Which is pretty much everybody who uses HDMI. Have you seen how quickly Netflix burns your battery life? And on an ultrathin laptop that tries to squeeze every bit of battery power that it can out of an undersized battery, I'd expect it to be even worse.

I don't have a Rolex. In fact, I actually had to look to discover that it's a Tissot. It's been on my wrist for getting on for thirty years, and I have no doubt at all that it will go on 'til the end of my life without any problems. If, when I die, one of my heirs decides they want it, it will go on 'til the end of their lives, too. It needs a new battery once every three years or so, and it needs the date reset at the end of every month with fewer than thirty-one days, and, err, that's it. It tells the time. It just works. And I don't have to think about it.

If I amortised it over the time years I've had it already, it's cost me about £15 a year; if I amortise it over the time it's likely to be useful, that drops to about £4 a year. By contrast, a 'smart' watch - any smart watch, I'm not making a dig at Apple - will be obsolete in three years, so that's about £100 for each year you own it, or £2 a week. And I'd have to take it off every night to charge it, or if I forgot it would run out of battery just when I needed it most.

A reasonable quality mechanical watch is a very long way from obsolete; and, despite their price, they are very, very inexpensive to own, because you're only ever going to need one.

Thank you! Are you aware of any 'defensive publication' journal currently published I could send the idea to? If I publish it on my own blog is that legally enough, or do I need to have it on a flattened-dead-trees publication in some library somewhere? If so - what sort of library?

My current laptop, an ASUS ZenBook, is dying because it has a damaged power input port - the motherboard is cracked, and it is becoming increasingly unreliable. In the past year, two tablets in my household have died because the micro-USB ports which serve as their power connectors had ceased to work - presumably due to wear. And now Apple are bringing out a new laptop with just one port which is technically similar to a USB connector. How durable is it? How will it stand up to knocks and accidental falls? If that port fails, the machine is dead - and replacement of the port inevitably means soldering the motherboard, which is skilled and consequently expensive work.

The nature of a laptop which is used on the move is that it has a hard life. The Apple MagSafe connector is a brilliant design because it is not susceptible to wear and relatively invulnerable to knocks, trips and falls. I had already made up my mind that my next laptop would be a MacBook, simply because of the MagSafe connector. So I'm aghast at the decision to abandon it. It seems perverse!

Try an $80 adapter... just to get HDMI. This new laptop makes no sense. I can't think of anybody I know who doesn't use HDMI with their laptops, even if it is just as a way of piping Netflix to a hotel TV while traveling. And I can't think of anybody who doesn't use a USB port, even if it is just for charging an iPhone. So pretty much 100% of laptop users will have to own this enormously overpriced, clumsy adapter and carry it around with them at all times, just so they could make that computer slightly thinner.

Worse, most users polled would rather Apple make laptops thicker to give us better battery life, because the real-world battery life is a third what Apple claims unless you do nothing more complex than running Word and a web browser. A whole day running Xcode or Photoshop? Yeah, right. Making them even thinner and taking away ports that nearly everybody uses is exactly the opposite of what users are asking for.

Who did they design this for again? Apple managers?

Thank you, that's helpful. I don't want to patent it - I want it to be patent-free, so people (including me) can just use it.

My position is that businesses make money using the property, and their location is a significant contributing factor to their financial success, so because they gain the most from owning a particular piece of property, they should also have the highest property tax burden. Residents receive less benefit from owning property, so they should pay less.

It actually doesn't matter whether it's man made or not. If our cities and our farmland are going to be flooded and rendered unusable, we have to respond. Climate change could be 100% down to aliens from the Planet Bolg, and we'd still have to take action. Pretending it isn't happening, or claiming it's not our fault, is not adult behaviour.

The overwhelming majority of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to die - not directly of global warming, but of the war, pestilence, famine and general destruction which will ensue when coastal cities flood, the area of agricultural land (much of which, globally, is also low lying) reduces, and the temperate bands move towards the poles.

Not everyone will die, no. And probably the big die-off won't happen in the lifetime of anyone now alive. But if we don't halt global warming soon, the population of the Earth is going to fall very sharply, probably by an order of magnitude.

Solar works effectively every day of the year in Scotland, which is a lot cloudier and a lot further north than Florida. It's simply inconceivable that it doesn't work a whole lot better in Florida.

And prefer it to Unity, which I also use a little. The reasons I like it are:

• It's platform agnostic.
• It plays nice with Java and other JVM languages, including Clojure in which my AI is written
• It's open source, and since if I ever get to a place where I've a releasable game I'll want to release open source that matters.

What do you need from your community? Is it feedback? Is it actual engagement (like, do you want people to take responsibility for particular bits of functionality?) It is money? Frankly I'd be happy to subscribe maybe US$100/year to help fund the development of jMonkeyEngine, provided it keeps developing and stays open source.

jMonkeyEngine has been around for years, and is pretty good. It's the engine I use for choice - and yes, I do also have Unity. If you don't know anything about game engines, don't post your ignorance!

On the flip side of that, business property should be taxed on property's actual value, because it is actively making money using that property, so the business should be able to recover the difference in value through the use of the property. If it can't, then that business isn't making effective use of a scarce resource (commercially zoned real estate) and should make way for a business that will.

That's what bugs me about California's Prop 13. People get stuck in their homes and can't afford to move closer to their jobs because they'd take a huge property tax hit, but businesses just lease from land management companies that own properties forever (literally, because businesses don't ever really die), thus artificially deflating their costs and encouraging businesses to locate themselves in places where housing is most expensive rather than in the suburbs where most of their employees live. All of these factors put serious strain on the highway system, on workers, etc.

And rental housing units have artificially deflated rent because they aren't subject to property tax increases based on the value of the property, thus making it harder and harder for people to justify buying homes. As a result, whenever there's a recession, the housing market falls significantly faster in California than the national average.

If you ask me, property tax should be limited to property that is used commercially, either for a business (not including small businesses run by an individual within his or her home) or for rental purposes, and should be eliminated entirely for personal residences (or at least for your primary residence). This would go a long way towards fixing a lot of problems with one simple law change.