While I agree in large part, that little has changed in physics over the last 60 years, there is the one wrinkle of the soviet accomplishment in perfecting oxidizer rich engines as in the RD-180s. It took a lot of work finding materials that would stand up to high temp + high pressure oxygen and they deserve more praise than they got from the achievement.

Consider it to be importing tomorrows fuel source.

Given that lede is a recent invention that never caught on in many circles, I don't agree that both spellings are acceptable because it came from a web dictionary but because the web dictionary is right. A more traditional reference concurs.

Therein lies the the problem. You are a zealot, unable to move from your unverified preconception of USB as well designed, are unable to give a single concrete example of a USB connector which doesn't snap and see any criticism of USB or of your unsupported defense of same as "noise".

Blather indeed, how dare anyone actually doubt the holy church of USB as anything less than perfect. Yet another case of "none are so blind as those who refuse to see"...

Right, Mr GM ignition switch controller/USB zealot. Your sole experience of a connector that snapped because it was low end trumps my description of dozens of devices with three different but related USB failure modes. You welsh out on giving an example of a correctly engineered device because, even though you can't admit it, you know deep down that there is a problem with the weak center post in every USB design.

Post by post, it's becoming clear that all three: sour grapes, willful ignorance & intellectual dishonesty apply to your defence of USB.

I's either sour grapes, willful ignorance or intellectual dishonesty. Your choice, but sour grapes is the least pejorative IMO.

You've made the ludicrous clam that because you can hang your phone upside down from its cable USB is well designed.

Then you falsely claim that only shoddy connectors break the center post, delaminate or rip the female sockets off the PCB & gloss over the fact that these happen to all USB sockets, no matter what their claimed quality is. Come on, lets hear who exactly manufactured in what device one can find your supposedly flawless USB connectors. Given how many different phone & device manufacturers are in the dead USB box, I'm confident that I'll have a few. What then, hmmm? I suspect an attempt to move the goalposts claiming that "oh, but some other device has better connectors" like many other USB zealots I've encountered.

I do not have a box of low end dead USB devices. indeed most of them are/were high end when they were purchased.

You wouldn't mind if the USB committee would clamp down on the "shoddy" manufacturers? WAKE UP! It's NOT REPEAT, NOT spelled N O T just the low end. These problems happen to ALL USB devices! Not frequently, no, but it shouldn't be happening at all!

Up to now you have avoided acknowledging at all that Thunderbolt is a superior connector. A thought strikes me: Do you work on ignition switches for General Motors?

Yes, part of the reason that Thunderbolt is a better connector is because Apple's specifications are more rigorous. How good of you to take over 30 hours to at last agree with the the closing sentence of my first post in this thread. Now explain how that fragile center post does NOT make USB a worse specification/connector than Thunderbolt.

I see sour grapes because I clearly stated that it is the design of USB on my post of 2014-08-13 20:39 where I said:

Yet in your reply of 2014-08-13 20:39 you attempt to imply that my experience & everyone else who has bricked USB devices is because that I'm using shoddy implementations :

In my reply of 2014-08-14 3:21 I insist that it isn't just me or your putative shoddy construction. I've seen the center post snapped off/contacts delaminated/connecter ripped off the PCB on just about every make & model of phone that our company uses. No devices (other than Type B in my experience) are immune to USB's weaknesses. It's not rare to see Type-As are snapped off of PCs when they are turned in for renewal & USB charting stations in airports seem to be dying out in Europe because ports are broken so often.

Hey, maybe Apples patents are what is preventing the USB committee from using a better design. I don't know. That shouldn't stop you from acknowledging that Thunderbolt has a superior design & implementation when:
- Thunderbolt's female port doesn't have that fragile center post which snaps off
- Thunderbolt's female port contacts cannot delaminate from the central post & bend back.
- Thunderbolt's female ports cannot be merely soldered to the PCB, there HAS to be strain relief or it isn't Thunderbolt.
- Thunderbolt is more expensive than USB. (but the previous 3 points all brick devices so it's stupid to skimp here)
- Thunderbolt's uselessly reversible (But now that USB is going to a reversible connector too I suppose the die hard USB cheerleaders are going to drop this one).
- It's Apple's design.
- Apple won't let you use it.

When the only reasons are the last two, the problem is jealousy: Thus sour grapes.

