We know of these people because they were lucky. Not because they are superior specimens.

Sorry if my earlier reply was too terse and misinterpreted.

I like how hard the /. woke crew gets up in the morning to aggressively downvote everything that makes their womanly giblets sad.

Lucky.

iPads, and tablets more broadly, have always been a solution in search of a problem.

About the only thing I think they really do well, and better than either a phone or a tablet, is consuming video media. That's all they've ever been used for in my house, at any rate - by everyone in the house.

Almost everything else they can do, phones and laptops do better, and have always done better. They had a niche for a while due to battery life when paired with a bluetooth keyboard, but not so much anymore.

If they'd duplicate the Fujitsu Toughbook reversible laptop hinge from years ago, or one like it, so a Macbook could also be a tablet, I can't think of a single reason why you'd ever want to use a tablet.

But I guess Apple would lose out on a high profit margin gadget sale.

Don't put words in my mouth. I never said batteries were cheap. I said wind is cheap. It's very very cheap. Both land-based and off-shore, but the $/MWh for land-based wind has fallen below natural gas and solar concentrator. Solar photovoltaic is roughly the same or a little cheaper than wind now, but the two can complement one another in regions that have reliable winds that come in just as solar is ramping down for the evening.

As to your battery question. Feel free to look it up if you want to know the economics of batteries, specifically when used for large-scale energy storage. There's not a lot of large scale sites up and running (there are a few notable ones). In the last two years come to a point where the prices for batteries have dropped enough that building more of them becomes attractive.

For us home users. The whole house batteries prices have dropped noticeably over the last few years. But having no battery and being grid-tied is cheapest, and I'd recommend that unless you have other reasons for a whole house battery than trying to time shift your solar or wind generator.

P.S. I was pretty deep into installing wind at home, but I backed out. so I'm solar only. Even though I have the paperwork approved for my site.

Agreed. I think the whole argument is difficult to swallow. Here's a "solution" I pulled out with 5 minutes of thought: Use an AM/FM 1-chip radio or SDF radio placed in a module within the antenna pod near the outside of the vehcile. And route the digital outputs back to your entertainment center, and tuning controls over a bus, CANbus for example. Now instead running a beefy coax cable for your antenna around motors and controllers, you can route some cheap little ribbon of noise immune anywhere you want.

I mean, seriously. These auto companies hire thousands of engineers way smarter than me to work on this full-time. I need some solid proof that they can't make AM radios work before I'd accept their excuses.

  If a stereo store's techs could put a CD changer in my trunk in the 1990's, I think actual engineers could solve a slightly more difficult problem when designing a vehicle from the ground up.

That, plus the likelihood that said Indian workers are pretty unlikely to show up to occupy the corporate offices with purple hair and some bullshit entitled complaint.

Isreal

There's that misspelling again, because you shit eating Hitler Heiling Nazi Fuckbags are allergic to even spelling it properly. Fucking genocidal nazi shitfucker, your parents should have been offed after their Nuremberg trial.

I guess we'll all have to find some other way to pretend that we regularly go to Yoga workshops. It's a bit shocking to think of how people did yoga 50 or 100 years ago without foam mats and stretchy pants.

Dealerships give you a free 3 months when you buy a car. And if you sign up, they get some money. It's zero effort for them on the sales side, and the salesperson doesn't get a commission, it just goes to the dealership.

It's like an antenna and a digital tuner chip (whatever automotive equivalent to the Si4844 is) to receive AM radio these days. I suspect a replacement air filter on a car is more expensive than the components for AM reception. It can't be about the component cost.

They want to sell a certain segment of the population a Sirius subscription. In many parts of the US, the FM band is popular music and Spanish-language programming. If someone wants to listen to right-wing talk radio they need AM or a satellite.