the increase in unemployment actually matches quite well with the increase in time people can receive unemployment benefits

I was under the impression that once you stopped collecting unemployment, you were no longer counted as unemployed, whether that was true or not. In other words, the reason employment goes up as people hit the end of their unemployment checks is an artifact of the data collection process. Not that there aren't people who wait until the last minute to go back to work. Hell, I know a couple.

Is Apples GCC 4.3 significantly different from a vanilla GCC 4.3? I know they've been doing a bunch of work on llvm, so they can get a compiler not under the gplv3, is this part of the difference?

We already have a free, open source, modifiable text for every topic. It's called Wikipedia and it's the living embodiment of why we have professional, accountable, paid editors for text books

The difference between an open source software project and Wikipedia is that with software there are gatekeepers, so you can't commit nonsense, so you can keep standards high, etc. Why, exactly, is that not acceptable for a textbook project?

Luckily for us, xmonad substitutes time wasted rearranging windows with time wasted attempting to configure the window manager.

You can't make more gold

True, but you can always mine more. There isn't a shortage of gold in the world, it's just that most of it costs more to extract than it's worth.

If that ever changed, like, say, the way that aluminum suddenly became cheap, your gold-backed currency would experience... ill-effects.

And even if that never happened, the gold standard is not some cure-all for economic woes. The US was on the gold standard during the Great Depression, remember?