Hasta La Gadget!

Most smartphone manufacturers provide 32GB of onboard storage as standard these days, at least in their flagship handsets, but Apple has continued to keep the 16GB model of the iPhone around even though it’s about time that it was ditched. That might finally happen this year when the iPhone 7 is unveiled. A researcher at IHS Technology has predicted that from the iPhone 7 onwards the company’s smartphones will feature 32GB onboard storage as standard.

I am sure that this will be music to the ears of millions of people who buy iPhones, but keep in mind that nothing has been officially confirmed yet so take this with a grain of salt for now.

Kevin Wang, Director of Market Reasearch at IHS Technology, conducted supply chain research which leads him to believe that starting this year, all iPhones will have 32GB storage and 2GB RAM as standard.

I should point out that 2GB RAM is already the standard, look no further than the iPhone 6s and iPhone SE, so it goes without saying that the iPhone 7 will at least have 2GB RAM as well.

However, with media content and apps being absolutely necessary to users, nevermind the fact that 4K video recording can take up a big chunk of storage, 16GB is far too less for today’s requirements. Customers will most certainly be happy should Apple decide that the base model of the new iPhone will have 32GB of storage instead of just 16GB.

iPhone 7 Predicted To Have 32GB Storage As Standard , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

OnePlus is gearing up to launch its new flagship smartphone, the OnePlus 3, in the near future. The company today announced “The Lab,” it’s a community review program for its upcoming handset. The idea is to send OnePlus 3 units ahead of the release to selected reviewers who will then provide the company with feedback on the handsets features, design, specifications, etc. Sign ups are open for five days and OnePlus is going to select 30 people to take part in this program.

OnePlus is known for doing PR stunts to raise hype for its products. This is something that it has relied on quite heavily to get the word about its smartphones out there, and many would say that its PR stunts have worked.

This is more of a PR stunt than something that’s going to make any meaningful change to the OnePlus 3, given that the handset has already received regulatory certification in multiple countries and is going to be released in the near future. The only changes OnePlus can make based on the feedback will be software-related.

Users in all regions are eligible to participate in The Lab. Once applications have been submitted, the company is going to select 30 people after “intense deliberation” and will then send them a OnePlus 3 to review.

‘The Lab’ Is A Community Review Program By OnePlus For Its New Smartphone , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Capcom has been adding new characters to Street Fighter V through DLCs and the latest character to arrive in the game is one that franchise fans might be familiar with. Capcom has confirmed that Ibuki is making her way to Street Fighter V. Ibuki was first introduced in Street Fighter III: Third Strike and she was included in Street Fighter IV as well.

It seems inevitable for Ibuki to make her way to Street Fighter 5, and that’s precisely what’s happening. Capcom has confirmed that Ibuki is coming to SFV, but it didn’t confirm when.

Capcom could have made things a lot easier for all of us by revealing when this character will arrive, it has only confirmed that it will arrive in due time, we just don’t know when.

It has released a reveal trailer for Ibuki so if history is any indication, this character will be landing soon. We’ve seen Capcom release trailers for upcoming characters shortly before they’re released for the game. The biggest difference between this and the previous iteration of Ibuki is bombs. They are a new and interesting addition to her character and will certainly add a whole new dynamic to her gameplay.

As is the case with previously released characters, Street Fighter 5 players can either purchase Ibuki with “Fight Money” when she arrives or purchase the Season Pass to get immediate access to her in the game.

Ibuki Is Coming To Street Fighter V , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Who am I?

No…This is not some existential, philosophical, New Age-type question. Au Contraire!

Google tells me that they have no clue…even as they sell my data (hmmmm) to others and inundate me with irrelevant ads that actually prove they have no clue.

Amazon purports to know me well through my orders, which are lots of kids books and paraphernalia; home care and personal care; kindle and physical books, and lots of varied gift stuff.

Facebook has me down pat through my connections, my posts and my Twitter and Instagram links.

