There is a difference between formal power and real power.

The President of the United States has a great deal of formal power, but very little "real" power. His decisions are constrained in many complex ways by his party, his backers, his financial contributors and the various civil and military services in the US, which are the real creators of policy. They are the ones that present the viable options the figurehead chooses from.

"removing support for PowerPC binaries starting with Snow Leopard"

Surely you mean starting with Lion, 6 years after the transition to Intel? Rosetta runs just fine on Snow Leopard.

The phone number thing in Gmail useful, though. It can prevent permanent hijacking of your account. You can always request a new password and have it sent via SMS to your phone.

My mom's Hotmail account was hijacked by some clever phishers a while back, and I try as I might, I was unable to get it back under her control. No support from Hotmail, no replies to my queries, nothing.

So, the phone number request is not without its reasons. But hey, if you don't want Google knowing it, just provide a fake number.

"Great men are almost always bad men."

Get a sense of humour, fer God's sake. If He does exist, he must be the ultimate joker. I have a feeling he'd like our OP's tongue-in-cheek flippancy.

>Or that simple functionality like Refresh isn't available in Finder

As of Mac OS X 10.4 (released in 2005 -- 6 years ago), the Finder receives event messages whenever the content of an open folder changes, and the file list is updated automatically.

As an Icelander who follows things at home quite closely, I'm telling you you're in for a disappointment. Things are not going well.

Unemployment is still high, about 7.5%. Our currency has fallen (and we live with currency controls), so wages here are now among the lowest in the OECD (software engineers now earn about 400000 ISK/month, ~2000 GBP, before income tax (38.5%)) and the prices of imported goods has skyrocketed (and we import almost everything). The price of our exports go up, so the large fishing companies and their owners benefit, and Iceland's government gets foreign currency to pay off its huge and debilitating foreign debt (interest payments alone amount to about 1/4 of government income).

Almost all household debt in the country is price-indexed (!!! -- an almost unique situation). E.g. the war in Libya increased oil prices == more expensive gasoline, which raises the Icelandic CPI and so everyone's loans go up. It's a crazy system. Many Icelanders struggle under overbearing debt, which can only become worse.

To put it bluntly, Iceland's financial woes have been very firmly placed on the working people of the country. Just because we refused to pay the Icesave debt, it doesn't mean that everything is well. A

You, sir, make some excellent points.

Who cares? Thomas L Friedman is an obnoxious windbag mostly famous for being wrong about pretty much everything.

"As for Iceland, yo do realize the country went bankrupt because they insisted on having state controlled banks and made laws against larger international banks being owners/part owners"

This is complete and utter nonsense. The Icelandic banks Kaupthing and Landsbanki were privatised in 2003. They consequently became huge, borrowed vast sums of money and then crashed, tanking the Icelandic economy. Now they've been taken over by the state, and ordinary taxpayers are made to fork out to cover their private debts, much like in the UK and USA. No, Nordic welfare socialism is certainly not to blame for the state of the Icelandic economy. On the contrary, the reason the Icelanders are fucked now is because of their experiment with neoliberalism and mass privatisation -- an experiment that the next couple of generations will have to pay out the nose for.

Mod this UP!

Windows refused to install in those cases?

I very much doubt that online games can ever provide any decent economic modelling. The things that make most people risk-averse in the real world are largely mitigated online.

It may be terrible to lose your character or his equipment in the MMORPG universe, but you'd have to be pretty far gone in order to feel the same way about that as you would about losing your job / house / car.

"... Doubled the number of customers for its product. This was only a century or two ago"

I very much doubt that it was "only a century or two ago." I don't think many women removed their body hair in 1800, or 1850, or even 1900. More likely, it was a marketing gimmick in the post-war years, when Edward Bernais got up to his clever tricks.

The popularity of the stick-figure female model built like a boy in early pubescence is due to the prevalence of gay male designers in the fashion industry. They like skinny young boys, and so they want women to be as close to that ideal as possible. That, at least, is my theory.