I recently special-ordered a desktop computer for my very-computer-illiterate mother (a retired musician) and somewhat-computer-illiterate father (a retired lawyer) to use, to avoid confusing them with Metro. Meanwhile my niece (I'm too old for my "little sister" to be relevant) has no trouble at all dealing with the traditional Windows Explorer desktop (though she prefers her Mac, which is mostly the same) because she grew up with it. In fact, it's the only interface she's ever known, which makes replacing it a bit problematic. It's way too late in the game to start worrying about a dumbed-down UI for computer illiterates.

Why didn't you list DOS 2? Oh yeah, because it was hugely popular (for its time), thanks to its support for hard drives with subdirectories. Not as widely deployed as DOS 3 would be, but far from a flop.

You're correct that DOS 4 flopped. That's one data point. (And really, that was IBM's failure, not Microsoft's.)

DOS 6 was widely adopted, replacing DOS 5 (which had little to recommend it except that it wasn't DOS 4) and living a long and productive life under the 16-bit versions of Windows.

Windows 98 enjoyed quite a bit of success, and (except for being a trojan for IE4) deservedly so; 98SE was the Windows that people stuck with on their older hardware rather than installing the resource-hogging Windows XP. Perhaps you were thinking of the deservedly-reviled Windows ME, which followed it?

You're also correct that Vista and Win8 have been flops. So that's three data points, but non-consecutive. Microsoft's success/failure pattern isn't quite as simple as you misremember.

This is not just nature. Isle Royale's ecosystem was disrupted when Europeans came to the region and started trying to strip it of mineral, forest, and animal resources. In the early 20th century we turned most of it back over to nature, but by then the some of the major indigenous species (and the peoples who hunted them on a small scale) had been wiped out. Most importantly, the coyotes are gone, and moose have moved in to replace the caribou. The wolves (and the foxes that remain) have filled the coyotes' niche as predators, but because of the increasing difficulty of reaching the island from the mainland, they've had difficulty establishing a viable population. This is something "we" screwed up.

There's a lot more than the wolves that draws people to Isle Royale. (Most people who visit the island never even see a wolf. I consider myself lucky to have glimpsed one briefly, as it tracked a moose and her calf.) Visitors come for the trails, the moose, the fishing, the scenery, and the relatively solitude. Losing the wolves would mean that the island would lose a little mystique, but far more important would be the long-term repercussions on the island's ecosystem.

Global warming isn't "to blame" for this situation, but it is a factor: the infrequency of ice bridges between the mainland and the island has grown because of it. The real "blame" is more general human interference.

The summary is misleading in suggesting that new wolves have come to Isle Royale fairly often. They haven't (I think there were only two documented migrations) which is why this ongoing study has been so scientifically useful: the island has been a (mostly) closed system for decades, allowing scientists such as Rolf Peterson to track the system without too many external variables. Before the wolves arrived over the ice, Isle Royale was being deforested by its moose population (which can swim to the island). Prior to that, the apex predators on the island were humans, during the island's period as a mining, logging, and resort area. After the island was made a national park, humans left that role, which created a boom in the moose population, which led to overgrazing, which led to starvation of the moose, etc. The wolves have stabilized that system.

Before humans became a major influence on the island, it had a different predator/prey system, based on coyotes and caribou. But both of those populations have died out, and humans almost certainly played a part in that. Isle Royale is being preserved today as a wilderness, but it isn't an "untainted" one, and hasn't been for a couple hundred years. It is what it is because of human activities. Humans didn't introduce the wolves to Isle Royale, but in a very real sense, we made them necessary. Which is why I support the idea of restocking the island's wolf population, in much the same way that we restocked many of the rivers of the Great Lakes region after destroying their fish populations.

Yeah, Google Fiber will be great for accessing YouTube and Google Maps. It might not be quite so effective for accessing services that compete with Google.

Google is no different from Comcast or Verizon or AT&T. Without governmental enforcement of net neutrality, carriers cannot be trusted to provide equal service to competing services.

"because tools for monitoring the performance of carriers will emerge nd we'll catch them if they try."

Oooh! Some geeks will "catch them". That must have these megacorporations (with Congresscritters on their payrolls) just shaking in their boots.

A good follow-up question would be whether this makes you happy or sad.

Frankly, the jobs where I "lasted" the most time were some of the ones I enjoyed the least.

I don't know if Detroit will ever be "important" again, but Michigan as a whole has more going for it than former automotive plants, and "fresh water" only hints at it. That water's good for more than just drinking and industrial uses, after all: it's important for agriculture and has a whole lot of recreational potential too. The whole belt west of metro Detroit (and a bit to the north) is good for a variety of farming. North of that are countless forested lakes and rivers which are great for fishing and canoeing. And then there are the Great Lakes themselves, which have seasonal sandy beaches (think "California without the saltwater"), and are good for boating and also fishing. Lonely Planet listed Michigan's west coast and nearby Grand Rapids as their "top travel destination" for 2014, which is admittedly hype, but reflects well on the state's potential economic future, regardless of Detroit and the auto industry.

My SAT score (1510) was almost as high as Mr. Bill's. I scored similarly on the GREs (general and comp-sci), and hit the 90th percentile when I took the LSAT cold (having no idea what kinds of questions would be on it) on a dare. Yet I absolutely suck at chess, and other exercises in tactical or strategic thinking. Despite the literary/cinematic cliché of using "plays chess" to show that someone is really, really smart, it actually reflects only a very specific kind of intelligence, to say nothing of developing the skills and experience to play it well. This match-up was about as meaningful as putting a pro basketball player in a half-pipe competition with a skateboarding whiz.

Social networking isn't itself a network; it's a concept, and that concept doesn't benefit from network effects because various social-networking networks don't interact.

And the Bell System was in fact a single company for decades, and achieved its self-perpetuating status by the time it was artificially broken up.

The assumption that Facebook will decline in the medium term is challenged by the examples of other networks which became pervasive enough that they became effectively perpetual (at least until disrupted by outside forces). The telephone network, the Interstate highway system, and the power grid have all held on and show no signs of going away (even as the telephone network merges with the internet). Oh yeah: and the internet.

As for the trend of a decline in googling for "facebook", that could just as easily reflect the fact that fewer people need to search for it. Either they've bookmarked it, it's their home page, their browser is smart enough to do URL completion, or it's perpetually at the top of their history, so they never hit Google on the way to it.

Don't get me wrong: Facebook will go away at some point, just like the phone system and Interstates will fade away before humanity does. But projections that it is already in decline (or trending toward that inflection point) may be premature.