I mean, I don't exactly believe in the Star Trek universe which is even more fairy tale than most religions. Where are we in their world order - are we equals, enemies, slaves, pets, food, pests or just a honking big X-factor that threaten their very existence? Since their military power would be mostly unknown it'd be real easy to get paranoid. Just dealing with wacko humans is bad enough, what do you really know about an alien or how they think? Nothing. I think we'd jump right into a military arms race which might end very badly for at least one of us. Perhaps both, if MAD still applies on an interplanetary scale.

'"To quote, or double quote, that is the question'" - Not Shakespeare

Rank of this problem in things we need to worry about: 4,534,211.

That all sounds like things I've had in the past, perhaps not all at once but unless I'd been to Ebola-infected countries lately I might not think much of it. The infected person came from Liberia, but if a Texan that hadn't left the state for ages starts showing symptoms it's a lot less obvious. All it takes is one of those die-hard unbelievers in modern medicine who won't seek help until he's half way down the list of serious symptoms and you're in trouble.

Low-cost terahertz radar imaging is going to be very useful in handheld devices. You really can see a short distance into many materials. Great for seeing pipes and electrical wiring in walls. The day will come when that's a standard tool one buys at Home Depot.

Until that's working, a cooled IR imager would be useful. Those are great for finding heat leaks in houses, but currently cost too much.

No, the point of being a telecom company is to connect your customers together, move their data where they want it efficiently, and get them to pay you for it. Telecom workloads not only include digging ditches for your access line and running wavelength division multiplexors across them, they also include things like routing IPv4/IPv6, firewalls, load balancing, intrusion detection, preventing and mitigating DDOS, hosting CDNs, routing lots of private networks that all run RFC1918 addresses and maybe VLANs, MPLS, maintaining really large BGP tables, fast rerouting around failures, etc.

We're virtualizing that stuff instead of buying big expensive custom-built routers for the same reasons you're virtualizing your compute loads instead of stacking up lots of 1U machines. Internet-scale routers are blazingly expensive, and we want to use Moore's Law to do the compute-bound parts of the workload cheaply and efficiently and let us build new services quickly because we only have to upgrade the software, while using expensive custom hardware only for the things that really need it, plus a lot of that hardware is getting replaced by things like Openflow switches and SDN, which we'd like to take advantage of, and buying expensive dedicated-purpose hardware means you're often stuck overbuilding because the scale of your different types of workloads changes faster than you can redesign hardware.

Also, the transition of lots of enterprise corporate computing from traditional data center structures to clouds means that the communication patterns change a lot faster, and we need to keep up with them. This stuff does seem to be driven a lot more by the needs of the users (telecom and data center) than by the manufacturers of virtualization software or traditional hardware.

And yes, every bit of business buzzword bingo does flow across our desks.

Which basically means that the UI for all platforms are dumbed down to the least capable device.

Wrong. What they are claiming is exactly what you asked for:

a tailored experience for all hardware across a single platform family.... Windows 10 will deliver the right experience on the right device at the right time.

I think this is a good vision - you shouldn't need a different technology to target each platform (now that smartphones are fairly powerful); you want consistency in the UI between devices where possible, but that doesn't mean they can or should appear just the same, either. It is a tall order, and one has to question whether it is actually worth it, since switching between Windows and Android (or iOS and OSX) doesn't seem to have caused users' heads to explode, nor have developers been slow to discard PC code and re-implement everything for mobile.

Well, how many times have you seen "let's make our own date/time/number/argument/xml parser"?

No, it is the exact opposite.

Stickers and security awareness training and all this nonsense are attempts to put the responsibility on the user by telling him what to do, instead of handling the responsibility yourself by making sure that your product is safe.

As with all things, there is, of course, a limit. You cannot (with current technology) design a power drill so that it will work on a wall, but not on a hand. And if your user knows the master password that will destroy your company then he should be told to keep it secret. But you should also ask yourself if you really need such a gaping security hole or if you couldn't compartmentalise things better. Or if the power drill can be designed so that it only works if the user has both hands on the machine, to at least reduce risk.

the current administration has done more than any previous administration to expand it's[sic] intrusive power

No, sorry. Nothing's been done during Obama's terms that even remotely compare with the instantiation of the PATRIOT act and the TSA as far as harmful changes to the previously existing state of affairs by the government.

And then during Obama's terms, we've seen the drug war lighten up on marijuana, we've seen expansions of gay rights, we've seen increased rights and capabilities for consumers and less for credit card companies, access to Cuba has opened up, private sector spaceflight has been encouraged...

Obama's got his warts, all right -- constitutionally speaking, the man seems to be insane -- but on the scale of making life worse for all of us, he's done nothing even close, singly or in aggregate, to measuring up to the Bush/Cheney administration's insults to the body politic.

I'm not sure you can save anything with a dumb TV any more. These features are so cheap that they're being replicated by a $25 stick. Adding at least basic "smart" features is kind of a no-brainer for the manufacturer.

Too bad they suck at it. At least, in my experience: the built-in version of Netflix on my TV is so bad that I bought a Roku. It's a few years old, and maybe they've improved it since then, but on mine it's slow and awkward. Perhaps in the future they'll just spend $25 and wire in one of these things.

Now they've gone back to trying to just blow the plane up. It's not impossible to get explosives past security, but they've resorted to complex ways to hide them, and they seem to suck at it. They get derogatory names like the Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber because they failed.

Their incompetence suggests that they were individuals rather than concerted efforts, as the 9/11 hijackers were. Those were coordinated attacks on multiple targets, and a fair bit of effort was put into training them. It's certainly clear that they won't be able to get control of the cockpit any more, even if they threaten to kill the passengers.

That change alone probably accounts for the lack of hijackings, though having to risk passing through even theater security also means the chance of capture, and thus potentially turning into an intelligence bonanza. So the core of al Qaeda seems to have given up, and instead of unaffiliated nuts going to Cuba we get unaffiliated nuts trying to blow things up.

Then eBay can become a bank. In exchange for more regulation, they get to do lending and can borrow from the Fed.

Why not? There have been $30 Android tablets available in Shentzen for a year or two.

<consultant mode>
Well, I'd put it in a 2x2 matrix with low/high impact, low/high corporate usage. High/highs is stuff like your office suite, a lot of people use it and quite a lot. Low/high are things like time sheet recording, people need to do it but it's a very minor part of their work day. Both of these you generally need to have good solutions for since you'd be wasting so many people's time otherwise, the heavily used of course more so. Low/lows you don't really need to care much about, unless they add up to some extraordinary amounts. The killer is often the high/lows, basically the specialized tools a few in your organization use.

The (strike:problem) challenge is that these tools are different. For example, your graphics department might rely heavily on Photoshop. Nobody else in the business might care about that, but they again have their own tools they care about. Retraining, lost productivity and lower output quality can be significant costs. Existing workflows and procedures must be migrated. Forced migration may lead to employee dissatisfaction and higher turnover as they want to continue their career towards becoming a Photoshop expert. Those costs have to be considered relative to the gains of making a migration. I can do an in-depth study, if you got funding...
</consultant mode>

Seriously though, I think more plans about migrating to Linux dies from a thousand cuts rather than one fatal blow. I haven't done an OS migration but I've seen some others, the major issues are under control. It's all those minor "uh oh, we didn't think of that" issues with emergency band-aids and workarounds that tends to turn it into a fire fighting exercise.