I hate to "blame this on millennials," but think it might be just that millennial (and gen-X) culture is stuck.
1. I think that is common for every generation however. "Pop culture" changed, but is mostly the youth. The older generations didn't change that much. We remember the differences, but forget how much is the same.
2. Youth culture is different today than the late 00's, but it takes time and space to see those differences clearly.
3. Cultural plateau is the historical norm. While we can argue if it is good or bad, the wider 1k+ year historical view shows this is just a reversion to the mean. (granted before it was localized and now mostly globalized)
Make sure you have connections with your coworkers you wish to remain connected with (for friendship and/or opportunities).
Make sure you have no personal data saved only on your work computer.
Advocate for open sourcing any small utilities or other code that you have written so that you can have good public code samples.
Make sure that you have non-work access to retirement accounts, paycheck stubs, etc...
Finally, be willing to leave first. (For many) it can be hard to not have your work as part of your identity. Remember that businesses cannot care about you, just people in them.
Cost: $0
Time: ~1 hour
Location: Zoom
Requires: Someone to act as host
Here's something we recently tried that worked fairly well: Story Time. The goal was to share short humorous stories. Exaggerations were encouraged. And topics suggested. To help I (acting as the host) started it off with a story about a car and picking up "new" clothing at 70 mph. Opening up to others for other stories, but specifically encouraging stories about cars or clothing (to help prime the pump).
People tended to thread story topics on their own for the most part, but if things quieted down, I would add in another story, likely shifting the topic around some.
A few stories fell flat, but they are short and for the most part it worked really well. It also helped with one of the parts of "Zoom Happy Hour" that I hate: not knowing who is supposed to be talking and when to join in.
It does require a level of comfort with the team, but at the same time it allowed an enjoyable time for those who just wanted to lurk. It also didn't appear to be limited to those who lean extroverted as some happy hours can even in real life.
Oh but that's what I do on our daily in the morning. Isn't that's why it's called a "stand-up"?
Speaking seriously, we have a Mo-Wed-Fri 3PM 'virtual coffee break'. The team of ~15 is invited, but it's optional, and free mic; you can talk about anything. It's fun, not always the same people, not the same topics.
I hope this leads to a better non-Google App store. I have to keep Google Play disabled most of the time or it forces my phone to re-enable the Chrome browser each night. I choose to use Firefox on my phone and thus have Chrome disabled (it is not uninstallable without rooting). Google Play however will enable a non-system critical app that I explicitly told the operating system to disable.
I refused to buy Amazon ebooks when I learned that I didn't own them. I only owned a right to read them (dependent on many legal things).
The price of an ebook has so far been the same as the price of a physical book. Considering the resale value of a book is on average about 50% of the original price, the real price of an ebook for the user with this limitation should be ~50% less than the cost of the paper book. (Not taking into account shipping costs, etc...)
This became real to me when my aunt died. She had purchased thousands of dollars worth of ebooks. Had she purchased physical books, those books would have been donated or resold. At a loss to the publisher, but a gain to the original purchaser and secondary purchaser. (or estate in this case).
Unless I as the purchaser am at least partially compensated for this loss of value by a price decrease, I cannot buy ebooks with a resale limitation.
The resale value of most books is nowhere near 50% of the original price. The more popular the title and the bigger the print run the less it's worth - until you get to remainder mountain title like 50 Shades of Grey, which are literally worthless, except perhaps as fuel for a wood stove.
I had a library with thousands (and thousands) of books. When I moved I decided to get rid of many of them, because decluttering. Long story short - by the time you've allowed for post/carriage, listing time, packaging, and so on, you're more likely to be left with 5-10% of the nominal cover price - and that only after endless hours of work.
I donated most of mine, and I still got complaints from the local recycling facility that they were worthless because they were "too obscure" (i.e. pop science, math, stats, and such.)
The average paperback book weights between 1 and 2 pounds and would cost 2.75 -> 3.25 in shipping for media mail in the US. In addition amazon would take 0.99.
I see I can buy it new for about $11 although I wouldn't be surprised to pay $15 in a physical store. Selling it could get me about 10 but I would have to pay about a buck to amazon and around 3 to ship it for a net of 6.
This is 40% - 55% of original value.
Perhaps more importantly lending or giving them in person arguably gives them the same $10 worth of value. Shipping it to someone produces $10 worth of value for 3.
