If I could pay for a shot that
would make me immune to the effects of cigarettes, I would pay for it
without thinking.
That's what's scary. You can not know what that shot would do *irrevocably* to your mind. Nicotine and other psychotropic drugs affect the way your mind works. As has been said in a post above, vaccines that inactivate receptors for nicotine, actually inactivate receptors for a natural chemical that is part of how your brain functions. Without these receptors functioning ( at least to some degree ) one might be left a dribbling idiot. Of course the vaccine would never pass drug trials if it caused *obvious* effects, but it is very possible that more subtle *permanent* unhealable effects remain from knocking out a part of your mind with a vaccine.
Ciggarette addiction is a serious disease. It can easily kill you. Doctors would find it hard not to prescribe a treatment for it, if that treatment worked, even if it was 'risky'. The risks dying from smoking are great enough to outweigh quite a bit. They won't advise against taking the vaccine. Not taking the vaccine would be a choice every smoker would have to make themselves.
I don't know what TMJ is, but if you think about it the one essential ingredient to a successful stop-smoking attempt is that you really want to stop.
To me, nicotine containing 'stop smoking aides' make quitting harder. They merely make the withdrawal period longer. I think you learn to appreciate the stop smoking aide the way you learn to appreciate a ciggarette, and the minor cravings you get when say the patch is wearing out remind you of the nicotine you are addicted to.
The withdrawal from nicotine isn't even that bad. It's 3 days to a week at the very longest, with the pain very front-loaded. ( I was a 3 pack a day smoker ) The first day is the worst, the next is somewhat easier, the third still easier.
This is very conducive to being overpowered by will because when you decide to stop, you have the most will power. By the third day, your will is wearing thin, but so are the withdrawal symptoms.
Willpower can not last for long periods of time. Willpower ( going against your own nature ) is for the short term. Only habit stands the test of time.
That's the hardest part, not the first three days to a week, but the first month of being a nonsmoker. I've quit for a week many times, but staying nicotine free for long enough to develop the habit of NOT smoking is tough. What do you do when you are bored, or want to relax? Smoke a ciggarette. And at those times smoke is good. Now you have to get through or learn to avoid those situations as they come up enough times that not smoking becomes a habit, and willpower is no longer required.
The first three days is going to leave your ability to go against your nature pretty much completely depleted. So you need something that is IN your nature to keep you going - especially for that first month.
My thing was avoiding ever having another nic-fit. I hate nic fitting, which was why I smoked three packs a day. But you don't live long smoking that much. I knew I would have to quit sooner or later.
Whenever I thought about smoking another ciggarette, I purposely linked it with going through another three days of nic-fitting. I had already gotten through those three days. Smoking another ciggarette would mean I would have to go through that again, even if I smoked only one. The three days starts immediately after consuming any nicotine in any form.
When I thought about cigarettes, instead of thinking about the relaxation and relief and all the things a nicotine addict will coo about like a gourmand, I concentrated on the truth that far from being a source of relief ciggarettes were the CAUSE of nic fits, and that whatever minor twinge of craving I felt now would be made orders of magnitude WORSE, not better by smoking a ciggarett
I have kmail set up to send it's mail using sendmail because my ISP's SMTP server is down so often - more often than the servers of my intended reciepients it seems!. An ISP mandating a hardware reverse firewall will piss off their own customers who want to do things on blocked ports for the benefit of everyone else who won't have to recieve zombie spam from infected users of theirs. It won't happen. It violates economics.
I'm not sure if BT chose to do this blocking on their own, or if they are managed by the government, and were somehow 'directed to' ( are they some wierd corporate/governmental chimera? IANAB ), but a private communications provider has a STRONG interest in NOT blocking anything. Once you start blocking/censoring it whittles away at any argument you may want to make later that you can not be held responsable for the content your network is used to transmit. They are shooting themselves in the foot long-term, since it will prove impossible to block all offensive ( to whatever standard ) material.
The main problem is that "Hot Teen" can mean many things. 99.9% of the time it means some 18 year old, some 19 year old, and a lot of 20-25 year old nudes. Someone who clicks on a link marked "Hot Teens" or even "Hot Yung Teens" certainly has not proven that they at all intended to view underage porn.
And the male is genetically programmed to be sexually 'interested' in any female that might bear them a healthy child even if they are not really 'interested' for practical/moral/social reasons. If you ever had a woody for the girl that sat in front of you in high school, you probably can't say that you would suddenly find her image ugly even if you prefer women that have filled out more with age. 45 minutes of droning geometry lecture, with the same ( high school aged ) girl sitting in front of you as the scenery, would probably still leave you with a stiffy, but you wouldn't do anything about it. But 'In caveman days' even those on 'Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn' ( Comedy Central ) mostly admitted they'd 'do' a 15 year old. What would the average male admit to fantasising about while not on national TV?
Underage is prevalent enough of a fantasy that porno sites falsely advertise in order to attract the crowd that would be after that sort of thing, and also draw those in search of legal porn to click on their links because they know that 'Hot Teens' doesn't mean child porn ( most of the time ). Most all porn is either 'Hot Teens' or 'MILFs'. If you are after 18-25, you must click on stuff labeled 'Hot Teens'. 25-45 is MILFs, and 40-60 is 'granny porn'. There is tons of overlap depending on how well preserved the models are. Age is fairly hard to determine.
And then alt.binaries.pictures.erotica posters that post porno pics with links to their websites. Usenet is the only place on the internet that I have seen what is probably child porn. Though I avoid clicking on things that are labeled as underage porn, over the many years I have probably failed to avoid 3-5 pictures that of abuse. Oops - deleted.
There is also the grey area of pictures of 'Itty Bitty Titty Committee' women that are 18-25 that wouldn't look out of place amongst much younger girls. There is alot of that ( mostly offtopic ) crowding the a.b.p.e newsgroups lately...
Why are small tits a legally grey area? Because if 'the cops ever raided your hard drive', although the sites that offer such pictures have proof of age on file, if the source of the picture was not known, the person's features would be used to guess their age. Since the model was specifically chosen to 'look young', they will have the features of someone younger than their true age. If you use height as a measure of age, then someone with a midget fetish would be in trouble. More than just height is used, but it is always possible to find mutants in the world that conform to your standards yet are not age you expect.
So back to the parent's topic, the law against *VIEWING* child pornography would block much viewing of non-child pornography if people didn't choose to continue doing things that cause them to risk breaking the law by accidentally viewing child porn ( like clicking a "Hot Yung Teens" link, or reading a.p.b.e ).
