"one day, you may only get to choose which noise your car makes, rather than whether it does."

Me and Mr. side-cutters beg to differ...

Do you happen to use any plug-ins with it? The problem may be with a third party software and not Firefox.

Also, from what I've heard, much of Chrome's recent "growth" in install base is a function of the malware-esque techniques that Google has been using to have auto-install when people install other, popular, software packages. This just means it's on their system. It doesn't mean that they're actually using it.

What's wrong with the sign language I already use?

Funny, I don't seem to remember such a time. As far back as I can remember, Slashdot headings have been misleading; the summaries have been poorly written; and the editors were too lazy to do any actual "editing".

Yes, that's the point I was trying to make. Honestly, at our present level of technology, even mining other bodies in our own solar system isn't economically viable as you'd spend far more money getting the materials than you'd get back from the materials you mined. Unfortunately, the things you listed as being practical reasons (finding more livable planets and extraterrestrial life) really have no value in our present economic system.

You might thing that more livable planets would be valuable, but it's highly unlikely that it will ever be even remotely profitable to spend the energy to transport people there. The only real value from it would be to send a small group of settlers with a library of genetic material so that they can reproduce without fear of genetic disorders caused by a small gene pool. It makes sense from the standpoint of increasing the statistical survivability of the species, but does nothing to deal with overcrowding on Earth.

Uh, that's a nice picture but there's a lot more to what the kid did than make a diorama of a tree and glue solar panels to it instead of leaves. What you posted is a nice looking pic but there is no additional info. As far as I can tell, it's just an ipod/iphone solar charger with an aesthetically pleasing design. Is there anything to suggest that the designers of the charger in the pic thought to reproduce the phyllotaxis as a way of increasing efficiency? That's the, potentially, patentable part about the kid's work, not the fact that he made it "look like a tree".

Most likely freeze, but very slowly. Exploding and freezing instantly have both been, as far as I know, de-bunked as what would happen if a person was ejected into space. You wouldn't explode because your body would be able to contain the fluids it couldn't out gas and would out gas any it could. As for freezing, assuming you weren't so close to something hot (like a star) that you'd be roasted, there is no air to conduct your body heat into and away from your body.

The private investors are investing in things like non-orbital launch systems (Virgin Galactic/Scaled Composites); orbital launch systems (SpaceX); and orbital space stations/hotels (Bigelow Aerospace). All of these private ventures would never have happened if it weren't for almost half a century of government funding of NASA and the Air Force before that.

There are whole classes of radical advancements that, simply, can't happen without significant initial investment without a guarantee of success. Examples of such things include space travel and the nuclear bomb. Historically, some of these kinds of discoveries have been made because an individual monarch was willing to take a gamble (ex. Queen Isabella funding Columbus) but modern business structures are designed to work against such things because they are often wastes of money (ex. the search for El Dorado and the fountain of youth).

When it comes to traveling to other stars, there are obvious advantages to be had to science as well as humanity as a whole. On the other hand, even if it works in the end, there are no obvious profits to be made on it with our current understanding of science. Any resources we find in a distant solar system would be so hard to transport back to Earth that it'd be cheaper to just manufacture it (atom by atom) in a particle accelerator (which we could do with present technology). In such cases, governmental spending is the ONLY way for it to get done.

Actually, from what I understand, there are more than one strain of AIDS/HIV. It's possible to contract multiple strains and, as far as I know, it can cause additional complications and/or faster death. Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't people out there willing to just not care.