Astronauts are expensive. They have highly valuable skills and training is costly.
Even if you neglect the value of human life, it is still a huge loss. And you'd better make sure it doesn't happen again.

You won't believe how advanced these fields are.
It's easy to dismiss modern game design as "just better graphics" until you learn why things are the way they are. You may not like some design choices, especially if such choices are driven more by profit than player enjoyment, but there is often a lot of things going behind it.
So sure, there is room for improvement, same for graphics, but AI, GUI, plot and mechanics are mature fields, with a significant history.

FirefoxOS is basically a web browser with JS APIs to access the hardware.

All apps use web-based technologies, which means that the only thing needed for any OS to use FirefoxOS apps is a web browser that support these APIs, no need for native code unless you really need performance. You can already run some apps on Android as using Firefox components.

I really hope that the guys at Mozilla focus on the compatibility aspect by making it easy for developers to use the FirefoxOS framework on other platforms (Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Desktop, ...) rather than attempt to compete.

Assuming no mistake, I guess you are somehow intolerant to aspartame.
The thing is : for almost every substance, someone will be found intolerant. And I'm not just talking about chemicals, after all, diabetics can't handle regular sugar normally.
Except that intolerances like this may not show up during testing, only when the product is out in the market for millions of people to consume. And of course, a substance that make some people sick, even if it is one in a million, will get bad PR.
As a result, companies will stop using it (a good thing for intolerant people) but they will also replace it with another substance that will probably make other people sick, and the cycle repeats again.

My opinion is that we should stop sweetening everything : no sugar, HFCS, aspartame, sucralose, stevia, etc... Learn to appreciate tastes more complex than the sweetness we are hardwired to love like an addictive drug. It won't completely solve the problem but it would be a great step forward. And we should promote variety too.

- Unpopular substance X is used
- Scientists discover substitute Y
- Y is tested safe and approved by the FDA
- Companies massively use Y so that they can advertize "X-free" products
- Out of the now millions of consumers, a few of them develop conditions that appear to be caused by Y
- No matter how real the problem is, the information spreads wildly and Y become unpopular
- Repeat the process with Y as the new X

Google is persistent. They have been trying to build a social network for years, Google+ isn't their first attempt. They bought several companies like Orkut, there is also Google Wave and Buzz. And it is obvious they failed and keeping the service in its current form won't do it any good.
Facebook is a different story, they didn't launch their service alongside myspace, waiting for it to overtake it. They grew slowly but steadily, from a glorified address book for Harvard students to what we have now.

Debian is all about choice, that's why it is opensource and you can fork it if you don't like their design choices. Many successful distros started as a fork of Debian, including Ubuntu, so I don't see why the same can't happen for sysv init lovers.

In fact poker has rules (antes, blinds) where the whole point is to make not playing a losing move.
In a global thermonuclear war, it would be like making unused bombs self detonate in one's country after some time.

Only Acer left. Who wants this ?
I remember back then, several friends bought Acer laptops because it was cheap, few of these survived. Even store brands fared better.

I hope they are better now because otherwise, it would be a nightmare.

I would probably mean that the "device" you swallowed is full of ketamine or something.

Considering that hangovers is probably the most researched subject in all universities, I believe that it is indeed the most important part.

Yes, the software would become public domain in 5 years but the source can still be kept secret indefinitely. Not very amazing, especially so if the software is designed to stop functioning after 5 years.

Remember that copyright also include include free software.
And 5 year or less copyright would be a huge blow to the FOSS community as it would make all 5 year old GPL software including linux into the public domain.
As a result we'll see plenty of software based on outdated GPL software just so that it can be made proprietary. Hardly a good thing.

I would agree with you if it was just about zooming.
However, some sites are close to unusable on mobile. The worst offender is the popup (often an ad but not always) that you can close because the button is outside the screen. But there are also sites relying on mouseovers, text squeezed in a column so small that there is no more than one word per line, or sites that completely mess up the layout when you try to zoom. Good content is useless when you can't read it, and I don't want these sites to appear in my top search results unless there are no alternatives.

And BTW, Google doesn't recommend "mobile friendly" versions of sites although they consider it acceptable. They recommend making sites that work whatever your device is. Web designers call this "responsive design", I call this "not broken". Here is a motherfucking good example.

In SSD tests I'd like them to try RAGE.
This game may have been criticized for various good reasons, however, the engine is a bit unusual in a sense that the textures are huge and continuously streamed from the disk. Disk performance made a big difference in gameplay, not just in loading times.