...recent Western culture has shown that a higher percentage of men have become fathers in the past few generations than before that.

As more and more males become adjusted to the instant high of popular culture, we'll just return to the times when a tinier percentage of men were having all the babies.

Marriage is already on a decline, in some races good husbands are hard to find so women have more biracial babies, and the powerful men won't stop spreading their seed.

Does it matter to me if the weak male class doesn't have kids? Hell no -- and they make good employees, too. Maybe better ones.

50% of your body hasn't wasted away by the time you turn 35. You're lucky if the opposite doesn't happen.

They never said:

1. Unlimited speeds
2. Unlimited data

The term "unlimited" is from the AOL-centric dial-up days where you had a limited amount of connection hours.

Unlimited still means *unlimited connection time*.

It's been discussed before. Read your TOS and the fine print on advertising.

Primes have no patterns, so why not just map sounds/beats to prime numbers?

I have two B&N nooks, and I've always been able to share any of the books I buy with friends.

There's a limitation (8 weeks or something), and you can't loan the same book to the same friend twice.

I can also "check out" books from my local library via their website, and I've done that before trips where I won't have good Internet coverage.

How does B&N get away with being able to do it, but Amazon can't?

If they would let the developers choose to add sponsored results within the map (with a category to pick so as not to compete), maybe they can offset the price.

I wouldn't have a problem if my map showed Taco Bell or Red Box locations.

Of course, I guess the app or website could filter the sponsored results out, but I'm sure Google's smart spiders and human TOS verifiers could detect it and remove the free access. If only 0.35% of their API users are affected, it's not like they've got that much work to confirm proper TOS compliance.

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

I think a lot of a woman's security has to do with city and neighborhood, too. I have a few friends who are college educated or better and who also have entered the amateur porn field (here in Chicago there are plenty of jobs and they pay well) -- none of them feel the least bit afraid of stalkers and fans. One gal I know has been performing mostly solo work (full nudity, though) and she has guys come up to her at bars and during the day and are all really nice.

On the other hand, practically EVERY waitress I know who works a late shift (diner or bar) has people follow her home -- even in the dead of Chicago's winter.

Dr. Sbaitso? Is that you???

I spit out a solid half finger of good Scotch whisky at that.

Haven't laughed this hard in weeks.

Good work.

I run a little private forum where my friends and their friends can post businesses that offer Groupons so we can avoid them.

I thought about creating a free smartphone app that let's you check if a business ever ran a deal with a daily deal site. I don't do daily deals -- and I expect full service at a full price.

I run a print shop and we constantly need to snag installers for old software that is no longer supported by the manufacturers. One example RIP program that we use (and paid over $5000 for, mind you) no longer works with the dongle key that came with it.

So we traveled over to the dark side of the software world and snagged a great cracked copy. Works wonders. A year later our install was corrupted and we lost the installer, so I went back and downloaded it again (thanks, MegaUpload!). No issues.

Today, we lost our install again, went back to the forum to grab the link and MegaUpload had nuked it because the copyright owner asked to remove it. Thankfully I found a USB key from a year ago with the installer and we're back in service -- "pirating" software I've already paid $5000 for plus around $3000 for all the annual support subscriptions. The copyright owner, who has little reason to actively attack this old software, still spends time trolling the bootleg forums to specifically find these links.

And that's how it will continue to be -- companies with high cost software definitely troll the many bootleg forums to report to the content sharing hosts and have the ISOs removed. This said software is probably 10 years old (older?), and is sub-par compared to all the modern apps available. Yeah, I should probably get a new license and upgrade, but we're using it on a 12 year old printer that we run maybe twice a month, and it works just fine with the old software I paid for and want to run.

Hopefully, TPB does a better job at UX/UI versus MegaUpload and RapidShare, who have some of the most annoying interfaces imaginable.

16bits per channel is really important.

I own some print shops, we take artist original prints and paintings and produce reproductions, a la Giclée. We scan as high res as possible, with as many bits per color channel as possible.

Since no scanner is eprfectly color accurate, we do some post production work in Photoshop. 8bits per channel does bring some loss to saturation, contrast and gradients during post production. 16 bits per channel lessens these effects.

Do we use 32 bits? Almost never, but it does come in handy in *rare* instances. Recently we had to scan a painting with metallic inks. 32 bits per channel actually allowed us to properly map the metallic colors to our metalic ink on our printer.

Look how much has changed in 100 years, in 10 years, even in 1 year.

Things change quickly. There is no way to predict anything that will happen in 20 years properly when it comes to technology, which is driven by (1) warfare, (2) government research, (3) input costs versus need. I'm against 1 & 2, but in terms of technology chasing either speed or efficiency, we've been more focused on speed than on efficiency because energy is so damned cheap, and it's likely to stay cheap for the time being.

As long as energy is cheap, our focus will be on doing things faster or better, but not more efficiently, except where there is a financial incentive to.

If energy costs start to go up in a significant way, research will focus more on efficiency than on speed or quality.

For years I've wanted a simple, scriptable home automation system. I've played with all of the systems out there, but without smart outlets and smart meters, the systems are useless. Why aren't there smart outlets and smart meters that actually work? There's no need -- energy is cheap and easy to get.

This is fearmongering, pure and simple.