That is exactly what is happening. Here's a blurb from 2013: http://www.businessinsider.com... Apparently VISA shares this data as well. I'm sure it's in the TOS you agree to when you sign up for a credit or debit card. Something like "you agree to let us share anonymized data about your purchases with third-parties to market products and services that might be of interest to you."

And Blink is based on Webkit, which is based on khtml. MS bought Spyglass Mosaic in 1995, twenty years ago. It had been in development longer by Microsoft by a factor of ten. It isn't Spyglass's baby anymore.

Edge isn't practically bad on standards. We aren't in the early 90s anymore. I haven't encountered many differences between Edge and Chrome or Firefox. If anything, I've run into trouble because Safari won't implement certain web standards.

More volatile climate in the short term as Artic Ice recedes faster. In the longer run, warmer winters than by Global Warming alone due.

That is not feesable. It take years to be trained to fly in a spaceship - whether the lifting body like the Shuttle or Dream Chaser, or a capsule such as Soyuz, CST-100, or Dragon V2. You have to build not only the rocket, but a tower to carry the crew to the top of the rocket along with an arm to get the astronauts into the vehicle (which is not compatible/spacecraft). Escape systems need to be installed. It's very expensive, and it would never be built without assurance that the demand is there. At this time, there is no market for launches except from NASA or ESA. Cosmonauts would ride Russian spacecraft, Indians and Chinese are developing their own systems, etc. The public demand is too little at this time. Without a long-term contract, NASA is not enough for your proposal.

Indeed! Russia also requires all telcoms and ISPs, at their expense, to install monitoring equipment of the internet and telephones, This project is called SORM (wikipedia entry for SORM). The system was put into place around 1996-2000, but it has been used as recently as the Winter Olympics (source). It is explicitly a mass-surveillance system, so either Putin is lying or he is bending the truth: Russia doesn't pay for it... but by law the telcoms have to pay it. They don't do illegal wiretapping because it is explicitly legal. And you're right, they might not have the ability to store all that data for long periods of time, but you can be sure they are targeting people. And you can be sure they are targeting foreign governments too (of course). Heck, there were several diplomatic leaks at the beginning of the Crimean crises in order to strain US-EU ties. You can be sure that's due to Russia's intelligence services.

#3 was reported to be a hoax. I don't know whether it is true ir not, but you need to be skeptical if your sources. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/article-2311199/Britam-Defence-David-Goulding-Philip-Doughty.html

Apparently, there has been activity there for at least 850,000 years, which is not particularly young. The 1300-year interval since the last eruption is not long by geologic standards, but there are plenty of volcanoes just in the Cascades that have erupted more recently (Glacier Peak, Baker, Ranier, Hood, St. Helen's, Shasta, Medicine Lake, Lassen). So, Newberry is in the class of "recently active volcanoes", which someone probably simplified to "youngest". Not very accurate, but not terribly misleading, either.

This Newberry Volcano we're talking about. It is active. It may have been 1300 years since the last eruption, but that's nothing for a volcano like this. They aren't drilling into the magma chamber or anything. Induced seismicity is a real thing, but I've never heard of it producing earthquakes that did more than rattle some windows and maybe knock a few pictures off the walls. This is a volcano surrounded by lava flows, so I doubt there are very many people living in the area, anyway.

Good point. Floor strength/floor space are not trivial issues.

I wonder if waterproofing everything is feasible? Containing and excluding water are both hard. I do like the tanker idea. That seems pretty straightforward.

Like many other posters, my first question was why were the generators on upper floors but fuel (and pumps) in the basement? And as soon as I read the answer, it was completely obvious: fire codes. Duh. Thinking of how fuel is stored elsewhere, the only other option I can think of would be storing the fuel outside the building but above potential floodwaters. Not in a place like Manhattan. The price of real estate is much too high for tank farms on stilts. And the earthquake risk in New York is non-zero, so that solution might have the same problems as the current solution. So maybe the answer is that flood-prone urban areas are just not a good place for critical data infrastructure. Is relocating major data centers out of flood-prone areas of Manhattan (and other similarly risky areas) feasible? The potential of a major flood event in Manhattan has been well-known for a long time. Much of lower Manhattan is built on landfill. Did the builders of these data centers include basement flooding + extended power outage in their risk forecasts and just decide to deal with it if it happened?