OK, I get where that works if your use of a dating site is strictly for sex -- good looking women hunting good looking men mostly for sex can get away with a W4W profile. It either makes them look zestier to good looking guys or the guys just disregard it completely.
But I'd have to think that there's some kind of selection bias that would result here, like they would be inclined to just attract men who only care about good looking women, which again is fine if sex is your desired outcome. But ultimately wouldn't it wind up resulting in some pretty empty actual dating situations?
While I buy in general the 80% of women seeking 20% of men concept, my sense is there is a kind of rough statistical parity between men and women in terms of attractiveness. 80% of women *aren't* as uniformly attractive as the top 20% of men are, and half or more of those women in the 80% group will either be unsuccessful or have bad experiences.
And then there's the idea that the elite 20% of women by attractiveness -- why bother with online dating at all? They are the eponymous "head turners" who probably have no problem in finding appealing partners in normal social activities. Which maybe means that the "80% of women" idea is really not 80% of all women, it's like the women who are between 4-8 on the 10 scale. The 6-8s are generally good looking, but not competitive with the 8-10s but so much more competitive than the 4-6s that they can really choose to be picky.
The 4-6s seem like the ones who are kidding themselves. They overrate themselves greatly and really ought to be shopping on personality and secondary qualities with attractiveness of their partner as something they're willing to compromise on. They're confusing men's general desire for sex with their own ego.
Years ago I had a rooommate who worked for a local AIDS advocacy group and he said they spent a significant effort targeting a group they identified as "men who have sex with other men but aren't gay". Their logic was that the actual gay community was already getting the message about AIDS, but this group was "outside the envelope" and wasn't exposed to the messages about AIDS *and* a huge potential vector for infection because of promiscuity, denial and so on.
They were men who identified as straight (and were often married) but also liked or even preferred a male-male sexual experience. My rooommate figured some were just repressed/closeted and some just liked any kind of sex and male-male sex was easy to get, anonymous and disposable. Bisexual in practice, but heterosexual in identification and the rest of their lifestyle.
As for the right-wingers and others, I'd imagine there's a whole other subtype of men who have sex with men for whom it may be as much about power as any kind of sexual identity. Suborning other men, especially non-gay men, into gay sex is a power and control thing as much as it is about sex, and it has a thrill-seeking/risk component to it, engaging in behavior in secret that they openly disparage.
these idiots failed to account for a common practice among hetero women on dating sites, which is to falsely claim to be seeking other women as a means to reduce or eliminate an onslaught of tacky propositions from clueless het-boys.
So how exactly does that gambit work for hetero women seeking men? Is this a thing that clued-in men know about? Some secret signaling that says "my profile says woman seeking woman, but I really want guys?" Do they not get an even tackier group of responses from bros hoping they'll hit a jackpot with a lesbian with a secret yen for yang and possibly a FFM threesome? What about fending off the lesbians who take it seriously?
And then there's the whole potential for lack of response, eliminating non-gross men who think cruising the women seeking women section is tacky and a waste of effort.
I mean, I'm genuinely curious here, if this is really a thing.
Every three weeks we get a breakthrough in battery technology reported, but all we ever see are incremental improvements in the same technology we keep using.
I think some of that is splitting hairs, I think you could reasonably define email as an electronic messaging system allowing users to exchange private messages asynchronously.
Everything after that is a feature -- attachments, character sets, network reach. etc. Most BBS systems in the 1980s reasonably referred to their private messaging systems as electronic mail.
What's wrong here is that healthcare is seen as a growth market, as if the sources of healthcare funding were infinite and there was room for continuous long-term revenue growth.
If anyone really believed we had a way to solve the health care access problems, they probably wouldn't be investing in health care as a business sector because it would likely be a market facing at best flat costs if not declining overall spending.
The predictions are 30 minutes forecasts, so its likely the storm hasn't hit the L1 point used for generating the 30 minute predictions yet. The animation is the last couple of days, not a projection.
