You assert you're going to be factual, and then you say an absurd thing like "twice the specs."

Huh? This makes no sense. If they're Android, they can do an incredible variety of stuff. Being low-end, they might not do it well, but they should run pretty much every Android app out there. If they "can't do much to begin with", they're not Android.

To be fair, there *are* fixed costs to the power company in keeping you connected to the grid, in fact those costs are a fairly significant portion of the normal power bill. It's just that the current fee structure doesn't reflect it well.

By depreciating to zero in 10 years you're implying that a battery with 70-80% of its capacity is useless. That's hardly true.

MS probably spends more on political lobbying, advertising, and marketing than they spend on research.

For extraordinarily small values of probably. Lobbying is measured in millions, unlike the billions for research. And for whatever it's worth, Google spends more on lobbying than Microsoft does. Or anybody else.

Frankly I was shocked he didn't roll out "synergy" but I think they wised onto it thanks to Dilbert ragging on it so many times.

Too many people would've completed their Marketing Bullshit Bingo cards on that.

Cinavia HAS been cracked.

[citation needed]

(Not that it really matters to me, as none of my playback hardware pays any attention to it: not my TVs, not my OpenELEC boxes, not my surround-sound receiver. Maybe the Blu-ray players care about it, but they mostly gather dust while the OpenELEC boxes stream from a media server.)

Medium.com explains it all. It's essentially blogspot disguised as a news site.

I don't think Medium has ever purported to be a news site. It's doesn't look like one, it doesn't cover the news. It's a collection of stories. Not news stories, just stories. Thinking otherwise "explains it all".

I had the same notion. Originally I was considering the midrange Watch (stupid names they used make it so hard to talk about!), but after seeing early reviews from people I trust I look on this one as a "throwaway." I got the cheapest one, and will then take a fresh look when gen 2 comes out. I expect it will be more like gen 2.5, as the current one was delayed by perhaps six months or so, and the hardware frozen long ago.
For $350 less whatever I can sell it for, I didn't even really consider not getting one. I don't expect to be thrilled, but I expect it to be useful.

Absolutely not. They're there for various very important reasons.

However, none of those reasons are the one you postulate. If you look at each of them individually, drop your bias, and think about what benefit there could be to the company in providing that service to employees... it's generally very obvious.

Where do you keep your toothbrush at work? Or don't you brush after lunch? Ick.

Attrition at Google is very, very low, and what there is is mostly people leaving to found their own companies. As for how it sounds to you... you really don't know what you're talking about. Go spend some time with some of said young employees and you'll see why they feel it's fantastic.

Nope, just another SWE.

Salary plus annual bonus and incentive stock. Yes it's the same for pretty much everyone. Why?

given that they are alive less than 20 years

I believe you considerably underestimate the basement-dwelling demographic.

Immoral maybe (opinions vary), illegal no.