Yep, 20 years ago you didn't have the Moissanite choice anyway ;)
Diamonds are very common in nature. Their scarcity (and price) is artificial. Which is the main reason a diamond loses 50% of its value the moment you walk out of the jeweler's door. And let's not even go into ethics. Plus, it has a nicer story to tell - it is a material that was discovered in small traces in meteorites ("space rocks"). In fact, my wife's only problem is that it looks a lot like a very expensive diamond, so she is not comfortable wearing it everywhere.

Moissanite is actually transparent.

My wife's wedding ring is moissanite. I know all about its hardness, heat resistance, brilliance, rarity in nature (mainly from meteorites) etc. That's my whole point, their Sapphire pitch was all marketing and when it didn't pan out they should have at least given something good to their customers...

Sure, Apple is all about marketing, and they loved to give that "2nd hardest material after diamond" pitch when introducing their watch and would have loved to have it on the iPhone as well. Just for the hype. But since they found out it did not actually work, why not go to the best actual material out there that many other top devices are using instead of going back to hardened glass? When people at work pull out their cellphones, if you look at those without any screen protectors/cases, devices like the Samsung Galaxy S series have immaculate screens, while the iPhones are full of scratches...

The whole point is the first 1% and the last 1%, otherwise, the Mars Observer is probably still going strong having completed several thousand % of its original trip to Mars...

I mean, I read it and started trying to figure out if there was some sort of mass ejection that could happen to your eye's cornea. I started reading the options to get a hint, and the first one was about toilet paper. Ok, I thought (remember I was already in body-related thinking mode), maybe cornal after all is not about cornea but perhaps a slang word for bowel? But that's not a sane topic for a poll. So a copy-paste to google gave me the answer. Which is that you can never underestimate the inadequacy of the slashdot editors. Really, this is a new low, the entire text was 7-8 words...

Let me guess, he's gonna make us his bitch?

You can probably get them easily by searching for "fappening" on a torrent tracker. But the point is this has gone way beyond news for nerds or stuff that matters. We've covered the leak before here on slashdot, and there was one interesting aspect, namely that Apple would allow brute force dictionary attacks (and claimed there was no security issue, while patching it at the same time), but covering how reddit is banning a "community" known as "The Fappening"??? What next, articles analyzing the artistic merit of the average 4chan post?

You mean I can get direct links in results instead of redirects, the old and better functional maps & image search etc just by (pretending to be) using an old browser? That would be amazing, I'll try it out now! Also, hear that Slashdot? Google is showing the way, "force" users to upgrade their browsers by NOT serving the beta to them!

Ok, I guess, as long as it is not an Apple product. If it is, then all that is thrown out of the window and the product is deemed "great" and worth the extra cost. This is most obvious in the smartphone sections. For example you can read the "android user on an iPhone 5S" article, and he lists all those important limitations of iOS that would definitely turn any Android user away, but says they are "temporary" and inexplicably concludes that iOS is not a worse experience. Similarly, supposedly they would test all important smartphone releases, however they review each iphone multiple times (seriously, check it out), then some popular Androids and that's it. They missed things like the N9, which was probably the best phone when it came out (as I had an iPhone, an Android and a N9 at the time), and don't try anything that could appear too price competitive to Apple devices (like Xiaomi). The Mac/Macbook etc reviews are similarly biased, the site seems to be in awe of Apple and everything they make. As an owner of a Mac Pro, a Mac Mini, 3 iPhones (all company provided) and the experience with them and all Apple products in our company, I am not similarly awed (I could write long stories here).
So, yeah, Anandtech, while it is not as good as it used to be, it is probably still (one of) the best (although for PSUs and an alternative take on GPUs you should look at HardOCP), but be wary of the Apple bias.

If you are a contractor that can get a huge contract and can get paid even more for delays and cost overruns, what is your incentive for delivering quickly and cheaply? Plus the various limitations of having to source stuff off every state that has abusive (or others would say competent) congressmen, plus all the middle management and red tape and there you go.
People like to point out how SpaceX et al. are benefiting of all the NASA research, however that is not relevant to the question of why NASA itself can't source cheaply NOW.

Before clicking the link I was trying to imagine how a trapezoidal shape could help and I could not. Well, that's because it is a hexagon. Sure, not a regular one, as the article says "like a triangle but with twice as many sides", and even more complicated than that (half the sides are hexagonal themselves, the other half rectangular), but I would not call it "trapezoidal" unless I did not know what that meant.
That said, yes, you can push it to the wall, but due to its shape it is actually longer (at its lower part) than a rectangular case would be, so you would be able to leave enough space behind with a rectangular case if you set it so that its front is at the same place where this hexagon reaches when it is all the way back to the wall. If they wanted to actually save space perhaps they could get air from the sides and out from the top on a rectangular shape (along with ports etc)? I don't know, I'm just saying.

When I was 9 an uncle of mine gave me a "Halleyscope" (a not bad 40mm refractor on a tragic little tripod). I was a geek of course so it did immediately stir my interest, so a month later on my birthday I asked for a pair of binoculars. I had not read a recommendation anywhere, it just seemed that it was what I could find for observing based on my low birthday budget. Well, the Binoculars were more useful than the Halleyscope and I learned the sky and saw enough things to want to see more. So then it was certain that by giving me a bigger budget my parents would not be throwing away money (it was also tied to academic achievement) and it is how I got my Soviet TAL 1 4.5" reflector and it served me for years.
So, the advice is get binoculars (probably 7x50). If they show an interest and they want more, I would say stay away from alt-azimuth mounts (because they are usually crap), except dobsonians. I am not a dobsonian fan since I like to spend some time polar-aligning in order to get a more comfortable viewing experience afterwards, but it is a personal preference. Usually people who are more geeky and have patience will not consider spending time to try and align a mount to the earth's rotational axis as a bad thing. But dobsonians are also cheaper per aperture. So... overall your example link of suggestions seems ok, except as a second step after Binoculars and avoid Alt-Az mounts.

And that politician apparently had a name change between these two events, so I guess he might have gone through some life altering event which could explain it?

Isn't keeping production and the money flow to various Congressmen's states the mission of the SLS anyway? Or they want an official "excuse" before getting all the pork? In that case it could be anything. It doesn't even have to be science, security would work even better. E.g searching for Nazis in the dark (sic) side of the moooon. Oh, damn, I Godwin law'd myself right at the start of the discussion...