It's semantics really. IUPAC woul say that they are the lanthanides plus yttrium and scandium. I've encountered the term being used more generally (i.e. by non-chemists) to mean anything that's 'down-there' on the periodic table.

I think technically the analogy would be "three different kings of road vehicles called automobiles" (you might think the actinides also counted as rare earths) - but the substantive point that the language is clunky still holds.

This doesn't seem such a huge advance - we've been making elemental maps in STEMs for ages and combining several in false colour images for like also ages. As far as I can tell the new thing is that they're doing this by actually imaging selected portions of an electron energy loss spectra (rather than just recording the spectra point-wise) - I guess this makes it slightly faster to generate the image - but there's not really any new science in this.

So what's the bets that GCHQ is busy helping Apple close all the holes that the FBI is busy using to hack into iPhones....?

Yes well, you'll be asking for carbon free diamonds next I suppose.

Except T-Mobile doesn't charge for this. They just provide a (human and machine) protocol by which content providers can opt in to what amounts to dynamic traffic control. What it is is giving the consumer an incentive (not counting toward caps) for conserving a limited resource (T-Mobile radio spectrum.)

Now, if T-Mobile *were* charging content providers for this service it would be a very, very different matter.

What they are targeting, without kickbacks or other backroom deals, is a service by which users on mobile devices get a downgraded version of a particular service which most likely accounts for 80% or more of their traffic. As long as any provider can opt in without T-Mobile charging them anything more than a reasonable one-time administrative fee I don't see any problem.

I, as a T-Mobile customer, have the ability to opt out which is critical. If I lived somewhere where I could only get slow DSL or no wired Internet at all I might want to be able to stream via the mobile network onto a large screen. Then I pay for the privilege, and that is okay, but as of right now I have Binge On enabled because I don't need high resolution video on my 6" cell phone screen.

Also, consider the number of people who pull up Youtube videos just to listen to music...

No, but it is a unit of electrical charge - and since it's what bateries are conventionally quoted in, it's not a completely stupid thing for a company to quote when announcing a new battery product.
Not knowing the output voltage is not really an issue since you can always stack the cells up in series if they don't give you enough emf - just like you do with pretty much anything that takes more than one AA size battery!

The problem is that if you don't give lots of people the opportunity to find out if they can program, then you tend to miss lots of the fraction that could program to a reasonable degree. People like me in their 40's grew up with 8bit micros and a large fraction of us were exposed to programming - both at school and for many at home (even if that mean typing long listings of BASIC out of magazines and cursing because there was a misprint that resulted in lots of syntax errors). That sort of elementary introduction to programming has gotton lost - now I teach programming to Physics undergraduates and only a tiny minority come to us with even a rudimentary understanding of what programming is about.
The difficulty the government has is that it is easy to make policy and announcements - actually delivering it is rather more complex....

If a skill set is sufficiently rare then it's not very cost-effective to advertise for it on the open market - but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a very valuable skill set.

A number of languages have successfully enacted spelling reforms, so this is nowhere as ridiculous as they make it sound. However, the vast spread of English makes it harder.

With D20s you'd only need three rolls per word (20^3 = 8000).

So, given a reasonably small country with a population relatively well concentrated into population centres and good connectivity, turnout for voting does not seem to be strongly limited by access to polls.... yes, well, perhaps the solution is not addressing the real problem ?

A large number of companies from all over the world set up shell companies in Africa.

10Base-T and 100Base-TX can optionally have "Auto MDI/MDI-X" widely known as auto-crossover. Because GigE doesn't make the distinction between MDI and MDI-X, it is not applicable, although most if not all gigE hardware has mismatched pair detection just in case someone plugs in a crossover cable.