At the link you posted:
"With all-native core apps and no Java overhead , Ubuntu runs well on entry-level smartphones..."

Are there known speed benefits, or is this speculation?

There is another legal problem that this technical solution doesn't address. User A racks up 100 miles owed. Then says FU, and deletes their account. They create another account and continue to rack up miles. Who will take action against A? The exchange will send them a stern email?

Or, rapists/criminals determine that this is a good way to get their targets to lower their guard, and cities are faced with another crime vector. Who pays to enforce?

I wouldn't consider myself a KDE fanboy, having used it only for oh, like 3 years but I moved to it after some of that Unity/Gnome2/Gnome3/I-forget-the-details mess. Suddenly I found I could tweak things to my preference (nothing fanboyish, just being able to turn on editable paths, different views, etc. in the file explorer; a searchable "Start" button). I did find the default appearance ugly, but customized it (KFaenza icon-set, Smaragd window theme engine-thingy that lets me use a really nice Emerald window theme called HUD). I also use Windows everyday, and much prefer KDE. Yeah, some things don't work well - Wally breaks frequently because KDE makes it hard to change the wallapaper from the cmd line, Samba mounts ask for passwords repeatedly... but those are things that either aren't possible in Windows (or Unity, I suppose, I never looked back at that one), or well, they work in Windows (but other things drive my preference towards KDE).

Oh wait, it isn't 2011. 3 years, then.

Or, it could mean that municipalities, Google, and others who view internet access as an utility, have 7 years to get their act together.

In other words, you can use your phone "hands-free" which driving, but not really hands-free.

The article also makes an important point, which the OP misses in their summary, which is that the coprolites had a wider range of antibiotic-resistance genes, implying that present day human gut bacteria aren't as capable of fighting invasive bacteria.

Moreover, the summary of the first part (about gut bacteria) is just an exercise in poor writing. Let me summarize from the linked article, without similarly confusing bacteria, viruses, and microbes. Coprolites from Belgium had different gut bacteria species waging antibiotic warfare on each other. Each made antibiotics to kill other invasive bacterial species, and viruses (of the kind called bacteriophages) moved genetic material between bacteria (of the same kind) thus helping that bacterial species better fight the invasive bacteria.

Then there is some unrelated article, with possibly an equally poor summary, but my attention span was already exhausted.

How exactly are they then going to "take the funds back from the thief/thieves against their will"? The Japanese government doesn't care.

I think they meant to say "less space than that is required to store Wikipedia".

It is a feature of stories based on a dystopian future, and bykn some accounts (Shock Doctrine, I think?) of the present-day US, that the "common folk', you know, the ones with only 1 vote, are subject to increasing harsh punishments to stifle any hint of dissent, let alone revolution. Arresting for not returning DVDs is just a macabre progression from arresting for pot possession.

I'm sure in South Carolina, this will be only an human-interest story, not a cause of alarm or anything more.

Corporations get off with no punishment for far worse than illegally foreclosing homes! However your example is apt, since mortgages can be viewed as renting money (not technically however).

We had a rich man's son get off with no jail time for driving into 4 pedestrians, the judge said he suffered from "affluenza"! Other shocking examples are plenty in the US.

Do they mean water and dust, or just water or dust at one time, but not both simultaneously?

Agreed.

I mean, what does this mean, "... Micro-size hairs can also make a surface that repels water, called superhydrophobic, or dust,' the researchers said in a statement."

Does it mean they can repel water and dust, or they can repel water, dust, and something called "called superhydrophobic"? And if the clause "called superhydrophobic" is explaining water repulsion, then why isn't it just hydrophobic, but instead a super version?

ATT did a similar thing in the US. They started out promising FTTP, and I believe, received govt. $$$ (from the Uniform Subscriber Fee). Over the years, they down-graded it to FTTN, and now are merely converting their copper lines to IP-based (still called U-Verse). The bad news is that their FTTN (and of course all-copper) has much less bandwidth than the cable company's coax networks. Don't you guys have coax cable over there?

You're confounding the auto industry bailout with the financial industry bailout, probably intentionally. Since the argument here is whether the estimated savings from bailing out the auto industry were worth the price, the amount of the financial industry bailout isn't relevant.

You seem to be implying that the amount spent in the financial industry bailout was completely wasted, but don't provide any supporting argument. And I also read somewhere that most of the financial industry bailout was not spent in the conventional sense, but was guarantees, but since you're just making some offhand argument, I won't bother digging that up.