Apple doesn't delete any purchased movies from your local library. What can happen is that the studios can expire the contracts that allow Apple to stream or download the movie even for people who purchased it previously.
However if you purchase a movie, and keep a local copy of the file, you can continue to play it.
Yes, I know, DRM sucks, but...
Having titles pulled from the store rarely does happen, and Apple will offer some form of less than equal compensation when you contact them.
More often though, titles are upgraded for free. I've had many 720p/1080p movies upgraded to 4K for free as well as some upgrades on SD titles. This doesn't happen with all titles, but it happens far more often than titles being removed.
Personally, I still strip DRM from the movies I purchased from Apple, because I want to play them with alternative software, but regardless, while there are advantages to disc formats, all of this should be put in proper context as disc formats also have defects, and can be damaged, experience defects or be susceptible to some of the very same DRM issues.
One, as written, you'd have startups unable to afford the risk in whatever the end user does with the product/service.
For example, I have a WiFi connected power switch. Really, for me, it doesn't need any security at all. Worst case scenario, someone could turn off/off the nightlight attached to it.
However, someone else could take that same switch and connect it to something that if the power went out as a result of it getting hacked, the loss could be millions or more.
The other problem comes from determining who is actually to blame for a device being hacked. It could be the device, the user, another device (like the router) or some combination.
By trying to take it out of government regulation, you'd actually be increasing the reach of government. As it is now, manufactures are free to offer whatever warranty protection against hacking they want. They could protect the user for $100 in damages, $1,000, etc.. or nothing, which some people may be fine with depending on the use case. You're also getting the government involved (the judicial branch) when a device is hacked and the courts need to decide how much and who is to blame,
Can China come after the editors and owners of Slashdot for its users violating Chinese speech laws?
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding here is that in order to get an extradition the law that the person broke must also be illegal in the country you're extraditing from (and have a treaty with). So no, China could not do that.
It sounds like what they did was take whisky that had not been aged yet, put it in a glass vial with piecies of the charred oak barrels and sent it up to the ISS. They then compared this to the whisky of the same batch which had been properly aged in oak barrels.
Obviously this is going to age differently, as it would age differently if the same vials were on Earth. I doubt that if treated with the same temp, darkness and lack of turbulence that it would be any different from the same vials aged on Earth.
However, there's a reason why we don't age whisky by simply storing it in tanks with charred chunks of oak.
Instead we keep them in oak barrels that are aged in varying temperatures that cause expansion and contraction, bringing the whisky in and out of the wood. The whisky is also aged for varying amounts of time to reach the perfect taste characteristics based on the conditions they experienced.
Certainly though, those that commissioned the "experiment" were far more interested in marketing than science.
HP also solved this problem ages ago. Their solution is to link the Print Dialogue window directly to their online store for ordering a new set of ink cartridges each time you print.
The Apple Watch certainly costs more, and if that's a priority then the Pebble would be the way to go, which can be said for most premium or higher end products.
The Apple Watch has better sensors, better integration, a better screen, UI, and UE. Siri works really well, as does the haptic feedback. Even the features Pebble "matches" the Apple Watch with, it's far from really matching. Try making a phone call with it without a connected headset. Try going on a hike and getting an *accurate* measurement of distance, heart rate (min/max/avg), and calories burned). The list goes on and on.
As for the battery life, I take my watch off every night and let it charge so the Pebble has no advantage there any more than the fact that it's Android compatible didn't give it an advantage.
Again though, if battery, Android compatibility, and cost were the criteria, the Pebble would be a better match, but other than that, the Apple Watch is better in every way.
I take mine off at night because I don't want to sleep with it, but if I did, I would charge it off when I shower and when I eat. 2 hours is to go from 0 to full, in reality only about an hour is needed.
Because your feature comparison to the Apple Watch is totally ridiculous. If we have the money, we'd rather have something that does all of that and more (except for the Android compatibility, which we don't care about).
I had a Pebble, it was fantastic for me until the Apple Watch came along. I'm sure the Pebble and Pebble Time are still fantastic for others as well, but don't pretend you're getting the equivalent of an Apple Watch for less money.
