'We jokingly call Apple the Tesla graveyard. Cook gets our sloppy rejects. LOL'

QuoTW Welcome once again to our smorgasbord of tech quips, quotes and quibbles from the past seven days.

This week, rocket man Elon Musk – a billionaire big-mouthed bloke who regularly features in QuoTW – outdid himself with this delightful swipe at Cupertino.

Important engineers? [Apple] have hired people we've fired.

We always jokingly call Apple the Tesla graveyard. If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I'm not kidding.

And anyway, what does Tim Cook know about anything? Cars are way more complex than smartphones or watches, the Tesla supremo informed us.

Keep up the good work, Elon. No one is safe from your Musky corner of the interwebs.

Elsewhere this week, Volkswagen continued to defend its top execs against claims that they must have known about the company's emissions cheatware ploy, prior to US regulators wading in.

Lies from VW (Olaf Lies, that is) wasn't rolled out for another grilling about what the German car maker's chieftains did and didn't know. But one Horn did poke into view (the firm's American boss Michael Horn, that is) with this under oath claim:

This was not a corporate decision from my point of view. To my knowledge this was a couple of software engineers.

Up, up, up and away from these NO_xious skies, astroboffins continued to be puzzled by dwarf planet Pluto.

This week we learned that the remote, icy world has what NASA has dubbed a “high altitude haze” of red or grey particles – known as "tholins" – that come about as a result of “sunlight-initiated chemical reactions of nitrogen and methane.”

The tholins scatter blue light that in turn brings about a blue sky for anyone stood on the surface of Pluto.

Naturally enough, we now return back down to Earth with an almighty thud with the US government telling world+dog that it was "deeply disappointed" by the European Court of Justice's decision to effectively kill the long-standing "safe harbor" agreement covering the flow of people's personal data across the Atlantic.

US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker had a good old moan about the ruling. She said:

[It] creates significant uncertainty for both US and EU companies and consumers, and puts at risk the thriving transatlantic digital economy.

On the topic of privacy, security and all the nitty-gritty stuff in between, we cross live now to master blabbermouth Edward Snowden.

He's unhappy to have been accused of being a bit, well, talky with officials in Russia where he resides. Snowden, in a theatrical statement, had this to say:

I burned my life to the ground to work against surveillance. Why would I suddenly turn around, because I’m in a different geographical location, and say 'I’m all about surveillance ... that’s what I’d like to do from now on'?

Thanks for clearing that one up, Ed.

And finally, we close out this week's QuoTW with a really wild show. We're told:

It’s very likely that wildlife numbers at Chernobyl are much higher than they were before the accident.

Yup, forget the zombie apocalypse, it's those nuclear wolves you should be truly afraid of – if, that is, they escape the dead zone. ®