It may have useful applications or suggest further research in more meaningful topics like education.
It seems like there's always a lot of push to cram information down people's throats (the bootcamp mentality) in a short time period. If this results in people who learn less and/or have less long term proficiency, maybe it will suggest better learning/education strategies.
The problem is that it will be opt-in initially, and the people who take advantage of it will be the ones Verizon least wants to spy on -- cheapskates and naive young people.
They don't really care about this data, what they want is the data of the people who won't opt in. Once they get enough clueless/careless people to opt in, they start making it a coercive opt-in -- you pay more not to opt-in. Then they take away the ability to opt-in at all.
It's too bad that there can't be "Open GUI Standards Consortium" that all vendors get on board with. They could have a research arm that works with the all the human factors researchers, graphic designers, and actually synthesize some kinds of standards that demonstrably work well.
Product companies could then implement GUI standards that are the same, and the eggheads in the research arm could design them in a way that allowed some subtle tweaks that didn't break an actual person's ability to use/understand the system but still allowed for companies to apply a theme.
I think your bigger point is generally right, there aren't too many new ideas for user interfaces, Too many are just copied from someone else and then bastardized in ways that please attorneys but make them confusing to operate. I think there's probably an objective best GUI design that combines several different OEM methods, but all we ever see are individual OEM attempts that try to please lawyers and force lesser "innovations".
I avoid most political anything online (except maybe historical) because 99% of people are willing to start fights over anything seen as deviating from their accepted norm, right AND left.
There is a sub for my city and there was a local scandal with a hipster nightclub whose owner apparently gave money to a David Duke campaign at one point. There was a subscriber who basically defended hounding the nightclub employees as complicit in white supremacy over it, and if they lost their jobs due to the boycott it was acceptable collateral damage.
In that sub, nearly everything not hard left gets downvoted to oblivion. I mean, we're a lefty city but in my 50 years of living here I never thought it was like Cultural Revolution-bordering-on Khmer Rouge left, but maybe it is.
But overall the subs I pay attention to (some shows, some history, etc) seem more or less normal and not reactive or vindictive.
I just started using Reddit when IMDB canned the forums. It's a poor second for that particular use case, but I find it reminds me a lot of USENET 15-20 years ago. Lots of trash, but lots of pretty interesting and dedicated subreddits with no identifiable political content.
If anything, I see lots of complaints about left-wing proselytizing but not much in the way of actual evidence of left-wing anything. I figure how left-biased can it be if you see a lot of complaints about left-wing bias? Wouldn't that kind of thing be moderated into oblivion?
And the value of land is determined...how? By the value of principal exchange, money. You can argue land is still intrinsically valuable (you can live on it, farm it, etc) or have some value in alternate money types (gold, bitcoins, etc).
But chances are, if the value of primary money (dollars, etc) approaches zero, owning the land is probably marginally valuable unless you're obtaining intrinsic value from it (ie, you farm it, or you live on it).
If land was such a great long-haul investment, I would kind of expect a handful of families to own most of the land in the US.
My line of thinking is that it's relatively easy to get a state law passed pre-empting municipalities from building a network infrastructure and this has been the tactic the cable companies have used.
However, if a national law was proposed *allowing* municipalities to build networks, it would override state level pre-emption laws and be much more visible and difficult for cable companies to block, especially if it contained built-in limitations on what those networks could do.
The cable companies' main objection is always that the government is an "unfair competitor" and going into business against them. If the municipal network doesn't, in fact, provide any commercial services by itself, that argument is nullified.
And I think that's the right way to do a muni network -- just layer 2 transport -- the homeowner would contract with whatever ISP (or cable TV company or whatever) is a muni network provider. All the muni network does is fix last mile speeds and enable competition.
At this point the cable company is only arguing for monopoly status, which is much harder to argue for on a national level.
I don't think you really need a "national" fiber rollout. Most of the problems residential fiber is trying to solve are last mile and very local in scope. That's too many details for any kind of national rollout to manage without an overwhelming project management bureaucracy.
