shouldn't be paying a lower effective tax rate than someone making $100k/year,
Many of us are voting for elected officials who push policies to remove regulations and cut taxes on the richest people and businesses. It's a policy of granting wide latitude and control to people who already have immense economic power. It's a policy of wealth redistribution, but redistributing wealth from the public and the middle class, and pouring all the money we can into a tiny group of people.
Whether you like the word "giving", we're setting up a system that moves money to the top 1%, and not really getting anything in return.
It seems to me that we have a very simple and common piece of equipment for isolating one network from another while also allowing connectivity: a firewall.
You can get firewalls that scan traffic for patterns of attack, or compares the data being transferred against malware signatures. Granted, that's not perfect. It won't provide anything close to "perfect" security. But still, what do you anticipate your setup would provide that a good firewall wouldn't?
For example, you reference passing traffic through several Raspberry Pi devices, which essentially has each one acting as a firewall. Yeah, you can make all your internet traffic pass through multiple different firewalls, each with their own security scanning engines, but your adding expense and complexity for diminishing returns on improving security.
So what are you trying to do? What kind of security are you trying to provide, and what kind of attack vector are you anticipating?
It was a bit of a thing in the US. Not so big that it's strange you didn't experience it, but it existed and it was a brief fad. I think it was more mid-2000s, but I'm mostly basing that on my memory of mobile media sales peaking around 2007.
Anyway, they never became very mainstream because they were terrible. Even if the music was good and the cut was edited well, the nature of the product was that it had to be played over the cell phone network.
If you don't know why that's such a problem, cell phone networks compress their audio in order to save bandwidth. The audio compression schemes they used were designed to use as little bandwidth as possible while still rendering speech understandable. Of all the frequencies you can hear, human speech generally only uses a subset. Of that subset of frequencies that human speech uses, there's an even smaller subset that are required to understand what a person is saying. So in order to save space, they'd strip out all the frequencies that aren't needed to understand speech, and then compress what was left.
The big problem is, music uses a lot of those frequencies that aren't needed to understand speech. When you strip those frequencies out, the music usually ends up sounding like garbage. There was no way to make ringbacks sound good, so customer satisfaction was low.
Actually, though, there are newer standards being used for cell phone audio that would allow ringbacks to sound much better now. I don't know if people even buy ringtones anymore, though.
Note that I merely took exception to the refutation of "99.99% were poor because of their own decisions". I actually made no statement that 99.99% were poor for any reason, only noting that there was enough evidence to debunk the 99.99% number on the refutal just from anecdotal evidence.
I think maybe I misunderstood your post completely, then. Maybe? I thought you were agreeing that 99.99% of poor people are poor because of "irresponsible behavior", which would require that you had a census of 99.99% of poor people, or else a study with a large enough random sample to warrant extrapolating.
I'm going to be a little pedantic, but I think it might be somewhat true that "leadership is leadership". However, if you don't know where you're going or how to get there, then it's likely you're going to lead people in the wrong direction.
While still "small" as far as even the US population goes, I'd say my exposure exceeds the norm
I believe you, though I'd posit that it still might not be enough to be a scientifically valid sample.
I don't want to get into some kind of competition of who has struggled with more. I'd be willing to cede that ground if you want it. On the other hand, I have lived in a few neighborhoods with people who would be considered by most to be "poor", and I've met a fair number of people in those neighborhoods that I thought were good, hard working people. Some people were making some not-very-good decisions in my view, but often enough, I could understand why. Many others were just stuck in a bad situation. Often it was hard to draw a clear line between those two groups. Our anecdotal experience seems to diverge.
On the other hand, I wouldn't claim that either of us are impartial.
I just look at it as a "most commonly used" quick list of menu items. If what you want isn't there, then sure, you have to go to the full menu and dig, but more often than not, what you're looking to do will be there.
Yes, I think that's the intention. I think it really helps to think about the issue in terms of how all this was developing in the 80s and 90s. Early on in personal computing, a lot of people had trouble understanding even things that you might find brain-dead simple. It took people a little while to understand the mouse, and it wasn't uncommon to run into computer novices who had a hard time keeping track of the difference between left-click and right-click. GUIs were often far less refined, and much more rough and slapped together. I think you need to understand the issue specifically in that context.
