What is to prevent me from disabling the technical device so that I can get my pellet of rat food?
It's not prevention. It's increasing the cost. If the startup cost of going to CNN is about the same as the startup cost of pulling out a book on my stack of books to read, and I prefer the second to the first, this will mean I always choose to read a book rather than go to CNN. However, without this fix, then going to CNN is cheaper, and so I might choose it.
Having to disable it- assuming that takes as long as the startup of something you want to do more- serves the same function.
The alt text of today's xkcd reads:
Anyone have ideas about how to implement this? On Firefox one can always use LeechBlock. On *nix systems there would be a number of ways of implementing this, but not all of us use that OS or have the necessary savvy.
(I'm kind of surprised no one's made a discussion post on this yet.)