They're talking about literally printing a large amount of money money to solve the debt crisis. You seriously think you need an economist to tell you what would happen as a result?
This is high school economics. Well within the reach of pretty much everybody who posts here, and probably a course that was taken by many people posting here. You don't need somebody with a post-secondary or a post-graduate degree to tell you that when the government starts printing money unchecked, the value of that money goes down.
I see it as the media equivalent of a demo disk. Remember how you used to be able to get the first episode of Commander Keen or Wolfenstein 3D on a floppy, and you could mail away for the full version? Same deal with pirating movies.... if it's worth owning, I'll buy it outright. If it's crap, I'll do the digital equivalent of walking out of the theatre: I'll stop it halfway through and delete the file.
I realize that some people download movies they have no intention of ever watching, just because they can, but I'm not in that category. I download movies because I don't trust the recording industry to not put out crap, and because the movie theatres are charging too much money to find out whether it's worth seeing, and because the majority of the people reviewing the stuff are paid shills. I really don't have a reliable mechanism to determine whether a movie is worth watching without actually *watching* the movie. My "pirating" movies actually increases their sales: between TV series I've bought on disc and actual movies, there's nearly 500 discs in my collection, and most of those never would have been bought if I hadn't had the chance to watch enough of it to determine if it's worth paying for.
It's the equivalent of listening to an album play on a radio station that still does that kind of thing, or you're in a music store that lets you listen to the disc before buying it. Some of them actually do still do that, and I have discovered some bands I never would have spent money on otherwise through that kind of try-before-you-buy stuff.
This thread isn't talking about software... you won't find any pirated software in my home, actually. Not a one. Largely because most of it won't work on my system, and I can't be bothered to make it work when there's perfectly good alternatives available to me...
Seriously.... between tools like MakeMKV and Handbrake, it is trivial to rip a DVD these days. And on the crappy connections that they want to sell us (I'm on a 5mbit DSL with torrent traffic shaping turned on so I'm lucky to pull more than 100kbit), it's faster to simply rip the DVD to your local hard drive. Since I've already paid for the privilege, where's the incentive to actually go out and buy a DVD, now?
These people do realize that pirates are actually their best customers, right? The whole try before you buy thing? Yes, some folks will do it simply because they can, but I simply won't buy a DVD unless I've seen the movie, because I want to make sure I'm not paying for a crappy movie. That either means I download the movie, or I've seen it in theatre. If they don't want my business, that's their call; I'll just give the money to the local rental store, instead.
depending on what you're getting for that £30/mo, that isn't really that bad, by NA standards...:) I'm currently paying (taxes incl.) CAD$36.10/mo for a 5mbit connection with no throttling, no limitations on time of day, and a 300GB cap. For a few dollars more, I could get the same connection with no cap at all.
It's still far more than I'd be paying in South Korea, or even parts of Europe, but when you compare it against the alternatives in this country, it's actually a pretty good deal. It's all relative, I suppose.
Extra weight from extra features, coupled with changes in the way that MPG is measured.
While it wouldn't be enough to account for the full difference, anti-lock brakes and traction control systems are a very good example... back in '93, most cars on the road did not have ABS, and traction control was limited to high end sports cars. These days, they're required by law (in this country, at least) for all cars/trucks MY 2011 and later. ABS do add a fair amount of weight to a car (as much as 100kg depending on the model).
It isn't a *lot* of weight, but there's a litany of safety features that are basically required in any car these days, either by market pressures or by legislation, and they all do add up.
There's something to be considered... what are you buying the car for? My last car was basic transportation... it had a 1.6L inline 4, which produced an astonishingly powerful 103bhp. If you watch Top Gear, they actually used the UK version of my car (I'm in Canada) as the "reasonably priced car" for several years. (and then dropped a grain silo on it.)
