Business requirements and functional requirements have different purposes and are used by different parties on a software project:

Business requirements have a purpose to capture end-user needs, i.e., they should be statements about WHAT an application should do for the end-user. Business requirements are first used by project management to plan the next release:

a)      agree with the end-users on the release scope;

b)      estimate the development effort;

After the release scope has been agreed, business requirements are used by BA (or developers) to specify solutions to the needs. These solutions (i.e. HOW TO details) are captured as software requirements (where functional requirements are a kind of software requirements). Functional requirements are used by developers and testers.

To summarize, business requirements should capture WHAT an application should do, whereas functional requirements should capture HOW the user needs can be implemented (from the end-user perspective).  

Hope, this could help. Yuri

You can see why I have a problem distinguishing between the two...becauase everyone has a different opinion.  The terms do not seem to be consistently used anywhere.  Somewhere in every explanation is something about "the What" and "the How" but I have yet to find a good explanation with examples to back the it up.  That is why I was asking for examples in my first post.  Sometimes is sounds like BRs are higher-level features the system must support and the FRs are the details and other times it sounds like they are both refering to the same thing and other times the BRs are the overall business goals and the FR are the requriements.  I'm still unsure of the most effective way to use the two and if it makes sense to think of them as being the same or different.