Living in continental Europe, I find the statement that A Christmas Carol is "eternal and universal" amusing and sad at the same time. Let's face it, outside of Anglo-Saxon countries, A Christmas Carol is obscure at best. The same goes for Star Trek, although you might get a little more name recognition there, just because its later incarnations are occasionally on TV (dubbed into the local language) - but it gets lost, more or less, among all the other U.S. TV cruft that gets dubbed, broadcast at odd hours, and forgotten.

Americans should travel more. It sounds like this particular OP has never been outside the continental 48.

Come on, just do it. Even a trip to Canada will broaden your horizons. (Although it's possible that A Christmas Carol is beaten to death every year there, too.)

Is there a "save all changes" option in Picasa? Or do you have to hit Save on every individual file that you've modified in Picasa?

For example, I'd like to do this:
1. back up all the original files,
2. run "Save All Changes" in Picasa
3. migrate to a different photo manager

The reality of family photos is that there are way too many of them. Picasa is great because non-geek family members can easily edit their photos, but if at some point all those edits can "disappear", it loses a great deal of its appeal.

I'll wait until it makes a super ULTRA smart phone.

I live in Europe and can confirm no Expeditions here, fortunately for me. Aside from the rare Hummer, the SUVs I see here (mostly BMW, Mercedes) are smaller, on average, than in the U.S.

Now that I mention it, almost EVERYTHING is smaller here than in the U.S.

Human psychology is the same everywhere, though. Europeans tend to aspire for bigger possessions, just as Americans do. The difference is, over here bigger gets impractical more quickly.

which two countries have these patent issues?

I had never seen it before, either, and I had the same reaction as you ("Huh?") to the term "Google word search definition". But I found it _is_ there, just very small and easy to miss.

1. Go to Google
2. Type in a single word (I typed "retch")
3. In the bar just above where the search results start, on the far right, I see this:
Results 1 - 10 of about 311,000 for retch [definition]. (0.34 seconds)

The word "definition" in brackets is a link to Google Dictionary's page on "retch".