Twitter has a handle on me through my tweets.

Instagram has intimacy through my pictures.

LinkedIn profiles me based on my thought leadership posts and by the data I provided them.

And on and on and on…Netflix, Hulu, Samsung, Pandora, Apple, Microsoft, Sirius, Uber, various airlines, my bank, Dark Sky, publishers too numerous to mention…and I am only scratching the surface.

The outcome?

According to Internet Society, in an articled called “Defining an Online Identity:”

Your online identity is not the same as your real-world identity because the characteristics you represent online differ from the characteristics you represent in the physical world. Every website you interact with has its own idea of your identity because each one you visit sees you and your characteristics differently.

For example, Amazon has established a partial identity for you based on the products you buy, whether it’s you at the keyboard or someone else using your account. Yahoo! Finance has established a partial identity for you based on the stocks you are following, whether you actually own those stocks or not. Neither one has your full identity, even if they were to put together your partial identities.

Google can’t figure me out because so many of my searches are contradictory and cross defined lines of demography and such — I’m a grandfather and a gamer; a Doors diehard fan and a Peter, Paul and Mary acolyte; I love Shakespeare and Captain America, Moby Dick and Lord of the Rings…age doesn’t define me, place doesn’t define me and on and on…

Amazon has no clue about what I buy for myself or for my family or for my friends. They have no idea about what motivates my purchases or even searches.

The various social network platforms — many of which I link – only see a small side of me – I post carefully, conscious of many factors and filters, with a bottom line that reflects my accountability to the company I work for, my family and yes my friends.

As for the rest – what do they really know other than what is in my mind or rather my digit (true digital) at the moment I press.

And as Internet Society articulates it, continuing from above:

The result is that you have one true identity and many partial identities. Some of the information associated with a partial identity is under your control; other information may be out of your control or even completely invisible to you….

And there you have it…”some in your control” like the profiles you agree to complete; some “out of your control” like the data that is collected about you and some? Who knows??? Profiles created by algorithms that then share the data with other algorithms and on and on until even your mother wouldn’t know you…and yet your identity is sold as you every step of the way.

Frankly, to be fair, none of this concerns me. At best I find it amusing to see what I am being served and at worst mildly annoying…in fact less annoying than the robot calls of the ’80s and ’90s that I still get!

Younger people, though, seem to be more concerned.

According to Time, “More than 11 million young people have fled Facebook since 2011.”

WHY WOULD THEY LEAVE?

According to a study of 80 American college students, there appear to be three reasons:

Few college students want their parents to see their Friday night photos…

“Those pics are there forever!” Having grown up with these platforms, college students are well aware that nothing posted on Facebook is ever truly forgotten, and they are increasingly wary of the implications….

Increasingly, young people are being warned that future employers, college admissions departments and even banks will use their social media profiles to form assessments. In response, many of them seem to be using social media more strategically. For example, a number of my students create multiple profiles on sites like Twitter, under various names. They carefully curate the content they post on their public profiles on Facebook or LinkedIn, and save their real, private selves for other platforms.

And again, I call attention to their real private selves versus the “carefully curated” versions of themselves they actually post.

Think of the implications – we purport to know you, sell that notion to advertisers, and proceed to create “intimate interactive immersive experiences” for you…but for which you?

And I haven’t even begun to talk about the privacy issue and the Gawker/Hulk Hogan controversy that is in fact linked here as well, as there is an issue of persona vs person.

