A client in the construction/demolition industry tells me that tablets are popular with those guys.

No, this is really an absurd profit, Standard Oil's net profit from 1882 to 1906 was $838,783,800 equal to roughly $22B today, so on an inflation adjusted basis Apple's quarterly profit was nearly equal to the majority of the lifetime profits of one of the classic robber baron trusts.

The problem is the previous build was visually different while being MORE functional, this build is less functional if you have 19+ years of Windows experience. The previous build had the Windows 7 Start Menu with the addition of a live tiles dock area to the right, it added new useful functionality to the familiar and functional paradigm, the new build is basically a shrunk version of the Start Screen with all the crap that entails and which the majority of users have derided as being less functional on desktops (still the VAST, VAST majority of Windows machines). We had actually started plans for a Windows 10 rollout to our enterprise based on earlier tech preview builds, but those are now on hold and will be cancelled if they don't reverse the insanity. We can just keep using Windows 7 for the next 5 years.

Many posts suggest doing away with the cable by putting the motor on the elevator car; but this overlooks the fact that the elevator needs to be connected to a counterweight for efficiency reasons.

However, here's a thought: you put motors on the elevator *and* the counterweight. As the elevator goes up, the counterweight goes down and uses its motors as generators to partly power the elevator's motors. And vice versa.

Sure, you're not going to break even due to electrical losses; but it'll be a damn sight better than no counterweight.

And how do you handle the counterweight? What's that? You don't actually understand how an elevator works?

The other major problem I see is that this thing will have so many holes in it within months that there will be significant distortion to the image. Perhaps they'll use a self-healing material? In fact a quick google shows these students are working on testing such a material on a micro-sattelite.

According to this study reentry speeds are up to 9.5km/s so keeping relative speed to something in that range should not be hard at all.

A 2km spherical asteroid of average composition will have a mass of ~1.3 x 10^13kg, the energy of the B53 is ~3.8 × 10^16 Joules which for maths purposes we can assume is delivered in 1 second so an an imparted energy of 3.8*10^6N which gives an acceleration away from the blast site of ~2.9m/s^2 which should be easily sufficient to avoid impact if it's delivered with any time lead.

Delta IV Heavy + deep impact targeting system + B53 = 9MT wherever you want it on the asteroid. The B53 is already hardened for use as a bunker buster so as long as you can keep relative velocity at impact similar to the reentry speed it was designed for you don't have to worry too much about where you land it on the asteroid.

Which brings up an interesting point, the WH doesn't seem to have an intermediate defense against things like small aircraft, cruise missiles, or mortars (the IRA attacked #10 downing street with mortars). I wonder why they don't add CIWS to the roof as a complement to the manpads which are intended for larger aircraft?

To be honest he said 15 years of his life which means he may have start before Dish became spammers (not sure how long their scummier business practices have been around since I have a mental filter on snail mail spam that gets immediately recycled and my home phone is given out to noone who doesn't absolutely need it like our local schools or our doctors office).

Whatever fines are collected should be distributed to the people
They are, in a much more efficient way that cutting everyone a check, by lowering the amount of taxes which must be collected or the debt that must be incurred by the federal government.

Where Muslims dominate government, law becomes Sharia sooner or later. That is not a world in which you and I will be permitted to believe whatever we want to believe, and if we insist upon it, one in which we will not be permitted to exist.

Perhaps you missed the bit of history where Spain was controlled by Muslims for nearly eight hundred years with Jews and Christians living freely and being left to practice their own religion, and then they were kicked out and the Christian leaders that replaced them forced the Jews out under penalty of death if they did not convert or leave?

Even if we assume that for every active terrorist there is 100 people supporting them (a high estimate, but not outside the realm of possibility at all), we're still talking about only hundreds of people.

Well, official estimates say that some 1,200+ people have left France to join jihadist groups in Iraq and Syria so I'd say your estimates are quite low in how many support the terrorists ideals, 1,200 people have been so enraptured by the same ideals that they have left their homeland to take up arms in a distant country, how many more must there be that support them but haven't been so moved yet as to actually take physical action? I think the problem is much, much larger than your musing imply, and it's something that needs to be talked about and dealt with. Is every muslim in the west a terrorist? No, of course not. Have the majority of terrorist attacks against the west in the last 2 decades been perpetrated by extremist muslims, yes.

There is NO software vendor that offers longer support than MS for free, not one. There are only a handful of products that even offer a supported lifetime longer than 10 years which is the MS standard, and of those the longest other than IBM's mainframe OS is 12 years. This isn't about extortion, it's about the realities of the software industry and the inability of companies to profitably support the very longest of long tails.

Just like with the AC unit, the vendor isn't telling you you may no longer use the product, they're merely telling you they will no longer offer support for it, if XP continues to work for you, then that's fine keep running it, but it won't be updated by MS just like the manufacturer will no longer offer warranty extensions or out of warranty repair parts (although for at least 3 more years MS will support 2003 if you sign a custom agreement and pay them high 6 to mid 7 figure annual support contracts). I've seen CNC machines running MSDOS in the early 2000's, many many years after MS stopped supporting the OS, so it's not like the software just dies at the EOS date.