Depends how you define modern windowing OS. As soon as you require modern text rendering, you are in many-MB territory, and just a 1080p framebuffer is fairly large.

Printer sharing. A problem that was solved well in the 80's and since re-solved slightly worse every few years. It is difficult to imagine a worse way than NetUSB, but I am sure there are developers out there with a better imagination than mine.

There has been practically zero progress on handling the demand side. Doing so would require a radical rethink of how Western countries deal with drugs and drug addiction. This is not likely to happen in the next 20 years at least, and it is stupid to condemn other countries to 20 more years of violence by keeping our focus on limiting supply.

If we eliminated the need to grow opium, a some countries would find their economies transformed. Imagine Afghanistan without opium financing various criminal factions. We just need to figure out how to make cocaine without coca, and Middle America would be changed too.

Of course that relies on the secret getting out. Otherwise we are still stuck with the morass of violent crime.

That is exactly the tradeoff. If you do not like it, do not allow electronic voting.

Defending against this requires secret ballots. If you can verify how a person voted, then that person is at risk of coercion. Online voting cannot provide secret ballots. If you want secret ballots, do not use online voting.

I thought I wrote that clearly enough in my first attempt, but apparently not :)

We are really really good at handling online transactions of various kinds. Voting is easy. You just have to give up the secret ballot...

Anonymous secure verifiable voting is a bad joke.

The washer and dryer primarily spend their energy on heating, not on running the motor. Using less water means savings on electricity because there is less water to heat. Dryers jump dramatically in efficiency when you switch to a condensing dryer, since you save most of the heat that went into turning water into steam.

Clothes dryers made an enormous jump when they switched to condensing operation. After that, the improvements have been smaller. It is quite likely that a 10 year old dryer is non-condensing, and so the gains are huge.

They did not spend millions of dollars looking for the microwave oven, and they knew all along that the signal was man-made. Figuring out precisely which item made it is the kind of thing that gets you in the newspapers, so they did a little PR stunt.

Their usual work changes our understanding of the universe but does not have a chance to make it into the mainstream news. Can you begrudge them their 15 minutes of fame?

If you have a 10 year old washing machine, the likelihood is that a new one will pay itself back in energy + water savings in a few years. The efficiency improvements in white goods over the last decade have been astounding.

They can, but are they? I have only seen residential solar which reacted to grid overload/underload situations (i.e. situations which should never occur in an ideal world), not any which reacted to constant requirements for reactive power. Do you know of any which take part in the standard grid stabilization in normal use, outside of grid emergencies?