Engineering is a more term incorrect than IT for a development team. Software development is NOT engineering. Check out these related posts:

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I suspect neither the "Head of Engineering" nor anybody he or she manages is actually an engineer with an engineering degree. Seems odd to call a whole department of non-engineers "Engineering". Information Technology seems to be fairly relevant to the roles you described.

The phrase 'IT' is so overused, I'm not sure what it means any more.
It means the same as it ever did, Information Technology, it is intentionally a broad term for an industry. Like "Finance", "Retail", "Automotive", "Medical", etc.

OK, maybe it's an ego thing, but I spent a lot of years in grad school, lots of years getting good at creating software, and lots of years getting good at creating technical products and I don't want the same label as the intern who fixes windoze.
Yes, it's an ego thing; that attitude won't help you earn respect or lead peers. You're no better than an intern starting out fixing computers. In my company there is a distinction between "IT" and "development", who most of the rest of the company considers a bunch of "code monkeys". In a closely related company we partner with, everything is called IT, including development. It's no big deal.

we have to stop referring to all these people as 'IT people' or I'm not going to be able to attract and retain the top-tier talent that is required
I disagree, the best people generally do not have the attitude you do. People who are ego-driven or make a big deal about their title are generally high maintenance under-performers.

Am I just being petty? Should I just forget it? Change it slowly over time?
I think you are being petty and should forget it. If it is a big deal to you then changing it over time is a better idea than confronting the CEO directly about it before you take the job.

Just call them the 'Tech Department' or the 'Engineering Deptartment?'"
I'm not sure I follow here, are you asking a question or suggesting your own answer? Software development is NOT engineering. Just as you are concerned about the overuse of the word "IT", I know many engineers who think the word "engineering" is overused. I suspect none of your advanced degrees are in any form of engineering, and 90% of the people you hire will not be engineers of any sort either.

Unlimited does not mean infinite capacity, nor does it mean they will allow a single user to abuse their resources. Unlimited means there are no artificial limits imposed or quotas that you will hit in the normal course of doing business. If you use up the resources you have purchased (e.g. dedicated server CPU) then that wasn't a "limitation" that was imposed on you; you simply used up the resources you had purchased. When shared servers and bandwidth are the question then yes the definition of unlimited becomes a little more gray, but all the stories of "my account was shut off" is usually attributed to some single significant event or obvious case of abuse.

I'm not saying ISP's shouldn't try to create a more clear definition of what resources they can provide on what account levels, but I am saying that people shouldn't think the word "unlimited" implies infinite resources no matter what. Use common sense.

Chrome supports user scripts, and scripts for all of those things already exist. Check out http://www.adsweep.org/ for one. And it is still "just another browser" like Fx, Opera, IE, etc.

I should probably clarify a bit. I was a hiring manager for many years, and now hiring managers report to me. I'm not suggesting to not engage in the interview and ask questions about job relevant topics as they arrive, I was speaking about asking what generally amount to be HR related questions at the end of the interview (as per original topic) when they "turn it over to you". Hiring managers don't want to sit there and try to remember if the time off for bereavement if your great-uncle who is sick dies next week is 2 days or 3 days, etc.

I read most of the suggested questions above my post on the page and on 70% of them they are not relevant to the job at hand which makes hiring managers roll their eyes, sigh, and try to figure out exactly how needy this employee is going to be and if they're willing to put up with them. So let me change my statement slightly to: ask only duty-specific questions.

The interview is for them to interview you. There may be an opportunity to reciprocate, but don't - the interviewer just wants to finish the interview at that point. If you ask a bunch of questions you may turn them off or change their minds. If they ask, you can just say "not at this time, thank you."

Learn as much as you can about the company before going on the interview, and then be observant when you go to the interview - pay attention to people in the parking lot, smoking at the doors, how the receptionist is, what people are wearing, etc. but don't ask questions during the interview. If they decide they want to offer you a position, that is the time to go back and ask all of your follow up questions.

Without knowing any details beyond what you described, I would say stay away from Megacorp. It sounds like you weren't actively looking for a buyer and if Megacorp never came along you'd be perfectly happy doing what you're doing. When Megacorp gets involved, it will be very time consuming and when the deal is done things will change for you very significantly. When you say "The money is fair enough" I suspect you're not aware of the potential if you create a solid product and succeed in having regular sales on your own. Unless we're talking about money that you all could retire on, in which case forget everything I said above and go for it, then based on the limited information I would say thanks but no thanks, check back in a few years.

I checked out PublicPatent.org and clicked on the "Random Page" link a few times and it seemed to either go to what looked to be a page of spam for some "aaaoe" organization or a page of Chinese characters. All of the AAAOE.COM spam pages follow the same template with different keywords. There were a few other pages that looked like spam as well, I don't think I came across one legitimate article.

The core answer to "are long URL's wasting bandwidth" is no, they are not. The extra bandwidth used is much less than the general background noise of the Internet. There are so many other things that waste more bandwidth than long URL's that it's not worth spending any time worrying about them. Think server headers ("x-powered-by: asp.net" is really annoying), spam, extra email headers, long email threads where the entire original thread is copied each time, un-optimized graphics on web pages, un-optimized javascript/css/html, un-followed prefetching and DNS prefetching, viruses spreading, port scans, etc. The list goes on and on. Watch a raw firewall log on an active connection for about 5 minutes to see what I mean about "background noise". Long URL's can only go to about 2,000 characters (~2KB) before you start running into compatibility issues (IE), and most "long URL's" are much shorter than that even. This just isn't worth worrying about.