>The eight security guards, I can kind of understand.

You must live in the USA. The rest of the world goes... WTF?

I dont remember anyone wanting a tablet until they brought it out.

Steve Jobs would disagree with you

People from the 1980s would laugh at that comment.

+1

>An emacs clone ... done badly!

Like emacs?

I haven't seen that phrase here in years!

I would be very interested to hear what you use it for, and what the benefits are to you. ('Fun' is acceptable :)

>So my question is: Why would anyone want to be an early adopter anymore?

Youtube views. Remember how many people bought the Apple VR headset, and then returned it :)

>In my college classes at a prestigious school, well over 15 years ago, only a tiny fraction of the students in class could actually code to any reasonable degr

Back in 1983 at university, I saw the same. I tought one foreign how to solder. My dad had taught me ten years earlier.

Some people do engineering degrees because they love the subject, some just see it as a career path. Both were very obvious

I first learned COBOL (books only) then BASIC, then assembly language, then Pascal and Fortran (the last two at university)
I worked in Pascal first, then 5 years later discovered C. Took me a while to get used to it, but I'm still happy with it.

+1

+1 insightful.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

From a very long time ago. Ben decodes the list of bad words and prints them out, so NSWF.

Dick Van Dyke is whitelisted. So some normality.

Agreed. Except in airports