Some HDD sizes are now cheaper than before the Flood. The 3TB 3.5" models should definitely be cheaper, simply because the technology has matured with the move from four platters to three 1TB platters. Increased areal density has also pushed down the cost of 1TB 2.5" (laptop) drives.

I'll wait for 500GB SSDs to go down to the prices of today's 120GB SSDs before making the plunge. I have a 750GB 2.5" HDD installed on my SFF desktop, with about 300GB of data that can be moved to an external drive.

I'm also looking at installing mSATA SSDs, which cost about the same as full-size SSDs. With the graphics now built into the CPU and mSATA, I'd have almost the entire system on the motherboard, making it easier to just unplug the PSU when changing desktop cases.

Typhoons, earthquakes, a couple of volcanoes and comrade Kim (who's probably God to some people), Japan is not the best neighborhood for a high-energy project. The best location is probably still Europe, and not the US, Russia or China, among the most paranoid countries in the world.

... the impacts were on the near side of the Moon ...

The summary is wrong then. Copy-pasta of the summary at time of posting:

The twin spacecraft were running low on maneuvering fuel and NASA, not wanting the crafts to fall on historical sites such as the Apollo landing sites, redirected their flight patterns to impart the far (dark) side of the moon.

Apparenlty, the near side is the darker side because of the lunar maria, which

are less reflective than the "highlands" as a result of their iron-rich compositions, and hence appear dark to the naked eye. The maria cover about 16 percent of the lunar surface, mostly on the near-side visible from Earth.

Apple and Microsoft aren't the only companies in the industry.

If that's the case, why not just publish at an open-access site?

If I'm not mistaken, the US is the world's top weapons exporter. US agriculture can also be considered a form of manufacturing (genetic engineering). So it's not entirely dismal.