CaptainTux

Government and technology is ALWAYS a bad mix!!!!!The government gave us the DMCA which restricts legitimate reverse engineering for the purposes of engineering and understanding how things work. the goverment missed the boat and charged MS with the wrong crime. The State of California wanted to remove gmail's ad technology across the board which would have removed the technology that drives spam filters and net nannies that make the web safer, I could go on. What politicians do not know about technology could fill every crater in the moon.

You are my hero and I think it is important for other parents to follow your example. I get tired of the whining "The kids know more about the computers than I do!" Most parents are one community college or park district class away from enlightenment,

Your husband meant well, as this Bishop and many teachers and schools do when it comes to myspace. They have become victims of misinformation and something known as FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). The problem is not being addressed, I am not even sure the symptoms are being addressed. What is the MAIN problem (along with a sub problem)? The main problem is that teenagers are divulging personal information and falling prey to predators. Now comes a followup question that I do not here the press, ministers, teachers, or parents asking...why is this happening? I know, the internet task force officers I work with know, and the predators know. The kids want to be heard and listened to and recognized, unfortunately, only the wrong people are listening. I wonder what would happen in homes if parents would read their child's blog before having it deleted. A blog is nothing more than a place where you share your interests and thoughts and what you feel to be the essence of you. As an adult I use myspace for marketing and I use it in a similar fashion as MBASS, I am sharing a hobby with fellow enthusiasts and it is an easy way to reach out to fellow hobbyists around the world. As one who councils parents on the dangers of the Internet, I cannot believe I am about to defend myspace, but here goes... Does anyone in the church have cable tv? Direct TV? You got pay per view...you may not use it, but it is there. You have to make choices as to what you will watch on TV. In myspace, the choices are even greater. You have to make choices in how you present yourself in your profile, you have to make choices as to who you choose to be your myspace friends, you have to make choices as to what you will say on your blog and what blogs you will view. This is the same as life at work or the gym...you can hang with good people or bad people and you can say wholesome things or filth...myspace controls nothing you view or say..you do. In this case..he is wrong. No, falling o temptation leads one away from righteous living. You can fall to temptation on myspace, at the mall, at school, in the back seat of a car, or in front of the television. I would ask why there are not more youth pastors helping the youth take back the web? A youth group myspace account? One that does not tolerate garbage and will report to myspace and the authorities the behavior they see? We are called to be a salt to the earth and to let out light shine...why do we run and hide from the www? 0 for 2. If I go to google images, I am one word and one click away from porn, if I have my remote control in my hand, I am about 3 clicks away. From this very site I am a few clicks of the mouse away. There are people on this forum that have myspace accounts and there is no porn on them. Strike 3. I can find no official myspace (owned by FOX) documentation encouraging same sex gender....there are people on blogs doing such...I also see it advertised on tv for Girls Gone Wild and tv shows and in bars.He has shown people talking on thier blogs about things they like..the things they like are sinful. With little effort I cn find people saying wholesome things on myspace as well. On this very forum we have secret passwords and nemes that are not our own....I just looked at my drivers license and my name is not Captain Tux. As far as codes...the Internet has always had those. LOL, ROFL, IMHO, POS, etc etc etc. It is lingo, nothing more. Is LDSTALK with its free membership and no means of verification harboring dishonesty? I mean, the forums do have secret passwords and codes. As a parent, I can join myspace or any forum. I will give him this one. However, I will say that this is not much more different than jr high and HS. You try to find the right clique and be the most popular and be the BMOC. To be popular, kids will smoke, ingest, say things, and dress in ways that are not reflective of who they are. That is where parents have to lay the foundation of a strong sense of self in our kids so they do not feel they need to do these things and choose friends wisely and judiciously. This has never happened before. I mean, I have never seen teenagers in mini skirts, wearing too much make up, piercing tongues, and wearing low cut jeans before. Forgive the sarcasm, but teens dressing and behaving inappropriately is nothign new, but something we should be concerned about. Removing myspace will not change the closet. High School has been doing this for years. TV and Hollywood have as well. Kids here swear words all the time. Will they say them? Will they associate with those who use vulgar language? Having a myspace account does not mean the child is participating in profanity or using profanity. So, it can compromise social and employment chances? In the same way, it can also enhance if they have blogs talkign bout the community service they do and they have friends who are online saying.."Yeah, helping clean up the park district grounds after the fourth of July was great! The park people took notice of us...it was almost as kewl as when we helped out at the retirement home!" Employers and colleges might see that attitude as a plus. It is not the posting..it is what is posted. As far as the predators using info..I cannot argue that that is a concern and one to be taken seriously...on myspace, aol, yahoo, even here. Hmmm...well, if a bishops daughter is a stripper, she can be found out by a member of the church going in to get a lapdance. It is hard to accidentally come across a teens myspace blog. You really kinda gotta look for it. It is easier to see how a leaders daughter dresses at the mall or the son of a leader makes the local police blotter for underage drinking. Do we caution our children to not go to bad parties and engage in promiscuity or to dress properly because we are raising responsible children and adhering to our duty as a piritual leader of our family...or are we concerned about our street cred? This last point bugs me. Sorry. Look, I am not defending myspace. It has its problems. Myspace is not the problem though. Remove myspace and something else will fill the vacuum and nothing will be won or changed. Hearts need to change. Parents need to be aware of what the kids are doing. Kids need to be responsible. Predators need to be punished. You cannot stand in front of a soda machine and block access saying it is bad for you and not at least offer a juice machine. Kids want to express themselves and connect with the world. The want to express is a good thing, the curiosity to connect with the world is a good thing...we just need to help them and guide them in their approach to connecting. We also need to do a better job paying attention to them. I saw ten points on why myspace is bad. Were there ten steps on how to be a better listener toyour children? Was there a reminder to fathers not to exasperate their kids? Were there pointsto the youth on how to me more responsible...or is myspace this weeks scapegoat? Before that it was rock music, movies, tv, etc. BTW...good post letsjam!

