Heh, or to quote @timjonze "At this rate Clegg'll end up with PR, no trident, control of Belgium, £750cashback + promise Balls will wear mankini"

Russell has a sound understanding of Google's position - they have many staff with strong intuitions about what is evil and what is not, and if they're not already millionaires via stock options then they certainly have the talents to get a new job almost instantly, so if Google want to hang onto those staff they had better *stay* on the non-evil side of the fence. A lot of the code they work with is open source, and their APIs are relatively open as well, so a lot of those staff really have quite portable skillsets. Also, they're under more scrutiny than ever from the pundits and "screechy monkeys" of the social media landscape, so any sign of evil gets magnified into a PR disaster. At this stage, losing the "do no evil" reputation would result in massive destruction of shareholder value, so they're quite protective of it.

Ta for mentioning Interclue. We're really happy about how things have gone since the Firefox 3 launch. 40,000 new users in 6 days...a few more than we were expecting...not that we're complaining!

Uh Mark, most of them were "congratulating" Slarty, whose reply was marginally more intellectual than Stephen's, and had the additional virtue of being funny, so I think your claim that this display in some way "balances" right wing anti-intellectualism is uh, not to put a fine point on it, nonsense.

Presumably you come from the libertarian arm of the anti-Bill argument. How do you feel about siding with the bible bashers against UNICEF, Barnardos, Plunket, the Families Commission, etc, etc?

If it is true that 85% of NZ think your way Mark (and I doubt it), then this a fairly classic case of where the public is (mis)led by the media who are (mis)led by the more vocal groups, and who in any case need to tell a story with limited time or column inches...whereas the politicians in their select committees have to hear the lengthy testimony and read long reports from the people and institutions who've actually put a bit of thought into it.

It would seem that voting for this bill can only hurt a politicians electoral chances, hence if they do vote for it, one would argue that they're doing it because they strongly believe it's the right thing to do (the same would not be true were this America and it was a decision that large well connected corporations stood to profit from, but it's not)