When a certain drug, whose active ingredients were asprin and something else, had its patents about to run out the maker "invented" a new durg that was the same except that the replaced asprin with aceteminophen. Patented that. and then withdrew the original from the market.

Unfortunately for me, I react well to asprin, and aceteminophen doesn't do a thing for me. But the other version was no longer available.

*I* did not find this an improvement, or an increase in innovation. Or anything else desireable.

O, they also increased the price.

You don't necessarily get dictatorship or communism (whatever you mean by that). Bureaucracy is probably more likely, with all meaningful decisions made by people you never heard of who are angry with their boss.

Please note that this is a prediction based upon all major power being held by the government, and doesn't have any prediction about the ostensible form of the government, which may be any form of authoritarianism. This includes dictatorships, but it also included democracies. It's more a prediction about the form of administration than about the purported theory of government, of even its claimed mechanism.

Most clickable things on the web don't have boxes to make them look like physical buttons.

Those are hyperlinks. That's the generally accepted, even traditional, look for a hyperlink. You do know what a hyperlink is, do you not? When I click a hyperlink, I expect to arrive on a web page forthwith. That's what they mean. But that's not what these mean. These mean... random stuff. Normal words... are words. Underlined and/or blue-colored words are hyperlinks. Buttons, despite Ive's insane, drooling jihad against skeuomorphism, should look like you are expected to reach over and press them. This leverages the user's familiarity with the real world (something I admit I don't think I can assume you have) and creates a natural understanding of an implied action just by existing. An action, I might add, that is not hyperlinking. Because we use, you know, highlighted words for that. How would you react to a stereo that had no buttons, just words on its face? Is that intuitive? Of bloody course it isn't. You press a button, it depresses, it looks different, it clicks, you know to expect the action to occur. If it's a toggled state, the button stays in. Natural. Normal. Expected. But a word? Where's the premise for touching a word? Where indeed? Hyperlinks, you say? YES! BLOODY HYPERLINKS!

Ives is probably the worlds foremost product designer

Ah. Ah ha. Ha. Ha Ha Ha. Oh, that is priceless. Just priceless. Ive's work is at best, a mixed bag, and he surely isn't the world's foremost designer. I can think of any number of designers that make him look like the pretentious hack he is. Starting with any number of supercar designers, wandering off into audio equipment and musical instrument design, heck, there are even refrigerators that are designed better than Ive's work product. Also, Scott Forstall's ideas were far better in terms of design than Ives. He just wasn't minimalist -- but minimalist is not a synonym for "good", and in fact, very seldom is that the case.

Also, look at the new Mac Pro. What a dysfunctional failure-storm. Can't install drives in it, doesn't fit in with other equipment well, requires desk warts to be even reasonably functional... expansion is a plug-addled nightmare... even the plugs themselves can be pulled right out, no security (physical or data) whatsoever. Oh yeah, Ives. I wouldn't let that guy "design" my kitchen. He'd probably take out all the plugs, knobs and buttons, color everything silver, and not allow silverware dividers in the drawers or pots on the stove. But you'd get a microwave with only one setting, and son, you'd be expected to like it. And you... well, you probably would. Lacking any kind of taste as you do. ;)

You're one of these people that will always be a reactionary against change.

Yes, absolutely, that's why I praise Mavericks so highly after years of buggy OS's left unfixed. That's why I thought "awesome" when the fully expandable Mac Pro came out, and why I bought right in. That's why I changed from Windows to the Mac. That's why I generally have the latest in home theater gear. That's why I have a Tesla on order. That's why I cohabit instead of marry. That's why I'm atheist and not theist. That's why I just took in a severely injured kitten. That's why I get such a kick out of messing with a Raspberry Pi, cobbling up little RPi projects we can use around the house. That's why my favorite literary genre is hard science fiction. That's why I have moved to SDRs, away from conventional radios. In fact, that's why I write SDR software.

Yeah, I'm just terrified of change, you bet. You crack me up. Any other "insights" you might care to share while you're making things up out of the clear blue? I think Fox News is holding a place for you, better get right over there.

Let me attempt to clue you in here: I'm not "afraid of the new Mac Pro because it's.... new", I dislike it because they functionally crippled it and because they compromised its reliability. I'm not "afraid of Yosemite because it looks different", I don't like it because it is unintuitive. because it is known to have privacy issues, and because it is ugly, which I would hasten to point out to you, since you clearly don't get it, is not in any way the same thing as "new."

I think your actual problem is that you pee down your leg when another Apple user doesn't play the sycophant as you expect. Can't help you with that. In my worldview, something is good when it actually is good. Not just because it came from a particular source.

Podkayne... isn't real?

But... but...

She's why I wanted to be a synthesist!

Yet another "Ready, Fire, Aim" sally from the blind, deaf and dumb contingent. Please DO go on, it's absolutely fascinating. :)

You might start with your definition of a "libshit"; is that a left winger? A libertarian? A librarian? What?

Also, I was dreadfully sorry to learn that your sense of humor was shot off in the war.

My nearly-an-SUV 3/4 ton pickup (Avalanche) neatly converts into nearly a full pickup if I want it to. The back of the passenger compartment comes out, the rear seat area becomes part of the bed, and as a bonus, you can pop out the glass, open all the windows and the moon roof, and you're nearly sorta in a jeep. Kinda. If Jeeps had pickup beds. :)

Reminds me of recent fighter designs. Not really great at any one thing, but pretty good at most. As long as I don't have to take it into a furball, I guess I'm ok.

Primordial subatomic particle soup?

Why, we used to virtually sit by an imaginary pond, hypothesizing that probabilistically speaking, we could, at some point, be observing the potential ducks quarking. Then we just like "flock it", and someone decided to bang (big) and that was the beginning of the end of that. I'd expand upon this, but I'm too hubble to indulge. I red that, it must be so. It's enough to stretch your brane.

Grass? We didn't have any grass. We just cowered in and among the anthills, interminably scratching our ant bites, waiting for the next Monolith to drop from the sky so we might learn how to utilize the bones of our fellows...

The future is now.

Well, if you have a Mac you'll use and like Helvetica.

Or, you'll stick with buggy-ass 10.6/Mountain Lion if your machine is one of those left unsupported by Apple in its most recent "fuck you" to its customers, or, you simply still require that your PPC apps work.

Or, if you can run it, you'll stick with 10.9/Mavericks. And benefit from (finally) a decently stable OS that hasn't yet been hit with the flat stick, uses the nicer fonts, and generally try to hang on for a while until hopefully, Apple gets rid of that blind, tasteless cluetard Ives, followed by a return to design principles that don't make their products look like a generic pack of cigarettes.

I mean seriously -- have you folks yet *looked* at Yosemite? Minimalism taken beyond ugly, well into "what the hell" ("buttons" that are nothing but text... who was the dimwit that thought that was an "advance", I wonder? Browser with no title-bar, information-poor pseudo URLs... it'd be funny if it weren't so sad. These functional downgrades were *not* done with usability in mind. For anyone. This isn't design. This is flailing at random change with no one around who can tell you "dude, that's... stupid" to your face.) I'm half surprised they didn't take the ability to nest folders away. But hey! Maybe next time, eh?