Why not? The only thing that Google really does better than anyone else is search (and maybe free machine translation). For everything else, there's a better or at least equivalent option.

Gmail is actually doing quite a good job as well. What other mail provider does probably BCC every mail you receive and send to the NSA cloud for safekeeping and backup?

Google suspending Orkut is but a tiny example of why you better communicate with people by using e-mail directly. Or, if you must, go the old fashioned way (*cough* Usenet *cough*). But rely on a specific social network run by a single company, and you're sure that it will be shut down sometimes down the road. Even Facebook, not to mention Google+ will someday go the way of Geocities.

When their glaciers start growing. Duh!

citation needed

That's what you might call a market incentive. Capitalism sees national security and arms export controls as damage and routes around it.

Don't worry about that! They had their own classes of blunders instead. (Every programming language has a characteristic set of problems that come up, and a set of recommended programming practices that avoid those blunders.)

If your compiler is doing that, you should choose a different compiler. Summoning elder gods just because signed arithmetic might wrap around is not a good cost/benefit tradeoff!

Better than a Lunar one I suppose.

I always preferred the phrasing "up to 1000 times faster, or more!" Totally devoid of meaning.

If a lot of browsers are getting it wrong in what they send, the incentive to support it is not strong. Guess what? A quick test with Chrome, Safari and Firefox indicate that they all get it wrong by default. Safari doesn't provide an option to change it that I can find; the other two pick the wrong default for me, instead of using the system language settings (which are correct and available for software to read) even if those are imperfect for the task. (I'm on the wrong platform for testing IE and I don't have Opera.)

Why would you make your website use a feature that no browser gets close to right by default?

Selling bitcoin - or ANYTHING ELSE - at an auction in exchange for US dollars does not set ANY kind of precedent establishing that bitcoin - or ANYTHING ELSE - is now legal tender. In fact, it establishes the opposite.

You're right. It would make bitcoin legal tender only if you could pay for the auctioned bitcoins with... bitcoins. But then again, that would be pretty pointless, wouldn't it?

How you get from a military theocracy to some sort of representative and stable government is a question that has yet to be answered.

Well, for Egypt, the question is rather to choose between an autocratic military regime on one side, and an autocratic theocracy on the other side.