DVD-R? DVD+R? DVD+RW? Single or dual layer? Gold metallic layer? Silver metallic layer? How are they stored?

Depending on how you answer those questions, your 25 year-old media may be past due and you've just gotten lucky, may be just entering the timeframe where it may die, or may have decades of reliable life left.

DVD-R single layer disks with a gold metallic layer are good for 50-100 years. Other recordable DVD options are less durable, some as little as 5-10 years.

As long as some little bitch keeps modding down my factual posts

All the extraneous bullshit Microsoft added to the start menu is always lurking in memory for performance reasons.

Fear of facts is a sign of cowardice

School issued devices often don't permit installing arbitrary apps, only those on the approved list.

Most iPhone owners didn't buy them outright. They got them "free" with their plan. Consequently out in the real world I commonly see people with old iPhones with cracked screens. They can't afford to replace them, we don't have an Apple store anywhere near here, etc.

The tariff revenues are needed to cover the tax cuts for the wealthy instituted at the same time, so no.

"An employer can only pay the workers what their output is worth, so if your industry is producing things that are difficult to sell, then you're not going to get a good paying job"

You're blaming the victim. If the employer's plan doesn't include paying a reasonable wage then their plan is crap and they need to go out of business so that someone with a better plan can succeed them.

"The experience of Detroit should be a warning to those who believe that this economic law can be avoided; the car makers sold the same stuff year after year whilst Japanese and German producers made ever better stuff."

That's not because they couldn't do better. They chose not to and depended on regulatory capture instead, preventing others from bringing more superior products to the market. Again it's the employer's fault and no one else's.

In Google's case, they're under quite a lot of FTC scrutiny, operating under two consent decrees, and they have an employee population that isn't known for keeping their mouths shut. It's possible that Trump's FTC might not act if he were paid off, but a leak would definitely generate a lot of press.

People who aren't you, but who are near you. They also matter. We all know quite well you don't care about those people, as you've let us know on numerous occasions, but they do matter.

In this case a false denial would put them in violation of two FTC consent decrees, and would almost certainly leak (Google employees are not known for keeping their mouths shut), so it would be a particularly stupid thing to do.

Suck them both.

Of course they didn't say that. They've always been open about doing that for unpaid consumer accounts, it's how they can provide the service for free. If you don't want your the ads, or for your data to be used, you can get that, starting at at $7 per month.

Do they, or could that stuff be on the surface? Pump cold water down, get hot steam back up, run it through a heat exchanger/condenser, cycle it back down again. Or maybe something other than water. You'd lose some heat to the shaft walls, but that could be acceptable.

I think all the maintenance-required parts you're talking about are where the heat is transformed into electricity, plus the safety-related monitoring of the core. With this design, it seems like all of the turbines, etc. will be at the surface, where they can be easily maintained, while the safety-related stuff just isn't an issue. Rather than designing a core that can be controlled and ramped up and down, with this system you'd designed the core to just operate at a continuous steady state for its operational lifetime until the fuel is used up, at which point you just fill in the hole.

You might make the core self-moderating so that if it gets too hot it will ramp down the fission so you don't have to worry about stoppage in the flow of water resulting in a meltdown or similar, but that would only be to reduced the likelihood of the core damaging itself before the end of its useful lifetime, not because there is any safety concern with a meltdown that occurs kilometers underground.