A book that is shared 3 times has produced $30 worth of value. A book that is shared 10 times has produced $100 worth.
An ebook that you might not be able to read in 10 years is SUBSTANTIALLY less valuable than the physical book.
Adding this value proposition back in and removing DRM that strip actual ownership both laudable goals in themselves are entirely at odds. Artificial scarcity is broken by design and unfixable.
Two local, both large, donation centers refuse any and all book donations. From paper backs to the obvious encyclopedia sets. One told me they have to throw every such donation out and since the trash container cost money they just put up a sign saying, no books. They do not accept records or music CDs either but DVDs are apparently okay.
I went through a phase where I was buying and selling job lots of books in the hope of striking gold (spoiler: you have to go through a LOT of books, and you'll make less than minimum wage). I ended up selling pallets of excess books for pulp - the paper of the books were worth more than the content.
The only books I would really consider saving are those that have survived long enough to be well out of print. It's like software in that sense - the longer it's lasted, the longer it is going to last.
I have a large library of technical books (accumulated over 50 years). Every 10 years or so I feel like I'm running out of space (5000 books or so) and I round up my oldest most out-of-date CS books, like books on pascal programming or LISP manuals from 1971. I fill up boxes of a couple hundred books and take them to a local Half-Price Books bookstore that sells used books. It is always so disappointing. I end up with pennies for each book. So I avoid going for another 10 years until I forget about my previous attempt to sell my out of date books. I've also made library donations of books I felt were still useful (I end up with duplicates sometimes because I forget that I've already purchased a book and shelved it somewhere that I don't see it until after I purchase a second copy.) Again, it's frustrating, most libraries really don't want very technical books.
I can't expect anyone to want an old manual for LISP programming so now I'm holding onto my old books because it's not worth dragging them to the used bookstore. And, every so often, I will go back and look at them. There was a discussion on HN involving assembly language and machine architecture, it caused me to pull out my old book on CDC 6600 assembler.
In another 10 years I'll forget this and try to sell my used books again.
For that reason, I mostly get books from not the most legal sources, and then buy a copy from a local bookstore. I either donate that book to a library or give it to a friend as a gift.
I get what I want while supporting a local bookstore and the author.
Personally I consider the convenience of ebooks to significantly outweigh the inability to resell or possible pricing discrepancies, so I always choose ebook (at least for text-only works).
A similar argument can be made against downloadable audiobooks, but in that case, they're far cheaper than buying CDs.
As an example, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: Primary Phase. The CD version is £20 from Amazon, whereas on Amazon Audible it's at most £8. (I'm not counting the £18 listed price on Audible, as one can simply 'subscribe' for £8, buy the audiobook with the token, then immediately unsubscribe. I put 'at most' because their per-book price is lower with a high-volume subscription.)
In this case, I'm ok with the DRM'ed non-physical version, as it's so much cheaper. It's true I can't easily gift the audiobooks or leave them in my will. It's also true that Amazon has the power to lock me out of my library, and if Audible disappears, I probably lose my library.
Absolutely, and also for 'buying' movies on Amazon, Apple, Google and (especially) smaller services.
The product you're buying is really: rental of unknown duration. And unless that's really substantially cheaper than actually buying it on disc, it's a terrible deal.
Well, maybe, though an external DVD drive probably costs no more than three or four movies, and then you can make yourself non-DRM digital copies too. (As long as you don't need BluRay and HD).
I place a big value on not owning things I don't want, like external DVD drives. I'd pay more for a virtual one-time-viewing copy than I would for a DVD even if it came with a DVD drive. I specifically want to not own one.
It's not a terrible deal if I prefer it in digital form (most fiction in particular) especially if I'm likely to only read it once. In normal circumstances, digital is much better for me as I can travel with all the books I want.
I bought an ebook from Amazon a few days ago. It asked me "which device do I want it delivered to", and I picked the "download please" (or something worded like that. I downloaded the epub. I could read it on Calibre, on the ReadEra app on my (Amazon-crapware-stripped) Amazon Fire HD, I emailed me to my partner's, "kindle email".
It displayed everywhere nicely. I never purchased books from other locations so I got no opinion on FNAC and the likes, but I never had an issue on Amazon books.
It's explicitly indicated on the info page for some applicable Amazon Kindle books that it has no DRM due to publisher/author request - e.g. [1]
I do not believe that is universally true.
