We Canadians, you're neighbours to the north, also recorded record heat and record (lack of) rainfall in July.
Hopefully August will be better. As I type this, it's been raining heavily for the last 20 minutes. We've had more rain in the last 20 mins here in Ottawa that we've had the entire month of July. I'm pretty sure I heard my grass cheering.

Pressed music CD's DVDs are not the same as the ones you use to burn. Pressed CDs/DVDs are not made of the same materials as those used for burning, and will last decades if properly taken care of.
For CDs/DVDs used for burning, the first couple generations of these (when you were paying 2-5$ A DISC) were made of much thicker material and most of the stuff I burnt in the 90s on these types of discs are still readable today. However, with cheap discs came cheap/slim material, which are greatly affected by disc rot. I have some CDs and DVDs that I burnt just 2-3 years ago that are unreadable due to disc rot. If you hold them up to a light you can see the holes.

That being said, you can buy archival DVDs & CDs. The companies claim they will last 100 years if stored properly. I use them to back up my pictures. Those should be sufficient for the time capsule. Burn 3 or more copies to ensure greater chances of being to read everything.

HBO, Nick and Food Network are Canadian versions of those channels. They're not the US feeds. HBO is broadcasted by TMN with some canadian content. I believe Food Network Canada is owned by Rogers. I'm not sure who owns Nick. There's also no Canadian provider that carry SyFy. There is Space (Canadian channel, owned by Bell) which has a lot of the same programming, but again, it's not the US feed you're seeing.
 

That would be because the levy on media is for music only. Movies, games, software, books etc.. do not fall under the blank media levy, and are still very much illegal.

I used Costco (Canada) to have my digital pictures developed. Their online service is very simple to use, and you can even directly import your pictures from Facebook and Picasa. The prices are very reasonable, at 8 cents for 4x6. If you want more than pictures, they also turn your photos into photobooks, canvases, etc...
I've been using them for years and haven't had any issues whatsoever.

I used to play 3-4 hours a day. But then I got married, bought a house (which requires some work apart from the usual), had a kid (now 2) with another one on the way. Although I greatly enjoy video games (mostly of the MMO/RPG kind), if I can play 2-3 hours in a week I count myself very lucky. I think it's been over a week and a half since I last played. Once my kids are a little older, I'm hoping it's something that we can do together.
 

DC has a line of comics aimed specifically to kids called DC Nation. http://dcnationcomics.kidswb.com/. Young Justice, Superman Family, etc.. You can even read some of the comics free online, to see if your kid will like them before you start buying issues/TPBs. My son is 2, and I hope that he will have a similar love of comics that his old man does.

Or you know, stick the car in neutral. So what if you might blow the engine? It would give you time to pull the car to the side of the road and exit it long before things started to go bad.

At work we have over 600 servers spread across many cities, so we don't use any 'fun' names. The name has a standard of including city/location, function and number. Not our choice, this was enforced by a previous manager a few years ago. Even though location and such is all tracked in an inventory database, it is a little helpful to know where a server is located/function without having to look it up. Long ago, when we only had 50-60 servers and a different manager, they did have names based on celestial bodies and sports teams (weird combo, I know). Now with virtualization the function part isn't really useful, so we'll probably have to come up with something new, but meh, that's a story for another day.

At home however, my machines are named after the Endless/characters from Sandman. Destruction for my gaming rig, my SANs are named Lucious and Destiny, my main (non gaming) PC is Morpheus, wife's PC is Desire, etc.. etc.. I try to match the function with the appropriately matching character.

I thought Doctors didn't die, they just regenerated? Unless of course they were killed while regenerating.

Having a 1 1/2 yr old son, I went thru the same questions you have. This is the working solution that I currently have in place.

1) Running a DLINK DNS323 SAN, in raid mode. This is the main repository.
2) Purchases 2 external 2TB USB drives. I keep one here at home. Every 2-3 months I copy pictures/videos to one, bring it to my parents place and bring back the other one. Rinse and repeat every couple of months. This also protects me from losing pictures if the house was robbed, caught fire, etc..
3) Every 6 months or so I also get selected pictures professionally printed. Usually anywhere between 50-100 pictures. They are then stored in nice photobooks.

Last Xmas I also surprised my wife with a professionally done photobook, with pictures celebrating our first dates up to the first 6 months of my son's life. She really treasures that gift.It can get pretty expensive (100-200$), but oh so worth it.

For the first 10 or so years of Costco's existence in Canada (mostly known under the name Price Club), you could only get a membership if you worked for the government (federal of provincial) or were a business owner. The primary account holder could also add 2-3 people to their 'membership. So what's happening in the UK isn't something new.

Missing option:

-Not American. Don't really care/have a voice/have an opinion

When there's US centric polls, there's sadle never an option for those of us not in the US. Slashdot is read by people outside of the confines of the United States ;)

Having recently had a hand in buying new Sun/Oracle hardware, I can attest that prices did not directly go up, BUT the discounts offered to corporations have gone down. For example (using fake numbers) we used to get a 20% discount on hardware purchases, but now only get 10%.