While all of those things you listed affect the technician or enthusiast almost none of them have any bearing on regular users. Most people don't upgrade their own machines anymore. If they ever did.

Xerox's problem was that they didn't listen to their r&d people.

There are probably thousands of viruses that if mutate to become transmissible by air that would have a similar or worse effect on the human population. It's just not that likely.

The mitigating factor is that we don't have to start from scratch, we have the knowledge to survive in an energy poor environment, we know what minerals we need and where to find them. Yes we might only be able to find a very small percentage of what we used to but we should be able to find power to supply critical infrastructure and further research into alternative energy once the plug on mainstream energy is pulled. It's true to say life as we know it would end, but that might just mean we're not so consumer oriented.

Considering that Africa accounts for about 7.7%* of the total world's energy consumption then no, even if all of Africa died it would not reverse climate change. It would not even stop it. It would not even slow it that much.

Source: World Energy Consumption

There are a few good applications for this, the most obvious one being police firearms where weapons are sometimes drawn by someone else and used against the officer.

We all work so that we can pay the bills. If we're given an opportunity to sell something we've made for the option of never working again but living in luxury for the rest of our lives why not take it? That gives security, and the option to go on and do bigger and better things that 2BN dollars can provide. It's a dream come true.

>I bought Minecraft specifically because they have Linux support, that would end if MS ever got their hand on it. That's probably not true. For example Skype is still available cross platform, Linux included.

They shut it down for everyone bar China for some reason. This must be the day they turn China off too...

In the olden days everyone was too drunk while driving to be scared of the steel spear waiting to impale them for their driving mistakes.

Yeah but Hughes never built *anything* that worked.

The US Government never really admitted, from wikipedia:
The U.S. government issued notes of regret for the loss of human lives and in 1996 paid reparations to settle a suit brought in the International Court of Justice regarding the incident, but the United States never released an apology or acknowledgment of wrongdoing.[8]

Thanks for that, you gave me a chuckle. I agree with you in spririt, but there are a lot of people out there molesting data in order to perform their work function and to get paid. Far more than have any understanding of data structures, algorithms or even basic data normalization. It's unfortunate.

Working. There are far more people that work with large amounts of data than know how to program.

Oh the horror.