You're a racist cunt. People are people, and want/need basically the same things - if you don't push them into corners and poke at them with sticks.

The thugs? Products of our selective, post-colonial domination. Nobody rallies round a bully, when they have nothing much to fear.

Exactly. "What you mean 'We', White Man?"

Why not disband the NSA and instead spend the hundreds of billions of dollars that fascist cess-pit drinks off of the public teat - instead spending a decent fraction on making FRIENDS, not ENEMIES? There are a lot of schools, hospitals and high-school diplomas that could be bought, all round-the-world. You wouldn't have a popular resistance to American influence in the world, were that influence actually benign.

You just keep sniffin' that throne, now.

"No," said Bob.

You keep trying to prod me into this 'idolize' thing. I'm really not clear why, but you're kinda funny.

Just to follow up my preceding response, I'm not coming out in strong agreement Bryan Fischer. He's certainly channeling some Old Testament prophet thinking, with the vast difference that they were understood to be proper prophets. Fischer, not so much. Thus, everyone should prayerfully repent as required, but it's far from clear that there is any judgement coming prior to the Apocalypse.
I really don't traffic in fear and guilt: sorry.

A fair assessment of what you're about, yes.

It's all fun and games until the Almighty taps the 'smite' button.

One word answer: "Disappointment"

Really? Doesn't seem that that far out of line. Now taxation per capita, adjusted for inflation, is way up. And spending is even growing faster...

NSW police arrest SWF for NSFW behavior. Lurid film at 11.

So, beyond our "I know you are, but what am I?" circles, what is there? I came from your dead POV into life.

I met the truth, and it broke me utterly. You can call me anything under the sun, but "shallow" is laughable. Faith, in the ultimate sense, is really all I have. All of the other materialistic mumbo-jumbo is transient.

If only you weren't so locked in your paradigm, you could see the truth before you. . .
(How is my impression of you doing?)

It wasn't just about interface. People tend to forget how search engines did an absolutely horrible job of intelligently ranking the sites you wanted to see. They relied primarily upon keywords and other sort of fairly obvious metrics on the site itself, which of course can be significantly gamed. I've seen "tag clouds" on some sites and blogs, which I'm presuming is due in part to one of the historical metrics being how large a visible word is on a site - the obvious presumption being that keywords in titles should be weighted more heavily.

Google showed up and not only provided a vastly superior interface (look, all you want is to search, right? Here you go!), it also was the very first search engine that actually had a really good chance at returning the most relevant search as the very first result due to it's PageRank algorithm - hence, the "I'm feeling lucky!" button. Such a button would have been labelled "I'd love to win the lottery!" for other search engines, since the results you were looking for might well be on page 13 of a hundred pages of results returned.

One could argue that although Google did not invent web searching, they may have been the first ones to invent truly effective web searching algorithms. It was only the pressure of Google's overwhelming effectiveness that forced other companies to significantly improve their own search engines. Even today, other companies have a hard time even reaching parity with Google search, let alone exceeding it, although such metrics are obviously somewhat subjective.