Actually, in this case, assuming the manufacturers aren't lying, then the GP is right. Government regulations led to extreme processing of the Aloe Vera gel, which ends up destroying the acemannan that turns out to be the primary beneficial agent in aloe vera. So ironically, government regulations in this case made a product that otherwise would have useful health benefits into a useless blob of sugars and goo.
That said, those regulations do serve a purpose (preventing illness), so it seems likely that the regulations need to be tweaked rather than removed. Without the regulations, these products would probably be fully complete aloe vera laced with botulinum and other fun joys.:-D
But you chose to ignore all of that and say nah, nothing was really biased until after Fox.
I ignored nothing. I looked at the facts and looked at what the news media presented as facts, and concluded that the people who claimed bias were, in fact, merely whining because the news media was reporting facts impartially rather than limiting themselves to facts that fit the right wing's viewpoint. And the fact that the mainstream news media has, after the introduction of a right-biased news source, wildly swung from actual journalism into left-wing opinion territory—to such a degree that the most accurate, unbiased news source is from a comedy network—tells me that I was correct in that assessment, and that what we had before was, for the most part, objective and unbiased. If it had actually been left-biased to begin with, we wouldn't have noticed a dramatic swing to the left in the rest of the mainstream media. Therefore, it wasn't left-biased to begin with, or if it was, then it was just barely so.
Back when Fox came out the press was voting 90+% Democrat. You aren't going to get much more of an objective proxy than that for what their personal biases are.
That's the sort of statement that could only be made by somebody who has never worked in the industry at all. A big part of journalist training at the college level is teaching people to move past their personal biases and seek the truth even if it disagrees with their assumptions—teaching them to be accurate and objective, and to not let their personal opinions color the news. The folks who didn't manage to pull that off generally didn't make it to graduation. Regardless of the media's personal biases, the news that they reported generally represented an objective view of factual reality to the best of their ability. Journalists—real journalists, not the faux journalists that have been popping up in the past decade or so—view that as a sacred duty above all else.
So your claim is basically tantamount to saying that people can't ever learn to be objective in spite of their biases. If that's true, then any hope for journalism is a pipe dream, and we might as well listen to commentary all day long, because nothing approaching objective news is even possible. I hope, for the future of humanity, that you're wrong.
Except that Fox News didn't counter the bias of those organizations because those organizations weren't actually biased. The people in the organizations were left-leaning, but their reporting was generally dead-on accurate, without any real hint of bias except in their commentary. If Fox News had just countered the perceived bias by substituting right-leaning bias in commentary, that would have been fine, but they didn't. They cranked the level of commentary up and began seriously slanting the actual news to fit the commentary. At that point, it ceases to be reporting and becomes advocacy.
There's no reverse engineering involved. Apple documents the AFP protocol publicly. I know this because I wrote the documentation that enabled adding Time Machine support to third-party AFP servers way back in 2009. If netafp doesn't fully support those features seven years later, I have to question whether netafp is actively being maintained....
True, but the problem is the increasing political bias of major news sources that used to pride themselves on being neutral. CNN is a particularly flagrant example.
I blame Rupert Murdoch for that. CNN's bias was a direct response to Fox News bias. Prior to that, they were neutral. At some point, somebody wrongly concluded that the only way to fight bias was with opposite bias, rather than with accuracy.
But there's more to it than that. The problems actually started earlier, as media consolidation led to cuts in the number of journalists and reductions in pay resulting from the glut of available staff to fill the positions. The inevitable result of such poor pay is that the industry fails to attract the best and brightest, and over time, quality suffers more and more.
I basically predicted this collapse of TV (both journalism and programming quality) way back in 1999 in a speech before the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences board of directors in which I said why I'd be using the computer science part of my degree rather than the communications part, largely because TV pays new people so very badly. I predicted that broadcast TV and cable networks would become largely irrelevant, replaced by Internet-based content. I predicted that content quality would decline more and more rapidly as the quality of people declined over time because of poor starting pay.
