The word you are looking for is "equipment" ;)

Yeah, move over Einstein! ;)

I think that's actually a bit too optimistic. What Hollywood, "traditional media", Politicians and associated Moneypolists want is to turn the web into Television. They want a one-way medium to distribute their content, whether it be entertainment, political platform or other stuff they sell. They don't want the regular Joe to generate their own content, hence the extremes they go to brand anything not made by them as spurious and pirated.

If this law was to remain, it would cement their grip on the medium so they can turn it into the advertisement broadcast platform they want it to be: sanitized, monetized and sales-orientated. They want to know who you are and where you are so you can't dodge them; they want you to be a trapped consumer, and they want to keep tabs on you to better tailor their efforts at shovelling their crap down your throat. This is why that MoFo Murdoch (or was it Turner?) said the Internet should have been patented from the start. This is why politicians and law enforcement agencies everywhere want it muzzled, they don't want disent they want obedience and mindless consumerism.

Hate to break it to you but this is absolutely not the same and not better. If you type www.facebook.com/business you land on the business page straight away, and the first thing you see is whatever content business placed there.

If one follows your method, you land on a Google search page where the page you look for is one of many links. Yes, it is the top link but you are still on google, you still see the listing of other random crap (or related crap if you're [un]lucky). It takes an extra click to get to the goods, and all the extra links are potential distractions that in some cases will take you away from the business you were looking for originally. plus.google.com/business would be a much cleaner solution.

I beg to differ. We are unquestionably at the top of the food chain, but evolutionary chain? very debatable. Just because we have culture and technology and other nifty stuff doesn't mean we're more "evolved" than oil-eating bacteria, or sharks, or cockroaches, or...

I disagree; in any case it should be "There's no conclusive evidence" because his whole point is that there is some of it. If whatever evidence there is isn't enough to convince you that's fair enough, some areas of human knowledge aren't as solid as math and physics (biology, medicine and psychology to mention three biggies) and have much more hazy areas than the "hard" sciences.

Great point. What /. should do is have a dual system. An "Agree/disagree" button that does absolutely nothing but count the number of either paired with the current moderation system. To reduce a bit the potential for abuse and promote fair moderation, they could make the Dis/Agrees invisible to people with moderation points.

So the christian god... evolved to become omniscient and omnipotent? that is awesome :)

Crap, Annon, you beat me to it. It's only a defect if what you wanted is not a snake, for them is a feature. Opinions may vary but I for one don't feel so defective because I don't have gills or feathers for instance...

Allow me to point out that an "omniscient" and "omnipotent" god would have no need to attempt anything. He's omnipotent, thus he can do anything and everything, no holds barred, no need to attempt something that he is guaranteed by definition to be able to do. And being omniscient he would know the outcome of any such attempt without trying.

The christian god is said to be both omniscient and omnipotent, which is one reason any human attempt to understand such a being or even explain his actions is futile, we simply couldn't. Note I'm not saying that such a god exists or doesn't, merely that all these rationalisations about his supposed motives are nonsense.

I wonder if most people don't just talk within circles. I've caught myself thinking a few times "why is this person from my +Photograpy/Cooking/Blah circle talking about $UNRELATED_TOPIC"? When I share with them I usually make my general coments to my +Smalltalk circle, Nerd comments and post to the +Geeks circle, etc. I don't make that many public posts and most of my contacts don't either. So maybe outsiders see a drop in Public posts, but how do they know for sure there is an overall drop in activity? If they talked about measured traffic I missed that bit.