When I was a Linux dad with young kids getting access to the net, I spent some time worrying about this. When I grew up, you might score a copy of Penthouse, but today, you might find "Two Girls One Cup," or back then it was probably goatse. Nothing I ever encountered in Penthouse could compare to goatse. What would stuff like that even do to the mind of a child? Not to mention all the pedophile stalkers and lions and tigers and bears. I felt I had to try to protect them.

In the end, I found some stuff some guys said I could use to create a net nanny thing. It involved reading several PhD dissertations, a lot of programming, and at least three rubber chickens. It was all way over my head, and I never got anywhere with it. The kids ended up having totally unrestricted, unfettered, free reign of the whole big ocean of sleaze and pedophile stalkers and everything, pretty much from kindergarten on.

They turned out fine, and eventually thanked me for not trying to net nanny them. As my now 21 year old son said once, "Dad, I never wanted to watch donkeys fucking midgets anyway, and you never had anything to worry about."

Both of them have switched to Windows, incidentally.

An overwhelming majority of the American public doesn't give two shits about anything more complicated than who's going to win the next Super Bowl and what to order at McDonald's for dinner tonight.

Get real.

Funny you mention that. I drive a gasoline tanker, and get hazard pay to sit on my ass all day.

Basically what I'm thinking. I'm really getting bored with the latest ZOMFG WIMMINZ ARE UNDERREPRESENTATED equalist hivemind groupthink crowd.

A good English friend of mine once told me all about how common it is to find cars there which have no user serviceable parts at all. The hood doesn't open, you can't check, let alone change the oil. I have no idea how long these cars last, but I know they couldn't last forever without some kind of service. Brakes have to be relined periodically, for starters, at a bare minimum.

We gots them too. If'n you call them town car folks 'round here that feller picks you up in a four-door dualie with "POWERED BY CUMMINS" wrote across the back winder. If you pay extra, that feller takes a hose to wash off most of the cow shit before he picks you up.

If you're only going to speak a paltry three languages, English, Spanish, and French make a good trio.

Thinking about this reminds me of the day a German-born guy from Québec, three Africans from three different countries, and I all came together one day to find common ground in our mutually mangled French. That basically proves the point underlying the graphic and the article right there.

So I got this beak installed, and now I'm having trouble playing the trumpet. What's the solution?

What's even more irritating is that the richest and largest company in the world staffs itself through subsidies that come out of your pocket and mine. Most of the people working there are barely scraping by, and when the hours get cut after Christmas, they go file for welfare and unemployment benefits to supplement their meager income. People can afford to work there because we make up for their pathetic salary through taxes. This seriously pisses me off.

On the bright side, if we did find intelligent life out there, we would immediately launch into action doing something nasty to them. They're better off not knowing us, and if they're like us, we're probably better off not knowing them too. Good fences make good neighbors.

I can't imagine somebody on Facebook posting a picture that includes me. Possibly this is because I have no social life.

That's why in the long run, we've got to get out of the solar system and plant colonies somewhere else. Mars isn't an interesting end destination, but getting to Mars would help pave the way to start sending colonies out to all those exoplanets we keep discovering, and hoping one of them is habitable.

This may actually be impossible. I've been working up a novel whose premise was a completely believable last ditch survival shot at colonizing the stars with as little new technology as possible. What if some dinosaur killer event is going to happen in the present time, and we've got to just get it done? My novel stalled out, because I'm going to have to invent far more magic than I wanted to make this remotely believable. The problems are immensely daunting, and we're nowhere close to being able to solve them.

We might never solve them. If we don't, our extinction is 100% guaranteed unless some friendly space faring neighbors give us a lift off of this rock. We won't go extinct in the foreseeable future, probably, but it's inevitable that we will go extinct eventually.

Much as we are hard wired to kill our neighbors, fuck their women, and take all their shit, we are hard wired to survive. We want to live forever, which is why we have invented so many religions that allow us to pretend that we get to do just that. To anyone who truly understands the inevitability of the sun going red giant and scorching our home planet, remaining entirely on this one rock runs counter to the innate human survival instinct, and the innate raping and plundering instinct. Thinking about how to get us off this rock isn't a flight of fantasy, it's a compulsion, and the most critically important problem we need to solve in the long run to ensure our version of eternity for ourselves.

Do we accept extinction, or do we figure out how to get this done? Personally, I don't want to accept extinction. A very small minority of us have enough foresight to agree, while the vast majority are playing shuffleboard on the poop deck of the Titanic saying the sun will be around forever and ever, and anyway, Jesus will save us, so why invest in all this crazy space fantasy when we could be spending money on yachts and luxury cars instead?