And now, just 17 years later, we see the results. We have reality TV star Donald Trump as our President-elect because the TV industry stopped paying their people enough money twenty or thirty years ago.
And inadequate pay for K-12 teachers compounded the problem by ensuring that the people looking for jobs in the journalism industry are not as well prepared for understanding the world and are less capable of recognizing bulls**t when they see it. This has been an ongoing problem for even longer than poor pay in journalism.
This is the point where I would ordinarily say, "I told you so," but as is frequently the case as of late, the smugness I should feel from being right is overwhelmed by despondence over the horrifying consequences of everyone ignoring my warnings. Such is life, I suppose.
And just as the problem was obvious almost two decades ago, the solution is just as obvious now: pay journalists better. If you do this, then in two or three decades, quality will start to improve. Nothing else will help in the long run, and nothing can solve the problem in the short term, because problems that take a long time to develop take an even longer time to fix.
My point is, using the others as a model, B&N doesn't need to be a good company and provide lots of great support. It's sad.
That's why I think they could so easily dominate the e-Book reader market if they did, and actually could cut into the tablet market significantly.
If you look at Microsoft's competition in this market, it's essentially non-existent.
I assume that person meant the tablet market, not the e-Book reader market.
Why would B&N exit a market where they're in the top 3?
Because despite being #3, their actual products are adding no real value to the market. Their software products are just poorly hacked-up copies of woefully out-of-date versions of Adobe Digital Editions, and on some platforms (OS X, for example), their software is so bad that it wouldn't even launch on many machines (last I checked). B&N could continue to sell electronic books for ADE without making their own software at all by just providing a simple, web-based storefront. IMO, they need to either get into the e-Book reader software market fully by making something that works well (defined as better than ADE) or they need to get out of it and just be a bookseller. They're trying to go halfway, and that's almost invariably a recipe for failure.
Amazon doesn't even run Android on their E-ink hardware.
Yeah, and that makes them pretty much useless for anything but reading books from Amazon. Unfortunately, there aren't enough users for the E-Ink market to really be a sustainable market in the long term. I'm surprised B&N sells enough units to break even on their R&D costs. In the long run, they really should just get together with Amazon, Kobo, and Apple to form a jointly held company that builds basic Android-based E-Ink readers that can read Kindle books, Nook books, Kobo books, and iBooks books, running a current version of Android, and with access to the Play store. It just isn't a big enough market for competition to make sense, and an Amazon monopoly would be bad for everybody—Amazon included, at least from a federal regulation perspective.
On the Fire tablets, Amazon doesn't support the normal app ecosystem (no google play, no gmail, no chrome, no firefox, no hangouts, no chromecast support, etc). AFAICT, you can't even make a bookmark onto the home screen, so you can't make a shortcut to the web versions of things. I'm VERY upset about that, cause I tried to make that a drop in replacement for some elder family members (the live support and cheap price with decent specs sold me on them... these shortcomings were downplayed by everyone I talked to, but now the tablets are unused junk).
I remember a time when folks were worried that those low-cost tablets from Amazon could seriously cut into the market for the iPad. But when it became obvious that you'd have to hack it just to run arbitrary apps, everyone relaxed. Amazon had a chance to make a real impact, but instead, they were so scared that users might install apps and read books from their competition that they completely blew the opportunity. Oops.
The problem was that their heart was never in it. Competing with a big company means taking big risks, and continuing to take big risks even when the numbers don't go up as quickly as you'd like them to. It means creating products that are innovative, and doing it on a regular cycle. And it means creating the perception that you stand behind your products and will continue to do so over the long term. B&N has completely failed at all of those things, and that's why we're all so shocked that they're even bothering to release a new model rather than dropping out of the e-Book business entirely.
At this point, B&N has been out of the hardware business for several years, with the possible exception of their E-ink model. Everything else is built by other companies. But even when they were still designing hardware, they kept shipping new hardware that didn't even run the latest version of Android on the day it shipped. Heck, their latest E-ink hardware was behind by two major versions on the day that it shipped. And AFAIK, they never update them to run current versions of the OS, so anybody who wants to stay reasonably current depends on third parties to hack together support. As a tablet, their products start out as crap and get further behind as they age.
