Being in the center and a decline to state voter, it's a tempest in the teapot. Both sides do it, both sides are corrupt, and the current shouting and fist shaking is just another case of political theater used to hide the hypocrisy.

I disagree. Fox News is absolutely a right wing mouthpiece, and it is by design and it is not denied by the owners or management. Fox explicitly says that they don't make any attempt to be balanced. However most news organizations are not like that at all, they are not left or right wing and make at least a token effort to maintain fairness, even if they have an ownership that has a leaning very often the management will insist that they maintain control. Even the most left leaning mainstream news organization is much closer to the center and less vitriolic than Fox is on a slow day.

The biggest problem today with news media is not their political bias but their tendency towards sensationalism in order to mainain ratings. Even with Fox, they are not necessarily right wing because that is their politics, but they are right wing because that is the market segment that they are going after and they are keeping that market through sensationalism.

Some kickstarters do interact with their backers, asking them for directions, and so forth. Of course this is optional. But even with real investment if you're not on the board of directors you have extremely miniscule control other than a yearly proxy vote about whether to keep the current board.

It depends upon the items. I backed some games. The upside beyond the expense of the game is that it is also reviving interest in good old style games again, stuff that the bean counters in industry said were not fashionable enough and who decided that every new game must be an assassin's creed or GTA clone on a console. It's a long term payoff if it works for only a small percentage of premium over the cost of a game.

Kickstarter doubles as a proxy for customer to vote.

Why 3-6 months? Some of these projects know in advance it will take 2 years or more to complete. And rushing people to a deadline defeats much of the benefit of kickstarter which is to do away with the traditional bean-counters who care nothing about the product but who only want financial return on investments. I'd vastly prefer having a late product that's high quality than a typical on-time product that buggy or defective.

Ok, the only thing I've backed are games, so maybe it's different for a bike. A late bike means you're walking a lot, but if you want a good bike soon then go buy one instead of investing in a new type. Kickstarter is not intended to be a market place to buy stuff.

Because some of the employees were well known and who had proven track records with well loved games. It was a very early kickstarter so there were a lot of unknowns with the project and how it would work. I suspect there are a lot of backers who think it was a success because it helped revive interest in the genre and help other game companies learn from the mistakes.

Software (ie, apps) I think is somewhat easier than firmware, mostly because there are a lot fewer people with experience in firmware and low level development.

Yes, the kickstarter backers should use their judgement. It's not a pre-order site. So if an idea sounds really really stupid and you want the product, then don't back it. But sometimes people may want to back a project because they want that sort of idea to succeed, ie it could be charity. I know a lot of gamers backed some projects that were going more old school style of games because they wanted those sorts of games to make a comeback.

I think most things on Kickstarter would be later rather than earlier. The investors don't want their money back, but they want the product that they signed up for. And a later product is more likely to be higher quality than something rushed.

There was an article not long about how many games were late (relative to what the kickstarter originally estimated), with the implication that late meant failure. It just felt completely wrong. With Kickstarter it can be ok to be late, they investors are not your typical investors which hard deadlines and expecting a financial return. One game I backed has asked if it's ok to be late with higher quality and the backers overwhelmingly said yes. That's a completely different reaction from the typical game investment model.

This happens even with the groups that have done it before. They've been making games for a long time. But every new game that's not a sequel or reusing old parts is still something that's never been done before. New game engines with large learning curves and many unknown factors. There needs to be a new attitude that being late is not a disaster, and Kickstarter type funding may be a way out of the current model that doesn't work well.

This is not just a Kickstarter problem. This sort of thinking is rampant in the corporate world, and in the government. Executives are just horrible at estimation of cost or difficulty of projects. Many of them think up an idea and then assume everyone else will make it work on time and on budget. They think it's just software, and how hard can that be? Or it's just a bridge, we've done so many bridges before, so how hard can that be? I see so many times that deadlines flow down from above; the product must be ready by the time of the trade show, or it's been sold to a customer already.

The same thinking that applies to having just a minor modification to an existing product is still in place for products that are very new or novel, or products using new parts or systems.

So draw up the system diagram on the white board. It looks so simple. The trap is then thinking that it's all understood and we're ready to go.

Some times I think it's because the executives mistakenly think they're a part of the team, or that the workers are all just a highly motivated as they are. It's not true, these are two distinct groups. Execs have no clue whatsoever about how things work at their companies, even if they used to be mere workers in the past. They've been removed from reality for so long they don't remember it. They very often come from a world that knows only about sales and financing. They'll get an extra million dollar payout if the project succeeds, but the workers may get only a thousand dollars in bonus.

The insult is the implication that no one uses Google+, thus only nobodies would actually be there.

Only if you're sitting there naked and you need a piece of paper under you so that you don't stick to the birch. And if it's hot enough that it hurts to breathe, since these are Finnish saunas and not the wimpy Swedish ones.

I'm not on Facebook. It's for the masses. I don't follow fashion and prefer to think for myself. I don't see anything on Facebook that I would want to participate in. The most I would get out of it is to hear some news about distant relatives.

It may be theoretically possible to have a social media site that's not horrible, but we're still waiting for the evidence to come in.