The best contribution would be a Federal law that defines a municipality's right to build local fiber networks to the home and the nature of the services they could provide. You'd eliminate some opposition by declaring that municipal fiber networks can't provide any service beyond Layer 2 connectivity, that the network is open to all providers who want to lease space and co-locate equipment, that the system must be self-financed and run as a wholly owned entity separate from the municipal government, possibly even privately managed with a fixed percent profit margin.
By providing a connectivity-only network with any services (internet, TV, etc) provided by third parties it would be a lot like the road system -- the city builds and maintains it, but it doesn't really provide any services.
You could argue that even then, municipalities have mixed results with road networks, water systems, etc. This is true, but most do a decent job with these utilities and it's unrealistic to expect that universal excellence is a necessary outcome. Most will be good, some will be great and some will be poor.
I'd even argue it might be in local cable monopoly's interest to sell off their local networks to a municipal network provider to jump-start the process. Where I live, CenturyLink has run fiber and a large regional provider is adding fiber rapidly to neighborhoods and has just reached mine. Comcast has a decent fiber distribution network to neighborhoods, but their RF to the house side is aging and increasingly will be non-competitive, requiring an expensive upgrade. In exchange for selling it, local cable providers could be given a 5-10 year management contract to operate it.
Some group of officials doesn't like replicants and Jared Leto wants replicants and has supposedly done something special with them.
I don't really understand how this "bridges" the gap. I kind of expected a scene which did more to create back story for the larger Blade Runner universe -- political changes, corporate changes, whatever. Or maybe an explanation how after the death of Tyrel we still have Bladerunners on Earth?
I think they're less lobbying organizations than they are intellectual justification factories.
Pick a position on an issue, threw a few million dollars at a bunch of academics, and you can probably wind up with enough "evidence" to advocate for the truth and accuracy of your position and bury your opponents.
I think at one time, think tanks actually did something useful -- academic studies of issues ignored by academics, or multidisciplinary studies of issues that weren't well explained by any single discipline -- and when the person who wanted the study didn't have a stake in the results, they just wanted the information.
I think they got into trouble later on when they started taking work for hire and it became understood that their clients were buying *justification* and not truth.
Nowadays, it just seems like an ideological racket designed to manufacture intellectual edifices in order to win debates or sway public opinion.
Blade Runner is artistically styled specifically to be a false future that blends 1940s noir and high tech, which means you end up with a lot of paradoxical technology elements.
If it was meant to be a coherent high-tech universe, it wouldn't be able to pull off the noir styling it's famous for.
The author really should have tried to make his point with a pure science fiction story that didn't intentionally try to map older styles into the future. I wonder how his analysis would hold up with Star Trek.
I don't know what kinds of checks and balances there really are for some senior classes of IRS enforcement agents. They're basically Federal law enforcement agents, just legally restricted to criminal tax related enforcement.
My guess is they have more or less general access to Federal law enforcement databases for stuff like license plate lookups in addition to access to at least general taxpayer data (declared income, taxes paid, etc, but probably more detailed than that).
I'd guess it wouldn't require a committee or a direct order for someone with that job to cross-check a car on the road and its owner's tax and income. I would believe, though, that if you did that and you spotted an anomaly, it would require some kind of approval process to initiate an audit or criminal proceedings.
I'd bet that the anomaly would have to be large (guy claimed $20k, is listed on the title of a Lamborghini as owner) before they would bother. I'm sure there are borderline cases where it looks suspicious, but is actually explainable through relentless savings or luck.
I can't back this up with any citations, but I'm pretty sure I read about an IRS agent who did pretty much this. He would see an expensive sports car, note the license plate, and then check out the owner to see if their tax filings lined up with owning a sports car.
