Why does everyone assume that Google is the only game in town for funding Firefox?
Firefox has 1 out of 5 users on the internet. If Google lost Firefox it would be significant. They really wouldn't want to lose it.
Microsoft would love to have Firefox's default search area (and love taking it from Google) and they've repeatedly demonstrated their ability and desire to throw gobs of money at a product until it succeeds (or clearly fails beyond redemption) - and Bing is one of those products.
It seems like few people made the connection when Microsoft partnered with Mozilla to release a version of Firefox "powered by Bing search". Just a month or so later Mozilla announced their three year, $900 million search deal with Google. It seems clear that Mozilla either just before, or during, negotiations with Google demonstrated their ability to pull the trigger with Microsoft.
Google does not want to lose Firefox, but further would hate to lose it to MS. Either way, even if they did, Mozilla would not go hungry.

Best start praying to the god of whatever alternate dimension you've stepped into because someone just handed the laws of probability an anvil.

Eich often does a good job of intelligently addressing questions in the comments. I strongly encourage looking through them to learn more.
In reply to one question about the binaries he replied:

And another,

It appears we can have a good amount of confidence that what's in the code is what's in the binary.

I'm curious how they will handle the driver situation in Android.
As I understand it the specific drivers for your device's hardware are package (compiled?) with the OS, making it infeasible to swap out parts.
Perhaps drivers could be stored in updatable firmware on the modules?

Oh crap, then what's this pile of brown stuff in front of me?

I checked the site and I think this bears repeating: The tuner in question is approaching a quarter of a million dollars in costs (perhaps more depending on the '+' part of '30+').

At that rate, wouldn't it be more economical to pay a hacker to build/design one based on MythTV that pulls off the same features (then whip out another or upgrade when you need it)? Heck, you could hire a couple MythTV developers.

I think it's a good time for us all to take a step back and reflect on the (many very reactionary) comments made after the "Google breaks Chromecast" story the other day.

http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/13/08/25/2254208/google-breaks-chromecasts-ability-to-play-local-content

Persona has been designed to be fully decentralized. Mozilla plans to be removed from the equation. So that should really help to up the anonymizability (suck it spell check!) of the system.

This *isn't* a part of the core. Nothing is shipping with the browser, it must be installed.
It's an API, just like the addons APIs, except addons can see what page you're on, and what links you click, and your history, etc, etc. This API is significantly more restricted (and that's a good thing). The only way for Facebook (or anyone else) to see what page you're on is if you share it to them - which is kinda the point anyway. Its "surface area" to affect the browser is much more limited than addons.
I'd much rather have my friends & relatives using Facebook's version of this than an addon equivalent.

We complain about how all the "sheeple" keep voting the idiots into power and then doing nothing as their freedoms erode, but if ignorance is a significant part of the problem, what are we doing to fix it?
I don't always have the time or eloquence to lay out a compelling narrative with an overwhelming mountain of evidence to persuade my friends and relatives - and frankly, my memory sucks. So I'm wondering, is there compelling, noninflammatory collection of facts that I can point people to?
The media isn't telling the story, so that leaves it to us.

Since you seemed to have a potentially genuine question in there, I'll give it a shot.
Firefox has three 6 week long prerelease phases before a final release (Nightly, Aurora & Beta). Nightly is reserved for larger changes and then subsequent phases have increasing restrictions for code landings (always getting more strict before moving to the next phase). Each phase, of course, has an increasing number of users, with Beta having the most.
This way most of the code that's changed gets between 12 and 18 weeks of testing.
Mozilla has thousands of automated tests they run daily looking for stability, correctness, etc (and of course security reviews).
Chrome uses this same basic model.

Oh, I just saw you said "a schedule like this" referring to the new Firefox OS schedule. That would mean that the final releases will have been in testing for 30-36 weeks.
This does not seem "run and gun" to me.

Your math would check out if you had your details right.
Firefox cuts a release every six weeks (not four). So a FFOS feature release would correspond with *every other* Firefox version (not every third).

In what ways have you seen this?

No need to turn it around, we can have both.
But if it turns out the cure is worse than the cause, these are good questions to answer.

Sorry if the term was used in a confusing way.
The idea being communicated was that the different layers of Android (kernel, libraries, Dalvik, etc) are implemented in a way such that they cannot be separately updated. (Probably my understanding of the stack is flawed, I had been thinking that the code was perhaps not cleanly separate in the layers - hence the "vertical integration" idea.)

Either way, the point stands that Android cannot be updated piecemeal, thereby relying solely on carriers, greatly hurting the security and overall experience of users.

Thought I'd point out that it's the vertical integration design of Android that has led to this carrier conundrum in which updates and upgrades are forced to go through the carriers, but the carriers are focused on new sales not maintaining old hardware. So the engineering resources they're willing to invest are minimal, leaving users out in the cold.

This is something that's of interest to me in the design of Firefox OS, which completely separates out the the Linux kernel, and the two layers on top of that (the Gecko engine and the UI). All of these can be updated independently. Updates to the kernel require the carrier's knowledge of the underlying hardware, but most security, feature & performance updates will be to the top layers. So updates should be installable when they're first released. This should help to avoid a lot of what we're seeing with the carrier foot-dragging (or outright abandonment) hurting consumers.

I'm unfamiliar though with the the design of Ubuntu Touch and Tizen. Does anyone know if they have a similar advantage?