I think I looked at it for a minute or two, clicked on a couple things, then fired up synaptic and loaded awesome. If awesome hadn't been available I might well have opted for twm, it is indeed that bad.

Instead of sat phones, just regular cell phones with built in encryption (should be configurable by user so someone can decide who to share info with). And solar powered mesh nodes, some of which go either to countries nearby which access outwards, or to satellites, or to whatever other relays might be made available. Maybe make it all wifi based. The hardware should be cheap enough these days.

I have an iGoogle page with a number (25 at the moment) of selected RSS feeds in boxes (but no hamster gadget). Several of these are news feeds (general news, NY Times, BBC, Al Jazeera), some are tech (slashdot...), others are just interesting stuff (metafilter...). I guess this is customization (as opposed to personalization) and it works for me.

I used to have Google News open more or less permanently in a tab, but since their new look this summer, it has become less than useful for me and I don't think I've looked at it more than twice since they changed it (once was just now to see if it had become any better). I suspect this was personalization. (Well and twittization with the "popular" cruft and adization with the "spotlight" cruft.) To echo that New Yorker cartoon - "I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it."

So, "Without a Trace" would now be "Without a License". A thrilling hunt through thousands of wiretaps to prove that Little Johnny did indeed torrent "2012"!

The hyperinflation certainly pushed things along, but I suspect that it helps to look at things as being a long war starting essentially with Napoleon, with smaller and larger shooting wars more or less interrupting a long period of arms building, Germany was falling apart by the end of the the first world war and the Versailles treaty didn't help, but I find it hard to see it as being the the most important factor. But I'm not a historian by any means, just someone who finds that flow of events interesting.

I've seen it suggested several times that if you're going to prison, finding Jesus is a Good Thing as it means that there will be guards, administrators and the like who may prefer to help out Christians as opposed to those of other religions or atheists.

This year in Washington state there are more than 50 initiative petitions filed. To actually get on the November ballot, each such petition needs 241,153 valid signatures. Most of these are unlikely to get anywhere near that, but if even a half dozen do, that leaves a million or so signatures to be verified between July and whenever the ballots are finalized (September?). Surely making these public would help remove invalid signatures, do it quickly and well - and how is this a bad thing?

That is not true at all.

You are correct in that.