Verbing weirds language.

For extra credit: Why can't you "arrow someone"? Or "missile a building"? Or "garage a car"?

What are the alternatives? Carbon-sulfur might be a reasonable option. Silicon-oxygen is a little further out. There are only so many atoms available, and their prevalence is dictated by stars, so that puts a limit on what variations could be possible, and, well, there aren't that many.

They either tend to be dead on arrival or fail at some point many years or months down the line.

The data that Google released from their server farms indicates that the "bathtub curve" isn't shaped anything like what people used to think — infant mortality isn't very significant, and drive failure is more or less random between 2 - 5 years old, during that time, drives don't fail at higher rate the older they get.

The most information I could find is here (the full-size images are pretty large) and here.

It's hard to pick through the information, but is this scientifically viable? Or is this the random musings of an architecture student focusing only on the architecture side, and ignoring the biology side?

This is more like a journalist asking a street bum for information. Sure, you put the blame on the bum for lying, but most people would blame the reporter for asking a bum in the first place, because street bums aren't known for being reliable sources of information.

Also, circular reporting is easier in today's environment. What likely happened is that The Guardian decided to run the story based only on Wikipedia, and after that happened, all the other papers just assumed that The Guardian had done proper fact-checking, and so just copied what The Guardian said. Back then, there were printing press delays, and a newspaper on one side of the globe couldn't just instantly copy-n-paste what a newspaper on the other side of the globe said.

No, the reason that Google Images uses frames is that the designers were faced with three alternatives:

1. Display only the full-size image. This hotlinking, and is considered worse than framing.
2. Display only to HTML page. At best, it makes the user play hide-and-go-seek. At worst, the image is hidden, and the user has to figure out how to make some random Javascript happy before the image can be displayed. Either way, the user often ends up being very frustrated.
3. Use a frame.

Framing was the best of three bad alternatives.

The problem is that businesses use autorun on burned demos for customers, particularly when they need only a small number of demo discs. There are lots of small businesses that do this, and we even do it at the Fortune 100 company I work at.

What percentage of legit uses of autorun CDRs versus virus autorun CDRs? I'd imagine the legit uses far outweigh the virus ones (though that could change in response to this article's change, I suppose).

Seriously, when PDF is based on a language that can calculate fractals on the fly and draw a different random maze every time you print it, why are we surprised that PDF is nearly as capable?

How do I opt-out of opt-out lists?

Yup, it was invented in 1958, and was used on the Gemini back-up ejection seat, and is used on the Mk-82 unguided gravity bomb.

The motion of galaxies/superclusters/filaments is pretty steady, why not just record the current positions many of them, and note when each observation was taken? Even if a small number of superclusters collide, most are likely to still be intact after millions of years, and this would require no moving parts.

any more than that gives me jitters, a racing pulse, and headaches.

Keep taking it for a few days, and you'll be fine.

Caffeine tolerance develops very quickly, especially among heavy coffee and energy drink consumers. Complete tolerance to sleep disruption effects of caffeine develops after ... 7 days. Complete tolerance to subjective effects of caffeine was observed to develop after ... 18 days.

"Big iron" hardware is still used for modern supercomputers, but the software is increasingly becoming Linux. Even on the hardware front though, commodity hardware with software failover is increasingly being used.

The problem is that "critique scientific explanations" means different things to different people. To a good science teacher, it means valid scientific critiques, and yes, that's very good. To a bad science teacher though, that means critiques that sound like science to the uneducated ear, but are really nothing of the sort. Surf some of the anti-evolution videos on YouTube for a few minutes to see just how good some people can be at blurring the line between science and hogwash.