It is impossible to read usenet looking for legal porn, or click on web links and be 100% sure the pictures you will see are legal. When it is impossible to comply with the law, the
Using a signal that would put the viruses into kill mode would let them spread until it was time to take down all infected machines at once. In kill mode, the virus would broadcast the kill signal to other infected hosts, and then cause havoc/destruction on its host.
In order to get around firewalls, the virus would have to hijack a common means of communication like email. It would not want to monitor any ports as virus researchers would be able to detect it and the incoming connections would likely be blocked by firewalls, and it wouldn't want to depend on opening any outgoing connections once in kill mode because this would likely be blocked by firewalls.
Using detectable means to spread in the first place is one thing, but keeping the kill signal functionality secret until after it was too late would be paramount for this scheme.
It might pick one or more popular email clients to hijack, monitoring incoming email messages as they are recieved or opened for a 'kill message'. A kill message might consist of a random number inserted into the message with certain properties like being divisible by 2243243243323243242342343243243254325215 with a remainder of 2822. The number might be segmented into chunks seperated by spaces so that no chunk was so long as to arouse suspicion. The number could be base 26 with the letters a-z serving as digits. That way, when properly broken up into eye pleasing random length 'words' the 'number-phrase' would be impossible to detect and filter using regular expressions. The number-phrase could be added to the first line of a random message in the infected person's inbox and forwarded ( or resent ) to random people that person knows via email. This would destroy the privacy of that person by sending their inbox messages, and propagate the kill signal in a way that can not be detected and filtered.
If, after recieving a kill signal, the virus waited a random amount of time up to a few hours, then you could choose the properties of a kill signal number to be able to set off the cascade by sending an infected person an inoccuous message with the phrase in it.
Suppose your phrase was: "My fortune cookie had one six twelve sixteen twenty two and thirty eight listed as lucky numbers." Concatenate the letters from a-z in that phrase, and you have a base twenty six number that isn't likely to appear in any other email message in the whole world ever. (Lotto numbers may be suspicious. Steganography is an art. Let the messages be monitored in all locations for a fixed length kill phrase, and non a-z characters ignored, and you could put your phrase anywhere say: Hey what's [up C00lguy77? SpikeyHamster29 was tal]king shit the other day about some stuff. This becomes: "uplguypikeyamsterwastal". That looks fairly unlikely to appear anywhere ever.
Take the remainder of "uplguypikeyamsterwastal" modulo "longpassword" and have your viruses require and generate random kill signals based on that criterion. Most likely the guy who gets the first kill signal will send their broadcast and then start recieving kill signals soon enough. It is always possible that it could be proven to have originated from that email, but if it was sent from a brand new hotmail account using a computer in a college computer lab while wearing a disguise through an anonymous remailer with a high minimum retention value to ensure that any video tapes from any cameras that had been taping the lab unbeknownst to the virus author had been written over by the time the message was sent. To a relay setup not to log anything running on stolen hardware that was slyly plugged into a forgotton network jack somewhere months ago by a guy dressed as a woman wearing a veil and which has been waiting for this moment ever since...
Of course nobody should ever write or release a virus.
IDs are just primary keys to databases of information. In the case of IDs created by the user, you can be sure that the user that created the account is the one using it. Any other information that you can tie to that account can be faked. ( They could have entered a fake address for instance ).
If you want to verify that other data tied to that account is correct, you need proof. You can look at their driver's license, or you can take the word of a third party like a credit card company that THEY know who you are. Of course, anybody who digs through a department store wastebasket will be able to find a recipt with all the neccessary information to fool a credit card company into vouching for them, so you only 'keep out the honest people' that way. Most likely the credit card would not be charged. You could just verify the data by putting a hold on some money for a few seconds and then releasing it which would not even show up on the person's bill. ( And if you DID charge the credit card, good luck in getting anyone to use their credit card to sign up. ) You will also need to pay the credit card company to use their database for verification, as opposed to sales, as this probably violates their merchant terms of service. ( Why should VISA let you use their database for free? )
And people aren't likely to mail you their real driver's licenses. A photocopy will have to be accepted, which is ridiculously easy to fake. If you know the relavent information about someone, you can easily photoshop together a 'license', take a grainy photocopy of it, and send it in. Only honest people are kept out. Also, many states have privacy restrictions on what data they will let you verify. Unless you are in one of the specific classes of people that have exemptions written into the law for them, you aren't legally allowed to verify that data with the state. In at least one state that I know of, it will cost an insurance company, or private investigator ( yes PIs have an exemption here! ) $5.00 to verify your license data. You may be able to get less up-to-date data from a company like ChoicePoint for less, though the same legal restrictions apply.
So it will be a pain in the butt to verify the correctness of the data you recieve. It will cost money, and time. How are users going to create custom fields? You will have to create new standards for each datum to verify the correctness of the data they provide which will cost money. How will you guarantee to websites that accept their ID, that their favorite ice cream flavor REALLY IS black raspberry, or that they REALLY DO own a Geo Metro? Who cares? You might decide to take their word for it about the ice cream, but you would probably have to pay a human being to verify that the photocopy of their title was really geniuine, and also pay all the fees neccessary to query the appropriate authoritative sources ( if that is even legally allowed ) in order to certify that the person was really the owner of a blue 1994 Geo Metro. Who would care if that information was true? Maybe a Geo Metro collector's club would want to exclude non Geo Metro owners. They might be peeved when 'posers' that don't even own a Geo Metro post on their site.
This ID is going to cost someone alot of time and money. Users have nothing to gain by certifying their information - they KNOW if they lied or not. So the consumers of the information ( the web sites ) will have to pay for all this verification. Also the web sites will have to offer SIGNIFICANT benefits to users who log in using an ID that is tieable to all this certified-to-be-true data in order for the users to even go to the trouble of dealing with all the red tape to certify their data ( like sending photocopies in ).
Yeah, but 'someone' isn't likey to. 99% of pirating isn't for profit, it's just some Joe handing a copied CD to their friend, or putting an ISO on kazaa. If somebody hacks into it, then oh well. 99% of pirates will just look for another game ( kinda like The CLUB - you can't cut it, but you can cut the steering wheel it's attached to with damn near anything, though most thiefs will just go to the next car) . This licensing scheme wouldn't be for 'corporate software', mostly for home user stuff. Corporate software doesn't need to protect itself from Kazaa pirates. Any company with a workforce risks being turned into the BSA by any employee with a grudge if they don't keep things legal. Most of what's pirated is games. The fraction of computers that are up-to-date enough to run a modern game that are not connected to the internet, owned by people who would play games is what? 0.5%? I would do this over https, so as to be able to make it out of most corporate firewalls, and be somewhat obscure. This is just dirt cheap low effort 'security' to keep out the 'honest people' pirates which are almost all of them. If you are paranoid that someone will bother to distribute a pirateable version with your phone home software hacked out, you can add a few checksums hidden around your compiled code in obscure places to ensure that obvious ways to tamper fail.
