I feel at times like this that English may be short a word. Now, I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment, but pedants like to flock to statements like this and say things like, "anything is possible!" On the flip side though, a word like improbable simply doesn't properly convey the true odds of this happening (not that anyone can guess the TRUE odds, but, really, first contact? pshaw).

I don't have the largest possible vocabulary out there, so there may already be such a word, but I like portmanteaus, so might I propose improbsible?

That's a fantastic point. I should have been more specific - what I meant was the only reason security concerns and bugs are being found out in a pre-alpha is that it is open. It is exceedingly rare that a closed piece of software releases up a pre-alpha for general review (and hence, you wouldn't have ever even known about them). In more mature released closed software, though, you're right that my point holds no water.

Biases and accusations of bias run rampant on slashdot. So yes, I was trying to avoid just that. I've followed them mostly because I found their way of getting funding novel, and have been curious how it would pan out in the end.

Okay, I have no horse in this race, as I only have a passing interest in online social networks (enough to read the article, but not enough to join one), so I am not very passionate about this news in one way or another, but...

Isn't that why it's called pre-Alpha software?? I mean, bugs happen. In open architectures, you fix them. If this were a closed software project, you wouldn't even know about them. If there were endemic, critical flaws inherent in their underlying assumptions going into this project, then that would be news, but "oversold Alpha software contains bugs!!!" is hardly worth noting. Being free software, many eyes will ensure that the Beta version is better, presumably.

Ironic then that the name means something to the effect of "pointing to your heart's desire". Having eaten a fair amount of Dim Sum, I somehow think that it got that name for a reason.

Feel free to leave all of the worthwhile food in the world to people with taste buds, though. We'll leave you all the Whoppers you can eat.

OR PERHAPS $20! You won't know until you look.

What do you expect? To me it appeared to be little more than stumping for the programming language he wrote - Google Go. Which has yet to impress me. They say that it's flexible like an interpreted language but fast like a compiled one. To me, it seems like it's missing all the cool shit that makes me USE an interpreted language, but doesn't provide the same low-level access that makes me use a compiled one! All languages have their niche, I suppose, and I guess I'm just not the target demographic for Google Go

For anyone curious, as I was, what the surface temperature of our star is: 5500 degrees C

My source was NASA's world book page (then again, it goes on to state that our solar system has nine planets, so trust NASA at your own risk)