"...Microsoft would make and BUNDLE their own implementation..."
Yep, that was a very real threat. I saw that happen to companies that didn't sell to Microsoft, and I was at companies that developed stuff with the thought of Microsoft taking us over in mind (that was usually a mistake).
The title says Memory, but they're talking about Storage.
The answer is that a lot of people use less than 16GB of storage. The more interesting question is why the 32GB doesn't exist.
I think it's because people either don't use much storage at all, like my mom or girlfriend who just use the iPhone for email, Safari, Twitter, Words with Friends, Facebook, and streaming music. For them, 16GB is more than enough.
Once you start collecting music, photos, videos and such, 32GB is not nearly enough, so 64GB kicks in. While 32GB would be enough for those in between casual users and media collectors... say those that just take a lot of pictures, but nothing else, the numbers of these people are too small to support a 32GB offering in the line up and Apple is better off bumping these people up to 64GB.
Because I'd rather have an iPhone than any other phone and an iPad than any other tablet. If they have to be jailed, then so be it. On the other hand, once I get my device, it's just that much better when it's jailbroken. I'm not rewarding bad behavior. Apple made their choice of how they wanted the platform to be, and most people are perfectly fine with that choice. My personal protest to the contrary wouldn't change one thing.
"Heck, wasn't the iSight the only webcam for Firewire? "
Nope, not even close. Not only were there dedicated FireWire based webcams, but almost every digital video camera had FireWire (and could be used as a webcam) until they went from tape to flash/HD.
People who see FireWire as some kind of failure must have been completely absent in the digital video industry for almost a decade.
I can get a new iPhone each year if I buy it myself. I get a subsidy with AT&T, and they can charge me whatever they want monthly as I charge that to my company.
Wow, it got just about everything wrong in analyzing my profile. Right off the bat it shows a picture of my girlfriend that it thinks is me. It shows pictures of people I have a high level of interacting with, one of whom is George Tekei who it says it doesn't recognize and I've only briefly met once at a political fundraiser. It also doesn't recognize Wendy Davis (running for governor of Texas) even though the picture they used isn't one I took, but an official campaign photo.
The commonly used words are out of context and were only used once each... Fire, Breast, Parties:
Photo from an Arcade Fire concert. Photo from Breast Cancer fundraiser. "I rarely go to parties unless they're for a political or charity event".
The "we can find you" shows a concert venue that is the 4th most common concert venue that I go to (only twice in the past year). This despite the fact that I have my home town listed and do check-ins at places there all the time.
My income is about 1/3 of what it actually is and wouldn't come close to paying for any of the vacations I posted about, or the property tax where I listed that I live, or for my boats and cars. This one surprised me the most, since I list where I got my graduate degree and the titles of my jobs and companies I work(ed) for.
The password attempts didn't even come close. My close friends and family could guess my "dummy" password really quickly (the password I use for sites I don't care about). My other passwords I wouldn't expect to be guessed at all since they're all different and randomly generated.
Now all of that said...
Ya, I see the point. There is data to be mined, and as foolishly as it is mined, it can be used even though the chances are high that it will be misused due to incorrect analysis.
I'm not sure what the answer is. Initially, I thought having a profile allows you to at least project what you want your profile to be as opposed to being off-grid, which I can't be in my profession. Now I'm realizing that increasingly, the issue may not be humans individually making assessments based on manually viewing your profile but by using very, very stupid tools.
Imagine this... an HR person looks for your profile and sees you're off-grid, ok toss that resume. They do a manual inspection and see you're high risk or acceptable. That's what we were dealing with, but now the HR person may get access to stupid tools and you could be labeled as risk for using keywords that were analyzed out of context.
Ugggh!!! (oops, according to this tool, saying this once makes you depressed)
I'm finding it funny that you kids never saw these. Around 2001 (not that long ago), there were a bunch of tablets being shown at CES that never caught on. Some were PCs as tablets. Some were more consumption like tablets, only with a lot less to consume.
They were slow, clunky, expensive. No YouTube, no videos (the storage was measured in MBs). They were heavy, had short battery lives and terrible screens.
