I don’t care if it’s not politically correct, or not compassionate, or whatever. If you do this you should forfeit your right to raise children. Period.

No long-term monitoring of the home environment. No six months of counseling and all is forgiven. You shouldn’t have to do this twice to be ruled unfit as a parent.

A one-year old for God’s sake.

Michael Jackson tries to claw its way out of a car on the way to its trial at the Santa Barbara County courthouse.

So “hackers” got into Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile account because the password she used was “Tinkerbell” — the name of her Chihuahua. The task was made easier because the T-Mobile Web site offered a password hint, “What is your favorite pet’s name?”

Duh.

One more time, the importance of a decent password raises its head. For heaven’s sake, don’t use a common word or something obvious.

Three quick ideas:

Use the license plate of your first car, which is likely a combination of letters and numbers — 85JJO or 173-KQB.

Use a friend or spouse’s name and phone number with punctuation: 867-Jenny-5309.

Use your first pet’s name and the house number where you lived: Terri5819.

What’s nice about all of these is that you can leave yourself detailed hints without giving anything away, e.g., “First dog plus Queens house number” or “Pontiac plate.” You have a bit more security, but don’t have to worry about remembering something like HGX1267Qw7Hb.

At what point did “stealing a credit card number” become “identity theft”?

To me, identity theft means doing more than ordering a bunch of electronic gizmos with someone else’s card. It means opening back accounts, signing deals — in short, pretending to be that person on a larger scale.

But today, because it sounds sexier, “credit card theft” is now “identity theft.”

Making the rounds is a story from the Washington Post called “Hard News” about how print newspapers are struggling against the free and easy Web.

It’s easy to say that the Web is where people will get their news, and that traditional news organizations will join or die. Heck, I get most of my news from CNN.com, Google News, and USAToday.com.

But there’s something interesting I wanted to point out. From the article:

In 2003, the New York Times’ Web site became profitable for the first time; last year, The Post’s Web site did the same.

I find this interesting because the article doesn’t tell us what expenses these sites have. Do either pay the salaries of the reporters who provide most of the content? Do either chip in for AP news or Reuters?

It strikes me as pretty easy to make a profit if you don’t have to pay for your content.

Let’s say that readers across the land drop their newspapers in favor of the Web — that print subscriptions fall 95 percent and papers begin to fold and reporters fill the unemployment lines.

Where, I wonder, will those Web sites get the news? Without papers to pay for it, the Associated Press won’t be able to field nearly as many reporters. Free sites can’t generate enough advertising to pay for reporters, and even the b1oggers have to get their news from somewhere. The people who go to Google News or what-have-you would suddenly find their news disappearing.

Getting something for nothing is great, but without the popularity of the ad-supported versions — TV or print — those couldn’t exist. Nor could the AP, nor Google News, nor many of the now-free sites. And even a subscription model would need to be awfully pricey to pay for a remotely decent-sized reporting crew.

That doesn’t mean that papers won’t suffer. But the pendulum might well swing back once people realize that good news is hard to come by, and newspapers — perhaps in another form — make a comeback.

Not that many people use them, but my trackbacks seem to be broken. I’ll try to fix them tonight.

Damn spammers. I tweaked the settings to kill trackback spam, and must have broken something. #$%&@!

Back in November, I commented on how some companies come through my Caller ID as “111-111-1111″ as a way to get around my “no anonymous calls” feature. It’s slimy.

Now I see that Dan Gillmor has also noticed this. Glad I’m not alone.

I’ve got a great old computer that I use for a lot of things. It’s a 300-MHz machine, and it’s perfect for Web browsing, e-mail, running Microsoft Office, and a lot of other things — even Photoshop runs pretty decently on it.

But anti-virus software kills it. It makes the machine so slow as to be almost unusable.

This wasn’t always the case. When I got the machine, McAfee VirusScan version 5-something worked great. But McAfee doesn’t support those older versions; you can’t get new virus definitions, rendering it weak, if not useless. And newer versions of anti-virus software are so full of feature bloat that they drop the machine to a crawl.

My father, too, has an older machine. It, too, does everything he needs it to do. But his anti-virus protection is woefully outdated, and there’s nothing I can do to help — there are no updates.

I’m sure McAfee and Norton and the other anti-virus-software vendors will say they have good reason to add all those features. There are more threats these days. But I don’t buy it. All I need, and all my father needs, is something that will scan e-mail and downloads for known viruses.

Just like the old version of VirusScan used to do.

Yes, yes, security gurus will tout the need for firewalls, and for protection against unknown viruses. And yes, that’s important. But not that important. Because I can’t run that stuff on my old machine, and thus I don’t run anything.

Someone needs to tell these companies that there are plenty of older machines out there that need protection without the bells and whistles. Because simply abandoning them isn’t the right way to go.