(FWIW... I found a lot of SciFi authors request no DRM, as it supports their personal beliefs and values, but that's a personal observation rather than objective survey of the field)
You were lucky. Most e-books from Amazon come with DRM and restrictions preventing you from reading them on devices that do not have a kindle app. I once purchased a textbook (that wasn't on libgen) on Amazon and had to use the Kindle app on Windows to read it. It was not readable on Kindle Cloud Reader and Amazon does not have a Kindle app for Linux. I returned the book after using it (only needed it for a week) and got a refund.
While it's not DRM free... DeDRM [0] can be run stand alone or as a plug-in to Calibre. I have it auto run when I import a new book to my collection. From there you can do what you like with it.
You need to download the books from the "Manage Your Content and Devices" page using the "Download & transfer via USB" link. Those still use the old DRM.
Baen [1] is another to mind that imprint-wide believes that DRM is a waste of time. As another poster pointed out it is interesting that it is mostly sci-fi imprints leading the vanguard of DRM free, in terms of well known commercial publishers.
You can only do this on the minority of drm unencumbered books and even then the UI for simply getting at that drm unencumbered file is a complete mess especially if you are buying and trying to read the book on an actual computer.
It can be downloaded/accessed on all devices, but it gets explicitly pushed to the ones you select. These can be any registered device - kindle or fire but also phones or tablets.
If it's recreational reading, most hard copy books I only consume once. It's nice to pass on a hard copy book to a friend and have the opportunity to hear what they got out of it.
Ebooks don't work this way. I borrow them from a library. You're right, once an ebook is read it's just bits. They don't have the same value as hard copy books for resale, gifting, donation, or leaving out on the coffee table. Even obsolete textbooks have value, my monitor sits a few inches higher on top of a couple. Can't do that with ebooks.
I prefer physical as well but my problem is I'm hitting a shelf limit. My plan is to donate the books I don't care about to friends or the library to open up space.
Consider donating them to the Internet Archive OpenLibrary if they don't have them in their catalog. It's very inexpensive to mail if you use USPS' media mail class of mail. I just sent a 13x13x16 box weighing ~10lbs to them for ~$8.
This is exactly what I do with old books. I keep the ones I really like and give the rest to any place that accepts book donations. Might as well, I am clumsy and have busted two kindles, so I'm all aboard the physical book train now.
> The price of an ebook has so far been the same as the price of a physical book.
When I go to buy a book, the ebook price seems to be 10-25% lower than hardcover. It could just be my experience, but this has been the case for dozens of books. I look at this difference as the lack-of-salability discount.
Right, but hardcover is usually 100% more than paperback, at least more. So 25% less than hardcover is 50% more than hardcover. And a lot of modern hardcovers are so poorly made (especially as I've learned in the last couple of years, when it comes to RPG rulebooks), it's not as if the paperback is less durable.
I won't go so far as to say that's absurd, but you are neglecting value pricing. You aren't paying (say) 20% less than print cost and losing money over net value (which I would highly dispute your calculation). You are paying 20% less than print and gaining more value thanks the e-format.
I won't buy print books anymore, because they are too cumbersome vs digital. The 20% discount vs print, or 30% increase over net value of print, by your calculation, is worth the value I receive.
I exaggerate, because there are some print books I buy, specifically for the print format, because for those books so much of the value is in the packaging and physical form factor. The Apple hardware book, the Nasa Graphics Standards book, the recent Prince of Persia book, etc. For a couple, I buy both print and ebook because both formats have their own value; for the same book sometimes it's good to be able to page flip and sometimes it's good to be able to search. Brendan Gregg's BPF book is a recent one that comes to mind.
But for the most part (95%+), I buy only digital, and I am happy to pay "more" than the net print value.
Books are my life and my Kindle library has reached 1,200+ in 7 years of reading ebooks.
I'm a bit morbid, given that I statistically have decades of reading ahead of me, but I always dreamed of transferring the collection to my bookworm niece. I only learned of this Amazon policy recently and it was crushing!
I think within 5-10 years digital media like ebooks, games, movies etc will transition to being represented by ERC-721 tokens which brings with it the benefits of physical media (permanent ownership, sharability, etc) while also being easy to store, transport, read digital items. The main benefit is that you can buy your ebook/game/movie in one store/ecosystem and even if that system goes out of business your purchase will still be valid at other stores and platforms. Like physical books, these items can be re-sold and given to anyone you like (granted you won't have access to the book anymore.)
