With all the tracking by advertisers it makes one wonder if the Feds have approached them for access to those databases.

I know, it's ridiculous. But people do want to see how many likes the story has, and cross-service comments are pretty next-wave, so you have to have widgets now for 5 social sites, 7 comment systems, global analytics, live analytics, sitewide ad, contextual ad, site cookie and maybe add two more because I haven't thought of them... that's 19 right there!

We really need something better than having these MASSIVE amounts of callouts. It's like those pictures of Internet Explorer totally taken over by toolbars, except it's a different set on every single site on the web. Bah!

It turns out that if you block all the trackers and 3rd part widgets, the website continues to function as the use desires, and nothing of value is lost.

For some sites, yes. Space.com and Business Insider are two that I've noticed tend not to work if some of their trackers are blocked.

Try that with Noscript on, and it gets cut down to 3 trackers.

Everyone was ok with google's tracking for ads and commercial purposes, even though it felt kinda weird, we had a feelign it wasn't evil somehow.

Now I can't even look at Google anymore, they're like a spouse that cheated on you. You knew the spouse may have been watching you, but at least they weren't fucking with someone else while you trusted them.