I think that predates Windows. Crashes of various kinds were frequent on Apple IIs, Commodores, etc. You just got use to various reboot/retry routines.

Different legal regimes. It's easier in some countries than in others to expropriate land for public purposes. It's also easier to oppose government actions with lawsuits in the US than in many other countries.

Gross sales =/= revenue.

I agree that a psychic interface would be great, but short of that how is the GUI supposed to know, for instance, that at Time A I want this text editor window to be small and the browser to be big (because I'm taking notes on a web page) while at Time B the opposite is preferable (because I'm writing a document and only want the browser open for reference)?

Bad grammar. You're asking whom?

That sounds like an excellent question for Ask Slashdot...

That's exactly my point. People who have a B.S./B.Eng. can apply it to useful work. People who almost made the cut to be competitive athletes can't apply their athletic training to equally productive purposes.

We need lots of scientists/engineers/etc., and relatively few athletes (arguably we don't *need* any at all). And student athletes are generally being trained in something else, which they can apply to a career if sports don't work out. A football player who doesn't make the cut might still have a degree in accounting or philosophy or bio or whatever else. That makes no sense as a model for STEM education.

Perhaps he hand-engraves his music onto vinyl.

The reason this is such a bad analogy has nothing to do with whether an app succeeds because of luck, or how much the annual fees are. It has to do with where the money comes from. The money a developer gets comes, ultimately, from customers buying the app. Yes, the middleman takes a lot (but perhaps not more than more middlemen), but that doesn't make it a casino. In a casino, all the money coming in is from the gamblers, and all the money you win is from other gamblers (minus the house's cut). The same is true in a lottery. But an app store is completely different. Sure, it's unpredictable whether you will make big, medium, or no money, but the source of that money is not your fellow developers' entry fees.

No. If a stock market were to triple its value over a decade, then lose half its peak value in a week, I think that would qualify as a crash, even though it was still up from ten years earlier. It depends on the time scale you're looking at

Water would make an awful currency because it's way to expensive to transport (imagine going to the coffee shop with a gallon jug to pay for a cup of coffee). Not everything that is valuable would be an efficient form of money. And how would you pay a water bill to your utility company? With water?

Just like the gold standard, whereby any country that finds gold deposits can also create currency.

...or hot fusion surrounded by very good insulation...

Would it melt, freeze, or both?