The first stage isn't supposed to land with humans on board. It's just designed to land so that they don't have to build another one from scratch every time they launch a customers' payload into orbit.

This will mean they don't have so much cost per launch, so they can either pass those savings on to their customer (customer wins), don't pass those savings on to their customer (SpaceX profits), or pass SOME savings on to the customer (so both parties benefit).

Virgin were deploying cable internet here years before BT spun off their infrastructure into what is now known as Openreach, let alone began their FTTC rollout

However, they've still not got cable anywhere near me, so they're not an option.

BT Openreach upgraded my telephone exchange to allow FTTC connections more than 2 years ago. However, they only got around to enabling my cabinet back in June. I can therefore get a FTTC internet connection from any number of providers - but my estimated maximum download speed is between 8 and 11 Mbit/sec, regardless which provider I ask. I currently get anywhere between 6 and 9 Mbit/sec on ADSL (but mostly nearer 6). There's almost no point in upgrading. I am guessing my cabinet is a fair distance away (I have absolutely no idea where it is).

I'd like to see Google Fiber coming to the UK - give BT Openreach some much-needed competition.

Sure, there are plenty of ISPs in this country - but they are all entirely dependent on BT Openreach's fixed-line infrastructure, telephone exchange network, and street cabinets.

End the monopoly!

1541? Get off my lawn.

When I were a lad, we used to load up games off audio tapes. If you were lucky, you'd have a tape deck with a counter on it, so you could fast forward or rewind the tape to the right place so that you could load the game you wanted. And it would then take about 15 minutes to load the game. The border of the screen would generally have rainbow striped patterns flashing all over it all the while, apparently something to do with how it loaded data from the tapes.

Sometimes, it'd take so long to load the game that the game makers would put in a little mini "loader" game for you to play while you wait for the actual game to finish loading in the background. Or, they'd have a tune for you to listen to (Ocean was famous for doing this - the "Ocean Loader", with music written by Martin Galway). That's right - Commodore 64 had multitasking and multimedia, 8-bit style.

And if your game failed to load, you'd have to turn it off and on again, rewind the tape to the right place, and try loading it again. With your fingers crossed harder, this time.

But Assassin's Creed tells us that we have genetic memory! That our entire lives' memory is encoded in our DNA and passed down through the generations! And with a fancy machine, our decendents can relive our memories, and those of our parents and grandparents too! Surely a genetic clone would have all those memories too???

Oh wait, it's a game, and not real at all.

This is the issue most people have with cloning - it's copying the physical form, not the memories, and not the personality. In order for "favourite dog v2.0" to be the same as "favourite dog v1.0", you would need to raise that dog in exactly the same way, responding in exactly the same way to its behaviour as you did with the original, AND it would need to learn from your behaviour and respond to it in exactly the same way as the original did. Too many variables.

Once we can download and upload the contents of the brain -- reliably -- then this may be a possibility. But we're so far away from that, that when we do invent this tech, it'll be powered by those long-awaited commercial fusion reactors that are only 20 years away.

Sorry sir, we're right out of spiders.

... I've got a slug?

Hurricane pilots were responsible for more shoot-downs of German aircraft during the Battle of Britain than Spitfire pilots were.

This is partly due to the Hurricane being available in greater numbers, and partly because the simpler design of the Hurricane meant that the aircraft had a much shorter turn-around time (for rearming and refuelling) than the Spitfire did. The RAF also tended to field the slower Hurricane to shoot down bombers, and used the faster and more agile Spitfires to tackle the bombers' escorts.

My mod points lapsed; if they hadn't, you'd have got a "Funny" from me because I laughed. Thanks for that! :D

Perhaps if you adjusted the strap, it wouldn't be hanging off your wrist.

Maybe then they'd actually roll out a carpet for you.

OMG - RUN! ZOMBEARS!!!

My local telephone exchange has been enabled for fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) for a year and a half

The street cabinet my line connects to has not been upgraded. I can't even physically find the damn thing, no idea where they've hidden it. Maybe BT doesn't either. Nobody can tell me when or if it will be enabled.

I can get 4G LTE on my phone and get 30 Mbit/sec up or down. But ADSL2 is as fast as I can get - with the distance from my exchange to my house, I get no more than 9 Mbit/sec down (but more often than not closer to 6 Mbit/sec) and no more than 1 Mbit/sec up.

I'm all in favour of gigabit broadband rollouts - but I want them to finish the FTTC programme first.

Also - I live in the middle of a city of 230,000 people, and the area I'm in is entirely residential. They'd get more fibre subscribers if they enabled more cabinets.

So operating the robot wirelessly - will that mean it is completely self-contained? By which I mean, does the robot's shell contain all of the computer control / decision-making equipment it needs to operate and move around, or will this equipment remain on separate hardware, transmitting commands wirelessly to a much smaller "movement control" system on-board?

Just wondering if cutting the cords means that the robot could simply be told "go and explore your environment", with the decision-making on where to go, how to get there, how to move to overcome obstacles X, Y and Z (i.e. step over, walk around, duck under, etc), without damaging itself or causing injury to humans, all being performed on-board with no external input (power or control).

My Nexus 7 2012 (WiFi only) just got updated from 5.0 to 5.0.2 the other day, as an over-the-air update. It will happen, just it sometimes takes a little while - I have no idea why.