Lol no, but seriously I could tell you stories... One hospital I worked at had to go so far as to outright ban cell phones in the OR...

Kind of like the esophagus did... the trick was finding it again.

As for your second paragraph - I know. I was bored and I felt like posting. It was a... long day.

The truth is none of it makes any difference at all. In the long run, we are all dead.

[citation needed] I can give you plenty of examples where sports have outright killed and injured people. There's no case to be made for sedentarism but there is also mounting evidence against excessive exercise too. As usual the best path is moderation.

Yes, because if there is anything the world needs, it's MORE children. Besides, look around you. By your argument only jocks get to breed. I'd say you're mistaken.

Define "bad" please? Do come up with the one definition that we can all agree on. Or how about you butt out of people's lives? What difference will your opinion make in 5000 years? If people want to waste their time then more power to them. It's their time to waste, after all. Life is more than slaving away to make someone else rich or staring at a sunset or a flower. What we choose to do (or not do) with our time is what defines us as individuals.

It's a time-sink. There's a market for it, and Blizzard (and others) merely capitalize on this. It's really not up to anyone to question what someone else chooses to do with their time. Would you rather he be getting drunk every night at a bar and then driving home? Or hitting on your wife? People need their little things, it's what makes them feel that their life belongs to them.

Less revenue, stronger brand. No one likes a cheater. There is such a thing as a bad customer and you want to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

Makes me wonder how I managed a 16 hour surgery the other day without ever getting bored or distracted (kind of hard to do when the patient is trying so hard to die on your table). I guess that sort of thing is not accounted for in terms of length of attention span, or if it is, then god help us because between the anesthesiologist, my colleague, myself and the instrument nurse I think we skewed the average for the year and the "real" value is on the order of a second or so...

Seriously this kind of study is just BS, a make believe study designed to prove some particular point or other the marketing department wants to make. I'll wait for the peer reviewed version (and even then I'll reserve judgement).

Unlike what Hollywood thinks not all problems are solved simply by running across a border. Have you ever: tried to get a passport for a minor without the other parent's signature? tried to travel as the sole parent of a minor? tried to enter a country as the sole parent of a minor? And assuming you made it to that "other country", not paying your child support is a crime pretty much everywhere. If that country has extradition treaties then you're coming right back to jail and even if it doesn't you won't be welcome by the foreign government. The only cases where parents have been able to get away with keeping their kids out of the US have been when the kid was born outside the US and the American parent wanted the kid back. Heck even the US gave Elias Gonzales back to Cuba...

Unlike rats in an infamous experiment where they are offered a choice between being stuck in a cage drinking regular water or stuck in a cage drinking heroin laced water, we do not have a choice of just a CGI orgy of mindless violence and destruction (Mad Max actually lost any semblance of a plot about 5 minutes into the first movie and never found one again) or Woody Allen. Fortunately there are other choices available to us like suicide, or avoiding the movies entirely.

Ads are immoral. In fact the whole advertising business is immoral, based on nothing but speculation, greed and lies. If what you are hawking over the internet is so devoid of value that you can charge for it and pay your bandwidth costs directly then I have no interest in what you offer. Besides that's a lie. No one has ads to "pay the bandwidth". The ads are "to make me money".

Later I'll write to the author and try to explain to him why marketing an anti-procrastination device to procrastinators is a bad idea. Right after I finish

It's a private school that receives federal funding, federal loans and federal grants. If you don't want the feds to have a say then give back the money. Notwithstanding, law applies to private as well as public entities. If discrimination can be proven to a judge or jury it matters not one bit that Harvard is a private school. You think only a government employer can't refuse to hire you because you're gay, for example? The only reason it's easier to ignore the law for private institutions is because usually it's much harder to compile statistics on their policies.

Yes it's that old argument that "x" is only bad when used against us.

Just because you've only seen three answers so far doesn't mean that there are only three answers. Unless of course you stop looking.