In Australia, a "Diploma" is not the same as a "Degree", see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Qualifications_Framework#Diploma.2C_Advanced_Diploma.2C_Associate_degree

A diploma is a 2-3 year course, whereas a degree is 3-4.

Water is also "stuff of life": it accounts for more than half of the chemical make-up of nearly every living thing. However, humans require a specific amount in order to live. If you try and breathe it, you will die. If you drink too much of it, you will die. If you don't drink enough of it, you will die. So there is a lower limit and an upper limit of desirable values.

The same goes for CO2: it's necessary to sustain life, but only in the right quantities. Therefore the objective is to determine what the desirable lower bound and desirable upper bound values are. We can start with the two boundary cases:
* 0% of atmosphere: Plants cannot live
* 100% of atmosphere: Animals cannot live
So our desirable range exists somewhere between these two extremes, and we need to perform research in order to narrow the range to within acceptable error margins. The best research to date seems to indicate that the range is around 2-6ppm.

WAAS is only available in North America. The equivalent CDGPS source for Europe is EGNOS.

As NocturnHimtatagon has alluded to, data providers only tend to cover specific areas or countries. If Andoid does not provide low enough level access to the GPS hardware to do WAAS then I doubt that you'd be able to do any form of DGPS. Typical consumer-level chips will just output NMEA data, whereas you will need access to at least the raw pseudo-range data (i.e. distance from satellite to receiver) in order to be able to apply the pseudo-range correction (PRC) values. Some provides may provider Code Differential correction data in addition to/instead of PRC but you would still need access to low-level data from the GPS chip.

I've worked in the DGPS industry for nearly a decade now, and I can tell you that this is not a new concept in any way. Firstly, it is true that there exist many free correction sources (e.g. WAAS in the US, EGNOS in Europe) which will allow a DGPS receiver to determine it's position to decimetre accuracy. Centimetre accuracy can be achieved with Real Time Kinematic (RTK) corrections (either from a local base station or delivered remotely by some kind of long distance connection, e.g. GPRS). Neither option is free, but subscribing to a correction provider is a hell of a lot cheaper than buying your own base station. Millimetre accuracy can be achieved using very expensive laser equipment and is very common in the surveying industry.

The concept of using local transmitters for underground applications is not new either. I am aware of a number of mine sites in Australia which have been using Pseudolites (Pseudo Satellites) for a number of years for this exact purpose.

I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic or not, but I can honestly say that I quite regularly use cars for non-transportation purposes. To me, a car is also a generator and a climate controlled environment. My line of work takes me to various locations which don't have any shelter or electricity, so the car becomes a mobile office for all intents and purposes.

Like pretty much everything else in life, it's not a clearly black-and-white situation. Sometimes government regulation is good (whether it is telecommunications, health care, food standards, whatever) and sometimes it is bad.

Until recently, in Australia our options for ISPs have been very poor. This was essentially the result of the previous government's (whose Communication Minister for some time was Robert Alston, regularly pilloried by The Register as being "The World's Biggest Luddite") blind ideological drive to privatise the government monopoly (Telstra, nee Telecom). To preserve the value to shareholders of the newly privatised company, the company was not split into separate retail and wholesale parts (which was advocated by pretty much everyone in the industry who wasn't Telstra) but instead a private company found itself with a complete monopoly over the entire national infrastructure. The government passed some feel-good laws about minimum service obligations (e.g. see http://www.telstra.com.au/universalservice/docs/uso_smp.pdf) to prevent people in the bush from getting screwed over because they weren't economical to service, but these covered only telephony services. As a result, many people outside of the major cities (and even a substantial number inside their suburban areas) have only been able to use dial-up (and then not even at 56k) until wireless services became more widespread recently. Telstra also abused it's monopoly and illegally prevented other companies from accessing the telephone exchanges (e.g. see http://www.theage.com.au/business/telstra-cops-18m-fine-for-exchange-block-20100728-10uwx.html) which prevented any serious competition from emerging.

Thankfully, in the last few years, things have been changing - some great ISPs have finally been able to build up some infrastructure (iiNet, Internode) and offer at least some level of competition to Telstra. These guys mostly service only the cities (which includes something like 80% of our population) but it doesn't help those in rural areas. In most places there is now some level of wireless coverage available. Although this is fairly expensive (e.g. $30/month for 1GB, $150/GB for excess data with Optus) it's still much better than what they had before. The current government has started building a $40bn National Broadband Network, but it will take many years until this is finished.

TL;DR: Sometimes government regulations are good, and sometimes they are bad.

Hydroelectric has significant failure mode issues - if the dam breaks then lives can be lost. This in fact occurred at Fujinuma Dam and has led to more loss of life than Fukushima.
Here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_failures is a list of major dam failures but I don't hear people running around saying that we need to shut them all down.

Perhaps ethics may have played a part. Some engineers refuse to work for defence companies as they are not able to morally justify building machines to kill people in new and improved ways. Perhaps your top students couldn't morally justify designing new and improved ways to kill the concept of privacy.

I do agree however that your initial suggestion may have also played a significant role. The majority of web technologies simply aren't interesting, and PHP is the worst of a bad bunch.

Are you saying that you are approximately 70 years old? I never imagined that there were any Slashdotters older than 40 (physically, that is).