The problem is, 700 games including expansion packs versus out of my ass 50,000 games on Windows.

Simply launching Audacity and picking the right "input" allowed me to capture the same sound that pulseaudio sends to speakers.
Possibly a second Audacity instance can be used to record what enters the PC through microphone. Then investigate using two simultaneous tracks in Audacity. Would that be working and good enough?

hard drive may mess the weight distribution up too.
But frankly there's not an exceptionnally strong reason for no removable flash storage, that'll be a commercial and design decision.
Flash can also get integrated right into the main CPU, or why not in a stack.
Seen a dumphone design on the web (chinese card phone) that consisted of only two chips, main SoC and radio. The SoC integrates some RAM and flash (has 8MB but not sure if the figure is for one or the other) and there's slots for SIM and micro-SD. So that's two removable storage devices, to be perfectly pedantic.

Lately they have been new Taiwan brands in the laptop market. MSI, Gigabyte. They seem nice and "desktop like" in a sense (no stickers, can be bought without an OS, 1080p and 900p displays..). I propose you buy one and report later on build quality : )

iPod classic. Oh crap, it was discontinued on Septermber 9 2014. Seems the 1.8" HDD have stagnated for years if they're even still made, and their niche has effectively ended.
On the other hand a 2.5" single platter, 5mm high drive exists, aimed at ultrabooks. It could easily fit in a Surface Pro clone. Have flash on M2 PCIe so that the user puts in whatever he want!

And so if you want both generic audio and low latency audio you need TWO sound systems on top of a THIRD one and at least two of them (Pulseaudio, ALSA) are configured by editing empty or semi-empty config files on the command line.
All so that maybe (not sure if that configuration is easily possible or makes sense) an ALSA application sends sounds to Pulseaudio (which emulates ALSA), which outputs to Jack which pipes it to ALSA.

I'm not necessarily against all that stuff but distros should support configurations where everything works, with wizards or a GUI to help you. Last time I tried launching (not even using) something other than audacity or qsynth all I got was "Ardour 2 couldn't start because fuck you". (granted that was a few years ago on ubuntu 10.04 I believe)

You can do neat things but they require writing hardly discoverable crap in a configuration file. E.g. I was delighted to be able to get an optional downmixing from stereo to mono, which I wanted for years (be it on Windows, ALSA, ALSA + pulseaudio, or as a hardware feature - the latter can be found on 1970s amps).
But you have to scrounge the web then write this in the adequate place in the file system : "load-module module-remap-sink master=alsa_output.pci-0000_04_04.0.analog-stereo sink_name=mono channels=2 channel_map=mono,mono"

If that were Windows software you would have a GUI with checkboxes and the like to remap sound channels. And that's what Media Player Classic gave me a decade ago. And if software was still made like in the old days you would have off-line help files.

To pulseaudio's credit the feature works well : a new radio button appears in the GUI and switching from one sink to another works instantly.

I dislike that pulseaudio doesn't set its volume at what was the last value, when I boot and autologin to my desktop. The sound control applet (or is it a tray icon) does remember, but it registers after twiddling it up or down.
As I use an amplifier at 100% volume and Alsamixer is set at -2dB that result in very loud sound coming from the music player or video player etc. if I forget about it. Fortunately the amp is low powered and 2x12 watts so I guess the sound comes out at around 100 decibels only. Would be fun to try a dB meter to know exactly

I thought the used fuel was too polluted with fission products and crap to be useful. You would at least need to use your civilian reactor in short runs tuned for millitary plutonium breeding rather than normal operation. (and that's what very old dual use designs were design to do, such as Chernobyl type.)

If we can do that sort of thing then theoretically a thorium reactor can be used to make Uranium 233 bombs.

Even if wind turbines do manage to get a CF of 30 to 35% (only achievable in specific areas), massive generation of wind energy requires hundreds billions spent in transmission lines, other power grid upgrades, gas turbine backup, energy storage.

I find it doubtful. We can possibly achieve that, with the goal to avoid causing too much global warming ; but burning so much carbon in the process that we'll cause it anyway.

But the cheap combined CPU+GPU is probably what allows those "distributed smart monitors" to be practical. They seem a fun idea, though probably suitable to certain classes of custom applications.

Let's hope the toolkits and applications will keep supporting X forever, or at least 10 years. No news of GTK3, Qt etc. dropping X11 support and there still is the older or simpler stuff around (GTK2, Motif, FLTK 1.3..)
Then the distro and app maintainers have to not throw X11 out as you say, like apps or libraries compiled with flags so they do not support X11.. Realistically for a good while they won't do that, with the moutains of applications and older hardware to support.

Then it shouldn't matter if you're using Wayland locally, if you still can ssh -X or putty+xming from another box and run your app. A nested server is even built in for local use.
So I don't feel terribly threatened by the whole issue (maybe GTK3 removing some GUI features is more annoying). X11 doesn't give a shit if you're running 80x25 text, Xorg, Wayland, serial or nothing at all on your local box. It will not be so easy to kill!

Fair.
Your desktop uses a lot of power at idle though, by putting together a low end beige desktop without trying hard you can get much lower than that at load.
There's a relative lack of power supplies for low powered PCs. 300W Bronze (way overkill but decent), 360W Gold, PicoPSU (a bit weird), and a handful of motherboard that have a DC in for use with a generic laptop power adapter (for relatively "slow" Atom or Jaguar offerings). We'll hopefully see more of them.

You'll end up idling at higher power than a Mac Mini if you roll your own, but it ought to be reasonable.

But Wayland or an implementation has always seemed to be two years away. It's just so slow moving - drivers, distros, toolkits, DEs need to be there. I'm figuring out we can finally use it in 2016 (Ubuntu 16.04 LTS variants and derivates), 2017 for debian-stable-after-jessie.
I'm figuring Ubuntu wanted their Mir so they could control the development, QA, testing, whatever of it for the Ubuntu phones, which eventually failed to be introduced or were delayed.

The diesel car's battery is used for some pre-heating before start up?