If it really works people won't give a damn about patents.

Are the BT routers used now combined router/modem or do they still need the separate fibre box?

About minus $50 trillion... supposedly.

The ballot box has nothing to do with euros, dollars, or what...
Who am I kidding?

It seems the singularity has been and gone, yet nobody noticed.

I imagine it's because the relays are either in the engine compartment or hidden behind so much interior trim that they're inaudible. Either way a separate buzzer would be needed. In older cars the flasher unit was easily accessible and there wasn't nearly as much stuff behind the dash..

Call me when you can hack it to sound like George Jetson's hovercar.

If you don't notice a flashing green light barely in your peripheral vision I would start to wonder if you ought to be driving at all.

Kirk: "Where's... ... Mr. ... Spock?"

...

Kirk: "Good girl."

Sends a shiver down my spine.

I don't know about sad, but it's hardly surprising. On the one hand you have a group of people who greatly enjoy the source material and want to make more of the same for likeminded fans, while on the other hand you have a bunch of money-grubbing studio execs who want to make big bucks by milking a franchise and simmering it down to the lowest common denominator.

The problem with Abrams is that he left it on the heat too long and had to fill out the mixture with leftovers from his other movies.

I've really enjoyed them so far. For me they rank in order of air date: the first one was pleasing mainly for the return of Apollo and the actor who played the role in TOS, the second is a really solid story in the original style helped no end by casting Lou Ferrigno as on Orion slaver and an admirable performance by (sorry, had to look this up) Fiona Vroom* and the third was an excellent continuation of Mirror, Mirror.

Vig Mignogna plays Shatner to a T and easily surpasses him in the role of Mirror Kirk, while Chris Doohan (yes, it's his son) has obviously spent many an hour watching his old man and gets the accent just right. The series as a whole is well worth watching and I'll definitely be throwing some money their way if it means I get to enjoy more of the same; the show has clearly been put together by people who have spent far more time watching the original series than I. There are a number of small guest appearances that will bring a smile to your face, not least of which is Michael Dorn.

*Points also earned for having such a cool name.

Sci-fi lets writers hand-wave technical things like FTL travel, a common trope, with the goal of exploring how people would react in the situations that technology would open up. Whether you choose the hardest or softest sci-fi story you can find, you'll most likely find that the plot revolves around people and not technology.

In short, sci-fi isn't about the science, it's about the effects that it has on the human condition.

Since I've apparently offended both of the fans of Prometheus I suppose I'd better elaborate on a few of the things that made it such a disappointment. Insofar as Scott himself is concerned, I suggest you (not the parent, just folk in general) watch/listen to any of his recent interviews and see the smugness and dismissiveness of the fans' criticisms for yourselves. Anyway, back to the film. We had:

-An alien astronaut that was single-handedly responsible for all of human evolution, while handwaving over all the other flora and fauna that populates the Earth.
-An insufferable man-child anthropologist who throws his rattle out of the pram when faced with the revelation that a race from eons past don't instantly greet the explorers on their arrival on a world that was apparently pinpointed using only a handful of dots painted on a wall by cavemen.
-A crew so unbelievably stupid that it's a wonder they were able to don their spacesuits at all.
-An android whose actions are never explained, just followed by a lot of shouting and loud sound effects in the hope that no-one would notice.
-A leading character whose sterility is drummed into the audience with as much subtlety as her involuntary pregnancy (Prometheus has nothing to do with Alien, honest!), to say nothing of the major surgery that is seemingly no impediment at all when running and jumping about just when the action was drying up.
-An antagonist whose appearance and behaviour run counter to what was explicitly stated previously, simply because Scott didn't want to or couldn't use the original Alien again.
-A disembodied, reanimated head. One of many shout-outs to a franchise that is both shit-upon and declaimed as having nothing to do with with the film at hand.

I would go on but the hour is late and I can't help but think that the only reason that Scott's only other watchable film since Alien was so because the source material (Hannibal) was two inches thick and that left little room for "vision". Whatever skill Scott possessed back in the 70's has apparently deteriorated into a sense that he can do no wrong and to hell with the people who actually watch his style over substance dreck. Suspension of disbelief is a thing to be used sparingly, not as a catch-all to excuse a myriad of plot-holes and unexplained character motivations.

I would dearly love to see Man in the High Castle adapted for film; it's a good story that deserves Hollywood treatment but, frankly, Ridley Scott has had his day and there are any number of film-makers who could do it better.

I'd be a lot more excited if Sir Ridley hadn't disappeared up his own fundament shortly after Gladiator. He has a lot to do to make up for Prometheus.

Depends. I can get my PC speakers about thirty feet. As for the floor standing ones, I have to toss them like cabers... so about ten feet.