The title suggests that Google is fighting against distracted driving laws, but when you read TFA, it sounds like they are really fighting laws that ban Glass-like devices which, depending on your point of view, might not be the same thing.

When I'm using my phone to navigate in the car, I have to glance at the phone occasionally. If I had Glass active and it was showing some of the same things, I wouldn't need to look away from the road and (in theory) could be less distracted. IMHO, I would think a blanket ban on the device is premature at this point. If Glass is released to the public and the data shows that it causes problems, the it will be time to start the discussion.

Separating the libraries to run in their own process is one way to get the same effect as different libraries with some benefits (clearer boundaries of each module, the ability to switch components seamlessly, and the possibility of splitting components over difference servers come to mind).

Any socket communication using a loopback address would not be an order of magnitude slower since it never goes out over the wire. There would be some overhead (copying the data from one memory space to another), but not that huge.

Er, the point of the test was to generate page views. But yes, a graph showing the clear winners and losers at the end in the summary would have been helpful. At least with Tom's Hardware, they put a summary of the different pages.