Hardly billions. The technology that goes into fibre lasers is very cheap and efficient. My guess is that this was made form mostly off the shelf components.

A burst from an A-10 main machine gun costs hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Nothing important should go on facebook!

Licenses and license plates originated as a form of tax, although I agree they offer various forms of social control.

I will take well written procedural code over poorly implemented OO any day... not to mention that I can't remember a single time where I refactored and the LOC wasn't significantly reduced.

It's an IQ test, and they failed!

The important thing to consider though is what the size of the therapeutic dose compared to a hazardous dose.

Our Corgi chewed up my entire GOT collection but won't touch an e-reader.

Or maybe the blogs were being blocked at many schools, businesses and libraries limiting their usefulness and by proxy having much of their non-sex content censored....

There are almost no private venues that are literally censorship free so the dictionary usage of the term is trivial in this context.

But not in the constitutional freedom of speech sense. Not sure why this is even news.

The NYT doesn't publish racy advertisements or articles either. Because they are Evil!

Google owns these servers and the web address and may do what they want with them.

Even if we had a full out nuclear exchange during the height of the cold war the majority of humans would survive. What do you think will take to end it?

Yes I think it is an important aspect of human nature- it's just how you channel it. Below is an interesting article about anger an creativity, I know that I can be kind angry when working on a difficult problem and I call it my 'mental razor'.
http://www.scientificamerican....