"NASA is performing an inhumane act by needlessly killing living organisms on Moon mission, wasting taxpayer money on a cheap publicity stunt", says animal rights group that became notorious a few posts ago for trying to grant chimps person status. "Plants are living things too, and one cannot simply destroy them for entertainment", said group spokesperson in an exclusive interview.

Yes.
Citation:

Ever since the 1960s we've been told: * we'd have flying cars in 20 years * we'd have affordable space travel for everyone in 30 years * we'd have permanent Moon/Mars bases in N years * we'd have fusion power in 50 years (and we're still being told that) and so on. Star Trek-like medical technology, human-like AI, self-driving cars... Just a fad. 50 years would be too soon I guess. Sorry for being so pessimistic (realistic?)

Plastic money deteriorates from current use as well, especially the lower denominations. In practice plastic notes are being replaced all the time.

I don't think you understand correctly how a superscalar processor works. Maybe you're confusing parallel instruction execution with pipelining? Even single-core, non-hyperthreading processors have been able to execute multiple instructions *simultaneously, in a single cycle* since the first Pentiums or earlier. See, they can fetch two instructions at once from the cache because it has a wide internal bus, decode them simultaneously, and execute them simultaneously (if they are independent) because each core has multiple execution units. Modern processors can easily execute 3 or 4 instructions at once on a single core, in a single cycle. As I understand it, hyperthreading comes in when part of those execution units are sitting idle because there are not enough instructions in the main thread that can be executed in parallel - they're not independent, some depend on the results of others - and so those idle units are used to process another thread. Of course it's slower than having two full cores, but the point is that a single core CAN execute a lot of stuff in parallel.

That chip actually consists of 4 dice (Xilinx calls them Super Logic Regions) bound over a special silicon interconnect layer. Source: http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/data_sheets/ds180_7Series_Overview.pdf The reason they do this rather than use a larger die is exactly to get a higher yield (defect density is constant, defect probability increases with surface). Therefore I highly doubt they're only getting one good chip per wafer. Cost is based on supply and demand, and these chips are very, very specialized. They're used in applications where costs are huge anyway, such as high-performance IC prototyping - things like CPUs, ASICs for multi-hundred Gb/s switches/routers et cetera.

Yes, I would. Are you suggesting we ban all TX-capable SDRs because they can be misused by kids? While we're at it, let's also stop any research and abandon all technology because, you know, it can be misused. Law enforcement is paid to enforce the law: if someone is transmitting illegally, triangulate them out and make them stop. Do this a few times and I'm sure kids will quickly get the idea that it's not OK to use their WiFi in undocumented modes to transmit in ambulance bands or whatever. Keep your hands off my equipment!

I'm sorry, but the link to NASA's page currently points to just a generic text, sprinkled with big words and phrases, that really doesn't say anything. Details please?

I don't trust anyone, that's why I use encryption when transferring data over the Internet that I don't want others to look at. The ISPs only know that there's been a connection from A to B at time T and nothing more. And that's why I don't have any sensitive data on third party servers, Google-owned or otherwise. Chill out.