I have to admit being somewhat torn. My gut reaction is its kind of shitty that a lone agent can operate in an almost personally vindictive manner. My other reaction is that this might be surprisingly effective and people who practice tax evasion cost the rest of us who pay our taxes. Then I have a bunch of vague notions about taxes sucking, the super rich rigging the system so they don't pay taxes legally, and that anyone who isn't super rich probably should be evading taxes as some kind of civil disobedience.
It strikes me its more a move to recapture the people who used to buy a new iPhone when they came out and stopped because feature innovations became too few and because performance didn't really increase enough to warrant it.
I think Apple is really hitting a wall where the device is so mature that there's not much utility left to add, other than the utility they won't add, like external memory slots and the like.
It seems inevitable. The nexus of business, government, national security and social stability all seem to make China seem like an innovator, not a regressive authoritarian.
I guess its just a question as to whether China can make their society seem consumer/individual friendly enough that nobody really cares about the authoritarianism, and whether the US can make their authoritarianism consumer/individual friendly enough that nobody notices.
It's like the last great frontier of innovation is how you implement authoritarianism.
I think the reason that high tech crowdfunded products are so popular isn't due to the inherent foolishness of the people who back them, but because of the failure of established technology companies to actually meet market demand.
Too many products are crippled by their parent company or VC financing MBAs who look at the product and figure out how it can be manipulated into 5 years of new models and revisions, which features can be withheld or turned into vendor exclusive options or upgrades, and so on.
The high tech landscape at all levels from consumer to enterprise is littered with good technology corrupted by relentless marketing and financial scheming to extract the maximum amount of money from the buyer, and quite often with the side effect of not fixing bugs or making basic functionality or features completely reliable.
It seems like so many kickstarter projects are attempts to fix broken products with accessories that ought to be built in features or produce a variant of a product that wasn't crippled at birth by its maker for whatever marketing or long-term pricing games they have.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I get where that works if your use of a dating site is strictly for sex -- good looking women hunting good looking men mostly for sex can get away with a W4W profile. It either makes them look zestier to good looking guys or the guys just disregard it completely.
But I'd have to think that there's some kind of selection bias that would result here, like they would be inclined to just attract men who only care about good looking women, which again is fine if sex is your desired outcome. But ultimately wouldn't it wind up resulting in some pretty empty actual dating situations?
While I buy in general the 80% of women seeking 20% of men concept, my sense is there is a kind of rough statistical parity between men and women in terms of attractiveness. 80% of women *aren't* as uniformly attractive as the top 20% of men are, and half or more of those women in the 80% group will either be unsuccessful or have bad experiences.
And then there's the idea that the elite 20% of women by attractiveness -- why bother with online dating at all? They are the eponymous "head turners" who probably have no problem in finding appealing partners in normal social activities. Which maybe means that the "80% of women" idea is really not 80% of all women, it's like the women who are between 4-8 on the 10 scale. The 6-8s are generally good looking, but not competitive with the 8-10s but so much more competitive than the 4-6s that they can really choose to be picky.
The 4-6s seem like the ones who are kidding themselves. They overrate themselves greatly and really ought to be shopping on personality and secondary qualities with attractiveness of their partner as something they're willing to compromise on. They're confusing men's general desire for sex with their own ego.
Years ago I had a rooommate who worked for a local AIDS advocacy group and he said they spent a significant effort targeting a group they identified as "men who have sex with other men but aren't gay". Their logic was that the actual gay community was already getting the message about AIDS, but this group was "outside the envelope" and wasn't exposed to the messages about AIDS *and* a huge potential vector for infection because of promiscuity, denial and so on.
They were men who identified as straight (and were often married) but also liked or even preferred a male-male sexual experience. My rooommate figured some were just repressed/closeted and some just liked any kind of sex and male-male sex was easy to get, anonymous and disposable. Bisexual in practice, but heterosexual in identification and the rest of their lifestyle.