So it's not that Jobs didn't like that there was a menu of "most commonly used" items, he just thought that menus should be consistent and predictable. To give an alternate example, there was a version of Microsoft Office, where they had the bright idea to automatically hide menu items. For example, if you never used mail merge, it would eventually disappear from the menus. Some people liked the idea, since there were a lot of obscure features you probably weren't going to use, and it got those menu items out of the way.
It ended up being a bit of a disaster, though. All menu items were subject to the culling, even something as basic as "File" > "Save as...". If you didn't use thaat menu item for a month, it would disappear. Granted, you didn't have to be very clever to find it again. There was a little arrow at the bottom of each menu, and if you clicked it, it would expand to show all the items. Still, it confused the hell out of a lot of people to have their menu items vanish, and it became much more difficult to find a menu item if you didn't already know where it was.
That's just one example of how it can be confusing and frustrating when a UI is volatile (i.e. the opposite of "stable") and some controls are hidden.
"Open With" does appear under "File" in the menu at the top of the screen, when Finder is active. There may be some other example of Apple breaking their own rules, though.
I don't find context menu's counter-intuitive at all, in fact just the opposite --well, at least, on Windows.
When you've been doing something a particular way for a long enough time, it'll end up feeling intuitive, almost no matter what. But anyway, the objection wasn't exactly "It's not intuitive", but rather "it makes functionality hidden and unpredictable". It's less of a problem when there are a set of conventions around what's in context menus, and you know the conventions, and developers follow those conventions, which is the case often enough these days.
I think it might help to go into a fairly concrete example, because I don't think it's easy to understand otherwise:
Imagine you have a document open in an imaginary hypothetical word processor. You right-click on some text, and you get some options to copy/paste the text, along with some options for font and paragraph styling. You get some options for spell-checking and grammar-checking, and maybe another couple of things. Over time, you get used to these options, and you know those what's where. But now you right-click on an embedded image, and surprise!, you get totally different options. Admittedly, it's not that surprising, since it's pretty close to how Word works, and you're familiar with that. These options have to do with size and positioning, options on how text should wrap around the image. Maybe you can add a caption. So now you memorize all of those options.
But now you want to change the transparency of the image and rotate it. Those options don't show up when you right-click on the image. Hmmm... You ask someone more familiar with the app, and he says, "Oh, right! So for those options, you have to right-click on the border around the image, and go into the "filters and transformations" menu. You didn't notice that there was a border around the image until he said that, but yeah, it's there. The border is faint and only shows up when you're hovering over the image, but it's there. You right-click and find totally different image-related options.
Now you want to reformat a table a bit. You want to distribute the width of the columns evenly among all the columns. Ok, so you right-click on the table, and get options for formatting that cell. You ask your friend, "How do I resize columns?" and he shows you that you can right-click on the top cell of each column, and resize that individual column. It kind of makes sense, but you wouldn't have guessed that you'd get different options depending on what cell you click on. Also, you're a little annoyed because it still won't let you distribute the width evenly. You'll have to do the math of figuring out the total width of the table, dividing it by the number of columns (taking the border size into account), and then manually resizing each column.
You go back to your friend and say, "Thanks for showing me how to resize columns, but isn't there an easier way to distribute the table width among all the columns?" He then shows you that if you select the entire table, you can then right-click on any cell, and it will give you a different context menu for resizing and formatting the entire table. There's an option for distributing the column width in that menu.
So now let's take a step back and talk about what's going on in this example. "Context menus" are so called because they change based on context. Which options show up change based on the application you're using. They might change based on the object that you're right-clicking on. Which options show up might change based on what objects are currently selected (e.g. right-clicking on a cell in a table might give a different menu if the table is selected than if no selection is made). The menu options might change if you right-click on a different location in the same object. Worse, the different areas in an object that will give different options might be poorly delineated, meaning if you click here on an object, you might get different options than if you click over there
It still sounds like you're trying to draw conclusions about a large number of people from the anecdotal evidence of your own experience of a very small subset of those people. Plus, you're assuming that "having a new car" = " being irresponsible", and that "living in a poorer neighborhood" = "living next to people you don't want to be around".
