Serious question: how much of that alleged $700k/year-to-mothball is real, hard cash NASA has to spend, vs accounting formalities like "how much would the site be worth if put to its highest and best use" (and taken as a paper loss because the site isn't being used)? Or one-time costs that were incurred for mothballing, but aren't likely to be repeated annually (like shuttering the building, building a fence around it, etc)?

Don't discount the accounting formalities. I once worked for a company where upper management directed us to immediately dispose of about 100 non-obsolete laptops... at a disposal cost of more than $900 apiece. Why? Because they were sitting in a stack in the middle of a mostly-empty datacenter literally covering most of a square block, and some idiot in the accounting department decided that they were costing us $25,000/year to maintain for no reason besides "they're taking up 100 square feet, and we're paying $250/foot per year in rent"... in a building that was about 95% empty & leased for 20 years at the height of the dotcom boom just because "it was there". The fact that even if you take the fictional annual rent for the floorspace seriously, it took more than FIVE YEARS just to break even on the insane disposal fees. And in the meantime, we had to buy new laptops to replace the ones we were ordered to dispose of, because new people were still getting hired. Wait, it gets better. As a matter of policy, we were required to ship the laptops to the disposal center via FedEx. Priority Overnight. Individually. Almost a decade later, I *still* can't grasp how anybody could have possibly thought it was sane, let alone a *good* idea.

Bzzzt. Florida is probably in the best position of any state (besides MAYBE New York) to deal with climate change. Why? Because we haven't had anything that vaguely resembles a natural river or coastline in almost a century. Our coastline is ALREADY fortified against flooding. Drive to South Beach sometime, and notice that West Avenue (the road along the western edge of the island) is already a few feet higher than the surrounding terrain. Then observe that there's another huge berm sitting between Ocean Drive and the ocean itself (the one covered in sea oats with boardwalks over it).

Then, while you're at it, take a peek at the western edge of urban Dade & Broward counties. Notice the HUGE-ass dike that keeps the "Everglades" side underwater, and the "human" side dry & suitable for condos, office parks, and golf courses.

It's the same as the Netherlands. Everyone likes to point to it as a country that's in peril of being submerged, but it's probably the *least* likely country in Europe to even *notice* rising sea levels, because the barriers around it were all solidly over-engineered with plenty of wiggle room to spare. And when the time comes to rebuild them in a century or so, they'll just get rebuilt a few feet higher.

In theory, the answer is a qualified "maybe". Most new laptop discrete video cards connect via mini-PCIe, and I believe there's some anecdotal degree of physical compatibility between Alienware/Dell and someone else (Clevo, I think). As a practical matter, if you you're talking about buying a better video card on eBay that was explicitly designed for your exact model (say, upgrading from the cheapest ATI card to the best Quadro), you'll probably be OK. Everything else is a crapshoot.

Apparently, screw holes are a big, big problem with cross-device compatibility... different laptops put them in different places, even when the electrical interface, shape, thickness, and cooling arrangements are compatible.

There are actually a lot of relatively upgradable laptops out there (as long as you don't insist on one that's a glued/laminated-together 1mm-thick Apple-inspired abomination that's built like a cell phone). The problem is, it's nearly impossible to make any kind of informed purchase decision in advance of actually buying anything. The information you need just plain isn't reliably available until some brave soul tries doing it, takes pics, measures things, and posts the pics to his blog. Thinkpads are somewhat of an exception... but Lenovo made a new mess of their own (and got lots & lots of hate) when they started whitelisting specific mPCIe cards in the EFI BIOS and refusing to enable cards not on the list.

Put another way, there's a lot that can go wrong, and you're at least as likely to burn cash on parts with limited resale value that won't ultimately work, and can often be purchased only used on eBay from sellers who harvested them from broken laptops bought for scrap.

No need for a lawsuit. Just file a complaint with the FTC under the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act, then sit back with a bowl of popcorn and watch the manufacturer beg for mercy. Or ask to speak to the front-line employee's supervisor, and just say the magic phrase that pays: "If you don't fix it, I'm going to file a Magnuson Moss complaint with the FTC". They'll blanche, take the phone, charge the usual deductible if you let them, JTAG-reflash it back to stock, and proceed as normal.

The catch with Magnuson Moss is that the manufacturer is under no obligation to return a rooted or reflashed phone to you STILL rooted or reflashed. They're 100% unambiguously entitled to JTAG-reflash it to stock prior to returning it, even if the newer version to which they reflashed it doesn't have a working root exploit. So, 9 months from now, you COULD conceivably find yourself owning a rooted & reflashed phone with a flaky USB port that's eligible for warranty repair, but will be returned to you reflashed with unrootable Android L and a locked-down bootloader. You'd be stuck between two equally-shitty rocks and hard places... flaky USB with root, permissive SElinux, and ext2 microSD hacked back into the ROM... or working USB, but no root and Google-crippled microSD that only supports FAT32, and restricts what apps can do with it regardless.

They lock down their phones, and in the past they've actively disabled features supported by their phones' hardware to force you to use their premium services (Bluetooth modes, Wifi, and GPS have all been casualties of Verizon's lockdown fetish in the past). Compounding matters, there are lots of semi-rural places where Verizon is the only carrier with viable service (or at least, viable service INDOORS). Verizon was also the only carrier who forced bootloader-locking up until AT&T joined the party last year.

That's why T-Mobile is the carrier everyone desperately wants to love, even in areas where their service is poor. They're the only carrier who DOESN'T lock down their phones & try to restrict what you can do with them.

It's "Don't be Evil".

~15 years ago, Google was "Chaotic Neutral" (openly disruptive, with both lawful and lawless tendencies).

Today, they're more "Neutral Neutral" (they still enjoy being disruptive, but they've been reined in by self-preservation and forced to pay lip service to lawfulness).