As for the right-wingers and others, I'd imagine there's a whole other subtype of men who have sex with men for whom it may be as much about power as any kind of sexual identity. Suborning other men, especially non-gay men, into gay sex is a power and control thing as much as it is about sex, and it has a thrill-seeking/risk component to it, engaging in behavior in secret that they openly disparage.
these idiots failed to account for a common practice among hetero women on dating sites, which is to falsely claim to be seeking other women as a means to reduce or eliminate an onslaught of tacky propositions from clueless het-boys.
So how exactly does that gambit work for hetero women seeking men? Is this a thing that clued-in men know about? Some secret signaling that says "my profile says woman seeking woman, but I really want guys?" Do they not get an even tackier group of responses from bros hoping they'll hit a jackpot with a lesbian with a secret yen for yang and possibly a FFM threesome? What about fending off the lesbians who take it seriously?
And then there's the whole potential for lack of response, eliminating non-gross men who think cruising the women seeking women section is tacky and a waste of effort.
I mean, I'm genuinely curious here, if this is really a thing.
Every three weeks we get a breakthrough in battery technology reported, but all we ever see are incremental improvements in the same technology we keep using.
I'm not holding my breath.
I think some of that is splitting hairs, I think you could reasonably define email as an electronic messaging system allowing users to exchange private messages asynchronously.
Everything after that is a feature -- attachments, character sets, network reach. etc. Most BBS systems in the 1980s reasonably referred to their private messaging systems as electronic mail.
What's wrong here is that healthcare is seen as a growth market, as if the sources of healthcare funding were infinite and there was room for continuous long-term revenue growth.
If anyone really believed we had a way to solve the health care access problems, they probably wouldn't be investing in health care as a business sector because it would likely be a market facing at best flat costs if not declining overall spending.
Clearly such "facts" are fake news and the byproduct of white nationalist agitation.
By repeating such facts you inflame the sensibilities of everyone oppressed by the rise of fascist right-wing movements.
The predictions are 30 minutes forecasts, so its likely the storm hasn't hit the L1 point used for generating the 30 minute predictions yet. The animation is the last couple of days, not a projection.
It may have useful applications or suggest further research in more meaningful topics like education.
It seems like there's always a lot of push to cram information down people's throats (the bootcamp mentality) in a short time period. If this results in people who learn less and/or have less long term proficiency, maybe it will suggest better learning/education strategies.
The problem is that it will be opt-in initially, and the people who take advantage of it will be the ones Verizon least wants to spy on -- cheapskates and naive young people.
They don't really care about this data, what they want is the data of the people who won't opt in. Once they get enough clueless/careless people to opt in, they start making it a coercive opt-in -- you pay more not to opt-in. Then they take away the ability to opt-in at all.
It's too bad that there can't be "Open GUI Standards Consortium" that all vendors get on board with. They could have a research arm that works with the all the human factors researchers, graphic designers, and actually synthesize some kinds of standards that demonstrably work well.
Product companies could then implement GUI standards that are the same, and the eggheads in the research arm could design them in a way that allowed some subtle tweaks that didn't break an actual person's ability to use/understand the system but still allowed for companies to apply a theme.
I think your bigger point is generally right, there aren't too many new ideas for user interfaces, Too many are just copied from someone else and then bastardized in ways that please attorneys but make them confusing to operate. I think there's probably an objective best GUI design that combines several different OEM methods, but all we ever see are individual OEM attempts that try to please lawyers and force lesser "innovations".
I avoid most political anything online (except maybe historical) because 99% of people are willing to start fights over anything seen as deviating from their accepted norm, right AND left.
There is a sub for my city and there was a local scandal with a hipster nightclub whose owner apparently gave money to a David Duke campaign at one point. There was a subscriber who basically defended hounding the nightclub employees as complicit in white supremacy over it, and if they lost their jobs due to the boycott it was acceptable collateral damage.
In that sub, nearly everything not hard left gets downvoted to oblivion. I mean, we're a lefty city but in my 50 years of living here I never thought it was like Cultural Revolution-bordering-on Khmer Rouge left, but maybe it is.
