I'm guessing you don't live in a rural community.

"Big government" aka the local post office in my central Virginia hamlet consists of a 400 square foot post office built by sectioning off the local country store. Along with the country store, it's the primary place to go to learn or pass along news, or to meet your neighbors. Of course it's kind of insane from a purely economic standpoint to maintain it, with a full-time postmistress, when there is a medium-sized PO five miles away in the next big town and a full-service PO a dozen miles away. But when that branch closes, and I suppose it will, it will mean one less point of human contact for folks around here, and some not insignificant additional burdens for people without a lot of money or with health problems for whom a trip to retrieve a package at a distance is not trivial.

Let's see... do Virginia rednecks whose great-great-grandaddies undoubtedly fought for the Confederacy count as owning third-world mentalities? Because I'm in a rural service club in central VA that puts up a Nativity scene every year, and granted a couple of years ago when someone stole the baby Jesus doll and replaced it with a bottle of beer it was a Corona beer, but I'd still bet pretty good money that it was a Morris or a Shiflett who did it rather than a Gonzales or a Gomez...

Absolutely. This is far and away my biggest gripe with recent-model cars. It's not just absolute size of the rear window, it's the slant and curving of the rear styling that cuts down on visibility.

Nothing new under the sun. This dates me, but when I was in high school the local branch of the John Birch Society advertised an upcoming presentation called "Pot, Rock, and Revolution" that was going to expose how the jungle beat of rock & roll stimulates primitive brain responses and was part of a Communist plot to turn the youth of America into zombies. They seriously cited the Beatles' "Back in the USSR" as propaganda piece, clueless to its status as a parody of "Back in the USA", etc. So a group of long-haired kids went to the meeting, attracting nervous stares but surprisingly little outright hostility, and amazed the crowd by noting that several of us had straight-A grades despite a life-long diet of rock music.

The Australian researcher quoted in the story was co-author of a paper involving forensic use of C-14 dating of wines published in 2004:

U. Zoppi, Z. Skopec, J. Skopec, G. Jones, D. Fink, Q. Hua, G. Jacobsen, C. Tuniz, A. Williams, Forensic applications of 14C bomb-pulse dating, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section B: Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms, Volumes 223-224, Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, August 2004, Pages 770-775, ISSN 0168-583X, DOI: 10.1016/j.nimb.2004.04.143.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6TJN-4CDWMNK-F/2/b2a003d44396872bd06d5c80443167cd)

and I'm nearly certain I saw published research in the 1990s using C-14 dating to establish wine adulteration, but as it's 3:40 in the morning insomniac me is not going to run down the reference

Another story on the lawsuit currently circulating on the wires includes this nugget: "Through a spokesman, Delta denied that it was involved in any hacking. 'Obviously, the idea that Delta would hack into someone’s email is clearly without merit,' spokesman Trebor Banstetter wrote in an email."

Without prejudging the facts in the case, I'm not sure that "clearly" and "obviously" are adverbs that belong in any statement relating to wrongdoing on the part of a huge corporation.

I have a first-generation iPod Nano. Yesterday (the 31st) after I had downloaded an audiobook to it, it crashed totally. Was around 1500 my time, 2000 GMT. iTunes restore wouldn't fix it until I had reformatted the drive. Never happened before.

Probably just coincidence--but kind of spooky. FWIW I have time/date set to display in the menu bar, which is not the default.

First-generation iPod Nano, bought two years or so ago. Never had a problem with it before. After downloading an audiobook to it today, it suddenly displayed the iPod BSOD, namely "Use iTunes to Restore". So I tried that... no joy, iTunes error "Cannot Restore". Finally had to reformat the iPod drive using Disk Utility before the restoration process would work. Seems to be okay now

So what is this? Some arcane spill-over effect from all the dying Zunes in the force field?

Well, now: reading Tolkien certainly does expose people to all kinds of religious, philosophical, and sociological ideas, it's just that they all date back to around the 11th century...

You left out those of us who bought VMWare Fusion and an XP license (well, okay, used my university site license) just to run Quicken for Windows.