Yay. I'm glad to hear more and more folks are moving back to Firefox. It really is the best browser IMO. Like you said, it's fast, stable, has all my extensions and gets out of my way. Love it.
OK I have to say this: reading some of the comments here makes me think I was actually friends with you back in 1998/1999 because that's about when I was doing this same shit in my high school computer lab. Small world.
I definitely use IRC to communicate with users of open-source projects like Spacewalk or Fedora. Anytime I can't get decent help using forums or Google searches, I go to IRC and work with the community there. Works very well!
This is a really cool story. Science FTW! We have new evidence and people are starting to adjust their frame of mind and thinking in regards to the new evidence. Hopefully they can prove their hypothesis and we'll have a better idea of the actual age of the universe.
It's comical how people get so "jazzed" about something like not liking systemd and make a whole movement about it (with their t-shirts and everything). I get people may not love everything about systemd (or maybe they hate it), but I'm not convinced it's so bad. I've been using it since RHEL 7 and I've really gotten used to all of the benefits of systemd. It also doesn't hurt that I went to the session on pid 1 by Lennart Poettering at Red Hat Summit 2014 and he convinced me of the at least not-horribleness of systemd.