Long gone are the days when pirating software meant dragging an EXE onto a floppy. With the windows registry etc, the only thing worth pirating are CD images complete with installer. Nobody is going to bother hacking too deeply in order to disable a phone home mechanism.
Just have the software require an internet connection and have it call home on install, and every 30-90 days thereafter to renew.
Each time you install the software you must register it, and the software company's license servers send you a unique installid. They must call home and renew their license every 30 days or so.
Each install would generate and register a unique installid.
You could deregister the installid whenever a new installid is registered requiring a reinstall to use the software on the original machine in 30 days, but this would mean the software could still be pirated for 30 days at a time.
The above simple scheme would be sufficent for most software license enforcement, but if you want to be REALLY strict, you could try the following:
Every install registers an installid. Each installed copy of the software has a maxium standard license renew interval of say 30 days. If your copy of the software registers it's installid ( or reregisters it after 30 days ), and there was another installid registered since your installid was last registered, the renewal interval is halved and rehalved with each iteration down to a possible minimum of 1 day. If the last registered installid was indeed yours, then the reregistration interval is doubled and redoubled with each iteration up to the 30 day maximum. As more and more pirated copies spread, each copy generates more and more frequent calls home. A additional callback scheduled 1 day after any copy of the software finds that it was not the last registered installid that does not have the ability to double the callback interval would allow installed software to be promptly responsive to license key invalidations.
That way the software license company only has to store 1 installid ( last installid registered ) and 1 date ( the date that installid was registered ) and an activation flag ( is the license key available ) for every license key. It will know if a license key is being used by more than one copy of the software, by tracking traffic, and will be able to refuse to register/re-register installids for that license key. It may even be able to detect a user that installs the software on 2 computers at home if they use the software on each machine regularly. Eventually each copy of the software would be calling home every day. For a week, maybe he was just fiddling around or migrating to the other computer, but if it goes on for a month, who really would believe that they were reinstalling on both computers every day for a month? Perhaps a warning message with scary legalese would be able to get Joe User to shell out another 5000 bucks to play minesweeper on the other computer.
Saw 'Grass' last night. One statistic was that the War on Marijuana cost the gubmint over 200 billion dollars from 1980 to 1998. I can damn well have a few cents of my taxes wasted on generating interesting space stories to read on the internet if certain Weeners can have 200 billion$ to waste on preventing people from getting stoned.
A saw, when running, creates an environment strewn with sawdust, vibration, and heat. How long do you think a *sensitive* detector is going to survive, and remain correctly calibrated to detect flesh in that environment?
You don't sharpen an axe blade like you do a knife blade. That fine a point would be blunted in one or two chops. A duller blade to begin with, may not slice through trees like a ninja's sword ( as in Spies like Us ) but it will chop more trees between resharpenings, and not get stuck in the logs.
Have a law that lets anyone who sends an unsolicited email collect a 100 dollar fine from anyone that buys something from them. The public would soon learn not to buy from spammers and spam would end. ( Fark.com had a link the other day to a story that said 20% of internet users buy things from spammers.. Holy shit... )
The patent on double blind coins expires in 2006.. This, I predict, will open up it's use on the internet. Soon even free software will be able to use cash micropayments.
Even without tying the banking system into your electronic coinage system, there might be uses for cash as a resourse allocation system. Resources on a network could 'charge' for their use, and high priority processes would be able to pay more, ( where high priority is defined by how much service they provide the network, and hence how much 'cash' they have on hand. A service that serves up millions of clients would be able to pay more for it's data than each one of those clients.
Electronic coinage might be used to prevent leaching on P2P networks, with storage, or CPU cycles, or bandwidth earning your computer 'profits' that can be used to spend on bandwith/storage/etc from other nodes. Instead of funding supernodes with GATOR revenue, individuals with bandwidth to spare could set up nodes that charge for their services, and then sell their 'ecash' for real cash on e-bay.
Users with dialup, or with heavily download biased connections could buy the coins on EBay, or subscribe to ad servers which would let advertisers pay them ecoins to view their ads, taking a small percentage from the advertisers for themselves as a service fee. Then if you didn't want prono ads, you could subscribe to the 'Christian Ad Service' instead and get ads for glossy posters of Jesus in a revealing loincloth doing a hardcore S & M crucifixion fetish spread.
You have targeted advertising plus an incentive for people to subscribe to it.
The people writing the software should choose the following business model: People download the software, and agree to a eula that gives them a debt for the price of the p2p network software payable in ecoins. They would be charged interest only automatically by the p2p software ( like a credit card ) as their 'account' accumulates coins to collect from ( maybe obtained from some Folding@Home type thing, or for viewing tons of ads ) unless they choose to pay off the debt in full with collected ecoins. That way the 'skimming' or 'taxation' is limited to the 'price' of the software or to interest payments on it. The author becomes rich in 'valueless' ecoins that they can sell to businesses or individuals that want services from p2p network nodes for real cash.
Taxation would be one legal problem such a scheme would face. Even if you say the ecoins are valueless logical entities used merely to perform the logic required to efficiently manage p2p network resources, the truth is, that they are NOT valueless. Governments would want a piece of the action. Also, keeping track of these cash-like things that are not 'officially' cash might mean your token account database must conform to all the legal morass of being a bank. Wouldn't it be silly to end up in jail for years because Juan Valdez laundered his cocaine money as ecash or Osama bin Larden smuggled funds to his terrorists through your ecoin 'banc'?
It would certainly be wise to hide any connection these ecoins had to legal tender behind many layers of obscurity. Just show the funds as a green bar, and call it mojo or something... Maybe you'd be rich and have sold the company before the feds understood what you were doing and cracked down. Some other sucker can go to jail for banking violations or tax evasion.
Also fraud would be a problem. What do you do to prevent people from taking your money and not providing you with service, or using your service and then not paying up? Payment schemes should limit the amount per transaction and increase the number of (smaller) transactions if possible to keep losses down, but there would inevitably be service debts and ecoin debts unpaid. If you make IDs easy to get, then reputations become worthless, and if you make them hard to get, you end up doing 'collections' - expensive. Maybe some kind of mutual trust networks could be designed, but it would be complicated, and disputes would still arise, that would be a pain in the arse to resolve.