If B&N really want to compete, they need to get serious, and make a pledge to always ship the current version of Android on all of their hardware. They need to provide OS updates for existing customers so that the products don't get farther and farther behind. Basically, they need to take the OS side of things seriously.
They also need to keep their RMSDK versions up-to-date so that book publishers won't keep having to cater to the most ancient devices with the oldest, most broken version of Adobe Digital Editions wrapped in a Nook UI.
They also need to make options available with faster hardware. I mean sure, there's something to be said about making a low-end device that they can build cheaply, but they ought to also have a step-up device that's a serious Android tablet with all the Nook-ization. Otherwise, people who want a tablet that's actually usable as a tablet will install Nook's Android app on a device from someone else, which means B&N loses not just market share, but also the psychological advantage of folks thinking of their devices as Nook tablets. As a result, they're more likely to also install the Kindle app, and they have less incentive to buy books from B&N.
I think Trump was being honest about that. I figure he's going to run the economy so badly into the ground that American workers will illegally immigrate to Mexico looking for jobs, and eventually Mexico will get so fed up that they'll build a wall and pay for it....
The copy protection is, indeed, often that paranoid, though most software I've seen will work as long as you cloned the entire disk (not just the filesystem with dd so that the volume UUIDs match, the folder IDs containing various files match, etc.
2. Then DO a dd clone! Afterall, dd exists in macOS [ss64.com].
You can certainly do that, but you aren't going to do it very often, because it means not touching your machine for eight or ten hours every time you do....
Spoken like someone who hasn't been burned by Time Machine. When it works, it is great. When it doesn't, you're screwed. Mind you, this is true for a drive failure anyway, but realistically SSDs rarely fail, whereas other components on the logic board frequently do (GPUs), so this significantly increases the number of people who will lose data.
BTW, I ca think of several audio apps that don't work at all if you restore them from a Time Machine backup. The software sees it as a new installation and makes you buy a new license. There's only one reliable way to back up those apps, and that's with a block-by-block copy to an identical drive. It also requires you to stop using your machine for several hours, so it isn't worth doing unless you have no other choice.
Who has time for that? Seriously, if a machine goes down then you have a brand new one delivered the very next morning or it costs you money.
Who the f**k has time to burn a whole day waiting for a brand new machine and then an entire second day restoring your backups to that brand new machine? If you're in the category of user for whom losing a couple of days for repair will cost you significant money, you also likely have on-site IT people who can pop the bottom cover off, swap the flash stick with one in a spare machine, hand it back to you five minutes later, and send the defective machine off for repairs with the spare flash stick. And if you don't, then the Genius Bar can probably do it while you wait. That's the advantage of the storage being separable from and functional without the logic board.
On the other hand, having fewer components by soldering their contents onto the same board makes the machine more reliable.
Moving from hard disks to SSDs reduced the in-service failure rate by probably one failure per five or ten machines (by removing head crashes from the picture). I doubt moving to soldered SSDs reduces the in-service failure rate by even one failure per hundred thousand machines. The impact is many, many, many orders of magnitude smaller when you're talking about a connector that is internal to a device, is properly designed, and doesn't have to support much weight.
By contrast, putting mass storage on the same board as a GPU that has historically had significant reliability problems likely increases the risk of data loss by several orders of magnitude, completely obliterating all the reliability wins Apple has achieved over the past ten years.
How the fuck is this desire unique to an "audio pro"? Do "audio pros" not understand the concept of backups?
It isn't. They're just more likely than average to have software with heinously abusive copy protection that makes restoring software problematic. Restoring from backups is a pain in the backside for everyone. It is just worse for some folks.
Different motherboard with different hardware IDs, different disk drive with different hardware IDs... actually, it would be running on an entirely different machine, with no physical parts retained from the original machine other than the display.