Update: A couple of folks wrote to me to tell me about a free anti-virus solution from Grisoft called AVG. It’s not as full-featured as the company’s commercial product, but it’s got a small memory footprint and updates itself automatically.

I’ve installed AVG Free Edition on my old laptop and, unlike McAfee or Symantec, it didn’t slow it to a crawl. Highly recommended if you have an older machine.

Quoth my boss:

suddenly, blogging is everywhere. every fool with a keyboard is talking about blogging, debating blogging.

now every newspaper exec who ridiculed blogs and instant messaging and probably web sites in general in years past is now a blog expert with an expert blog opinion.

i’m already sick of it.

it’s most definitely not cool any more.

(damm, that woulda made a good blog entry)

Houses need instant messaging. I don’t mean “everyone in a home needs IM.” I mean that homes need an electronic message board in the kitchen that would display incoming IMs, so that when I call home and my wife isn’t there, I can simply send an IM.

She may not check voice mail, because the only way Verizon lets us know we have any is with the stuttering dial tone. And she may not get around to e-mail till later. And all I need to say is, “I’m not coming home for lunch.”

So houses need an IM “board” in the kitchen for just these sort of thing. “Call Mom.” “Running late.” “Don’t forget doctor appt.” You get the idea.

Now go make it.

Shouldn’t be hard: a simple LCD display with a WiFi connection built in to tie it to the network. Config software would let you identify it on an IM service, so you could make it “Home11355″ on AIM or Yahoo Messenger. Then you could just send a message to the service and it would appear on the board. (That would also get rid of potential spam because you could always get a new AIM ID.)

Heck, you could probably just do e-mail, now that I think about it. Hmm.

I have to share this for no good reason.

When I was but a tot, one of my favorite songs was about the planets. It was from my parents’ collection of 78s and every now and then I still think of the lyrics: “Mercury is first, then Venus with its clouds galore…”

I didn’t remember the rest, other than “Jupiter is next, a real giant.”

And then, somehow, I remembered the name “By Rocket to the Moon.” And i Googled it. And I found it. And I am just so pleased. (As pleased as when I found an MP3 of Mark Lindsey’s song “Arizona” which no one other than my brother seems to have ever heard of.)

Thank you to all the people who wrote to me at the suggestion of the folks from the Answers in Genesis “museum.”

You and the museum are, of course, welcome to your opinions. And I will stick with mine.

I appreciate the various suggestions to read this or that Bible passage, but — and I mean no offense by this — I have other columns to write.

I don’t plan to make arguing this my life’s work. I know from experience that it will simply degenerate into a weeks’-long back and forth, time-sucking discussion, and no one’s mind will change.

If you’re about to write to tell me I’m a bad person for not spending hours or days researching your views, please don’t.

I’ve said my piece. I believe we need to protect and enhance science education in this country if we want to remain a technology leader.

Thanks.

Please note the link on the left (under “USA Today Follow-Ups”) if you want to comment on this column.

As expected, a bunch of creationists wrote to complain that I disparaged the national embarrassment that is the Answers in Genesis “museum” outside Cincinnati.
Many of the letters were the typical personal attacks I’ve come to expect. After a while, though, they got repetitive and I stopped reading them.

Many quoted a response the AiG people posted to their Web site, supposedly refuting me.

“Aren’t you embarrassed to be refuted on the AiG site?” they crowed.

Well, no. Because the site didn’t actually refute me very well.

What the AiG article did was demonstrate a typical creationist trick: Take a few examples of things that seem to support them (distorting them as necessary) and completely ignore the thousands of examples that refute them.

I had said in my column that “museums” like AiG’s were bad for technology because they were bad for science education. Kids who believe the nonsense spouted there weren’t likely to create the technology we’ll want tomorrow.

The AiG folks jumped on that, pointing out, for example, “It was actually the creationist Robert Boyle who fathered modern chemistry” and “Lasers depend on electromagnetic radiation theory, which was pioneered by creationist James Clerk Maxwell” and “The creationist Wright brothers invented the airplane after studying God’s design of birds.”

Other creationists they mention were Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794), Isaac Newton (1643-1727), as well as Pascal (1623-1662), Joule (1818-1889), and Pasteur (1822-1895).

All important, to be sure. And all, except for Orville Wright, dead for more than a century.

They didn’t like it when I said, “every kid whose parents take him to places like [the Creation Museum] can probably be scratched from the list of ‘America’s future scientists’.”

Their reply: “I guess that means that the list of Ph.D. creation scientists on our website should be deleted…”

They refer to a list of about 163 scientists who support creationism.
And that’s what I meant by taking a small example and trying to make it sound big. Because against that list of 163 comes another list — one at the National Center for Science Education. It’s PhDs who signed a statement that said, in part, “There is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence.”

There are now about 550 signatures on the document — more than three times what the creationists have.

But wait. Here’s the fun part: The NCSE’s list is limited to PhDs (and the equivalent, such a MDs) named “Steve.”

