+1 for Think Tank products. I use several of their products, including the aforementioned Streetwalker Harddrive. Like you, I lug around some serious SLR gear (plus laptop, accessories and heavy tripod) and this bag has performed well and has got very good build quality. Of course, it's quite pricey, but so is your gear.

I've worked on a passenger ship that used RO for drinking water distillation. The RO water is so clean straight out of the membrane that we had to "pollute" it by letting it go through a sand filter. The sand adds taste, ions and minerals (and pH stability?) to the water.

I just couldn't let this pass by without comment. Yes, I am a flac kind of a person, and take pride in ripping music with the absolute highest quality. I am also a photographer, and yes, I shoot in raw format. Why? Because I do post-processing. On every photo I take. A good-quality jpeg is indistinguishable from raw until you start doing the least bit of editing. Then the differences will be clear as day and night. Ever tried rescuing an underexposed 8-bit JPEG and then try the same with a 12-bit raw? And don't get me started about color spaces...

JPEG is perfect for the holiday shooter, though, but personally I long for the 16-bit raw files (best available today on 35-mm SLR:s is 14-bit). That will take care of *some* of the imaging artifacts that come from the rounding errors between the sensor and the memory card.

Don't insult the name of Ansel Adams.

I'm a photographer myself, and I have yet to see a gigapan that looks lood. Why do people think that the resolution is interesting at all? A photo is all about capturing something interesting, and that requires hard work from the guy behind the camera. Gigapixel is the latest excuse for lazy photographers to make boring photos. A great (no, let me say legendary) photographer like Adams doesn't need gigapans. And large format photography is alive and kicking, btw.

...I'm Swedish/Swiss, and live in Zürich atm.
Daily basis and fluent: Swedish, German, English, (+Swiss German, which I for these purposes just count as a half language)
Less fluent: French
No problems communicating in Norwegian and Danish, too. Summing up to 3.5 or 6.5, depending on how you count.
Currently learning Mandarin, and can read Dutch text at full speed
And I agree with what many people above have written: Learn a language. Srsly.

The parent is somewhat correct; the delete option has existed for a long time, though it has been extremely well-hidden. I would describe it as a hack. When I deleted my account in early 2008, I had to create a new fake account and "overwrite" the e-mail of the old one. Everything I had done vanished, including all my messages in groups and on other people's "walls". There's a better explanation of the procedure here.

There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those who understand binary,

those who don't,

and then there's people who don't understand zero-based indices

In some countries the NMT system is still operational and is used by ships for it's excellent coverage (compared to GSM, that is). Don't have any links at the moment, but I know some ships that are using NMT to get an OK network connection when out on the sea. Other than that, I think I remember you can surf using VHF. Don't know about SSB, internet over SSB would be slow but with an awesome coverage. Last resort: Satellite.

Not legal in Sweden

I certainly don't hope for it, but in the case I referred to above copyright was put above the constitutional Offentlighetsprincipen. Anything is possible when dealing with pirates, it seems. Thanks to IPRED we now have private entities doing policework and the government spies on our internet traffic thanks to FRA.