Do they count "Doing something else but have the TV on in the background"?

Yes. The definition of "watching" used for TV ratings is "in the same room as a TV when it is switched on".

I have enough downtime to actually sit and watch a whole hour a day

The definition of "watching" used for TV ratings is "in the same room as a TV when it is switched on". So your amount of viewing would come to more than the one hour per day you think of as "watching".

No, big screens aren't going away

And much of the evidence that might be advanced to show that they are going away can be misleading. People might watch many YouTube videos on their tablets and smart-phones, but all those videos are very short. Looking at the total amount of viewing, in minutes, shows that tablet and smort-phone viewing is much less important than many think.

Sharp has no right to impose her expectations on them

She didn't impose her expectations. She complained. Then when nothing improved, she left.

Just how stupid are British officials that they can't see the obvious route is to sue and fine the company directly for false advertising

Because requiring consumers to sue a company, with all the hassle and legal costs, provides consumers with no effective protection. That is why Britain has consumer protection legislation. It provides an easy route for consumers to get redress.

it offers features (such as multi-user and multi-process) which are today made redundant by the hypervisor

I can't see that working well, unless they mean no heavy-weight processes, which have their own address space.

And also, zero tolerance = zero justice. By replacing human judgement with an inflexible rule, we replace the justice that come from judgement (being judicious) with a mechanical tyranny.

In the context of school bullying, this will disproportionately fall on the victims of bullying. The bullies are good at bullying. From practice they know just how much they can get away with without crossing the line of official sanction. Frustrated and angry victims are not so practiced, so when they snap, they are more likley to cross the line that gets them punished.

Typically you see a rule like "at least 10% of the workforce m ust be x% female".

But TFA Says

Don’t lower hiring standards, or make exceptions or compromises

Heaven forbid that you should RTFA, or even the summary, so plow on with your prejudice. Nowere does its say that frequent check-ins would be used as indicating a good programmer. Quoth the patent:

So, Alice and Bob are good programmers and check-in once a week. Charlie is a bad programmer and checks-in ten times a day. Perhaps his manager says to him Why don't you work more like Alice and Bob? They make less frequent changes. Perhaps you need to slow down a little?. Once you have data to analyse, you will be able to find correlations. This is how spam filters work, after all. They do not a priori decide that Viagra indicates spam: the data indicates that is so.

Good stuff. Philosophy 101 includes not confusing arguments about things with arguments about the meanings of words.

DVR makes this MUCH more difficult because fast-forward/rewind vastly increases the number of datasets you need to compare against. Also, while in theory you could identify a DVD, the selection of possible DVDs is so great and the amount of noise in the measurements is such that you're never in practice going to be able to identify someone's watched content reliably.

Welcome to my world. I write software for computing TV ratings, including for DVR and VOD use, and capable of being used for DVDs. It already exists.

I'll quote The Register on why it is sad that you don't think there is anything wrong in this:

Once, we did understand. Twenty-five years ago, Independent science correspondent Steve Connor and I wrote a tome about Britain's Databanks and the effect of growing data processing on civil society. Steve had located Britain's first ever vehicle Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) device, a washing-machine-sized contraption planted on a motorway bridge near St Albans. It heralded the potentially tyrannical ultimate development of a nationwide movement surveillance. We both reached for and proclaimed words from early reviews of data protection laws that had warned that new sensors and new software such as free text retrieval (FTR) raised "new dimensions of unease". A quarter-century on, these words are all but unsayable. The thoughts no longer fit the world.

a growing cadre of Christian scholars who say they want their faith to come into the 21st century

Christianity has already done that. The problem is not Christians, but fundamentalist Christians. I'm an aetheist, but if I were a Christian I would be enraged at the way that fundamentalist Chrisitains identify their particular sect as Christianity in toto, labelling everyone else who also calls themselves a Christian as not Christian.