"NOAA predicted a 50% chance that an El Niño could develop in the latter half of 2014"

With odds like that, how could they be wrong?

With so much of his time devoted to maintaining the caveman diet, there's a good chance Thiel could actually die of boredom. He's kinda boring me already.

Surely, the backside will become the natural place to inject this horse's ass of an idea. Maybe payment will is made by twerking? That would explain a few things.

Sure, you can freeload in your own country & take advantage of the infrastructure that other people pay for. Do you think your approach can scale?

FTFA: "Police were called around 2AM when one of the horses reared and kicked a catapult, causing it to roll down an embankment and bounce into the windshield of Joffrey Baratheon’s Honda Civic."

Exactly. Blind faith that "future" technology will save the day is not much better than any other kind of faith.

So all of these other perfectly good English words had better beware the wrath of Facebook:

bankbook, bluebook, casebook, cashbook, chapbook, checkbook, cookbook, copybook, daybook, domebook, guidebook, handbook, herdbook, hornbook, hymnbook, kabook, lawbook, logbook, matchbook, needlebook, notebook, passbook, playbook, pocketbook, pollbook, promptbook, schoolbook, scrapbook, shopbook, sketchbook, songbook, storybook, studbook, stylebook, tablebook, textbook, wastebook, wordbook, workbook, yearbook

Some of these already have .com domains with memberships and features like "friends", photo sharing, etc. Let's hope someone throws the book at Facebook over this.

What you call "law" is also bound up with politics and corporate lobbying. Last year Mozilla was was fuming about Apple foisting Safari 3.1 on Windows users. And so it goes. Yawn.

Yes -- I've always found it interesting that no one complains that Safari is required on Macs these days. Bundling is in the eye of the beholder, I guess ;-) From Apple's web site:

Choosing a default Web browser other than Safari

1. Open Safari (/Applications).
2. From the Safari menu, choose Preferences.
3. Click the General button.
4. Choose a different browser from the Default Web Browser pop-up menu.

Safari and Mail shouldn't be deleted

After changing your default application, you should not delete Safari or Mail, even if you do not plan to use them. You will need them if you wish to change your default settings in the future.

I do believe we have all been Pronk'd by this story.

Some, like Steve Mann from University of Toronto have said the answer is for everyone to carry surveillance gear, so we are all watched and watching at the same time. Try taking a video camera into Best Buy and start filming the people who work there and see what happens :-) In any case, the bajillions of live cameras -- and insecure "GeoCams" -- are much more of a threat to privacy than what Google is doing. A while back I made a slide show of screen grabs from several publicly accessible Geocams. You can see them here if you like: http://penopticon.com/geocamming/