You're right. It's a conspiracy. The Man pays me to promote my petro-burning ways.

Electric Vehicles have become a fucking religion here on Slashdot. It's so disappointing.

The important thing when Mr. Stuffed-Shirt calls for 'back-up' is to make sure you hook the fat fucker in with you into the mess that ensues. We have a free press in this country to ensure that's possible.

The guy doesn't want to deal with you because you're still only out $210. And you might tell your friends how much money you spent for an essentially useful bike. Dude wants your $600 and wants your friend's $600 too.

We can get you a lab coat to wear. There can be a half-door for people to come to to submit jobs and get back printouts. Congrats, IT fuck, you're back in charge. When does my fucking job get done?

No. Nice try, though. Now go put paper in the LJet in finance. Chop chop now.

People often forget that in the past there were people like Howard Hughes. He poured huge amounts of money into things like his giant wooden plane project (google 'spruce goose'). He was sort of an older Elon Musk.

Additionally, sapphireâ(TM)s cost and environmental hit are huge issues.

Can someone expand on this point more for me? It's thus far not been discussed. Is synthetic sapphire production environmentally nasty?

On your new Apple phone, you'll have a little pile of fragments of sapphire to sweep up.

What makes you think the case design on these things will be as bad as Apple's case design on the Newton? (one of Apple's last ventures into customer-openable moble-device case devices)

The things will hold up to ordinary use and droppage, or they won't make it onto the market.

Many ./er's aren't old enough to remember when computers were monolithic pieces of silicon like phones are today, a single assembly with everything soldered in and not replaceable.

WTF? What alternative reality do you come from? Are you talking about low-end chunk-of-plastic computers like the C-64? (which, incidentally, had the full schematic diagram printed in the back of the owner's manual)

Because every IBM-PC sold back when they were sold by big monolithic IBM had plug in ISA cards. The video, drive controller, serial communication controllers were all plugin modules with what rapidly became an industry standard plugin footprint.

It sounds like you might be hearkening back to some middle period when Compaq and Dell were selling 'compatibles.' I remember Panasonic, Radio Shack, and AT&T computers that sported 8086/8 processors, that couldn't run stock MS-DOS and so had their own customized variants rebranded from Microsoft. But that wasn't what we were building. We bought 'PC Clone' hardware where the motherboard had a common footprint and dropped into whatever commodity case you chose. Just like today.

Or maybe you really are talking about 'the olden times' when you had to pay a very high-cost Customer Engineer to come out with an oscilloscope and a wirewrap gun if your PDP-8 went on the blink.

Back in the day, there was probably a point when Apple sold more Macs than Compaq sold the equivalent over-priced high-end PCs, too.

That wasn't the computer that The Rest Of Us were using, though.

It's fascinating how Apple has managed to position themselves as facing a 'chief enemy' competitor in the cellphone market that is the equivalent of enemy 'IBM' back in the days of the early Mac. Apple needs a competitor that can be shape by their marketing gurus into a Emmanuel Goldstein-like being, so they can conduct little five minute hates.

That's when they're not pretending they produce the Mercedes of the cellphone market. In reality they make the Buick in a market of Chevys.

Pepsi versus Coke? It's a shame that Apple is reduced to a marketing hype operation, hawking overpriced sugarwater in the end. What would Scully say to Jobs now?

So enthusiasts can build liquid-cooled cellphones that are overclocked? With windowed cases and cabling with LED racer lights running up and down them? What are the graphic card options?

There are many UFOs. All a UFO is is a flying object that hasn't been identified.

Runs a sandwich shop? Rastamon don't have no am-bee-shun.

Also, if the electric utility has nuclear power plants, his car is steam powered.

Only if it's powered by ground up eagles and other birds is it green.

There's a turkey baster and two lesbians somewhere in the middle, too, eh?