The user experience of these things was really poor as well. Think WebTV.
This thing was nothing like an iPad. And it's not like as if you can really say, "like an iPad would've been in 2001". If you look at what most people use their iPads for, none of that would be possible/practical on the 2001 tablets. It's more like saying that Apple had a QuickTake digital camera, but it never really took off... amazing because today we all have digital cameras all over the place.
I applaud Nokia for developing a prototype to demo at CES, but it was a good thing they didn't take this to production.
Everything you described is NOT default behavior. The default behavior is for iMessage not to be on. If you have an iPhone and don't turn on iMessage then texting works just as normal.
To be clear, you have to actively assign your phone number to iMessage, and then assign email addresses and devices to that account.
The whole point of iMessage is to disassociate your phone service as the controller of your SMS and have the control be given to iMessage. This is in part so that you CAN send and receive texts on things like your MacBook over WiFi with no cell connectivity and all transparently.
Sure, I can see how it may be confusing for people who stick their heads in the sand and wave their hands in the air when it comes to reading instructions, but changing the way the system works to accommodate the ignorant isn't the answer.
That's like blaming Google hosted email for hijacking a domain's email.
Why did your wife's iPad get the text message? Because she configured it to do just that. Same goes for your coworker's MacBook Air. As far as your niece goes, the phrase "after she wiped it" is false.
This comes from someone traveling in another country right now who just had to send several iMessages from my MacBook Air that would've cost $$$ in international texting had Apple not set things up the way they did.
I think it's great for cops to be recording what they're doing, as long as their video can't be destroyed (until a standard time-based dump applied to all recordings not being used as evidence), and as long as individuals remain free to record cops as well.
However, there are all kinds of issues with Google Glass and other smart video processing being used, not only by cops, but by individuals as well.
So imagine a world where cops all have smart glasses and are running apps that do face recognition combined with database lookups. So instead of stop-n-frisk based on race, they can stop-n-frisk based on "He's a known convict" or "He once Tweeted that he likes to get high" or "He's unemployed, but walking out of a high-end department store", etc...
Likewise amongst civilians, smart glass apps tied to mugshots.com, sex offender databases or other public records... political contributions, licenses, etc...
There are lots of posts here claiming that they aren't using like to like comparisons. The point of the post isn't that an iPhone is getting better battery life than a MS Exchange Server, the point of the article is that in almost every scenario you can match up, Android/iOS/OS X comes out clearly ahead. And this is the case regardless of what hardware or type of hardware you're comparing. Put Windows on a MacBook and it's going to get lower battery life... a-ha, it's a driver issue, you say, ok, but spec out a similar PC notebook and it will have lower battery life than the MacBook.
In other words, Microsoft doesn't have a battery life on the Surface RT or any other product problem, Microsoft has a battery life problem. Why is that?
"My last two phones and the one I have now had and have micro-USB."
That's not very many. I've probably had just less than 100 different devices, and about 5-10% have been damaged. However, many cables have gotten damaged.
Worse though is that some cables and some ports don't want to work together.
Some devices, like my Motorola Bluetooth headphones, I feel like I have to jam it in so hard that it's going to break each time, though it hasn't yet.
I think this is also one of those things where Micro-USB is better than what I could come up with. It works, and you can live to deal with needing to wake up your girlfriend by turning on the lights, and figuring out how to plug it in at night. Likewise, the fragility isn't bad enough to be a consistent problem, even if it *feels* much worse than it actually is.
Try using the Lightning connector, and even better the Lightning connector on actual Apple cables with the hard-coil. It's pretty sweet to be able to plug in a device one-handed and completely in the dark on a single shot.
Honestly, the convenience of this makes up for the messed up inconvenience of having to also carry around 30-pin, Micro-USB, and Mini-USB.
I would definitely like to see Apple license Lightning rather than adopt Micro-USB.
"USB itself will only plug in one way, polarized wall plugs only plug in one way, and I don't remember anyone bitching when they went from non-polarized to polarized wall plugs."
