This might seem trivial, but I think it is not. This actually describes how the crowd mentality works, how predictable it is and I think more interesting things are in the study. This is NOT waste of time.

If I needed github on my server, I would choose gitlab.

Despite I agree with you pretty much, I have to say something against the idea of Windows being closely coordinated and not hacked together with praying it will work. This is a confession of one of the windows kernel developers. It almost made me cry.

The main thing I lack on Linux systems is powerful file manager. And by powerful I mean really powerful. On Windows, I use Far, I can manage files, processes, edit multiple files, start/stop services, browse SMB network, connect to ssh (scp), connect to sftp, manage registry, view images and so on. And there are many plugins I can use for many more features, if this is not enough. Totalcmd has similar features. There is absolutely no comparable file manager on linux. Midnight commander is just nightmare and doesn't have half the features that Far does and as far as I remember, Krusader is also quite behind.

I'm not sure what reasonable should be, but for example Google can pay in single acquisition several billion dollars. If they have tens billions dollars in reserves, I think it is reasonable. They are large companies and need large reserves. But I have to admit, I don't know, how big their reserves in fact are.

I really don't agree with taxing companies. If company generates revenue and doesn't spend this money the same year, it gets punished for this by the income tax. Why do we do that? We are forcing responsible companies, that want to make financial reserves not to do them. Let's tax only the transfer of money from companies to people. If the money stays in the company, nobody is going to buy a super expensive yacht for their own ego without paying taxes.

Somebody could say that taxing the companies is important because they can pile the money without passing them again in the economy and thus cause deflation. However, income taxes don't prevent this, they merely slow this process.

You can take their stuff if you find it. I imagine this as a boat with gold sailing in international waters. This boat is not protected by any country, but you can't steal it, because you don't know, where it is.

If you bought DVD and you want to resell it, you actually can (IIRC, there was a definitely a legal case and I think the it was ruled in favor of the resell). You can lend that DVD too and even for profit. You are, however, not allowed to create a copy of the DVD and sell it. As for the youtube, If they didn't generate a revenue, why the hell would they maintain it and pay for the servers? Of course they have no right to generate revenue, but if they won't YT will simply cease to exist. If you were the owner of the youtube and you had to pay $10M annually to have it working, would you be willing to pay it? And as for them, they could not ask MS to remove their application, they could change the youtube implementation and do it so often, that such application wouldn't work anyways. But their approach is more considerate to end users who can use such hacks on their own.

Yes, it is similar but not the same. When you buy dvd, you own it and should be able to do anything with it, because you paid for it. When it comes to youtube, you didn't pay anything, but the bandwidth and the servers Google uses aren't for free. They need to be able to generate revenue somehow.

Unfortunately, the ads on youtube are so annoying and so disturbing, I had to install adblock and I'm not very happy about it. I feel like I should pay Google somehow back for using youtube, but when advertisement banner pops up over subtitles and I'm not able to read them, or 15 seconds intro delays me from watching 1 minute video I can not withstand it anymore.

Not really. For example, I'm running right now about 10 different gui programs. If each of this programs used its own Qt library, it would cost me 100 MB in total. Right now, my firefox consumes about 700 MB of its own, thunderbird 200 MB. Don't tell me it is so much.
And as for the performance, I can't see the performance impact. If you have like 256 MB of ram and don't use any memory consuming program, you can have more swapping, that is true. But if you have normal computer with enough ram (say 2-3 GB), you won't notice anything.

I can imagine, that in some cases this scenario happen, but it would be rare. There will be far more likely a security problem in the application itself. For this scenario to happen you need:
1. Released stable library, that has security holes in some of its api
2. Application that uses this library and this api
3. The application has to be exposed to "hostile" environment (you don't care if a app has BO in it if you use it only yourself).
4. The hostile environment must be somehow able to go trough the application to exploit the vulnerable api.
1. 3. and 4. are extremely unlikely.

It really doesn't matter that much. Many developers write their software, test it and release it. They don't test it again when a new version of library appears (it costs them money). If the developer has more applications to maintain and the user base isn't big enough (many small but great application fall in this category) and compatibility problem appears, it could stay unfixed for long time, even forever. I'm talking from my own experiences - not making things up.

Actually, the "shitload of bloat duplicate binaries" is quite good. Nobody gives a damn about 10 MB of their disk space because the program takes it's libraries with it. However, everyone gives ten tones of damn when they can't install new application because of "dependency problem". Solving dependency problems costs time and hence money. Disk space is cheap.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying, that new Ubuntu does that, I'm just arguing against the philosophy of bad duplicate binaries.

With Qt, C++ is language that is quite hard to replace - pretty fast, very portable, very powerful and quite convenient for the developer.

As for the processing, the speed of normal computer would be sufficient, I'm not sure about a small device that can the singer have with him. Still, I think that the latency might be problem with cheap webcam - from my experiences I can say, that webcams do have noticeable latency.

The problem is delay. You would have to have expensive webcam and expensive computer in order not to have delay (half second is infinity). Moreover, when you look at the choirmaster, you can recognize that he is going to express the sign even before he actually does. This allows you to prepare. It would be hard to recognize this with such solution.