imprecision

You can have and use TV and not pay, so long as you can reasonably show you are not receiving live broadcasts (if it ever came to a warrant being issued). Not having it plugged into an aerial and the channel presets not tuned is considered proof enough.

I'd guess with more and more watching via the internet they probably have far more success catching people watch live broadcasts via IP addresses and ISP logs these days though.

I was really surprised how well a modest VM (Virtual box etc) with Ubuntu + X11 + i3 runs. I use that fullscreen in a virtual desktop to switch between host OS and Linux/i3 and am increasingly surprised by how much time I am finding myself in the "simple" VM which flies and the host OS. I've found it a great way to make a simple first step to switching over on the desktop.

Entirely agree with you about the current lack of longer term stable data storage options.

That said, waiting the full duration of a material's projected life span before actual use of that material would limit options hugely, especially with the massively increasing corpus of generated data.

In this sort of context (amount of data) one can spread your bets and use vellum, as well as other methods, until other more stable forms of storage are easily available.

Interesting piece released yesterday related to long term data storage; a projected lifespan of 13.8 billion years doesn't sound too bad... University of Southampton - http://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage-up...