I don't pretend to understand why, but I read somewhere that the minimum energy path for a stretched ribbon leading from the ground to geosynchronous orbit is not a straight line but a spiral. ( maybe someone in the know about this could elaborate. ) But a spiral is a longer path than a straight line, and so would weigh more in terms of ribbon...
There seems to be little evolutionary pressure to limit myostatin in the general population
Loosely put: feed conversion. Muscle is expensive to maintain, so why would you want alot of it if food were limited as it often is where evolutionary pressures prevail.
Even the Belgian Blue beef cattle that lack myostatin mentioned in the article don't seem to have taken over the meat industry where evolutionary pressure comes from economics. 'Why not?' I wonder. Lots of lean saleable muscle meat seems ideal. But maintaining all that mass while building more might be more expensive than it is worth, fat tissue being mainly for caloric storage and muscle being mainly an engine to burn calories. Not being familiar with the beef industry I couldn't do more than guess. I would guess that female beef cattle breed until their calving output decreases to where it makes more sence to slaughter them ( though they might be tough at that age.. ) I know excess male dairy cattle are often sold for beef.. I imagine a myostatin deficient animal would not produce as much milk as a breed built with a more miserly metabolism.
Then again, maybe Belgian Blues would be quicker to bring to a slaughterable weight... A younger animal might be more tender, and not suffer from mass maintenance problems. A fleet of Belgian Blue Cows producing calves like hotcakes which were slaughtered earlier than normal steers might be economic.. I dunno..
Most people would just click the checkbox next to the message and then hit the SPAM button to mark it as such, and send it to the bulk email folder where it belongs.
I will check gmail out when it is generally available, but I don't want spam from anyone including google.
I'm sure they were *capable* of killing much more than 10%, but that plausable war scenarios peaked at 10% destruction.
With all those nukes, if your aim was killing as many humans as possible, I bet you could get to 30-50% without breaking a sweat, and maybe even go as high as 70%. You will have a hard time killing all the very rural, spread out primitive folks. The surface of the earth is pretty big after all. You might be able to leverage your arsenal by targeting food and water producing areas with especially dirty bombs, and by taking prevailing winds/weather conditions into account in order to dust large swathes of only moderately densely populated areas. Of course one would turn all major cities into glass if their aim was pure bodycount.
I've *NEVER* applied a security patch to my home linux machine, and it is no doubt vulnerable to tons of exploits. My home linux security practices are comparable to diving into a cesspool with an open wound, however, I have NEVER had a virus/worm/whatever on that machine.
The windows partition by contrast, requires 'sterile technique' to avoid immediate contamination, and still gets sick from time to time. Windows is like an OS with AIDS, or maybe it's more like the 'boy in the bubble'. To install, first you have to build a plastic firewall with HEPA filters and autoclaves for everything entering or exiting, and then the OS will only survive if you maintain positive pressure inside the bubble to keep out 'germs'.
Potato blights can wipe out entire crops of cloned potato plants, but non-cloned heirloom varieties are not suceptible. You can grow them, and have a better defense against disease than any remedies or blight epidemic control techniques ( like burning crops ) could ever provide. Sure some disease might be able to kill your strain of potatos, but you aren't likely to catch it from the clone-growing farmer next door. You aren't likely to catch it at all.
Not as cool as letting it grow moss and house birds on land where people can actually see it.
It would eventually look like a relic from an advanced but long since defunct civilization. The fact that the civilization that produced the rotting behemoth is ours, kinda gets you thinking about our own possible demise...
Yeahbutt, I can send mail w/o an smtp server that will *probably* get delivered ( unless *their* mail server was down ). If the recipient can tell who sent it, than so can the free smtp provider who can then add the appropriate headers to allow it to be traced back to me ( Is there such a Hop log as part of SMTP? An 'open relay' that told on the originator doesn't seem like a security hole. You can always find out who to yell at... ) Also, there is a pop before smtp authenticate mechanism that exists, though I don't know much about it...
Well actually it would be both. You need to specify your pop3 and your smtp servers. Pedantic and IMAP aside, that's a really good idea.... I'll have to look into that...
So true. Their spam filtering is the best, and bulk email doens't count against your quota. The 4 mb limit isn't even really an issue now unless you want to send a file that is bigger than 4 mbs. 4MB goes a LONG way if you restrict yourself to text and links.
The article said they are going to allow people to download mail to third party email clients. This is great! Yahoo seems to be saying: We don't care about the pittance we make off email banner adverts, we are willing to TRUELY GIVE you a larger mailbox than your ISP just to keep you using yahoo for other stuff.
I doubt most people will use third party mail clients anyway: Going to a web page is easy, typing in smtp.yahoo.com into an email client ( what's that? ) is 'hard'. Plus most people would be pissed if they accidentally clicked 'delete from server' and couldn't get their email at their friend's house.
Google searching email is a feature they won't be able to duplicate easily, but how useful will that really be? I for one wouldn't trust google's search algorithm to find all occurances of a string in web pages. For instance: I type A55M0NKEY ( a word that doesn't occur on the web unless I put it there ) and I do not find everything I have ever posted. If someone used 'A55M0NKEY' in a message, would google's search be guaranteed to find it? If not, then Yahoo could come up with a more-useful-for-email-searching-algorithm easily, and if it were also willing to store seperate indexes for each user privately, they would have a completely better service than GMail.
Google has been the king of search almost since it came out. News, Newsgroups, Froogle, and Images are great. The features unique to yahoo have been the ones that require a login - email, IM, chat, personals, commerce, billionsweeps.com. The search engine changes so often, it's only intermittantly useful.
Google thusfar has not required an ID for any of it's services ( except to post on groups.google.com, but most use of that is archive searching which doesn't require a login ID, who wants to reply to a 10 year old usenet thread? )
Gmail gets people to create a google login. What else do you think they will offer now that they've got you to sign in? How much of that crap will end up on their front page?
You say that complete lack of regulation would lead to bad things for consumers. TRUE. But it would lead to good things for other consumers. There would be tons of fighting over spectrum, but there would be winners and losers just as there is today. WHy should people who have cell phones be able to -as a group- keep me from having a local area digital gizmo on their band? Let there be no cell phones ( the losers ) and make way for local area digital applications that can always outpower a distant broadcast source ( winners ). If people want to provide a wireless message relay service, let them provide it inside their own building, protected from the outside interference by a faraday cage. People can go into a faraday cage booth ( with a reciever inside ) to use their cell phones to make outbound calls or wait for inbound ones. Better yet, have a telephone IN the booth that takes quarters so that people don't have to carry a phone with them all the time.
