Same here. I don't check my emails much, but the infected spam rate is atrocious right now. Overall spam is about normal, I think, but more of them have infected attachments.

Nah, just buy carbon credits to make up for the horrifying, horrifying things your breath does to the atmosphere.

Thank you. I'm not so fond of carbon footprint as a measure, but it really annoys when they talk about the entire footprint of an activity of a person without mentioning the resting footprint. Certainly you'll use more energy during an activity, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. Shall we all become slugs on the couch, afraid to move because it might increase our carbon footprint? Oh wait, what about the footprint of the couch?

Great. Last thing I need is my kids bringing home another dragon.

I know what you mean about "too hot." One of my daughter's friends has rarely been able to come over to play this summer because it's too hot pretty much every day. Seems to be anything over 85 or so counts.

My kids get kicked out of the house almost no matter the weather. Not that I have to kick them out often, since most days they're headed out to catch lizards, dig in the yard or do I don't know quite what. I've had to wash serious mud off them with a hose before letting them inside a few times. Pretty sure that stuff should just be part of being a kid, and mostly it's not that risky, just messy.

Too true. This is why I liked my college professor who describes parenthood as raising future adults, not children. I want my kids to keep growing up. They get better as they get more mature. Sure, babies, toddlers and on down the line are fun, but seeing kids grow up is much more fun than treating them as younger than they are. They're people, not my personal toys.

Why not is a great question. My sisters and I played in the canyon behind our house often. Lots of fun and since this was well before cell phones, we carried a whistle in case help was needed. We only gave up on the canyon when poison oak took over all the good paths.

Too true. I'd love for my kids to have seen some of the playgrounds I played in as a kid. Much more challenging than most of what they see now.

My daughter's old school very, very briefly had a zip line in their playground. Must have been in there just a couple weeks during the summer before school started, because I never saw it in one piece. Got taken down when a girl broke her arm on it shortly after the new playground opened. It's still a better playground than most, but it made me sad to find out my kids had missed out on the zip line. Unfortunately, the school had to go with what their liability insurance wanted them to do.

Current school is far more protective, and their playground is pathetic, and sometimes closed for over a week due to rain on one day. And yes, that no running rule applies on any pavement.

Too true. Especially if you don't learn after an infection or so, paying someone to fix it is just what you deserve. Malware's out there. Be ready to deal with it.

While I don't see the point to adding a new law in this case, as I would expect the right to privacy to be enough, I also don't see how a law saying you can't spy on the people renting a computer from you is a big hoop for a business to leap through. Not like it's hard to avoid installing this sort of program.

My husband's computer had a virus along these lines a year or two ago, hijacking Google results, and that thing was tough to get rid of. Not a single malware scanner found it. I simply noticed because he complained his computer wasn't working right, and the usual scanner wasn't fixing it for him. Neither was any other scanner I tried, and I tried a bunch. Not one so much as detected it, but the changed search results showed that something was going on. I had to do a reinstall on his computer too.

Found it his computer probably got infected because he kept going back to a site his scanner warned him was infected, and he'd ignored the warning. *headdesk* I think he knows better than to make that mistake again, but there are reasons why I don't like him using my computer. You'd think the previous discussions we'd had about malware would be enough... I hope he finally has that lesson down.

Going to have to keep that Sysinternals suite mentioned elsewhere in mind. He's not the only problem child in the family, although I have most relatives pretty well trained now.

That's horrible, and they would probably do the same to my oldest, who is incredibly imaginative and insists that fairies are real. The little fluttery type with wings, not the other sort. I wouldn't consider drugging her out of being herself.

My school had a late bus too, southern California. The way schools are cutting buses in my area now, however, I don't know how such things would be worked.

Same here. I'm thinking this would take access after school at the school for kids who don't have internet at home, or some sort of program to lend computers and pay for basic internet access in the home.

Not the same thing at all, but my daughter's online charter school did just that. Computers were loaned for the school year, and a check sent to subsidize a part of our internet access costs. Pretty nice program to ensure that kids could do the program even if it was hard for their parents to afford such things.

It sounds great to me too. My daughter already deals with the frustration of being ahead of most of her classmates, and while my son has just finished kindergarten, I suspect he's going to have the same issue soon enough, as he picks this stuff up really fast. I've actually thought about having them go through the early arithmetic videos a bit this summer as review, rather than just doing the occasional practice problems (very occasional, just enough to help them remember more over the summer). If the school isn't going to use it, it may be a decent parental tool, even though it means more time studying for the kids.