The difference there though is that in both cases, for the most part, it easily plugs in one way and definitely doesn't plug in the other way. Furthermore, for the most part those connections are static. Meaning most people just need to think "larger blade goes in on the left". However, have you ever been in an older partially renovated house? It is annoyting trying to reach behind the furniture to plug in a lamp in a socket that you don't know if it's polarized or not, and if so which direction it was placed in.
Likewise with USB-A, the icon usually faces up, or vertically towards you or to the right. Again you're dealing with a static thing, so it's always facing the same way and very easy to detect when you're trying to go the wrong way.
"I would guess that most problems with any plugs stem from users pulling them out holding the wire rather than the plug."
That, and coiling up cables incorrectly, but Micro-USB connectors definitely aren't as robust as Lightning even when used properly.
Conventional advertising is good because good companies with good products can afford the ads.
Ok, I guess I can kind of buy that if you through in a bunch of caveats and exceptions.
But where he's losing me is on targeted ads being bad because they're too efficient and thus lower the bar to enable any advertiser.
I understand the point... I once took out some very cheap ads that were targeted towards my nephew for an imaginary fake product in an elaborate prank.
However, that only worked because there was no competition. Nobody else bid on ad placements for the exact criteria that I knew perfectly defined my nephew and would result in him seeing that specific ad.
In real-world usage, if I'm constantly searching for shoes, I'm going to get all kinds of shoe vendors bidding to target me. Jimmy's Shoes won't be able to bid as high as Nike, and if what I want are Kenneth Cole, it won't matter anyway.
Even if I'm wrong and bidding isn't a factor, won't we just adjust to discrediting ads the same way that we discredit spam from Nigeria? Won't we rely more on editorial and user reviews as well as brands we've experienced and trust?
Slashdot Mirror
Apple doesn't delete any purchased movies from your local library. What can happen is that the studios can expire the contracts that allow Apple to stream or download the movie even for people who purchased it previously.
However if you purchase a movie, and keep a local copy of the file, you can continue to play it.
Yes, I know, DRM sucks, but...
Having titles pulled from the store rarely does happen, and Apple will offer some form of less than equal compensation when you contact them.
More often though, titles are upgraded for free. I've had many 720p/1080p movies upgraded to 4K for free as well as some upgrades on SD titles. This doesn't happen with all titles, but it happens far more often than titles being removed.
Personally, I still strip DRM from the movies I purchased from Apple, because I want to play them with alternative software, but regardless, while there are advantages to disc formats, all of this should be put in proper context as disc formats also have defects, and can be damaged, experience defects or be susceptible to some of the very same DRM issues.
"The theory goes that the slowdown creates a shift in the shape of the Earth's solid iron and nickel "inner core"
There was a really great documentary about the Earth's core not only slowing down, but stopping altogether:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/combined/
I have a few problems with that idea.
One, as written, you'd have startups unable to afford the risk in whatever the end user does with the product/service.
For example, I have a WiFi connected power switch. Really, for me, it doesn't need any security at all. Worst case scenario, someone could turn off/off the nightlight attached to it.
However, someone else could take that same switch and connect it to something that if the power went out as a result of it getting hacked, the loss could be millions or more.
The other problem comes from determining who is actually to blame for a device being hacked. It could be the device, the user, another device (like the router) or some combination.
By trying to take it out of government regulation, you'd actually be increasing the reach of government. As it is now, manufactures are free to offer whatever warranty protection against hacking they want. They could protect the user for $100 in damages, $1,000, etc.. or nothing, which some people may be fine with depending on the use case. You're also getting the government involved (the judicial branch) when a device is hacked and the courts need to decide how much and who is to blame,
Can China come after the editors and owners of Slashdot for its users violating Chinese speech laws?
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding here is that in order to get an extradition the law that the person broke must also be illegal in the country you're extraditing from (and have a treaty with). So no, China could not do that.
Just in case you aren't joking, that's a *really* bad idea.
It sounds like what they did was take whisky that had not been aged yet, put it in a glass vial with piecies of the charred oak barrels and sent it up to the ISS. They then compared this to the whisky of the same batch which had been properly aged in oak barrels.
