Apple spends 2 billion in places where they can continue avoid paying US taxes and the governments bend over backwards to treat them like royalty. Anyone who thinks this is about "green power" is delusional.

No, I read the whole kickstarter page. It's a terrible game.

The oatmeal creator is a true genius to be able to extract that much money out of this many idiots with such a terrible game. I have a whole new high level of respect for him, and an all new low respect for the human race overall. I'm not against the idea of "exploding kittens" - I don't find it shocking or offensive, but there's barely a game worth playing here. Only a complete idiot would fund a game this bad.

Tesla didn't just build a car, they built a series of important innovations in batteries and battery charging, and then made it so that they wouldn't enforce patents on anything. Now anyone can design their own batteries based on Tesla's design.

That might not seem like much to you, but I assure you that it's a pretty big deal.

You're right. Apple did great, and their portable electronics made them more than any other thing they've ever done. There's nothing wrong with being really good at lego-like construction. However the point here is that apple doesn't do a lot of their own component-level construction. It's logical and smart for them to hire specific expertise in specialized areas for things like battery design which is not so simple as people think it is.

I don't like Apple as a company, but there's no denying the significant impact they've had on portable electronics.

I just checked out the energy density thing, seems I got that backwards in my post. Thanks, your post was incredibly informative.

What is it with people coming way outside of their areas of expertise to offer advice these days? Greatest respect for Hawking as a cosmologist and theoretical physicist, but he should stop talking when it comes to topics that fall outside of those areas of expertise.

It matters little to me because when something happens with my laptop my answer is never "reinstall the entire thing". Was it a shitty thing for them to do? Yes. However I have better things to do with my day than sit there like an angry little person and dwell on it. Fix it and move on. Your rage achieves nothing.

I have a lenovo laptop, it does serious work just fine. Obviously they care about people like me, because they're taking steps to fix the situation rather than ignoring it.

Making a battery for a car is way different from making a battery for a portable device. They have to have a completely different set of tolerances, and energy density in a car has to be far greater in a car than in a portable device. Apple is not very knowledgeable of innovative when it comes to battery technologies. When it comes their advances in battery longevity, this is almost exclusively done in software. Apple doesn't really invent hardware components. They're more like lego fans who arrange existing hardware in to their own configurations.

...until someone asks for your name and makes the connection. It's not a very big jump to go from one to the other.

By that logic, anything that mess of gelatinous porridge inside your head can conjure up must be real.

If you don't like play services, then replace them. Android is there, in the open for you to modify.

I'm not sure how this complaint can even get made when what Apple is doing with iOS is 1000x worse in terms of restrictive behavior.

This idea that running Linux makes you invulnerable to intrusion and spying is a stupid and dangerous way to think about security.

Linux machines get hacked all the time because people like you think just running a particular OS is enough.

That, and the devices are becoming less and less hackable while simultaneously becoming more and more disposable.