No, it isn't. It isn't even close. You have new copies of the license files with different inode numbers. And yes, copy protection schemes do break when that happens. Nothing short of a dd-style backup will restore some software to operation.
Of course, those two approaches are only practical for mission-critical systems, because the first involves spending twice as much money on hardware and the second involves being permanently tethered to an external RAID array. And realistically, getting your software up and running without data isn't of much value, so in effect, both approaches mean being permanently tethered to an external RAID array.
People want to buy from the counterfeiters because their products are exactly the same quality as the legitimate ones, but at far lower prices.
That simply isn't true, and anybody claiming otherwise is kidding themselves. At my previous employer, they were cheap and bought generic fake Lightning cables that looked like the Apple cables. The average life expectancy was about a week. By contrast, the typical life of real Lightning cables is measured in years, because unlike the fakes, the real authentication chips don't overheat and burn out when plugged into a charger all day.
But either way, with the sole exception of fashion products, the counterfeit makers are generally free to make and sell their goods, so long as they don't pass them off as legitimate. It isn't a huge burden to call something "Lightning-compatible" or whatever, and nobody would sue over that.
What causes problems is when they advertise their products as the real thing, causing their fake products to be commingled with the legitimate products sold by other sellers, and causing other folks to get blamed when they turn out to not be as good as the real thing, which they usually are not.
The products are usually not identical except in outside appearance. Often, the guts of the product don't meet minimum safety standards, and thus cannot be legally sold in the United States. But even if the products were identical, they would still have a higher failure rate, because counterfeiters typically cut costs by skipping burn-in testing, which means that all the DOA products get returned by consumers instead of getting caught early and never making it out of the factory.
No, the $2 Apple chargers aren't real. Folks have disassembled them and found serious design horrors in the counterfeit supplies. The outside cases are probably made in the same factories, but not the guts.
It took Apple a lot of effort to design power supplies that fit into such a small space and are still safe. The counterfeiters don't use their designs because they're too complex and cost too much money to make. Instead, they use hack designs that are cheaper to manufacturer and significantly more dangerous when they fail.
That's easier said than done. With scammers like these, when you stomp one account into the ground, a new one pops up the next day to take its place, and nothing ever improves.
Nope. It won't be an extinction virus. China will create one to wipe out the U.S., the U.S. will create one to wipe out the Middle East, the Middle East will create one to wipe out Israel, Israel will create one to wipe out Koreans (North Korea, in particular), which will end up also wiping out the Chinese, and the North Koreans will create one to wipe out western Europe, who will wipe out Russia. The good news is that Madagascar will survive.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, in this case, assuming the manufacturers aren't lying, then the GP is right. Government regulations led to extreme processing of the Aloe Vera gel, which ends up destroying the acemannan that turns out to be the primary beneficial agent in aloe vera. So ironically, government regulations in this case made a product that otherwise would have useful health benefits into a useless blob of sugars and goo.
That said, those regulations do serve a purpose (preventing illness), so it seems likely that the regulations need to be tweaked rather than removed. Without the regulations, these products would probably be fully complete aloe vera laced with botulinum and other fun joys. :-D
I ignored nothing. I looked at the facts and looked at what the news media presented as facts, and concluded that the people who claimed bias were, in fact, merely whining because the news media was reporting facts impartially rather than limiting themselves to facts that fit the right wing's viewpoint. And the fact that the mainstream news media has, after the introduction of a right-biased news source, wildly swung from actual journalism into left-wing opinion territory—to such a degree that the most accurate, unbiased news source is from a comedy network—tells me that I was correct in that assessment, and that what we had before was, for the most part, objective and unbiased. If it had actually been left-biased to begin with, we wouldn't have noticed a dramatic swing to the left in the rest of the mainstream media. Therefore, it wasn't left-biased to begin with, or if it was, then it was just barely so.
