But was planning on going with the new Macbook or an Air for their slightly smaller form factor.

The new Macbook enjoys the same increase, though of course there might be other reasons to not choose it.

Just say one of my kids 'goes rogue' and... shoplifts. Does that suddenly mean I did a bad job?

No, and you also might think "She would never do that." That doesn't make you an "idiot parent", despite what the OAC said.

But come to think of it, that'd be a little weird: you'd be able to drive your car into the city on one day, but wouldn't be able to drive it out the next.

They did this in San Jose, Costa Rica (and maybe they still do, I don't know). Cars were each restricted one weekday. Plates ending in 1 or 2 on Monday, 3 or 4 on Tuesday, etc. It wasn't 24 hours, it was from ~6am to 8pm.

It was somewhat successful, though not surprisingly considerably less than a 20% reduction. Taxis were not restricted, and of course wealthier families tended to have more than one car.

Not all the data is contained within 1 photo. It is spread across many.

Only when you have more than 1,000 words.

You mean like how Bing and Yahoo (powered by Bing, but not the same results) promote their own "versions" of things ahead of other search results?

Protip: If you ever end up in traffic court, "I wasn't the only one speeding" is not a recommended defense.

So people who agree that the better results are harder to find are switching to search engines that outperform Google, right?

You might as well be talking about Microsoft in the 90's. They could treat their users like pawns because they weren't going to switch anyway.

Come on. You think these problems won't be solved? Travelling by automobile is one of the most dangerous things people regularly do. Autonomous cars don't need to be perfect, just significantly better than humans. That's not a high bar. It won't happen all at once, but rather bit by bit. One day children will look back at the grisly statistics of death and disablement and be horrified. 91 people a day are killed in an automobile in the US. If that was from, say, the flu, the country would be in a state of absolute panic and it would dominate the news.

out of the 11,000 000,000 or so people on the Planet.

Wow! I must have overslept!

I did not sounds to me as if Google was planning to foist this down the throat of third party app stores. They just want to reduce the vast piles of what is quite frankly digital refuse that's cluttering up the Play Store.

One step at a time. You can't build the walled garden until you lay the foundation.

I wish they took it one step further and provided a one-time-use CC number for every transaction.

I see your philosophy is "It's much easier to have my dreams come true when I wish for things to be as they already are." Good thinking!

Consider a farmer with a couple hundred acres. Annual 'income' of $20,000, but on paper, a millionaire, because of the land.

That makes no sense at all. If his equity in the land is more than a million, then he *is* a millionaire. Being a millionaire doesn't mean he has a million dollars in cash laying around.

And if he is a millionaire, then busting his ass to make $20k doesn't make much sense either. Surely he could rent out that land for a lot more than that.

That was remarkably difficult to read. My brain kept looping back to earlier in the sentence to try to parse some sense from it.

Talk about read-only code!

Hmmm. How would something like that get written?

Adding numbers with less and less energy means nothing in the physical world.

Boy is that wrong. It's extremely valuable and important.

The numbers quoted are what some analyst thinks that someone might theoretically pay.

There's nothing theoretical about it. They raised a bit over $500M in return for a bit over 20% of the company. 500M / 0.2 = $2.5B.
Like all companies, they are worth what someone is willing to pay.