Twenty years from now, they'll probably be "Lawful Neutral", with increasingly-frequent side trips into "Lawful Evil" territory (which they'll rationalize and publicly blame on government regulations, even when those regulations are more of a pretense than a legally-binding order backed up by overwhelming firepower and force).

The real danger isn't Eric Schmidt. It's his successor's successor, who (more likely than not) will be a bland, Wall Street-approved CEO with a completely conventional background who'll contentedly fill his role of making Google the government's favorite bitch... as long as he can invoice the feds for the effort, eliminate R&D, outsource everything to Nigeria, and prop up the stock price with annual layoffs and the sale of a division or two, just like every other major corporation in America that's owned primarily by risk-averse institutional investors run by CEOs who went to the same elite universities.

Wireless might be good enough to leapfrog over asshole landlords (and maybe restrictive/corrupt municipalities with hostile neighbors willing to host towers aimed into the restrictive municipality), but at the end of the day, you really need to get real fiber within at least a thousand feet of the end user. The upper microwave band is still mostly empty and has enormous amounts of available bandwidth, but there's a good reason why: at those frequencies, even things like smog, air pollution, humidity, and fog start to seriously mess up the transmission. Hell, back when I had Sprint, I saw my wimax speed literally fall to 10% of normal during driving rainstorms, and their 2.6-GHz spectrum had almost UHF-like propagation compared to what you'd see in a state like Florida from 20-60GHz. Yes, there are a few semi-prime chunks where precipitation isn't as big of a problem... but THOSE aren't the chunks that will be available for wireless broadband, because they were snapped up years ago by companies like MCI for long-distance backhaul. The chunks that are left are vast, but they have propagation characteristics that are more like wireless HDMI (~50 feet, literal line of sight within the same room).

I'm sure you HAVE... but from what I remember, the gNex bootloader wasn't even TENTATIVELY circumvented until February or April of the following year, and wasn't robustly-overcome to the point where owners no longer worried about Verizon pushing an involuntary phone-bricking update on them until summer... ~7 months after initial release on Verizon.

Hence, my second paragraph ;-)

The catch is... nobody really knows for sure WHEN someone will have a working root for bootloader-locked Z3s. It's probably safe to say that SOMEONE eventually will... but it could EASILY be 3-7 months, with no guarantees. And if you DID root the phone, back up the DRM keys, and reflash, you'd STILL probably be fucked if the phone got lost/stolen/broken & had to be replaced under warranty, because the new one would probably be locked in a way that defeated the older root method.

I learned MY lesson the hard way. ~3 years ago, I bought a Motorola Photon fully expecting it to either have a working bootloader unlock that didn't disable Wimax, or for Motorola to become non-evil as a Google-owned company. I will never, ever totally forgive Motorola for the 2.3.4 Trojan non-update they did their best to make everyone THINK was going to be an early open beta of ICS, but REALLY permalocked the bootloader(*) so you couldn't even sacrifice working wimax and unlock it. The phone got angrily thrown in a drawer in disgust, and I went back to using my old Epic 4G for 3 months until I finally got a Galaxy S3 on release day. #Motofail. #Neveragain.

As a direct result of AT&T's decision to lock the bootloaders like Verizon on all new phones, I'll be fleeing the intolerable yoke of AT&T's authoritarianism for the liberating sanctuary of T-Mobile when my new Note 4 arrives in a couple of days.

Galaxy Note 4. Just make sure you buy the T-Mobile version. The Verizon and AT&T versions are pre-crippled with locked bootloaders.

Making a phone that can do both CDMA and GSM, and work on multiple carriers' LTE, is a political and business obstacle caused mostly by Qualcomm's complicity with anticompetitive American carriers, not a technical one.

The radios in these phones are overwhelmingly software-defined (and constrained by limits dictated and imposed by the carriers, the most important of which is "thou shall not support the frequencies of any other US carrier, even if the phone is nominally unlocked"). Even in cases where the RF amplifier might not be optimized for a particular carrier's band, the line between "doesn't work" and "doesn't work as well as it does with other carriers" is a lot blurrier than most people realize. Put another way, it's not rocket science. American phones aren't physically INCAPABLE of interoperating with multiple networks... they're arbitrarily PROGRAMMED to be incompatible.

Huge warning about the Z3 -- Sony implemented a chunk of the camera firmware in a way that causes it to be crippled forever if you unlock the bootloader... and as of at least a few days ago, there was no root exploit that didn't depend upon having an unlocked bootloader. There probably will be one eventually... but you might be waiting a LONG time to get it. Ask yourself whether you'll still be happy with the phone if you end up not being able to root it for months (or ever), and if you'll still be satisfied with it if the low-light performance goes to hell as a consequence of unlocking the bootloader.

Put another way, don't buy a Z3 unless you know beyond doubt there's a working root exploit for it that doesn't require an unlocked bootloader, and make equally sure that the phone you're buying has a ROM that hasn't slammed the door and locked out that root method. You'll still lose a chunk of the camera's functionality for the duration of your use of a custom ROM, but at least you'll preserve the ability to restore the phone back to stock at some future time if desired.

In other words, AT&T and Verizon will sell crippled, ruined, defective-by-design phones with locked bootloaders masquerading as real "Nexus" devices, tainting the brand name as badly as Verizon's Galaxy Nexus did. :-(

My guess is that UDF is probably encumbered by one or more patents that are licensed under terms that allow them to be used for free if the manufacturer already paid the royalties related to the optical disc recorder/media, but would require separate and additional royalties from the manufacturer of any non optical drive. With optical drives, those patents are unavoidable and have to be paid either way. With hard drives & flash drives, they'd be an extra cost that's currently discretionary.