I stopped my formal education one year into a highly math-centric university program, so I often find that my knowledge of even modern history is woefully inadequate. Histories written for mass audiences (just like pop science books) sometimes get a bad rap, but I've found them to be both enjoyable and stimulating. They generally highlight a specific thread of events (the ascension and rule of emperor Hirohito, Churchill's effect on the middle east) while furnishing plenty of interesting background that should spur your curiosity about the context surrounding the main thread (modern Japanese political development, circumstances and attitudes in Europe before the first world war).

My policy in picking these has generally been, did the NYT / TLS / NYT BR / New Yorker like it? Did it win an award, or appear on editor's choice lists? Does the prose appeal after a couple pages of browsing? Perhaps least important, does the subject sound interesting? If you can answer yes to a few of these, pick up one of these books and give it a read. I'll close with a few recommendations:

A Peace to End All Peace - David Fromkin (the Ottoman Empire, Churchill, the great war)
Hirohito - Herbert P. Bix (the rearing and reign of the titular emperor, and developments in 20th century Japanese politics)
Citizens - Simon Schama (the french revolution, the decline of monarchism)

Do you really know what you're talking about? Because it sounds to me like you actually prefer to go by your own "make-believe magical fairytale unicorn definitions".

Hydration absolutely does not "equate" to intake of water, despite the magical mystery powers of "common sense". There are in fact three types of dehydration: Hypertonic, which is the only kind you've ever heard of; hypotonic, which is a loss not of water but of electrolytes; and isotonic, which is a loss of both water and electrolytes. A hypotonic or isotonic patient could be given litres of bottled water without recovering, since they also need electrolytes (notably sodium).

If you don't believe me, Wikipedia is of course your friend, have a look for yourself.
I advise you to remember that science and common sense are rarely on speaking terms, and that people who live in make-believe magical fairy unicorn land should not throw stones.

What the fuck?

What the fuck!?

Seriously?

Holy what the flying shit!?

I'm calling the gun store with all my phones at the same time

I've been an android partisan since way back, but credit where credit is due: Siri blows Voice Search out of the water. On my Galaxy S II, I can say "Send text to Bob... Hi Bob" and the result is a text to no one with "To Bob hi Bob" in the body. This is a well documented bug. I can say "set an alarm for two minutes from now", which results in being told I need to download a CLOCK from android market. This is another well documented bug (hilariously, it sometimes searches google for the phrase instead, and the first result is a thread on the google forums saying "set alarm does not work").
Siri isn't a big enough deal that I'd trade in my Galaxy for it, but still, it's a piece of software without a contemporary equal, and there's no point in pretending otherwise.

You're right to worry about transparency. From Ars Technica:

In other words, you can make FOIA requests until you're blue in the face, but it won't get you anywhere.

They replaced the keyboard in my laptop after I got coffee on a key and it wouldn't work. On the other hand, when the back-light in that computer's monitor died, the only thing they could offer was to replace the entire top half of the laptop. A little goggling found me an independent operator who replaced the back-light for a tenth of the price.

You mean Pees at the Keys? No, I don't think so.
Tickles the ivories.

Newspapers is an interesting comparison. Should we make it illegal to talk about the news? I hear about lots of topics like Iraq or the Japanese quake from friends before I'm exposed to any articles about them, but somebody had to work to acquire the facts that I'm hearing for free! Don't they have a natural right to profit from their labors? Clearly it should be illegal to conversationally repeat any information found in a copyrighted newspaper!
I'm pretty sympathetic to copyright holders, but I think it's time that we admit there really is no fair solution here. Copyrighted material shouldn't be available for free, but people also shouldn't be labeled felons for sharing that material.

I could be wrong about this, but as far as I'm aware, the full content (including edit history!) of wikipedia totals less than 5TB, which should by no means be difficult to house. Now, perhaps there are architectural considerations that I'm not taking into account, but even if that's the case, remember that these deletion discussions often grow to a size eclipsing that of the article being discussed.
This isn't about space. It's about image. Some Wikipedians don't want their encyclopedia hosting frivolous or trivial information, because that conflicts with the air of solemn academia they affect.

It's even worse than you suggest for those early adopters. If you bought itunes music back when the tracks had DRM, and you lose it, it's gone forever- itunes won't let you download re-download albums that have been changed in the interim, under any circumstances.

But it probably won't be. Consider "There Will Be Blood" and "No Country For Old Men". Not horror flicks, sure, but in my opinion two of the best R-Rated Movies of their decade. Together, they won 6 Oscars and over 100 various awards from other sources. They were cheap to make, too, at about 25 million a piece. Yet despite the acclaim, they only grossed 40 and 74 million, respectively. Now, to you and me that sounds like a tidy profit, but for a studio to see two absolute standout R movies, with critical acclaim positively dripping off them and pooling at their feet, turn up about 100 mil between them? That spells R I S K.
Remember, too, that the exorcist was made a solid 25 years before theaters started getting serious about enforcing R ratings. It's a different world now, and R-type, blockbuster-budget films require either indestructible licenses or surefire, tested premises to get the green light.

It's true, he says that a lot. But if you see him as a calculating cynic, it just looks like an attempt to appear beyond questioning. What I hear is more like "See? Nothing up my sleeve. And now, for my next trick..." I'd bet his audience is actually less likely to fact-check claims that precede an invitation to do so. It's classic reverse psychology! Of course, even if his viewers did heed the call to "look it up for themselves", it wouldn't matter.
There's a fairly large, interconnected, conservative blog-sphere, just as there is a liberal one. Selection bias gives us isolated left and right information ecosystems, and each one suffers few internal contradictions. Beck can baldly lie and tell his viewers to investigate for themselves, knowing that the places they'll look will be echoing the same ideas at the same time. (Cass Sunstein was one of a few individuals who earnestly investigated ways to mitigate this damaging effect. For that, Beck gave him the gift of complete character assassination.)

- Domestic violence became something people report
- Driving, and every offence associated with it, gradually became possible for the average individual
- Harmless drug offences must surely have increased since 1928, when pot was made illegal

Even if the population has become more criminal, as GP suggests, it's audacious to claim that the UK was better off a hundred years ago:
- Life expectancy is up 30 years
- Infant mortality rates are less than a fourteenth of what they were
- You're slowly closing the gender gap for members of parliament and degrees obtained

In short, even if there is more crime occurring, the UK is undeniably better off now than it was in the past.

Egyptians are probably going to get what they want, or at least what they want at the instant of transition. That doesn't mean it won't be bad for us, them, and the rest of the world as well. I haven't read up on the Iranian revolution, but superficially the protests in Egypt seem similar- they're not really about anything, except the removal of Mubarak; a large proportion of the population is Muslim; and there's no obvious candidate to fill the leadership vacuum.
It's easy to imagine Egypt voting for a new government not unlike Iran's, and that's the last thing anybody needs- including the Egyptians.