As basic transportation it was great. It got around the city just fine, and it was reasonably useful, if somewhat uncomfortable, on long road trips. When I bought my current car, however, I wanted more than just basic transportation. I wanted a car that would work reasonably efficiently when I wanted to, was comfortable to drive and loaded with creature comforts, but would also allow me to have fun when I wanted to. As such, 4-wheel drive and a "Traction Control Off" button were mandatory. I'm driving a Subaru Impreza, and tt wasn't exactly bought for efficiency. And yet, in spite of the fact that I am driving into town for work every day (have given up on the bus), I spend less on gas than one of my coworkers who's driving an econobox.
Most modern linguists would recognize that because the word has taken on a contextual meaning as a verb in contemporary society, that makes the word a verb. It wasn't a verb 100 years ago, but it is one now. One of the defining features of a language is the ability to adapt and change with the society that uses it.
Could. But most people would still apply some kind of social or cultural bias to it. For example, most people reading my posts on Slashdot assume that I'm male, because in their world view 99% of slashdot posters are male, and the other 1% are males pretending to be female. They assume wrong, but I really don't care enough to correct them usually.
This is, after all, the Internet. Your gender shouldn't really be a point of consideration. The medium was created to foster the exchange of ideas, and whether something's a good idea has nothing to do with the sex of the author. (though to be fair, it's also been exchanging porn almost since its birth).
You still can't be certain that the hot chick tweeting at you is really a hot chick, but you might start wondering if she persists in using a half dozen male oriented terms.
That's the problem, though... how do you know if those terms are actually male-oriented? Like most people with an education, I use language differently depending on the format it's in. In spoken conversation, yes, I do use a lot of the words that they identify as typically "female". And while I may write something like "omg, you have got to be kidding lol:)" in an MSN chat with a friend, most of those words would *never* make it into something I write, so how would they be able to identify based on that? That's to say nothing of the cultural skew that's present in their lists (using the word husband/hubby scores -45 points towards being male? that'll surprise some of my gay male friends who, living in a country that allows it, have gotten married).
Some may argue that Twitter is more like an MSN chat than it is a blog post, and I really can't argue that point because I wouldn't sign up for Twitter unless you paid me. I would probably treat it more like Facebook, where the overwhelming majority of my posts are composed of complete sentences comprising words you'll find in a dictionary. But if you're just reading a blog post, how on earth could you tell? If I have you on Facebook or MSN, chances are we've spoken face to face at least once, and if that's the case, then you don't need a computer to tell you which bathroom I use.
Borrowing money isn't bad. Not paying it back is bad.
You need to look at how much of that money was paid back while the Democrats were in office, too. More appropriately, you need to look at which presidencies ended with a budget surplus, and which ones ended with a budget deficit.
From Truman to Nixon, every President, both Democratic and Republican, decreased the national debt as a ratio to GDP. Since Ford, every Republican president has increased it as a ratio to GDP, and every Democrat (with the exception of Obama, who inherited the largest US deficit in history) has decreased it as a ratio to GDP. And yet somehow, the Democrats are the ones who don't know how to manage money.
And in direct response to your numbers, that very same graph (it's the first table on the page) lists how much the national debt has increased under Democrat vs. Republican presidents. Not the debt ceiling, the debt itself. The two are very different numbers... the debt ceiling is just a limit on how much can be borrowed. The debt itself is how much was actually borrowed. When you see the amount actually borrowed, it's obvious that the Republicans have been worse at managing money.
They don't need to balance the budget by August 2, they need to raise the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is a legislated limit saying "this is how much we're allowed to borrow, not a penny more".
The debate isn't whether the debt ceiling needs to be raised. Everybody but the tea baggers knows that it needs to be raised, and August 2 is merely the deadline for getting the legislation passed in time for it to pass through the channels it needs to in order to be signed into law. The debate is about how they're going to go about balancing the budget once the debt ceiling is raised, so that they can continue to pay their obligations while trying to restore the budget surplus that was there before Shrub took office.
Citation needed. Please show me, in writing, from a reputable source, how the US economy is doing better now than it was when Clinton was still in office.
And what, exactly, do you think is going to happen when a government with zero income tries to enforce the laws its passed in an effort to reign in the rich aristocracy that's trying to push around the middle and lower classes? How, with no money, do you think they're going to pay for the enforcement of the laws that are established to prevent the unelected corporations from exercising their unfettered power over the everyday business of the common man?
