While you were voted down, you were not that far from the truth. The amount of net-taxpayers (as in pay more than get from the state) is around ~30% currently. However, the real ideology behind this is to reduce bureaucracy and that way save money (personally I don't believe it would reduce any human resources, those currently doing the job would just be invented new places like stamping instead).

No, but this seems to be aimed more at Control-M and other scheduling 'frameworks'. Not that these features are enough to challenge CTM, but it's still targeting that one more than it's targeting cron.

That explanation doesn't make it any less obvious or more innovative. It's basically the same issue that retail stores do at different holidays, stock up something that they think is going to be on demand. Somehow this applied to computers makes it innovative?

Certainly true is many aspects, but PDFs aren't one of them. Acrobat Reader works just fine, I use my Touchpad to PDF formatted papers often. There are few key apps missing (but not many to my tablet usage), and the user interface is still something no other tablet can currently provide (it actually uses the advantage of bigger touchscreen, unlike Android Honeycomb for example, which still relies in several places on small icons and stuff that would fit nicely in a small screen). Maybe it was ahead of it's time though.. HTML5 will caught eventually and then tablet could run the same programs, thus removing the need for platform specific programs. But is that too late..?

Not all automatic transmissions lose to a manual. However, conventional automatics do, I'm not arguing that.

As for computer operated manual with dry clutches, that's a different case, and probably something where these big BMWs (which you compared to) have upper hand to Prius' transmission. For example, the M5. Their engine isn't, but that's besides this point.

However, the belt itself is what causes the inefficiency. It's flexibility and slipping causes the power to get wasted as heat. And this number is a lot higher than what a cluth slips.