When I was young, I desired one computery toy above all else: General Jumbo's wrist-worn remote control.

http://www.generaljumbo.co.uk/...

The details of the controls are never explained, but he uses it to issue orders to his personal army of remote-controlled miniaturized military robots.

All true apart from the 'usually.' Those devices are expensive, and few police forces have specialists trained in their use. This means calling in support from another force and even more expense. This is enough of an issue that they are not used in routine cases - they'll only bring them out if you are either involved in an exceptionally high-severity crime (Child abuse images, terrorism, large-scale narcotics) or if you are specifically suspected of a computer-related crime and they have reason to believe you have taken security precautions that would require the use of such equipment.

Any zombie survival team needs an expert in at least four fields: Combat, medicine, survival and technology.

Combat and medicine keep the team alive.
Survival collects food, at least for the first few months - after that it becomes safer to return to the urban areas where you can just grab canned food with ease.
Technology establishes communications with other survivors and maintains the radio gear and power source.

I don't think American politicians are allowed to talk about ten year plans, as it sounds dangerously communist.

Space is actually very, very hot - the very few atoms you find floating around have a great deal of kinetic energy. If you could create a perfectly non-radiating/reflective material and leave it in space, it would eventually get hot. This doesn't happen because the density is so low: The heat transfered to an object by conduction is a negligable fraction of that lost to radiation. Also, anything with water in will freeze in seconds due to evaporative cooling: At near-vacuum, just about everything is above the boiling point.

Colonisation is unrealistic today. The technology is decades away from practicality at least, and the expense of establishing a long-term colony is such that it may well be the single most expensive project in all of human history. Yet the prospects are so exciting - how long as it been since there was a true age of exploration? We can't plan colonisation today, but we can lay the first stones of the foundation that a future generation can build upon.

Just send in the riot squad to beat up the angry unemployed, then charge anyone who tries to organise with inciting a terrorist act.

I'm thinking of a silly-high-power laser with a rotating mirror that slowly pans across the lawn, cutting every blade to a precisely equal height.

The free market is ultimately self-destroying - a monopoly is a very stable situation. Once one company achieves dominant status there are all sorts of underhanded tricks they can use to beat back any smaller competitors. Exclusive deals at retail or on raw materials, selling at a loss to undercut a competitor on price until they go out of business. If you don't limited that freedom a little with regulation, it ends up being not free at all.

Rovers are cool, but they can't compete with the excitement of a crewed mission. Apollo captivated a generation, and there's not even very much to see on the moon.

We were supposed to have that back in 1999.

One of the jobs I applied for years ago even got me to the interview - but I learned later that the whole thing was a sham. They promoted someone internally, and had always intended to, but there was some legal requirement that they consider external applicants equally. So they interviewed a bunch of outsiders to put on a show and appear to comply with the law.

If youtube were launched a few years later, it would likely have been forced to shut down by the cost of legal action.

A little more work and we might not even need the torrent sites. Magnet links can be copied and pasted with ease, including into facebook posts.

Usually by bringing in some files obtained elsewhere.