I agree with all of this, but I'd also be willing to put a few bob on Intel dominating the future with an implementation of RISC-V.

Competition seems to have been a good thing for Intel:
  —AMD added 64-bit to x86, forcing Intel to match it and ultimately abandon Itanic.
  —ARM has gradually educated the world to adopt a new, cleaner architecture in a way that the major RISC players of the 90s (IBM Power, Sun SPARC, H-P PA-RISC, DEC Alpha, SGI and others with MIPS) never managed. This has undoubtedly influenced Intel for the better, apart from their messy x86 ISA that we've been expecting to die soon for the last 30 years.

Perhaps the world is finally ready to be weaned-off the x86 legacy for good. ARM may have too many IP/licensing issues for Intel, whereas there's no such issue for RISC-V, and Intel announced an interesting investment last month:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Friscv.org%2F2018%2F05%2Fsifi...

But whatever happens, we need the likes of AMD to keep Intel on their toes.

That's my recollection, too, as an Orange user in 1995. With the 160-character limit and the awkwardness of using the keys–as well as not knowing anyone else on Orange at the time–texting seem like an oddity that I didn't expect to catch-on.

Unix and its relatives have dominated desktop computing for professional astronomers for about thirty years. In the 1980s, Sun workstations and Unix mini-supercomputers displaced Digital Equipment Corp's VAX minicomputers, then, as the performance of x86 overtook most of the RISC CPUs, Linux became useful for professional astronomical image processing applications (e.g., AIPS & IRAF). Over the last 10-15 years, MacOS X has also become a major player.

The adoption of Unix and related open systems standards made porting of applications from one vendor's hardware to another much easier than it was in the days of proprietary operating systems. Of course, Windows did something similar in the wider world, but the x86/Windows combination was later to the show for many scientists and engineers, and, in the early days, not up to the job, both in terms of performance and sophistication of the OS and toolset. Of course, that's changed now, but Unix/Linux (including MacOS) dominates astronomy.

The story's similar for other fields of physical science and engineering, in academia and industry. A generation of such people largely bypassed the world of Windows for serious work, perhaps only using it when they needed to use proprietary commercial applications. Where they write their own code, it's likely to be on Linux or MacOS.

Scaremongering is also a great diversionary tactic.

The "war on terrr" saved how many lives?
How many lives would a war on tobacco producers–significant contributors to the top three causes of death–have saved?

end-to-end encryption
curtains
drapes
shutters
blinds ...

Not Thunderbirds, but one of the Anderson's other creations - Captain Scarlet - had this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

It's already been there and the fall can be quite fast. In the early-mid '80s the Pound dropped from over $2 to a little over $1. On one trip I took in early '85, the effective rate was less than $1 to the Pound by the time the bank had taken its cut.

Mod parent up - it's insightful irony - who the hell moderated it as "troll"?

Damnation - I just blew my mod points before this story came-up. SuperCharlie has hit the nail on the head.

This has come about because politicians - mostly soft classics/humanities* types with no significant experience of the world outside politics that pays the bills - wanted to make voters think that the junior and high school systems in places like the US and UK were still working after all their meddling. Add some incompetent box-ticking bureaucrats and educators who are content to game the system, and you have the mess that we're in. The best and brightest still make their own way, but many kids arrive in STEM courses at university/college and can't cope with the kind of learning environment that depends on curiosity and initiative in addition to hard work. Some seem to think that regurgitation and rhetoric will win celebrity status - but STEM subjects generally aren't like that.

*These subjects are great in themselves, but we have too many politicians from this kind of background who largely use their subjects as a way of peddling lies.