Clearly, I might add, I am not alone:

The average Internet user had 5.4 social media accounts in 2015.” (Global Web Index)

In 2015, the average number of email accounts was 1.7 globally, predicting 1.8 in 2018 and 1.9 in 2019. (Radicati)

And, while some of us curate or hold back on our identities for good, legal and ethical reasons, others take advantage of their 5.4 social media accounts and multiple email accounts to rip off and cause damage to the unsuspecting. Which by the way is not a new phenomenon…it’s just been made more efficient by our digital world:

According to Vice, in an articled titled “How Catfishing Worked Before the Internet (a reality show about people who lie on the Internet):”

Desperate, dishonest people have been pulling this shit for millennia. Though the etymology of the word catfish is sort of strange, it’s a useful term to describe a type of con artistry that is centered around crafting a fake identity. What’s fascinating about catfishers throughout history is that usually they weren’t after financial gain–like their contemporary counterparts, their behavior seems to have been compulsive and driven by personality quirks or frustrations… In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “Lonely Hearts Killers” were the Craigslist Killers of their time. But Henri Désiré Landru, Harry F. Powers, Sweden’s Gustav Raskenstam, and the married couple of Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck were all out to make a buck– using a personal ad to lure people to a secluded place in order to kill them for their cash is awful…

Scary stuff with more permanent consequences than how we curate our privacy…

Bottom line, we cannot allow ourselves to lose who we really are because online entities see only parts of our whole and then claim to fill in the rest – selling that to others who do the same and…you got the picture.

But don’t despair — the issue of “Who I am/Who am I” is not new. It is not an outcome of our 24/7 connected, data-driven, algorithmically run world. Socrates, himself, said “Know thyself.”

Yet, today it is amplified. So as much as we can drive clarity and transparency, we can drive equal confusion and obfuscation.

So remember…Listen:

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is enlightenment. Lao Tzu

Yes, we can know others. Somewhat. And maybe it does give us some wisdom…or sellable data…but do not lose sight of yourself.

Perhaps the late Margaret Mead supplied the ultimate expression for our world today.

Listen:

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

And there you have it. The most important point of all. The point that will keep us human and ourselves so long as we let it.

We are, in the end, no more or less than who we are.

And while anyone of the entities I mentioned and thousands more claim to know all about us, all there is to know about us, they don’t really.

And therein lies the lesson for marketers, politicians, pollsters, demographers, and you and me.

Who are you?

What do you think?

Read more at The Weekly Ramble

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Sentence #1: If a Democratic primary candidate can win 59 percent of the Party’s “pledged” (primary- and caucus-won) delegates or more, the primary is decided by pledged delegates; if a Democratic primary candidate fails to meet that threshold, they are considered by DNC electoral processes to be a weak front-runner and the nomination is finally decided, instead, by “superdelegates” — who can express support for a candidate at any time, but cannot commit themselves to anyone (i.e., cast a binding vote for any candidate) until the Democratic National Convention in July; superdelegates are unlike pledged delegates in this regard because, while pledged delegates also do not vote until the Party’s convention, they cannot change their votes from what their state’s voting results pledged them to be — though it has been argued by some that in fact they can change their votes at the Convention, with this argument most recently having been advanced by Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008.

Sentence #2: Superdelegates were created in 1984 to enable elected Democratic Party officials and some others of high standing within the Party (including, remarkably, some lobbyists) to overturn the will of the voters if the Party deems it necessary for a November general election win; in both this election cycle and every other, superdelegates interviewed by the media have stated, en masse, that they are in no way bound to vote for the pledged delegate or popular-vote winner, but instead cast their July ballots on the basis of — depending upon which superdelegate you talk to — “the good of the Party” or “who can win in November” (the two usually being seen as synonymous).

Sentence #3: Hillary Clinton currently leads Bernie Sanders in pledged delegates, superdelegates, and the popular vote, and would continue to lead Sanders even were the pledged or superdelegate allotment rules to be changes in any one of a number of ways, but has nevertheless failed to receive 59 percent of the pledged delegates — despite having every possible advantage on her opponent American politics is able to bestow, both financially, in terms of Party support, and in terms of the logistics of individual state electoral processes — a fact for which she has only her own poor campaigning skills and inability to generate a 59-percent-plus level of enthusiasm from Democrats to blame; what this means is that her only hope for clinching the Democratic nomination, short of a Sanders concession that the Senator has assured the nation is not forthcoming, is to convince a large number of superdelegates to not just voice support but actually vote for her when they cast their ballots at the Democratic convention in July.

