What was gold's inherent value to industry prior to 1930 or so?
The fact that gold now has industrial uses makes it less suitable as money or a store of wealth than it had been for thousands of years, because saving/hoarding/speculating artificially reduces supply and increases its cost.
I can grant that people might be more trusting of bitcoin if it had some kind of intrinsic value to insure against collapsing 100%, but realistically it wouldn't be more than a tiny fraction of the market value, anyway. And as with gold, those other applications would be more expensive than they ought to be.
The people who buy the devices will create their own apps if nobody else does. The "ecosystem" won't buy houses and cars for high-buck Western commercial developers, but that doesn't mean there will be no ecosystem.
Can people actually write apps using only a Firefox OS device? I'm not being flippant. I think this is an interesting question for sustainability of the Firefox OS ecosystem.
I'll point out that a Firefox OS app is, literally, a web app with a manifest file. If there's a web app out there that happens to work on Firefox OS, it's very close to being a Firefox OS app with ten minutes of effort to write the manifest file. You don't even have to put it on the store. Getting out of the walled gardens of the app world is a large part of the point of Firefox OS's goals.
Even if it didn't have any apps, it provides complete and open access to the Internet for $25 to people who might not otherwise have access to it. Wikipedia, email services, OpenStreetMap, Twitter, news sites, political forums, MOOCs. It's a chance to give the last billion people their voice on the open Internet.
All of which is to say that less than half the world actually has anything like consistent internet access today. And yes, getting those next 4 billion people on the internet is one of the explicit goals here.
I can't say for sure. My only experience with a browser OS was an early Chromebook. There it was possible to develop an app in an online IDE, then download and install it. (I had to do this to build a rudimentary text editor that could save locally, although I believe there are usable editor apps available now.)
If there's no way to do something similar on Firefox OS, then I see that as a much worse hindrance to the ecosystem than the income demographic they are targeting.
Reading numerical data has its own drawbacks. E.g. your mind may perceive too much significance between 389 and 412. Even worse if any kind of error bars are involved.
I define "patent troll" as anyone who has and defends patents that should have never been issued. So, everyone who has and defends software patents is a troll, and I have no sympathy if they get sued into oblivion by other trolls.
When someone now says doing something was a mistake, I sure hope the statement is in stark contrast with their sentiments at the time they were doing it. Otherwise, why do it?
Someone probably should still carve instructions on how to build a Blu-Ray reader into a few traditional stone tablets. Hopefully whoever reads it in 1,000 years won't assume "Laser" is the name of our fertility goddess.
