It's just what it says: not free money. It's the opposite of a mortgage, where you get money up front, have a debt, and pay it back with interest over time. In a reverse mortgage, you start with no debt, get money over time that increases your debtb, and end up with a big debt that has to be repaid at the end of the term. In either case, the debt is secured with a lien on your house. At the end of the reverse mortgage term, you can either pay off the debt and keep the house (this might require taking out a new, standard mortgage to finance it), or they will take title to and sell the house to pay off the debt--depending on the terms, you may or may not be on the hook for the difference if the sale of the house doesn't cover the debt. This will not usually be the case anyway; the bank wants to make money.

The whole point of a reverse mortage is normally to drain your equity out of the house, which you INTEND to lose at the end of the term, while living in it or renting it out during the term.

This is different from a home equity loan or line of credit because in that case you get money up front (or a revolving line of credit) secured by the house, which you pay back over time. A home equity loan in turn is different from a mortgage because it does not finance a sale; you just get cash to use for any purpose (often to improve the house, but not necessarily). A home equity loan is like a second (or later) mortgage, in that it is subordinate to the any pre-existing mortgage or other secured debt in the house.

A reverse mortgage is different from an annuity because it has a fixed term and a fixed (or predetermined) amount of money that you get out of it over that term. If you outlive the reverse mortgage, you'll either have to refinance at great expense to pay it off, or find somewhere else to live. With an annuity, you get a guaranteed amount per month for the rest of your life, based both on the equity you have in the house and your remaining life expectancy. You enjoy possession and the rights of ownership in the house for life, then it goes to the annuity issuer when you die.

Nobody mentioned one of the main draws of Wikipedia, which is that the content is freely licensed. And it is run by a nonprofit that keeps it that way and keeps the ads away. Are experts really going to want to write authoritative, high quality articles to give away to a huge public company that profits off of advertising? Oh, they share some unspecified tiny fraction with the authors. That's nice. If my article is so great, why don't I publish it on my OWN website and then I can keep ALL the ad revenues, as well as total control over the article?

Then there is the downside to this whole "my writeup is my own and nobody else's" methodology. You sacrifice any hope of maintaining uniform standards. For this kind of project you can't expect it to just develop by itself magically into high quality. You would need to, I don't know, actually PAY people money and have real, paid EDITORS. H2g2 was mentioned as another similar website. There's also everything2.com. They both suffer from several of the same problems mentioned.

Some slightly-racy fashion shots of a 17-year old young woman in a national newspaper? Pardon me for lacking outrage. Spend some time on a college campus for crying out loud. What exactly is wrong with this? She's above the age of consent in just about every state. These photos are barely sexual, she's barely a minor, I really don't see what the deal is with all this prudery.

She looks 12? Maybe she looks like a 12-year-old who can pass as a 17-year-old. So what?

Child porn indeed. I suppose we should imprison the folks who run Myspace, all those 15-year-old belly-buttons on display are breeding child-rapists.

How very prescient of you. I don't think that instilling delusions in a kid for as long as she'll accept them is child abuse, at least when it comes to Santa Claus, but it is an odd parenting choice. What is so great about encouraging this kind of magical thinking? What purpose is there in telling some dumb kid that a fat man comes down the (nonexistent) chimney to give presents once a year on the anniversary of a baby god's birth?

I'm glad my parents never bothered me about Santa Claus mythology (although they were heavy on the Christian mythology). This kind of intentional balderdash-instillation isn't charming; it's betraying. Childhood is not about believing in magic; it's about every new experience of reality being new and magical. It's not cynical to teach your kids the difference between fantasy and reality, it's cynical to think that reality isn't fantastic enough for them.