It's also worth pointing out that Obama and the moderate Republicans aren't talking about *only* raising taxes to cover the shortfall. The people in Washington who actually have a functioning set of synapses between their ears realize that the only way to balance the books is to decrease spending at the same time as increasing income.
It's the tea baggers who seriously don't understand that their stance is going to cause serious problems for the world economy who are screwing things over for everybody else. What boggles the mind is that they're willing to do this over an ideological stance without actually considering the impact of what they're doing or how it would affect the middle class, who make up the majority of their electorate.... if they're seriously in it to try to further their political goals, I would think the best way to do that would be to avoid hurting their core demographic with their stupidity.
Depends on why you go to TED, I suppose. I watch most of the videos, because it's interesting to see how some people are tackling certain problems. There was a very interesting post a few weeks ago about building a car for a blind person to drive, for example. Not one that drives itself, but one that uses alternate methods to convey visual information to the driver so that he can drive without his eyes. It's not really very informative about the state of the art of robotics or artificial intelligence (which are the two main technologies they're using, along with tactile displays), but it is an interesting discussion of a practical application of these technologies, and is worth the watch.
I still prefer print media for keeping up with the latest developments in science, actually... magazines like SciAm keep it readable for the average person, you can also go with something like PhysOrg if you want it slightly higher brow. Nature has always been a good publication, and the New England Journal of Medicine is a pretty good read if you want to keep up on what's happening in medicine. If you want something more esoteric, like what's happening with the state of the art in quantum physics (hint: not much in the last 30 years, since none of it can be proven experimentally yet), you can probably find specialized journals for those, too. For a more general and broad approach, however, the ones I mentionned above would be a good starting point.:)
Amusing... on what basis do you say that I write like a guy? Is it because I'm not afraid to drop a cuss word into the conversation where it's appropriate? Is it because I get up in arms about my privacy, and that doesn't fit into your understanding of how women work? Is it because you've never seen a woman get confrontational when something strikes her ire?
I do genuinely want to know where you're getting this impression.... do share. I want to hear it.
Use AbiWord... it's more in line with the analogy, because like WordPerfect, it's just a word processor and doesn't load spreadsheet libraries just to present you with a text window.
That said, yes, things do use a *lot* more memory these days. They're also prettier, and have significantly more features that were unthinkable when WordPerfect 5.1 came out. WordPerfect is more in line with editing a TeX file directly than it is using a modern WYSIWYG editor.
It's as private as you make it. If I use a pseudonym, there's a degree of privacy that isn't there if I am forced to use my real name. For example, if I post under the name "tafiboo", and some random person on the Internet comes across a post about attending pride in Ottawa, Canada, basically they will know that I'm either queer or an ally, and that I probably live somewhere near Ottawa. With a pseudonym like "tafiboo", it's relatively feminine and you can safely assume that I'm either a very femmy gay male, or a female. None of that is really personally identifiable, however... there's a million people living in the Ottawa area, and it's fairly safe to assume that a lot of them are either gay, female, or both.
If, on the other hand, you come across that post and it has my real name attached to it, you can now identify with certainty that I'm female, and if you were to plug that name into a search engine, you'd come up with other associations that you may not have been able to make otherwise... who I work for (the company directory is publicly searchable), where I live (phone books, online directories), contact details (mailing address, telephone number), etc.. I may not have even filled that information in to the social network profile, but because it's there (and remember, Google has built their business on making it easy to aggregate information about a given subject), it's now all tied in to who I am. More than that, anybody who knows just my real name and puts that into a search engine can now discover that post about going to pride, and may be able to figure something out about me that I didn't want them to know. (now, in the civilized world, it's not actually detrimental to your ability to function in society if you're queer, but as I understand it, in parts of the states you can still get fired for being gay).
