My first thought was that if Apple was granted this patent, they could force AT&T to allow tethering on iPhones, a feature Apple would love to provide but which AT&T blocks. Course, they'd be making AT&T angry but with their huge market share AT&T probably would just have to put up with it.

Course, it could also be used as a weapon against any other phone manufacturers, either to prevent crippling (but to what purpose?) or else get a piece of the pie from every carrier that blocks and then sells back features.

This encroachment of freedom you describe is fearmongering. It doesn't need to happen. Has this happened in any other country with universal healthcare? I think I would have heard of it if it had. This is a classic slippery slope argument that has no basis in fact. Come back when the government is seriously considering food-control collars that measure your food intake.

Here's a little additional perspective on that as well. Why do people eat junk food? Why are foods filled with nasty preservatives and thick with sugars? Why do people eat and eat and eat? Why do people smoke cigarettes? Why do people keep coming back to foods that make them sick? Why do people become alcoholics? All of these are results of some weakness or lack of education. Do you think this is the state people want to be in? Do you think someone wants to be a fat smoking alcoholic? Do you think someone wants to be drained of energy and feel sick all the time?

Government should step in with education and industry control. Just look what happened with trans-fat. It was unhealthy but cheap and so all these food makers used it. But eventually the FDA recognized as being terrible for your health and the government mandated labeling. Instantly the food makers switched to other kinds of fats that didn't affect your health poorly. What did you lose? Did you lose your freedom there? And if you say YES, are you really sad that you're not getting more sick eating the same foods?

Is it a violation of your freedom that there's no arsenic in your food? Please.

The first idea that springs to mind would be for NASA to have a contest to see who could provide a modern online contest idea submission form. Having the "Call For Prize Concepts" and "Entry Form" as linked Word files that need to be edited with your ideas, and then attached to an email with a specific subject line is not very high-tech or open. Word is popular but not everyone has it.

What is the chance that our own probes have seeded life on Mars?

If bacteria is discovered that is the same as bacteria here, could we prove that it didn't come from Earth?

That's not how the gateway effect works. It's actually quite simple. When someone smokes pot for the first time and finds that they are in a pleasant, dreamy place where their imagination is empowered, food tastes amazing, and music is incredible, they realize that they have been lied to by people who told them "drugs are bad, mmkay?" And if somehow pot didn't turn them into a maniacal junkie sitting in a pool of vomit as they were led to believe, then what else were they lied to about?

That's it. That's the entire gateway effect. It's a realization that you've been lied to, and the curiosity that comes naturally from that.

I applaud and agree with most of your post. My only point of contention is that while I think you're right in that starvation models wouldn't exist if the audience didn't want and accept it, the audience has been indoctrinated into the beliefs that make them want it long ago. When growing up, women are presented again and again with these cultural "facts" - that skinny woman do better and are more attractive. It's everywhere. And once that belief is established, then we end up with the codependency. Where it all started is a good question, but at this point it's a self-generating cycle.

In other words, if you had a woman who grew up today without ever having seen fashion ads or magazines or shows, and asked her to choose which picture of a woman she liked the most, she'd probably choose the one that looks most normal rather than the one that looks closest to starvation.

This is a terrible idea. Someone wearing this will feel that they are owned, that they are property, that they are watched and not trusted. Parents who would use this have a problem, either in that they watch the news too much and believe the world is a very dangerous place, or that they have an adversarial and overly controlling relationship with their kid, at which point you give up all pretense of having a good relationship and enter into a nasty tug-of-war that will last until the kid is 18 and flees the parents forever.

My parents would have used this on me. My mom believed the world was a dangerous place, with evil lurking around every corner. Both my parents had trust issues even though I was an ideal student, never got in trouble, and was always trustworthy and dependable. And if they had shackled me with something like this, my eventual rebellion would have been a thousand times worse.

What you are suggesting is that the defendant is guilty until proven innocent. The accusation alone is enough to halt their business and take down their site. This should only happen if a court determines that there is a violation.

Also, perjury doesn't matter at all here - if someone is alleging a copyright infringement, then that needs to be investigated. Both the plaintiff and defendant can believe that they are in the right, and make claims in line with this, but if they're wrong, it's not perjury.

IANAL

I had a similar experience. When we got our first Series 1 Tivo, it changed everything. I never watched TV before because no way was I going to plan my evening around show times. But now I could discover great shows and watch them on my time. Not only that, but Tivo's interface was slick and intuitive and reminded me of something Apple would design. It was quick, responsive, had no ads, and just did the trick. I think it was $100-200 and then $5/month at the time, or maybe even free.