Well said, Dror. Very well said.

Be it myspace or any blog or forum, allowing your children to play on the Internet unattended is about as safe as playing stickball on the freeway during rush hour. Yes, myspace blogs are a great way for sexual predators to find information about a teen in a short amount of time. I have also seen responsible children that are judicious in the information they put on myspace blogs and who they allow communication with. If you block myspace from your browser, you have not made your child any safer, you have merely removed one of many sites like it for them to communicate. There are many things you can do.. -keep the pc in a common area -use an alternative to windows such as Mac or Linux and use the root admin controls to monitor their IM sessions and emails. -if you own a web cam...throw it out. -get to know who your kid's friends are. -etc etc I agree with the Bishop that myspace is generally a bad idea for teens and kids, but I respectfully disagree that it is just myspace that is so wicked...it is just more popular. What he said of myspace can be said of yahoo chat, msn messenger, livejournal, deadjournal, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc

Questions: If you did move to Canada, the increase you have in taxes would decrease your disposable income for whatever pleasures or necessities you enjoy. How much are you willing to sacrifice for the government provided bennies? Also, will you so as so many Canadians do when they are sick and cross the border for certain things they need now that the government says they can wait 6-10 months or longer for? I am not slamming the concept, I just know a few Canadians of various Provinces and know that-like everything- the bennies come with trade offs. The ones that move here did so so they could better provide for their families and have the opportunity to start a business or make more money in their profession and keep more of their paycheck or have access to health care at will.

sgallan, Forgive me, I had not noticed you were sticking with industrialized and 1st world rankings. I am a patriot, CS Lewis' book "The Four Loves" speaks of the patriotism as being natural. Loathing for one's homeland seems to be trendy in universities these days. Pampered spoiled brats who have everything, including cable tv and credit and maybe even a little overweight bug me. I have more stamps on my passport than the average bear and I have sees a lot of places. Though I think Australia is cool, Istanbul is wondrous, Prague freaking gorgeous, and so on... I have to say that it would take a lot for me to want to leave here. I spent the first five years of my life living in Germany a few miles away from the US Army base in Frankfort and I have lived in London and Istanbul for a time as well. Here suits me just fine. Every place has its good points and it's dark sides. There is no nirvana here on earth. There was a place near the tigress and Euphrates...but that is blocked off by a sword now from what I here.

It will be a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

East St Louis is still far better than about 80% of the world for all it's faults. I have hung drywall in East St Louis and taught intro to computers there in a computer lap I helped establish and I am *gasp* white. Despite the poverty in our terms and despite the crime...most of the impoverished there still have TV's (with Cable), one apartment with at least two bedrooms per family, more than one change of clothing, at the very least..one meal per day, access to health care (limited and subject to long lines in county hospital, but exists), access to schools (not as good as other schools HERE, but they got desks and books), and there is enough disposable income to buy drugs....most of the things I have listed you will not find in the third world. What we call poverty and filth is what more than half the world would consider opulence. To say we are all doomed is an obvious remark, it does not make any of us clever, despite the fact the deep people in universities and the black turtlenecks in poetry houses think it does...it just keeps us in the dark. It is perfectly easy to be cynical, it is hard to make the world a better place. If you do want to see third world conditions here in America, it is not in the inner cities, it is the Appalachia. Even now, though, we are making dramatic steps in improving things there...there is still a lot of work to be done and countless unknown families and stories there, but the past few decades we have started to wake up to the area. If I could choose anywhere in the world...well, I like it here in the Chicago Area...if forced to leave the US...the Czech Republic would be nice. Has nothing to do with liberty, just pretty architecture.

