My theory is that it's whooshes all the way down.

Use a third party application (while you can). They don't have the promoted tweets and the like. For Android I recommend TweetLanes

I did as otherwise my actions would have little consequences. :)

Replying instead of moderating..

Things like the medieval opinion that the world is flat

They never did think that, it's a modern invention, introduced as late as 1828 after Washington Irving's publication of A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. The ancient Greeks could show that the Earth was round already. In fact, if in the medieval ages they thought that the Earth was flat, why would Columbus (and his contemporaries) even bother sailing west in order to reach India?

You have some points but please do not perpetuate this myth.

As a European, I did the one thing I could do, cancel the server I was renting in the US. Sorry to the very nice people who ran it but your government left me with no choice.

It's not the speed that kills, it's coming to a sudden stop against those trees.

Or go to the local zoo and pick up some wolf/tiger/lion poo..

You are right, it doesn't. But it that relevant? There is a 90% chance that the child being abused knows it's victim. So why is everybody seemingly going after the 10% stranger danger?

For that 90%, it is debatable whether having accessibility to child pornography has any effect has any impact as they have direct access to the child. What do you think would attract a paedophile to a child? Pictures of a child or being in the presence of a child?

This is likely to be hugely ineffectual, as the actual numbers point to a rather different typical abuser:

In the United States, approximately 15% to 25% of women and 5% to 15% of men were sexually abused when they were children.[33][34][35][36][37] Most sexual abuse offenders are acquainted with their victims; approximately 30% are relatives of the child, most often brothers, fathers, mothers, uncles or cousins; around 60% are other acquaintances such as friends of the family, babysitters, or neighbours; strangers are the offenders in approximately 10% of child sexual abuse cases.[33] In over one-third of cases, the perpetrator is also a minor.[38]

From: Wikipedia

So what is this actually supposed to accomplish apart from censorship? What sort of "unsavoury" things are in this list of 100k search terms that are not even illegal? Snowden perhaps?

You mean: "I refer you to the reply given in Arkell and Pressdram".

xkcd 301

Sounds like the Congress could use something like Parliamentary privilege principle:

it allows members of the House of Lords and House of Commons to speak freely during ordinary parliamentary proceedings without fear of legal action on the grounds of slander, contempt of court or breaching the Official Secrets Act.[1][2] It also means that members of Parliament cannot be arrested on civil matters for statements made or acts undertaken as an MP within the grounds of the Palace of Westminster, on the condition that such statements or acts occur as part of a proceeding in Parliamentâ"for example, as a question to the Prime Minister in the House of Commons. This allows Members to raise questions or debate issues which could slander an individual, interfere with an ongoing court case or threaten to reveal state secrets

I found this extremely offensive website through just a simple Google search. It must be banned instantly! After all, we can ban child abuse images, why not MPs who are idiots?

http://www.johnwhittingdale.org.uk/

Interesting you raise the point about the "mandate to spy on as much as possible on the off chance that it may prevent some terrorist act".

There is a very interesting article on the BBC blogs indicating just how useless MI5 has been at any sort of intelligence gathering, even the sort that's been painfully obvious over it's entire existence. It's opening gambit: "Maybe the real state secret is that spies aren't very good at their jobs and don't know very much about the world".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER

This. The Nokias I've owned before have all been great pieces of hardware. It's likely that if they launched an Android phone it would sell well. In fact, if they only put Android on one of their Lumia 925s, I'd be very tempted to ditch my Nexus 4.