Exactly, I am not sure why Apple tries so hard to make their device so thin.
Thin cost money, the more it cost the thicker case you will want to put on it to protect it.

Not really. They've increased a bit above inflation, but the amount I'm spending on electricity has remained pretty constant, increasingly slightly below inflation (increases in device efficiency offsetting increase in costs). The amount I'm paying for gas has gone up a bit more.

I switched to DuckDuckGo and haven't looked back. They used to be noticeably worse in results quality, but Google has gone a long way downhill. Occasionally I don't find things with DDG and try Google. When I do, I have to wade through pages of totally irrelevant stuff to find that there are no matches, whereas at least DDG tells me straight away that it can only find half a dozen possibly-relevant things. I especially like the way DDG integrates with a number of domain-specific search engines.

The Government Bidding process for services is corrupt by design.
You can make bid for service.
Then you have stipulations which weigh it in a companies favor, not because they are required for the job, but to write the contract for the company.

I have seen State Bids for services for a Web Site. Which has odd requirements, such as 20+ years in COBOL, 10+ Years in RPG, 3 Years of HTML, 2 Years of ASP.NET
When you see these contracts you know they are for a particular person they want to keep on board.

It isn't. It runs natively via the NDK.

How dare Netflix provide services that the customer wants at a price the can afford!
That people are willing to follow a bunch of hacking methods to get access to a service that they will pay for!

My main issue is we are entering a post desktop world. (No the desktop isn't dyeing, but it isn't the center of our computing world)
So we need the following.
1. A platform to create moble apps.
2. Being able to create these apps on different systems.

It is actually very lame to have to have a Mac to build an iOS app. You really should be able to do it on at least the Big three OS Windows,Mac,Linux. Because we are not desktop centrist anymore and people will go around with different Desktops and OS's freely.

The biggest issue with a lot of of the home grown Open Source Apps, is getting past the dreaded 80% complete mark.
This is the point in the program where all the interesting proof of concepts and interesting algorithms are all set. However that last 20% is a lot of the detail fine tuning that really puts all the pieces in play.
This last 20% mark when it no longer becomes fun, is where the project looses steam and sometimes dies off.
Having a company putting money towards development with management and direction and all those MBA Buzzwords basically means we push the developers to get that last 20% done.
But of course if they are pushing to get that set done, and are putting in resources to help that, it is going to be their vision of 20% not necessary yours.

I know a lot of the Open Source people have this Anti-Corporate everything mind set... However to make it in the world there needs other sources of motivation other then just feeling good.

I maintain the GNUstep / Clang Objective-C stack. Most people who use it now do so in Android applications. A lot of popular apps have a core in Objective-C with the Foundation framework (sometimes they use GNUstep's on Android, more often they'll use one of the proprietary versions that includes code from libFoundation, GNUstep and Cocotron, but they almost all use clang and the GNUstep Objective-C runtime). Amusingly, there are actually more devices deployed with my Objective-C stack than Apple's. The advantage for developers is that their core logic is portable everywhere, but the GUIs can be in Objective-C with UIKit on iOS or Java on Android (or, commonly for games, GLES with a little tiny bit of platform-specific setup code). I suspect that one of the big reasons why the app situation on Windows Phone sucks is that you can't do this with a Windows port.

It would be great for these people to have an open source Swift that integrated cleanly with open source Objective-C stacks. Let's not forget that that's exactly what Swift is: a higher-level language designed for dealing with Objective-C libraries (not specifically Apple libraries).

Objective-C is a good language for mid-1990s development. Swift looks like a nice language for early 2000s development. Hopefully someone will come up with a good language for late 2010s development soon...

I find it pretty easy to remember - I go to Google today.

The UI was what made me switch both to Google originally and from it some years later. When I started using Google - and when Google started gaining significant market share - most users were on 56Kb/s or slower modem connections. AltaVista was the market leader and they'd put so much crap in their front page that it took 30 seconds to load (and then another 20 or so to show the results). Google loaded in 2-3 seconds. The AltaVista search results had to be a lot better to be faster. I switched away when they made the up and down arrow keys in their search box behave differently to every other text field in the system.

My 'precious electronic toys' use about a tenth of the power that the ones I was using a decade ago for the same purpose did. Even lighting power consumption has dropped. My fridge, freezer and washing machine are the big electricity consumers in my home - efficiency has improved there, but nowhere near as fast as for gadgets.

There's a lot more to government than military intelligence gathering and law enforcement (although it would be a good idea for someone to remind most current governments that those are two things, not one). And most government projects end up spending insane budgets. This isn't limited to the US. It amazes me how often government projects to build databases to store a few million records with a few tens to thousands of queries per second (i.e. the kind of workload that you could run with off-the-shelf software on a relatively low-spec server) end up costing millions. Even with someone designing a pretty web-based GUI, people paid to manually enter all of the data from existing paper records, and 10 years of off-site redundancy, I often can't see where the money could have gone. Large companies often manage to do the same sort of thing.

The one thing that the US does well in terms of tech spending is mandate that the big company that wins the project should subcontract a certain percentage to small businesses. A lot of tech startups have got their big breaks from this rule.

Check your hardware, including your pfsense and cablemodem.

I'm on Comcast, and I run three VPNs over my residential connection -- SSL outbound from an internal NAT client to my work network for about 8 hours a day, plus a nailed-up outbound IPSEC tunnel to my personal server in Chicago, and I also have a listener for inbound OpenVPN sessions. All this and I've been doing about 100GB/month in torrents, yet my connection is rock solid.

Analog Data fairs better when it isn't touched, every read could damage it a bit, and copying a copy of a copy using analog methods will degrade its content.

For digital data, it wants to be moved around.
The more you copy and move digital data the better it is.
Raid Disks makes sure you have a couple of copies.
You post it the cloud and it will last longer.
You could get fancy and have a backup method that copies your data from one drive to an other. When it fails you swap the drive out with a new one.

Being that your 32bit Macbooks are 8 years old.
You really should expect to not get much updates in any software what so ever.
I am surprised that Google had 32bit mac support.