> Rather, if you list a price for various packages, people get scared off

Yet somehow other businesses manage to convey tiered pricing without scaring customers.

Imagine trying to book a hotel room but were told to contact them because they have a range of rooms from single bed to honeymoon suite. "We couldn't possibly list all the packages, it would confuse you!"

Or try to buy a car, but the dealer refused to list a base price because "we have so many options it's meaningless".

Withholding guideline or indicative pricing is a deliberate obfuscation designed to increase friction and reduce choice.

Not 'entirely', the 6500's wings are made in Japan, the rear fuselage and tail in Northern Ireland and the engines in England.

"Gell-Man" is an unfounded toy theory invented by an author without any research, using a colleague's name without permission to make it sound more authorative. It's hokum.

> "less space than a Nomad"

I actually thought that was a valid comment, more so than the Dropbox one. The contemporaneous iPod _was_ technically and acoustically inferior to the Nomad.

The iPod "won" on account of fashion, style and marketing. Yes, the Slashdot comment was naive in underestimating or ignoring the power of Apple, but objectively it wasn't wrong. Apple released an inferior product and used out-of-band techniques to sell it.

> The contemporaneous iPod _was_ technically and acoustically inferior to the Nomad.

You're cherry-picking your "technicals". The click wheel hardware and software implementation (especially the UI response time) was (and still is) revolutionary.

iPod won on the technical merits; just not the ones you're focusing.

The anti-Apple crowd on here loves to crow about how Apple only wins on marketing. Look I find the ads cringe as fuck too, but let's not pretend that the hardware isn't much, much better than average.

Better than all? No certainly not, Apple's build quality loses out to plenty of much more premium products. But it generally sits head and shoulders above the average build quality of any given product category, which seems to be the niche they most aim for: "the upmarket version of the common offering." That ones that immediately come to mind are Macbooks and iPads.

The thing with Apple products is that they may not be the best at every single spec but they usually have the best overall package.

You can find a laptop that is better in one aspect, but it will be worse in others.

You have to mention the music store. Prior to that, there were few legal ways to get music to put onto the devices.

TBF, iPod design was very neat and the nano's were very thin for the time.

It's a category error to compare the two comments at all.

You literally compared them in your comment.

Yes, by pointing out that they are not similar conceptually.

The non-programmer decomposition of that joke was painful to read.

Particularly from those outside the domain who criticised it as a 'not a very good joke' because they didn't understand it, which I think summarises the entitled mindset of many people these days.

> The word "live" is doing a lot of work here

A latency of a few seconds for streaming video compared to several months for a still photo from the Shuttle seems an entirely valid use of 'live'.

The difference here is a matter of AV technology improvements in the last 40 years.

The difference is having high-bandwidth signal pointed up / away from the wall of plasma.

And having such a large craft that a hole in the plasma envelope exists above the craft that can reach Starlink.

> It's reduced technical debt

I think that's a misunderstanding of the phrase.

AI may have reduced your immediate technical burden.

However AI, if not carefully used, increases technical debt because it builds up a vast heap of code and business logic that nobody understands. The agent that created it forgets about it once it's out of its context window, the programmer that scripted it just knows it passed some tests.

In two, five, ten years from now trying to maintain that vibe-coded slop will be a battle between various agents making conflicting changes and some poor human trying to get it into a shippable state.

You are completely right that AI can be misused/abused. If done right it can fix things like code bases that were created by multiple people and groups each with their own conventions. Before I had to know which group did what to know the variables. Claude fixed that.

There used to be pushback to have 100% test coverage. If you don't have that, then you can't merge. AI can write the tests but a programmer must own them.

> This is the reason I only _ever_ spend money on credit cards

Which illustrates one of the most prolific examples of regulatory capture.

Credit cards became mainstream because of that protection, which was a triumph for the payment processors. Whatever they spent on lobbying was a bargain.

> Altavista had exactly the same function as google

I disagree, Alta Vista had excellent an excellent search UI with Boolean logic. Google discarded that because it thought it 'knew better' in terms of Page Rank.

A-V could be fine-tuned to find a page with exactly the search terms, Google just gave fuzzy approximations from a very large search set.

> I disagree, Alta Vista had excellent an excellent search UI with Boolean logic. Google discarded that because it thought it 'knew better' in terms of Page Rank.

This is precisely what all the extreme LLM haters have memory holed.

Having failed to ratify UNCLOS, Iran is entitled to claim only 3nm of territorial water.

That's international law, as it stands.

Iran passed its own law in 2003 claiming 12nm. They can only assert that claim through violence.

Pretty much everyone agrees that 12 nautical miles is the edge of territorial waters; whether they're bound by the UNCLOS or not.

The UNCLOS Part II Section 2 Article 3 [1] states:

> Every State has the right to establish the breadth of its territorial sea up to a limit not exceeding 12 nautical miles, measured from baselines determined in accordance with this Convention.

It does not restrict this to member states or signatory states or etc. I don't know that the UNCLOS is binding on member states while operating in the territorial waters of non-member states, but I don't think there's a compelling reason to think territorial waters of non-members are limited to 3 nautical meters, given the consensus is territorial waters are 12 nautical meters.

> Iran passed its own law in 2003 claiming 12nm. They can only assert that claim through violence.

As a member state of the UN, they can assert a claim about territorial waters against another state at the International Court of Justice. It would seem to be a question of international law. If they were a member state of the UNCLOS, there are additional dispute resolution mechanisms available. Of course, violence is always an option for dispute resolution.

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_...

Oh. Nautical mile. Not nanometer.