Your question is limited to existing technologies and platforms that are built around the assumption of 12/3Mbps connections at best.

Imagine a respectable percentage (or large enough market) where the network was reliably 2Gbps or more.

If the latency were low enough, there'd be less reason not to share multiple GB files on remote drives for editing locally, like agencies using Photoshop files between 700MB and 1GB large.

Hi quality VR conferencing might materialize if the machines connected to each other could exchange data at rates that today are considered too fast to do anything with.

Or what about existing or yet-to-exist distributed networks that might benefit from truly massive throughput? What would be possible with faster interconnectivity across great physical distances? Say 10Gbps. 100Gbps? 1Tbps? 2Exa bps?

Sure, none of those speeds even mean anything today let alone would be feasible in the current market, but hopefully you get my point, which is that the as-yet uncreated future technologies that would evolve and flourish under much faster and reliable Internet throughput can't be known in advance.

And like any resource rich ecosystem, you can bet that once those resources are there, someone and something will use them.

Yeah it'll be used for higher fidelity porn, more unwanted spam, and larger cat videos. But such a network will also be used for cool things like better medicine, more accurate physics, and more efficient manufacturing, in addition to stuff we can't know about yet.

Stop holding back the future by asking for comparisons from today.

Come on. Tell us how you REALLY feel.

; )

Affirmative action in the United States counteracts institutional and systemic discrimination against specific groups (often visible) minorities.

Affirmative action for women is not the same as sexism; it is a corrective for sexism.

Most users don't know it, but Slashdot actually has had an edit button since 1997.*

It appears after you click the "Preview" button and has the label "Continue Editing".

(* It's actually an anchor, but you get my drift.)

The great thing about parallel construction is that everyone is always already on a watch list.

Such an eloquent a reminder. Thank you.

It cuts both (multiple) ways.

If $person1 is aware of sexual attraction on the part of $person2, it would not be too difficult for $person1 to manipulate $person2.

This is why it's important to behave respectfully, thoughtfully, and openly when dealing with other people. Men, women, what-have-you.

I know you mean well, but you're completely missing the point.

The real tragedy will happen once they've finished paying their debts to society and they get full access to the Internet with no one having told them not to read the comments.

Someone upthread posted a presentation of evidence contra speculations about the problems with climate models such as Dyson's.

The consensus models for AGW are accurate. You and Dyson need speculate no more.

Unless you're logged in as root, you have to use sudo

From your descriptions of how you use of Windows accessibility features, it sounds like you've figured out highly efficient usage patterns and your facility with navigating the UI seems (to me) a bit higher than even many expert users. So, manipulating a different set of accessibility interface may not be comfortable or as useful for you, which totally makes sense. To answer your question about contrast:

OS X does have a separate slider and checkbox for contrast.

I don't use these regularly so can't comment on their usefulness. When I manipulate them, they do noticeably affect the display contrast, so much so that when the contrast slider is high enough, font edges of text and other UI elements start to wash out.

OS X does not implement themes and, like you, I would be ALL OVER a system-supported dark/professional theme. (With the latest version of OS X, Apple has introduced an extensions framework which opens a path to vendor-supported UI theming. But even if this is the direction OS X is headed, I would not expect custom themes for at least a couple more years.)

I have good corrected vision, so I don't use the magnifier regularly. I occasionally do fiddly UI work and it works OK enough for me in that instance. It has some customizability but not a whole lot.

On the customization front, I use a third-party piece of software that I sort of think of as my personal API for the UI (as well as much of the command line and UNIX layer). That software is Keyboard Maestro. It is definitely worth checking out if you regularly use a Mac-like machine ; ).

Not trying to troll (honest), but you but have you looked into Macintosh systems? The visual accessibility features are invoked at the level of the graphics layer (Quartz, I believe) so there's no futzing with colors as such.

For example, inverting colors (which is how I compute 99% of the time) cannot be overridden by third-party software. (The current trend for "professional" UIs, which avoids the black-text-on-white-background usability nightmare of most software and websites, makes me glad I can toggle this setting using a keyboard shortcut).

For your use case, there is an adjustable contrast setting that can be customized to the point of making your computer look like a Warhol painting if you want (thankfully, there is also the option to desaturate colors so the high-contrast display all black and white).

If you absolutely have to have particular Windows or Linux software, you could run those OS'es as VM guests, which is not ideal but at least you'll have access to the accessibility features in your host OS.

One of the things Apple gets better than many other software companies is accessibility. It's not perfect, but in my experience it's very good.

YMMV

"Home" or "end" keys? Please.

Pro user tips: Ctrl-A gets you to the beginning of the line and Crtl-E to the line's end. This also works in web-based text input fields like Slashdot's and Google's (which may be a product of using Mac-compatible web browsers).