It's the official response

It is - at the end of episode 2 (right before Eli Vince was killed), Gordon was brought in on the project of checking out the Borealis - which is described as the main research facility for aperture labs (or at least it presumably is seeing as after it was lost, they could no longer compete for the government grant that black mesa went on to win). Not to mention the multiple references in portal to black mesa.
Unless you are insinuating that they link in the portal gun device - that would certainly be interesting.

This isnt necessarily true - unless you have entirely separate networks for departments that dont need access to another department's resources, there will still be access elevation bugs that can be exploited. Phishing the login of someone as basic as the cleaner (dont ask me why they would have computer access) could quickly elevate to root access - opening up other computers on the network to attack

Would be easier if facebook just offered an opt-out option (even better - make it default) for facial recognition

I think he was insinuating Linus is in fact a deity

No, but it has been blamed on rap music (among other things)

Degradation is mainly caused by minuscule asteroids in space hitting the plastic that is shielding the solar arrays. As they are practically in a vacuum (at least if we discard the gas in space, and the numerous dense spots), they can be anywhere between barely moving to traveling at the speed of light - ie scratch it or penetrate through the array altogether. If you examine any solar cells brought back from space, you will find it like this.

Being developed in the UK, just in case you didnt read the word "Oxford researchers"

Did you miss the bit where he is including many other features that he hasnt disclosed? I imagine he would throw in missions, NPCs and other things you couldnt think of off hand - the game has certainly surprised me before

Excluding the booming economy and ensuing economical stability

Dont forget he managed to get around 250,000 people to read it

I think you meant to say $200 a week

What I dont understand is why you seem to believe the US government is the sole authority for currencies worldwide. Whatsmore, the only way to actually stop use of bitcoins is to stop websites taking payment, otherwise as an untracable P2P technology, no government can manage it. Of course even then, individuals will take payment. The only true way to stop this is to outright block P2P, not just the the ports but all traffic streams that display P2P behaviour, and i cant see that happening worldwide, especially with completely legal uptake of the technology