i guess the obvious solution, since you are creating a social network where you are connecting with friends you usually know first hand, would be to simply split up the private key into 3 or 4 parts and give them to your closest, most trusted friends.. once you lose your key, all of those 3 or 4 friends have to verify that you are actually the person you claim to be..
so if maybe with more knowledge about cryptography could answer the question if it's possible to split up a private key into multiple parts without each part lowering the security of the whole key.. that would lead to your answer :)

well at least the german wikipedia entry (not that i cared to check the sources) reads "Da er laut eigener Aussage Probleme damit hatte, sich unterzuordnen und dumme Befehle“ zu befolgen, wurde er als militärisch ungeeignet eingestuft und aus dem Bundesheer entlassen." (he was dismissed from the "armed forces" because, according to him, he had problems following "dumb orders" .. go figure..)

Locking might be a bit overstated but with android they definitively improve their services.. everyone using android will have a google wallet account, most will click that google+ signup button, add google drive to access their data - and use google talk more and more instead of texting (the last one leading to much more online google+ users) i imagine that they will actively push google+ - auto upload of photos is already more or less the default - and if you have your photos already on google+, you will use this to share them, not upload it again to facebook..
If the market share for android continous to grow like it is, their services will increasingly have more value just because more and more people are actively using them (ie don't bother to change the default settings)

the only people who don't attach them are people who want to track the views of their newsletter, so it makes sense that gmail, thunderbird, etc. won't show external images by default.. if you send a big email, include it in total, why only include half of the message.. you could just have sent a link to your website if you don't want to use email in the first place..
or, simply send out small emails without 5 MB worth of images..

i just don't get statistics.. take a look at what wikipedia says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_governments_by_development_aid
if you look at the "Official Development Assistance by country as a percentage of Gross National Income in 2009" it draws a different picture.. GNI is different than GDP or by capita.. but anyway.. for example:
  Austria – 0.30%
  United States – 0.21%

while the GNI by capita seems pretty much comparable between US and austria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GNI_(nominal,_Atlas_method)_per_capita
17 United States 47,390
18 Austria 47,060

(i am using austria solely because i am from austria and i never figured that we are that greedy about donations..) but anyway, those are just the first numbers i found via a google search, completely unrelated and probably not even from the same timeframe, but i'm not that sure that the US is the most perfect country in the world.. even if your source, 'american.com' tells us so?

I hope everyone agrees that it was just wrong to talk about it in a news radio show as fact.. but his one man show/whatever can indeed make the story more engaging by displaying events.more first hand than he has really witnessed.. creative work is just there to make you think about it and find out what is true and what isn't - and to what degree.. the original radio show even had a discussion about what is known and real, and what is questionable, but it obviously didn't go far enough.. people just have to learn that news can only have one truth, while story tellers, comedians, etc can exaggerate to a degree (they definitely shouldn't lie about whats true and what isn't when asked outside their show... obviously)

for me this looked like something we learned even before we wrote our first program in school at a computer.. debugging on paper..
although we had one column for each variable while the demo shows one row for each variable (in the same row as the variable is changed in the code).. so i don't think this is really that revolutionary but it would be quite cool, and maybe not that hard to implement.. simply an eclipse debug extension which when you have a breakpoint within a method, not only shows you all variables but also how they change, and allows you to change the input parameters of that method.. (would only work during debugging, since otherwise you would have to somehow initialize that class).. it's already possible to change variables in eclipse, so there must only be a way to try different input variables of the code without effecting future calls (maybe cloning the current object or forking the whole process).. too bad there are no savepoints&rollbacks in java to get back to the state when the breakpoint was invoked :)

ok, just actually read what the page said:
"Classic Checkout merchant accounts are used to sell online on any website, are not related to selling apps on Google Play, and can be created only for sellers in US and UK. "

so maybe you have tried to sign up for the "classic checkout merchant account" - whatever that means.. if you only want to sell paid apps, or use in app billing, signup should work in non-us/uk countries..

but this seems really weird, since i have a google checkout merchant account with an address in austria.. and the link i provided in my last comment shows that you can sign up in 29 countries "Supported locations for merchants" - which country do you live in?

huh? since when is googles in app billing system US Only? i live in austria and have used it without any problems..
http://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=150324 it doesn't really support all countries, but far from "US only"

i'm not sure i see your problem.. we already have a way to digitally sign documents - use it to sign off transactions in the online banking, send the tax declaration, etc. (i obviously only know it from my country where it's sponsored by the government, so basically free - everyone can turn their social security card into a way to officially sign documents (you only need to buy a card reader)) how hard can it be to let the people who want to vote register using their digital ID and receive an anonymized encryption token which can be used once to actually cast the vote.. sure you have to trust that this token is anonymized, and you are not tracked using cookies, etc. but the same holds true if you are actually going to the voting booth (hidden serial codes on the sheet, hidden cameras, whatever) - so you always have people watching an election and ensuring your trust.. but i don't see why you can't have privacy and accountability

i'm not so sure.. what would happen if they stored their bank account login credentials there and someone managed to steal it - you wouldn't (just) blame the hoster, but the one who is so stupid to store something valuable without protection (or do you mean the bitcoin exchange should have the insurance, not linode.. then i'm with you :) )

Where is your point? If you know the underlieing technology you perfectly understand the code on first glance and it is easy to write..
Its like saying .. yeah, you need to understand the GC and parts of the jvm to know what the impact of my 5 lines of java have - so i write my own JVM.. i guess you suffer from NIH syndrome..

well.. it would be really great if that 1% could access it.. i have android 4.0.3, but i live in austria, so i'm still out of luck.. https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2393487&p=market_countries

why would google need to do that? simply use the amazon app store or (if you use a samsung phone) the samsung apps market.. both of which review all apps which are submitted before they can be downloaded or bought. the android market is just one (very popular) choice, but you have the option to choose a reviewed market, so go for it.. if they turn out to be much more popular, maybe google will come to the conclusion that it's worth investing into a review process..