That's odd, that page says the E-4B flies as backup to the VC-25, I thought they used the second VC-25 as the shadow (perhaps if the second one is being worked on they use the E-4B, could be why the order for the VC-25 replacements is 3 instead of 2 airframes?)

Korean Air isn't going to scrap their 10 747-8's.

Plus it's probably easier to add to the 747 Missle defense and reuse the radiation hardened avionics

Yes to the first, no to the second. The 747-8 uses the 787 avionics suite which is an all digital setup, almost nothing is common between the old 747 and the 7474-8 from that perspective.

The only thing they're regulating is how government money is being handed out to telecom companies. You government is evil people are so odd.

Uh, they changed the standard so that those who are milking on the USF can't continue to give their customers 1990's internet speeds with your money...

You can't stream HD video on 4Mbps, you can't get large patches is a reasonable time with 4Mbps, you can't Skype in HD with 1Mbps of upload, it takes forever to seed a cloud backup with 1Mbps (I put a few hundred GB in Crashplan and it took a month, I have more data than that but I had to pick the important data because my upload was so limited), etc.

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.