All in all, what this conversation seems to be revealing to me is that you have some issues surrounding economic insecurity that you still need to deal with. It's sort of like hearing someone rant and rave about how fat people are all lazy and stupid, citing as evidence, "I know what I'm talking about because my dad was a fat piece of shit." In that circumstance, it the evidence cited doesn't really prove that fat people are all lazy and stupid, but rather that the person speaking has some daddy issues.
So what does that distinction mean in terms of your argument? Are you saying that the very poor and destitute might not be to blame for their circumstances, but the moderately poor, the not-well-off, are "poor" due to irresponsible behavior?
I'm just not sure why you view this distinction as relevant.
FYI, the reason Apple stuck with a one-button mouse is to discourage relying on context menus. Reportedly, Jobs hated context menus because they hid functionality in unpredictable ways, i.e. it's often hard to know exactly what will be in a context menu when you right-click on a particular object, until you right-click and see what pops up.
Also, they kind of gave up on that a while ago. Apple mice have had a virtual second button for years.
Sorry, I know you're just making a joke, but I just thought I'd throw in a little info in case anyone didn't know.
So you can't make the distinction between actually poor people and people that live in undesirable areas yet still own new cars?
Well first, I don't know what distinction you're trying to make there. Second, I don't know how it's relevant to your argument.
Maybe we derailed somewhere in this conversation. Someone made the claim "99.99% of 'poor people' are 'poor' due to irresponsible behavior." Someone else responded, disagreeing. You responded saying:
I'd say a lot of evidence is out there to the contrary. I see much newer vehicles in what we consider poor neighborhoods than what's in my driveway.
I took that to mean you were agreeing with the original claim, and agreeing that "poor people" are poor due to irresponsible behavior. I understood you to be citing, as evidence, that you see newer vehicles than yours in "what we consider poor neighborhoods".
Unless I missed a step along the way, I don't think it matters what you meant by "what we consider poor neighborhoods". The argument seems to be that poor people are poor because they'er buying nice cars, which is implied to be irresponsible behavior. My response to that was to point out that isn't very good evidence that poor people are irresponsible. Maybe there was a misunderstanding along the way. If so, feel free to explain.
But if that much is correct, there are some pretty fundamental reasons why your argument isn't very good. First and foremost, I was pointing out that the cars you see in a certain neighborhood is only anecdotal evidence. We don't know that the pattern applies more generally. There could be a variety of biases that lead you to perceive a higher tendency of fancy cars in those neighborhoods than are actually there. You might be correct about the particular neighborhood you're referencing, but not about poor people in general.
Aside from that, I think there may be other explanations as to why a fancy car may be in a poor neighborhood. Maybe a rich person was visiting a poorer friend in that neighborhood. Maybe someone wealthier in that person's family died, and left them a nice car. Maybe some guy in the neighborhood works at a car dealership, and he got a great discount on his new car. I really don't know. I don't know what neighborhood you're talking about.
But aside from all that, there's also the possibility that people in that neighborhood bought fancy cars, but weren't being irresponsible. Maybe you're seeing people who could theoretically live in a nicer neighborhood, but they like their neighborhood and have chosen to stay. Maybe they're very frugal people who are willing to live in a cheap house in order to save money, and would rather splurge on a car instead of buying a nicer house.
And before you go trying to pick apart individual points that I'm making or examples I'm using, keep in mind that I'm not arguing that any of these things are the case. I'm not saying that the people in the neighborhood all work for car dealerships. I'm just pointing out that you probably don't know what the deal is with each of these individual people-- and then also, even if you did know a bunch of poor people who were poor because they're irresponsible, that's only anecdotal evidence that may not apply to poor people in general.
Apple's goal was literally to protect their ipod business from being inevitably cannibalized by Palm, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and whoever else came along. That's not a theory, that's literally what the team leaders from the iphone project say. 'we were like oh shit, nobody will buy an ipod if their phone is just as good'.