Radio listeners would not lose out on radio. There would always be something on the dial - namely whatever signal was the strongest.
Some might say that preventing someone from removing themselves from the gene pool by being a homosexual is medical kindness. Attempting to 'save' such a mentally ill person, even an attempt that failed like forced injections hormones could be interpreted as coming from the right place. Perhaps they thought, that with a more healthy hormone balance, that they would come to be grateful for the intervention in the same way that a person with a head injury is grateful that they were not allowed to leave the hospital once they come to their sences.
But the road to hell is paved with good intentions eh? There needs to be a clear line drawn that gives you the right to refuse medical care. It should err on the side of letting nutcases continue their self destructive behavior.
You should also have the right to kill yourself. That would make it very clear where the priorities were. If someone is allowed to kill themselves, then what right does anyone have to restrict their freedoms 'for their own good'? None. It's just not NATURAL to interfere with darwinism at work by persecuting Gays or the suicidal. If there are 2 men that want to eschew women, I say Great! more for the rest of us. If there are 2 women that want to make out with each other, I say: Can I watch?
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That's what's scary. You can not know what that shot would do *irrevocably* to your mind. Nicotine and other psychotropic drugs affect the way your mind works. As has been said in a post above, vaccines that inactivate receptors for nicotine, actually inactivate receptors for a natural chemical that is part of how your brain functions. Without these receptors functioning ( at least to some degree ) one might be left a dribbling idiot. Of course the vaccine would never pass drug trials if it caused *obvious* effects, but it is very possible that more subtle *permanent* unhealable effects remain from knocking out a part of your mind with a vaccine.
Ciggarette addiction is a serious disease. It can easily kill you. Doctors would find it hard not to prescribe a treatment for it, if that treatment worked, even if it was 'risky'. The risks dying from smoking are great enough to outweigh quite a bit. They won't advise against taking the vaccine. Not taking the vaccine would be a choice every smoker would have to make themselves.
I don't know what TMJ is, but if you think about it the one essential ingredient to a successful stop-smoking attempt is that you really want to stop.
To me, nicotine containing 'stop smoking aides' make quitting harder. They merely make the withdrawal period longer. I think you learn to appreciate the stop smoking aide the way you learn to appreciate a ciggarette, and the minor cravings you get when say the patch is wearing out remind you of the nicotine you are addicted to.
The withdrawal from nicotine isn't even that bad. It's 3 days to a week at the very longest, with the pain very front-loaded. ( I was a 3 pack a day smoker ) The first day is the worst, the next is somewhat easier, the third still easier.
This is very conducive to being overpowered by will because when you decide to stop, you have the most will power. By the third day, your will is wearing thin, but so are the withdrawal symptoms.
Willpower can not last for long periods of time. Willpower ( going against your own nature ) is for the short term. Only habit stands the test of time.
That's the hardest part, not the first three days to a week, but the first month of being a nonsmoker. I've quit for a week many times, but staying nicotine free for long enough to develop the habit of NOT smoking is tough. What do you do when you are bored, or want to relax? Smoke a ciggarette. And at those times smoke is good. Now you have to get through or learn to avoid those situations as they come up enough times that not smoking becomes a habit, and willpower is no longer required.
The first three days is going to leave your ability to go against your nature pretty much completely depleted. So you need something that is IN your nature to keep you going - especially for that first month.
My thing was avoiding ever having another nic-fit. I hate nic fitting, which was why I smoked three packs a day. But you don't live long smoking that much. I knew I would have to quit sooner or later.
Whenever I thought about smoking another ciggarette, I purposely linked it with going through another three days of nic-fitting. I had already gotten through those three days. Smoking another ciggarette would mean I would have to go through that again, even if I smoked only one. The three days starts immediately after consuming any nicotine in any form.
When I thought about cigarettes, instead of thinking about the relaxation and relief and all the things a nicotine addict will coo about like a gourmand, I concentrated on the truth that far from being a source of relief ciggarettes were the CAUSE of nic fits, and that whatever minor twinge of craving I felt now would be made orders of magnitude WORSE, not better by smoking a ciggarett
I have kmail set up to send it's mail using sendmail because my ISP's SMTP server is down so often - more often than the servers of my intended reciepients it seems!. An ISP mandating a hardware reverse firewall will piss off their own customers who want to do things on blocked ports for the benefit of everyone else who won't have to recieve zombie spam from infected users of theirs. It won't happen. It violates economics.
The main problem is that "Hot Teen" can mean many things. 99.9% of the time it means some 18 year old, some 19 year old, and a lot of 20-25 year old nudes. Someone who clicks on a link marked "Hot Teens" or even "Hot Yung Teens" certainly has not proven that they at all intended to view underage porn.
And the male is genetically programmed to be sexually 'interested' in any female that might bear them a healthy child even if they are not really 'interested' for practical/moral/social reasons. If you ever had a woody for the girl that sat in front of you in high school, you probably can't say that you would suddenly find her image ugly even if you prefer women that have filled out more with age. 45 minutes of droning geometry lecture, with the same ( high school aged ) girl sitting in front of you as the scenery, would probably still leave you with a stiffy, but you wouldn't do anything about it. But 'In caveman days' even those on 'Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn' ( Comedy Central ) mostly admitted they'd 'do' a 15 year old. What would the average male admit to fantasising about while not on national TV?
Underage is prevalent enough of a fantasy that porno sites falsely advertise in order to attract the crowd that would be after that sort of thing, and also draw those in search of legal porn to click on their links because they know that 'Hot Teens' doesn't mean child porn ( most of the time ). Most all porn is either 'Hot Teens' or 'MILFs'. If you are after 18-25, you must click on stuff labeled 'Hot Teens'. 25-45 is MILFs, and 40-60 is 'granny porn'. There is tons of overlap depending on how well preserved the models are. Age is fairly hard to determine.
And then alt.binaries.pictures.erotica posters that post porno pics with links to their websites. Usenet is the only place on the internet that I have seen what is probably child porn. Though I avoid clicking on things that are labeled as underage porn, over the many years I have probably failed to avoid 3-5 pictures that of abuse. Oops - deleted.
