So a man who was born in and lived in England until he was 27 (2005) is as English as George Bush. I see. So what makes you English and not him?
Americans might look on with bemusement; I can understand that. I guess it's a bit like Florida choosing to break away from the US, having a pro-Florida political party endlessly demonizing "them" (the rest of the US) as causing pretty much every economic and political woe Florida has going for it. As an English guy, I think this whole situation really sucks. If the UK breaks up, the whole of Britain will be worse off for it, but I suspect Scotland will take the bigger brunt of the pain. And given that it will have made the decision, it will deserve to.
Well as an American guy I have to say that's not a good analogy. As much as the rest of the US thinks Florida is backwards, Florida was not another country rich with their own traditions when the US acquired it. Texas would be a better analogy. Also an English guy, I don't think you understand that you've not exactly treated Scotland very well and that's one of the reasons it wants to leave. Another reason is that much of oil England is harvesting is Scottish and they do not get what they think is a proportional amount from it.
Here's another view from another Englishman, John Oliver.
Webkit was a fork of KDE's HTML renderer, mostly over maintenance issues.
So when Apple rewrote the engine in WebKit2, it was over "maintenance issues"? That's a little bit of revisionist history. When Apple forked KHTML it was for one reason: control. Apple wanted to make a lot of changes (which they did) and take it in a new direction. They could have stayed with KHTML; however, that meant they would have to rely on KHTML developers to approve and upstream changes. So they forked it which they are allowed to do.
I don't think Apple has ever open sourced anything because they actually believed in open source ideals, namely that open sourcing something has a positive-sum outcome.
No Apple is interested in getting things to work. If that means open source, that's what they'll do. The positive-sum is not for them but for us.
Almost everything you said is wrong. At the time clang was born GCC was not stagnant, it was moving along quite well, and it was busting out C++ improvements.
For Objective-C it was. So Apple either had to switch to C++ or go on their own which is what they did. Now Clangs work on other languages but Apple's focus was always on Objective-C.
Apple prides itself as a closed ecosystem.
Apple prides itself on an integrated system. That does not always mean closed. For example, their music is AAC which is the successor to MP3. This is not a format of their design.
Yes it may have adopted some open source projects like WebKit in Safari.
And by adopted do you mean made it the de facto engine for many different web browsers? When Apple forked KHTML, it was not used by Google or Opera etc. If you want to ignore that they created OpenCL, LLVM, Bonjour, etc.
And that's the problem with green energy (other than hydro) - production is lowest when consumption is highest.
First of all when is production lowest when consumption is highest? I'm not sure where you get this. Peak hours is normally during 9-5 business day. For solar, that is also peak production. With wind, it is more more variable but the turbines are placed where there is some constant wind. Geothermal is pretty constant as well as hydro.
What are they going to do, use all those batteries to store electricity?
Maybe but the OP has specifically stated that the plant is likely grid-connected so it will produce power when it can and draw power from the grid when it cannot.
Does that mean if I buy an electric car I'm paying premium prices for a used battery with limited life?
Why would you even think this? Most car manufacturers make cars for their own internal use for factories like cargo vans and pickup trucks. These vehicles are sold to the general public as used after the manufacturer retires them. They are not sold to the public as new. The car manufacturer also sells brand new vehicles to the public of the same model.
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.