1. How do you stop a person who can legally read a book, and thus has the key needed to decrypt it in memory, from obtaining that key and using it to create an unencumbered copy on their hard drive without totally depriving them of ownership of their computer to provide a controlled environment where such copying is impossible?
2. I remember a substantial issue with Etherium wherein someone was able to steal a large amount of currency from other users in 2016. What are the risks of an attacker say stealing a large number of tokens intended to be sold to users from distributor or even the ability to create them? In a decentralized world how do you invalidate them? If you can invalidate them doesn't that mean any seller can take back anything?
This can happen now of course they can steal a copy of your pre production movie but potential to monetize is garbage and effect on your legitimate value proposition may be largely unchanged. In this brave new world their stolen tokens may actually have a legitimate market. Steal 1 million tokens sell all 5 days after release as already read for 10% less than going rate before owner bans tokens from legitimate market.
3. What about the case in which someone breaks into your computer or infects it with malware and effectively loots all your books and music and sells it on craigslist/amazon/facebook. How do you invalidate those purchases without a secondary authority. If you can haven't you recreated central distribution with more steps?
1. ERC-721 tokens don't replace DRM. Effectively you would buy the book and use any DRM scheme you want as the DRM would verify that you owned the ERC-721 before allowing the media to be used.
2. True, there is always smart contract risk. The DAO hack happened right after Ethereum was founded as nobody really knew what they were doing and tooling was extremely basic. Things are still in the early dial up days for crypto but even now tooling is vastly better, there are dedicated firms for contract/code auditing and the systems being created today are much more robustly designed. With that said, nothing can be certified 100% safe and the only concrete proof of security we have is the passing of time itself. These systems will be new for a while and adoption of this tech will happen slowly over time in the same way the internet grew over two decades into what we know today. There will likely be a system that withstands the test of time and becomes old enough to be trusted by even conservative developers, but until then there will likely be mechanisms built-in where the content creator can destroy and re-create tokens in case of failure. Not every token will be this way and the decision is up to the content creator themselves.
3. This is a problem for wallets in general and lots of people are working on it. The leading solution seems to be social recovery which is where you designate trusted addresses (family members, hardware wallets, friends etc) and configure it to allow your wallet to be recovered if say 3 of the 5 agree that you legitimately lost it. If you ever lose your wallet because you forgot the password or your computer/phone died then you can recover it easily and safely, no complicated and technically hard key backup systems needed which is key for normal non-HN people. You can also set outgoing filters so your ERC-721 tokens couldn't be sent unless it's to a whitelisted address or you verify it with another of your trusted addresses, so even if a hacker got into your wallet they couldn't transfer the tokens and you would just recover your wallet using the system above. It's still early days but Argent is the best example of this.
Are you saying the original owner can destroy the token they already gave you? Regarding social recovery. I wasn't talking about recovery in case of data loss although that is a legitimate concern I was talking about loss through theft.
If everyone suddenly had at least hundreds of dollars of value on their desktop that could be stolen and easily monetized by any software also running on said computer then the entire planet becomes a target rich environment full of badly secured computers. Buy or break into an addon used by 10k people. Steal an average of $200 in digital goods per user and walk away with 2 million dollars.
>Are you saying the original owner can destroy the token they already gave you?
With most tokens, no. They are yours forever. If the token creator did want to set this up then they can do it though. An example is RealT which tokenizes rental housing. They can revoke a token and re-issue it if they need to (if you lose your token or it gets stolen) and they are up front about this. It is very obvious when a token has a backdoor and most of them do not as it's kind of a scandal when someone does backdoor a token and people don't adopt it.
>Regarding social recovery
I did cover theft in my comment but I'll elaborate. Smart contract wallets are more sophisticated than simply money being stored on a computer. They operate a lot like banks do today with daily spending limits, trusted owners, and the like. With Argent for example you can limit outgoing transfers to non-whitelisted addresses to $100 a day similar to how ATMs are limited in the amount you can withdraw daily. This cuts down on loss due to theft. As soon as you notice $100 missing you would recover your wallet (like replacing your debit card) and the thief wouldn't be able to steal anymore. Also, in case you don't know the technicals, wallets are generally very secure and even if an extension can see your wallet they won't be able to access the funds as they are cryptographically protected and also secured by a password/biometrics. So it's not likely that your funds will be stolen by a run-of-the-mill thief and even if they are successful the loss is limited.
