I use OS X, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android, so exceptions/substitutions are made when an app isn't available for a given platform.

DropBox - Because that's where all the stuff I'm working on at any given time is.

Firefox - Because I'm a same-browser-on-everything kinda guy, and I'm too stuck in my ways for that to be Chrome.

LibreOffice - Because I'm a same-wp-on-everything kinda guy, but not so stuck in my ways that it has be OpenOffice.

Manga Studio - Because I create comics as a hobby, and even on the machines that don't have stylus input, I like to be able to open the projects I'm working on, and work on lettering or coloring. I don't use the GIMP because I think it's worth buying myself nice software sometimes, and I don't use Adobe Creative Shite anymore because that doesn't have to mean wasting money.

CyberDuck - Because a simple drag-and-drop ftp client is handy for getting my stuff where it's going.

I use the 52-pick-up sort

I don't see it happening. The US military has become the federal government's most dependable jobs program. It's like the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps... but not civilian (and not doing conservation work). In an economy where "defense" has become an important sector, budget cuts mean layoffs.

The only thing I know about WhatsApp is that for a while I was getting a lot of mail that was either spam from it or from scammers pretending to be it.

Soft robots have been with us for decades.

"E-sport" is an attempt to apply the macho-associated word "sport" (usually understood to be a physical activity) to gaming. Competitive video gaming (even for an audience) is really no different from competitive chess or poker. You sit down and you match your ability to play a game against other people playing the same game. Something one can reasonably be proud of being good at, so the pretending-it's-something-else aspect is a bit childish.

Which might help explain the lack of appeal to female participants: childishness in adult males is really, really off-putting. Combined with the aggressiveness of a competitive activity... it's worse.

Lots and lots of people don't consider hunting or fishing "sports". Those are effectively a whole different sense of the word "sporting".

I recently special-ordered a desktop computer for my very-computer-illiterate mother (a retired musician) and somewhat-computer-illiterate father (a retired lawyer) to use, to avoid confusing them with Metro. Meanwhile my niece (I'm too old for my "little sister" to be relevant) has no trouble at all dealing with the traditional Windows Explorer desktop (though she prefers her Mac, which is mostly the same) because she grew up with it. In fact, it's the only interface she's ever known, which makes replacing it a bit problematic. It's way too late in the game to start worrying about a dumbed-down UI for computer illiterates.

Why didn't you list DOS 2? Oh yeah, because it was hugely popular (for its time), thanks to its support for hard drives with subdirectories. Not as widely deployed as DOS 3 would be, but far from a flop.

You're correct that DOS 4 flopped. That's one data point. (And really, that was IBM's failure, not Microsoft's.)

DOS 6 was widely adopted, replacing DOS 5 (which had little to recommend it except that it wasn't DOS 4) and living a long and productive life under the 16-bit versions of Windows.

Windows 98 enjoyed quite a bit of success, and (except for being a trojan for IE4) deservedly so; 98SE was the Windows that people stuck with on their older hardware rather than installing the resource-hogging Windows XP. Perhaps you were thinking of the deservedly-reviled Windows ME, which followed it?

You're also correct that Vista and Win8 have been flops. So that's three data points, but non-consecutive. Microsoft's success/failure pattern isn't quite as simple as you misremember.

This is not just nature. Isle Royale's ecosystem was disrupted when Europeans came to the region and started trying to strip it of mineral, forest, and animal resources. In the early 20th century we turned most of it back over to nature, but by then the some of the major indigenous species (and the peoples who hunted them on a small scale) had been wiped out. Most importantly, the coyotes are gone, and moose have moved in to replace the caribou. The wolves (and the foxes that remain) have filled the coyotes' niche as predators, but because of the increasing difficulty of reaching the island from the mainland, they've had difficulty establishing a viable population. This is something "we" screwed up.

There's a lot more than the wolves that draws people to Isle Royale. (Most people who visit the island never even see a wolf. I consider myself lucky to have glimpsed one briefly, as it tracked a moose and her calf.) Visitors come for the trails, the moose, the fishing, the scenery, and the relatively solitude. Losing the wolves would mean that the island would lose a little mystique, but far more important would be the long-term repercussions on the island's ecosystem.