Does it matter what's real? If it's a good dream, don't pinch me.

It does matter, because if this isn't real life, but a mere simulation, it means that after we die, sim runners could restore as from backups and that in turn makes religious people actually right... Which kills my worldview a little bit ;)

Yeah, but only if you can fit your hardware in the little space left over by removed jack socket.

I've tried KDE5 for a few weeks and excluding some minor annoyances, it's quite OK. But it's not stable enough for me. The second time when just to get back my panel, icons and launcher that disappeared completely, I had to overwrite .kde, .config, etc. directories in my home folder with a clean backup (and restore manually all my customizations), I went back to KDE4. Perhaps I'll switch to Plasma5 when it's in one of Long Term Support distros.

Win95 UI design was basically very effective and people still like it

This. I've switched from Windows to Linux more than 10 years ago, because Linux is better suited for software development. I've been a Gnome user since the beginning, because it was simple and basically implemented the Win95 way of doing things. When the Gnome3/Unity craze came, had to switch to KDE just because it still uses the GUI metaphor found in Windows 95.

Yeah, really - Android. And an old phone. It has WiFi (can even act as a hotspot), a decent enough camera and there's an app for that - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pas.webcam - which serves the video stream and a nice web frontend to it. You can even tell it to take a full resolution snapshot. I've been using it as a digital babysitter and were quite happy with it.

programs that archive digital conversations make it easy to look back and see exactly who said what

Not only lying will vanish then, but changing one's mind over time, too :-(

This. The first salary you negotiate usually anchors every future pay at the employer, even if they tell you that after a trial period you'll get a significant raise. You probably won't.

A single school lesson lasts 45 minutes. There's rarely more than 1 lesson on specific subject per day. Do children not learn then? And much of those 45 minutes is lost on checking homework, making kids quiet, etc. I'd say 30 minutes of undivided attention is much more than a lesson at school. Also, in six years this 0,5h cumulates to 1000 hours. It's not about teaching kids to be great programmers, as some say it takes 10000 hours to become great at anything. But spending 0,5h per day on different things gives children a choice in what they want to pursue later in life. And it gives them basic knowledge on numerous topics so they for instance are not cheated by a web developer the way I usually am by a car mechanic.

Why the hate? I see nothing wrong in letting a kid spend half an hour a day learning things that will probably be needed one way or another in her or his adult life. Especially if the kid's interested (and they usually are when the see parents work on a computer). There's plenty of time (s)he can spend playing outside anyway.

Take a look at Lightbot. It's an educational game where you program a robot to turn on lights on the board. It's very nice. My 4 year old daughter loves it and is able to solve simpler levels by herself. I introduce more complex ideas (procedures, loops) when we have some time to play together. It reminds me a bit of LOGO and turtle graphics - that's how I got started and I thinkg turtle graphics in one of modern editions is also one of good first steps.

Just to add a voice of different opinion. I'm not sure if I'd prefer spending 15 years in prison (and probably losing everything I had - family, money, good name, youth) or being killed painlessly.

You can get one for like 5$. Attach the HDD directly to the new computer and copy files over.

Why would anyone want a whole OS tuned for such a purpose?

Use whatever distro you like and configure just your text editor / IDE / whatever. Use something like Vagrant (https://www.vagrantup.com/) to set up your dev environments.

If AI can participate in its own improvement and be better at it than humans, then that AI should already be more clever than humans. How do we get AI to that point?

The only way to win is not to play :)