I disagree - no budget is going to help with time dependant issues or bottlenecks that cannot be "bought off". The most famous and trivial example is bringing a child to term - not happening any faster with ten mothers. Seasonal conditions are another. Production capacity of suppliers is another. Availability of staff is another. I'd say it's only really a major factor when comparing with projects with inadequate budgets.
Run three shifts and some time problems go away but not all of them.

If you want to call yourselves "engineers" without everyone laughing at you there is a need to do things like be able to schedule projects and not be afraid to put in conservative estimates for unknowns instead of what you think the boss would like to hear. If what it takes is a small pilot project to get even a vague idea of how long the real project will take then that's often a more acceptable option than stumbling in the dark until whoever is funding the project runs out of patience.
So, do you guys want to be like (or actually be) engineers or do you want to "shrug" on the job you are supposed to do and leave the time estimates to people with far less of a clue than yourselves. The latter way leads to "death march" projects and nasty ambushes where dismissal for lack of performance can come at an unexpected time simply due to others having no way to measure whether the progress to date is up to expectations or not.
Don't be afraid to take so time out to plot out a timeline and list dependancies instead of giving your boss an instant guess. An answer of "I'll have an extimate by time X" is far better than an instant wild guess of "finish the project by date X" before you've even checked who is available to do the work.

USB to IDE to get to the drive, or boot off an old linux root/boot floppy like Toms rootboot disk, and ftp, or whatever the files over to something else via the ethernet connection you didn't mention (maybe because it doesn't have one), or parallel you did mention (laplink). I'm sure many others have mentioned laplink for MSDOS.
Remember you don't have to be in the native OS or even the native hardware when all you really want is the files on the disk.
Another alternative, if there is an ethernet connection, is to go full knoppix - it isn't all that hard to run knoppix on one machine as a PXE server to boot up knoppix on a machine with no cdrom.

Last I heard, Australia wasn't located anywhere near Moscow.

Closer than the US by Abbott - when Putin turned up at the G20 the expected confrontation over the airliner didn't happen - Abbott instead quietly had a photo opportunity with Putin and Koalas then called the President of the USA a liar over fairly tame comments about the barrier reef.

However, odd diversions into irrevent sidetracks about terrorists aside, the NSA do not respect the constitution so legality does by definition not apply to the situation. They want to punish Snowden and don't care if it's done with reference to the courts or not - "justice" Chinese style.

You've missed the point that the above poster was doing mindless ethnic profiling like the Irish jokes, Black and White Minstrels etc of the past. I suppose I should have stated it directly instead of gentle mocking.
The economic collapse in Greece owes more to a greedy few getting financial advice from Goldman Sachs and believing in a quick buck with no consequences, than a work ethic or lack of one in the majority.
It's not a Greek racial trait of laziness just as there is no Irish racial trait for stupidity despite how popular jokes about stupid Irishmen used to be in the USA.

I'd say that SunView has far more contrast with the icons so they are far more distinguishable than what we've been shown with Win10 so far.

It could be worse.
There could be no icons at all but somehow you are expected to know to go to the corner and then they will pop onto the screen.
Oh, that bit of stupidity is already in use isn't it?

If 95%+ of scientists agree with each other ... and are NOT all paid by the same corporations ...

but the scientists who disagree with them ARE all (100%) paid by the same corporations ...

I think you're implying bias on the wrong side.

They've got the inherent problem that transmitted light through an LCD is going to look more vivid than reflected even if the quality reaches glossy magazine levels.
I'd still get such a display if the device has real keyboard input, just for the daylight readability and battery life, but I don't see the mass market abandoning LCDs that provide images that look much better than something that isn't backlit.

As for the icons the ones on the Jetbook Color ereader for the education market do have drop shadows and similar things to make them far easier to see than the examples of Win10 icons that have been put up. It's a reduced range of hues but not limited so much that it can't already do better than those icons.

You can make Win7 look very much like Win2k instead of an attempt to clone a pre-2000 enlightenment WM theme (right down to the little snapshot windows - how cute).

It's not ridiculous if it doesn't offer any obvious advantage over what you have and you also think it looks ugly.
With Win7 vs XP (don't mention the Vista) there were plenty of obvious improvements, such as a higher memory ceiling, that meant looks were not so important. When there are not then trivialities can be enough that it's not worth change.
One last thing - removing the entire OS is not a big deal if you've only just started using it and can easily go back to something else.

we don't really use many trains

How do you think all of that new shale oil is moving around? No pipelines yet from those areas, so among many other things that it's a matter of using many trains. A couple of recent accidents with trainloads of oil should have highlighted that.

well that just shows ignorance of US exports in that sector

Actually the reverse is the case, which should be obvious even from that single example - being aware of other sources of equipment is obviously knowlege and not ignorance if this was being discussed at a level above that of a high school debate.
I suggest less flag waving, less schoolyard insults and more being aware that problems are arising that should be dealt with.

Export leaders included: construction machinery, engine equipment, turbines and turbine generator sets, and agricultural equipment.

A major problem with all of those areas mentioned is not leading in quality (which aerospace can still do) and not leading on price so a chance of losing at both ends. As the German equipment gets cheaper and Chinese equipment improves in quality where does that leave the US equipment unless it can better compete in either of those two situations? Being complacent and attacking obvious examples of abandoned industries - without appearing to notice that it was put up deliberately as an example of what happens when complacency sets in with an industry - is not going to get us anywhere.

By the way, the pretended stupidity over the train example is rather pathetic and is best left behind in a school playground. Using it as an attack vector with the ridiculous " existing horse-drawn carriages are state-of-the-art" and pretending to be far too stupid to see the obvious just so you could sling mud at someone achieves little other than making your other words look utterly worthless. Such silly posturing over a couple of simple examples is worrying.

My point is that close to 100% of the "irreplacable" technology already has non-US made replacements available. There is no longer a techology gap or a capability gap.
It's no longer the "land of the future". It's the place where the not even the trains are as good as Japan had in 1968. Competition then has to rely upon quality instead of complacency because somebody can always get an alternative at the same "level of technology" that can do the job.

Greece? Wow. Got anything to say about people with dark skin or Jews as well? How about the Irish?

to get the Greeks to work hard

When I was growing up Greek migrants in my area effectively demonstrated the definition of working hard. I'll bet it was the same where you live as well.
Sometimes posts here just reveal far too much information about the poster and nothing at all about the topic at hand.