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since they provide a seldom-used (but still used) function in a laptop with good WiFi.

Used an an awful lot by mobile pros who work with large files, or pros who configure networks. Maybe Apple should create a sku with a couple extra usb ports, a gigabit port, as thick as the 2011 mbp with the extra space used for battery. They could call it "Macbook Pro".

They can renamed the current macbook pro, macbook Air+

In the end, it actually provides more flexibility for individual needs,

Fewer options is greater freedoms! Taking things out provides more flexibility! What double think! What newspeak! Much wow!

without overly-complicating base designs or unnecessarily increasing hardware costs.

Nobody buying a $2500 pro laptop in 2016 is concerned about the cost of a few ports. Indeed that's what the $2500 is for... because we want it to have all these capabilities built in, and we're willing to pay what ever it costs to get it.

It's reached the point where I'm considering buying a thunderbolt dock to keep in my laptop bag. Has all the ports I'll need, and I'm less likely to misplace or forget it. And its cheaper than the combined price of all the hubs, adapters, and dongles I currently need to carry around.

But you know what would be really cool... if they put some extra battery in the dock. And added a keyboard, screen, touchpad, CPU, SSD, and RAM. Then I could just carry around the dock, and not bother with a useless laptop. ;-)

PS:

Those Ethernet "Dongles" (as you call them)

A dongle is a piece of hardware that attaches to a computer and allows a piece of secured software to run. [...]

The term dongle has expanded beyond software protection to include any small device that plugs into the Universal Serial Bus (USB) or other computer port, regardless of what it does. These devices are usually used to provide some function that is not built in to the computer itself. This includes adding memory, supplying Bluetooth® and WiFi® connections, and adding adapters so that other devices can be plugged in.

http://www.wisegeek.org/what-i...

They're not reporters, though. They're 'News Entertainment Personalities', and they're paid to push someone else's opinion.

No, they are not paid to voice someone else's opinion, they are all believers in the US's dominant philosophy, Logical Positivism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.wisegeek.org/what-i...
http://plato.stanford.edu/entr...

killing off the value of existing workers' labor

To kill off the value of existing workers' labor would indeed be stupid and harmful. Fortunately, every time you equip a worker a more powerful tool, you increase the value of her labor (and make her job less shitty). After upgrading from a treadle-powered sewing machine to an electric sewing machine, she will assemble more garments (and her calf muscle won't be fatigued at the end of the day). If she starts out welding truck chassis by hand, and later supervises a team of robots that weld truck chassis, the value of her labor has increased exponentially, and her job has become safer.

NOBODY WANTS TO DISALLOW PEOPLE FROM DRIVING THEMSELVES AROUND. I'm sorry to have to shout

You didn't have to shout, because everybody knows that nobody, not even you, wants to disallow people from driving themselves around. That was my point, and you missed it. Neither should anybody want to disallow workers from being equipped with more powerful tools. That is especially true when it comes to extremely powerful tools, such as robots. How do you expect workers to accomplish tasks such as laying down thousands of square miles of PV cells in an environment deadly to humans, if they're not equipped with robots?

we live in a society where a person's worth is measured entirely by how hard they work to enrich someone else.

How do you get around with such a huge chip on your shoulder? I don't work to enrich someone else; I work to enrich myself. The fact that my work also enriches the executives and the shareholders is a good thing, not something I should begrudge them. A lot of the shareholders are retirees like yourself, on a fixed income, who own shares indirectly, via their pension fund. If anything, I'm grateful to the shareholders for ponying up the capital that allows me to work in a nice facility with pleasant landscaping out front.

I can only conclude that you don't really want to increase the value of existing workers' labor and make their jobs less shitty; you just want to continue to be a clueless malcontent, mindlessly repeating the anti-capitalist clichés you've been indoctrinated with.

The U.S. is #1 in manufacturing and has been since WWII. http://www.wisegeek.org/what-a...

The United States is, by a wide margin, the largest manufacturer of goods in the world. We produce nearly 25% more than China and the Russian Federation combined, with a small fraction of the population. This was BEFORE the fracking boom.

http://www.wisegeek.org/what-a...

Yellow journalism is sensationalist journalism. It is a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers. http://www.wisegeek.org/what-is-yellow-journalism.htm

The only specific microbes mentioned in the abstract is the genus vibrio. The vast majority of microbes are uncharacterized, which is not surprising given the sheer number of branches in archea and eubacteria. Bacteria, for example, it's estimated that there are 10 million to a billion species. It would be surprising, to say the least, if there is only one microbe out there that eats petroleum or it's byproducts.

They are in deep space, so they have an infinite sink at nearly zero deg kelvin.

I don't think it's in "deep space" by most definitions as that's generally considered to be outside of the solar system. Also, L2 is not around the 2.75K that is estimated to be the average temperature of space. The temperature of space around Pluto's orbit is estimated at 35 to 40 K. This site states that Herschel passively cools to 80K So I would guess that the temperature at L2 is 80K and they are in fact using the He to cool to ambient as you already suggested.

The character's nickname, "Bones", is a play on sawbones, an epithet for physicians, [8] in particular, those qualified as surgeons. [9] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_McCoy#section_1

A sawbones is a slang term used to describe a physician, and more specifically a surgeon, especially one who would have served in battle. The term is often tied to the Civil War, but in fact predates it. Dickens uses it to refer to a doctor in the 1837 novel Pickwick Papers which suggests common use of the expression at least 20 years prior to usage during the American Civil War. http://m.wisegeek.org/what-is-a-sawbones.htm