The topic "Why the industrial revolution was in Britain" it's one of the firsts ones in the History class that I took at university. The short answer it's "because the glorius revolution": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorius_revolution
I use fabric too, it's easy because most of the developments done here are in Python and writing a "deployment script" in the same language makes sense. The only problem I get with this is the "socket closed" error from time to time.
There is a technical aspect of the GSM encoding that most people doesn't know: It's just 140 bytes. In most encodings (the way computers represent text as 0 and 1) one character of the english language can be seen as a byte, this is because the 8 bits of the byte are used to represent 256 numbers that are mapped to letters, since there is less than 127 characters (leters and symbols) in the english alphabet, the GSM encoding use only 7 bits (less than a byte!) to represent the letters, and taking adventaje of those bits left it finds the way to have 20 more characters than bytes.