90% of American university professors are sympathetic to Che, Castro, or Marx? You sound like an Eastern European who hasn't yet adjusted to life in the West. Support for USSR-style Communism has never been more than marginal in the West, partly because people here just plain don't like that ideology, but mostly because we really, really hate totalitarianism.

I figure a good on-line news source is worth at least $5 a month, but my total news budget would end up being a lot higher if all the good news sources would go the paywall route -- I'm not going to blindly trust any one news source, I like to skim at least half a dozen on a regular basis. As long as even the paywalled sites let me at least scan their headlines for free, I guess it wouldn't be too bad.

The jury is still out on that. In China they went with regulating reproduction, but in Europe and Japan fertility rates are falling on their own. My personal theory is that it is actually possible for entire nations to come to their senses and start behaving responsibly, and those non-enforced low fertility rates could be evidence of that, but of course it remains to be seen whether the current demographic trends will hold long enough to really make a difference.

I'm quite shocked by the US where they catch a drunken bozo for the 5th time in a month and he still is allowed to drive to work and back.

It depends on which state you're in. Here in New Jersey, a first DUI conviction will cause your driving privileges to be revoked for 6 to 12 months; a second conviction is 12 to 24 months; a third conviction means you lose your license for life. The law does not provide for exceptions for people who need to drive because of their jobs or because of disability.
At least, that's how it was when I took my NJ driving test back in 1998. IANAL, etc.

I'm personally pretty pleased with Firefox and found every new release to be an improvement so far. The fact that sometimes a configuration setting disappears from Preferences and then has to be set through about:config, it's not ideal, but not exactly a big deal either since I only have to do it once.

Regarding the awesomebar, though -- using the "oldbar" extension I can get the old, sparse look back, and using a few about:config changes I can get most of the FF2 behavior back, but the one thing I always wanted the FF url bar to do is simply sort the drop-down by access time, so the least recently used ones are on top. Mozilla always did things this way; at some point I submitted a patch to mozilla.org that implemented the same behavior in FF2, but it never got picked up, and we got the "you'll learn to love it, trust us" awesomebar instead.

I've used FF3 for as long as it's been out, and it still bothers me that selecting a url from the url bar drop-down doesn't just move it to the top of the list immediately. Add an about:config setting to get us that behavior, and I'm sure that a lot of the awesomebar-related whining will stop.

I guess your idea of "actual information" is not the same as mine. Maybe I'm naive, but I have a hard time even imagining edit wars over things like the carbon cycle, the climate of Buenos Aires, Winston Churchill's alma mater, or the progression of the U.S. GDP or unemployment levels.

If you can provide some actual examples -- as opposed to saying "I can think of half a dozen articles" and then not citing a single one -- I would be interested to hear about them. If I'm really so seriously misguided, I'd like to know.

Criticism of famous / historical figures has no place in an encyclopedia in the first place; they are supposed to be repositories of information, not opinion. I spent countless hours with major encyclopedias when I was a kid, and whenever I see criticism or praise of people in Wikipedia, it feels jarring and out of place. I don't consider it a problem, though, I just skip over those sections.

What keeps me coming back to Wikipedia is because it is actually truly excellent as an encyclopedia. Whenever I'm looking for something about physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, geography, history, etc. etc. etc., I find what I'm looking for and I find it quickly. The edit wars that so many people seem to have such huge stakes in tend not to affect articles that disseminate actual information, and those are the only ones I'm interested in; those are the only ones that belong there. The fact that lots of other people use Wikipedia as their personal political soapbox or Geocities page is a very minor annoyance, and maybe the way Wikipedia deals with those annoyances is heavy-handed and/or misguided sometimes, but it takes little to nothing away from its true utility. Certainly not enough to stop me from donating $100 a year.

It is just you getting old and crotchety. I speak as someone to whom this is also happening, FWIW.
People are always complaining about the youth of today, mostly because they reach a point where they no longer remember what it was like when they were young themselves, when it was them annoying their elders with their questions. At my job, I am regarded as a guru now, but in the past I did my share of asking questions, too, some of them perceptive, some of them lazy or stupid. At some point you transition to being a person who answers them, and at that point it behooves a good citizen to be patient with the youngsters and return the favor to society.
In other words, relax. Civilization is not collapsing just yet.

I prefer a planet with an atmosphere that I can actually breathe. As in, being able to open a window, or walk out the front door without having to put on a spacesuit.
But all of you who voted for the first five options, go ahead and enjoy.

Right now, I am sending and receiving my email via public SMTP and IMAP servers that my mail client connects to over SSL. There are several major email providers that offer this option, and it's not difficult to set that up on a server of your own, either, if you so choose.
This takes my ISP out of the equation: SSL was specifically designed to be secure against eavesdroppers *and* to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. The only way around this would be to ban SSL altogether, or cripple it with a government-mandated back door. This is going to be fun.

Sun did not sue Microsoft for making their own JVM; they sued Microsoft for making an incompatible JVM, while using the Java trademark -- in direct and deliberate violation of the Java licensing terms.

More...

What's with the fixation on spending cuts? How about we leave government the way it is, and make up for the budget shortfalls by raising taxes on the rich? Seriously, if there's one segment of the population that's been making out like bandits over the last 30 years (while the rest of us went nowhere), it's them. How about we end the neocon nonsense and start redistributing some wealth already? It's not like the rich are spending it on anything that benefits the common good. Trickle-down economics, don't make me laugh.

The Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson.

It's slow in places, and long (2700 pages total), but I found it an absolute page-turner. If you're interested in the history of science and technology, there's a lot of good stuff here, parts of it are almost a documentary... but there's also high drama, a great love story, good laughs, and even actual swashbucking action (pirates!). I thought it was awesome; I read it three times back-to-back.

I'm not happy with iOS 4.0 on my iPod touch (second generation), either. General UI sluggishness, sometimes to the point of making Mail react so slowly to the keyboard that it becomes unusable, and at that point the only way to get things back to normal is a reboot. There is some new functionality in Mail 4.0 but I don't use it. It appears that it is possible to downgrade back to 3.1.3; I'm going to try that next...

Er, no. I think you fell for a joke article where the reverse was done (retelling Star Wars in the style of an Icelandic Saga): http://tattuinardoelasaga.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/tattuinardoela-saga-if-star-wars-were-an-icelandic-saga/