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no one thinks Gates and Microsoft invented the PC. no one thinks they invented the GUI

No-one here on / but plenty in the wider world. Just one example from a quick Google "We all know that Bill Gates created the personal computer"

.... but they did in fact make the PC affordable.

More bollocks. In the UK I bought my first personal computer, an Amstrad (with CP/M and a printer) for 400 GBP ($600) when an IBM PC with DOS (and no printer) cost around 1200 GBP ($1800). I, and other young techies at the time, regarded the IBM PC as a corporate machine that was unaffordable (and undesirable) for home. Even at work very few people were issued with one. The subsequent spectacular reduction in IBM compatible PC prices was due to falling hardware costs and owed nothing to Microsoft. It owed more to Alan Sugar and the manufacturers of hard drives and memory.

Today the price label on a desktop or laptop is typically a quarter of the 1980 price label, while Microsoft's operating system price label has trebled, having gone through a period in the 90's - the very period when PCs became "affordable" - when it was five times the 1980 price. The percentage of the cost of a PC that goes to MS for their pre-loaded operating system was 3% in 1980 but is typically 20% today.

I suggest you watch this interview with Sugar to hear what a dominant and frustrating part Microsoft's OS price was in setting the price of the PCs he made and sold.

For that matter, how much do artists get paid each time I listen to a track on a CD?

Hmmm, let's see: Artists get about 10% of retail
A CD costs $10, and say there are ten tracks on the CD.
Thus, each track costs $1, and the artists earns ten cents per track.
Most of my CDs were purchased at least ten years ago. I have no doubt I have listened to many of those tracks at least 100 times (those that were purchased more recently obviously don't have the same number of "listens", but - barring sudden death or deafness - I expect they will in time).
So the artist gets about $0.001 (1/10th of a cent) every time I listen to a track.

That's slightly less than Pandora pays and 6 times less than Spotify. Even assuming they get slightly better rates and I listen to the tracks far less frequently, the artists are still earning about as much money each time I listen to a track on CD (well, okay, ripped to MP3 but you know what I mean).

You could argue that the percent the artist is earning is far too low - that the middlemen are siphoning off too much into their own pockets - but that's a different issue. As it stands, it seems to me that online streaming services are paying them about the same (if not more) than they might get from more traditional sales, at least if you calculate based on the number of times a song is heard.

Maybe measuring "per listen" (stream) isn't the optimal way of calculating revenue.

As cool as this would be *now*, given enough generations these mutations will disburse (ever wonder why so many people have blue eyes?)

Well not till you mentioned it, so I checked out of idle curiosity. Using carefully selected words for the search:
how many people have blue eyes

Blue eyes are indeed becoming less common in the world. One study showed that about 100 years ago,
half of U.S. residents had blue eyes. Nowadays only 1 in 6 does. http://genetics.thetech.org/ask/ask355

2% of the population has green eyes. It's the rarest eye color. 8% has blue, or a variation of blue like violet or grey.I guess the rest has brown or hazel. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_people_in_the_world_have_blue_eyes

Approximately 8% of the world's population has blue eyes http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question79523.html
which references http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_color#Blue that makes no such claim.

8% is the answer most often given.

As for the mutation for blue eyes.
According to a team of researchers from Copenhagen University, a single mutation which arose as recently
as 6-10,000 years ago was responsible for all the blue-eyed people alive on Earth today.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-511473/All-blue-eyed-people-traced-ancestor-lived-10-000-years-ago-near-Black-Sea.html

The previous article also noted it could have been due to Krakatoa Island sending house sized bits of itself into low earth orbit four years earlier.

Given that less than 100 milliamps can kill a person I wonder how the 133 milliamps in this device are safe. How can they guarantee the current doesn't go through the heart so as to not stop it? I don't know how scientific it is but the 3rd post on this forum indicates 133 milliamps is not safe to say the least.

Maybe the direct method of incapacitating the victim isn't voltage but indirectly, if it is an electronic device, it is going to rely on voltage so I agree with your question. Must be an issue with their marketing department. Of course, everyone knows it is the current that does the damage anyway.

about plants that smell

Does somebody @ NASA have a sense of humor? I heard 'Artemis' & the first thing I thought of was Superman II.
Far & Away, Terrence Stamp's Finest Performance!

Here are a couple of references -
http://collectspace.com/ubb/Forum35/HTML/000234.ht ml
http://www.funtrivia.com/en/Movies/Superman-II-104 17.html
(I had to check myself to make sure I wasn't crazy) You'll have to scroll down a bit in each link.