You're right, it *is* a social network, and the purpose is to share social information. The thing is, by taking away the ability to use a pseudonym, they're taking away the ability to keep that information separate from the rest of your online identity, which does have the potential to harm you. People have a right to keep their personal and professional lives separate. Since most professions won't allow you to work under a pseudonym (and even if you do work under a pseudonym, your employer has to know your real name for tax purposes), that really only leaves using a pseudonym in your private life if you want to keep it separate. Telling me that if I don't like it, I can just use something else is well and good: in fact, I do just use a different service. But that doesn't mean that their policies aren't asinine, or that they're not blocking out an entire segment of the population who actually values this ability.
I would also add that a lot of employers are now trying to check out peoples' Facebook profiles, or to Google them, prior to offering a job. If you can't separate yourself from some stupid things you did in high school, it hurts your chances of ever landing a well-paying job in the future. Forcing people to use their real names isn't *really* a problem (I use my real name on Facebook for example), but allowing people you haven't friended to "follow" your posts without your permission *is*. Sooner or later, you will forget to make something private, and then you're screwed for life.
Information, once it's out on the Internet, can't be stifled.
I don't think you grasp the way the money works... Google makes most of its money off advertising. Part of the reason it's able to make so much on advertising is because they have such a large share of the market. If their market share dropped, their advertising revenues would drop significantly as well.
Also, I don't think you understand how the scalability of something like a search portal works. Compared against the advertising revenue increase that they could get by increasing their market share, their margins would improve greatly.
If it's revenue, then Yahoo would be the second in the US... they're actually profitable.
That said, I'm surprised it isn't Yahoo in the first place. When I think of search engines that get used to actually find stuff in North America, Google is first, Yahoo is second....
I'm fairly sure that more than 10% of the population are atheists, and that similarly, more than 10% of the population are Christians... the two are diametrically opposed ideas, especially when you get to that core group that has the unshakeable belief that they have the one true answer to life, the universe, and everything....
Slashdot Mirror
They're talking about literally printing a large amount of money money to solve the debt crisis. You seriously think you need an economist to tell you what would happen as a result?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation
This is high school economics. Well within the reach of pretty much everybody who posts here, and probably a course that was taken by many people posting here. You don't need somebody with a post-secondary or a post-graduate degree to tell you that when the government starts printing money unchecked, the value of that money goes down.
I see it as the media equivalent of a demo disk. Remember how you used to be able to get the first episode of Commander Keen or Wolfenstein 3D on a floppy, and you could mail away for the full version? Same deal with pirating movies.... if it's worth owning, I'll buy it outright. If it's crap, I'll do the digital equivalent of walking out of the theatre: I'll stop it halfway through and delete the file.
I realize that some people download movies they have no intention of ever watching, just because they can, but I'm not in that category. I download movies because I don't trust the recording industry to not put out crap, and because the movie theatres are charging too much money to find out whether it's worth seeing, and because the majority of the people reviewing the stuff are paid shills. I really don't have a reliable mechanism to determine whether a movie is worth watching without actually *watching* the movie. My "pirating" movies actually increases their sales: between TV series I've bought on disc and actual movies, there's nearly 500 discs in my collection, and most of those never would have been bought if I hadn't had the chance to watch enough of it to determine if it's worth paying for.
It's the equivalent of listening to an album play on a radio station that still does that kind of thing, or you're in a music store that lets you listen to the disc before buying it. Some of them actually do still do that, and I have discovered some bands I never would have spent money on otherwise through that kind of try-before-you-buy stuff.
This thread isn't talking about software... you won't find any pirated software in my home, actually. Not a one. Largely because most of it won't work on my system, and I can't be bothered to make it work when there's perfectly good alternatives available to me...
tara@MarchHare:~$ uname -r
2.6.35-28-generic
tara@MarchHare:~$
'nuf said?
Seriously.... between tools like MakeMKV and Handbrake, it is trivial to rip a DVD these days. And on the crappy connections that they want to sell us (I'm on a 5mbit DSL with torrent traffic shaping turned on so I'm lucky to pull more than 100kbit), it's faster to simply rip the DVD to your local hard drive. Since I've already paid for the privilege, where's the incentive to actually go out and buy a DVD, now?