With all that said, a lot of people will likely still use banks to store and use their crypto as those existing trusted intermediaries still work just fine. People just have the option of storing their digital money themselves now.
What is the point of a token if its actually centrally controlled like rental properties? You can't actually use the token to revoke a rental agreement you use a court and the court looks at supporting docs like the rental agreement. At best it acts as official motorization of what the exact agreement is which isn't normally the point of dispute.
Presumably those spending limits and indeed ANY limits are user configurable with a token that could itself be stolen or just used by software instead of a person on the machine in question. If the person can do it the software can after all. For example by faking keyboard and mouse input and keystroke logging the user to steal their password.
We can't secure simple things now I cannot imagine how you can believe we can secure complex things with even higher stakes.
Credit card transactions are tolerable because the financial sector takes in a huge chunk of the value of the economy and writes off losses out of that huge pile of money.
In a decentralized situation where the only money in the kitty is users actual money how does this actually work?
>What is the point of a token if its actually centrally controlled like rental properties?
This goes down the rabbit hole of crypto a bit and I don't want to drone on too much if it gets annoying, sorry in advance.
Most tokens will not be centrally controlled in the future (I can elaborate if you're interested). During the transition period there will be centralized tokens like RealT which have similar properties to the paper forms we use today but even in that state they do offer improvements such as integration with DeFi products (RealT tokens can traded on Uniswap and will likely be integrated into Maker allowing for using your property shares in a collatorized loan), easier accountability/auditability, and other use cases (Let's go a bit sci-fi and say your car lock will open for you as long as you prove you own the car's ERC-721).
>Presumably those spending limits and indeed ANY limits are user configurable with a token that could itself be stolen or just used by software instead of a person on the machine in question.
This stuff does exist and there's some really good documentation out there that's not just me rambling :) Changing or turning off the spending limits or whitelists comes with a user-defined waiting period, so even if a virus somehow accomplishes this feat you would still be notified and have a day or so to cancel the changes and recover your wallet. Your original example was a browser extension which cannot fake keyboard or mouse input to your wallet. It would need to be a real virus of some kind which is rare on desktops in today's world and basically impossible on mobile platforms. I'm not saying the risk is 0% but it's not like mass numbers of people are going to just get their crypto stolen willy nilly, especially if they use their phones like the majority of the people in the world do.
>Credit card transactions are tolerable because the financial sector takes in a huge chunk of the value of the economy and writes off losses out of that huge pile of money.
Credit cards will still exist in a crypto world. Banks will still exist too. You will be able to reverse those payments just like you can today even if the credit card company backs their operations with ETH/DAI/BTC instead of USD. On top of that, it's actually really easy to develop a payment system on top of Ethereum that contains the ability to reverse transactions for a period of time with complex logic such as different amounts of time for different merchants based on a calculated risk score. For end users this isn't much different at all in the short to medium term.
The point about changes requiring time to implement is well taken and I can even imagine people relying on notifications to catch bad behavior because I see some people doing that now.
Malware isn't impossible on mobile. Android install security is in a fashion crap and androids are 90% of the market worldwide.
OEMs base their installs on old kernel versions that support their custom never to be upstreamed modules needed to boot their board then after 0 through a few updates stop providing updates for their phones. This is so because their is no stable interface for kernel modules.
My own phone is running 3.18 while my laptop is running 5.6.
Ultimately a lot of people are running around with devices that are actually vulnerable to things we already know are broken in addition to the known vulnerabilities upcoming that will be known to attackers long before its known to OEMS.
You can posit a better more secure future but the honest truth is that our present work is crap and we have no particular reason to believe the future isn't also largely composed of crap. It's trivial to imagine that in a situation where you can derive an increasing payout for breaking security that the attackers wont keep pace with those trying to secure the future.
This pessimism has been the correct answer from the moment computers were networked to one another through today. Given that we have been bad at securing networked computers for 5 decades it behooves the optimistic to prove it.
Maybe in 5 years we will all be running devices running Sel4 with only substantially audited code but I would bet on more steaming piles of insecurity instead.
http://erc721.org/ (Edit: https://cointelegraph.com/explained/non-fungible-tokens-expl... is probably better) has a nice friendly writeup. It's basically a token on Ethereum representing a unique object such as artwork, media (like above), a cool sword in a game, cards in a trading card game (Magic like games such as God's Unchained), or even physical items such as cars, houses etc. These tokens represent an individual thing that needs to be usable in the digital world (sending to others, selling/trading, using for identity management etc).
