But who decided systemd is right, and init/upstart is wrong? The decision seems very arbitrary, fascist and non-community oriented.

Apple didn't have the first tablet. Microsoft has been trying for decades

Those pre-ipad tablets with their styluses are about as ancient as an apple newton. That's not a fair comparison.

Apple was the first company to get tablets noticed by general consumers,

That's because it had a great design, unlike its predecessors.

The Surface Pro was an incremental step from the many different types of convertable laptops.

Wrong. The surface pro is MS playing its usual game of cloning a market leader (embrace), in this case the iPad, and adding features to it (extend), i.e. a keyboard.

Wait a sec, isn't surface pro just a clone of iPad with a keyboard and mouse attached? Who's copying who?

But let's say apple did clone (stuff they already invented) the surface pro. Won't that hurt the market for ipads? So no, they won't do something stupid like that.

What if I want a straight text log file that requires no other tools? Why would anyone even have a binary log on a *nix system?

What if you want to filter or search the log? Binary logs would be much easier to deal with in that case instead of having to write a text parser to process the text file.

Pogoplug costs $50/year. Why should you pay that much to store on your own device? You can get get your own shared hosting webserver for that much money.

As soon as any of the data leaves the device, you've lost control of it.

Even if it's encrypted?

Lots of storage and the ability to share data with other computers and only a select group of people (i.e. exclude strangers, and companies like dropbox, facebook etc.)

If they want the use of your patented IP, they can license the technology or buy the rights to the IP from you.

Companies pay millions to license patents from other companies. But they only pay $2,000-$6,000 for a single patent belonging to their employee. Guess which payment model the company will choose?

Why wouldn't people just use the system of "where your customers pay you" for any multinational company to determine "where to tax is owed"? Much simpler and fairer between different nations.

Not fair. You should also take into account where the employees work, the raw materials (if any) come from, factories (if any) exist, managers work, middle managers and upper management exist to make a clear assessment.

Do other planets, such as mercury, pluto and neptune, leach atmosphere or is mars the only planet in our solar system that does this?

Yep, all they have to do is install microphones at all public places (along with cameras) and they can now track everyone's position, along with what they are talking.

They are trying to defend their mostly useless jobs.

Eliminating these jobs just promotes lawlessness in the skies. Who is supposed to handle it if someone faces a problem, or there is a fight/argument between two passengers?

Hell, I bet you could live quite a comfortable life on the talk show circuit afterwards anyway. Who the hell needs billions upon billions?

Only a total moron would sacrifice billions for a few million.

If I invented the single most money-making device in over a century, exceeding even personal computers, I wouldn't open source the specs even if I had an established patent.

This invention would make electric cars extremely useful. Eventually people are going to take a peek at it (maintenance and technicians). And if it isn't patented, someone could reverse engineer, manufacture and sell it without paying him anything.

There was nothing about the device itself that was really new, nothing that it could do which you couldn't do as well or better on another phone,

Have you actually tried using a cellphone prior to the iphone? 5 to 7 tiny buttons are all you get to control the device. These multi-button controls are a lot slower than the iphone and require memorization and they are vastly limited in their capabilities and features.

The iphone changed all that... vast number of functions available at a tap of your finger. Most of all, its screen was 3 times larger than a dumbphone. It was a game changer. Google cancelled their Android phone (which at that time looked like a blackberry phone) after seeing the iphone launch, and then copied the iphone.