Mind yer souls, ye young whippersnappers!

14 years of Slashdot and articles respond to me in my head, day and night, awake or asleep.

"for reasons that are mutually sound"?

That's very naive. There is no agreed upon definition of "sound" here -- sound for whom? For you? For Obama? For Bush? A powerful politician's agenda is not very likely to coincide with yours.

Give it a chance. I read it in English translation and it was a truly great book.

Painfully "droll"?

Droll \Droll\, n.
          1. One whose practice it is to raise mirth by odd tricks; a
                jester; a buffoon; a merry-andrew. --Prior.
                [1913 Webster]

          2. Something exhibited to raise mirth or sport, as a puppet,
                a farce, and the like

I think you may have meant "painfully dull."

Their chances of re-election don't hinge on the experts, but if enough of their constituents kick up a fuss, they might think twice.

Or maybe I'm just being hopelessly optimistic.

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.