I teach a programming class to young adults (18-25, usually) and was flabbergasted last semester when I realized that a couple of them didn't know what a directory hierarchy/file system was.

My suspicion is that the ease of use angle of "just tell me what you want and I'll find it" led to this. Not saying ease of use is bad, but I expected more from people wanting to learn programming.

And I'm over here meticulously organizing my music library into folders by band, album, year, etc...o the humanity.

Kids often don't know the difference between "wifi" and the Internet. It's not an age thing these days.

Lawmakers and judges should not be allowed to make decisions on something they know nothing about. This is a huge problem with people not even wanting to educate themselves, and then deciding how the rest of us get to interact with the internet.

That being said, Firefox is only popular with tech folk. They have just over a 3% market share. I’m a developer and I don’t know anyone but myself that uses it. My mother would think I was talking about a cartoon if I brought it up. A lot of lemmings use it, but o would not call it a popular example.

I'm 46 and I know the difference.

I'm a 53 year old IT person, and I'm leaning towards 1. The level of technology incompetence in the general public is astounding. My wife only knows "Have you tried turning it off and back on again?" And that pretty much makes her a member of the help desk at her job.

Honestly same. The passage of time is weird

People think 52 is like super old.. but really that's just Gen X

Hell you really wanna know how warped our perception of time is?

Most people think 20 years ago Mario was an 8bit platformer that revitalized interest in video games after Atari killed the medium with oversaturation and nonexistent quality control.

What was Mario 20 years ago? An aging mascot with a divisive summer themed pollution game that I loved but others seemed to hate, on a console that only did well with diehard fans... 20 years ago Nintendo wasn't the big man on campus, that was Sony with the PS2 despite it being weaker than GCN and Xbox.

In the 1990s if you wanted to play a PC game you had install it manually with a CD, typically configure ini files in a text editor and fix irq requests for your peripherals just to play. In the contemporary world a zoomer only needs to tap the install icon on the screen, Gen Z may have more experience usually technology than any previous generation, but the days of asking grandma to fix your computer seem a certainty on the horizon.

I work as a website developer and I think number one is so, so much more likely. The average person barely knows how to use a computer at all, let alone how it works and different terminology.

An older, non-IT person - an actual judge, yeah I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt here - they likely don't know lol

if Microsoft is a browser or a search engine.

yes

Welcome to American politics.

Welcome to politics.

They do so all the time - do you think judges are experts in every thing? The judge needs to understand the law. It's up to the counsel to ensure they have experts to explain the details.

Yeah, that's great and all. But this judge shouldn't be ruling over this case if he doesn't know the basics of today's technology.

Tech just isn’t his expertise.

Mehta has been described as an avid fan of hip hop music. In a 2015 copyright case regarding the similarity of two songs, Mehta noted in a footnote that he was "not a ‘lay person’ when it comes to hip-hop music and lyrics,” and noted he has "listened to hip hop for decades". American rappers Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye West and Canadian rapper Drake are among his favorite artists.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Mehta

His job is to ask those questions. If he doesn't do it, his reasoning will be flawed and then the case will restart with a new judge when appealed, wasting everyone's time and money. I gotta imagine that's more embarrassing to a judge than asking these questions.

Are people here unable to see that the layman might not know what Firefox is off-hand?

I don't think it's that. I think most people want a judge who's knowledgeable enough on the subject that he/she's actually judging.

Bringing in experts to educate him during the court case is not right, he's supposed to be able to judge if the experts are actually experts and know what they're talking about, by the time the actual case is happening.