No metric is adequate for all purposes. This one is adequate for the task it was designed for, and is adequate for some other purposes as well. That's the best that can be expected of any tool. Always use the appropriate tools for the task at hand, of course.

So you use a VM, marginal cost is near zero for a 4GB VM in todays world.

AWS started as a way to gain revenue from the spare capacity they had for cyber monday, but it's now ~200x the size of Amazon's actual needs and is its own revenue and profit center. If a new CEO wanted to at this point he could spin it off into a separate company with contracts to host services for Amazon. I'm honestly not sure what it would gain you other than access to a pile of capital to use elsewhere, but for the time being Amazon doesn't seem to be hurting for access to capital.

They're not selling goods below cost for the most part, it's just that their expenses eclipse their earnings from sales. This is largely due to capital investments in projects and shipping centers.

Lol, they're less than 1.7% of the retail market, a quarter the size of Walmart and only twice the size of the flailing Sears. Heck, as a percentage of the market they're significantly smaller than the old Sears catalog business used to be.

You don't have to login to use a Chromebook, you can browse as a guest. As to your comment about compilers, MS offers Visual Studio Online Basic for free.

Except Google doesn't track apps for education users.

That's probably a good thing since students shouldn't be static consumers of information and tablets are really subpar for most kinds of content creation. Add in the fact that a Chromebook costs half as much as even an ipad mini and overall the schools are probably making the rational choice.

Wasn't that the incident where they pressure washed the cages of the deceased animals thus flinging infected fluids all over the area?

Reducing cost through optimization of manufacturing can be more important than lots of original research, for instance the recent boom in photo-voltaic solar has much more to do with the plummeting $/W for panels made with decades old technology then it does with the constant stream of announcements that some group has eeked out .5% better efficiency out of cells made of unobtanium. I'm not saying that basic science research or materials science research should be halted, just that people who poo poo people making a better/cheaper widget just because it's not new and sparkly are missing the forest for the trees.

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.

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.