The new Samsung slogan should be: " Apple say our products are indistinguishable from theirs. Be smart, pay less, buy Samsung!"

And what requirements this case violete?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Company

For what I known the fastest high level language is Fortran. Besides being the first language high level language and obviously have lots of work of compiler optimization done, it has a very restrictive type system that does not have pointers (or have them in a very restrictive way), so the compiler can do optimizations in arrays that would be unsafe in a language like C.

As shown by the map posted in another link, a lot of the sugar cane is from Sao Paulo, not northeast. There was a lot of subside to create the pro-ethanol program and there was some problems to regulate the prices. (If the price of ethanol is too low in relation with the price of sugar, the producers can prefer to use cane for sugar) But I think it is a positive experience, ethanol can substitute some of the most poluent aditives of gas, and we became less dependent of external oil.

For those that do not known Brazil, the map shows that the majority of the sugar cane is cultivate in southerathern Brasil, in the state of São Paulo, the most developed of our country.

The first two problems are based on the early implementations that were made in Prolog.

The weird syntax is basically result of getting Prolog without unification plus processes, but I don't think is that bad (I first hated it, but after some use I liked it more than Lisp, basically because I like pattern matching more than using car and cdr).

The invariable variables are also from this source. In logic programming, variables can be bounded or not, the implementation search for possible assignments. I'm not sure if these are particulary usefull for Erlang, but similar variables are used by Oz programming language for to obtain deterministic concurrency, also known as dataflow computing, that is a lot easier to reason about and programming than full concurrency.

What makes Erlang relevant is a solid implementation, a well tested VM and many libraries/utilities for the context of distributed programming (unfortunally text processing is not in this niche); and excellent documentation (the concurrent design patterns that they documented and implemented are valuable even if you don't want to program in Erlang).