According to the CDC, a child dies every 3 days from an unintentional gun shot.

Far more child pedestrians die every year getting hit by cars, yet we don't gnash our teeth about it. Know why? Because it is such a small number that it is statistically irrelevant in a population of three hundred million. Your intentional portrayal of the statistic as children per day is intentionally disingenuous and demeans the discussion.

If Google services put the businesses paying them above the users they would be ad-laden crap that no-one would use.

Perhaps you didn't read the article. Every single entry in Google Shopping from now on will be a paid placement. It will be 100% ads. I don't think you can get any more ad-laden than 100%.

no paying to influence search result ranking).

Umm, again, perhaps you didn't read the thing you are commenting on. Every single thing displayed will be a paid placement. It is 100% pay-to-play. "Unpaid results will never appear" seems pretty strongly influenced by payment.

I see tons of shady listings,

Pay-to-play is unrelated to whether Google filters the results based on quality. They filter spam and other shady SEO in their regular search engine, and certainly have the technical chops to do the same in a shopping search engine. The question of shady listings is entirely unrelated to pay-to-play. Including that notion in the discussion is disingenuous.

'We believe that having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date. Higher quality dataâ"whether itâ(TM)s accurate prices, the latest offers or product availabilityâ"should mean better shopping results for users, which in turn should create higher quality traffic for merchants.'

That is a fine explanation of why you want to have a formal relationship with the retailers that you include in your search engine. Of course, that has nothing to do with it being pay-to-play. The pay-to-play is the part that matters to your users. The quote above is clearly deflecting attention from the change from a search engine (motivated primarily to satisfy the user) to a shopping mall (motivated primarily to satisfy the retailer). That is the part that is significant to users.

it's at least plausible that the few people that could, would.

Show me the evidence. Show me the evidence that Iran has ever officially sanctioned an invasion of undisputed Israeli territory since we have made it clear that we will destroy them if they do. Show me the evidence that Iran has ever officially sanctioned any military action that would result in a full-scale military response from us. Show me the evidence that they do not understand what our eleven carrier strike groups are capable of. Show me the evidence that your fears are well-founded, instead of simply chanting them.

I like your post, and would add one more that I think should be an addendum to every discussion of copyright in the current context:

(4) Without any empirical data showing that current copyright expenditure is lower than the optimal level.

The purpose of copyright is to make our world a better place by rewarding creatives for an activity that the free market cannot naturally price. We choose to create artificial scarcity to establish a profitable market for creative work. When the government steps in to create an artificial market, to set an artificial price, it is a necessary function of the government to seek to set a price that is market optimal.

The degree of copyright enforcement, strength and duration, is how the government establishes the artificial market price. In a perfect free market, that price naturally reaches the optimal level through competitive supply and demand. In a government established artificial market, that price must be consciously selected. We are not making that selection based on empirical data or market measurements. At present, we are blindly accepting the labels' supposition: "More, because we say so."

Do we need more culture? Are we Sparta, powerful but lacking in a cultural record, or are we late Rome, growing weak because of excessive expenditures on entertainment and cultural excess? If the former, we would make our society better by increasing copyright strength and duration. If the latter, by decreasing it.

unleash the dogs of war and start preparing to take out Tel Aviv.

Iran is not seriously considering attacking Tel Aviv. Not now, not any time in the near future. They know exactly what would happen if they attacked Israel. The only possible exception is if they think we are about to attack (in the conventional, air assault and invasion sense, not limited cyberwar) and they are going to get wiped out anyway. They may do some things that seem irrational from our Western perspective, but they are not stupid. They know that starting a shooting war with Israel would be suicide.

Take a minute to really reflect on your hypothesis: What has Iran done -- not talked about, not nationalist tough guy rhetoric, I'm talking real military action -- that suggests they are irrational enough to attack Tel Aviv under the clear and present threat of getting twice what we gave Saddam?

class action lawsuits don't help the victims. Neither does putting murderers in jail.

hahaha -- succinctly said. I hadn't heard that one before. Well played.

Real geeks hack their tech. And when it comes to cooking, you can buy something that is half as good as what you can build, for twice the price -- as this ridiculous article handily demonstrates. Food hacking (or Modernist Cuisine, if you prefer) is a very big field these days. Want a great steak? Start with sous vide immersion cooking to get the perfect medium rare, then hit it with a flamethrower for the char. Play with your food.

Immersion Cooker (about $100 all-in):
http://beach.traxel.com/img/hopped-up/whole-rig.jpg

Weedburner Charring (about $35 at Harbor Freight):
http://beach.traxel.com/img/sous-vide/weedburner-char.jpg

Here's some more info on building your own meat jacuzzi:
http://qandabe.com/2011/70-diy-sous-vide-universal-controller/

a world without software patents would be 'open slather for anybody who can just go faster than the next person.'

Well, yes -- that is pretty much the essential nature of "Open." Anyone who has the skill, time, and energy can build whatever they want, even if it is based on someone else's work. It has its ups and downs, but saying the software world would be more Open if it were more restrictive is an internally inconsistent statement. It is logically self-contradictory.

There are those who believe that using the system against itself is better than changing the system. Some believe the GPL is better than would be the elimination of software copyright. I actually fall into this camp (though I do believe in reducing the strength and duration of patent and copyright). But it would not be more Open. Open has some shortcomings, and that may lead a rational person to believe that absolute Open-ness is less efficient than some degree of Closed-ness. But that does not mean you can redefine Open to mean partially Closed. Just say you believe in a balance between Open and Closed. It's OK to believe in shades of gray.

Not every question demands an absolutist answer, but rational discourse does rely on words like Open having a clear and unequivocal meaning in a given context. Dilute your hard-core ideology, not the terminology you use to describe it.