Sentence #4: Superdelegates, who have only been around for six contested Democratic primaries, have, depending upon the primary, not previously voted against the pledged-delegate or popular-vote leader for one of two reasons: either the candidate leading in pledged delegates and the popular vote has been a “strong front-runner” with more than 59 percent of the pledged delegates, making superdelegate votes immaterial, or else the candidate behind in pledged delegates and the popular vote has conceded prior to the Democratic National Convention, rendering superdelegate votes essentially meaningless; in the 2016 Democratic primary, it is presumed by the media and many political observers that superdelegates will not switch their endorsements from Hillary Clinton, not because she leads in pledged delegates and the popular vote, and not because the current hard data suggests she’s the strongest Democratic candidate for the fall, but rather because she and her husband built the modern neoliberal Democratic Party and therefore own more cultural capital within that context than any other husband and spouse, she and her husband have raised a lot of money for the Party, and she and her husband are believed to be such strong fundraisers that it is felt they will be able to spend their way to a low-turnout general-election victory against Donald Trump.

Sentence #5: Bernie Sanders, who in fact has never called Democratic primaries and caucuses “rigged” — only an Establishment-favoring superdelegate system that allowed Mrs. Clinton to amass a 400-superdelegate lead on all challengers before the Democratic field had even been set — is staying in the race because all the extant hard data suggests he is a stronger general election candidate than Mrs. Clinton, because he passionately believes the Democrats must defeat Donald Trump in the fall, and because Mrs. Clinton’s stunning failure to secure 59 percent of pledged delegates didn’t merely invite but indeed encouraged him to take his case to superdelegates in July; claims by Clinton and her supporters that no general election polling showing Mr. Sanders beating Mr. Trump nationally and in battleground states by significantly more than Mrs. Clinton can be trusted because only Mrs. Clinton, and not Mr. Sanders, has been vetted by the American media and the American political system are wrong on four separate grounds:

• Americans have long been aware of what is allegedly the most damning allegation against Sanders, that he is a socialist, and all current polling reflects this knowledge;
• Mrs. Clinton has slandered Mr. Sanders repeatedly in the current primary, including falsely alleging that he opposes Planned Parenthood (he has a 100 percent rating from them), falsely alleging he opposes gun control (he has a “D-” rating from the National Rifle Association), and falsely alleging he voted against the auto bailout (a claim rated 50 percent false by Politifact);
• opposition research conducted on Sanders during his many, many prior runs for federal office has been dumped into the media en masse this election cycle, including false allegations that he “honeymooned” in Russia (he took a sanctioned goodwill trip to Burlington, Vermont’s “sister-city” as Mayor of Burlington), false allegations that he wrote “rape fantasy fiction” in 1972 (he wrote a feminist essay that used retrograde views on sexual relations as a rhetorical counterweight), and false allegations that he has supported repressive Communist regimes abroad (he has noted that certain things can be learned from healthcare and education systems in other countries, a small minority of which were non-democratic); and
• historical analyses of Clinton’s favorability ratings, which are currently as bad as Donald Trump’s, show that these have dropped not because of several GOP-manufactured scandals but because of (a) political campaigns Clinton was then running, as tellingly her approval ratings crater every time she’s in the public eye daily as part of a political campaign, and (b) public scandals explicitly the result of Clinton’s own poor judgment, distaste for transparency, and unwillingness to take responsibility for her actions, three core personality traits which (i) will continue to plague her throughout any general election campaign, and (ii) remain in particularly high relief during the current FBI investigation into a non-permitted clandestine basement server she used to escape FOIA requests from American citizens for two years.

