Where do you get this "end of the world" thing? As for the claim of "alarmism", do you not remember the flu strain several years ago that tended to kill healthy people in the prime of their life, rather than "immunocompromised hosts"?
It's not that the reports are "alarmist". It's (1) you're not understanding the actual risk, and (2) you're pretending that the reports are predicting the end of the world.
The other cost of the S is the difficulty in obtaining and using certificates that are recognized by browsers without bothering the user. That's why the Let's Encrypt project is trying to make it free and easy.
Yes, you understand exactly!
But climbing higher in the tree will never get you to the moon. Programs that do better than humans in one particular area will not develop to the point that they have general intelligence. They'll be idiot savants, great at one specific thing to the point of being better than any human (like playing chess or Jeopardy, driving a car, performing surgery, or even writing a symphony), but a complete idiot at everything else.
I also think these programs will never get as good as the best humans at certain activities, like doing significant novel scientific research, proving hard math theorems, doing general programming, or translating languages. Certain activities do require general intelligence, not just one narrow specialty.
Uh, well how do you incrementally add 1 to "thousands" and wind up at "tens of thousands" at some point? Randomly?
Or did you mean count up to 2 billion, at which point you report billions and billions served and stop incrementing?
To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.