Fair point - what I am reasonably sure about, though, is the following.
The ability to contemplate time spans in the order of the thousands years, is a modern one.
I speculate that the idea of *eternity* that an Egyptian could have, probably translates into an engineering requirement of 'some generations'.

source?

Under this same logic, Egyptian pyramids are a total engineering failure, because most likely there was no requirement for them to last 4000+ years.

The technology was not chosen - it appears to be more the motive behind the event.
Turns out that MS, in fact, is the main sponsor of this thing, according to the website.

About 95% of the surveys I see on mainstream news outlets, have some type of severe or killer statistical flaw in the data, that should be entirely obvious to any mildly clever 4th grader. This one is no exception.

I still wonder if it is due to basic mathematical illiteracy, or to a headline-grabbing attitude.
Either way, it's depressing.

Singapore is 274.2 sq mi , and densely populated. (>200x the U.S. density).
Infrastracture is, therefore, cheap. Compare it to a plan that you could use, say, only on the Manhattan island: that would be cheap as well.

The profiles are NOT private, nor there is anything "hacked" here.

This archive contains only the information that users made publicly available (consciously or not) - this stuff was just crawled from the web and put together in one large file.

There is no news here... if I were Apple or Cisco, I would crawl this public info myself, rather than relying on some dude that posted it on a torrent...

Then, you should probably add interlingua to the list (the amazing fact about interlingua, is that you may be able to communicate/understand it, even if you are not aware of its very EXISTENCE as a language)

....but the "non-technical" person that starts with this type of mindset, I suspect, won't get too far. Learning anything complex and new requires enduring efforts and a strong will, plus a certain degree of intellectual curiosity, and a sense of purpose.

"Let's start learning something about X", especially if X is as broad as "technology" is too generic an intention, to fit what above.

It reminds me of man who goes at the library and says: "I have decided to get an education. Which books will get me educated?"

TFA links a Quantcast "estimated traffic" chart showing an alleged decline in traffic for /.
The alexa chart shows actually a steady growth over the last couple of years.

That is 100% correct, in theory.

In the real world, however, process changes in any large organization tend to be slow, expensive, and messy.

It's often a NECESSITY to look for incremental optimizations and workarounds.

I saw a situation very similar to the one you are describing. A large organization with 1000+ points of sale, having to snailmail paper documents (i.e. contracts) to the headquarters - everyday.

Such contracts were produced/printed with a proprietary software solution, in which Cobol (!) code was a major part, plus a bunch of different databases, etc etc.

The type of thing: "Don't touch ANYTHING or it falls apart...". Despite this, for their needs, it was working pretty ok - wasn’t changed in may be 15 years or more.

Add to this: (1) old-ish /poorly trained staff, used to the very same UI since forever (2) the necessity to file the paper version anyways, since it carried signatures .

What do you do? Sure, there are valid arguments to change it all, and start from scratch - web UI / cloud / VPN / insert-your-buzzword.

But at the end of the day, if you take the total cost, this would easily be a multimillion investment. And cause a lot of glitches in the business. And almost 100% piss off the staff ("I liked the old one better! It was nice and green! And what about this new mouse thingy?")

While you figure out the ramifications of a total overhaul, in the meanwhile you may still want to file the contracts as PDFs, instead of simply throwing them in a warehouse. And, the "meanwhile" could last years...

Correct. It did NOT happen in the last ten years, though.
Your examples are all from a different era. Microsoft has seemingly lost the ability to eat the next-big-things (more or less since Ballmer got his job).
And the stock price curve has reflected this.