You absolutely can - it's a standard x64 Intel CPU + UEFI, and although it comes with Secure Boot enabled you can disable it easily - but the driver support will probably take a little while (as always).

Um, no. "When the Surface first came out" was the Surface RT. The Pro didn't come out until several months later.

One could easily chalk this up to Microsoft (still, as always) being shit at branding their products, but the Surface Pro and Surface RT lines are and always were aimed at different demographics. The RT is an iPad/Galaxy Tab replacement that happens to have a full-size USB port and built-in file manager and Office suite. The Pro is a laptop with a touchscreen, a stylus, and a removable keyboard. The Pro is meant to be able to serve as your only machine, even if you actually use a computer as more than an email-and-Facebook machine. The RT isn't, really (although it gets a lot closer when you jailbreak it, which MS put an absurd amount of effort into trying to prevent).

There's no guarantee that Intel was actually compromised, though they would have been an obvious target. More likely that effort was aimed at dedicated hardware RNGs, which have been a thing since well before RDRAND, but the final point of the post (about not trusting RNGs you can't audit) has obvious merit.

Also, while I think I know what you mean, "all 3 SSL protocols" makes no sense. There are currently four SSL/TLS protocols in use (SSL3, TLS1, TLS1.1, TLS1.2) plus a deprecated one (SSL2, which is broken; SSL1 was never published AFAIK). If you meant SSL implementations, there are at least seven: the three OpenSSL-derived ones (OpenSSL, LibReSSL, BoringSSL), BouncyCastle (which is technically two implementations, Java and C#, but they are supposed to be equivalent), GnuTLS, Mozilla's one (may be client-only?), Apple's one (I think does both client and server but could be wrong), and Microsoft's SChannel (client and server).

The IE 12 preview runs on Win7, which went RTM nearly five years ago. Vista users need to upgrade, yes, and XP users really seriously guys why the fuck are you running XP need to upgrade, but Win7 is still supported.

Yep. If somebody asks "what did Microsoft ever really innovate?" then "AJAX" is a pretty good answer. Previous versions required silly things like tiny [i]frames on the page that would make requests without navigating the whole browser window, but those were clunky and problematic.

They've already demonstrated multiple successful test firings that have lasted many times longer than any given flight, with multiple shutdowns and re-lights, of the exact same rockets without even dismounting them. Try again?

F1 and such have completely different goals from SpaceX. Professional racecars are machines that push the bleeding edge of the performance envelope, with minimal concern for cost, and squeezing out 0.03% more performance is worth the cost of rebuilding the thing even if it doesn't need it. Rockets are built for reliability and safety first and foremost, with performance coming behind them. For the old guard government contractors, costs come in last, but for SpaceX it needs to be higher priority than that; they have to actually win bids for their launches and don't have long-standing arrangements with the feds.

Landing legs on the reusable Falcon 9 first stage cost some payload capacity, but drastically reduce the effective cost of each launch. We'll see how much it costs when they actually re-use one for an actual launch instead of a test or demo, but I'd bet my estimate of how much work needs to be done is closer than yours.

I believe it's just "Falcon Heavy", since if it was numbered for the same reason the Falcon 9 is, it would be the Falcon 27 (or possibly the Falcon 9 3). But yes. The basic design is, I believe, complete... they're just having some trouble with the propellant cross-feed (where the side fuel tanks are used up first by all 27 rockets, allowing the side boosters and their 18 rockets to be dropped after their tanks are used up, while the central one booster and its 9 rockets still have a full supply). Currently they could probably try a launch just burning from all three tanks simultaneously, which gives a bit less payload but is still pretty impressive.

Currently the first stage (by far the most expensive; ~70% of the total launch cost for the Falcon 9 stack) and the spacecraft capsule (specifically, the just-unveiled Dragon 2) are reusable or close to it. The ablative heat shield on the capsule puts a limit on its lifetime unless they can replace the shield, but the rest of it supposed to be fully reusable with little more than refilling consumables, and the shield is supposed to survive multiple re-entries. The second stage and the spacecraft trunk section are not yet observed to have any upgrades for reuse, although there are already talks of how to make the second stage reusable. The trunk is inexpensive; I don't know if it's even worth the cost (in payload capacity) to recover it.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no parts (except possibly an explosive bolt or three?) that are single-use on the capsule or the first stage. The first stage engines are already relightable - the booster makes a propulsive landing - and so are the "superdraco" landing thrusters on the Dragon 2.

I can only assume you're using some convoluted definition of "US space launch" that excludes all the ones that SpaceX has flown, whether for the government or not. Because I can't even imagine how you'd manage to call the Falcon/Dragon stack "military".

Well, technically the fuels (~200k) and the rechecking/recertifying (unknown, hopefully not much) will prevent it from being actually zero-cost, but it'll be a pittance compared to current prices.

The goal is that the attraction to the coins is greater when you're close (so you don't wander past one, pulled by that large cluster off to the side) and the repulsion is lesser when you're further away (so two allies can turn directly towards each other to pick up coins that lie between both, even though they repel each other).

Tesla and SpaceX are currently in very, very different markets. Tesla is selling luxury consumer products, and trying to get the economies of scale + technical innovation to start selling non-luxury consumer products, where the real market is. They are also competing against an entrenched, widely-deployed technology that has been in widespread use for longer than 99.9% of the human race has been alive. They need their product to become more than a niche, and they need to have viable competition if for no other reason than for the legitimacy that competition brings.

SpaceX sells cheap, high-tech rocket launches, where cheap means something like what a "cheap" computer in the 50s would mean: governments and really big organizations can afford to buy them, and nobody else is even going to consider it. In a way, they're the opposite of Tesla: rather than being a luxury brand trying to get cheaper, they're aiming to be the cheap alternative to the existing competition.

Unlike Tesla, SpaceX is not publicly traded and does not file for patents. Patents provide no meaningful protection against the Chinese or Russian governments, which are the organizations SpaceX is most interested in competing with. SpaceX patenting their stuff would allow those entities to undercut SpaceX for the small number of customers that even exist in such a space, because they could use the disclosed technology without needing to recoup R&D investments or pay California salaries and regulatory costs.

The problem is that SpaceX is the only organization in the world currently demonstrating great success in disrupting the entrenched space launch market, and they need to (and do) re-invest their profits from those launches into producing still-better (cheaper) launchers if the want to achieve their stated goals of making space access cheap enough that actual human beings can afford it. They can't afford to be undercut, because there just aren't enough customers right now for them to afford to do other than fight for every purchase they can get. Tesla can totally afford to be undercut; it will help grow their market (electric car owners) and meanwhile there will always be people who will buy their cars just because the market is big enough.

T-Mobile US. Then it'll work on all those countries, with no extra costs for data or messages (calls cost a bit extra), and you get to keep your US number while overseas!

Well, or T-Mobile if you broke the SIM-lock on the phone (which was one of the most important reasons for jailbreaking early iPhones).

You're completely mistaken. Nearly all phones sold in the US, whether GSM or CDMA, SIM-using or not, are locked. On SIM-using phones (all GSM and LTE-capable devices, some others), the radio firmware simply refuses to place non-emergency calls if it doesn't recognize the SIM. You can get "unlock codes" which remove this anti-feature... or you can buy factory-unlocked phones, if you look hard enough for them.