That's the sort of statement that could only be made by somebody who has never worked in the industry at all. A big part of journalist training at the college level is teaching people to move past their personal biases and seek the truth even if it disagrees with their assumptions—teaching them to be accurate and objective, and to not let their personal opinions color the news. The folks who didn't manage to pull that off generally didn't make it to graduation. Regardless of the media's personal biases, the news that they reported generally represented an objective view of factual reality to the best of their ability. Journalists—real journalists, not the faux journalists that have been popping up in the past decade or so—view that as a sacred duty above all else.
So your claim is basically tantamount to saying that people can't ever learn to be objective in spite of their biases. If that's true, then any hope for journalism is a pipe dream, and we might as well listen to commentary all day long, because nothing approaching objective news is even possible. I hope, for the future of humanity, that you're wrong.
It's like the old joke:
Q: What's the difference between fascism and capitalism?
A: In fascism, the governments own the corporations. In capitalism, it's the other way around.
Except that Fox News didn't counter the bias of those organizations because those organizations weren't actually biased. The people in the organizations were left-leaning, but their reporting was generally dead-on accurate, without any real hint of bias except in their commentary. If Fox News had just countered the perceived bias by substituting right-leaning bias in commentary, that would have been fine, but they didn't. They cranked the level of commentary up and began seriously slanting the actual news to fit the commentary. At that point, it ceases to be reporting and becomes advocacy.
There's no reverse engineering involved. Apple documents the AFP protocol publicly. I know this because I wrote the documentation that enabled adding Time Machine support to third-party AFP servers way back in 2009. If netafp doesn't fully support those features seven years later, I have to question whether netafp is actively being maintained....
I blame Rupert Murdoch for that. CNN's bias was a direct response to Fox News bias. Prior to that, they were neutral. At some point, somebody wrongly concluded that the only way to fight bias was with opposite bias, rather than with accuracy.
But there's more to it than that. The problems actually started earlier, as media consolidation led to cuts in the number of journalists and reductions in pay resulting from the glut of available staff to fill the positions. The inevitable result of such poor pay is that the industry fails to attract the best and brightest, and over time, quality suffers more and more.
I basically predicted this collapse of TV (both journalism and programming quality) way back in 1999 in a speech before the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences board of directors in which I said why I'd be using the computer science part of my degree rather than the communications part, largely because TV pays new people so very badly. I predicted that broadcast TV and cable networks would become largely irrelevant, replaced by Internet-based content. I predicted that content quality would decline more and more rapidly as the quality of people declined over time because of poor starting pay.
And now, just 17 years later, we see the results. We have reality TV star Donald Trump as our President-elect because the TV industry stopped paying their people enough money twenty or thirty years ago.
And inadequate pay for K-12 teachers compounded the problem by ensuring that the people looking for jobs in the journalism industry are not as well prepared for understanding the world and are less capable of recognizing bulls**t when they see it. This has been an ongoing problem for even longer than poor pay in journalism.
This is the point where I would ordinarily say, "I told you so," but as is frequently the case as of late, the smugness I should feel from being right is overwhelmed by despondence over the horrifying consequences of everyone ignoring my warnings. Such is life, I suppose.
And just as the problem was obvious almost two decades ago, the solution is just as obvious now: pay journalists better. If you do this, then in two or three decades, quality will start to improve. Nothing else will help in the long run, and nothing can solve the problem in the short term, because problems that take a long time to develop take an even longer time to fix.
That's why I think they could so easily dominate the e-Book reader market if they did, and actually could cut into the tablet market significantly.
I assume that person meant the tablet market, not the e-Book reader market.
Because despite being #3, their actual products are adding no real value to the market. Their software products are just poorly hacked-up copies of woefully out-of-date versions of Adobe Digital Editions, and on some platforms (OS X, for example), their software is so bad that it wouldn't even launch on many machines (last I checked). B&N could continue to sell electronic books for ADE without making their own software at all by just providing a simple, web-based storefront. IMO, they need to either get into the e-Book reader software market fully by making something that works well (defined as better than ADE) or they need to get out of it and just be a bookseller. They're trying to go halfway, and that's almost invariably a recipe for failure.
