“Today, we’re introducing Chrome for Android Beta, which brings many of the things you’ve come to love about Chrome to your Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone or tablet.”

This is horrifying on a level I can barely contemplate, and I spend my spare time sitting around thinking up horrifying things to write, people.

The school district insists it has been portrayed unfairly. Superintendent Carlson points out it has been working hard to address the mental-health needs of its students by hiring more counselors and staff – everything, it seems, but admit that its policy has created problems for its LGBT community. "We understand that gay kids are bullied and harassed on a daily basis," and that that can lead to suicide, Carlson says. "But that was not the case here. If you're looking for a cause, look in the area of mental health." In that sense, the district is in step with PAL. "How could not discussing homosexuality in the public-school classrooms cause a teen to take his or her own life?" PAL asked Rolling Stone in an e-mail, calling the idea "absurd," going on to say, "Because homosexual activists have hijacked and exploited teen suicides for their moral and political utility, much of society seems not to be looking closely and openly at all the possible causes of the tragedies," including mental illness. Arguably, however, it is members of PAL who have hijacked this entire discussion from the very start: Though they've claimed to represent the "majority" opinion on gay issues, and say they have 1,200 supporters, one PAL parent reported that they have less than two dozen members.

This school has purposefully set out to build a culture where it is acceptable to literally bully gay teens to death, and then has the unmitigated gall to proclaim that the resulting epidemic of suicides is not their fault. Every member of their school board should be fired. Hell, the whole damn district should be cleaned out, and replaced by people who can bother to remember that part of their job is to protect children.

These people are setting themselves up for a school shooting. It's nothing but luck that one of these kids didn't decide to bring a street sweeper to school and turn their misery outwards, instead of inwards.

#ImSoBloggingThis #GayRights

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One Town's War on Gay Teens | Politics News | Rolling Stone
In Michele Bachmann's home district, evangelicals have created an extreme anti-gay climate. After a rash of suicides, the kids are fighting back.

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One of the problems with the protest against legislation like SOPA and the PROTECT-IP Act comes in trying to explain a lot of fine and complicated details to folks who just want to use their computers to get the latest Groupon deal or update their Facebook status. Very little useful information is trickling out to the general audience about the particulars of these bills, and much of what’s being reported about them is coming from techblogs. Techbloggers are finding themselves bogged down in trying to explain technical details to a general purpose audience.

Not pictured: the actual problem.

The protest against SOPA and the PROTECT-IP Act doesn’t stem from a bunch of us scandalous nerds who are mad because we won’t be able to get to the Pirate Bay anymore. For one, neither SOPA or the PROTECT-IP Act are actually going to stop us nerds from getting to the Pirate Bay. (Hint: that would be part of the problem.) Nerds already know how to get around the tactics SOPA and the PROTECT-IP Act are going to use.

Folks, getting around this crap is kind of what makes us nerds. We aren’t exactly worried about that bit. In fact, it’s so easy to get around these measures that Firefox already has a plugin ready to go that will do it for you. I think I even read somewhere that Firefox is going to be including this plugin in its base program.

Which brings me to one of the points I want to make: SOPA and the PROTECT-IP Act are bad because the technical process they use to prevent people from getting to “pirate” websites doesn’t work.

The more important reason the Stop Online Piracy and the PROTECT-IP Acts are bad legislation is because they’ll work to stifle all the best things that come out of the Internet.

Required Reading:

Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing

Confused by the Stop Online Piracy Act? Here’s ‘SOPA For Dummies’

What is SOPA and how does it work? The Stop Online Piracy Act explained

What is this #SOPA thing all about?

How to Get Involved:

Contact your elected officials

Contact SOPA Supporters

r/SOPA

the Electronic Frontier Foundation

I’ll be the first to say that there’s a lot of horrifying stuff out here in Internetland. Rampant hate, racism, misogyny, flamewars, bullying, fraud, pedophiles… you name it, we got it. The Internet can be awful – “never a more wretched hive of scum and villainy” and all that. And a lot of it is unregulated, unstoppable. It’s like the myth of the Wild West made real out here.

But for every awful thing you can find on the Internet, there’s something truly awesome: grassroots political and social movements, random fits of charity, support, and kindness, like, oh, the Traveling Red Dress, r/SuicideWatch, Dusty the Cat, the Arab Spring, or Post Secret.

That’s what you get with a free and equal communication tool. When you have a technology that gives everyone a voice, some of those voices are terrible. But more of them are just amazing.