There is also the grey area of pictures of 'Itty Bitty Titty Committee' women that are 18-25 that wouldn't look out of place amongst much younger girls. There is alot of that ( mostly offtopic ) crowding the a.b.p.e newsgroups lately...
Why are small tits a legally grey area? Because if 'the cops ever raided your hard drive', although the sites that offer such pictures have proof of age on file, if the source of the picture was not known, the person's features would be used to guess their age. Since the model was specifically chosen to 'look young', they will have the features of someone younger than their true age. If you use height as a measure of age, then someone with a midget fetish would be in trouble. More than just height is used, but it is always possible to find mutants in the world that conform to your standards yet are not age you expect.
So back to the parent's topic, the law against *VIEWING* child pornography would block much viewing of non-child pornography if people didn't choose to continue doing things that cause them to risk breaking the law by accidentally viewing child porn ( like clicking a "Hot Yung Teens" link, or reading a.p.b.e ).
It is impossible to read usenet looking for legal porn, or click on web links and be 100% sure the pictures you will see are legal. When it is impossible to comply with the law, the
Using a signal that would put the viruses into kill mode would let them spread until it was time to take down all infected machines at once. In kill mode, the virus would broadcast the kill signal to other infected hosts, and then cause havoc/destruction on its host.
In order to get around firewalls, the virus would have to hijack a common means of communication like email. It would not want to monitor any ports as virus researchers would be able to detect it and the incoming connections would likely be blocked by firewalls, and it wouldn't want to depend on opening any outgoing connections once in kill mode because this would likely be blocked by firewalls.
Using detectable means to spread in the first place is one thing, but keeping the kill signal functionality secret until after it was too late would be paramount for this scheme.
It might pick one or more popular email clients to hijack, monitoring incoming email messages as they are recieved or opened for a 'kill message'. A kill message might consist of a random number inserted into the message with certain properties like being divisible by 2243243243323243242342343243243254325215 with a remainder of 2822. The number might be segmented into chunks seperated by spaces so that no chunk was so long as to arouse suspicion. The number could be base 26 with the letters a-z serving as digits. That way, when properly broken up into eye pleasing random length 'words' the 'number-phrase' would be impossible to detect and filter using regular expressions. The number-phrase could be added to the first line of a random message in the infected person's inbox and forwarded ( or resent ) to random people that person knows via email. This would destroy the privacy of that person by sending their inbox messages, and propagate the kill signal in a way that can not be detected and filtered.
If, after recieving a kill signal, the virus waited a random amount of time up to a few hours, then you could choose the properties of a kill signal number to be able to set off the cascade by sending an infected person an inoccuous message with the phrase in it.
Suppose your phrase was: "My fortune cookie had one six twelve sixteen twenty two and thirty eight listed as lucky numbers." Concatenate the letters from a-z in that phrase, and you have a base twenty six number that isn't likely to appear in any other email message in the whole world ever. (Lotto numbers may be suspicious. Steganography is an art. Let the messages be monitored in all locations for a fixed length kill phrase, and non a-z characters ignored, and you could put your phrase anywhere say: Hey what's [up C00lguy77? SpikeyHamster29 was tal]king shit the other day about some stuff. This becomes: "uplguypikeyamsterwastal". That looks fairly unlikely to appear anywhere ever.
Take the remainder of "uplguypikeyamsterwastal" modulo "longpassword" and have your viruses require and generate random kill signals based on that criterion. Most likely the guy who gets the first kill signal will send their broadcast and then start recieving kill signals soon enough. It is always possible that it could be proven to have originated from that email, but if it was sent from a brand new hotmail account using a computer in a college computer lab while wearing a disguise through an anonymous remailer with a high minimum retention value to ensure that any video tapes from any cameras that had been taping the lab unbeknownst to the virus author had been written over by the time the message was sent. To a relay setup not to log anything running on stolen hardware that was slyly plugged into a forgotton network jack somewhere months ago by a guy dressed as a woman wearing a veil and which has been waiting for this moment ever since...
Of course nobody should ever write or release a virus.
If you want to verify that other data tied to that account is correct, you need proof. You can look at their driver's license, or you can take the word of a third party like a credit card company that THEY know who you are. Of course, anybody who digs through a department store wastebasket will be able to find a recipt with all the neccessary information to fool a credit card company into vouching for them, so you only 'keep out the honest people' that way. Most likely the credit card would not be charged. You could just verify the data by putting a hold on some money for a few seconds and then releasing it which would not even show up on the person's bill. ( And if you DID charge the credit card, good luck in getting anyone to use their credit card to sign up. ) You will also need to pay the credit card company to use their database for verification, as opposed to sales, as this probably violates their merchant terms of service. ( Why should VISA let you use their database for free? )
And people aren't likely to mail you their real driver's licenses. A photocopy will have to be accepted, which is ridiculously easy to fake. If you know the relavent information about someone, you can easily photoshop together a 'license', take a grainy photocopy of it, and send it in. Only honest people are kept out. Also, many states have privacy restrictions on what data they will let you verify. Unless you are in one of the specific classes of people that have exemptions written into the law for them, you aren't legally allowed to verify that data with the state. In at least one state that I know of, it will cost an insurance company, or private investigator ( yes PIs have an exemption here! ) $5.00 to verify your license data. You may be able to get less up-to-date data from a company like ChoicePoint for less, though the same legal restrictions apply.
So it will be a pain in the butt to verify the correctness of the data you recieve. It will cost money, and time. How are users going to create custom fields? You will have to create new standards for each datum to verify the correctness of the data they provide which will cost money. How will you guarantee to websites that accept their ID, that their favorite ice cream flavor REALLY IS black raspberry, or that they REALLY DO own a Geo Metro? Who cares? You might decide to take their word for it about the ice cream, but you would probably have to pay a human being to verify that the photocopy of their title was really geniuine, and also pay all the fees neccessary to query the appropriate authoritative sources ( if that is even legally allowed ) in order to certify that the person was really the owner of a blue 1994 Geo Metro. Who would care if that information was true? Maybe a Geo Metro collector's club would want to exclude non Geo Metro owners.
They might be peeved when 'posers' that don't even own a Geo Metro post on their site.
This ID is going to cost someone alot of time and money. Users have nothing to gain by certifying their information - they KNOW if they lied or not. So the consumers of the information ( the web sites ) will have to pay for all this verification. Also the web sites will have to offer SIGNIFICANT benefits to users who log in using an ID that is tieable to all this certified-to-be-true data in order for the users to even go to the trouble of dealing with all the red tape to certify their data ( like sending photocopies in ).
