Even better, someone should publish a *book* of them, and then *it* could be the citation. :)

You can be sure I'm never updating my copy of Social Fixer again!

I don't know anything about how RDRand works so this may be a stupid question, but would it be possible for someone to write a drop-in replacement for it?

If we're talking about a lending library, then they take away your books after 3 weeks, even IF you continue to be a member.

Our public library has something very similar running already: there are a number of ebooks and audiobooks available for 7 or 21-day loans, for free. It was kind of neat this summer when I was on vacation in another country, and still able to check out a book from the library. :)

The tighter the filter, the more people will be annoyed by it and turn it off. And if it really were strictly a porn filter, people might be too embarrassed to opt-out. Now everyone has plausible deniability: "I need to run a VPN for work" or whatever.

This idea that blocking ads is "stealing content"...very interesting. Suppose instead of blocking ads, I made a list of every company that advertised to me on the web and personally boycotted each one. Where would that fall on the ethical scale?

Mod parent up. It will be a lot easier, psychologically speaking, for people to opt-out of the filter if it's not just about porn. Also more people will be inconvenienced by it, and more people will get pissed off over it. So this is actually good news, in a perverse sort of way.

What would happen if the Bitcoin Foundation just shut down, ceased to exist? What effect would that have on the use of Bitcoins as currency? And would that satisfy the "cease and desist" order?

First, I take exception to this remark. I'm a 38-year-old straight guy (I find women WAY more attractive than men), but this sort of transparent ploy just seems pathetic to me. It is not a turn-on to see women desperately flirting with me when I know all they want is for me to buy their product. People like to talk about sexism towards men: THAT Is sexism towards men. "Oh, put a sexy lady in front of him and he'll do anything we tell him to." Ugh.

Second, did you see the numbers above? "45 percent of the entire gaming population is now women, and women make up 46 percent of the most frequent game buyers." It is *not* a male-dominated industry any more.

(I'm not even going to get into the use of women as decorative objects because someone who complains about "political correctness" isn't going to see anything wrong with that anyway, I figure.)

gtbritshskull is correct; s/he merely said that if there were a common factor (3 in my example), then you could simplify the expression, which is true: 3^3+6^3=3^5 CAN be simplified by dividing both sides by 3^3.

In general, you can divide both sides by [gcd(A,B,C)]^min(x,y,z) I believe.

D'oh, good catch. But then z=2 and the conjecture specifies that all the exponents be greater than 2.

Only if x=y=z. For instance, somebody above suggested 3^3 + 6^3 = 3^5 (27+216=243). If we factor out the common 3, we get 3^2 + 2*(6^2) = 3^4 (9+72=81), which no longer has the right form because 72 is not a power of any number.

If x=y=z, and if A^x+B^x=C^x where A,B,C had the same greatest common factor n, then you could divide all three numbers by n^x and get a new formula (A/n)^x+(B/n)^y=(C/n)^z where A/n, B/n, and C/n had no common factor, and if Beal's conjecture is true then these numbers cannot exist if x>2. Therefore A^x+B^x=C^x has no nontrivial solution for x>2, which is Fermat's last theorem.

Meh, you're exaggerating my analogy; Alice was able to call a friend on her phone and she got down from the roof just fine. And Bob could have said "No sorry, I can't hold the ladder for you," or he could have said, "I'm so sorry, but I forgot I left my oven on," or he could have shouted up the ladder, "Hey Alice, sorry but I really have to go!"

But I won't try to convince you further unless you want me to.

ALICE: "Hey Bob, will you come hold this ladder for me while I climb up on the roof, make sure it doesn't fall over."
BOB: "OK"
Bob holds the ladder, Alice climbs up on the roof. Bob gets bored and leaves, and the ladder falls over.
ALICE (on cellphone to Bob): "Hey you jerk! You left me up here on the roof! Why didn't you stay?"
BOB: "It's not like you were paying me or anything. You should be grateful that I stayed for as long as I did."

Now, how should Alice react? There probably isn't any sort of legal remedy she can take against him (just as there's no legal remedy that people have against Google for taking away their free services). But you can bet she's angry, and she's going to think twice about turning to Bob again, and she's going to warn all her friends that Bob is not to be trusted.

That's the "issue", and that's what's going on here. All free services have the potential to become an important part of somebody's life, so that taking them away can leave them up on the roof without a ladder.

I check Facebook because my extended family posts there; some of them I wouldn't be comfortable talking with one-on-one because we don't have a lot in common (and I've tried!), but I still want to know how they're doing because I love them and care about their well-being. Facebook isn't my main hangout and I rarely post there myself, but to quit FB entirely I would either have to cut myself off from my extended family a little bit, or else convince all of them (most of whom are not particularly computer-savvy) to move to another service.

It's all about where your group is at. Personally I think it's weird that people have personal conversations over Twitter: it's just a news/joke aggregator for me. And I do most of my social-media socializing on an odd little website called Plurk, because that's where my closest circle of friends have ended up.

I have a Firefox extension called Social Fixer which does great at fixing the major Facebook annoyances, but there's no such option on iOS and the in-feed ads are already pretty annoying; with videos I'll probably limit my FB viewing to the laptop.