ASCII is more than 30 years old, it's 51 years old, and I'd bet $10,000 that it will be readable by nearly every computer in another 51 years. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are also highly unlikely to be unreadable anytime during my lifetime since they've been in use for 21 years and are open standards with many real world implementations.

You're probably thinking of floating platform as something that moves around like a boat, more likely it's going to be a converted deep sea oil platform like Broglio Space Centre or Sea Launch.

which we keep buying/making to prop up the ICBM industry with civilian dollars.

More like to feed dollars to Utah as demanded by their powerful senior senator. (ATK's Thiokol unit is based on Utah and Hatch has been seated since 1977 and his predecessor served from 59-77)

River birch survives just fine in my climate here in Northeastern Ohio, we average 1.5m of snowfall and regularly see -23C temperatures with dips about once a decade down to around -35C. We're at the extreme northern end of their range though so it would probably be a crap shoot as to whether it would grow.

You could try river birch if you're subarctic.

Actually the group worst hit WAS in an area where they weren't supposed to be, but they had the attitude of damn gubmint can't tell me what to do. source (among many). If you think these folks would have been worried about higher insurance rates you're almost as loony as they are =)

Especially in Windows 8 where you just assign the connection as a metered connection and most of the background stuff gets turned off without diving any further into the system. (Yes I know tech sites like to bag on Win8, and in many cases deservedly so, but there are genuine innovations that are useful contained in it)

Better to just turn off background mobile data, that way only apps you're actually interacting with will be able to access the mobile data network and you won't have to toggle something every time you want to actually use your plan.

Ads aren't harming you, you trade bandwidth and eyeball time to receive free stuff, and unlike cable tv most apps are either ad supported or paid, precious few require you to pay in both ways.

If you can provide 2kva for 100 hours from 40in^3 you'll have a lot now than $1m coming your way! Heck the Nobel committee alone will give you $2m, $1m each in physics and chemistry.

Amen to this, we run ~400 VM's on 14 hosts, using less than 1/3rd the power we did when we ran 160-180 physical boxes and everything is easier to manage, new deployments take minutes instead of weeks. We've saved a few million by not needing to grow our datacenter, probably over a million on Microsoft licensing, and made both my staff and my customers happier. There's no way I'd run things on old physical boxes just to save a few dollars on capital expenses.

This is why we've got a virtualization first strategy, VMWare HA makes sure even if you lose a box downtime is minimal (and for even more fun use Fault Tolerance and so long as your switches are properly configured you lose nothing since the two VMs run in lock step)

That's not true today, the Moto G and to a lesser extent the Moto E are fine phones, and not everybody is so silly as to waste money on "free" phones with inflated monthly costs. And because the Moto G is such a good phone the competition seems to be upping their game as there were quite a few non-hobbled sub $200 (off contract) phones announced at this years E3.

Spy satellites aren't offensive, they're intelligence assets and good intelligence about equal opponents leads to more peace and calm, not more war. The Cuban missile crisis is a good example of this in action.

If there's a war with another superpower it's all over anyways because any general who see his realtime intelligence assets quickly going away is going to assume it's part of a preemptive strike plan and so will recommend we launch. That's why the idea of blinding the enemy is so dangerous, in a MAD scenario the only thing keeping the peace is the ability to verify that your enemy is not trying to perform a first strike.