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.

No, they're there to cater to a couple of UI designers' whims, which is how we got an interface that none of the users wanted.

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.

That's not what everything I've read about the disaster has said. The mountain has gone through cycles - whenever it collapses, the river gets moved away, and the slides stop for a time, but eventually it wears away the footings enough that it falls again. They'd even tried to prevent landslides there by manually shoring up the base back in the 1960s, but it just flowed over their reinforcements.

The waterlogging of the soil is also a necessary factor too, mind you - not saying otherwise. :)

I had paperbark birch seeds, which are also pretty water tolerant (though not as much as river birch), but none sprouted - ironically I think the seeds were too wet when I stratified them (same with my maples). Isn't river birch (B. nigra) a warm-weather birch species? I've got some cuttings of random local birches from a neighbor but I have no clue whether any of them are water tolerant enough to take swampy ground. Also birches don't usually get that tall so I don't know how expansive of a root system they'll put down. The abundant local species B. nana (dwarf birch) grows (nay, volunteers) readily here almost anywhere that sheep don't graze, but it's just a shrub, I doubt it'd do the trick (though it's probably better than just grass). It can take wet soil, although not totally swampy conditions.

For the wetter areas I also have about a dozen or so western redcedar seedlings - they're not as swamp-tolerant as dawn redwood and western recedar, but they're still reportedly quite tolerant of wet or even waterlogged soils, and they should be more cold/wind hardy than those two (wind is actually the big issue, it doesn't really get that cold here). I've also got a number of other pacific northwest trees with varying degrees of standing water tolerance. Oh, and a species or two of tasmanian mountain eucalyptus (don't remember which ones) that tolerate fairly swampy ground and should at least stand a fighting chance against our winds.

Basically, I'm just going to plant a ton of stuff and see what survives. ;)

One plus is that where the ground is persistently wet and at landslide risk, it is slowly flowing water, it's not standing. It's constantly replaced by fresh, cold ground-filtered water, so there's probably not as much risk of root rot as might be common otherwise. But there's still the oxygen issue. That and the damned sheep, but I'm working to fix that issue once and for all...

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 =)

Are trees supposed to eliminate the river at the bottom that's been eating away at the foundation of the slope?

The challenge is a challenge. The goal is clearly to produce usable power, not to need more filtering. While the requirements for this contest don't require grid-tie, that's something that can be implemented later.

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.

The 'pedia says that it's an ancient delta of glacial sand that was subsequently exposed to a lot of water flow, washing out the silt and clay, leaving just the loose sand and gravel with nothing to cement it together.