Someone may have said that, but it doesn't seem to be the whole story. Jobs killed the Newton shortly after returning to Apple, saying that PDAs didn't make sense to him. He thought that functionality should be in a phone, and not a separate device. Apparently Apple had been working on a lot of the functionality for the iPhone in different projects. They created the iPod. They were working on the iPad. I remember reading an article at shortly after the iPhone's announcement, that people within Apple kept pitching the idea of a Newton phone or iPod phone, but he was insistent that the the products they were proposing weren't ready yet.
From what I've read, at least, it seems Jobs knew a smartphone was in Apple's future. He was just waiting for the technology to come together into a product that he thought was cool.
I also think it's not fair to single out Palm in the example of the iPhone. I was working in the mobile industry at the time, and the iPhone caught everyone off guard. One day, the Motorola Q and Razr phones were hot shit. Blackberry owned the business smartphone market, but Palm was still in the game. The next day, everyone wanted an iPhone.
One of the big miscalculations was that people hadn't realized how long Apple had been working on the iPhone. They were thinking, "Apple thinks they can just start working on a phone now, and have a working product in the next year?!" Few people had been paying enough attention to realize that the iPhone had been in development for about 10 years.
There was another big miscalculation, but I don't know exactly how to characterize it. Basically, the incumbent vendors thought they were doing a great job. They'd make a new version of the same old device, but it was slightly thinner. They put out the same phone with a slightly higher resolution screen, or a screen that could display more colors. Palm made the glyphs that you had to learn to write with their stylus just a little easier to write. They were tinkering around the edges because it was easy and cheap, and didn't require anyone to be particularly innovative. They thought they were the smartest people around, and because these products were the best they could do, they were the best anyone could do. It's just a thing that happens in entrenched markets, when people get comfortable.
(Those would be the neighborhoods we'd consider as candidate population for these cheaper units)
That doesn't change anything about the meaning of what you were saying. As far as the accusation of a straw-man argument, it makes it seem like you don't really understand what a "straw-man" is.
There have been gradual speed-improvements, but they are, well, gradual.
Even with gradual speed improvements, you may reach a speed that represents a tipping point, where these processes go from taking an unacceptably long amount of time to taking an acceptably long amount of time.
When you hit a tipping point like that, usage and adoption might expand dramatically (even if not "explosively), regardless of whether there's been real innovation.
But to add to this, I don't really care. I have no attachment to Clinton. Lock her up. Whatever. Go dig up Nixon's corpse and put that in jail, too, if it makes you happy.
But the past misdeeds of some other politician should not serve as an excuse or as cover for the current president to commit crimes. Let the investigations go forward, and if there's a case that he committed criminal acts, lock him up.
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It's not quite that simple. Why do you think he goes on the news and tries to make the coal industry look good? Why do you think he's suing anyone who points out his company's questionable practices?
The main issue is government regulation. If the government prohibits coal companies from putting their employees in dangerous situations, and prohibits coal companies from damaging the environment, *that* will cost them a lot of money. Whether that kind of regulation gets passed is entirely based on the level of public support. Preventing public support depends on nobody shining too bright a spotlight on his company's business practices.
Therefore, he's going to sue anyone who publicizes his company's business practices.
Well... because then you'd have malware. A big part of my point was that malware authors have already been able to include a headless browser if they wanted to, so it doesn't seem like this really changes their ability to have their malware perform click-fraud. It just means that, if you're unfortunate enough to get click-fraud malware, it won't also download their headless browser.
But I don't even know if it'll have that effect. If you're writing malware and you want it to be effective, you probably don't want to rely on specific 3rd-party software already being installed. They'll probably keep bundling their own headless browser anyway.
But maybe I'm missing something...?
The adware won't need to include or download any extra tools and could use locally installed software to perform most of its malicious actions. In the past, there have been quite a few adware families that used headless browsers to perform clickfraud.
My first reaction to this is, I don't see why I should be concerned. Malware authors had the option of including a headless browser of their own to enable this, and now they can use the already-installed browser instead. So... if I do get this kind of malware, it'll install less crap on my system? Seems like a win to me.
Yes, limiting deductions and removing loopholes would help to solve the problem.
However, it's worth noting that conversations about a "flat tax" often conflate two different issues. Sometimes when people are talking about a "flat tax", they're talking about removing (or severely limiting) deductions, and just taxing people a set percentage of income. Even then, it's complicated. Are the tax rates for corporate taxed and capital gains also taxed? If not, you may be opening some loopholes already.