Boy, I am torn on Fat Man and Little Boy. I do not know that I will ever not waffle on that one. The act saved far more lives than it ended and it ended the war swiftly. I have to wonder if we could have dropped one or two in a non populated area on their islands and said, "lookee what new toy we got...still wanna play?" I am not a big fan of civilian casualties and civilian targets. I am not a big fan of enemies that hide in homes of civilians to force a very difficult hand. I am not sure if it reduces the sting, but MacAuthur was the right man at the right time to come to Japan after the surrender. He offered the people of Japan a dignified surrender, he understood them and had compassion and respect and they in turn revered him.

Interesting. I have not seen the movie.

Quick side note...my opinion on violent crime? I think the answer does not lie in guns or no guns..death penalty or no death penalty...etc etc etc. I think the root cause is a loss of hope. Note the per capita rate is always higher in densely populated areas that are usually poverty ridden. No hope=no worries. Not sure there are any bills we can pass to give people hope. I sometimes feel like we are treating migraines with foot massage. Darn, it feel good, but we are not going after the root problem.

I am not LDS, but it would seem to me there is a difference between gambling and a game show. I would consider a game show to be more like a contest with prizes........taxable prizes......... Have fun and let us know if you make on the telly.

Again, no disrespect, but in 2002 the deaths per 100,000 people for them was 2.8 and in the state of Texas it was 6.

With all due respect, your story here proves nothing for or against gun control. Frankly, all I see is sloppy journalism. The statement in the story... Could have easily read Belgians do not have a death penalty. Belgians do not have a constitutional or legal right to wear blue, not even on Tuesdays. There is no causal relationship proved between the two events. We have a right to bear arms...so do Canadians...but we have much higher crime..so guns affect on crime is not a factor...why do we have more crime per capita over Canada? Do they wear more blue?

If pulling fingernails is allowed by the terms of the Geneva Convention as proper interrogation and treatment of a POW, then peel away and to Jersey with the opinions of others. Well, I am not an employee of our government any longer, so I will likely not know of our option in the heat of the moment. However, in that gut wrenching circumstance, I hope I can make the right choice. Twist the analogy a little and you have a real life event that has happened to many Russians for decades. All they had to do was deny God and their child or spouse would live. I know it is a work of fiction, but the movie V for Vendetta had a wonderful sequence in which V teaches Evey that certain freedoms and principles were more important that her own life. Most of us do not think deeply about where that line is. Most of us do not know where we would stand when put to the fire. Maybe this sounds corrupt...as a citizen and a father I would have no problem sawing off his arm with a rusty butter knife to get the information. Heck, I might kill his own mother in front of him to save my child. After I have saved the day, I expect to be tried for my crime. As a government...no. Sometimes things that are beautiful and true have a but more beneath the surface that makes them hard to swallow. It cannot only be beautiful and true when we are at peace and the sun is shining. Forgiveness is a beautiful and true axiom mentioned several times by our savior-but it is so hard to do when we are wronged, but we want that mercy ohhh sooooo baaaad when we goofed. It is easy to tell a woman she may not have an abortion...but what if we meet the rare woman who is a rape victim who got pregnant or a unborn child of incest. What about the self righteous teenager in youth group who just plain had an oops? Life is not as pretty as our principles, but we have to stay true to them. On the other hand, our forefathers signed their name to a document knowing the quest for freedom endangered the lives of their children. People defected to this country knowing they put relatives in physical peril just so they could say what they want. If you give up too much for the illusion of safety, you will wake up one day to find out you are not free and watch those precious children raised to not be allowed to say, think, and express themselves the way they want...oh, but they will not be assaulted from an outside enemy...they will be safe to survive, but not free to live. I say this as a father. Ain't that always the truth? If we good guys are poor, we have to try to get a minimum wage job, get government cheese, etc. If the bad guys are poor, they can rob a convenience store. If I am lonely while my wife is out of town, I gotta tough it out. The bad guy gets to hit the local bar and take his pick. When I am wronged, I have to call the police and wait for due process on my assailant...the bad guy can put a cap in his butt. There is a certain "freedom" you get from not having principles. When you became a Christian you gained freedoms and liberties you never dreamed of...the things you lost do not matter....the same applies here. We have the constitution and it grants us things you cannot get in Arab nations, but we have list the permission to do certain things...things we have been freed of.