SOPA and the PROTECT-IP Act want to limit and regulate that voice. They want to blunt the sharp edge of that tool. This legislation puts the power in the hands of anyone to have any website shut down on the basis of someone’s say-so. I could have your site shut down simply by making a claim in good faith that you’re stealing my content. I don’t even have to prove it to make it happen, people.

For example: Let’s say you and I get into some kind of little drama queen argument, and I decide to get even. All I need to do is make a claim to Facebook that you have infringed on copyright, and Facebook will have to close your account, or they could face all kinds of fines and legal troubles. Hell, if you’ve ever uploaded a video or posted a funny macro, the odds are pretty damn good that you have, in fact, infringed somebody’s copyright.

If you scan up a bit, you’ll note I linked to the Pirate Bay a few paragraphs ago. That, all by itself, is enough to get this site removed from the Internet under SOPA and the PROTECT-IP Act. And me fined and possibly jailed.

Supporters of these bills would like you to think that SOPA and the PROTECT-IP Act are all about protecting copyright and intellectual property rights and so forth, but the way these bills are written turns them into censorship bills. That’s what we’re protesting.

Trust me, guys. Losing access to free music and movies are the least of our worries, here.

For fear of losing these things down the Internet memory hole…

I think someone's got their knickers in a knot over a couple of things that aren't technically G+/Google's fault, here.

1) If you quote someone else's work, you should attribute it, full stop, regardless of the platform you share it on. On social media networks, it can get a little tricky to share links and do proper attribution. One of my favorite tools is the bit.ly extension available for FireFox and Chrome. (And possibly IE, but seriously, why are you still using that? Stop it.)

[Bit.ly for Chrome, shared using the Bit.ly extension. Bit.lyception! Here: http://bit.ly/xCJzml ]

[Bit.ly for FireFox, here: http://bit.ly/xl0G2R ]

On the rare occasions when I'm posting an excerpt of an article to a social network but not using the embedded link feature that goes along with Facebook or G+ (like the embedded article below), I use Bit.ly to link to the article I'm quoting. It makes a short, tidy URL, as opposed to the giant-assed thing you copy and paste out of your browser's address bar.

To link to a person, I either use Bit.ly, or I use G+, Twitter, or Facebook's built-in linking system – + the person's name on G+ or @ the person's name on Twitter and Facebook. (No spaces between the + or @ and the beginning of the name, of course.)

Attribute when you quote, folks, and make your quotes and excerpts as obvious as possible. It's only polite.

2) Google has been catering your search results to your personal tastes for quite awhile – since well before G+ was a thing. I log out and clear my browser cache when I want to do a Google search and want to make sure I'm getting unbiased results. The rest of the time, I stay logged in, because for most searches I do, I want to help Google make the search as relevant to me as possible.

There's a great TED Talk on the "Google Search Bubble." You can (should) watch it here: http://bit.ly/xwHnX7. It's about ten minutes long and worth every second.

The problem the author is complaining about here, though, is that G+ links are taking precedence over other types of links in Google search results, whether you're logged in or out.

I haven't yet seen a particular problem with this, myself, but maybe I don't search for the same kinds of things as the author. Google mentioned at the beginning that G+ results would take precedence in search results, so I suppose that's technically fair warning, but still. If I'm searching for information, I want the information, not what you said about the information. No offense, guys, but except in fairly rare cases, I can't quote most of you as experts.

3) If G+ has become too "noisy" for you – if you've got so much crap in your news stream that you're having a hard time keeping up, then you need to learn to use your circles properly. Start at +SocioloG+, here: http://bit.ly/z4AFSY.

I can't say I'm happy with +Google+ futzing with search results. I think that's a dangerous game to play when you've spent years setting yourself up as an information provider. I also can't say I agree entirely with this article, because I think a lot of what's being complained about in here are the result of users, not Google.

Overall, I'm still much happier with G+ than with Facebook.

#ImSoBloggingThis #Google #GooglePlus #SocialMedia

Reshared post from +ReadWriteWeb

As Google ships "the Google part" of its new Google+ identity, it's breaking the Internet it once helped build. I can't take it anymore.

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Google+ Is Going To Mess Up The Internet
I hate Google+. Can't stand it. It is agonizing to use. The stream is so noisy, it won't even bother me when the inevitable Google ads arrive. Culturally, it feels like walking into a religious school. It swarms with disciples of the + waiting for the messianic downfall of the Evil Internet, so t…

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