True enough, but you still might run into overheating issues. Pretty much every laptop I've ever worked with has gotten pretty hot if it's left operating with it's lid down for any length of time. YMMV though (perhaps I've just dealt with oddball laptops).

Nonsense. Responding to an request, they provided a text file containing rendering instructions compliant with standards (or not, but close to compliant). End of transaction. You don't violate any of their rights by not reading their reply in the way that they expect you to.

You don't HAVE to use a browser at all to view their site. You could use wget piped to less and 'render' it in your mind's eye. Alternatively, you could use a simple (or complicated!) algorithm to render the parts that you were most interested in and suppress those parts that you were not interested in. The fact that someone else will give the webmaster money every time someone downloads the instructions and subsequently renders the ad in no way changes the fact that you are free to use your computer to process information in a manner you see fit.

From a pragmatic standpoint, I agree with you that in order to support websites that ads should be viewed, but claiming that you're required to process information the way the sender wants you to simply doesn't seem to have support.

Every drug has side effects, some more noticeable than others. The simple fact is that we don't understand human biology well enough to predict or prevent all side effects while preserving the mechanism of action of the drug. As in engineering, it is a trade off: you exchange symptomatic and pathophysiologic relief for less severe symptoms due to adverse reactions to the drug. When adverse reaction to drugs exceeds the relief granted by them, they're typically discontinued on a patient-by-patient basis. The only way to avoid all side effects is stop taking drugs until human biology advances far enough to control for them all which will never occur in our lifetime.

Isn't this basically the business model of Napster? A quick search of their website reveals the following marketing text:

for which they charge $13/month.

Better to just cite the CDC guidelines for adults:

(150 minutes a week of moderate-intensity activities OR 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity activity) + muscle strengthening 2 days / week

See http://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/everyone/guidelines/adults.html

Agreed, but until the laws are rewritten so that they would reasonably be enforced 100% of the time, it's probably not a good idea to push for 100% enforcement of laws that were written at a time when that simply wasn't possible.

I agree with you that increasing efficiency would ideally end up being a good thing. My primary objection is that the laws are not written to be enforced 100% of the time. Should every single person who exceeds the speed limit by 1 mph even for a few seconds get a ticket? Should every jaywalker get ticketed every time even when there is no traffic to speak of? I'm not too keen to see either of these happen.

Efficiency in law enforcement is great, but I'm not sure the efficiency of our policy makers in writing reasonable laws has quite caught up with our new technological abilities to enforce the law.

I've noticed that this is often brought up when discussing drug companies. I'm never quite sure what to make of it. The often efficient properties of capitalism notwithstanding, isn't the need to deploy money into advertising an inefficient aspect of a competitive economic system rather than some evil aspect of Big Pharma?

Perhaps I simply don't see a more elegant solution, but it seems that in order to eliminate the need for marketing in drug development competition would need to be eliminated (perhaps by the creation of some national or international regulatory authority?), but I haven't often heard people suggesting that be done. Thoughts?