I liked the old one better because there was less of it. I use a text browser most of the time!
Yeah, but 'someone' isn't likey to. 99% of pirating isn't for profit, it's just some Joe handing a copied CD to their friend, or putting an ISO on kazaa. If somebody hacks into it, then oh well. 99% of pirates will just look for another game ( kinda like The CLUB - you can't cut it, but you can cut the steering wheel it's attached to with damn near anything, though most thiefs will just go to the next car) . This licensing scheme wouldn't be for 'corporate software', mostly for home user stuff. Corporate software doesn't need to protect itself from Kazaa pirates. Any company with a workforce risks being turned into the BSA by any employee with a grudge if they don't keep things legal. Most of what's pirated is games. The fraction of computers that are up-to-date enough to run a modern game that are not connected to the internet, owned by people who would play games is what? 0.5%? I would do this over https, so as to be able to make it out of most corporate firewalls, and be somewhat obscure.
This is just dirt cheap low effort 'security' to keep out the 'honest people' pirates which are almost all of them.
If you are paranoid that someone will bother to distribute a pirateable version with your phone home software hacked out, you can add a few checksums hidden around your compiled code in obscure places to ensure that obvious ways to tamper fail.
Just have the software require an internet connection and have it call home on install, and every 30-90 days thereafter to renew.
Each time you install the software you must register it, and the software company's license servers send you a unique installid. They must call home and renew their license every 30 days or so.
Each install would generate and register a unique installid.
You could deregister the installid whenever a new installid is registered requiring a reinstall to use the software on the original machine in 30 days, but this would mean the software could still be pirated for 30 days at a time.
The above simple scheme would be sufficent for most software license enforcement, but if you want to be REALLY strict, you could try the following:
Every install registers an installid. Each installed copy of the software has a maxium standard license renew interval of say 30 days. If your copy of the software registers it's installid ( or reregisters it after 30 days ), and there was another installid registered since your installid was last registered, the renewal interval is halved and rehalved with each iteration down to a possible minimum of 1 day. If the last registered installid was indeed yours, then the reregistration interval is doubled and redoubled with each iteration up to the 30 day maximum. As more and more pirated copies spread, each copy generates more and more frequent calls home. A additional callback scheduled 1 day after any copy of the software finds that it was not the last registered installid that does not have the ability to double the callback interval would allow installed software to be promptly responsive to license key invalidations.
That way the software license company only has to store 1 installid ( last installid registered ) and 1 date ( the date that installid was registered ) and an activation flag ( is the license key available ) for every license key. It will know if a license key is being used by more than one copy of the software, by tracking traffic, and will be able to refuse to register/re-register installids for that license key. It may even be able to detect a user that installs the software on 2 computers at home if they use the software on each machine regularly. Eventually each copy of the software would be calling home every day. For a week, maybe he was just fiddling around or migrating to the other computer, but if it goes on for a month, who really would believe that they were reinstalling on both computers every day for a month? Perhaps a warning message with scary legalese would be able to get Joe User to shell out another 5000 bucks to play minesweeper on the other computer.
Saw 'Grass' last night. One statistic was that the War on Marijuana cost the gubmint over 200 billion dollars from 1980 to 1998. I can damn well have a few cents of my taxes wasted on generating interesting space stories to read on the internet if certain Weeners can have 200 billion$ to waste on preventing people from getting stoned.
You don't sharpen an axe blade like you do a knife blade. That fine a point would be blunted in one or two chops. A duller blade to begin with, may not slice through trees like a ninja's sword ( as in Spies like Us ) but it will chop more trees between resharpenings, and not get stuck in the logs.
If they released it in XP prior to patenting it, I think that prior art can still be used to invalidate the patent.
Have a law that lets anyone who sends an unsolicited email collect a 100 dollar fine from anyone that buys something from them. The public would soon learn not to buy from spammers and spam would end. ( Fark.com had a link the other day to a story that said 20% of internet users buy things from spammers.. Holy shit... )
Even without tying the banking system into your electronic coinage system, there might be uses for cash as a resourse allocation system. Resources on a network could 'charge' for their use, and high priority processes would be able to pay more, ( where high priority is defined by how much service they provide the network, and hence how much 'cash' they have on hand. A service that serves up millions of clients would be able to pay more for it's data than each one of those clients.
Electronic coinage might be used to prevent leaching on P2P networks, with storage, or CPU cycles, or bandwidth earning your computer 'profits' that can be used to spend on bandwith/storage/etc from other nodes. Instead of funding supernodes with GATOR revenue, individuals with bandwidth to spare could set up nodes that charge for their services, and then sell their 'ecash' for real cash on e-bay.
Users with dialup, or with heavily download biased connections could buy the coins on EBay, or subscribe to ad servers which would let advertisers pay them ecoins to view their ads, taking a small percentage from the advertisers for themselves as a service fee. Then if you didn't want prono ads, you could subscribe to the 'Christian Ad Service' instead and get ads for glossy posters of Jesus in a revealing loincloth doing a hardcore S & M crucifixion fetish spread.
You have targeted advertising plus an incentive for people to subscribe to it.
The people writing the software should choose the following business model: People download the software, and agree to a eula that gives them a debt for the price of the p2p network software payable in ecoins. They would be charged interest only automatically by the p2p software ( like a credit card ) as their 'account' accumulates coins to collect from ( maybe obtained from some Folding@Home type thing, or for viewing tons of ads ) unless they choose to pay off the debt in full with collected ecoins. That way the 'skimming' or 'taxation' is limited to the 'price' of the software or to interest payments on it. The author becomes rich in 'valueless' ecoins that they can sell to businesses or individuals that want services from p2p network nodes for real cash.
Taxation would be one legal problem such a scheme would face. Even if you say the ecoins are valueless logical entities used merely to perform the logic required to efficiently manage p2p network resources, the truth is, that they are NOT valueless. Governments would want a piece of the action. Also, keeping track of these cash-like things that are not 'officially' cash might mean your token account database must conform to all the legal morass of being a bank. Wouldn't it be silly to end up in jail for years because Juan Valdez laundered his cocaine money as ecash or Osama bin Larden smuggled funds to his terrorists through your ecoin 'banc'?
It would certainly be wise to hide any connection these ecoins had to legal tender behind many layers of obscurity. Just show the funds as a green bar, and call it mojo or something... Maybe you'd be rich and have sold the company before the feds understood what you were doing and cracked down. Some other sucker can go to jail for banking violations or tax evasion.
