Buy they can make an 11-inch ipad and sell it for $350. Are you really suggesting that they can't put that into a clamshell form factor for $600?

I live in semi-rural eastern Tennessee and our schools have 1:1 laptop policies with district provided and managed equipment. What school district out there is requiring parents to buy devices like that in this day and age?

I mean, Thunderbolt in phones isn't a thing, but the rest? iPhone 17's SSD is 256GB which is the same size as our standard corporate laptops (and without the 100GB of Windows bloat) so claiming "SSD is too small" is an odd claim to make. If you're docked to external peripherals, "screen too small, shitty on screen keyboard" is similarly a strange complaint. "Wrong OS" is only applicable if you have some specific application stack you need to run. If it's just "I sent email and push spreadsheets around" then ios and android are totally fine.

There is a very large swath of office type workers who "dock your phone" would work fine for.

I like still having one or two USB-A ports on my laptop, but I can't say I've ever been annoyed by having to "lug around" a USB hub (with a gigabit ethernet interface) in my laptop bag. It weighs around an ounce.

I also think the article complaining about shit like mice, keyboards, and headsets is a bit out there, since any of this crap connected to my laptop is connected via bluetooth which has been around over a quarter of a century and has been ubiquitous in laptops for at least 15 years.

I agree that the claim is eye-roll inducing, but you could have at least read the next sentence before replying with the exact thing that it references.

As I said, that's decidedly possible, and I agree that knowing who is actually doing useful work is definitely more important that knowing that you have bloat in the first place. Taking a chainsaw to the org is probably not going to have a positive outcome.

That's decidedly possible, but when it involves one of these multi-billion dollar "startups" I'm very inclined to believe most of their employees aren't actually doing anything useful. Uber having >30k employees would be an example of this.

I do think with concepts. They get translated into words to post here, because that's how slashdot works. I think about the square-cube law, I'm actually picturing a 3D cube in my head.
What you haven't done is make any acknowledgement of the concept that while a sand battery might not be efficient at the scale of a house (for example), the bigger it gets the more efficient it becomes. A house might not be enough space - though there are plenty of thermal mass solutions for houses, such as masonry heaters. But this is a district system, 1-2 orders of magnitude larger.
Look at the history:
1. You reply to me, wondering how it can be efficient due to heat loss.
2. I reply, mentioning that the square-cube law means that it won't actually have that much surface area relative to the volume, giving several examples (like an office building).
3. "All heat exchangers are fundamentally surface increase mechanisms." does not imply philosophical heat exchangers that include unintended exchangers or even insulated structures, which are designed to minimize surface increases.
4. This is storage, not a designed radiator; they've optimized for the opposite
5. Accusing me of not understanding.
etc...
You never actually specifically invoked the concept.

I mean... people literally demanded this. Remember "cable unbundling?" "Why should I pay for a package of 1000 channels I never watch, I only want to pay for the ones I do." Well, now you get to pay separately for Disney, and Amazon, and Netflix, and HBO, and...

And no, I'm not okay with this, and if prices continue to climb I will likely end up giving my money to one of those shady IPTV services that are probably run by Russian organized crime.

Presumably, Apple thinks that "I went to another country and my expensive translator stopped working" has a higher risk of a lawsuit than "someone with airpods may have heard me regurgitate private information in a public space" does. Knowing how the EU has been operating over the last decade or so, I don't know that I agree with that assessment.

I was this many years old when I learned that "revolution" was "law enforcement."

Yes, I understand that. Please read the last sentence of my comment again.

There's multiple options for money transfers if any one system goes down. That said, have you seen how many businesses can stay in operation if the internet is down lately? All the major stores shut down.

Well, our language is littered with it - ATM Machine, PIN Number, LCD Display, UPC Code, DMZ Zone, Free gift, new innovation, etc...

Personally, I don't think "the patriarchy" actually exists, at least not in the form attributed to it. While Marx was very off base in a lot of things, I think that what people mistake for patriarchy is actually class dominance. Most men don't have the advantages they would actually have if there was actually a patriarchy enforcing male rule.

What a lot of people tend to miss is that while Men might have more hard power - by law due to their position, wealth, strength of arm, and all that, that women have a lot of "soft power". The ability to convince others to do things without actually having any legal requirement to do so.

I tend to start comparing humans to lion packs in this case. A few powerful and lucky men get many of the women, and while it might look like a heady and desired position, it's a lot more fragile than most think, and only a fraction of men get it. Women actually have a much easier time of it on average, even if they don't reach the lofty heights.

Wait, you expect Americans to understand the rules of the road? There's the problem...