However, some people are not advocating a "flat tax" in that sense, but instead they're suggesting that income tax be made "flat" in terms of being non-progressive. That is, every American pay the same percentage in income tax, and there are no income brackets.
Some people will argue in favor of a no-deductions tax structure, but are fine with progressive taxes. Some will argue in favor of a no-tax-bracket structure, but are fine with deductions. Some people want a no-deductions and no-tax-bracket structure. And all of these groups use the term "flat tax" to describe what they're advocating for.
So I don't necessarily have a problem with a no-deductions tax structure, assuming experts/economists think it through and don't find too many adverse effects. However, a no-tax-bracket system that allows for deductions is really a way to give the wealthiest people a huge tax cut without calling them "a tax cut".
He's not looking for money in this lawsuit. He's trying to intimidate people, to make them afraid of broadcasting information about him and his business practices.
Also, it seems like it might cause a Streisand effect. Wouldn't that be lovely.
This is a classic straw man when talking about taxes on the wealthy. Nobody is talking about taxing the top 0.01% at 100%. Nobody is talking about taxing *only* the top 0.01%. Nobody is talking about violence.
But tax money is used to build infrastructure, provide security, and maintain a stable society. If you do those things off the backs of the middle class and don't ask the rich to pay their fair share, it is "giving". If those rich people don't want to contribute, then fine, let's take away the protections they derive from our society. Let them try to build a product without an educated and healthy workforce. Let them try to sell that product without customers. Let their businesses survive without infrastructure. Let them try to hold onto their money without government protected banks. Let's do that for a while, and see how it turns out.
Billionaires shouldn't be paying a lower effective tax rate than someone making $100k/year,
Many of us are voting for elected officials who push policies to remove regulations and cut taxes on the richest people and businesses. It's a policy of granting wide latitude and control to people who already have immense economic power. It's a policy of wealth redistribution, but redistributing wealth from the public and the middle class, and pouring all the money we can into a tiny group of people.
Whether you like the word "giving", we're setting up a system that moves money to the top 1%, and not really getting anything in return.
It seems to me that we have a very simple and common piece of equipment for isolating one network from another while also allowing connectivity: a firewall.
You can get firewalls that scan traffic for patterns of attack, or compares the data being transferred against malware signatures. Granted, that's not perfect. It won't provide anything close to "perfect" security. But still, what do you anticipate your setup would provide that a good firewall wouldn't?
For example, you reference passing traffic through several Raspberry Pi devices, which essentially has each one acting as a firewall. Yeah, you can make all your internet traffic pass through multiple different firewalls, each with their own security scanning engines, but your adding expense and complexity for diminishing returns on improving security.
So what are you trying to do? What kind of security are you trying to provide, and what kind of attack vector are you anticipating?
It was a bit of a thing in the US. Not so big that it's strange you didn't experience it, but it existed and it was a brief fad. I think it was more mid-2000s, but I'm mostly basing that on my memory of mobile media sales peaking around 2007.
Anyway, they never became very mainstream because they were terrible. Even if the music was good and the cut was edited well, the nature of the product was that it had to be played over the cell phone network.
If you don't know why that's such a problem, cell phone networks compress their audio in order to save bandwidth. The audio compression schemes they used were designed to use as little bandwidth as possible while still rendering speech understandable. Of all the frequencies you can hear, human speech generally only uses a subset. Of that subset of frequencies that human speech uses, there's an even smaller subset that are required to understand what a person is saying. So in order to save space, they'd strip out all the frequencies that aren't needed to understand speech, and then compress what was left.
The big problem is, music uses a lot of those frequencies that aren't needed to understand speech. When you strip those frequencies out, the music usually ends up sounding like garbage. There was no way to make ringbacks sound good, so customer satisfaction was low.
Actually, though, there are newer standards being used for cell phone audio that would allow ringbacks to sound much better now. I don't know if people even buy ringtones anymore, though.
Note that I merely took exception to the refutation of "99.99% were poor because of their own decisions". I actually made no statement that 99.99% were poor for any reason, only noting that there was enough evidence to debunk the 99.99% number on the refutal just from anecdotal evidence.
