If the starwars stuff gets +1 the comment above should at least get +2.

Must be the death star. Probably planned as a viral advertisement for the new Starwars movie.

Assuming this result is real, why is it not published in Nature? (I do not mean to criticise, I am genuinely curious)

What are they talking about? The last time I heard a "hobbyist" repairing a car must have been 20 years ago. Modern cars are way too complex too repair or modify at home or even by a professional without a fully equipped garage. I doubt that the small number of people who can actually pull this off poses a problem to the car industry. Conclusion: they have other motives.

I think I should have picked intermediate instead of advanced, but looking at the CVs I get everybody now claims to have "intermediate" programming experience because they once wrote a python script that reads a text file. So I decided to contribute to this inflation and pick advanced instead.

This is of course true, but in some countries people may not have learned to be critical. On the contrary: I am not sure if this is the case for India but in some countries people are taught from a very young age to trust the (usually state owned) media.

I have one of those noisy DAS keyboards (with the blue switches). It is indeed noisy but absolutely brilliant for both typing and gaming. http://www.daskeyboard.com/

I foresee a bright future where lots of correlations will be found. Without "a PhD" or someone who knows what they are doing ALL software is worthless.

The things these researchers use are not bubbles. Not even close. As usual, science reports by journalists and PR offices are terrible.

No offense, but if you need to ask this question (and the way you are asking it) I don't think you are the right person to do this job and risk scaring them off more than engaging them. Let someone else do it. Seriously.

"Given that the course of hypersonic research has acknowledged both of these concerns, why have several countries started testing the weapons?"

Another reason could be that developing such a weapon and thereby knowing what the weak points and technical requirements are is useful when you want to defend against them,

There is also an important difference between the people that are 40 years old now and those that are going to be 40 years old in 20 years.

Legally binding?
I thought the goal was to get your data back*, not to start a lawsuit.

* ...which you should have backed up somewhere obviously, not only on a single cloud storage location

I don't think its true that in marketing bigger numbers are better. Not if you are marketing something like using LESS fuel. But even if you are right, I think the issue here is that if they started with a boeing 747 and then decrease the number, sooner or later they would have to start using fractions or negative numbers.

If you want to go that way I would suggest microlitres per attoparsec.