Data, encrypted or not, usually have headers describing the contents. And encrypted data typically looks random (tip : if you suspect a file is encrypted, compress it with a good compressor like PAQ, if you can't reduce its size, it likely is). This should be enough to know if data are encrypted or not in almost all cases that don't involve steganography.

Apparently not. However the severance pay is conditioned on "continued satisfactory performance", which looks pretty broad.

They never had this slogan to begin with. It was "don't be evil" not "do no evil".
And even in the early days, the scope of this slogan was quite limited. It was a business strategy along the lines of "treat our users correctly so that they want to stay with us rather than head to our competitors as soon as they can". It never was the irrealistic ideal people make it to be.

Or even better, register for a premium-rate phone number. You get paid each time they call you.

I guess that by including a FPGA in their chips, they could completely get rid of the southbridge/PCH and connect all I/Os directly to the chip. As a result, motherboards will only need to take care about the electrical and physical connections and provide a program to the FPGA for the logic.

"trusted computing", locked bootloaders, ... controversial stuff like this are all improvements in security that are easy to mandate, are pushed by big companies and closely match the Tylenol example (where tamper resistance was the solution).

What I understand is that the lasered piece of graphene shoots out electrons, creating a thrust. But what happens when there are no more electrons ?
Moreover, stripping off all these electrons will ionize the material, which would either cause nuclei to detach as well (like with a plasma thruster) or the resulting positive charge will eventually end up pulling back all the ejected electrons, negating the thrust.

Long term storage is not that big of a problem. It's only a matter of converting all that waste into rock (aka vitrification) and dumping it into a hole drilled into rock. As long as there are no waterways, rocks can stay stable for thousands or even millions of years. There are fossils to prove it.
Direct exposure from these sites would be negligible compared to natural background radiation. Water contamination would be more problematic (not catastrophic though), that's why it is important to chose the site wisely and have a few layers of safety (such as corrosion-proof containers).

The irony is definitely not lost on the authors...

Blocking google-analytics.com doesn't work ?
Anyways, If you want to block all ads with ABP, just uncheck the very obvious checkbox in the settings, or use an alternative blocker like uBlock.
If you are paranoid about the blocker sending data to their company, know that ABP is an opensource project, so is uBlock, you are free to analyse the code and build it yourself. But considering the controversy about ABP, I guess serveral people alredy did this.

By letting Greece sink, there is no way the Eurozone will get its money back. So they try to keep it afloat enough to make sure they stay at least a bit productive but not too much so they can't waste too much money.

On modern Android, yes that's Chrome mobile. But before that it was just "android browser", Samsung also has its own browser so not all android phones use the same browser.
Most of them are based on WebKit though.

The difference : try to find an Uber driver who accepts to drive 200 miles for $10.
Uber is not at all like ridesharing. With ridesharing, several people who go to the same place share the same car. It is good as it decrease traffic congestion, pollution, etc... With Uber, it is the same as when you are driving by yourself regarding pollution and congestion, the difference is that you are not the driver, i.e. it is a taxi service.
Price is telling too. With ridesharing service, the driver usually get barely enough to cover the car running costs but it is fine : driver get to drive basically for nearly free and passengers get a cheap ride. With Uber passengers pay for the driver's time, like a taxi.
And now, why regulate Uber drivers more than ridesharing drivers ? A reason I can think of is that because of the finencial insensitive, Uber drivers will spend more time than normal on the road, increasing the risks. Rideshaing drivers would be better off not driving at all, they simply take passengers to lower the burden for the trips they would have done anyways.

If you want to compare with sex, I'm not against paid sex. However it is normal to have laws targeting prostitution because of the increased risks (STD, ...), either by regulating it or banning it altoghether. (putting aside questions about morality and crimmnality).

Any adblocker worth its salt removes sponsored links altogether.
Unfortunately Chrome mobile doesn't support extensions so your best bet is probably Firefox mobile + uBlock.
As for the Google search app (the most likely target), you probably can't do much about it besides, maybe, an xposed module (note : xposed framework requires a supported rooted device).

Because the EU doesn't want to bear the costs of processing these requests.