Answer:

The Europeans have never been afraid of using taxes and subsidies to push consumer behavior in the favored direction.
Which is why diesels are so popular over there, since the fuel taxes have favored diesel over gasoline.

IMO, this is a bit nuts, since modern diesels are really clean.
Ultra-low sulfur fuel allows for catalytic converters to limit NOx emissions and particle filters remove most of the carbon soot and fine particles.

I'd be interested in seeing the research the French looked at before making their decision.

Why do we even need desktops? A browser is all anyone needs... just run your servers on that!

This recreates the correct 800x600 experience for optimum viewing. We've had 800x600 for years and years and it's well-proven and stable. There's certainly no need for all these extra resolutions to complicate things!

This is only tangentially related, but in the USA, many of the State borders are wrong.

Surveying was a significantly less exact science 200+ years ago.
Many of the borders were marked by specific trees, rocks, or waterways that have since moved or disappeared.
To add to the confusion, the surveyors didn't/couldn't always follow the original land grant instructions,
since making a perfectly straight line across several hundred miles of wilderness was nearly impossible.

By way of example, the Four Corners Monument (AZ/CO/NM/UT) is ~1800 feet East of where it should be.
The Mason-Dixon line (separating DE/PA/MD) is off by 800~900 feet in places.
They couldn't correct for gravitational effects that skewed their plumb bob and consequently offset their star sightings.

For the most part, these issues aren't very contentious, except where water is involved.
States fight like cats and dogs over water rights and access.

Well, the good news is that the military has gotten enthusiastic about "going green" in a big way.

Thanks to extended wars in the mid-east, they've discovered that energy costs are making up a non-trivial part of the deployment cost. Nowadays, the Pentagon is actively defending solar/biofuel/battery research, because that will help free them from the tyranny of extended supply chains that lead to $400/gallon fuel.

The bad news is that Republicans are decidedly unenthusiastic about green energies and they've already done damage at State level private/public partnerships. Look out for fights at the Federal level, now that Republicans control both Houses.

Sure it is. Home Depot checkout scanner glass is sapphire-coated. You can drag steel tools across it all day for years on end.

It's cost Apple nothing. They're selling every iPhone 6 they can produce.
Here's what could end Apple's winning streak

Apple PR flacks are talking this risk down, but other than smart watches, Apple doesn't really have room to grow in the USA.

That doesn't sound like this situation at all.

Apple loaned GT more than half a billion dollars to build the plant. When GT failed to deliver, Apple stopped giving them money. When GT ran into financial difficulties, Apple offered to give them more money and defer repayments to keep them afloat.

What did you expect Apple to do? Just keep on giving them more money indefinitely without getting anything in return?

The trust usually comes because the small company assumes the big one wants to make money by completing an actual product line and selling it - normally the way just about everybody thinks Capitalism works. The small company says to itself, well, they've got to have X (like Sapphire coatings for screens) to make money - they can't actively want us to fail and take steps to make us fail or they take a hit too. So what we have to do is deliver the component at the price where they still make money, and as long as we do that, we're on the same side. So the small company focuses on distrusting the contract clauses it thinks are rational to distrust, in ways that it thinks might allow abuses a rational but dishonest actor might try..
      It's like buying a car and thinking you can't trust the salesman to tell you the truth - only you should have somehow known the salseman wasn't the real salesman but a psycho-killer who had just slain the real salesman and the big thing he wanted wasn't to make too much money selling that car, it was your home address so he could pop by at 2 AM with his skinning knife collection. Most people don't go through life checking with NASA in case the persons they are dealing with are secretly space ailens.
            From the summary, Apple seems to have had control over the decision to install back up power supplies, and to have chosen to save money on them instead. That sounds like an Apple executive brought in a good quarterly bottom line and then got out before the product couldn't be made as specced, and to heck with whether Apple still looks good five years down the road. The big company takes a small hit, the little one goes bankrupt. Apple is by this definition exceptionally untrustworthy, just because they won't take as much damage as their smaller subcontractors, or individuals, but if that's true, then Capitalism is a system where the bigger a company gets, the less it should be trusted, just for sheer size, and smaller businesses and customers should rationally start distrusting sheer bigness. How about that, free-market types and Randroids, do we need stronger Anti-Trust laws? The other solution seems to be extreme paranoia. If great market share or rapid growth mean everyone should regard that company as exceptionally untrustworthy, they why doesn't it make sense for consumers to always pick a smaller competitor for everything?

I guess that's why they call it "nitpicking".

"He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future." - Orwell, 1984

It's not finished yet. They have the clock and the delay line memory working, but it can't run programs.

Make the ballots out of hemp, problem solved.

RFID bracelets are fairly cheap.
If a little thought is put into the readers' placement, authentication should require minimal/no interruption of the workflow.

Try reading the paper.

/all spelling mistakes are in the original text