More important than that to the end-user is that using money decouples in time the supply you can generate, and the demand your needs create.

If I need toilet paper at 9pm on a Sunday night, I can go to the local drugstore and buy it with the cash I earned some nebulous time earlier when it was more convenient and efficient for me to generate. Who knows if I'll have a spare half dozen eggs the next time the toilet paper runs out, and if the store owner will need eggs at that point. Decoupling those two parts of the transaction makes the economy vastly more efficient.

But the quality has dropped. It's news for hire now.

If it had been left to the private sector, we'd wouldn't have got to the moon, mars, the heliosheath. And despite the fact that earth orbit is profitable, probably no private sector project would have made the investment or taken the risk to go to space at all.

Space X can only do what it's doing now because it's standing on the shoulders of previous public sector projects. And heck this very project is being paid for by the public sector.

Trouble is it was too dark to see the milk-bottle they launched it from.

Than what? Apollo? The Space Shuttle? Soyuz?2010s technology is more efficient than 1960s and 1970s technology. Who da thunk it?

Indeed, so it's not just as simple as "a death is a death". There are some variables in there to do with intent. And "racially motivated" is just one of those.

Society views it as more serious if I decide to kill you yesterday and do it today (1st degree), then if I just do it immediately as an impulsive reaction. (2nd degree).

Society also views it as more serious if I decide to kill someone of your race, and you end up getting killed, than it I decide to kill you.

Your views might be out of alignment with society on the second of those, possibly because you have no experience of being a victim of racism, or no empathy for it. But laws don't need the approval of everyone. They only need for society as a whole to find them reasonable.

No it didn't. There are long standing distinctions between different degrees of murder and manslaughter.

Post-PC doesn't mean there will be no PCs. Just as post-modernism doesn't mean that there is no more modernism, and post-feminism doesn't mean there are no more feminists.

It simply means the computing devices that have or will come to the fore after the period when the PC is the primary computing platform.

You can't say it won't happen because it already has. Smartphone shipments already outnumber PC shipments.

It's only a matter of time before tablets also outnumber PCs.

And when TVs become fully fledged computing devices able to run applications, they'll outnumber PCs too.

And these things mean an inevitable change in how we interact with computers, most of the time. Different input devices and differently sized screens demand different UIs.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.