Yeah, yeah, heard it before. If anyone calls into question the USB committee's weak designs, say it's because they must be using shoddy connectors, whereas your "well made" connectors don't have a problem. USB design isn't "fine" as you put it, it's demonstratably poorer than thunderbolt. Repeating the USB mantra "We put the parts that wear out in the connector so you don't damage the socket" doesn't make it true. The dozens of cellphones & other now useless devices that come from Blackberry, Samsung HTC, etc that all say that their USB sockets are well made yet snap the center post or delaminate the contacts or separate from the PCB tell me that that position is a load of crap.

Thunderbolt doesn't use a hollow male connector made of plastic with inward facing contacts and a thin wrapping strip of metal like USB. The male Thunderbolt connector is a solid injection moulded slab with the contacts on the outside.

Thunderbolt female connectors don't have a fragile central plastic post that often breaks but Apple did render obligatory the strain relief that the USB committee left off. If the female socket doesn't have strain relief, it's not Thunderbolt.

Thunderbolt's solid connector is thus mechanically much more robust, but not to the point where the male connector is stronger than the female socket.

Apple's design is clearly superior but through sour grapes many, like you, refuse to see.

So people say, and yet we have a box full of telephones and other USB devices at work with that supposedly well designed invulnerable center post snapped off or the contacts delaminated off it & bent into uselessness. Yeah, of course, it must be because we must be using shoddy devices insufficient to deal with our superhuman strength. Damn that yellow Sun...

Or, just maybe, designing that fragile central post into the standard and allowing cheap & shoddy connectors is the problem. Not a problem with the (better designed IMO) Thunderbolt connectors.

Unfortunately, that's not true as every USB adapter has a design where the contacts are facing inwards towards an isolated post which can & does snap off. On USB type-B connectors the post is thick enough so that I've never seen anyone do it but on Type-A's and much more commonly all the newer smaller connectors it's the most common failure mode after poor strain relief that often rips the connector off the PCB.

Apple's design of lightning without this fragile post and more rigorous specification that the female ports must be screwed (& not just soldered) to the PCB makes it a clearly superior solution.

Clearly you are not talking to the people who are paying the Microsoft tax. Microsoft's repeated licensing changes which have made it ever more expensive to be correctly licensed have made them no friends and many enemies. These are NOT the generic slashdot crowd, they are the people who look at the year over year increases in licensing wondering why they have to pay more for the same services. MS's bundling of supplementary services -- which they neither want nor need doesn't justify the increases for them.

Then you need to change the people you are asking or at least enlarge it to people beyond those who's biggest joy is hacking access points.

All true, and the kicker when using a recent airport versus an old WRT is that the airports are just better access points with more range than the WRT54GLs that they replaced in our household. While I had a lot of fun playing with DD-WRT & tomato & other firmware I got tired of low bandwidth in some parts of my home. I'd replaced the WRTs at a relative's house with airports because their configuration is simple enough for them to preform by themselves & I was impressed by how much better the coverage was enough to do the same in my home.

I've moved all the ancilliary duties the WRTs performed to a mac mini & now with the airports I have great coverage everywhere.

VOTE PARENT UP, it's the most insightful comment posted so far!

I came into this to see if anyone else noticed that these supposedly high end SSD drives are still using SATA 3.0 & an anon beat me to it.

Looks more like he is throwing everything he can think of at the wall in order to find something that might work. Given how slowly the wheels of justice turn it delays the eventual reckoning but Judges tire of the technique eventually

Really? Your eyesight is good enough to detect pixels clearly enough to make a difference in an image that has been rasterized at 3840x2400 & then interpolated down & displayed on a 15" 2880x1800 retina screen? Sure you can...

Ah, so my being able to see the pixels of a 24" 1920x1200 screen is "sitting too close" but you can see interpolated pixels in a retina display.

So do I now that age has hardened my lenses, but mine don't give me super telescopic vision the way you claim to have with yours.

Snort, sure sport.

Ah, who's this attempting to draw conclusions and failing?

Righto, you just led with the equivalent of "I don't hit women" leaving out "but I do make sure my wife stays in line". The "clarification" doesn't change the position fundamentally, no, no, not at all...

In parting, because we're clearly done here, your incoherency & refusal to admit that your any part of position is wrong (ex: your aftermarket SATA drive is clearly slower than the recent rMBP's PCI flash) proves to me that my judgement of your character was well founded.

You believe that you're always right, any who disagree with you must be wrong so instances where you've been proven wrong fall into your blind spot so they can be safely ignored. Go back to using Windows, you're a bad fit with the Mac crowd.