150 million US Smartphone Users Are Downloading Apps, Data Shows
At some point (already?) there will be so many smartphone users that even if only 50% of smartphone users download apps then smartphone apps will be bigger than almost anything else.
> I don't trust private owners to take the required long-term view
If there's anything we know about politicians up for re-election in two years or unable to run for another term it's that they take a long-term approach to problems. /s
> What would prevent someone from, say, buying up all the water and then not selling any of it, or selling just a little to a handful of rich people?
First, no one has enough money to buy up all of the water. Second, even if they did, it wouldn't make sense not to sell it. Most people like making a profit and having more money. It wouldn't make sense to only sell it to wealthy people, because they don't use enough more water to exhaust supply in most places people inhabit and they'd be forgoing a lot of profit from selling water to normal people. Also governments also often sell water to politically connected business and agriculture groups at a lower rate than they sell to normal people.
> completely owning natural resources like lakes and forests
They wouldn't completely own them, they'd have property rights in them. Depending on how the property rights are structured you could have many owners of say a lake or a river.
> Those private entities would rationally take a long term vision
If there's anything we know about politicians up for re-election in two years or unable to run for another term it's that they take a long-term approach to problems. /s
I wasn't actually arguing for water privatization, but rather I was arguing against blaming the free market for the current situation, one where the government owns most bodies of water and allowed this pollution.
I'm no expert on water privatization. I know a few economists have written about it, but it's unrealistic to expect them to come up with a great solution on their own. A good solution would have to evolve over time with decisions by judges etc.
AFAIK most proposals don't have a single entity owning a river, but rather people own rights to a certain amount of water from the river at a certain quality.
I wasn't referring to Walter Block's book on roads, but this one: "Water Capitalism: The Case for Privatizing Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, and Aquifers." I haven't read it.
You can believe whatever you want, but most systems of justice recognize things like proportionality and imminence.
While a nearby coal power plant is likely to harm your health, it's unlikely to kill you, so killing someone over it would be disproportional.
Also, even if it were going to kill you, it's not going to kill you right now, so shooting on sight instead of exhausting other avenues would be avoidable and hence not self-defense or justifiable.
Most people would sympathize with you as a victim of this coal plant, but find you guilty of a crime.
> mistrustful of arguments that the free market will sort things like this out. There's just no good mechanism to stop massive harm to common resources
Most arguments that the free market can handle these problems start out with the recommendation that the resources involved (rivers, lakes, ocean) should be privatized. Economist Walter Block and others have written about ways this could be done. To fault free market arguments for not working when the waterways aren't privatized is to misrepresent the arguments. Most people aren't arguing that the free market is going to solve problems relating to unowned, unownable, or government owned property without first recognizing private property rights in those resources.
Governments often protects polluters by limiting their liability. If that were changed, and assuming these resources (bodies of water) were privatized so non-governmental parties had standing to sue, if you have an argument why a class action lawsuit or something like that can't handle these problems, then that would be an interesting comment. But just saying the free market doesn't solve problems where there are no property rights is rather uninteresting, because free marketers agree with that.
Also it's pretty amusing that a failure of government (who owns the waterways, and most of the sewer systems) to solve this problem sooner somehow gets twisted into a failure of the free market (who doesn't own these resources). Without property rights there's no free market.
I agree that governments, who subsidize animal feed, water, land, and waste, and prosecute activists, do a great deal of harm to the environment by promoting and protecting animal exploitation. I'm fine with banning animal exploitation, even on private property, and I see that as no more anti-free market than banning slavery on private property.
Have you ever met a team that wants to support two things instead of one? :) No one wants to support the old stuff, especially when no one's paying for it. If they make staying with the old too convenient, people won't convert to the crappy new, and their adoption graphs will suck! Can't have cannibalism!
I'm all for writing new apps in HTML, I think Atom and VSCode are awesome, but I'm not for rewriting huge legacy apps to be HTML apps for no good reason. The reasons given, that XUL requires maintenance that Mozilla engineers don't enjoy doing, is a joke considering the amount of effort to maintain XUL is less than 1% of the amount of effort to move Firefox to HTML.