I think maybe I misunderstood your post completely, then. Maybe? I thought you were agreeing that 99.99% of poor people are poor because of "irresponsible behavior", which would require that you had a census of 99.99% of poor people, or else a study with a large enough random sample to warrant extrapolating.
I'm going to be a little pedantic, but I think it might be somewhat true that "leadership is leadership". However, if you don't know where you're going or how to get there, then it's likely you're going to lead people in the wrong direction.
While still "small" as far as even the US population goes, I'd say my exposure exceeds the norm
I believe you, though I'd posit that it still might not be enough to be a scientifically valid sample.
I don't want to get into some kind of competition of who has struggled with more. I'd be willing to cede that ground if you want it. On the other hand, I have lived in a few neighborhoods with people who would be considered by most to be "poor", and I've met a fair number of people in those neighborhoods that I thought were good, hard working people. Some people were making some not-very-good decisions in my view, but often enough, I could understand why. Many others were just stuck in a bad situation. Often it was hard to draw a clear line between those two groups. Our anecdotal experience seems to diverge.
On the other hand, I wouldn't claim that either of us are impartial.
I just look at it as a "most commonly used" quick list of menu items. If what you want isn't there, then sure, you have to go to the full menu and dig, but more often than not, what you're looking to do will be there.
Yes, I think that's the intention. I think it really helps to think about the issue in terms of how all this was developing in the 80s and 90s. Early on in personal computing, a lot of people had trouble understanding even things that you might find brain-dead simple. It took people a little while to understand the mouse, and it wasn't uncommon to run into computer novices who had a hard time keeping track of the difference between left-click and right-click. GUIs were often far less refined, and much more rough and slapped together. I think you need to understand the issue specifically in that context.
So it's not that Jobs didn't like that there was a menu of "most commonly used" items, he just thought that menus should be consistent and predictable. To give an alternate example, there was a version of Microsoft Office, where they had the bright idea to automatically hide menu items. For example, if you never used mail merge, it would eventually disappear from the menus. Some people liked the idea, since there were a lot of obscure features you probably weren't going to use, and it got those menu items out of the way.
It ended up being a bit of a disaster, though. All menu items were subject to the culling, even something as basic as "File" > "Save as...". If you didn't use thaat menu item for a month, it would disappear. Granted, you didn't have to be very clever to find it again. There was a little arrow at the bottom of each menu, and if you clicked it, it would expand to show all the items. Still, it confused the hell out of a lot of people to have their menu items vanish, and it became much more difficult to find a menu item if you didn't already know where it was.
That's just one example of how it can be confusing and frustrating when a UI is volatile (i.e. the opposite of "stable") and some controls are hidden.
"Open With" does appear under "File" in the menu at the top of the screen, when Finder is active. There may be some other example of Apple breaking their own rules, though.
I don't find context menu's counter-intuitive at all, in fact just the opposite --well, at least, on Windows.
When you've been doing something a particular way for a long enough time, it'll end up feeling intuitive, almost no matter what. But anyway, the objection wasn't exactly "It's not intuitive", but rather "it makes functionality hidden and unpredictable". It's less of a problem when there are a set of conventions around what's in context menus, and you know the conventions, and developers follow those conventions, which is the case often enough these days.
I think it might help to go into a fairly concrete example, because I don't think it's easy to understand otherwise:
Imagine you have a document open in an imaginary hypothetical word processor. You right-click on some text, and you get some options to copy/paste the text, along with some options for font and paragraph styling. You get some options for spell-checking and grammar-checking, and maybe another couple of things. Over time, you get used to these options, and you know those what's where. But now you right-click on an embedded image, and surprise!, you get totally different options. Admittedly, it's not that surprising, since it's pretty close to how Word works, and you're familiar with that. These options have to do with size and positioning, options on how text should wrap around the image. Maybe you can add a caption. So now you memorize all of those options.
But now you want to change the transparency of the image and rotate it. Those options don't show up when you right-click on the image. Hmmm... You ask someone more familiar with the app, and he says, "Oh, right! So for those options, you have to right-click on the border around the image, and go into the "filters and transformations" menu. You didn't notice that there was a border around the image until he said that, but yeah, it's there. The border is faint and only shows up when you're hovering over the image, but it's there. You right-click and find totally different image-related options.
