Ah, OK. So we'll just take your word for it.

#insert "bunch of insults"

Well said!

Also note that all the trading laws or the private stock-markets' rules aimed at "stop speculation", "market distortion" and "inside trading" always end up hitting the little smart traders that are using the big firms' flawed algorithms against them, and almost never hit the stock markets' big customers (big thieves) who are screwing the other investors daily.

So if tobin-taxes are imposed, you can be sure that it will not hit the thieves (because they will go around the tax) and it will give very little income.

So instead of simply paying a fee on everything, and then hand out the money to companies and people who have published very good designs and/or research, you honestly think it's a good idea to go medieval and hand out state enforced monopolies and force people to have armies of lawyers fighting each other in courts for years while the invention is forced off the market?

Not to mention that

patents kill innovation directly. An innovation is a combination of two or more ideas (always). If you combine two patents into something new, the both patent owners will say that their patent counts for 65% of the value of the product, and thus the product is effectively banned from market. Because people want to have laws that forbid new inventions to be used.

No, that isn't a correct analysis. I've studied this for years, as I develop and run (more narrow) social network sites for a living.

What is happening in both Brazil and Russia is that people in the big towns and people who have international connections tend to use Facebook. You can't keep contact with your friends in Europe with Orkut or Vkontakte, and after a while, Facebook wins because it's a better system and because people don't want to use two systems (people do use two systems for a while, but then Facebook wins). There are many many more examples, you can take a look at the pretty old, but still valid State of Facebook Competition that I wrote last year.

In USA there was a social difference between MySpace and Facebook, where the students used Facebook and annoying kids used MySpace. Eventually Facebook won because it was less annoying to browse around. Now it's the nerds that are using Google+, but they kind of fail to attract more people. If you want to read something from a nerd, just read his (or maybe "her") blog, Twitter, FB and so on... No need to register for Google+ for that.

Here in Sweden Facebook has had a little of backlash among kids, because they don't want to be on the same site as their parents and teachers. But I think it's something they have learnt to handle now.

Yes, that's why no one is using Facebook and everyone is using MySpace.

I have discovered that people think that one of the best features of Elftown is that there are no games...

"Actually the "compelling function" is that the crowd is there."

Yes? You don't expect the ones with thousands of photos and stuff on Facebook to suddenly just start using Google+ instead, do you? And Google+ doesn't offer anything that I can't get on FB. If someone has something important to say, they do it on FB (or a site related to the subject).

I think that Google+ has messed up the marketing here. I got tired of Google+ after a few days, and I feel really uncomfortable with giving even more power to Google.

An artist's job is to do propaganda. That the best of the artists have little problem to convince people to give them benefits that they don't deserve, don't need and are harmful to society is just as sad as it's predictable.

I see little hope to change this sad fact until the ones who stand up to the entertainment industry can get an equal amount of money to spend on propaganda and people who are good at it.

If Springsteen wants money, I suggest that he goes out and play some concerts. I don't see why anyone should get money for stuff they recorded a long time ago. It's OK if someone sells old copies of records or tunes, but there is NO REASON to give them a monopoly.

It would be so much better if the money spent on buying old music, went to something useful, like investments for the future. Ex-musicians and RIAA will just spend the money on bribes and jet set lifestyles. Not something the state should pay for by giving them monopolies.

So how can we make it work again now when all neanderthals are mostly homo (;))?

Of course not. You're a bacteria. There are more bacterias in your body than human cells, and they are probably more important than most of your cells. It's not like you brain does anything without the influence of chemicals created in your gut.

Eh... Google is always changing how they enforce their policies. A Google robot suddenly locked out two of my sites (after 5 years!) from Google Adsense (because of some pages, but I don't know which except one example and neither exactly why. Before they just stopped showing ads on the actual pages that might have "questionable" content (like artistic nudity or a link to a Hentai site)

Short story: Google will ass-rape you sooner or later, if they can. And Google+ isn't an alternative to Facebook as the US government has access to both.

I still haven't seen one single reason to use Google+. None. Nada. Nichts! Net!

Google+ doesn't have a problem. It just haven't got anything for it. Get that, and we can start talking problems!

Electricity, even from a coal plant, is way more clean and efficient than burning gas in a car. You do loose some due to battery issues, but compared to the waste in a explosion engine, it's nothing.

And cars should be driven with electric motors, that isn't a question. The question is if the power comes from batteries, engines, fuel cells or loaded while driving.

The rules and restrictions against things like pump and dump are there to protect firms that own or pay huge amount of money to the stock exchanges, so that they can continue to run their very profitable ultra fast trading computer programs without risking that a human fools them.

There are no protections what so ever for small traders. They get news later, much higher fees, less transparency and so on, just because the stock exchanges want to earn more money and can do so because traders accept this. Partly due to that people like you think that the rules are there to protect you, although it's quite clear that the rules are there to protect the "bribing" ones against you or any differently thinking and trading trader.