You are dangerously close to pulling a Digg or a Windows 8 and becoming the laughingstock of the tech world. Doesn't that concern you a little bit? Doesn't that make you think at least for a second that maybe the entire redesign needs to be reevaluated? The problems with beta are running out of control - in any other engineering discipline, work would be paused while the whole project is reworked from first principles. You should be doing this.

There are mid 7 digit ones now. I did a double-take when I saw that.

You'd think they'd have learned from how effectively Digg was run into the ground.

I've been wondering about this myself. What if they see the existing userbase as more of a cost than a potential for revenue? We're more likely than average to use adblockers and NoScript when compared to the typical web user - maybe the cost of our bandwidth is outweighing the money they make off ad impressions? Pure speculation, but it would explain some of the behavior we've seen.

Or maybe if they want to sell drinks, they should use the other bar staple, pretzels. I mean, seriously, who's allergic to them?

Feeding the troll, but... ME! ME ME ME ME ME! I would go in a second. Now, I don't have that kind of money to throw around, (stupid grad school), but I'd be there in a heartbeat.

But see, if you actually had experienced both 5F and 20F regularly, you'd know that while both are fucking cold, there's a world of difference between the two. 20 is about where it's cold, but you can bear to be outside with something nice and warm on. 5 is so fucking cold that it feels like the air itself is burning you. The gradations of the Fahrenheit scale do matter in the lower end.

The worst part is that our teachers used to continually drum into us that "these are the best years of your lives, you'll never be as happy as you are now!"

My arse.

I doubt it.

Mount Wilson doesn't just hold the observatory but also transmission towers for all of the major broadcast TV stations in Los Angeles, as well as a majority of the radio stations, along with transmission towers for a large percentage of emergency responder communications and commercial transmission, such as trucking logistics. Mount Wilson is a major asset, and the fire crews have been preparing the area for several days in order to save the area.

Nothing in life is guaranteed, but in the case of Mount Wilson, it's clear they've been concentrating as much effort saving the complex as they have in making sure the fires don't reach the residential communities in La Canada/Flintridge and La Crescenta.

Anyone who was in Canberra around 2003 is going to find this spookily familiar. The Mount Stromlo Observatory was pretty much destroyed by a bush fire in that year. It was especially sad because it could have been saved except that the firefighters were focused on Canberra suburbs and towns like Tharwa. Also, a CCD they were building for an international telescope got left behind in the panic. Stromlo was historically important but past its best as an observational sight by that time.

Perhaps I used the wrong link, and yes, it entered a ballistic trajectory after the thrust unit tore off. But prior to that, it was reentering without its heatshield forward. Currently, they do think they have the problem fixed, but they've yet to find the original cause. Interesting article here: http://www.aiaa.org/Aerospace/images/articleimages/pdf/Soyuz_JUN2009.pdf

Actually, the issue with detaching the thrust unit is that one of a number of bolts didn't fire. The unit ended up tearing itself off due to aerodynamic drag, but there's evidence this issue has been around since the first Soyuz missions. There was a pretty good article on it in the June 2009 AIAA magazine. PDF here: http://www.aiaa.org/Aerospace/images/articleimages/pdf/Soyuz_JUN2009.pdf

Really reliable except for a series of Soyuz spacecraft that nearly burned up on reentry, due to the thrust unit not being released properly. They still have no idea what is causing it. See for example: http://www.universetoday.com/2008/04/20/soyuz-crew-safe-after-a-violent-re-entry-and-landing-400km-off-target/

And I disagree with you. Blizzard has alienated a large number of us "casual" players who do not have three and four hours a night to spend running end-game content. They have obviously recognized this problem with the last patch allowing the extension of resets so content can be cleared at a much more casual pace. I've been playing for almost 2 years and I've probably seen less than 20% of the game content. My first character hit L60 and got MC attuned a week before TBC came out. I've still never been to MC. Determined to not let that happen again, I spent most of TBC leveling my main to L70 and trying to get my other toons there as well. I wasn't even close when WotLK came out. It's now a race to get everyone up to L80 before the next XPac. And when I do, I'll have a stable of characters - only one of which has every run a pre-TBC dungeon, and none of which have run any TBC dungeons at all. And forget playing both races. Were it not for the TBC quests for Alliance, I wouldn't even know what the major Horde cities look like. I've paid for a whole bunch of content I will never get a chance to see or experience. And that kinda sucks.