I think people are missing the point. Of course this is not surprising. Of course a for-profit company wants to advertise their own products. Of course they want you to use their stuff before you use Groupon et al. Of course. The point is, Google touts itself as providing a fair service that doesn't favor its own services (as conflicting as that may be). It claims that its algorithms are unbiased. I think that is all the author was trying to point out (i.e. they may not be as unbiased as Google is touting themselves to be... as unsurprising as it is). A small point but an important one.

Or the resurgence is an old world. Hacking is nothing new, neither is the hacker culture. Wikileaks was the spark that rekindled the soldering embers that once were in the 80s and 90s with their unwavering pursuit toward exposing organizations and governments (regardless of whether you agree with their actions or not). I expect we will see much more of these types of groups and actions until the US adopts serious net neutrality laws or in (one might wish) that they add net neutrality or freedom of information to the constitution as a basic human right.

Ahem, you mean the rapture, my judeo-christian friend. It would be folly to indulge in the apocalyptic stories of barbarians! Ho ho ho!

I actually think just the opposite. The origins of the hacker spirit have long been washed away. Lulz is exposing a lot of things people don't like to hear - that all you thought was secure was in fact not at all (SQL injections anyone?). This is especially important as end-user services move to the cloud. Innovation is a result of people like Lulz forcing otherwise complacent experts to upgrade their infrastructure. We need more people like them imho. If the people who worked for these companies were so hard working Lulz wouldn't be breaking into them on an almost daily basis. I'm glad they don't have a purpose, they don't need one either. Some men just want to watch the world burn (I couldn't resist).

"When the president does it, it means it is not illegal."

I agree completely. It solves nothing. In fact, it just makes things needlessly complicated. For instance, does some nature conservatory body about the amazon river get dibs on .amazon if they front the cash or does the internet giant get it? Does that infringe on Amazons copyright? The classic excuse regarding similarly named companies is that it confuses consumers, e.g. Facebook sueing all "___Book" companies. So now both big and small companies can spend more time sueing each other than making products or actually running their businesses. Super move ICANN.

Psychologists study human behavior... then change it! What kind of world do we live in, Dr. Milgrim?

Redundant.

Meta rate garbage stories down next time. You're part of the community too ya know.

Don't worry, when their housing bubble pops they'll wish they retrieved all that extra fuel and metal.

"It does seem to be sufficient short-term profit to motivate private industry. If we humans ever go to those worlds than it will be because a nation or a consortium of them believes it to be to its advantage or to the advantage of the human species...

Just now, there are a great many matters pressing in on us that compete for the money it takes to send people to other worlds. Should we solve those problems first or are they a reason for going?"

TV WATCH YOU

Correlations are one of those simple statistical terms that lots of non-technical people like to throw around without actually knowing what it means. It's a wonderful tool that Google has provided for everyone but people need to remember what the basic assumptions are of correlations, namely a relatively normal distribution of scores and independence of observations. Independence is especially important if you're tracking search engine results because if you were to look at how many times people Google'd Randy Savage's name the day he died it would influence the subsequent day, ultimately biasing whatever other variable you decided to correlate it with.

In case you didn't know what it was (like me):
Wikipedia:
A Geiger counter, also called a Geiger-Müller counter, is a type of particle detector that measures ionizing radiation. They detect the emission of nuclear radiation: alpha particles, beta particles or gamma rays. A Geiger counter detects radiation by ionization produced in a low-pressure gas in a Geiger-Müller tube. Each particle detected produces a pulse of current, but the Geiger counter cannot distinguish the energy of the source particles. Geiger counters are popular instruments used for measurements in health physics, industry, geology and other fields, because they can be made with simple electronic circuits.

Because someone found it funny, just a guess.