Auto makers in the US are required to keep the average mileage of their vehicles below a certain standard. This means that, to produce a lot of inefficient vehicles (trucks, SUVs, etc.) they need to produce a quantity of fuel efficient vehicles.

Producing vehicles that use 0 gallons per mile has the added benefit of allowing them to make more gas hogs. This probably isn't a huge part of the reason they made the volt, but it would be a contributing reason.

Staying relevant and in the press would be another factor.

.... , only 1 types matter for desktop usage: Debian-based or Redhat based.

It makes sense when you remember to start counting from zero.

If you are going to have to make arcane gestures for each letter, you might as well go the route of optical character recognition. At least that way, you don't have to learn a whole new way to write each letter for your mobile device.

The engine's compressor is used and pumped into the cabin to replace escaping air.

So, no it's not airtight. Minus 10 geek points for not watching the Mythbusters episode where they had to seal the heck out of the cabin to run their explosive decompression test.

Seriously, thank you for noticing that money spent on space exploration is actually spent here on earth and therefore doesn't simply disappear from the economy.

I've seen too many negative comments about how spending money on space exploration is a waste when we have problems here on earth. The way some people talk, you would think we were proposing taking billions of dollars and sending it all into space.

Every single penny he makes comes from someone else's pocket

You just described everyone except the places that mint pennies.

he simply monopolizes a resource and profiteers from it,

Monopolizes? Please clarify, is he preventing other people from also buying books in the book stores? Or is he preventing people from going to other bookstores?

contributing absolutely nothing to the economy.

Actually, he's filling a demand by increasing the flow of supply. If anything, the more books brought to the global market, the less they cost. If books that are in demand, collecting dust on a shelf, that contributes nothing to the economy.

Seriously, anyone in the book business that can't be bothered to check on the value of their inventory deserves to have their ... what was happening again? .... oh yeah, deserves to have their books bought. What?

1. Open a book store
2. Have a customer scan your books
3. Have them give you money for some of the books
4. Profit.

And only the logic deficient and the religious crazies are left arguing the options.

Really? You are absolutely certain you are correct and anyone else is either logic deficient or a religious crazy?

To everyone who isn't massively close minded, I posit that is would be possible that, the first creature that we would have identified as.... 'yup, that's a chicken', could have been born without the benefit of an egg. Or, the egg could have predated such a 'first chicken', with the precursor to the chicken already having egg-laying capability.

Anyway, the point of any such 'chicken and egg' debate isn't about the chicken or the egg. It's about applying reason to a problem as an exercise in reason.

Now, if you will excuse me, I think I'm just going to pop into my time machine and find out if the first egg-laying chicken-like creature does, in fact, taste like chicken.

Seriously... if Alice alters Bob's machine to steal money from Trent, you want the bank to be on the hook?

The problem with that is the bank isn't in a position to oversee any of this transaction. You can easily hook Alice for the crime. You can argue fault for Bob (if physical security of the machines is lax), as he needs to keep his machines secure. Trent should only be 'on the hook' for pursuing legal action. But the bank.... what did they do wrong? Process a transaction from Trent? How do you secure that while actually letting Trent buy his gas?

Obligatory HTML:

http://xkcd.com/123/