If the removal of fingernails is a violation of the geneva convention, let the city burn. This applies to a conversation I had with a friend of mine over a year ago on the prospect of wiretapping and certain provisions in the Patriot Act that me (a conservative) unhappy. Ben said, "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." He was also reported to have said, ""Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power." Is my privacy more important to me than a car bomb going into a pre school? Without liberty, we are already dead so what is the difference? Just as I will risk my life and the life of my family in the name of liberty, I will willfully risk my safety if it means that we obtain information correctly and in accord with the principles of what we take pride in. If we decide it is okay to tap phones an invade homes without proper checks and balances, if we decide it is okay to torture and we become machievellan as a nation...I may burn a flag...that is not my country. That is not my America. I have a contract. That contract is for freedom and liberty and happiness before safety and security. I do not believe that order was accidental.

At the end of the day we live in a broken world and are a broken people. The reasons Monica gave are biblically accurate. I am of the controversial belief that because of our broken world and the fact that we do not live sinless, that there is not always a righteous choice. Sometimes we have to choose between the lessor of two evils. I volunteer in a home for battered and abused women and children. I see the haunted looks once a week. I see the bruises. I have lived it in my youth. Maybe Jesus does not cover spousal abuse and maybe the abondonment clause is a legalistic twist on law that the pharisees did many years before any of us, but there comes a time you have to do what you have to do. Domestic abuse protection from the local authorities in most cases is a joke. If a woman is being beaten, my advice is remove yourself and the child away from the danger first and then do whatever it takes to stay away from the danger. If that means divorce and an order of protection from the father of your children....so be it. Correct me on the Biblical correctness of the action, tell me about being yoked...I do not care. Once the hitting starts and the fear is in place...time to get out. In the case of your young married friend...I am hearing about a lot of yelling and disagreements, but not beatings. Hers is a different case and I hope they can get past the differences and make an eternal go of it.

Thank you. Your a good audience, enjoy the veal! My next show is at 8.

I have to go with Shantress on that. You lose 90 minutes of conversing. Yeah, you get to talk about the movie afterward, but on first dates all answers about the movie will be neutral. I know you wanted advice from the women and I am not one of those. When I was in HS (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and we still though mullets were a good idea) I had only been turned down for a date twice. It boils down to this. -Make sure you know the girl first. Not just by name, but you are in the same social circles. -Be confident -Make eyes contact. -Ask her if she would like to go to (a dinner, a dance, a zoo, a local place with lots to do-In Chicago we have Navy Pier and many museums-if she likes art-pick an art institute-science, history-etc-in other words, things HS guys do not have the creative wherewithal to think of). -Smile when you talk. Once she says yes. Put some thoughtfulness to the date. Make dinner someplace a little nicer than the local pizza place. Ma and Pa Italian places are good. I recommend nice individually owned places. They are smaller, more intimate, less noisy. When talking, make her the main topic of conversation. Ask her her thoughts on things and about her...do not ramble on about yourself. After dinner, do not let the date end there. Go for a walk somewhere nice like a public park and just talk about life the universe and everything. During the evening..be yourself. Be honest. Be courteous. At the door, be a gentleman and tell her you had a wonderful time and hope for a similar response. Sometime within the next 72 hours you call her and reiterate you had a good time and say you would like to do it again.

I am actually glad that movie came out. I can finally watch Dogma in peace. I know that my friends here of various denomination will disagree with me, but salvation is not dependent on affiliation of flavor. But rather your relationship with Christ. A good Mormon and a good catholic and a good baptist may not have accepted Jesus. The you could have some guy in prison that has killed a bunch of people and does not have the denominational variety we have and is still a devout believer with full acceptance. I am sure PC can correct me..perhaps there is denominational variety in prison.

Your gnomes will be back in a week. They have a convention every year in San Diego. It is right after the peeps convention and right before the sherpa convention.

I know my answer may sound trite, but there are so many things to me that are unclear in the scriptures. Who is written the book of Life? Who is truly covered by the blood and washed clean to sit in the presence of the most Holy? Where do our acts counter and negate the grace given to us? I do not know. Anyone who claims to know is either a liar or a fool. The best I or any of us can do is to accept the sacrifice of Jesus, read and pray and meditate, and spread the Good News as commanded in the Great Commission. The questions is not weather Catholics or Mormons or Baptists or Messianic Jews are Christians. No where in the Bible do I hear Jesus refer to the term Christian. The proper question is am I saved by the blood? Is Bill or Sally or my mom or my daughter or my neighbor saved by the blood. Who can answer that? From my understanding of scripture and my devout and genuine love for and humility towards God, I am secure. I feel pretty darn sure about others around me, but only God knows their hearts. I have always been of the mind that if you say you are secure because you were confirmed, baptized, circumcised, or filled out a card in a building..you are not only myopic, but have reduced the Creator of all that we know to a genie in a bottle that if you rub just right, you get what you want. Godinabox....the great new toy from Milton Bradley! Don't work.

I concede...but only for the spacebar.

You use your thumbs when typing????? In answer to your question...to use your ears means to do it someone elses way and that is not in our nature. We like to rebel and resist.