Also fraud would be a problem. What do you do to prevent people from taking your money and not providing you with service, or using your service and then not paying up? Payment schemes should limit the amount per transaction and increase the number of (smaller) transactions if possible to keep losses down, but there would inevitably be service debts and ecoin debts unpaid. If you make IDs easy to get, then reputations become worthless, and if you make them hard to get, you end up doing 'collections' - expensive. Maybe some kind of mutual trust networks could be designed, but it would be complicated, and disputes would still arise, that would be a pain in the arse to resolve.
I don't pretend to understand why, but I read somewhere that the minimum energy path for a stretched ribbon leading from the ground to geosynchronous orbit is not a straight line but a spiral. ( maybe someone in the know about this could elaborate. ) But a spiral is a longer path than a straight line, and so would weigh more in terms of ribbon...
Loosely put: feed conversion. Muscle is expensive to maintain, so why would you want alot of it if food were limited as it often is where evolutionary pressures prevail.
Even the Belgian Blue beef cattle that lack myostatin mentioned in the article don't seem to have taken over the meat industry where evolutionary pressure comes from economics. 'Why not?' I wonder. Lots of lean saleable muscle meat seems ideal. But maintaining all that mass while building more might be more expensive than it is worth, fat tissue being mainly for caloric storage and muscle being mainly an engine to burn calories. Not being familiar with the beef industry I couldn't do more than guess. I would guess that female beef cattle breed until their calving output decreases to where it makes more sence to slaughter them ( though they might be tough at that age.. ) I know excess male dairy cattle are often sold for beef.. I imagine a myostatin deficient animal would not produce as much milk as a breed built with a more miserly metabolism.
Then again, maybe Belgian Blues would be quicker to bring to a slaughterable weight... A younger animal might be more tender, and not suffer from mass maintenance problems. A fleet of Belgian Blue Cows producing calves like hotcakes which were slaughtered earlier than normal steers might be economic.. I dunno..
I will check gmail out when it is generally available, but I don't want spam from anyone including google.
With all those nukes, if your aim was killing as many humans as possible, I bet you could get to 30-50% without breaking a sweat, and maybe even go as high as 70%. You will have a hard time killing all the very rural, spread out primitive folks. The surface of the earth is pretty big after all. You might be able to leverage your arsenal by targeting food and water producing areas with especially dirty bombs, and by taking prevailing winds/weather conditions into account in order to dust large swathes of only moderately densely populated areas. Of course one would turn all major cities into glass if their aim was pure bodycount.
I've *NEVER* applied a security patch to my home linux machine, and it is no doubt vulnerable to tons of exploits. My home linux security practices are comparable to diving into a cesspool with an open wound, however, I have NEVER had a virus/worm/whatever on that machine.
The windows partition by contrast, requires 'sterile technique' to avoid immediate contamination, and still gets sick from time to time. Windows is like an OS with AIDS, or maybe it's more like the 'boy in the bubble'. To install, first you have to build a plastic firewall with HEPA filters and autoclaves for everything entering or exiting, and then the OS will only survive if you maintain positive pressure inside the bubble to keep out 'germs'.
Potato blights can wipe out entire crops of cloned potato plants, but non-cloned heirloom varieties are not suceptible. You can grow them, and have a better defense against disease than any remedies or blight epidemic control techniques ( like burning crops ) could ever provide. Sure some disease might be able to kill your strain of potatos, but you aren't likely to catch it from the clone-growing farmer next door. You aren't likely to catch it at all.
It would eventually look like a relic from an advanced but long since defunct civilization. The fact that the civilization that produced the rotting behemoth is ours, kinda gets you thinking about our own possible demise...
Yeahbutt, I can send mail w/o an smtp server that will *probably* get delivered ( unless *their* mail server was down ). If the recipient can tell who sent it, than so can the free smtp provider who can then add the appropriate headers to allow it to be traced back to me ( Is there such a Hop log as part of SMTP? An 'open relay' that told on the originator doesn't seem like a security hole. You can always find out who to yell at... ) Also, there is a pop before smtp authenticate mechanism that exists, though I don't know much about it...
Well actually it would be both. You need to specify your pop3 and your smtp servers. Pedantic and IMAP aside, that's a really good idea.... I'll have to look into that...
The article said they are going to allow people to download mail to third party email clients. This is great! Yahoo seems to be saying: We don't care about the pittance we make off email banner adverts, we are willing to TRUELY GIVE you a larger mailbox than your ISP just to keep you using yahoo for other stuff.
I doubt most people will use third party mail clients anyway: Going to a web page is easy, typing in smtp.yahoo.com into an email client ( what's that? ) is 'hard'. Plus most people would be pissed if they accidentally clicked 'delete from server' and couldn't get their email at their friend's house.
Google searching email is a feature they won't be able to duplicate easily, but how useful will that really be? I for one wouldn't trust google's search algorithm to find all occurances of a string in web pages. For instance: I type A55M0NKEY ( a word that doesn't occur on the web unless I put it there ) and I do not find everything I have ever posted. If someone used 'A55M0NKEY' in a message, would google's search be guaranteed to find it? If not, then Yahoo could come up with a more-useful-for-email-searching-algorithm easily, and if it were also willing to store seperate indexes for each user privately, they would have a completely better service than GMail.
Google has been the king of search almost since it came out. News, Newsgroups, Froogle, and Images are great. The features unique to yahoo have been the ones that require a login - email, IM, chat, personals, commerce, billionsweeps.com. The search engine changes so often, it's only intermittantly useful.
Google thusfar has not required an ID for any of it's services ( except to post on groups.google.com, but most use of that is archive searching which doesn't require a login ID, who wants to reply to a 10 year old usenet thread? )
Gmail gets people to create a google login. What else do you think they will offer now that they've got you to sign in? How much of that crap will end up on their front page?
Radio listeners would not lose out on radio. There would always be something on the dial - namely whatever signal was the strongest.
But the road to hell is paved with good intentions eh? There needs to be a clear line drawn that gives you the right to refuse medical care. It should err on the side of letting nutcases continue their self destructive behavior.
You should also have the right to kill yourself. That would make it very clear where the priorities were. If someone is allowed to kill themselves, then what right does anyone have to restrict their freedoms 'for their own good'? None. It's just not NATURAL to interfere with darwinism at work by persecuting Gays or the suicidal. If there are 2 men that want to eschew women, I say Great! more for the rest of us. If there are 2 women that want to make out with each other, I say: Can I watch?
Some site sells magnetic Gay Pride bumper 'stickers' that you put on people's car for a joke.