These people do realize that pirates are actually their best customers, right? The whole try before you buy thing? Yes, some folks will do it simply because they can, but I simply won't buy a DVD unless I've seen the movie, because I want to make sure I'm not paying for a crappy movie. That either means I download the movie, or I've seen it in theatre. If they don't want my business, that's their call; I'll just give the money to the local rental store, instead.
depending on what you're getting for that £30/mo, that isn't really that bad, by NA standards... :) I'm currently paying (taxes incl.) CAD$36.10/mo for a 5mbit connection with no throttling, no limitations on time of day, and a 300GB cap. For a few dollars more, I could get the same connection with no cap at all.
It's still far more than I'd be paying in South Korea, or even parts of Europe, but when you compare it against the alternatives in this country, it's actually a pretty good deal. It's all relative, I suppose.
Never heard of the Telephone, have you? Or the electrical power grid? Or the highway system?
Extra weight from extra features, coupled with changes in the way that MPG is measured.
While it wouldn't be enough to account for the full difference, anti-lock brakes and traction control systems are a very good example... back in '93, most cars on the road did not have ABS, and traction control was limited to high end sports cars. These days, they're required by law (in this country, at least) for all cars/trucks MY 2011 and later. ABS do add a fair amount of weight to a car (as much as 100kg depending on the model).
It isn't a *lot* of weight, but there's a litany of safety features that are basically required in any car these days, either by market pressures or by legislation, and they all do add up.
There's something to be considered... what are you buying the car for? My last car was basic transportation... it had a 1.6L inline 4, which produced an astonishingly powerful 103bhp. If you watch Top Gear, they actually used the UK version of my car (I'm in Canada) as the "reasonably priced car" for several years. (and then dropped a grain silo on it.)
As basic transportation it was great. It got around the city just fine, and it was reasonably useful, if somewhat uncomfortable, on long road trips. When I bought my current car, however, I wanted more than just basic transportation. I wanted a car that would work reasonably efficiently when I wanted to, was comfortable to drive and loaded with creature comforts, but would also allow me to have fun when I wanted to. As such, 4-wheel drive and a "Traction Control Off" button were mandatory. I'm driving a Subaru Impreza, and tt wasn't exactly bought for efficiency. And yet, in spite of the fact that I am driving into town for work every day (have given up on the bus), I spend less on gas than one of my coworkers who's driving an econobox.
Our dear friends at Top Gear made a video on that point, too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKTOyiKLARk
Most modern linguists would recognize that because the word has taken on a contextual meaning as a verb in contemporary society, that makes the word a verb. It wasn't a verb 100 years ago, but it is one now. One of the defining features of a language is the ability to adapt and change with the society that uses it.
And yes, I did take linguistics at university.
Could. But most people would still apply some kind of social or cultural bias to it. For example, most people reading my posts on Slashdot assume that I'm male, because in their world view 99% of slashdot posters are male, and the other 1% are males pretending to be female. They assume wrong, but I really don't care enough to correct them usually.
This is, after all, the Internet. Your gender shouldn't really be a point of consideration. The medium was created to foster the exchange of ideas, and whether something's a good idea has nothing to do with the sex of the author. (though to be fair, it's also been exchanging porn almost since its birth).
That's the problem, though... how do you know if those terms are actually male-oriented? Like most people with an education, I use language differently depending on the format it's in. In spoken conversation, yes, I do use a lot of the words that they identify as typically "female". And while I may write something like "omg, you have got to be kidding lol :)" in an MSN chat with a friend, most of those words would *never* make it into something I write, so how would they be able to identify based on that? That's to say nothing of the cultural skew that's present in their lists (using the word husband/hubby scores -45 points towards being male? that'll surprise some of my gay male friends who, living in a country that allows it, have gotten married).
Some may argue that Twitter is more like an MSN chat than it is a blog post, and I really can't argue that point because I wouldn't sign up for Twitter unless you paid me. I would probably treat it more like Facebook, where the overwhelming majority of my posts are composed of complete sentences comprising words you'll find in a dictionary. But if you're just reading a blog post, how on earth could you tell? If I have you on Facebook or MSN, chances are we've spoken face to face at least once, and if that's the case, then you don't need a computer to tell you which bathroom I use.
