a) my phone is not a computer.
b) you do not need a Google account to use android. You only need it to use Google services. The phone runs just fine without Google services.

On the flip side you can't even receive windows patches without a Microsoft account on windows 8.

Lying, totally inept, actually blind and visiting Apple's website in a text only browser, or trolling.

Your pick.

So its troubling that people are upset about a U2 album, but it's ok that they are upset about a free 90day trial of McAfee when they buy a computer? What about the free copy of Flipbook that I can't uninstall from my phone?

Crapware is crapware. It's something people didn't ask for, it's something that is hard to get rid of. This U2 album is right up there with the rest of the shit that makes me want to format a freshly purchased computer, or install Cyanogenmod on a new phone as soon as I get the bubble-wrap off.

The bitter Irony is that Apple used to pride themselves on not distributing crapware on their phones.

There's a difference. Every time Bono drops a nickle it somehow ends up in the news, and he looks conveniently polished at the time. On the flipside Larry Ellison (yes that One Rich Arsehole) donated $100million to eradicate polio. How many people know that? In fact if you do a search for rich people donating things you will find a laundry list of rich people donating money, many of whom you've never even heard of, let alone end up patting themselves on the back in front of TV cameras every time they do it.

Soylent is unrelated to news you say?

Good example. Well mixed example really. Yes CoD is a multiplayer game, but I actually really enjoyed the single player. I actually still really enjoy trying to master the individual missions, and it had an ok story.

It's no Half-life, and yes everyone plays it online, but it actually had IMO a solid single player component and provided just the right senseless hack and slash that I needed after a day of work.

This is one thing I disagree with. For a small embedded chip targeting arduino et al. settling for a specific form of video output is something I do NOT want. I greatly prefer having a chip that can interface with a video driver of some description. For 99% of the uses for this tiny thing there will not be a display with a standard video input. It will be run via a parallel interface, or SPI, or I2C, or god forbid UART, all of which the chip supports.

Even popular displays for the Beaglebone, and RPi don't use the display capabilities but rather hook to the I/O connectors and communicate with one of the more typical methods.

If you want a display, add one using an interface of your choice.

The Edison is a system on a chip designed to go on a board. The chip itself naively supports a wide votlage range, SD cards. The official breakout board supports USB and USB OTG, and has a DC input jack for power.

Well you work on the demand side of things, and in the mean time I'm glad the company is taking the best possible approach to extracting the worst kind of energy.

This, a thousand times this.

It's a SOCIAL problem. It's amazing how many people simply don't get this. You can't engineer away social problems by applying limits. You can only engineer away social problems by changing social behaviors.

Samsung has trialed this approach with great success with S Drive. Rather than try and prevent people from using their phone, encourage people with incentives for using it safely (voice activation only, limits to phone functionality, text to speech interface), and demerit them for unsafe actions (touching the phone while in use). The idea is quite amazing and something like this could be a game changer.

Once you modify behaviors enough that they become instinctive then you can start rolling back the incentives and you have solved the social problem.

Probably but to what end?

The only reason the oil is being extracted is due to a demand for it. If you cut off the demand then it no longer becomes profitable to extract it. It's not just 3x as costly for CO2 but it's 3x as costly extract and refine too.

It's not green washing, the alternative is not to simply ignore it but rather the alternative is to use non-renewables to perform this process. One way or the other it's coming out of the ground so why not do it with the best footprint possible?

Because one is transportable and the other isn't. Renewables are fantastic in situations where they can be used, and a pointless waste of money everywhere else.

The answer to your question isn't non-renewable+renewable vs only renewable, the answer is either of new-renewable + renewable vs only non-renewable.

... I'm pretty sure I hit reply to the wrong comment... Sorry.

As opposed to an office where someone is watching your every move, you get interrupted every 5 seconds for a worthless meeting, and co-workers do nothing but yell football insults at each other across the open plan?

You are right of course, studying at home is like working at home; in many cases it works just as well if not better than doing it at university / work.

That's funny given my girlfriend got her entire degree from a reputable university doing nothing but online classes, as has everyone else who's ever learnt by correspondence.

I have news for you, just because they came up with a catchy name like MOOC doesn't mean this concept is in any way remotely new. My father did it too, but it was VHS tapes and books flung back and forth across the state in the mail.