Obviously this is going to age differently, as it would age differently if the same vials were on Earth. I doubt that if treated with the same temp, darkness and lack of turbulence that it would be any different from the same vials aged on Earth.
However, there's a reason why we don't age whisky by simply storing it in tanks with charred chunks of oak.
Instead we keep them in oak barrels that are aged in varying temperatures that cause expansion and contraction, bringing the whisky in and out of the wood. The whisky is also aged for varying amounts of time to reach the perfect taste characteristics based on the conditions they experienced.
Certainly though, those that commissioned the "experiment" were far more interested in marketing than science.
HP also solved this problem ages ago. Their solution is to link the Print Dialogue window directly to their online store for ordering a new set of ink cartridges each time you print.
The Apple Watch certainly costs more, and if that's a priority then the Pebble would be the way to go, which can be said for most premium or higher end products.
The Apple Watch has better sensors, better integration, a better screen, UI, and UE. Siri works really well, as does the haptic feedback. Even the features Pebble "matches" the Apple Watch with, it's far from really matching. Try making a phone call with it without a connected headset. Try going on a hike and getting an *accurate* measurement of distance, heart rate (min/max/avg), and calories burned). The list goes on and on.
As for the battery life, I take my watch off every night and let it charge so the Pebble has no advantage there any more than the fact that it's Android compatible didn't give it an advantage.
Again though, if battery, Android compatibility, and cost were the criteria, the Pebble would be a better match, but other than that, the Apple Watch is better in every way.
I take mine off at night because I don't want to sleep with it, but if I did, I would charge it off when I shower and when I eat. 2 hours is to go from 0 to full, in reality only about an hour is needed.
Because your feature comparison to the Apple Watch is totally ridiculous. If we have the money, we'd rather have something that does all of that and more (except for the Android compatibility, which we don't care about).
I had a Pebble, it was fantastic for me until the Apple Watch came along. I'm sure the Pebble and Pebble Time are still fantastic for others as well, but don't pretend you're getting the equivalent of an Apple Watch for less money.
"...Microsoft would make and BUNDLE their own implementation..."
Yep, that was a very real threat. I saw that happen to companies that didn't sell to Microsoft, and I was at companies that developed stuff with the thought of Microsoft taking us over in mind (that was usually a mistake).
The title says Memory, but they're talking about Storage.
The answer is that a lot of people use less than 16GB of storage. The more interesting question is why the 32GB doesn't exist.
I think it's because people either don't use much storage at all, like my mom or girlfriend who just use the iPhone for email, Safari, Twitter, Words with Friends, Facebook, and streaming music. For them, 16GB is more than enough.
Once you start collecting music, photos, videos and such, 32GB is not nearly enough, so 64GB kicks in. While 32GB would be enough for those in between casual users and media collectors... say those that just take a lot of pictures, but nothing else, the numbers of these people are too small to support a 32GB offering in the line up and Apple is better off bumping these people up to 64GB.
"Why?"
Because I'd rather have an iPhone than any other phone and an iPad than any other tablet. If they have to be jailed, then so be it. On the other hand, once I get my device, it's just that much better when it's jailbroken. I'm not rewarding bad behavior. Apple made their choice of how they wanted the platform to be, and most people are perfectly fine with that choice. My personal protest to the contrary wouldn't change one thing.
"Heck, wasn't the iSight the only webcam for Firewire? "
Nope, not even close. Not only were there dedicated FireWire based webcams, but almost every digital video camera had FireWire (and could be used as a webcam) until they went from tape to flash/HD.
People who see FireWire as some kind of failure must have been completely absent in the digital video industry for almost a decade.
I can get a new iPhone each year if I buy it myself. I get a subsidy with AT&T, and they can charge me whatever they want monthly as I charge that to my company.
Wow, it got just about everything wrong in analyzing my profile. Right off the bat it shows a picture of my girlfriend that it thinks is me. It shows pictures of people I have a high level of interacting with, one of whom is George Tekei who it says it doesn't recognize and I've only briefly met once at a political fundraiser. It also doesn't recognize Wendy Davis (running for governor of Texas) even though the picture they used isn't one I took, but an official campaign photo.