Borrowing money isn't bad. Not paying it back is bad.
You need to look at how much of that money was paid back while the Democrats were in office, too. More appropriately, you need to look at which presidencies ended with a budget surplus, and which ones ended with a budget deficit.
There's a nice little graph for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms
From Truman to Nixon, every President, both Democratic and Republican, decreased the national debt as a ratio to GDP. Since Ford, every Republican president has increased it as a ratio to GDP, and every Democrat (with the exception of Obama, who inherited the largest US deficit in history) has decreased it as a ratio to GDP. And yet somehow, the Democrats are the ones who don't know how to manage money.
And in direct response to your numbers, that very same graph (it's the first table on the page) lists how much the national debt has increased under Democrat vs. Republican presidents. Not the debt ceiling, the debt itself. The two are very different numbers... the debt ceiling is just a limit on how much can be borrowed. The debt itself is how much was actually borrowed. When you see the amount actually borrowed, it's obvious that the Republicans have been worse at managing money.
They don't need to balance the budget by August 2, they need to raise the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is a legislated limit saying "this is how much we're allowed to borrow, not a penny more".
The debate isn't whether the debt ceiling needs to be raised. Everybody but the tea baggers knows that it needs to be raised, and August 2 is merely the deadline for getting the legislation passed in time for it to pass through the channels it needs to in order to be signed into law. The debate is about how they're going to go about balancing the budget once the debt ceiling is raised, so that they can continue to pay their obligations while trying to restore the budget surplus that was there before Shrub took office.
Citation needed. Please show me, in writing, from a reputable source, how the US economy is doing better now than it was when Clinton was still in office.
And what, exactly, do you think is going to happen when a government with zero income tries to enforce the laws its passed in an effort to reign in the rich aristocracy that's trying to push around the middle and lower classes? How, with no money, do you think they're going to pay for the enforcement of the laws that are established to prevent the unelected corporations from exercising their unfettered power over the everyday business of the common man?
It's also worth pointing out that Obama and the moderate Republicans aren't talking about *only* raising taxes to cover the shortfall. The people in Washington who actually have a functioning set of synapses between their ears realize that the only way to balance the books is to decrease spending at the same time as increasing income.
It's the tea baggers who seriously don't understand that their stance is going to cause serious problems for the world economy who are screwing things over for everybody else. What boggles the mind is that they're willing to do this over an ideological stance without actually considering the impact of what they're doing or how it would affect the middle class, who make up the majority of their electorate.... if they're seriously in it to try to further their political goals, I would think the best way to do that would be to avoid hurting their core demographic with their stupidity.
By European, and even by Canadian standards, the Democrats are a conservative party.... What's gone in the US is liberalism.
Depends on why you go to TED, I suppose. I watch most of the videos, because it's interesting to see how some people are tackling certain problems. There was a very interesting post a few weeks ago about building a car for a blind person to drive, for example. Not one that drives itself, but one that uses alternate methods to convey visual information to the driver so that he can drive without his eyes. It's not really very informative about the state of the art of robotics or artificial intelligence (which are the two main technologies they're using, along with tactile displays), but it is an interesting discussion of a practical application of these technologies, and is worth the watch.
I still prefer print media for keeping up with the latest developments in science, actually... magazines like SciAm keep it readable for the average person, you can also go with something like PhysOrg if you want it slightly higher brow. Nature has always been a good publication, and the New England Journal of Medicine is a pretty good read if you want to keep up on what's happening in medicine. If you want something more esoteric, like what's happening with the state of the art in quantum physics (hint: not much in the last 30 years, since none of it can be proven experimentally yet), you can probably find specialized journals for those, too. For a more general and broad approach, however, the ones I mentionned above would be a good starting point. :)
Amusing... on what basis do you say that I write like a guy? Is it because I'm not afraid to drop a cuss word into the conversation where it's appropriate? Is it because I get up in arms about my privacy, and that doesn't fit into your understanding of how women work? Is it because you've never seen a woman get confrontational when something strikes her ire?