Sentence #6: The Democratic Party has never, in modern history, run a candidate with an unfavorable rating as high as Mrs. Clinton’s; it has never, in modern history, run a candidate who was currently under FBI investigation; it has never, in modern history, run a candidate who will (per polling reported by Nate Cohn) not receive the support of fully 50 percent of her opponent’s supporters, under circumstances in which her opponent has commanded nearly 45 percent of the popular vote; it has never successfully run a candidate for President who previously lost a Party primary, which loss suggested now-evident infirmities in that candidate’s appeal even to Democratic voters; it has never run a candidate who secured only 50 percent of the pledged delegates in the final two-thirds of Party nominating contests; it has never run a candidate whose only consequential primary challenger came from outside the Party, due to her cynical strategy of intimidating other qualified Democrats away from running using a massive pre-election superdelegate lead; it has never, in what is at once predicted to be a “movement” and “base” election, successfully run a candidate for President who neither has broad support from the Party’s progressive wing nor is at the head of any identifiable political movement; and it has never nominated for President a candidate losing in national polls, at the time of her media-driven elevation to the status of “presumptive nominee,” to a clinical sociopath; for these and other reasons, Sanders plans to continue his campaign in the hope of saving Democratic elders from their slavish devotion to a political dynasty that’s turned the Party from its New Deal roots toward a neoliberal corporatism now destroying the middle class.

Sentence #7: While not rigged, there is no question that the Democratic Party’s primary process — which uses superdelegates to create an appearance of pre-election electoral inevitability and closed primaries and onerous registration requirements to exclude many new, independent, and party-switching voters — has dramatically favored Mrs. Clinton, just as the mainstream media, while not engaged in a massive conspiracy, has without question done all it can to aid Mrs. Clinton and hinder Mr. Sanders (as to airtime, coverage, reporting of superdelegate tallies contrary to explicit DNC instructions, and much more); and now, having failed to stop Sanders via either a lack of media coverage or the superdelegate process, a host of arguments against the Senator are now being marshaled by Party and media forces, not a single one of which is novel, and all of which are familiar strategies for decimating grassroots movements before they have an opportunity to threaten entrenched power:

• alleging, alternately, that the movement’s leader is vain, self-interested, foolish, disloyal, senile/demented, short-sighted, or dangerous;
• alleging that participants in the movement are violent, spiteful, unrealistic, self-defeating, ignorant, destructive/anarchistic, or in some way grievously biased;
• alleging that hard data supporting the causes of the movement have in some way been misconstrued, miscast, over-emphasized, or wrongly elevated to the level of polite, reasonable national discourse; and
• alleging, with little proof, that absolutely nothing about the current movement is novel, and that it is instead merely a rehashing of other failed movements from the past, doomed to fade from public view and relevance in short order.

Sentence #8: In view of all the foregoing, allegations, like those by Paul Krugman and other supporters of Mrs. Clinton, that Sanders supporters continue their fight because of a foolhardy resistance to facts or indifference to consequences are not just misplaced but predictably disingenuous and strategic; what these allegations cannot overturn, however, is a simple fact few on any side neglect to acknowledge: given Mrs. Clinton’s certainty (and her supporters’ certainty, and Democratic Party leaders’ certainty, and media elites’ certainty) that she will ultimately prevail; given that the general election is many, many, months away; given that the responsibility for uniting a political party always and forever lies with its elected and nominated leaders, not with its dissidents; given that the length of time between today and the Democratic National Convention means that there’s nearly two months for unforeseen events to make it useful for the Democratic Party to have an active backup choice after Clinton (an FBI indictment of Clinton or an associate being, in fact, only one of these); there is no harm whatsoever in Mr. Sanders following DNC procedure and staying in the Democratic primary race until July 25th, fighting for superdelegate votes — on the basis of his consistent-with-process electability arguments — all the while, and for Clinton supporters and their numberless allies in the media to, as to that subject, spend the next two months doing little other than, with respect, shutting the hell up and letting the process play out like we do here in America.

Seth Abramson is the Series Editor for Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University) and the author, most recently, of DATA (BlazeVOX, 2016).

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