The commonly used words are out of context and were only used once each... Fire, Breast, Parties:
Photo from an Arcade Fire concert.
Photo from Breast Cancer fundraiser.
"I rarely go to parties unless they're for a political or charity event".
The "we can find you" shows a concert venue that is the 4th most common concert venue that I go to (only twice in the past year). This despite the fact that I have my home town listed and do check-ins at places there all the time.
My income is about 1/3 of what it actually is and wouldn't come close to paying for any of the vacations I posted about, or the property tax where I listed that I live, or for my boats and cars. This one surprised me the most, since I list where I got my graduate degree and the titles of my jobs and companies I work(ed) for.
The password attempts didn't even come close. My close friends and family could guess my "dummy" password really quickly (the password I use for sites I don't care about). My other passwords I wouldn't expect to be guessed at all since they're all different and randomly generated.
Now all of that said...
Ya, I see the point. There is data to be mined, and as foolishly as it is mined, it can be used even though the chances are high that it will be misused due to incorrect analysis.
I'm not sure what the answer is. Initially, I thought having a profile allows you to at least project what you want your profile to be as opposed to being off-grid, which I can't be in my profession. Now I'm realizing that increasingly, the issue may not be humans individually making assessments based on manually viewing your profile but by using very, very stupid tools.
Imagine this... an HR person looks for your profile and sees you're off-grid, ok toss that resume. They do a manual inspection and see you're high risk or acceptable. That's what we were dealing with, but now the HR person may get access to stupid tools and you could be labeled as risk for using keywords that were analyzed out of context.
Ugggh!!!
(oops, according to this tool, saying this once makes you depressed)
Can they order him to do a reboot of Miami Vice?
I'm finding it funny that you kids never saw these. Around 2001 (not that long ago), there were a bunch of tablets being shown at CES that never caught on. Some were PCs as tablets. Some were more consumption like tablets, only with a lot less to consume.
They were slow, clunky, expensive. No YouTube, no videos (the storage was measured in MBs). They were heavy, had short battery lives and terrible screens.
The user experience of these things was really poor as well. Think WebTV.
This thing was nothing like an iPad. And it's not like as if you can really say, "like an iPad would've been in 2001". If you look at what most people use their iPads for, none of that would be possible/practical on the 2001 tablets. It's more like saying that Apple had a QuickTake digital camera, but it never really took off... amazing because today we all have digital cameras all over the place.
I applaud Nokia for developing a prototype to demo at CES, but it was a good thing they didn't take this to production.
"China's leaders are aware of the extent of the problem and will soon revise China's environmental protection law for the first time since 1989"
Whew! Nice to know they're on top of this now.
Everything you described is NOT default behavior. The default behavior is for iMessage not to be on. If you have an iPhone and don't turn on iMessage then texting works just as normal.
To be clear, you have to actively assign your phone number to iMessage, and then assign email addresses and devices to that account.
The whole point of iMessage is to disassociate your phone service as the controller of your SMS and have the control be given to iMessage. This is in part so that you CAN send and receive texts on things like your MacBook over WiFi with no cell connectivity and all transparently.
Sure, I can see how it may be confusing for people who stick their heads in the sand and wave their hands in the air when it comes to reading instructions, but changing the way the system works to accommodate the ignorant isn't the answer.
That's like blaming Google hosted email for hijacking a domain's email.
Why did your wife's iPad get the text message? Because she configured it to do just that. Same goes for your coworker's MacBook Air. As far as your niece goes, the phrase "after she wiped it" is false.
This comes from someone traveling in another country right now who just had to send several iMessages from my MacBook Air that would've cost $$$ in international texting had Apple not set things up the way they did.
I think it's great for cops to be recording what they're doing, as long as their video can't be destroyed (until a standard time-based dump applied to all recordings not being used as evidence), and as long as individuals remain free to record cops as well.
However, there are all kinds of issues with Google Glass and other smart video processing being used, not only by cops, but by individuals as well.
So imagine a world where cops all have smart glasses and are running apps that do face recognition combined with database lookups. So instead of stop-n-frisk based on race, they can stop-n-frisk based on "He's a known convict" or "He once Tweeted that he likes to get high" or "He's unemployed, but walking out of a high-end department store", etc...