I do genuinely want to know where you're getting this impression.... do share. I want to hear it.
Use AbiWord... it's more in line with the analogy, because like WordPerfect, it's just a word processor and doesn't load spreadsheet libraries just to present you with a text window.
That said, yes, things do use a *lot* more memory these days. They're also prettier, and have significantly more features that were unthinkable when WordPerfect 5.1 came out. WordPerfect is more in line with editing a TeX file directly than it is using a modern WYSIWYG editor.
*shrugs* I type "ls" into a Dos box often enough that I created an alias for it on my work system... :)
It's as private as you make it. If I use a pseudonym, there's a degree of privacy that isn't there if I am forced to use my real name. For example, if I post under the name "tafiboo", and some random person on the Internet comes across a post about attending pride in Ottawa, Canada, basically they will know that I'm either queer or an ally, and that I probably live somewhere near Ottawa. With a pseudonym like "tafiboo", it's relatively feminine and you can safely assume that I'm either a very femmy gay male, or a female. None of that is really personally identifiable, however... there's a million people living in the Ottawa area, and it's fairly safe to assume that a lot of them are either gay, female, or both.
If, on the other hand, you come across that post and it has my real name attached to it, you can now identify with certainty that I'm female, and if you were to plug that name into a search engine, you'd come up with other associations that you may not have been able to make otherwise... who I work for (the company directory is publicly searchable), where I live (phone books, online directories), contact details (mailing address, telephone number), etc.. I may not have even filled that information in to the social network profile, but because it's there (and remember, Google has built their business on making it easy to aggregate information about a given subject), it's now all tied in to who I am. More than that, anybody who knows just my real name and puts that into a search engine can now discover that post about going to pride, and may be able to figure something out about me that I didn't want them to know. (now, in the civilized world, it's not actually detrimental to your ability to function in society if you're queer, but as I understand it, in parts of the states you can still get fired for being gay).
You're right, it *is* a social network, and the purpose is to share social information. The thing is, by taking away the ability to use a pseudonym, they're taking away the ability to keep that information separate from the rest of your online identity, which does have the potential to harm you. People have a right to keep their personal and professional lives separate. Since most professions won't allow you to work under a pseudonym (and even if you do work under a pseudonym, your employer has to know your real name for tax purposes), that really only leaves using a pseudonym in your private life if you want to keep it separate. Telling me that if I don't like it, I can just use something else is well and good: in fact, I do just use a different service. But that doesn't mean that their policies aren't asinine, or that they're not blocking out an entire segment of the population who actually values this ability.
^^
I would also add that a lot of employers are now trying to check out peoples' Facebook profiles, or to Google them, prior to offering a job. If you can't separate yourself from some stupid things you did in high school, it hurts your chances of ever landing a well-paying job in the future. Forcing people to use their real names isn't *really* a problem (I use my real name on Facebook for example), but allowing people you haven't friended to "follow" your posts without your permission *is*. Sooner or later, you will forget to make something private, and then you're screwed for life.
Information, once it's out on the Internet, can't be stifled.
I don't think you grasp the way the money works... Google makes most of its money off advertising. Part of the reason it's able to make so much on advertising is because they have such a large share of the market. If their market share dropped, their advertising revenues would drop significantly as well.
Also, I don't think you understand how the scalability of something like a search portal works. Compared against the advertising revenue increase that they could get by increasing their market share, their margins would improve greatly.
If it's revenue, then Yahoo would be the second in the US... they're actually profitable.
That said, I'm surprised it isn't Yahoo in the first place. When I think of search engines that get used to actually find stuff in North America, Google is first, Yahoo is second....
I'm fairly sure that more than 10% of the population are atheists, and that similarly, more than 10% of the population are Christians... the two are diametrically opposed ideas, especially when you get to that core group that has the unshakeable belief that they have the one true answer to life, the universe, and everything....