I was reading on Phillip Lenssen’s site about how it’s now a crime to use META tags to deceive a child into viewing a hurtful webpage. I posted my comments there, but I wanted to re-iterate here as well.
Who defines what’s harmful? a site saying there’s no santa when viewed by an 8 year old? A site talking about evolution to somebody from Kansas? An abortion site to a christian? The skeptics annotated bible having bible in it’s meta tags?
I can see the intent here is to shield children from porn sites that put “britney spears” in the meta tags… but like typical govt this is just flawed. That stuff is about 5 years too old. It doesn’t work. This is not an area the Govt needs to get involved in. If you don’t want your kids to see something harmful online, that’s your job as a parent; not uncle sam’s.
This law will serve no purpose other than an excuse to shut down more porn sites, and a pathetic attempt to appear to be protecting the children this ballot season.
The only real internet law we need will ban the internet from any children under 16 without parent supervision, and ban making laws about the internet from any politicians over 40.
What we really need to do as parents (ok not we, I don’t have kids) is take a more active role in our children’s lives so they don’t turn out like this kid. (He IS German… Phillip is that you as a young boy?)
August 30th, 2006
Wow.. it only took 15 minutes afer re-enabling the comments to get the first spam comments; 3 of them actually. It’s funny because the spam bot actually used UBB code to make it’s links.
I’m going to say this right now to all you spammers: All Links on dotCULT recieve rel=nofollow attributes. There.. now that I got that out of the way…
Let’s talk about etiquette, and not the which fork goes where crap either. One of the most annoying things you can do is call somebody you haven’t called in months and ask “Hey, is SomeRandomName there with you? Can I talk to him?”. It’s even worse when you do email somebody who don’t regualarly talk to and ask them for somebody else’s email address.
For the record, it’s always been my personal policy never to give out somebody else’s email address or phone number without their consent. You’d be suprised how often I’m actually asked to do this. My feelings are that if they wanted you to have it, they’d give it to you. It’s not my decision to make. If you want though, I’ll gladly pass your contact information along the next time I run into them; but don’t count on me making a phone call just to do that.
Of course, this only applies to personal phone numbers and emails. Business information for the purposes of business should be completely public.
In summary: If you don’t know his email address he probably doesn’t belong on your MySpace friends list anyway, and if he didn’t give you his phone number there’s probably a reason. Please stop asking, it’s rather rude. Don’t you think?
August 30th, 2006