Now you want to reformat a table a bit. You want to distribute the width of the columns evenly among all the columns. Ok, so you right-click on the table, and get options for formatting that cell. You ask your friend, "How do I resize columns?" and he shows you that you can right-click on the top cell of each column, and resize that individual column. It kind of makes sense, but you wouldn't have guessed that you'd get different options depending on what cell you click on. Also, you're a little annoyed because it still won't let you distribute the width evenly. You'll have to do the math of figuring out the total width of the table, dividing it by the number of columns (taking the border size into account), and then manually resizing each column.
You go back to your friend and say, "Thanks for showing me how to resize columns, but isn't there an easier way to distribute the table width among all the columns?" He then shows you that if you select the entire table, you can then right-click on any cell, and it will give you a different context menu for resizing and formatting the entire table. There's an option for distributing the column width in that menu.
So now let's take a step back and talk about what's going on in this example. "Context menus" are so called because they change based on context. Which options show up change based on the application you're using. They might change based on the object that you're right-clicking on. Which options show up might change based on what objects are currently selected (e.g. right-clicking on a cell in a table might give a different menu if the table is selected than if no selection is made). The menu options might change if you right-click on a different location in the same object. Worse, the different areas in an object that will give different options might be poorly delineated, meaning if you click here on an object, you might get different options than if you click over there
It still sounds like you're trying to draw conclusions about a large number of people from the anecdotal evidence of your own experience of a very small subset of those people. Plus, you're assuming that "having a new car" = " being irresponsible", and that "living in a poorer neighborhood" = "living next to people you don't want to be around".
All in all, what this conversation seems to be revealing to me is that you have some issues surrounding economic insecurity that you still need to deal with. It's sort of like hearing someone rant and rave about how fat people are all lazy and stupid, citing as evidence, "I know what I'm talking about because my dad was a fat piece of shit." In that circumstance, it the evidence cited doesn't really prove that fat people are all lazy and stupid, but rather that the person speaking has some daddy issues.
So what does that distinction mean in terms of your argument? Are you saying that the very poor and destitute might not be to blame for their circumstances, but the moderately poor, the not-well-off, are "poor" due to irresponsible behavior?
I'm just not sure why you view this distinction as relevant.
FYI, the reason Apple stuck with a one-button mouse is to discourage relying on context menus. Reportedly, Jobs hated context menus because they hid functionality in unpredictable ways, i.e. it's often hard to know exactly what will be in a context menu when you right-click on a particular object, until you right-click and see what pops up.
Also, they kind of gave up on that a while ago. Apple mice have had a virtual second button for years.
Sorry, I know you're just making a joke, but I just thought I'd throw in a little info in case anyone didn't know.
So you can't make the distinction between actually poor people and people that live in undesirable areas yet still own new cars?
Well first, I don't know what distinction you're trying to make there. Second, I don't know how it's relevant to your argument.
Maybe we derailed somewhere in this conversation. Someone made the claim "99.99% of 'poor people' are 'poor' due to irresponsible behavior." Someone else responded, disagreeing. You responded saying:
I'd say a lot of evidence is out there to the contrary. I see much newer vehicles in what we consider poor neighborhoods than what's in my driveway.
I took that to mean you were agreeing with the original claim, and agreeing that "poor people" are poor due to irresponsible behavior. I understood you to be citing, as evidence, that you see newer vehicles than yours in "what we consider poor neighborhoods".
Unless I missed a step along the way, I don't think it matters what you meant by "what we consider poor neighborhoods". The argument seems to be that poor people are poor because they'er buying nice cars, which is implied to be irresponsible behavior. My response to that was to point out that isn't very good evidence that poor people are irresponsible. Maybe there was a misunderstanding along the way. If so, feel free to explain.
But if that much is correct, there are some pretty fundamental reasons why your argument isn't very good. First and foremost, I was pointing out that the cars you see in a certain neighborhood is only anecdotal evidence. We don't know that the pattern applies more generally. There could be a variety of biases that lead you to perceive a higher tendency of fancy cars in those neighborhoods than are actually there. You might be correct about the particular neighborhood you're referencing, but not about poor people in general.
