We only have permanent bases in countries that have welcomed us, with open arms, to build those facilities.

The Germans and Japanese certainly welcomed us with arms, but I wouldn't call the the welcome "open", more like "open fire".

Who says it was the cash register receiving e-mails? It may well have been the back-end server, which, for small businesses, could easily be a regular PC, maybe even dual purposed as the owner's workstation.

I can routinely cause a BSOD (about 1/3 of the time) on my HP laptop running Windows 7 Pro if I use the touchpad at the log-in screen on start-up. It's apparently a known bug in the touchpad driver that will not get fixed.

Somehow, many people are reading the question as "How do I create a permanent network for these pumps" where I believe he's asking "How do I hook up temporary cables from my laptop to multiple pumps in a way that lets me update them all at once?"

A station has only one pump per grade of fuel (although in some rare cases of multiple tanks even when they are connected together they may have 2 pumps per grade of fuel).

Actually, it can go either way. You can buy dispensers with built-in pumps - one pump per dispenser per fuel type, with suction piped to the tanks, or you can drop a pump into each fuel tank, with discharge piped to the dispensers. You do have to be careful about minimum positive suction head if you go with a dispenser-mounted lifting gasoline from an underground tank. Cost and complexity can make the fewer tank-mounted pumps a better solution for large installations with a lot of dispensers, anyway, but it is not unheard of to have pumps installed within the dispensers for small installations.

On the commercial/industrial side, it is quite common to use demand-limiting software to help reduce energy costs taking into account time-of-day and demand charges. Sometimes energy storage is used for those purposes, also, though that requires a bit more thinking ahead and may be more difficult as a retrofit.

You're right when you say that the idea of pre-heating a clothes dryer is stupid. But I have to make a correction on the refrigerator: Most of the "cold" of a refrigerator is not lost when the doors are open (unless left open forever), even if you exchange 100% of the cold air in the refrigerator with room temperature air. Most of the "cold" is held by the mass of the food and other things inside the refrigerator.
That said, you can't really pre-chill an off-the-shelf refrigerator without having a lot of issues with frost and freezing. And the main energy consumption of an efficient, well insulated refrigerator is the work done when you put warm things inside to it cool them down.

domestic cats . . . are biggest cause of bird death . . .

Small songbirds, yes. Bald eagles, not really.

"exacerbated" - look it up. (not that I think GP makes such a great point)

The author of TFA doesn't have a clue. This idea is useless as bridges, particularly suspension bridges, deflect by much more than 1 cm under traffic and wind loads.

I think the aouthor of TFA knows that:

Forget cursive handwriting (after 15 years of manual drafting in all caps, followed by 15 years of using CAD at work, I certainly have) pencil & paper still works much better than a tablet or laptop for writing out problems & solutions in algebra, geometry, trig, calculus, etc.

Case closed.

When I did some work for a financial company, the head of operations told me that the department handling collections of bad debt was the most profitable - because by the time the account got to them, the money was already written off and anything they collected counted as pure profit.

I must be missing something.

Aircraft operate in 3 dimensions, trains operate for the most part in one - which implies that there is much less of a chance of 2 planes being at the same place at the same time than 2 trains being at the same place a t the same time. The airplane autopilot flies at certain altitudes depending on the path, and if the plane stays at the assigned altitude, there is almost no chance for crossing paths. Trains going in different directions share tracks in a lot of places, and they can't move out of the way of each other - timing is everything in train safety (hence we have a few time zones rather than hundreds of local times)

Well, if you couple the gps to the odometer, that should work most of the time, even with brief gps outages.

Most of the time isn't considered good enough for train safety. Unlike the interstate, there aren't dedicated lanes going each way - there are a lot of single tracks sharing traffic going in both directions.