When I was serving in the Marines, we would periodically have to provide a few privates to ride in the back seat of the colonel's car so he could take the HOV lane from Quantico to a meeting at the Pentagon. Your tax dollars at work.

I doubt very very much if the final decision was made by an engineer. It was far more likely made by either an accountant or a lawyer.

To qualify as libel or slander a statement must be not only false, but knowingly false, and used with malicious intent. I doubt if you can convince anyone that Google is libeling you.

If you type info into my website, then it is silly to later claim that it is "private". If you don't want Google to have your data, then don't use Google.

If you want to unilaterally control what other people say and publish about you, you might have some problems working around this annoying document.

Only if the "app" consists of a pull-down menu, a fill-in form and a database. Now try to do a 3D FPS game app, using OpenGL, with HTML5. Is it theoretically possible? Sure. But it will be incredibly difficult to manage polygons, scenes, frame buffers, etc. in a language where an integer is a float, and a float is sometimes a string, where the only data structures are arrays and hashes, and errors are almost never caught by the compiler.

I have written apps in both native code and Html5+Javascript. Html5+JS is almost always my first choice if I just need to slap together an interface to some backend service. But I would never go that route for an app that requires structure, planning, teamwork, and real engineering.

Except that in the past two decades, more than a billion people have been lifted out of poverty, as incomes at the bottom of the economic ladder have surged. You might want to start with a "core problem" that has a stronger connection to reality.

Or did you mean that people in rich countries with below median incomes (the bottom half of the top 10% globally) have not been doing well?

Nope, it is because diet soda makes you fat. It promotes the wrong kind of gut bacteria. The sweet taste also triggers insulin production, when causes hunger when the sugar that the tongue predicted doesn't show up in the stomach. So people end up eating even more to compensate. Sales of Diet Pepsi are falling because people are becoming more educated about just how unhealthy that crap is. If you are thirsty, try tap water.

According to Audi's press release, this fuel is "chemically identical" to petroleum based diesel. So that pretty much answers your questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8.

NOx can be removed by catalytic converters, as long as the catalyst is not poisoned by sulfer in the fuel. Since this fuel contains no sulfer, that should not be a problem. Start with electricity, convert it to liquid diesel fuel at 70% efficiency, and then burn that diesel at about 50% efficiency. So overall, the process is about 35% efficient. That is a lot worse than Li-ion batteries, but would have the advantages of range, and working with existing inexpensive engines. This process could be used as a demand leveler for renewables: on sunny/windy days, where there is plenty of surplus power, just convert the excess to diesel and store it.

It is about a 7% increase. Inflation in most of the developed world is between -1% and 1%. So, no, it is not at "pay cut".

You are incorrect. If the business paid higher wages, they would have to raise the price of strawberries to cover the cost. Then consumers wouldn't buy the strawberries, and would buy something less labor intensive instead, like watermelons. Then the business would fire the strawberry pickers, and switch to growing watermelons.

The price of a commodity has little to do with "importance", but with scarcity and cost of production. Air is the most important commodity, yet it is free. Water is the second most important, yet it is extremely cheap (as a residential consumer in California I get about 5 gallons for a penny).

Do you believe that air is free because of messed up social priorities?

We hit peak Mexican in 2008. Since then, the net flow has been negative (more people returning to Mexico than arriving). The Latino population is still growing because of a higher birthrate, but at that point they aren't "Mexicans", but native-born American citizens.

I think it is the author of TFA that is in the twilight zone. The notion that this service will lack customers is absurd. A few years ago, there was a booth making cheap 3D wax head models at the Circus-Circus in Las Vegas. There was a long line of people waiting for their turn. My kids each got one.

I remember learning Z80 assembly on the "Thrash 80". Great microprocessor. It had two register banks, so context switches, and interrupts, were really fast. There were also some undocumented instructions, and if you knew those you had a lot of street cred with the other teenage nerds. Fun times.