Aside from that, I think there may be other explanations as to why a fancy car may be in a poor neighborhood. Maybe a rich person was visiting a poorer friend in that neighborhood. Maybe someone wealthier in that person's family died, and left them a nice car. Maybe some guy in the neighborhood works at a car dealership, and he got a great discount on his new car. I really don't know. I don't know what neighborhood you're talking about.
But aside from all that, there's also the possibility that people in that neighborhood bought fancy cars, but weren't being irresponsible. Maybe you're seeing people who could theoretically live in a nicer neighborhood, but they like their neighborhood and have chosen to stay. Maybe they're very frugal people who are willing to live in a cheap house in order to save money, and would rather splurge on a car instead of buying a nicer house.
And before you go trying to pick apart individual points that I'm making or examples I'm using, keep in mind that I'm not arguing that any of these things are the case. I'm not saying that the people in the neighborhood all work for car dealerships. I'm just pointing out that you probably don't know what the deal is with each of these individual people-- and then also, even if you did know a bunch of poor people who were poor because they're irresponsible, that's only anecdotal evidence that may not apply to poor people in general.
Apple's goal was literally to protect their ipod business from being inevitably cannibalized by Palm, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and whoever else came along. That's not a theory, that's literally what the team leaders from the iphone project say. 'we were like oh shit, nobody will buy an ipod if their phone is just as good'.
Someone may have said that, but it doesn't seem to be the whole story. Jobs killed the Newton shortly after returning to Apple, saying that PDAs didn't make sense to him. He thought that functionality should be in a phone, and not a separate device. Apparently Apple had been working on a lot of the functionality for the iPhone in different projects. They created the iPod. They were working on the iPad. I remember reading an article at shortly after the iPhone's announcement, that people within Apple kept pitching the idea of a Newton phone or iPod phone, but he was insistent that the the products they were proposing weren't ready yet.
From what I've read, at least, it seems Jobs knew a smartphone was in Apple's future. He was just waiting for the technology to come together into a product that he thought was cool.
I also think it's not fair to single out Palm in the example of the iPhone. I was working in the mobile industry at the time, and the iPhone caught everyone off guard. One day, the Motorola Q and Razr phones were hot shit. Blackberry owned the business smartphone market, but Palm was still in the game. The next day, everyone wanted an iPhone.
One of the big miscalculations was that people hadn't realized how long Apple had been working on the iPhone. They were thinking, "Apple thinks they can just start working on a phone now, and have a working product in the next year?!" Few people had been paying enough attention to realize that the iPhone had been in development for about 10 years.
There was another big miscalculation, but I don't know exactly how to characterize it. Basically, the incumbent vendors thought they were doing a great job. They'd make a new version of the same old device, but it was slightly thinner. They put out the same phone with a slightly higher resolution screen, or a screen that could display more colors. Palm made the glyphs that you had to learn to write with their stylus just a little easier to write. They were tinkering around the edges because it was easy and cheap, and didn't require anyone to be particularly innovative. They thought they were the smartest people around, and because these products were the best they could do, they were the best anyone could do. It's just a thing that happens in entrenched markets, when people get comfortable.
What "qualifier"? This?:
(Those would be the neighborhoods we'd consider as candidate population for these cheaper units)
That doesn't change anything about the meaning of what you were saying. As far as the accusation of a straw-man argument, it makes it seem like you don't really understand what a "straw-man" is.
There have been gradual speed-improvements, but they are, well, gradual.
Even with gradual speed improvements, you may reach a speed that represents a tipping point, where these processes go from taking an unacceptably long amount of time to taking an acceptably long amount of time.
When you hit a tipping point like that, usage and adoption might expand dramatically (even if not "explosively), regardless of whether there's been real innovation.
But to add to this, I don't really care. I have no attachment to Clinton. Lock her up. Whatever. Go dig up Nixon's corpse and put that in jail, too, if it makes you happy.
But the past misdeeds of some other politician should not serve as an excuse or as cover for the current president to commit crimes. Let the investigations go forward, and if there's a case that he committed criminal acts, lock him up.