1) Huge landowning farmers are rich. On top of being rich, they get a lot of subsidies. They get the subsidies because, being rich, they can bribe politicians. This makes them richer, and more able to bribe. The EU is something I support entirely in principle, because trade is better than war, but in few areas has become more corrupt than subsidising landowners;

While I agree with the rest of what you say, farm subsidies are not entirely the result of corruption. They're a way for governments to tweak the supply/demand curve, so that there is a greater supply of food (farms) than demand. Farming is not like manufacturing, where you get an order 10,000 widgets so you manufacture 10,000 widgets. You plant enough crops to feed 10 million people, but if it turns out to be a bad year with crop failures and your yield is only enough for 9 million, well now you've got to decide between letting part of your population starve or putting everyone on rationing.

This can be avoided ahead of time if you subsidize farms to the point where they plant enough crops to feed 11 million. If it turns out to be a normal year and you have enough excess food for 1 million, that's preferable to being short food for 1 million. Turn it into feed for cattle (people won't complain about cheaper steaks), high fructose corn syrup, ethanol (which actually makes sense when done with excess corn instead of corn grown for the explicit purpose of turning into ethanol), and foreign aid. (Incidentally, this is why the U.S. pays some farmers not to grow any crops - if we suffer another Dust Bowl-like disaster, we'll have plenty of reserve farmland to fall back on the following year, but without upsetting food prices if there is no disaster this year.)

Even when you start with petroleum as your feedstock and only waste 10-15% of the energy it contains in refining and distribution, you've still got the car only turning 20% of the energy therein into useful kinetic energy (25% in the case of diesels), versus an average of about 85% of the electricty into kinetic energy (minus about 8% transmission losses), plus automatically gaining hybrid-style regen. Even if the process was 100% efficient - which it won't be anywhere even close to that - just the difference in propulsion technolgies would put the EV at 4 times the efficiency.

Slow down there. You're comparing the complete-cycle efficiency for petroleum to just the end-stage efficiency for electric. That electricity needs to be made somehow. Toss in 40% efficiency for coal plants (we'll leave out pumping/mining and fuel transport costs for now, assuming they're similar for oil and coal), battery charging efficiency of about 75% (discharge efficiency is unspecified, but since the EPA mileage estimates are based on battery capacity it's safe to ignore it), and the 85% motor efficiency you've specified, and suddenly your EV is .4*.75*.85 = 25.5% efficient. Same as a diesel.

This is the big thing a lot of EV proponents miss. Their EV is cheaper to operate not because the EV is more energy-efficient, but because coal is so much cheaper than gasoline. Coal costs about $50 per ton. A ton of coal has approximately 24 GJ of energy. That's about 0.21 cents/MJ. Gasoline costs about $3/gallon, and has about 120 MJ/gallon, or 2.5 cents/MJ. For the same amount of energy, coal is an order of magnitude cheaper than gasoline, which gives the EV a huge advantage in terms of operating costs. This is not a bad thing - being able to transfer a cheaper but traditionally static energy source into use in a mobile application is an economic win. But don't confuse it for better efficiency.

Yes you could argue that we can make electricity from renewables. But the vast majority of the cost of renewables is in the initial production of the turbine or PV panels. Operating costs are nearly nil (limited to maintenance). So for a fair comparison you then need to incorporate production and transport costs. At which point renewables lose because on a per Joule delivered basis, even with coal plants being only 40% efficient, coal is still cheaper than wind and solar power. (Wind is only about twice the costs of coal, so cheaper than gasoline, but I suspect solar would be about the same cost as gasoline.)

Low latency integration with the device's camera is a primary business concern when you're trying to let the user visualize how a particular home improvement product will look next to other things in the room.

Did you mean Disqus? So I guess unlike a lot of other users who have complained in comments to this story about Google's, you want a web search engine to correct your spelling.

Could you explain why Disqus are more "scumbags" than other comment section hosts? Or could you explain why all comment section hosts are "scumbags"?

The phone I already have doesn't support music. If I switched to a smartphone, the carrier would refuse to activate it on my present plan, instead putting me on a plan that costs $300 more per year than what I'm currently paying. Even in the GSM ecosystem, where a SIM is mandatory, carriers can and do automatically add a data plan to a voice-only SIM when it is inserted into a smartphone.

Did they stop making clip-on Bluetooth keyboards for phones or something? Amazon still appears to have slide-out keyboards in stock for iPhone 6.

Because an iPod touch is small enough to put in an armband so you can listen while you jog. Android tablets typically don't run smaller than 7 inches without being designed (and priced) for use with a cellular network. Or should people just buy an entry-level Android phone and use it without a SIM?

FM radio stations pay (the company that represents) the songwriter. Internet radio pays both (the company that represents) the songwriter and (the company that represents) the recording artist.

I figured as much. But how would the DNS server on your home or small office network, such as the one built into a home Internet gateway appliance, find a recursive resolver? Or would it need to be a recursive resolver?

Netflix streaming launched in the fourth quarter of 2008. Amazon Unbox (now Amazon Instant Video) launched in September 2006. iTunes preceded both, selling a million videos by October 31, 2005. Or did you mean that the use of all lawful Internet video services was still a rounding error compared to DVD?

Have you reported inability to adjust the game's font size and failure to respect system font size as defects to the game's publisher? If so, what was the reply? If "too bad", what was the publisher so we can avoid buying its games?

You laugh, but old school rotary phones could still call for emergency help if the power went out, they didn't hang, they didn't get viruses, they didn't get firmware "upgrades" that stopped them from working properly or at all, they didn't run out of their own batteries in the middle of a long call...

For once, I'm 100% in agreement with Khyber. Smartphones in a world with modern laptops, tablets, headsets and feature phones just look like a mediocre compromise to me. About the only thing they seem to be better at than any of the numerous other devices available is letting someone check Facebook every 10 seconds without actually having to take anything out of a pocket. At least until someone updates something remotely for them and breaks that functionality, anyway...

So can we agree on these two premises?
1. iTunes software is garbage.
2. People tolerate garbage because video purchases made before UltraViolet, Amazon, and Google Play started operating work only with garbage.

During the time period I describe, that was the only format in which movie studios offered movie downloads for sale. Someone who spent a lot of money buying movie downloads on iTunes Store before Amazon and Google Play started operating would have to spend a lot of money to replace them with Amazon or Google Play movie downloads.