Likewise amongst civilians, smart glass apps tied to mugshots.com, sex offender databases or other public records... political contributions, licenses, etc...
There are lots of posts here claiming that they aren't using like to like comparisons. The point of the post isn't that an iPhone is getting better battery life than a MS Exchange Server, the point of the article is that in almost every scenario you can match up, Android/iOS/OS X comes out clearly ahead. And this is the case regardless of what hardware or type of hardware you're comparing. Put Windows on a MacBook and it's going to get lower battery life... a-ha, it's a driver issue, you say, ok, but spec out a similar PC notebook and it will have lower battery life than the MacBook.
In other words, Microsoft doesn't have a battery life on the Surface RT or any other product problem, Microsoft has a battery life problem. Why is that?
But couldn't someone from a distance have used a super strong magnet to turn the radio on and then from a distance transmit the "off" signal?
I'm not talking about someone doing this from another country, but perhaps near enough where Cheney would've have been.
It seems like there was enough of a possible threat that he, and his doctors, felt the need to do this.
"My last two phones and the one I have now had and have micro-USB."
That's not very many. I've probably had just less than 100 different devices, and about 5-10% have been damaged. However, many cables have gotten damaged.
Worse though is that some cables and some ports don't want to work together.
Some devices, like my Motorola Bluetooth headphones, I feel like I have to jam it in so hard that it's going to break each time, though it hasn't yet.
I think this is also one of those things where Micro-USB is better than what I could come up with. It works, and you can live to deal with needing to wake up your girlfriend by turning on the lights, and figuring out how to plug it in at night. Likewise, the fragility isn't bad enough to be a consistent problem, even if it *feels* much worse than it actually is.
Try using the Lightning connector, and even better the Lightning connector on actual Apple cables with the hard-coil. It's pretty sweet to be able to plug in a device one-handed and completely in the dark on a single shot.
Honestly, the convenience of this makes up for the messed up inconvenience of having to also carry around 30-pin, Micro-USB, and Mini-USB.
I would definitely like to see Apple license Lightning rather than adopt Micro-USB.
"USB itself will only plug in one way, polarized wall plugs only plug in one way, and I don't remember anyone bitching when they went from non-polarized to polarized wall plugs."
The difference there though is that in both cases, for the most part, it easily plugs in one way and definitely doesn't plug in the other way. Furthermore, for the most part those connections are static. Meaning most people just need to think "larger blade goes in on the left". However, have you ever been in an older partially renovated house? It is annoyting trying to reach behind the furniture to plug in a lamp in a socket that you don't know if it's polarized or not, and if so which direction it was placed in.
Likewise with USB-A, the icon usually faces up, or vertically towards you or to the right. Again you're dealing with a static thing, so it's always facing the same way and very easy to detect when you're trying to go the wrong way.
"I would guess that most problems with any plugs stem from users pulling them out holding the wire rather than the plug."
That, and coiling up cables incorrectly, but Micro-USB connectors definitely aren't as robust as Lightning even when used properly.
So if I get his premise...
Conventional advertising is good because good companies with good products can afford the ads.
Ok, I guess I can kind of buy that if you through in a bunch of caveats and exceptions.
But where he's losing me is on targeted ads being bad because they're too efficient and thus lower the bar to enable any advertiser.
I understand the point... I once took out some very cheap ads that were targeted towards my nephew for an imaginary fake product in an elaborate prank.
However, that only worked because there was no competition. Nobody else bid on ad placements for the exact criteria that I knew perfectly defined my nephew and would result in him seeing that specific ad.
In real-world usage, if I'm constantly searching for shoes, I'm going to get all kinds of shoe vendors bidding to target me. Jimmy's Shoes won't be able to bid as high as Nike, and if what I want are Kenneth Cole, it won't matter anyway.
Even if I'm wrong and bidding isn't a factor, won't we just adjust to discrediting ads the same way that we discredit spam from Nigeria? Won't we rely more on editorial and user reviews as well as brands we've experienced and trust?