One reason may be that the vast majority of young (very fertile) pretty women are not looking for dates online; simply because they have plenty of choices around them and therefore don't need to look in the virtual world. Males follow women in that category, wherever they are.

The author meant the users of the service, because it doesn't increase significantly the chances of meeting someone for a long term relationship, otherwise there would be less involuntarily single people out there (that's Greenspun's argument).

Our site "Spottiness.com" may serve you well, in particular the "Blackspot" section. We help people communicate anonymously and allow targets to respond. If your anonymity is paramount, you should be careful with your writing style and other clues.

Yours is a widespread feeling. The following is a blackspot to GoDaddy, from December last year, that tells a similar impression: http://www.spottiness.com/spots/PDJ5K3WR

"The following is a blackspot to GoDaddy, from December last year, that tells a similar impression: http://www.spottiness.com/spots/PDJ5K3WR "

BTW, what's with E-mailing me about this? I consider it spam, especially since it ends with "Please do not reply to this email."

If people want to write to me person-to-person, fine. I don't really want impersonal ads (the E-mail made no mention of my name, another spam tip-off) about people's products.

Live announcement here now http://www.cmu.edu/event/sept7/

"That those who do not are inclined to do so unless heavily prompted not to is curious indeed."

What a confusing way of ending an article. It would translate into Ruby to something like this:

def ascribe_mental_acuity_to_the_dead?

  true

  unless believe_in_after_life

    false if heavily_prompted_not_to_believe_in_after_life

  end

end

We are experimenting with reputation derived from complete anonymity since we believe that anonymity is required to maximize sincerity. In our current stage, we're manually moderating all the content generated, rejecting what looks fake based on common sense and intuition. If we ever generate traffic above a certain threshold then we have a mechanism where the content is validated by the creators themselves. Basically, the writers of opinions ("spots" for us) will have to evaluate other opinions before they can post their own, and a decision is made based on the number of coincidences among all the reviewers of a specific posting. We got the idea from previous work by CMU's Luis Von Ahn, in particular his (now Google's) ESP game.

These are examples of anonymous reviews about hotels that we have in our site:

A positive one => http://www.spottiness.com/spots/BHBZ8QJT

A negative one => http://www.spottiness.com/spots/RKTPXLJJ

Interestingly, they don't have the strong deceptive indicators...

"We are experimenting with reputation derived from complete anonymity since we believe that anonymity is required to maximize sincerity. "

Interesting. Where do "real name" Amazon.com reviews fit in? These make a selling point of being attributable to real people, and to me, imply sincerity, since often these reviewers seem to write reviews almost as a hobby, and often make a point of covering both good and bad aspects of a product.

There's a interesting dynamic here, since Amazon is vanishingly unlikely to harass you on the web, unlike say an ebay seller, who might well come after you if you leave anything other than a perfect review. In this case you are likely to be anonymous as far as everyone but the seller is concerned, yet being sincere may carry some risk to your own ebay account.

Amazon is a good example where "real name" reviews cause a bias towards positive reviews. I believe that most people are reluctant to write negative reviews if their real names are associated with it, even if the fairness of the review is not in question. Negative reviews always put a negative halo on the reviewers, so good reviews are overwhelmingly more common. Curiously in our site, where anonymity is a requirement, also the positive reviews dominate by far, which is indicating that there's much more good than bad in the world. Cool!

"in our site, where anonymity is a requirement, also the positive reviews dominate by far, which is indicating that there's much more good than bad in the world"

Or indicates a lot of fake reviews or something in between.

You mean a lot of "positive" fake reviews, in which case people tend to fake positive opinions much more than negative ones. Definitely better than the opposite...

Seasteading by Patri Friedman: http://seasteading.org/mission/intro

The debate below the article is very interesting.

I voted up your posting, but please use the original title "New leukemia treatment exceeds 'wildest expectations'". The HIV part is pretty irrelevant.

To me the use of a harmless, modified HIV was the most interesting part.

Thing is, even if the HIV were as deadly as regular HIV, it'd likely give them a longer lifespan than they'd have without it.

At the risk of infecting someone else?

Of course, it'd create that risk.

You can expect to live for a decade or two at more or less your current lifestyle until near the very end, while with aggressive forms of cancer we're talking more about months of extreme pain and suffering.

If you (a) use protection and (b) are taking medicine as prescribed, however, even the risk of infecting someone else isn't that high. Your viral load remains very low; I remember a study in Switzerland that suggested that two HIV-discordant monogamous partners engaging in anal sex aren't at significant risk of seroconversion even without a condom, if the HIV-positive partner uses his drugs at prescribed and there aren't compounding factors like STDs. Which isn't to say it's a good idea.

It's definitely a trade I'd make in a second, though. Then again, I've seen people waste away from leukemia and not from AIDS, so my perspective is admittedly skewed.

Edited to add: that study is most definitely not a license to have unprotected sex with someone who has HIV. Just to be clear.

the Nature has perfected the viruses as effective delivery system of genetic material ("DNA patches") into cells. We just need to produce correctly working "patches". Another example:

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/smnrescue.htm

Me too, I'd like to know whether a consensus exists that this HIV is harmless or whether it's just these researchers' opinions.

The HIV is used to modify white blood cells .. so I'd wager harmless as they are not putting the HIV into the patient.

This is why I changed the title after a little nudge, to avoid people getting the wrong end of the stick.

I haven't studied the details of the vector they used, but as a general comment HIV is a very well-understood virus, so removing its potential to infect a human should be easy to do in theory. Practice is another matter, since molecular biology is quite messy.

Makes sense. Changed.