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/

I have fond memories of my Compaq Armada 7790. Among its many virtues was a built-in power supply. If it had used the standard power cable used on desktop PCs (and just about everything else with a detachable power cable) it would have been perfect, although theirs wasn't too hard to get either (it was not some completely nonstandard Compaq-only plug). Not having the brick to deal with makes a big difference in terms of convenience.

Apparently, even financial geniuses can miss bubbles -- see here, for example.

Not to say anything against the financial geniuses of the world, but if even objectively successful investors can miss something as huge as the U.S. housing bubble, it just reinforces my suspicion that those financial types are merely experts on the small scale, and ignorant of the big picture.

The big picture being: population grows. Places where you can find gainful employment are growing at a lesser pace because of limited natural resources. Population density grows disproportionally in areas with lots of Big Business and concomitant employment opportunities. Housing in said areas becomes scarcer and therefore more expensive. People get antsy about having to spend more and more on housing, but demographic inertia prevents the decline in population growth that would bring things back into balance quickly; instead, people start focusing on how rising real estate prices could actually work to their benefit, and buy things that are really kinda out of reach. This leads to real estate prices rising even more rapidly, making the expectation of rising real estate prices a self-fulfilling prophecy. People buy outrageously expensive houses yet feel that they've gotten themselves a great deal, will be able to retire 10 years sooner than they used to expect, a win-win all around. Some sane people realize that this cannot continue because it's just another pyramid scheme that will implode once the market runs out of suckers. Those sane people are a tiny minority that everyone else just laughs at -- financial geniuses included. Then the inevitable happens and the bubble bursts. Bankers get blamed because they made the juiciest profits; people who bought ridiculously overpriced homes consider themselves innocent victims. People who stayed in rented apartments while the world around them went nuts end up just scratching their heads and laughing at the stupidity of it all.

Protip: when someone doesn't get that you were joking, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're "humour-impaired". Maybe, just maybe, it means that it actually wasn't obvious that you were joking.

Besides, the difference between strong beer and whisky is no joking matter.

I'm pretty suspicious of those numbers. I mean, I keep hearing things like X thousand species going extinct each year, or umpteen bazillion species of insects found in one square mile of Amazon rainforest, and I can't help but wonder: *really*? Did they actually try to interbreed any of those bugs to make sure they were different species and not just slightly different-looking individuals from the same species? I'd love to know what criteria are being used there. I suspect that, with such large numbers being bandied about, while the line between what's a species boundary and what isn't isn't always very clear, even the various races of humans or breeds of dogs could be mis-identified as separate species rather than intra-species diversity.

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to discredit the dangers of biodiversity loss, but I have real trouble assigning any real meaning to the notion of "millions of species", and I don't think that those numbers are doing much to win over eco-skeptics either. The real issue to me seems to be overall genetic diversity and the need to preserve it; how many "species" you pigeonhole that diversity into has very little practical relevance and is probably impossible to do properly anyway.

Right. And if you freeze-distill wine for long enough, it'll be brandy, right? Bullshit.

It makes a huge difference whether you remove water by freezing or by distilling. The heat used in distillation causes chemical changes that do not happen when freezing; also, in distillation, much more than just water is left behind in the heated vessel, only the substances that can travel with the alcohol fumes end up in the distillate. This is why beer , even the really strong stuff, tastes nothing like whisky, and why even fortified wine tastes nothing like brandy.

But hey, if you want to call everything that was made from barley or wheat and has a high alcohol content "whisky", feel free to try and rewrite the dictionary -- while the rest of us continue to use words like "strong beer", "vodka", "aquavit", "jenever", and whatnot. Cheers!

No, you, sir, are making the mistake everyone makes. In game theory, it's called the Horizon Effect: where you fail to make the move that produces the best long-term result, because you aren't looking far enough ahead to see the disaster that will ensue if you keep on minimizing short-term losses.

Yes, lowering birthrates will mean that the generation that decided to have only one child per couple will have fewer children and grandchildren to take care of them. *Not* lowering birthrates leads to a world where natural resources are so depleted that your large number of grandchildren will have nothing to support you with.

We're already collectively screwed; the longer we stay in denial about this, the worse the pain will be when starvation forces population growth to zero or less.