Yeah, and that makes them pretty much useless for anything but reading books from Amazon. Unfortunately, there aren't enough users for the E-Ink market to really be a sustainable market in the long term. I'm surprised B&N sells enough units to break even on their R&D costs. In the long run, they really should just get together with Amazon, Kobo, and Apple to form a jointly held company that builds basic Android-based E-Ink readers that can read Kindle books, Nook books, Kobo books, and iBooks books, running a current version of Android, and with access to the Play store. It just isn't a big enough market for competition to make sense, and an Amazon monopoly would be bad for everybody—Amazon included, at least from a federal regulation perspective.
I remember a time when folks were worried that those low-cost tablets from Amazon could seriously cut into the market for the iPad. But when it became obvious that you'd have to hack it just to run arbitrary apps, everyone relaxed. Amazon had a chance to make a real impact, but instead, they were so scared that users might install apps and read books from their competition that they completely blew the opportunity. Oops.
The problem was that their heart was never in it. Competing with a big company means taking big risks, and continuing to take big risks even when the numbers don't go up as quickly as you'd like them to. It means creating products that are innovative, and doing it on a regular cycle. And it means creating the perception that you stand behind your products and will continue to do so over the long term. B&N has completely failed at all of those things, and that's why we're all so shocked that they're even bothering to release a new model rather than dropping out of the e-Book business entirely.
At this point, B&N has been out of the hardware business for several years, with the possible exception of their E-ink model. Everything else is built by other companies. But even when they were still designing hardware, they kept shipping new hardware that didn't even run the latest version of Android on the day it shipped. Heck, their latest E-ink hardware was behind by two major versions on the day that it shipped. And AFAIK, they never update them to run current versions of the OS, so anybody who wants to stay reasonably current depends on third parties to hack together support. As a tablet, their products start out as crap and get further behind as they age.
If B&N really want to compete, they need to get serious, and make a pledge to always ship the current version of Android on all of their hardware. They need to provide OS updates for existing customers so that the products don't get farther and farther behind. Basically, they need to take the OS side of things seriously.
They also need to keep their RMSDK versions up-to-date so that book publishers won't keep having to cater to the most ancient devices with the oldest, most broken version of Adobe Digital Editions wrapped in a Nook UI.
They also need to make options available with faster hardware. I mean sure, there's something to be said about making a low-end device that they can build cheaply, but they ought to also have a step-up device that's a serious Android tablet with all the Nook-ization. Otherwise, people who want a tablet that's actually usable as a tablet will install Nook's Android app on a device from someone else, which means B&N loses not just market share, but also the psychological advantage of folks thinking of their devices as Nook tablets. As a result, they're more likely to also install the Kindle app, and they have less incentive to buy books from B&N.
I think Trump was being honest about that. I figure he's going to run the economy so badly into the ground that American workers will illegally immigrate to Mexico looking for jobs, and eventually Mexico will get so fed up that they'll build a wall and pay for it....
No disagreement. That sort of software sucks horribly. The point was that it is out there, and it unfortunately isn't rare.
The copy protection is, indeed, often that paranoid, though most software I've seen will work as long as you cloned the entire disk (not just the filesystem with dd so that the volume UUIDs match, the folder IDs containing various files match, etc.
You can certainly do that, but you aren't going to do it very often, because it means not touching your machine for eight or ten hours every time you do....
And it was about as fair and accurate.
Of course not. That's part of what makes the joke funny. It's sort of a meta-joke.
Spoken like someone who hasn't been burned by Time Machine. When it works, it is great. When it doesn't, you're screwed. Mind you, this is true for a drive failure anyway, but realistically SSDs rarely fail, whereas other components on the logic board frequently do (GPUs), so this significantly increases the number of people who will lose data.
BTW, I ca think of several audio apps that don't work at all if you restore them from a Time Machine backup. The software sees it as a new installation and makes you buy a new license. There's only one reliable way to back up those apps, and that's with a block-by-block copy to an identical drive. It also requires you to stop using your machine for several hours, so it isn't worth doing unless you have no other choice.
