http://www.viruscomix.com/page329.html

Apartment with thin walls.

Shouldn't we also acknowledge that the root cause of this kind of misery are people who'll believe whatever they read, without any due diligence? If we were to apply scientific publishing standards in the news -- that is, whenever you're writing based on someone else's words, name your source -- then any allegation could be tracked back to whomever made the initial comment, or it would dead-end at an anonymous post. A non-anonymous poster can then be required to either produce their evidence or to retract/apologize/pay damages; anonymous posts can be used as a starting point for an investigation (this is precisely what anonymous tip lines are for) but should never be considered evidence of anything in and of themselves.
Seriously. If you get an anonymous email accusing your next-door neighbor of being a child molester, are you going to go over there to beat him up? Anyone who has actual evidence of something like that should be talking to the police, not sending anonymous messages and forum posts around. Whenever I see anonymous accusations, I treat them with a lot of suspicion.

Technically, you didn't -- the crew compartment survived the fuel tank explosion; the crew were still alive until they hit the water.

How did that cold-hearted garbage get modded "insightful"? Maybe I'm really, really unusual, but I do, in fact, care about all those 7 billion. Sure, I can't keep up to date with every facebook page on the planet, attend every wedding and every funeral, sit by every bedside, etc. etc. etc. In fact, I can make a substantial difference in only a handful of lives, and the rest of humanity is utterly beyond my ability to help. And yet, I care about them.

90% of American university professors are sympathetic to Che, Castro, or Marx? You sound like an Eastern European who hasn't yet adjusted to life in the West. Support for USSR-style Communism has never been more than marginal in the West, partly because people here just plain don't like that ideology, but mostly because we really, really hate totalitarianism.

I figure a good on-line news source is worth at least $5 a month, but my total news budget would end up being a lot higher if all the good news sources would go the paywall route -- I'm not going to blindly trust any one news source, I like to skim at least half a dozen on a regular basis. As long as even the paywalled sites let me at least scan their headlines for free, I guess it wouldn't be too bad.

The jury is still out on that. In China they went with regulating reproduction, but in Europe and Japan fertility rates are falling on their own. My personal theory is that it is actually possible for entire nations to come to their senses and start behaving responsibly, and those non-enforced low fertility rates could be evidence of that, but of course it remains to be seen whether the current demographic trends will hold long enough to really make a difference.

I'm quite shocked by the US where they catch a drunken bozo for the 5th time in a month and he still is allowed to drive to work and back.

It depends on which state you're in. Here in New Jersey, a first DUI conviction will cause your driving privileges to be revoked for 6 to 12 months; a second conviction is 12 to 24 months; a third conviction means you lose your license for life. The law does not provide for exceptions for people who need to drive because of their jobs or because of disability.
At least, that's how it was when I took my NJ driving test back in 1998. IANAL, etc.

I'm personally pretty pleased with Firefox and found every new release to be an improvement so far. The fact that sometimes a configuration setting disappears from Preferences and then has to be set through about:config, it's not ideal, but not exactly a big deal either since I only have to do it once.

Regarding the awesomebar, though -- using the "oldbar" extension I can get the old, sparse look back, and using a few about:config changes I can get most of the FF2 behavior back, but the one thing I always wanted the FF url bar to do is simply sort the drop-down by access time, so the least recently used ones are on top. Mozilla always did things this way; at some point I submitted a patch to mozilla.org that implemented the same behavior in FF2, but it never got picked up, and we got the "you'll learn to love it, trust us" awesomebar instead.

I've used FF3 for as long as it's been out, and it still bothers me that selecting a url from the url bar drop-down doesn't just move it to the top of the list immediately. Add an about:config setting to get us that behavior, and I'm sure that a lot of the awesomebar-related whining will stop.

I guess your idea of "actual information" is not the same as mine. Maybe I'm naive, but I have a hard time even imagining edit wars over things like the carbon cycle, the climate of Buenos Aires, Winston Churchill's alma mater, or the progression of the U.S. GDP or unemployment levels.

If you can provide some actual examples -- as opposed to saying "I can think of half a dozen articles" and then not citing a single one -- I would be interested to hear about them. If I'm really so seriously misguided, I'd like to know.

Criticism of famous / historical figures has no place in an encyclopedia in the first place; they are supposed to be repositories of information, not opinion. I spent countless hours with major encyclopedias when I was a kid, and whenever I see criticism or praise of people in Wikipedia, it feels jarring and out of place. I don't consider it a problem, though, I just skip over those sections.

What keeps me coming back to Wikipedia is because it is actually truly excellent as an encyclopedia. Whenever I'm looking for something about physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, geography, history, etc. etc. etc., I find what I'm looking for and I find it quickly. The edit wars that so many people seem to have such huge stakes in tend not to affect articles that disseminate actual information, and those are the only ones I'm interested in; those are the only ones that belong there. The fact that lots of other people use Wikipedia as their personal political soapbox or Geocities page is a very minor annoyance, and maybe the way Wikipedia deals with those annoyances is heavy-handed and/or misguided sometimes, but it takes little to nothing away from its true utility. Certainly not enough to stop me from donating $100 a year.

It is just you getting old and crotchety. I speak as someone to whom this is also happening, FWIW.
People are always complaining about the youth of today, mostly because they reach a point where they no longer remember what it was like when they were young themselves, when it was them annoying their elders with their questions. At my job, I am regarded as a guru now, but in the past I did my share of asking questions, too, some of them perceptive, some of them lazy or stupid. At some point you transition to being a person who answers them, and at that point it behooves a good citizen to be patient with the youngsters and return the favor to society.
In other words, relax. Civilization is not collapsing just yet.

I prefer a planet with an atmosphere that I can actually breathe. As in, being able to open a window, or walk out the front door without having to put on a spacesuit.
But all of you who voted for the first five options, go ahead and enjoy.