Under your desk, I submit that height is usually not a problem, as a typical desk has around 70 cm room between floor and desk plate. Even if yours is a bit smaller or has a drawer under the table, a compact micro-ATX case should fit nicely. For instance, the Aerocool Qs-200 Advance is only 185 x 367 x 395 mm large (just an example I recently looked at, there are even smaller solutions but the Aerocool has decent room for components).

Depth is also not a problem, and in terms of width the 185mm of the Areocool actually beat many ITX boxes.

Also, floppies in general are disappearing. In 2010 for instance, Sony ended production of the 3 1/2" floppy.

A company I worked for until recently was still producing a device with DOS based software and 3 1/2" floppies a few years ago.
Due to lack of floppy suppliers, they had to switch to pseudo-floppy drives that used specially formatted USB sticks and pretended to be floppy drives to the PC. And they were lucky that workaround existed. AFAIK it was developed for users of old but expensive manufacturing equipment that had the same problem, who did not want to scrap the machines.

I believe that particular device is out of production by now, but this illustrates the difficulties in using such obsolete hardware. Of course, Strategic Air Command might have the budget to keep some small scale manufacturing going ;-)

You can delay roll-out of the update while it goes through testing. Now I've never worked in a company that did this consequently, to the best of my knowledge. But it is an option.

In my experience, compatibility between Microsoft Office and LibreOffice is still not at 100%. Most of the time it works, but sometimes formatting gets lost or a particular feature is not there (patterned table backgrounds in Word come to mind).

So data exchange between the people using LibreOffice and those using Microsoft Office could make problems. If you migrate the whole company, that would be fixed by eliminating Microsoft Office internally, but what about customers and suppliers outside the company?

Three years ago, the developers of Mesa dropped support for some old graphics cards:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTg0Mg
Now those cards were badly obsolete and rare even in 2011, but this shows that even the Open Source community will at some point lose interest in supporting old stuff.
Today, you can maybe cobble together your own distribution that still contains those old drivers, or pay someone to do it. But for most people this won't be an attractive solution.

Perhaps a stupid question (not a crypto expert here), but if you have a not-easily-MITMed side channel, wouldn't you use that for key exchange? Or at least to verify the keys?

Well, unless the constitution is actually changed, you still have a chance to defeat such excesses in court. Which takes a lot of time and money, which sucks. But it is still possible.

In theory, as a contractor you could say "I'm not taking this job unless there is a decent set of requirements". But that will leave you with a very small set of potential employers.

In practice, most people need the money and try to manage somehow.

And then there are the unscrupulous contractors (usually companies, not individuals) who make big promises, knowing that those are not realistic. Or knowing that the requirements are incomplete and fulfilling them will not be sufficient to make a succesful project.
I strongly suspect that this is what happened with Toll Collect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_Collect) in Germany. Just for instance.

In political terms too.

While I'd still say China is worse, human rights wise, than western countries, asshats like the Australian government are working hard at erasing the difference.

Probably true, but being successful without a diploma still takes some luck.

A good example might be Josh Parnell, the developer of Limit Theory (URL:http://ltheory.com/).
The guy seems to be quite brilliant, and I believe he is capable of pulling off his plans for a space game with an unprecedented amount of procedural generation. But he still got lucky in finding enough backers for his Kickstarter.

Another thing we can learn from Josh's example is that it may not be necessary to drop out of college. He wrote that he put his studies at Stanford on hold, with the option of continuing later.

But publishers don't lower the initial game price from the goodness of their hearts. New releases on Steam still cost (typically) 50 Euros, that has not changed compared to pre-Steam times. In short, publishers try to charge as much as the market will tolerate and pocket the extra profit.

Now there are a few people like me, who strongly dislike "services" like Steam and will buy less than before (and that preferably from DRM-free sources like GOG). But it seems that we are too few to make a difference.
Unless you count the success of crowd-funded games (Kickstarter) as an aspect of that dislike. Which it may be, but I don't have the data to prove it :-(

And don't forget product liability.

If there is a known, safety-relevant flaw in a car, and the manufacturer does NOT do a safety recall, future accidents caused by that flaw might lead to lawsuits of the nasty kind. Since negligence is now easily demonstrated, the courts might grant the victims punitive damages. Ouch.

I guess it will backfire in the form of other carmakers offering cheaper cars that are just as good for the "entry level" features. Because the extra hardware was never installed.

NT4 had only limited DirectX support, so it was not for gamers (although vastly better than 98 in stability). 2K was the first "business" Windows that had all the features of the consumer OS.

[slightly off topic]
And I used it happily until 2007 when my then-new PC would not run stable under 2K. In hindsight I suspect the drivers, in particular those from NVidia. My 8600GT officially had only "legacy" drivers for 2K, inofficially you could also run the XP drivers. With either, the machine would crash frequently. So I finally relented and installed XP.

The 45W Kaveris are interesting, as they show a nice improvement in performance/watt - the new "sweet spot" is not in the top models but in the somewhat slower A8-7600 (3.1-3.3 GHz CPU speed).

I wonder how a 4 module (8 core) FX on that basis would perform and at which TDP. For software that scales well with many cores, it might be a good buy.