Wow, real intelligent contribution you just made there.

Obviously these crazy "islamists" are much more unreasonable than the kind-hearted Israelis, who are all good liberals, devoid of any fanaticism, religious bigotry and nationalism.

"... that the Muslims are terrorising Israel with..."

These are Palestinians, not "Muslims". And many of them are Christians.

"the real time when USA was actually a real economic power, when people truly had individual liberties was not any time past WWII, it was the time from the 1870 to 1913"

False. The USA was, relative to the rest of the world, at its economic power peak in the years immediately following WW2.

Economic liberties, on the other hand....

I listen, regularly, to fairly ideologically driven media (e.g. Democracy Now!)

And mainstream US media isn't ideologically driven? I calll bullshit on that. Most US sources of news are incredibly ideologically slanted and gung-ho. Democracy Now is one of the few US news programs that doesn't spoonfeed its viewers Whitehouse press releases unthinkingly.

Mind yer souls, ye young whippersnappers!

14 years of Slashdot and articles respond to me in my head, day and night, awake or asleep.

"for reasons that are mutually sound"?

That's very naive. There is no agreed upon definition of "sound" here -- sound for whom? For you? For Obama? For Bush? A powerful politician's agenda is not very likely to coincide with yours.

Give it a chance. I read it in English translation and it was a truly great book.

Painfully "droll"?

Droll \Droll\, n.
          1. One whose practice it is to raise mirth by odd tricks; a
                jester; a buffoon; a merry-andrew. --Prior.
                [1913 Webster]

          2. Something exhibited to raise mirth or sport, as a puppet,
                a farce, and the like

I think you may have meant "painfully dull."

Their chances of re-election don't hinge on the experts, but if enough of their constituents kick up a fuss, they might think twice.

Or maybe I'm just being hopelessly optimistic.

There is a difference between formal power and real power.

The President of the United States has a great deal of formal power, but very little "real" power. His decisions are constrained in many complex ways by his party, his backers, his financial contributors and the various civil and military services in the US, which are the real creators of policy. They are the ones that present the viable options the figurehead chooses from.

"removing support for PowerPC binaries starting with Snow Leopard"

Surely you mean starting with Lion, 6 years after the transition to Intel? Rosetta runs just fine on Snow Leopard.

The phone number thing in Gmail useful, though. It can prevent permanent hijacking of your account. You can always request a new password and have it sent via SMS to your phone.

My mom's Hotmail account was hijacked by some clever phishers a while back, and I try as I might, I was unable to get it back under her control. No support from Hotmail, no replies to my queries, nothing.

So, the phone number request is not without its reasons. But hey, if you don't want Google knowing it, just provide a fake number.

"Great men are almost always bad men."

Get a sense of humour, fer God's sake. If He does exist, he must be the ultimate joker. I have a feeling he'd like our OP's tongue-in-cheek flippancy.

>Or that simple functionality like Refresh isn't available in Finder

As of Mac OS X 10.4 (released in 2005 -- 6 years ago), the Finder receives event messages whenever the content of an open folder changes, and the file list is updated automatically.