But overall the subs I pay attention to (some shows, some history, etc) seem more or less normal and not reactive or vindictive.
I just started using Reddit when IMDB canned the forums. It's a poor second for that particular use case, but I find it reminds me a lot of USENET 15-20 years ago. Lots of trash, but lots of pretty interesting and dedicated subreddits with no identifiable political content.
If anything, I see lots of complaints about left-wing proselytizing but not much in the way of actual evidence of left-wing anything. I figure how left-biased can it be if you see a lot of complaints about left-wing bias? Wouldn't that kind of thing be moderated into oblivion?
And the value of land is determined...how? By the value of principal exchange, money. You can argue land is still intrinsically valuable (you can live on it, farm it, etc) or have some value in alternate money types (gold, bitcoins, etc).
But chances are, if the value of primary money (dollars, etc) approaches zero, owning the land is probably marginally valuable unless you're obtaining intrinsic value from it (ie, you farm it, or you live on it).
If land was such a great long-haul investment, I would kind of expect a handful of families to own most of the land in the US.
My line of thinking is that it's relatively easy to get a state law passed pre-empting municipalities from building a network infrastructure and this has been the tactic the cable companies have used.
However, if a national law was proposed *allowing* municipalities to build networks, it would override state level pre-emption laws and be much more visible and difficult for cable companies to block, especially if it contained built-in limitations on what those networks could do.
The cable companies' main objection is always that the government is an "unfair competitor" and going into business against them. If the municipal network doesn't, in fact, provide any commercial services by itself, that argument is nullified.
And I think that's the right way to do a muni network -- just layer 2 transport -- the homeowner would contract with whatever ISP (or cable TV company or whatever) is a muni network provider. All the muni network does is fix last mile speeds and enable competition.
At this point the cable company is only arguing for monopoly status, which is much harder to argue for on a national level.
I don't think you really need a "national" fiber rollout. Most of the problems residential fiber is trying to solve are last mile and very local in scope. That's too many details for any kind of national rollout to manage without an overwhelming project management bureaucracy.
The best contribution would be a Federal law that defines a municipality's right to build local fiber networks to the home and the nature of the services they could provide. You'd eliminate some opposition by declaring that municipal fiber networks can't provide any service beyond Layer 2 connectivity, that the network is open to all providers who want to lease space and co-locate equipment, that the system must be self-financed and run as a wholly owned entity separate from the municipal government, possibly even privately managed with a fixed percent profit margin.
By providing a connectivity-only network with any services (internet, TV, etc) provided by third parties it would be a lot like the road system -- the city builds and maintains it, but it doesn't really provide any services.
You could argue that even then, municipalities have mixed results with road networks, water systems, etc. This is true, but most do a decent job with these utilities and it's unrealistic to expect that universal excellence is a necessary outcome. Most will be good, some will be great and some will be poor.
I'd even argue it might be in local cable monopoly's interest to sell off their local networks to a municipal network provider to jump-start the process. Where I live, CenturyLink has run fiber and a large regional provider is adding fiber rapidly to neighborhoods and has just reached mine. Comcast has a decent fiber distribution network to neighborhoods, but their RF to the house side is aging and increasingly will be non-competitive, requiring an expensive upgrade. In exchange for selling it, local cable providers could be given a 5-10 year management contract to operate it.
Some group of officials doesn't like replicants and Jared Leto wants replicants and has supposedly done something special with them.
I don't really understand how this "bridges" the gap. I kind of expected a scene which did more to create back story for the larger Blade Runner universe -- political changes, corporate changes, whatever. Or maybe an explanation how after the death of Tyrel we still have Bladerunners on Earth?
I think they're less lobbying organizations than they are intellectual justification factories.
Pick a position on an issue, threw a few million dollars at a bunch of academics, and you can probably wind up with enough "evidence" to advocate for the truth and accuracy of your position and bury your opponents.
