Interestingly enough, the medical field uses an encrypted third party for medical release forms. I have personally seen more than one of these third party providers require a key and password that were both sent to the same email. They were in separate emails, mind you, but they did not require additional authentication, such as birthday, etc, that would be unavailable without access to the individual's email address.

I've did a little research in the field if immunology in college, and this theory is not only widely accepted, but is being used to help explain other common 20th century diseases.

A great example: It's been discovered that fatty tissue in individuals with obesity often have a very high number of macrophages - white blood cells - that cause a general inflammatory response, in fact a response very similar or identical to what the body would do in the case of a parasite. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC297006/)

It's also well supported that being exposed to allergens at a young age decreases your likelihood of being allergic to them later in life, as the body has time to develop an appropriate immune response while antibody production is still malleable. I.e. A child who has never touched a cat is more likely to be allergic as an adult than one who grew up with cats.

I would argue that the biggest and most effective change that saw an increase in general health and longevity in the 20th century was the widespread use of sanitary cooking and waste management. The ability to stop excrement from contaminating drinking water and food was responsible for a huge reduction in disease and especially spread of parasites.

There's an application that extends usability of trackpad functions on Macbooks running Windows, called Trackpad++ (Link)

Upon downloading for free, it is fully usable, but the owner updates the product with bugfixes and sometimes features once a week. If you don't register the product by sending the owner a donation to receive a license key, it is disabled every week (and doesn't download updates automatically). You can continue using the product, but only if you go online and download the latest version.

This has the benefit of showing off other potential goods you have on your website, giving you free advertising, in addition to forcing users to see the "purchase" button over and over again.

If a consumer doesn't like or need your product, it stops working, no loss. If he wants to test it a little longer, he can keep downloading it, until he decides to purchase or not. When he buys it he is guaranteed updates and a usable product.

I do tend to wonder, if Google Maps is so pivotal to the widespread adoption of iOS 6, would we begin to see a lot of people moving toward Android phones if Google removed their maps from the iOS App Store? I know Google Maps (and its turn-by-turn navigation) was a very important feature when considering purchasing my own phone.

Graphics card utilization is still rather far behind in OSX. There have been several tests comparing Windows and OSX for graphics card performance - such as this one (http://www.macworld.com/article/1155124/mac_windows_graphics.html). Because Linux is open source and is supported by avid enthusiasts, it is quite possible that the Linux port of Steam may begin to utilize the graphics card through the operating system more successfully than OSX does. Essentially, one shared barrier to the quality of gaming on UNIX operating systems - graphics support - is conceivably less detrimental to Linux than it is to OSX. I could see Steam for Linux surpassing Steam in a very short time. The upfront cost of the computer means that it is cheeper to get into gaming on Linux that it is on OSX, and Linux users have consistently shown (through the humble bundle) that they are willing to pay well for games.

Coal cares so much that it kills fewer people than wind power kills... birds...

And pretends to be Cowboy Neil

Maybe now I'll have a way to make money off all the weeds in my front yard. I'll finally be able to prove to the neighbors that an unkempt yard is actually worth something.

Should we not create computers with at least near human intelegence before we try to give them curiosity? It seems pretty useless to me to give a computer curiosity in the hope that humans might learn something when, at its current state, the computer could not decipher the information it is curious about. I guess we could still look to the future, but why waste this time on such things when we could be programming for the iPad?