The premise is great "minimum support times need to be written in stone, say a minimum of 5 years of updates from time of sale and any company that refuses to honor the support time should be forced to open up the device and hand over the driver code so another OS can be loaded that is patched." But we all know that the percentage of the "general masses" that would actually do something about their antiquated device would be in the 15% range, probably 5%.

I beg to differ on the saving money arguement... The vast majority of the time, my price comparisons don't even need to account for Sales Tax. I'm a Techie and to keep my electronics / gadget desires satisfied Amazon / NewEgg / MonoPrice / Etc... beat the local alternatives on base price. Nevermind accounting for sales Tax. I don't expect that taxing Internet sales will have any material impact on my online purchasing habits.

I can picture it now... Mark Zuckerberg dressed like a jedi, waving his hand... "don't be concerned with those pictures, those are no longer pictures you have any rights to..."

I would call it "RAID-5 for WiFi" Or how about RAID-Fi... :-)

Agree that solar (with appropriate means of storage) is probably the most viable. But disagree with your statement that the Earth is a closed system. The only input may be solar energy, but there certainly is an output in radiating heat / energy into space. The net must be pretty close to zero, though I imagine it oscilates positive to negative over time (say on the frequency of the ice ages...)

But our attention span is only about 15 minut.... squirrel...!!!

I would be more open to the idea of streaming only if there were some sort of offline cache system that didn't result in dead silence when in a rural area / on an airplane, etc... I.e. If [Insert favorite streaming app] had a "buffer/cache" of an hour or more and could play that (perhaps in a loop if necessary) even when not connected to teh Internets. Obviously there would be issues with what type of music / genre to cache. Just the last station/playlist, etc... Streaming only would be great, as long as there is a solution to never be completely without some tunes.

Sorry, but not everything revolves around Texas... I flew regularly on business for just over a decade and the only time I flew in/out of Texas was when that was my destination. Seriously why can't we all just ratchet down the rhetoric about a dozen notches and have a bit more rational conversation... (especially in our political discussions)!

LOL... On what plant / alien world is furlongs/fortnight a relevant or commonly used measure of velocity?

Yes, absolutely. Backing up to the cloud implies that you have the originals NOT in the cloud. In this case it appears many people are in shock and awe that the ONLY COPY OF THEIR FILES IN EXISTENCE is no longer available.

There is a difference between backing up to the cloud and storing your sole copy of a file there...

Backups should still exist, whether the originals be at home / work or in the cloud.

It goes well beyond JUST THE PEOPLE WHO DIE... The traffic delays, wasted fuel, frustrated people, road rage, etc... impacts of distracted driving are a pretty significant effect as well. From my ~15 years of commuting, I'm convinced that highway congestion would be reduced by 10-20% if all the morons on the road were actually paying attention to the road rather than talking, texting, reading, eating, shaving or applying makeup / mascara (the last one boggles my mind - why would ANYONE put a pointy object near their eye while driving... /shudder).