I think at one time, think tanks actually did something useful -- academic studies of issues ignored by academics, or multidisciplinary studies of issues that weren't well explained by any single discipline -- and when the person who wanted the study didn't have a stake in the results, they just wanted the information.
I think they got into trouble later on when they started taking work for hire and it became understood that their clients were buying *justification* and not truth.
Nowadays, it just seems like an ideological racket designed to manufacture intellectual edifices in order to win debates or sway public opinion.
Blade Runner is artistically styled specifically to be a false future that blends 1940s noir and high tech, which means you end up with a lot of paradoxical technology elements.
If it was meant to be a coherent high-tech universe, it wouldn't be able to pull off the noir styling it's famous for.
The author really should have tried to make his point with a pure science fiction story that didn't intentionally try to map older styles into the future. I wonder how his analysis would hold up with Star Trek.
I don't know what kinds of checks and balances there really are for some senior classes of IRS enforcement agents. They're basically Federal law enforcement agents, just legally restricted to criminal tax related enforcement.
My guess is they have more or less general access to Federal law enforcement databases for stuff like license plate lookups in addition to access to at least general taxpayer data (declared income, taxes paid, etc, but probably more detailed than that).
I'd guess it wouldn't require a committee or a direct order for someone with that job to cross-check a car on the road and its owner's tax and income. I would believe, though, that if you did that and you spotted an anomaly, it would require some kind of approval process to initiate an audit or criminal proceedings.
I'd bet that the anomaly would have to be large (guy claimed $20k, is listed on the title of a Lamborghini as owner) before they would bother. I'm sure there are borderline cases where it looks suspicious, but is actually explainable through relentless savings or luck.
I can't back this up with any citations, but I'm pretty sure I read about an IRS agent who did pretty much this. He would see an expensive sports car, note the license plate, and then check out the owner to see if their tax filings lined up with owning a sports car.
I have to admit being somewhat torn. My gut reaction is its kind of shitty that a lone agent can operate in an almost personally vindictive manner. My other reaction is that this might be surprisingly effective and people who practice tax evasion cost the rest of us who pay our taxes. Then I have a bunch of vague notions about taxes sucking, the super rich rigging the system so they don't pay taxes legally, and that anyone who isn't super rich probably should be evading taxes as some kind of civil disobedience.
It strikes me its more a move to recapture the people who used to buy a new iPhone when they came out and stopped because feature innovations became too few and because performance didn't really increase enough to warrant it.
I think Apple is really hitting a wall where the device is so mature that there's not much utility left to add, other than the utility they won't add, like external memory slots and the like.
Whatever made ADB so great didn't really matter, since it was only really used for keyboard and mouse.
The RS-422 serial ports were superior to RS-232, but made annoying by using DIN plugs instead of conventional serial ports.
It seems inevitable. The nexus of business, government, national security and social stability all seem to make China seem like an innovator, not a regressive authoritarian.
I guess its just a question as to whether China can make their society seem consumer/individual friendly enough that nobody really cares about the authoritarianism, and whether the US can make their authoritarianism consumer/individual friendly enough that nobody notices.
It's like the last great frontier of innovation is how you implement authoritarianism.
I think the reason that high tech crowdfunded products are so popular isn't due to the inherent foolishness of the people who back them, but because of the failure of established technology companies to actually meet market demand.
Too many products are crippled by their parent company or VC financing MBAs who look at the product and figure out how it can be manipulated into 5 years of new models and revisions, which features can be withheld or turned into vendor exclusive options or upgrades, and so on.
The high tech landscape at all levels from consumer to enterprise is littered with good technology corrupted by relentless marketing and financial scheming to extract the maximum amount of money from the buyer, and quite often with the side effect of not fixing bugs or making basic functionality or features completely reliable.
It seems like so many kickstarter projects are attempts to fix broken products with accessories that ought to be built in features or produce a variant of a product that wasn't crippled at birth by its maker for whatever marketing or long-term pricing games they have.