Not an extremely important point, but I just re-read my earlier message and realized that my sentence below didn't exactly state what I meant: "I myself don't pay much attention to ratings, as my own measures of things & people tend to be quite different from most, and therefore not very useful for my purposes." I meant that the the *ratings* would not be very useful for my purposes (at least, not the ratings as I've heard proposed so far.) I probably wouldn't have the same values or concerns of those who feel the need to apply them; I wouldn't judge the material by the same standards (raters are looking principally to create a means to censor material, and I myself am not concerned about passive text&graphics. When Java applets begin to coerce cybersurfers into complicity, I'll start worrying about it.) One more word about automating ratings: The more automated that filtering becomes, so that the viewer (be it an adult or a child) requires less and less personal involvement in evaluating what is appropriate (or even interesting) for themselves, the more weak & piddly (ignorant & psychologically dependent) those people could become, falling into the habit of having others - or an automatic robocop - do their content-filtering for them. Not a good system to introduce into a dynamic world-order. Like all automatic things, it can encourage intellectual lassitude. Like all tools, this one can also be misemployed. But, of course, surfers can make a cultural decision: sex&violence? or namby-pamby? :>) .. Blanc One voice among many.