What's Up

    Well, I'm fishin' for an idea for this story. I've already kicked
around some of the lighter stuff about computers. Now I could get
really technical and talk about how the binary number system works,
but that would probably bore the pants right off of you. Then you
might find something else to pay attention to. So, while I'm at it, why
don't I blend two articles into one and write a social / cultural piece
that also involves computers.

    It's no big secret that the Internet is an endless source of erotica
and pornography. There is great political debate right now as to how
the government can control it. All of those opposed to it keep naming
children as the primary reason to ban it. They don't want minors to
see it, and they don't want an easy way for people to traffic child
pornography. I'm not into kiddie porn. I don't endorse it and that's
not what this article is about.

    There are many software packages that are designed to screen out
Internet content thought to be inappropriate for minors. Some of these
"content filters" work by searching out key words that appear in Web
pages. If you thought about it, you might be a little upset about some of
the words that are on the list of no-nos: words like gay, lesbian, bisexual,
vagina, penis, breast, etc... What if a kid is doing some medical research?
What if a kid wants to know what a gay person really is? By this standard
of measure, the rainbow-akron.com Web site would get screened out even
though there is absolutely nothing pornographic about it. Anyway, the
general thought on the Net is that there are just too many anonymous
people involved for anyone to stop anything going on. Right On Man!

    I can't see how anyone could get arrested for putting a picture out on
the Net, when there is no way to prove that the picture is even real. It's
very easy to cut parts from one image and place them in anther.
Photographs are rarely admissible as evidence in court for this very
reason. So how is it possible that the guy down the street is getting
busted for sharing a photograph? On top of that, images on the Net
aren't really photographs anyway. They are just binary files -- streams
of ones and zeros. They don't look any different than any other type of
digital data, until you interpret them as an image.

    So now a kid can find a few dirty pictures on the Net, instead of having
to sneak into his dad's bottom dresser drawer. Big Deal! I think it's
perfectly healthy for an adolescent to be curious of what a naked adult
looks like. Why do we, as a country, want to keep teens in the dark about
sex anyway? The sooner they learn about it, the more mature they will
become at an earlier age. That can't be a bad thing. Many people would
say that kids should grow up a little bit more before they really get into sex.
I say that getting into sex is part of how a kid really grows up!           ===>