The Half-Life wiki has a good article called Future of the Half-Life series where you can follow the latest developments.

On March 19, Gabe Newell, when asked about Half-Life 3, replied: "The only reason we'd go back and do like a super classic kind of product is if a whole bunch of people just internally at Valve said they wanted to do it and had a reasonable explanation for why [they did]." This, like all of Valve's other statements regarding Half-Life 3, neither confirms nor denies the possibility that the game will eventually be made.

Not really. The improvement is usually around 10x.

Meeh. It's not necessarily him. sexconker said that he threw some cow comments in the mix just for the laughs. The original spammer is probably some other person. sexconker seems like a sane person to me.

Hey, at least the weird BSD spam seems to be gone for good (the one with random words and the word "BSD" there somewhere).

Take a closer look.

The taskbar icons in Windows 7 have glass effect, nice diagonal gradient and rounded corners. Try hovering the mouse cursor over icons of running applications: there is even a sleek little lamp effect which follows the cursor, and the color of that effect matches the application icon. Also the icon of the active application has brighter background than others.

These kind of small touches are missing in the Windows 10 UI.