Several years later we moved. We had to decide between DirecTV which we loved but who had just broke ties with Tivo and the nearly universally-despised Comcast that worked with Tivo. We tried out the DirecTV DVR and it was just atrocious. It made no sense, and it broadcast TV and commercials with sound while you were in the menus. Unfortunately, by then it was the era of Series 3 HD Tivo, which was like $600-$800 and then $15/month or something ridiculous.

The price came down to $400 at one point and we bought it. And while it's still far better than the DirecTV option, it's buggy as hell. The sort of polished quality is missing in all the new areas. There are long delays and black or flashing colored screens between menus, unresponsive delays for 5 or more seconds when you press buttons sometimes, then buffering the button presses to release to a slew of incorrect selections. Thankfully it's still built on a solid core from when they cared about quality, but it strikes me every time I use it how they let it slide. They've built new features that look good on the box, but they're not doing a good job of it. And then there are the ads. Not terrible, but distracting. And you're paying a lot more for a worse system with more ads. I'd go back to the Series 1 but Series 3 is your only choice for HD.

It's still the best option from what I've seen, but they're making it a lot easier for others to catch up.

I guess you could call ignoring most grammatical and spelling rules "bold".

That's quite a rosy way of looking at it. I'll have some of what she's having.

There's a new trend in WoW of price-fixing. People go to the Auction House, buy up all the valuable items, and put them back on at massive-inflated prices. It's been happening more and more in the last few months, and now it's almost constant. The only time you can buy affordable, useful gear on the AH is when you beat the price-fixers to it. I don't know if it's people looking for gold or gold farmers, but it increases the demand for buying gold offsite because it's nearly impossible to afford the gear you need.

That and spelling out gold farmer's domain names in dead bodies across popular areas - it's a constant battle to keep up with all the ways people will try to make money off of a MMO

I'm going to throw out my billion-dollar idea, in hopes that it gets made, because I don't have the connections to make it happen:

It's a new video game system based on Augmented Reality. You wear these special goggles that show you the world around you, but it's altered in real time. That cardboard tube in your hand becomes a sword, other players appear dressed in armored suits. Creatures float around the actual landscape around you. You play IN THE REAL WORLD with and against projected objects, people, and monsters. Course, it would make problems with Wiimotes look trivial in comparison. But play environments could be set up that could become futuristic areas, dungeons, other worlds, spaceships, bubbly worlds of goo, etc - much like a laser tag arena. The game machine would project whatever is needed onto the physical countours.

Even beyond games, the possibilities are endless. Imagine having someone you hate blacked out, or strange trippy visual effects on everything you see, or having whatever you're looking for lit up brightly, or flipping the picture until your sight adjusts (it will! and then when you take it off, everything will be upside down for a time). It could be used for training purposes or therapy or strange mental trips.

So there it is. Who will make it?

Hmm.. that seems kind of familiar. I've discovered a treatment for something. Nobody knows what I have, so I've had to do my own reseach for years, and found something that helps immensely. The symptoms are the wide range of those of chronic fatigue syndrome and aspergers seems to fit the profile as well. What it comes down to is a very unusual allergic reaction. One has a huge number of allergies, but no allergy symptoms. Clear sinuses, no sneezing, no itching. INSTEAD the reaction is neurological. Here's how it works - histamine (H1) is the source of all the usual allergy symptoms. The body has a histamine feedback mechanism - the H3 receptor, which turns down Histamine when it gets too high but also drags down dopamine, GABA, acetylcholine, noradrenaline, and serotonin with it. My theory is that in some people (CFS sufferers, maybe Aspergers, etc etc) this H3 receptor is oversensitive, and is constantly cranking down all those essential neurotransmitters, causing lots of side effects, and never giving you any sign that you have allergies, because H1 is never allowed to get too high and show symptoms.

I wanted to test my theory, and found a H3 receptor antagonist called Betahistine. I tried it. It works like magic. It's primarily used for Vertigo, but works for this. I wonder if it would help with Aspergers.

I am not a doctor, and you probably won't find a doctor who will prescribe it for this purpose. I'm throwing this out there, though, because I hope it could help someone.

Here's a situation that the MAFIAA is going to deny happens but which is a part of this whole story. It's in a different medium, but the same idea. Last week a friend recommended a graphic novel to me: "Y the Last Man". He found it by downloading it and based on his recommendation, I went out and bought it. I can afford it and like having physical graphic novels to read. So here's a sale that can be attributed TO piracy.

I wonder what percentage of sales happen for these reasons.

I had the exact same experience. I bought the first Avatar DVD, with a plan to buy the rest. But when I put it in, it forced me to watch commercial after commercial. After about 10 minutes of this, I got fed up, boxed it back up, and returned it. My plan now is to download a pirated version that just lets me watch the show I was gladly willing to pay for.