http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/14/85942/3961

I happen to really agree with this post. The problem with so many Americans these days is that they are consumed with the concept of acquiring material things. They want to acquire "Stuff" even if its at the expense of their children.

How many times have you heard someone complain how in the "good old days" only 1 parent "needed" to work to make "ends meet" yet today both are required. Often times, both parents go to work purely to maintain a standard that goes well beyond making ends meet.

In 1955, the average house size for a family of 4 was 1200 square foot. Today it's 2400 square foot -- twice as big. Typical family of 4 has 2 cars until the teenager can drive and then it goes up to 3 cars.

Then we get into how we "need" cable TV, vacations, summer camping, lots of gifts at Christmas, the latest electronic gadgets, etc. All this comes at a price -- our children.

Rather than putting our priority the human beings we *chose* to bring into this world, we put our priority into instant gratification and accumulating wealth.

And it's a real shame because the results are becoming increasingly obvious -- bad teens who are rudderless. I have neighbors whose teenaged children don't know what to do with themselves. They've never had to work for anything in their lives and are rudderless as they decide what to do for themselves. Our highschools are filled with teens who barely know their parents, have no concept of intimacy or feeling of closeness with their parents.

We naturally blame the media or video games or the Internet or the teachers because heck, we've been avoiding our parental responsibilties so long that why stop now? It's much easier to blame someone else anyway.

As a culture, we need to decide what our priorities are. Are kids essentially enhanced pets or are they an integral part of our lives?

Over at www.kuro5hin.com there was that article on "getting paid for content".

just introduced a "subscription" plan that sim;ply lets people donate to the site and in exchange that user doesn't see banner ads.

Immediately a bunch of users stated they were leaving and would not be back. This is a rather frightening reaction since in their case, they were providing a NEW feature -- i.e. the site always had ads before, now they were giving users the option to have the site with no ads. But users didn't look at it that way, many saw it as the site being "Crippled" for regular users.

Not a good sign for the webmasters of the world who are looking to find ways to pay the bandwidth trolls.

The Washington Post brings in a team of experts to test out the various compressed audio formats (MP3, MP3pro, WMA, etc.). The results are very intersting.

One of our top priorities when we created the site was to have a way of really giving users who are contributing to the site some accoldates.

That's why we track the top skin authors per category and top skins and such. But we shouldn't stop there I think.

One of the things we've been throwing around is the idea of having a points system for users. So that people who are contributing to the site in other ways can get more recognition.

Basically the idea works something like this:

When you make a post, you get 1 point for every 10 responses it gets.

When you submit news that gets accepted, you get a point.

For every 10 responses you make you get a point.

For every 5 responses on news items you get a point.

For every 100 downloads your skin gets you get a point.

For every article we publish of yours you get 1 point.

For every 100 people who view your article you get a point.

For every 5 comments you make on a skin you get a point.

Now, to keep people from writing "junk" responses, they would lose a point for every response/comment of theirs we had to delete (so if the person responded "Yea!" as their post, we could delete it and the user would lose 1 point -- we would just discretion, only if it was apparent the person was making the weak response for points would we do that).

This sort of point system would then let us have a hall of fame for top contributors to the site.

Each month Stardock emails out a magazine with the latest news on what its doing as well as interesting news and stories from around the web. The next issue will be outlining what's going to be new in WindowBlinds 3. Click on the link below if you would like to subscribe. Stardock Magazine goes out to over 100,000 people worldwide each month.

For all you would be webmasters out there interested in paying for that bandwidth, there's a really good article that talks about different ways of generating income from your website to pay the bills.

WinCustomize is accepting T-shirt designs, logo designs, etc. If we use them in something, we'll pay you $100 plus give you a few shirts or mugs or hats or whatever it's used on to give to friends and family. Just submit your designs to the Graphics area, the T-shirt ideas is a catch-all. Anything you think might be cool on something is possible. Shirts, hats, mugs, etc.

Anyone else here read the Harry Potter books? I scoffed at them for a long while and indeed the first one was pretty kiddie stuff.

But I just finished the 4th book, Goblet of Fire, and I'm hooked.

Any other HP readers here?

I love the summer. Michigan, which is where I live, is awful in the winter but you can almost forgive it in the summer.

Right now as I type this from the deck (wireless Internet, love it ) I can see the fire-flies flying around. There are woods behind the house and the creek is full of frogs (of course). I've been raising tadpoles into toads again this summer and the yard is full of tiny toads.

What would be cool would be to find out what the different people reading this from all over the world have surrounding them. What are some of the neat things you can describe around your home?

Okay, we've had some real troubles getting T-shirts going internally in terms of finding a shirt design we'd want to make so we're going to open it up to others.

In the Graphics area we have a T-shirt section now if you want to submit a proposal feel free. If we use it, we'll give you $100 and several free shirts to give out to friends and family.

Here is one example logo we came up with:
http://scripts.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?library=18&SkinID=12