In a couple of decades, travel will be considered tediously quaint, when we can just rent a body and operate it remotely in that foreign country.

You clearly haven't even thought about what kind of technologies will be commonplace before the end of the century, and how they'll make surveillance extremely difficult.

Uh, no, it won't. The harder the spies try to spy on us, the harder we work to avoid it.

Besides which, a world where everyone was spied on at all times and all laws were enforced automatically as a result would collapse within two generations.

Yeah, there's a game I own. First there was an ad to buy the sequel when you exit the game, which delays the exit for a few seconds. Then, in a patch, they added an ad at the start of the game telling you to buy the next one. Then they added a new window when you start the game so you have to hit 'Play' to play, and the window is... guess what... advertising the sequel.

Needless to say, I won't be buying it precisely because of the advertising.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, we won't wake up one morning and find Google autonomous cars driving everyone around, the technology will start out with hands-free cruise control and similar relatively simple systems, probably progress to self-driving trucks on the highways, and evolve over the years in new models until, one day, your new Ford can drive itself.

You mean, like an Android tablet? As much as I hate to admit it, iPads provide a better experience than both Android and Windows, but you can buy a perfectly capable Android tablet for half the price of an iPad right now if you don't mind a clunkier UI.

You don't need a keyboard with an iPad, because it's not designed to run desktop apps. The whole 'killer feature' of the Surface is supposed to be that it can run desktop Windows apps... for which you need a keyboard. No-one buys a Windows tablet to run Metro apps, because if they want to run apps, they buy Android or iPad, because no-one in their right mind writes Metro apps.

And needs it, for Windows and all those desktop Windows apps you're going to install on it.

What 'so much more' does a Surface Pro do that iPad owners want to do?

Hint: nothing, which is why they use iPads. Microsoft have been pushing tablets that run desktop Windows apps since at least 2001, and hardly anyone bought them because hardly anyone wants to do that. It's a brain-dead idea, but when the only profit centres you have are Windows and Office, every piece of hardware you produce looks like it should run Windows and Office.

If I remember correctly, they turned around the booster during the previous barge landing attempt and did a partial boostback burn, just not the full burn to take it back to Florida. So they're already most of the way there.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that, when I was still reading game magazines, the games that got high review scores were usually the ones that had full-page ads in the magazine.

And it still runs like a pig, thanks to garbage collection, lack of unsigned types, and the need to go through Java bytecode to generate the final host code. I remember the joyous days of running software that did encryption in Java rather than calling a native library, and ran at least ten times slower than it would have in C.

Is that really 28MB of code, or is that 1MB of code and 27MB of bitmaps, sound files, and other crud?

If Microsfot cared about corporate users, they wouldn't have released Window 8.

Uh, wut?

Back in the EVIL PRE-PC DAYS--or, at least, the EVIL PRE-WINDOWS DOMINANCE DAYS--we cross-compiled our code onto at least half a dozen Unix variants, and Macs, with a mix of big- and little-endian, and 32-bit and 64-bit.

Only dumb companies built in dependencies on endianness or word size that made their code not work. Almost all the OS inconsistencies for us were hidden in a low-level OS-specific wrapper, except for the places where we had to use hand-coded assembler.

Most of the complaints I hear about Window 8 come from people who've bought a new PC, booted it up, and have no freaking clue how to use it. 'WTF?' they say, 'I thought this thing ran Windows?'

New machines with Windows XP were still on sale two or three years before they stopped supporting it.

And the reasons Microsoft have to keep supporting old versions are:

1. They make you pay for new versions.
2. New versions often suck so bad that no-one wants them.
3. They change the driver model so old drivers for crusty old hardware don't work.

If new versions were free, or actually provided enough value to users that they were worth paying for, rather than usually making users go 'WTF were they thinking?' this wouldn't be required. ME, Vista and Window 8 have all been crap that no sane person would pay for and made users stick to their old OS.

SpaceX need something to launch to generate the economies of scale required in the launch market to really slash launch costs (i.e by mass-producing reusable rockets and flying them a lot). This isn't a bad one, and it could be much cheaper than previous attempts.