No one has listed the ten awesome features that we're going to get from HTML Firefox (cause there ain't many) or the 1,000 features (tons of little details) that will be lost. If users listed their 10 biggest problems with Firefox I doubt any of them would be solved by moving to HTML.
Imagine if instead of writing VSCode from scratch and releasing it alongside Visual Studio Microsoft had rewritten the Visual Studio UI in HTML, abandoned all the nonessential features, and abandoned the old native Visual Studio.
One might say that Mozilla will wait to release the new Firefox till it has all the old features of the old Firefox, but that's not been my experience with how teams work. They'll get frustrated with the rewrite and want to get it out the door. "We can add those features later" they will say, and then they'll never get added.
They want to kill XUL for Firefox so they can be all fancy HTML. So they have to kill Thunderbird, a XUL app.
In a few years the all new HTML Firefox will come out. My bet is that it will suck. It will lack a TON of features that the existing Firefox has, but hey, it's all HTML! And you won't be able to stick on the old one, because within a week or two some critical security flaw will be discovered and eventually (like six weeks later) they'll stop supporting those for old Firefox.
Initially the HTML Firefox will suck. When you take an app that's been worked on for 15 or so years and then replace it's UI you're going to lose a TON of features. They'll slowly reintroduce some of the most popular features (hamburger menu will be priority #1!) but there will be a TON that they will not reintroduce. Why? Because when they were first introduced a decade ago it was a cool idea someone had, and no one knew how popular it would be, so heck, why not implement it. But now they know that only 10 million or even 1 million people use that feature, and they're only interested in 100 million user features! If Google Chrome doesn't have it, it must not be important!
As much as people complain about XUL not looking native, wait for HTML Firefox, it will take them forever to get where XUL was years ago.
They can't just kill XUL for Firefox though, they have to burn down the XUL ecosystem first so they're just releasing a new Firefox, nothing to see here.
1. They try to kill xulrunner as a project separate from Firefox. They try to move everyone to firefox -app.
2. They stop releasing binaries for xulrunner.
3. They deprecate XUL extensions.
4. They distance themselves from Thunderbird. They say it's better for Thunderbird. Yeah right! Thunderbird is built on XUL, it's not going to be rewritten in HTML any time soon, definitely not by volunteers. It's not going to be able to maintain XUL either, and when Mozilla stops supporting XUL for Firefox a few years after deprecating XUL extensions then Thunderbird will be screwed, but hey, it's not our project! We abandoned it years ago!
So when the crappy HTML Firefox shows up, with way less features than the Firefox of today, remember that this (Thunderbird) was one of the things given up to have it.
But hey, donate to Mozilla! $5, $15, $25, anything helps. Because we already make hundreds of millions of dollars and we do whatever is shiny and new, screw the "community" of existing stuff. We're fighting for an open web! (where you can use Gmail for email)
Context. If I'm in a bright room (office), and the last page I visited was black on white (the default/norm on the web), and the page I view after this one will be black on white (most likely), then viewing this one in the middle in white on black is jarring, annoying, inconvenient, distracting, hard to read (because my eyes have to adjust) etc.
If one is in a dark room, and has a custom stylesheet to display all pages in white on black, or if the web were predominantly white on black, then sure it's OK.
I think it's interesting how he never explicitly says that he forked Gosling Emacs (I think that's what he did, but if not please correct me!).
"Therefore, when I wrote my second implementation of Emacs, I followed the same kind of design...Now, this [GNU Emacs] was not the first Emacs that was written in C and ran on Unix. The first was written by James Gosling, ... I discovered that Gosling's Emacs did not have a real Lisp. It had a programming language that was known as ‘mocklisp’, which looks syntactically like Lisp, but didn't have the data structures of Lisp... I concluded I couldn't use it [it here means mocklisp, but can be confused to mean Gosling Emacs] and had to replace it all, the first step of which was to write an actual Lisp interpreter. I gradually adapted every part of the editor based on real Lisp data structures, rather than ad hoc data structures, making the data structures of the internals of the editor exposable and manipulable by the user's Lisp programs...This second Emacs program was ‘free software’ in the modern sense of the term"
At some point (already?) there will be so many smartphone users that even if only 50% of smartphone users download apps then smartphone apps will be bigger than almost anything else.