So even limiting the list that way, they were able to get more signatures supporting evolution than AiG could get supporting creationism. FYI: About one percent of the U.S. population is named Steve, and about one percent have a PhD.

(The NCSE also has statements in support of evolution from dozens of scientific organizations including the American Anthropological Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Astronomical Society, American Geophysical Union, American Society of Biological Chemists, American Chemical Society, American Geological Institute, American Psychological Association, American Physical Society, National Academy of Sciences, Society for Neuroscience, Society of Physics Students, and Society of Systematic Biologists.)

They find that kind of support easy to ignore, I guess.

The AiG’s arguments continue to fit the pattern: Find a few examples that vaguely appear to make your case, and ignore the thousands upon thousands of examples that refute it.

Example: In a discussion on the site of how dinosaurs must have co-existed with humans (call it the “Hanna-Barbera theory”), Carl Wieland, founder of Creation magazine, explains that there is evidence.

“There are a number of anomalous finds,” he is quoted as saying, “such as the Tampa figurine, and the ‘Malachite Man’ remains in dinosaur rock in Utah.”

Sounds interesting, until you stop to realize that he offers only two “finds,” neither of which is anything more than “anomalous,” against thousands upon thousands of pieces of evidence that dinosaurs existed millions of years ago, and millions of years before humans.

By the way, if you’re curious and do a Google search on “Tampa figurine” you’ll find mostly quotes from Wieland.
And “Malachite Man” is regarded as a creationist hoax.

Yet another example of AiG’s tactic of taking small things and trying to make them sound big: On the site, as “evidence” of T. Rex and humans living together, are references to a 1997 article, “The Real Jurassic Park” in a short-lived consumer science magazine called Earth. It discussed the preliminary analysis of a bone from a T. Rex.

AiG says the article reports red blood cells being found. Sadly, that’s not true. The authors say quite clearly that what they found “were, at best, derived from blood, modified over the millennia by geological processes.”

If the truth don’t fit, AiG is happy to distort it. They have repeatedly referred to ‘T. Rex blood being found’ even though that’s not at all what the article said. (Read more of the lengths they go through to distort the facts at the Talk.Origins Archive.)

At this point, creationists often take a side trip to Dopesville with the argument, “Well, how do you know the dinosaurs were around millions of years ago? Were you there?”

Nope. I wasn’t in World War II, either, but I suspect that actually happened. And I guess these people believe we shouldn’t convict anyone of a crime unless there was an eyewitness; crime-scene evidence could never be enough, not by their logic.

And that’s why arguing with them is a waste of time. They do a very good job of coming up with slick-sounding but empty arguments, and drag you into an unending series of pointless discussions.

An article in today’s Christian Science Monitor asks some interesting (if not terribly original) questions about bloggers — specifically, ‘Are they journalists?’

What I found disturbing however, is the assumptions being made by the article about “real” journalists.

“Are they journalists with an obligation to check facts, run corrections, and disclose conflicts of interest?” the article asks, “Or are they ordinary opinion-slingers, like barbers or bartenders, with no special responsibilities - or rights?”

The assumption I’m referring to is that journalists are somehow different that regular folks — that they have a separate set of laws, or that there’s some body (government, presumably) that gives them official recognition.

There’s nothing preventing a blogger from writing “Hillary Clinton collapsed because she’s pregnant!” There’s also nothing preventing The New York Times from doing the same.

What stops “real” journalists is the desire to be taken seriously, and the desire to avoid libel suits. If the Times started printing nonsense, people would stop reading it. (And some people have.)

If the Times started printing libelous statements, it would find itself on the business end of a lawsuit.

But there is not separate law requiring either journalists or bloggers to print the truth. Both are subject to libel suits, both are subject to a readership that can disappear when they lose credibility.

Does the National Enquirer always print the truth? Of course not; Elvis is dead. But its readers don’t mind a bit of fantasy, and as long as the Enquirer doesn’t libel someone, it’s free — like anyone — to print what it wants and to try to sell it to people.

Heck, it’s even free to print libelous things, as is The New York Times, and as is any blogger. But it’s also going to get sued in civil (not criminal) court.

The question “Are bloggers journalists?” is a misleading one. A journalist is anyone who shares the news or information with others.

By implying that The New York Times enjoys a special status — other than that afforded it by its reputation and the printing and delivery system it has set up — you also imply that someone has to confer some kind of legal “you-are-a-journalist” status to make it so.

And that’s a road we had better not travel down.

(Note: There’s a difference with th idea of “press credentials.” Any organization is allowed, of course, to confer press status on anyone it chooses.
When I used to work at the Internet World trade shows, we discussed who we would give those credentials to — that is, who we’d let in free. There were some pretty shady characters asking for them, but we had the right to say “No.” We also had the right to say “No” to NBC.)