How do we feed the programmers, artists, and designers whose work appears on this site? As a distribution platform Pirate Bay is absolutely amazing, as an ethical business, not so much, Pirate Bay is making money from ads.
It's about time. With Steam, iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon VOD all major reasons to use optical drives have become weaker. Even for backing up, it makes far more sense to use a hard drive than cd-r's.
You don't need the appstore even if you go driveless, you need an internet connection.
Vertical farms make perfect sense when you rotate them 90 from the base, remove all the glass, and maximize your usable surface area. A basil garden in the windowsill is about as vertical as your going to get in any non-scifi form. Maybe having big tubes of circulating algae would work, but then you're all eating delicious Matrix Goo.
There may be only 1 bit of information describing the brain, it doesn't matter, the bits of information do not have a one to one correlation with logical gates or anything else for that matter. It is silly to compare genes with "lines of code", you also need a machine to parse, and eval those lines of code so you should also include the instructions for that machine as well.