Good afternoon,
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers said it would begin negotiations with ICM Registry Inc., run by British businessman Stuart Lawley, to iron out technical issues and prices for the new Web addresses.
Adult-oriented sites, a $12 billion industry, probably could begin buying ''xxx'' addresses as early as fall or winter depending on ICM's plans, ICANN spokesman Kieran Baker said. The new pornography suffix was among 10 under consideration by the regulatory group, which also recently approved addresses ending in ''jobs'' and ''travel.''
ICM contends the ''xxx'' Web addresses, which it plans to sell for $60 a year, will protect children from online smut if adult sites voluntarily adopt the suffix so filtering software used by families can more effectively block access to those sites. The $60 price is roughly ten times higher than prices other companies charge for dot-com names.
''It will further help to protect kids,'' said John Morris, staff counsel at the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology. Morris predicted some adult sites will choose to buy ''xxx'' Web addresses but others will continue to use dot-com.
-------
You will be able to count me among those who buys the "XXX" address as soon as they are available.
Numbers tell only part of the story. Whatever one thinks of Christianity, the history of Jesus gave birth to a new, lasting vision of the origins and destiny of human life, a vision drawn from the religion's deep roots in Judaism. Everyone is created in God's image; there is, as Paul said, "neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus"; all are equal, special, worthy. In the Christian world view, says the Roman Catholic theologian George Weigel, "we are not congealed stardust, an accidental byproduct of cosmic chemistry. We are not just something, we are someone." The promise at the heart of the faith: that God, as the fourth-century church father Athanasius said, "was made man that we might be made gods."
As the search goes on for so many along so many different paths, Paul offers some reassuring words for the journey: "Be at peace among yourselves ... encourage the faint-hearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks ... hold fast what is good, abstain from every form of evil"—wise words for all of us, whatever our doubts, whatever our faith.
Good afternoon,
There has been lots of stuff all over the news here
about the possibility of the FDA lifting its ban on
silicone breast implants. During a hearing many women
gave what amounted to 12 hours of testimony pleading
with the FDA not to lift the ban. They spoke of
illnesses and deaths that had occurred allegedly
because of silicone breast implant ruptures and
leakages.
I have silicone breast implants and elected to get
silicone implants instead of saline even at the height
of the silicone breast implant hysteria here some
years ago. That was when Dow Corning and the other
implant makers were hit with huge class-action
lawsuits from women who claimed that the silicone
implants were unsafe.
My feeling is that the silicone implants made in the
last 20 years or longer are not unsafe. I have known
of women who blamed their leaking implants for their
own serious illnesses and in every case they had
received their implants before 1980. What I am going
to say next is entirely anecdotal, but it struck a
chord with me as soon as I heard it. It just seems to
have the ring of truth even though this is basically
just uncorroborated thirdhand information.
An acquaintance of mine knows a man who worked for a
company that manufactured some of the first silicone
breast implants. Those implants were put into womens'
bodies and the company realized after the fact that
the industrial-grade type of silicone (or whatever)
they were using would be very dangerous or fatal to
the recipients if the implant ever leaked and that the
design of them might allow a lot of leakages. They
quietly researched the issue and created a safer type
of silicone implant. Now, many decades later the
company will never, ever admit to this.
As I said, I know of women who became seriously ill
with peculiar afflictions they feel were due to their
silicone breast implants. In most cases they were
friends of friends of mine, all of them were dancers,
and all of them received their implants in the 1970s.
One obvious conclusion to that is that it just took a
while for their implants to leak and that those of us
who received implants in the 1990's will eventually
have leakages and illnesses too. I don't believe so
because a lot of these women were already having
health issues in the 1970s and 1980s. Plus, I
personally know other dancers whose post-1980 silicone
implants have leaked and they did not become ill. They
had to have surgery to replace or remove the implants,
of course, but they never had recurring or abnormal
medical afflictions afterwards.
These words almost seems like a waste of my typing because
everything I'm writing is based on hearsay. Even I
don't actually have substantive reason to believe what
I'm writing, but yet it all feels like the truth on
some intuitive level. So much for my contribution to
research science :)
Nothing I've written will ever be proven, but I just
can't shake the feeling that it is the truth.
-- XXOO Tanya
