'reducing the tax incentives'
You can bet they're not lowering the tax on petrol.

Grazing the atmosphere has issues.
The heating pulse is quite large, and radiating it to cool down again before the next encounter may be an issue.
Plus, it places strong demands on the attitude control, and heats the tanks a lot when they're still full of volatile fuel.
'Just' reentering normally from what will be at least LEO takes quite a lot of heatshield or reaction mass.

The second stage, for many launches - to GEO - ends up in an orbit which is very unfriendly to reentry - if it reenters, it will do at a very high speed.
This makes reentry not simple.

What the government believe is largely irrelevant to the judiciary - or at the most only a slight influence.
The feelings of the government in interpretation of legislation are at best advisory.

Current thinking is that the second stage is probably not easily reusable, and they are not actually working on it.
Those videos were produced at a tim when there wasn't a concrete idea as to how flyback would work in practice.

To a degree.
A 1% niche of the mobile tablet or phone market is quite large enough for a small company.
Indeed - at that point - you're not a small company anymore.

i would perhaps agree - if it was from a company that had not produced hardware.
I suspect this is more the case of PR and a case to purchase early at a discount a device that was coming anyway.
I'm buying one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
'The Act renders terms excluding or limiting liability ineffective or subject to reasonableness, depending on the nature of the obligation purported to be excluded and whether the party purporting to exclude or limit business liability, acting against a consumer.'
In short - any provision trying to do this is probably not legal.

Of course it's a security risk.
The SD card has a 32 bit processor that does the wear leveling.
There is nothing stopping it doing 'interesting' things to files on it, if it's so programmed.
The extra fun part is that the user can't read out this programming.

Obvious things might be infecting files with viruses, appending small secret files to large media files in the hope that they will later be shared, or more targeted attacks.

that it turned out that the anaconda had a fondness for bread products, and would not eat anything without at least some in.
The handler turned to the director, and said 'My anaconda don't want none unless she's got buns hun'.

Why are pilots and astronauts and F1 racecar drivers - all of which actively picked a competitive field to enter, knowing the risks - considered more special and valuable than construction workers, loggers, or fishermen?

I note that the recent 'space rating' specs imply that flying to space 12 times a year is safer - not than a logger or a fisherman - but than a librarian.

The satellites are hardened.
And 20000km away from earth.
As are the uplinks. (well, not the latter)

The primary risk to GPS in the UK is the USA deciding to turn it off.
That risk doesn't apply for US shipping near the US, as if GPS was turned off - rather than severely degraded - so would the local LORAN locators.
GPS is not going away unless someone actually presses the button.
It's not vulnerable (theoretically) to single points of failure (ideally) as it's intended to carry on even in the event of moderate wars.

"This is always the problem with people imagining horrifying artificial intelligences that will snuff out humanity. To do that, you have to be motivated to achieve that end."
Well - yes.
But - it depends on the capabilities too.

Humans have wiped out many species, through direct resource extraction - like the passenger pigeon and dodo, to countless species wiped out through habitat destruction, to active extermination - smallpox.

'Terminator' style 'end of the world' scenarios only happen where there is a balance of power.
With mature AI, that has become sufficiently capable - destruction of humanity could take little effort, and only rely on a decision to do so - and the next day, everyones dead, and the resources are re-used for whatever the AI chooses to do.

This could very easily transition from a 'caring' AI that has global oversight - and provides many services to humans, through one decision to the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Civil Forfeiture (HBO)