So we can make more money off of it.

Find a chief executive who actually likes sci-fi, rather than one who admits he hates it.

There are a lot of reasons we haven't gone supersonic with air travel. Sonic booms do things like shatter windows, set off car alarms, drive animals nuts, etc. The concord flights had to wait until they were 100 miles off shore before they would go supersonic, and they were also extremely inefficient, which means extremely expensive. It really is not cost effective for any airline to do supersonic flights right now, although Virgin has designs on a sub-orbital plane that will fly from New York to Paris in something like 2 hours. There are also new airframe bodies that do not produce a sonic boom when they break the speed of sound, but I'm not sure how efficient those are for air travel.

I know this is the internet, but come on, that post reeked of sarcasm. No need to go on the offensive.

China values imitation much more than the USA does.

You should check out just what exactly you do when you distill a drink. Basically, you evaporate all the alcohol out of the mash (which is where the urine and meds are in this), collect it via an inverted funnel at the top which has tubing going through a barrel of cold water. The cold tubing condenses the alcohol vapors, which comes out of the bottom as alcohol. This is basically moonshine at that point, and takes on the flavor of whatever you put it in as it ages for years. Given that the type of sugar usually defines the type of drink you're making, I'm not really sure how this qualifies as "whiskey", though.

The "watch video" button has never been less appealing...

This seems to be the equivalent of bragging about getting increased range in a normal car because you put another fuel tank instead of having a trunk and removed everything else that makes a modern car modern. Like important safety equipment, or air conditioning. I don't get it. Tesla has already done what these guys are trying to do ten times over without sacrificing all of that. And good luck getting through the southern Mexican parts of the highway in that thing. You'll need it.

Just like anything else, if it's done correctly, it can be great. The problem is most people don't bother to spend the time at it and throw out a half-assed system. To date, Fallout 3 is the only one where the scaling isn't horribly done. The first time I played through Bioshock (PC) I had adaptive difficulty turned on. About 1/2 way through the game, I began wondering why every enemy I came across took 5 or 6 headshots with anti-personnel rounds to bring down. Unfortunately, it took them a while to patch it so that the difficulty would turn itself back down if you weren't doing as well. Oblivion was horribly done. Enemies would scale up as high as your level, but your ability to scale up your damage was often cut short long before that. A level gained due to speechcraft and alchemy would net the same increase in monster stats as a level in blades and repair. In the end I wound up editing the game via the construction set just so I could actually enjoy it again. Ultimately, companies need to hire players rather than play testers. Someone who's going to go through a game because they enjoy it will find many more problems than someone who's told specifically what to test for and look at.