Having kids in the computer age presents a lot of challenges that parents didn’t have to deal with years ago. Among them is the fact that hard core pornography is just a couple of clicks away. Depending on your operating system of choice there are zillions of programs you can buy to “filter web content”, but a parent has to shell out for the program, get it installed, then configure it, and it only works for the computer on which it was installed. There is a simpler way to block content, which will work for all computers on your “network” (all the computers in your home or business), which can be managed at a single place, and will even provide reports on what sites are being blocked which is completely free and fairly easy to set up.
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I’ve been poking around a bit on Prison Planet lately, thats a website run by Alex Jones, a radio talk show host who has been described as a “paleoconservative” whatever thats supposed to mean. Paleo means old, so I assume it’s being used to create a distance from the “neocons” (meaning New Conservatives) who were neither new nor really conservative in the first place. The first story I ran into over there was titled Louisiana Cops Plan for “End of the World” Scenario which goes on to describe how the program includes access to a .50 caliber vehicle mounted machine gun to help put down looters and rioting in the event of a crisis. I got a little further into the article and it is suggested that cities across America are beginning their own war training in preparation for the coming apocalypse in 2012. No, not the fabled Mayan end of the world, this refers to a prediction by a “futurist” named Gerald Celente.
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I’ve been interested in Pompeii from an early age, ever since I first read about how the Roman town had been buried by an eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD and that archaeologists were revealing it bit by bit just as it had been thousands of years ago. Images of the macabre body casts of the eruption’s victims were terrifying and compelling to me at the same time. The 1972 film Pink Floyd at Pompeii made a perfect soundtrack to my early investigations, and the images of the band set up in the otherwise empty ampitheatre were haunting.

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I noticed a few days ago that Facebook search was no longer returning anything from their own service, only the web. In other words, if you search for something in the search field, you’ll get a bunch of items out on the web that match your terms but no facebook pages. I’ve found a bunch of other folks have noticed the problem, but there hasn’t been any official word from Facebook about a problem as far as I can dig up.

I tested in FF and IE, and interestingly actually got a return when I clicked on “Pages” in IE *once* for some things, but couldn’t make it work again.

Great article in the NY Times magazine today examining the question of Christianity in education as the Texas State Board of Education weighs various petitions for modifying the curriculum. On the one hand arguments are made that the ’separation’ clause has been misused to totally remove any discussion of religion as a motivation in the founding of the US, while on the other that Christian factions are attempting to rewrite history and cast the founders as Christian fundamentalists. Why should we care, it’s only Texas? Simple, schoolbooks get rewritten based on how this very populous state decides to portray American history.
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