Who was claiming Vista superior to XP? I bet you'll find "they" had a vested interest in selling the latest and greatest. Microsoft wouldn't have needed to publish the 'Mojave' ads if there wasn't a widespread belief that Vista sucked. And as for Windows ME, I've been using windows since 3.1 was new and exciting, so I know better. Don't try to push some revisionist belief that anybody but Microsoft and their fanboys liked windows ME.

The earth has a giant magnetic field. Induce a powerful opposing magnetic field in your satellite/space tether system that "pushes" against the earth's field. There's no reaction mass, but your satellite can then control its position in orbit. Most satellites don't use the space tether system, although I don't know whether that's because it's inherently impractical or merely too new/expensive/fancy.

The iPhone bit was a hook to draw eyeballs. The smartphones are no more or less susceptible than any other machine running SSH, all of whom should have a more sensible password policy.

It's difficult to say whether or not a given system is infected, even if you inspect a complete packet log. Your checksum plan is one of the few ways to guarantee a lack of infection. Actually even that isn't always a guarantee, depending on where the hack is hiding. It could be in the MBR or even burned into the BIOS.

Luckily, in most cases the hackers aren't clever enough to hide their steps that well. There'll be oddly-named files in /var/www, ps and top will disagree about running processes, or you'll suddenly find yourself locked out of some system management tool.

HAM requires two people with equipment that can be hidden inside of a large suitcase. The Internet, I'm reasonably assured, takes rather more space to store. Even in the doomsday scenario where the tubes are completely closed, and all HAM licenses are revoked, there will still be amateurs using the airwaves. Good luck communicating over IP when the backbones have been cut.

Something to think about:
Registry cleaners have a huge incentive to be ridiculously oversensitive. They have almost exactly zero incentive to be competent and intelligent about what gets labeled as 'registry cruft'. Who's gonna pay for or download a reg cleaner that says 'nah, this is mostly clean, just a bit of stuff from an old trialware software to remove'?

There are more choices than your false dichotomy of letting the CEOs control everything and full-blown socialism would indicate. A very simple, non-socialist solution would be to legally mandate total *EO pay+bonus+benefits be (no more than) a certain (likely small, 3% seems a good ballpark) percentage of company net profits. There: corporate leaders are compensated fairly for their expertise, really good CEOs can make shit-tons of money, and imbeciles like, say, Carly Fiorina get jack.
As a side benefit, this would incentivize companies not to hide their profits from the IRS.
I obviously haven't thought this through very deeply, but I can't find any obvious flaws in the proposition.

Supposing that humanity learning how to manipulate gravity does indeed lead to violating causality, and that we live in one universe in an infinitely bifurcating multiverse, probability could indicate that any continuing stable universe is one which does not contain the discovery of the higgs boson.

All it takes is one madman with a sufficiently powerful time machine, and the entire shape of the involved universe is irrevocably altered--effectively destroyed. Or, over infinite future time, the probability that a universe containing time travel is destroyed by a time traveler must approach 1. Perhaps it's not any ham-fisted 'self-consistency' principle keeping us out of the cookie jar, it's just that the cookie jar is a disguised thermonuclear bomb.

You speak facetiously, of course, but spending the time and effort to setup your own email server is a very valuable exercise. And at the end, you get an email account with no limits. Want ridiculously tight spam filters? Easy. Want to send and receive 1GB email attachments? Your insanity can be catered to.

And best of all, nobody is sitting there watching all of your emails and serving you ads based on what you're emailing about.

The "0%" is a lie, or a willful lack of knowledge. There are many transitional fossils that have been discovered, including dozens of specimens that illustrate the progress of humankind as a species. Only the American Taliban seriously regard the evolutionary theory as anything but well-founded science.

Is it wrong that my first reaction was to flip over to a torrent site and snag my own copy of the PDFs? Purely for research purposes, of course.

I think the only thing the prevalence of touchpads indicates is that most people don't care that their input isn't pixel-accurate. I have a mouse-less interface on my laptop, precisely because the touchpad is imprecise and difficult to use. I despise touchpads. Proper multi-touch pads alleviate the hate somewhat, but I still have to hold my finger in a less comfortable position, and deal with wondering whether that tap was firm enough to count as a click or not. And as for window management, the double-tap-and-hold-to-drag input style really gets annoying if you have to move something and find yourself at the border of your pad.

Do you only ever post when it gives you the chance to use your fancy punctuation?

On the other hand, when working as a programmer I found coding some personal project for the sheer enjoyment of it to be a very welcome break from the old 8-to-6 grind of writing getters and setters. Just watching TV or reading a book didn't going to cleanse my mental palate as well as getting to tweak my Mandelbrot renders again. But then, I'm not getting a CS degree to increase my salary, I'm getting it because it's fun as hell.

You, uh, are aware that there are better alternatives to the shitheap that is outlook express, right? Thunderbird, just to pick the popular one, doesn't have any hoops at all. Why would you jump through the MS hoops for a piece of low-grade quasi-free software?