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I have a Nexus 6 updated with the latest OS version and FF. I spend about 90% of my browsing time on HN, LinkedIn, and a couple of miscellaneous other news sites. I observe the following problems:
Loss of UI, where the only thing I see is either a white or black screen. Swiping up or down as if to scroll or refresh "peels back" some of this to reveal the web page underneath, but it doesn't become functional unless I end the app. This affects all tabs open.
Terrible latency acting on navigation, where I'll press a link which has clearly been detected (an outline appears around it) and...nothing happens for seconds. Doesn't matter if I have one tab or a dozen open.
Terrible detection of which link was pressed. Sometimes it's bad enough that a link more than halfway down the page from where I touch is activated. This doesn't happen in any other app I have, even when it's happening on FF.
Poor download times. The bar indicating progress will occasionally stop at about 80% and pause. Sometimes when it pauses it finishes after a few seconds and other times it simply freezes.
I Have the same phone but don't recognize these issues. I've seen something similar to the blank page thing but it sorts itself out without restarting the app.
I notice you specifically mention LinkedIn. I don't use that site but I did read their recent web development blog post when they admitted that they had a CSS download of 3.5MB that was causing issues for mobile users. Apparently they've fixed that now, would be interesting to see if that was a cause.
Definitely not my experience but I believe you. If FF runs so bad on some phones Mozilla has still a lot of work to do. Maybe they should start with a list of phones that are known to run FF well (eg. Sony Xperia Compact) and badly (which phone do you have?) and start digging into what's wrong with ones in the latter list.
I'm on a Note 3 (great phone, 5 years old) with a Snapdragon 800 vs your Snapdragon 805. Seems we both have 3GB RAM.
I do notice that links in FF are harder to hit accurately compared to Chromium - am guessing Chromium increases the hit area on buttons or uses some intelligence to look for the button closest to a touch... because it seems like it's just being forgiving on my sloppy touches (as opposed to FF being inaccurate). Admittedly a better UX in that respect regardless.
Otherwise I don't have any of these issues, FF is completely smooth for me. I wonder if you have some other software causing a problem, maybe FF add-ons?
(EDIT: I'm also on LineageOS 14.1 which is based on Nougat so maybe the sibling comment about Oreo is onto something)
That was my thought as well. I have to switch to Chrome every once in a blue moon to make things work on my Android phone, but 99% of the time, Firefox works just as well.
I'll add my voice to mix here and agree that FF has worked well for me on Android. Between Nightly and Focus, I have yet to need a non-FF browser post adoption.
I had the issue with the doubling with the b key as well.
Mine was out of warranty, so I fixed it myself.
Failed: compressed air
Failed: cleaning under the key.
Success (but not recommended)
I removed the key, then pulled off the glued membrane. Cleaned all with 90% alcohol. Took a new membrane (but you might be able to use old) and used E6000 and a toothpick to glue it back. Replaced butterfly and key.
Not a good solution, but it worked.
It looked like the contacts were getting coated and not making good contact? Perhaps heat?
I am not confident in my ability to do that but it's good to know there is a solution if I get desperate enough. My mechanical keyboard is saving my life right now.
Lots of trouble with mine as well. Key presses getting doubled or more. Especially on the "b" key. Had to replace the entire key and membrane and clean underneath the glued membrane to get it working again. (was 2 months out of warranty)
Also had the left command key just fall off. I know I rest my finger on it, but it shouldn't just fall off.
I like the low travel that some complain about, but any keyboard is useless if it doesn't work consistently.
Just FYI, some credit cards extend manufacturer warranties to two years, so may be worth looking into it. Also, which model do you have? Some non-TB 2016-2017 13" MBP are eligible for a free topcase replacement for battery issues.
It's the TB 15". I thought about seeing if I could go into an Apple store and see if I could get them to do it, but I am currently 2 hours away from the closest real one.
1. I think that is common for every generation however. "Pop culture" changed, but is mostly the youth. The older generations didn't change that much. We remember the differences, but forget how much is the same. 2. Youth culture is different today than the late 00's, but it takes time and space to see those differences clearly. 3. Cultural plateau is the historical norm. While we can argue if it is good or bad, the wider 1k+ year historical view shows this is just a reversion to the mean. (granted before it was localized and now mostly globalized)