ICANN Haz .xxx Domain?

Good luck finding someone who has used the Internet for a while and hasn't stumbled into some sexually explicit content. The new .xxx top level domain that ICANN has approved gives further credibility to the porn industry. The only way that I would ever be in favor of creating a red light district on the Internet is if there were a way to completely eradicate sexually explicit content everywhere else. If that were possible, all someone would have to do is download a web filter, filter .xxx domains, and pick a garbage password and forget it. Problem solved, you'll never see Internet porn again! Children would be protected, and marriages would not fail because of Internet pornography viewing. The beauty of the Internet is that no government currently has the ability to regulate it, but the problem with that is no one can enforce "law" making moving all that objectionable content to .xxx domains impossible. Therefore I will NEVER be in favor of a red light district. The .xxx domain speaks only of the depravity of the human race.

Social Media: My Conversion

I just read "Here Comes Everybody" by Clay Shirky. It is a terrible book and horribly repetitive, but it convinced me embrace social media and stop hating it. The most important idea that stuck in my mind after reading it is that personal restraint has to be a part of social media. The public nature of social media exposes the author in ways they never have been before. What they write is available to the whole world and is not likely to go away any time soon. Where does your Facebook status go when you post it? Facebook's servers, i.e., out of your control forever. Anyone interested in learning about you now knows that you think your cat is adorable.

I have always seen social media as blogs with no substance or grammatical correctness, the Wild West of the Internet where anything goes because there are no rules. Facebook statuses like "chilin wit my homies" make me cringe because they are completely unnecessary! The only people that care about my status updates are the "homies" I'm "chilin wit". Social media is a way for an individual to publish for a audience that is genuinely interested in their life, but the broader audience of the Internet must always be considered. You might think that your boss is an idiot, and it might be important to your immediate audience to know about it, but remember that what you say is very public despite any illusion of privacy. Find your niche, be creative, have fun, express your unique perspective! Show the world the best of yourself, but be responsible.

Interview from The Green Show - Rouge Sys Admins

Show Us Your Papers!

The entertainment industry needs to find other ways to monetize their products or change their business model to cope with the new challenges the internet has produced. They have replaced fair use with Gestapo tactics trying to put themselves on your computer and tell you what you can and can't do with your legally purchased media. Instead of suing alleged pirates tracked through sketchy ISP traces, they should be focusing on developing good content that people want to purchase in high quality format. I watched a poor quality version of the third Narnia movie a few days ago and it was great! Has the movie studio lost anything from me? Absolutely not! Despite my distaste for the industry, I'm going to purchase the Bluray when it is released and I'll probably pick up a copy of Inception too. (I watched it at a friend's house. It was awesome!) I'll purchase a good product because I enjoy having high quality things, but I'll use it in my own way within fair use. To the entertainment industry: Deal with it.

Women in the Workplace

I believe that men and women should get all of the education they can. Men should be educated so they can be good providers for their families and women so they can raise their children. Therefore, women should only study cooking, sewing, child development, and family dynamics. Absolutely not! Those are all fine things to study but engineering, math and the hard sciences are too. If America needs a new generation of engineers to compete with developing nations, then no one would be better to raise them than mothers that have hard science degrees. I love it that my wife will have degrees in Civil Engineering and Mathematics because I intend to instill in my children a desire to pursue an education in the hard sciences. I have seen the influence a good mother has on children and it is worth much more to me than an extra salary. There are some women in the workplace that should be in the home until their children are raised properly. Work will always be there, but children will not.

Not Your Grandma's Internet

Technology and electronics have become far too diverse for one person to participate actively in every area. I feel like the old fart of the computing world because I don't care about social networking and can't play games on my phone.  Sure, I built my wicked fast desktop, and I've got more monitors than you can shake a stick at, but no gadgets. I was pretty slick learning to type in 8th grade, but my little brothers have been pwning me in video games since they were 6. It's kind of like high school where there are 30 clubs and you can realistically only join 2 or 3. As more people join the tech community even more niches will develop and hardware and software will be developed to support them. Our little world will continue shrinking and diversifying, and there isn't anything you can do about it. People stick to their own interests and groups in real life and they will increasingly do the same thing online. The only thing you can do is find your group and learn to enjoy the ride.

Genealogy: The Slippery Slope to Robot Domination

Long ago---the 1970s---genealogy was done by looking through family archives and visiting cemeteries in foreign countries linking deceased relatives. Genealogists could only dream of an easier way. Today the old tactics are still valuable, but searching enormous databases of extracted data from immigration records, birth and death certificates, marriage licenses and other legal documents is much more efficient. Computers have not yet been taught to make the connections between names and records that humans can, but they will be. To us that doesn't seem as remote or ridiculous as the idea of searchable databases did to people in the 70s. When computers can do that work, people will not be surprised and will return to looking through cemeteries trying to make the most difficult links. Well, until we find a way to make computers do that too. "I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords."