I'm pretty sure the person you are responding to wasn't implying that Chinese was obsolete; rather they were saying that some Chinese names contain ancient symbols. Sort of like how you could (in theory) run into an english speaking person whose family is positively ancient; their first name might be entirely in ASCII characters, but their last name might contain ancient/obsolete letters/symbols, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86 (the combined AE symbol). Depending on what exactly you are using the names for, it may not be correct to translate an old symbol into a newer one.

High strength to weight ratio, I believe.

With an umbrella on it, to ensure it doesn't overfill.

This is in Washington State; it never stops raining.

It involves lots of U-turns.

The lasers that one typically talks about using to clean up space debris are powerful enough to outright vaporize paint flecks and other small junk. On larger bits it vaporizes a portion of the material, producing thrust and hopefully changing the orbit enough that the junk hits the atmosphere and burns up.

Well, if we detected the explosions on the surface of the planet, we might have evidence that intelligent life used to exist there. But in theory they could be using an Orion type nuclear pulse rocket and we could detect those.

The (somewhat) sad thing for those of us that program is that the market price for software that isn't a custom built-to-order job is roughly $0.00. I haven't heard of any good solution to this either, though presumably some sort of "money first" or "money held in escrow" would work.

For a space elevator to be practical, we need a way to produce an extremely strong tether in huge lengths. Last I heard, the longest we were able to grow a carbon nanotube (which has roughly the required strength we need for the tether) was about an inch. So in other words I don't think people have forgotten about the space elevator (or other alternative launch technologies), but they are waiting on improvements in material science.

Why would someone build a house in a cold climate whose pipes couldn't be drained by gravity alone? My parents didn't even live in a cold climate, and our garage and house could be completely drained during the winter by gravity alone (with one underground exception) if need be.

No, there is a second limiting range, roughly 300 blocks or so. It is at this point that the chunk of land is taken out of memory and written to disk, so its state cannot change.

There are no methods for doing so which are both lawful and effective.

It is called "voting".

Seriously, get a like minded group of people together and work to change the law(s) you don't like.

"Also, why take up valuable satellite and computer resources to track ice floes? If there is free time on those platforms, it is a failure of CIA management to properly schedule them for tasks that are a part of that agency's objectives."

I suspect that most spy satellites are in polar orbits, so that they cover the entire Earth's surface once every 24 hours, as the Earth rotates underneath them. Assuming this is the case, then most of the time the satellites will not be over an area that is of interest to the intelligence community, so scheduling scientific photographs during that period (assuming they happen to be over an area of scientific interest) makes use of a satellite that would otherwise be doing absolutely nothing.

As for taking up valuable computer resources, I don't think that is really a problem. The communication antennas cost the same if they are being used or if they are not being used, so the only real costs to taking these images are the electricity used to power the receivers and the ground-side servers that store the images, and the cost of any personnel-hours required to declassify an image. Frankly, they might have the entire declassification process automated: if the picture is not of a predefined sensitive location, lower its resolution and send it off to the scientists.

I'll have to take a peek at EO

> For a brand new product vs an iconic powerhouse, that is little short of amazing.

I look at it the other way: a brand new product SHOULD be doing well compared to a similar product that is three years old and is largely unchanged.* "Iconic powerhouse" or not, a new product should be doing SOMETHING other than just sitting there getting crushed.

* Other than GPS, videorecording, and 3rd-party apps--which OTHER smartphones had BEFORE the iPhone was even out (so their introduction, while nice, wasn't earth-shattering)--little new of substance has been added to the iPhone since its introduction in January 2007. (Plus faster networking and a better camera and more storage, but that's just "it gets incrementally faster/better over time" like ANY technology.)