Who the f**k has time to burn a whole day waiting for a brand new machine and then an entire second day restoring your backups to that brand new machine? If you're in the category of user for whom losing a couple of days for repair will cost you significant money, you also likely have on-site IT people who can pop the bottom cover off, swap the flash stick with one in a spare machine, hand it back to you five minutes later, and send the defective machine off for repairs with the spare flash stick. And if you don't, then the Genius Bar can probably do it while you wait. That's the advantage of the storage being separable from and functional without the logic board.
Moving from hard disks to SSDs reduced the in-service failure rate by probably one failure per five or ten machines (by removing head crashes from the picture). I doubt moving to soldered SSDs reduces the in-service failure rate by even one failure per hundred thousand machines. The impact is many, many, many orders of magnitude smaller when you're talking about a connector that is internal to a device, is properly designed, and doesn't have to support much weight.
By contrast, putting mass storage on the same board as a GPU that has historically had significant reliability problems likely increases the risk of data loss by several orders of magnitude, completely obliterating all the reliability wins Apple has achieved over the past ten years.
It isn't. They're just more likely than average to have software with heinously abusive copy protection that makes restoring software problematic. Restoring from backups is a pain in the backside for everyone. It is just worse for some folks.
Different motherboard with different hardware IDs, different disk drive with different hardware IDs... actually, it would be running on an entirely different machine, with no physical parts retained from the original machine other than the display.
No, it isn't. It isn't even close. You have new copies of the license files with different inode numbers. And yes, copy protection schemes do break when that happens. Nothing short of a dd-style backup will restore some software to operation.
Of course, those two approaches are only practical for mission-critical systems, because the first involves spending twice as much money on hardware and the second involves being permanently tethered to an external RAID array. And realistically, getting your software up and running without data isn't of much value, so in effect, both approaches mean being permanently tethered to an external RAID array.
That simply isn't true, and anybody claiming otherwise is kidding themselves. At my previous employer, they were cheap and bought generic fake Lightning cables that looked like the Apple cables. The average life expectancy was about a week. By contrast, the typical life of real Lightning cables is measured in years, because unlike the fakes, the real authentication chips don't overheat and burn out when plugged into a charger all day.
But either way, with the sole exception of fashion products, the counterfeit makers are generally free to make and sell their goods, so long as they don't pass them off as legitimate. It isn't a huge burden to call something "Lightning-compatible" or whatever, and nobody would sue over that.
What causes problems is when they advertise their products as the real thing, causing their fake products to be commingled with the legitimate products sold by other sellers, and causing other folks to get blamed when they turn out to not be as good as the real thing, which they usually are not.
The products are usually not identical except in outside appearance. Often, the guts of the product don't meet minimum safety standards, and thus cannot be legally sold in the United States. But even if the products were identical, they would still have a higher failure rate, because counterfeiters typically cut costs by skipping burn-in testing, which means that all the DOA products get returned by consumers instead of getting caught early and never making it out of the factory.
No, the $2 Apple chargers aren't real. Folks have disassembled them and found serious design horrors in the counterfeit supplies. The outside cases are probably made in the same factories, but not the guts.
It took Apple a lot of effort to design power supplies that fit into such a small space and are still safe. The counterfeiters don't use their designs because they're too complex and cost too much money to make. Instead, they use hack designs that are cheaper to manufacturer and significantly more dangerous when they fail.
That's easier said than done. With scammers like these, when you stomp one account into the ground, a new one pops up the next day to take its place, and nothing ever improves.
Nope. It won't be an extinction virus. China will create one to wipe out the U.S., the U.S. will create one to wipe out the Middle East, the Middle East will create one to wipe out Israel, Israel will create one to wipe out Koreans (North Korea, in particular), which will end up also wiping out the Chinese, and the North Koreans will create one to wipe out western Europe, who will wipe out Russia. The good news is that Madagascar will survive.