You don't know much about Norway then... Norway has always been big on fishing, relative to their small population.
In recent decades they have become big in fish farming.
It is the higher intake of land-animal protein in the last hundred years that is the anomaly in the big picture, not the recent introduction of "meat-free Mondays".
Also, beans don't have to be imported. There are varieties of beans and peas and other plants that contain protein that grow just fine in Norway.

I have friends in the R2 Builder's Club that have pressured me into building one.
It would be cool, but I don't have the time or space for the build. Too many projects already...

I think that the fear at the top has come from the realisation that the way the US works is unsustainable in the long term. I am thinking primarily of the debt-based economy that is based on economic growth to function, the large dependence on oil and the effects of global warming becoming more apparent.

These are smart people. They understand that change from post-WWII model is inevitable and that this change may not come easy.
There is a large probability of future social unrest, riots and organised armed resistance against the ruling caste, so they do what they think is necessary for them to retain control of the country in the future. This is what I think is the real reason behind the de-democratisation of USA.

There is study and then there is practical training. What you are describing is study.
I don't think that military pilots spend six months reading books on how to use the helmet-mounted HUD. The use it practically, under supervision from instructors who have experience in how it should and should not be used.

If you continue to bitch about it, then I will politely have to punch you in the face.
By wearing Google Glass, you are inviting me to do it. Asking you politely before punching you is more courtesy than you deserve.

... and money is what drives the US government.

And, for many years, if you expressed public outrage against the establishment, the establishment branded you a "communist", later "unpatriotic", or in Snowden's case "criminal".

A system can not be "public" if it is discriminating against people who don't carry mobile phones that can run the app that is required.

Have you seen how many sizes of barrel plugs there are out there? ;)
Here is an example for you.

And we haven't started talking about voltage or AC/DC yet.

The power cable is to provide power for the phone, so that it can be charged while you play videos from it.
You can't charge a phone over HDMI. If you need a Micro USB-to-HDMI interface for your phone, then it is likely that your phone doesn't have another port through which it can be charged. I have never seen a phone with more than one Micro-USB port ... have you?

There are two "standards" for video over Micro USB but neither is actually using any USB protocol.
The devices do some tricks to discover that they should both use the fast video protocol, and then they do that.

Video over Lightning is more like video in packets over real USB, at low bandwidth. The phone compresses the video signal before sending it over to the dongle, which decompresses it and translates it into HDMI.
That is also the reason behind the high price of the dongle.

You're thinking of Thunderbolt, not Lightning.

The "64-bit" Intel and ARM have more to do with new instruction set architectures than the size of a processor word or the address space.
The new instruction sets are more capable than the ones before, not just in the larger size of pointers and words but also in other ways, such as in the number of registers. For instance, ARM's "64-bit" ISA has 32 integer registers instead of 16.

MIPS32 is already a very capable instruction set, with 32 integer registers from the start. The 64-bit MIPS instructions is just an extension, not a replacement as on ARM and Intel.

When I saw the header, I thought that the rocket engine would have 3D-printed cooling ducts around its nozzle. It is something that Apollo / space shuttle - sized rocket engines have, but which can be quite complex. This engine doesn't.

The same 3D-printing process used here is commonly used for making steel moulds for injection moulding, particularly because 3D-printing can create cooling ducts in the moulds which are impossible to machine with current methods.

Now that Steve Jobs is gone, Apple need another Reality Distortion Field Generator. Why not think big? ...

I see Chromebooks as:
1) For those who want to serf the web casually but prefer mouse and keyboard over touchscreen interfaces.
2) A proper netbook, as it was supposed to be. The first netbooks were quite similar to the Chromebook concept, a legacy-free system with a small (often Linux-based) OS that wasn't too taxing on the machine. Then Windows hijacked the "netbook" concept and made them into underpowered Windows PCs instead.

That said, I really don't see any reason why we shouldn't be able to also run touch-oriented Android apps on the ChromeOS desktop.
Google, go show Microsoft how it should be done!