I think you're overestimating the effect of marketing software. Oh, yes, it's extremely effective at figuring out who you are over many sites, but then the offers are absolutely atrocious. To wit:

There is no time in my life I am less likely to buy some white pants, a toaster or a flight to Los Angeles than after I've just bought these items, yet that's precisely the time I see ads for these products or services.

In other words, digital marketing is a con. It's conning business into paying for technology. No actual value is achieved.

America is special. Because at foundation time had a war with a dictatorship, they started anew, with a fresh constitution. Luckily, the forces that be found a workaround. Now they have a two party dictatorship. God bless you all.

Why do you think the sign of a dying society is a decreasing population? What is your long term outlook? Are we to support 10 billion people, then 100 billion, then a trillion? How do you think this would work out?

I think a population, decreasing or increasing toward stability, is a sign of civilization. Resources are being maxed out, people are no longer starving, and you do not need children to take care of you in your old age. I'm sure that in the US this doesn't hold, as you'll have infinite resources and infinite growth potential, though in the rest of the world, people beg to differ.

Let me correct that for you: About the only place where you see corruption worse than in politics, is in an American union. If you look abroad, there are many unions that are actually functional. In particular, I was very impressed with Nordic unions, having direct experience with Danish ones. There, whilst membership is mandatory, they function exceptionally well. The reason is that they have responsibilities. One of these responsibilities is that the union itself pays unemployment benefits. So here we have functional socialism. Everybody pays into a pot for unemployment, and when people get unemployed, there's a strong incentive to get people up and running again, lest the pot of money dries up. This works incredibly well. People in Denmark are unemployed for a couple of months. If it is conjunctural, they sing it out, if it is structural, the union forces re-education.

I think that indeed, the more generations people are residing on a continent, the more native they become. Furthermore, it is clear from the history of America that its success is based on the non-natives, the immigrants. Therefore it seems only logical that people from, say, fourth generation and beyond are officially declared to be native Americans, and thereby stripped off their possessions, and put into reservations.

I think he describes Tom Ray's Tierra system.

Is this an argument for or against the development of transhumanism? From where I'm sitting, you're making a very good argument to hurry up and get on with it.

I don't think so. When you do a rewrite, you have to uncover all use-cases that the the original software was covering. The software was doing A,B as well as C, D, E. When you do the rewrite, you will focus on the truly important use-cases A & B, and only later you figure out that people were really depending on C. Then you implement C, but D&E were really important as well. And before you know it, you're back to where you were before the rewrite: an organically grown codebase that solves A, B, C, D as well as E. The only difference with the original codebase is that it does A&B more efficiently, but C,D,E are bolted on. The original codebase had different biases (maybe C&E).

Google ranks the info, making some stuff come out on top, and some stuff at the bottom. That's Google's claim to fame, and that's why they are targetted. Nobody would care if they would work like a phone book, as the info people want to remove cannot be found. They make it appear on the first page, and that's the problem.

You're wrong here. Google doesn't blindly index. It ranks information, adding a subjective measure of worth to the information. That's why they make money, and that's why they are targetted by this legislation.

Yes, he might very well go to jail after a fair trial. But that will never happen, as he won't get a fair trial. By now, more than a decade after 9/11, the US has sufficient legislation in place to be able to completely avoid fair trials. That's the entire point of the article: Snowden will not get a fair trial. Chances are, he will not get a trial at all. He would be locked up and isolated, and will not be allowed to defend himself in court, because you know, law. It will indeed teach everyone about democracy, and the message is simple: don't screw over the best democracy money can buy. And large parts of the US will cheer: Snowden is obviously a traitor and traitors don't deserve a fair trial, that's for decent folks.

When Google complies, who cares that somebody creates searchable lists? Even if it is Microsoft. For all practical purposes, it would have dissappeared. You are probably a software developer, making the edge case (the information is not gone) dominate the common case (google doesn't show it). That makes bad software, and also bad argumentation.

Sounds like 'murica.

Dude, you are the one confused. The average is commonly used to denote the (arithmetic) mean. But yes, technically speaking there are multiple averages possible. This doesn't make it right to talk about a graph that shows 'the average'. What average? Mean (geometric or arithmetic), median, or mode? There are a few more choices. Talk about bad math.

Well, the word 'maths' didn't really surface before 1911, so I guess it's the English that in this case have introduced a break with tradition. The word was 'math' before.