You must be a marketer.

You know what? When I go to the store, I have a shopping list. I buy the things on that list, and I go home. Unless there's a topless chick offering free personal services if I buy her soap brand, I won't be buying it no matter how many times I saw it mentioned on Facebook lately.

But, hey, keep claiming that your adverts work by magic 'fluence if you like. It's either that or back to the dole queue on Monday morning.

Which robots can cover dozens of miles in a few days, while collecting the most interesting scientific specimens from that area?

The big disadvantage of robots is that they're damn slow. A human could cover the distance the Mars rovers have travelled in a day, but you could put a hundred or more rovers on Mars for the cost of putting one human there.

Only if you read too many Cyberpunk novels.

How do you have a corporation without a State, when the very idea of a corporation is the product of the State? How long would Microsoft survive if they had to pay to enforce copyright themselves, without a State to do it for them?

No-one in the West has built rockets so cheaply before. Look at Arianespace floundering because they're planning to build a new rocket that no-one will want to use if SpaceX are offering similar reliability for a fraction of the cost.

No-one has ever landed a first stage after launching a rocket into space. SpaceX haven't quite achieved that yet, but their last demo clearly brought it down to sea level and would likely have recovered the stage if it had returned over land.

Yeah, but it corners like a whale.

If I remember correctly, the stage is so light by that point that they believe they can turn around and fly back using 10% of the fuel. That cuts payload somewhat, but a 20% lower payload for 10% of the price would still be a big win.

The other option is to launch such that there's a convenient spot to land around where the stage would come down. That would take much less fuel, but you have to fly it back to the launhch site afterwards.

So, then. Explain why scrolling in an X-forwarded text editor is pretty much instant, while I can watch the pixels redraw if I use the same application through VNC?

Ah, because this is just something you read on the Internet, and you don't use X-forwarding every day like I do?

But, uh, that's the same as GTA3 and GTA4.

They were probably planning to charge players $50 to activate this 'DLC'.

You can already run your programs on a mainframe - just as fast as this microprocessor BS would be, if not more so.

So the German cars are as unreliable as the Mexican cars? An acquaintance did tell me a while ago that Mercedes had really gone donwnhill in the twenty years he owned them, but I thought at least the German ones would be OK.

I'm not sure that 'as good as European cars' is really a selling point, when the car buying books I've been looking at recently mostly say 'don't buy European cars, they're crap'. Then again, that may be because they're made in Mexico.

So, where are the TV ads for Joe Newbie's book? Where are the newspaper ads? Where are the billboards?

They're not there, because the publisher won't spend a cent advertising his book to readers, if they think it's only going to make $5,000.

Most of the really badly fomatted ebooks I've seen come from trade publishers just OCR-ing the paper book and uploading it without further editing. I've seen a few badly formatted backlist ebooks from authors, but most take a lot more pride in their books than their publisher would.

Ha-ha. You're funny.

If WB pull their movies off Amazon, I just stop buying WB movies. Few people are going to set up a separate account for every movie company, they just want to buy all their crap from one site with one account.