>From: "John Marlow" <johnmarlow@gmx.net>
>Reply-To: extropians@extropy.org
>To: extropians@extropy.org
>Subject: Re: "Printing" a $15 Computer
>Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2001 20:42:20 -0800
>
>Always possible, of course. And I don't mean to lessen the importance
>of the issues discussed here--but most of the tech discussed here is,
>in a sense, "vaporware" in the sense that you seem to be using that
>term--i.e., it does not yet exist in practical form for widespread
>use. This as opposed to the other sense in which I've seen the term
>used--to refer to stuff that never did and likely never will exist in
>ANY form...
>
>
It's not that I think it will NEVER exist, just that I strongly suspect that
whatever "studies" or "experiments" that purportedly were conducted to show
the feasibility of these devices/products/tech-science breakthroughs, were
actually massaged to a fare-thee-well, all in the name of generating venture
capital or stock gains.
Indeed, I suspect that 90% of all these science news stories are of this
ilk. They are not properly vaporware, in that there are hardworking
scientists or engineers & their managers, who just happened to be overly
optimistic, and that the product will be late, or will never appear because
funding for further dried up, or the market for the product goes away, but
that the products and/or revolutionary breakthroughs are nothing more than
the unhealthy confluence of greed and a new species of yellow journalism
that I might call "technofraud journalism."
It brings the eyeballs to the media stories, and that is all the media cares
about. It brings the VC moeny and/or stock gains, and that is all the
insiders care about.
But I guess they all forgot about the boy who cried wolf.
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