Facebook Goes Full Backdoor Creeper AGAIN

Just when you think it’s safe to log on to the most overrated social media platform in history…

Facebook Just Changed Your Email Without Asking—Here’s How to Fix It

Hey, here’s something really stupid and annoying: Facebook abruptly switched everyone’s default email address to the @facebook.com account you’ve never used. Here’s how to switch back Facebook’s obnoxious overreach right now. So people can actually, you know, contact you.

Of course, Facebook’s standard operating procedure is to constantly make changes that either compromise security or provide users with something they never wanted. It’s most stunning achievement is that every “improvement” seems to make the site worse yet people keep flocking to it.

Marx Madness On FTRradio.com

As everyone’s NCAA brackets began imploding during just the first weekend of March Madness, my good friends at FTRradio.com began cooking up a political diversion. Thus, Marx Madness was born.

Four differently themed “regions” of sixteen competitors each have been chosen and seeded for a tournament that will crown an MVP (Most Vile Progressive). Yours truly was part of the seeding committee and I will be on FTR tonight at 10 PM EDT for the big Selection Show. The tournament will open up to the public after that. Votes will be cast on the station’s site and should be almost as much fun as watching Duke lose early.

I did not agree with some of the final seeding choices so I may very well have to spend some time searching for votes in a Minnesota car trunk somewhere.

Only Monday & We Have A Headline Of The Week Winner

I’d go to church just to reduce the probability of spending eternity in Hell with Richard Dawkins

A hallmark of modern atheists is that so many of them seem to be rather, well, evangelical about their disbelief. Dawkins has made a career out of fervently preaching the non-word. Perhaps mellowing with age, he now admits to being agnostic rather than atheist (a label he had no problem with for decades).

Although Dawkins said that the chance of God existing wasn’t a great one, Dr. Stanley decided even that number was a bit high if the risk was any afterlife time with him.

Consider the calculations that a man makes when insuring his house from fire. If the chances of his houses catching fire are just one-in-a-hundred, he might forgo purchasing insurance because he gambles that he’s unlikely to ever need it. Yet all of us would still make the purchase because the consequences of that one-in-a-hundred accident happening are so unbearably dire. A single, improbable spark could destroy everything. Therefore, the man buys the insurance.
If Dawkins is playing the law of averages, then he has to make the same calculation about God. To be sure, he only acknowledges a 1.5 percent chance that the Almighty exists. If his gamble is proven right, then Dawkins will die and suffer no consequences. But if that 1.5 percent chance comes through, the consequences are hugely disproportionate to the stakes. One of the reasons why I go to Church is that I don’t want to run the risk of spending eternity in Hell with Richard Dawkins. Even a 1.5 percent risk isn’t worth running. I’d rather go to Heaven with the androids.

Android App Market 10 Cent Sale

Android can haz apps too…

There are still another five days left in this sale. New apps are featured each day and, at ten cents a pop, the majority of them are hard to resist. I’ve downloaded several games that I wouldn’t have tried at $4.99 and have been having a blast keeping calmer than usual in the TSA line the past few days. Where else outside of some obscure South Pacific island can you have this much fun for two or three bucks?

I’ve also gotten some fun photo apps like Paper Camera and Pano, which means my daughter will now have a reason to take even more pics than the two dozen or so every time I leave my phone unattended.

NY Times: Keep The Family Peace By Letting Your Teens Have Sex At Home

I wish I was kidding:

Would Americans increase peace in family life and strengthen family bonds if they adopted more accepting attitudes about sex and what’s allowable under the family roof? I’ve interviewed 130 people, all white, middle class and not particularly religious, as part of a study of teenage sex and family life here and in the Netherlands. My look into cultural differences suggests family life might be much improved, for all, if Americans had more open ideas about teenage sex.

Amy Schalet is a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, via an education at Berkeley and Harvard and a postdoctoral fellowship at UC San Francisco. So it’s safe to say that I’m not surprised that she’s staked out some ground somewhere on the far left of left in her new book. As the father of a newly minted (one week ago) teenage daughter, however, this one has my head spinning around. And not in the fun head spinning around kind of way.

While I haven’t read the book, I am using some of the points that Dr. Schalet chose to illustrate her conclusions. Some of these conclusions seem more like generalizations based on what she picked out from her own book to make her case.

Kimberly and Natalie dramatize the cultural differences in the way young women experience their sexuality. (I have changed their names to protect confidentiality.) Kimberly, a 16-year-old American, never received sex education at home. “God, no! No, no! That’s not going to happen,” she told me. She’d like to tell her parents that she and her boyfriend are having sex, but she believes it is easier for her parents not to know because the truth would “shatter” their image of her as their “little princess.”

Natalie, who is also 16 but Dutch, didn’t tell her parents immediately when she first had intercourse with her boyfriend of three months. But, soon after, she says, she was so happy, she wanted to share the good news. Initially her father was upset and worried about his daughter and his honor. “Talk to him,” his wife advised Natalie; after she did, her father made peace with the change. Essentially Natalie and her family negotiated a life change together and figured out, as a family, how to adjust to changed circumstance.

It is quite unfortunate that “Kimberly” didn’t receive any sex education at home. As this article is laid out, she is supposed to be indicative of the American teenage experience. And she may very well have been if this was written in 1965. It’s true that I haven’t conducted any research on this subject. I am, however, fully immersed in the child-rearing experience, which, at the very least, gives me a legitimate frame of reference from which to form a somewhat informed opinion about this subject.

Life on a Cloud

It’s time for me to inform iTunes that we’re breaking up. No, really Apple, it’s not me, it’s you. Keep your proprietary aloofness and your clunky updates, I’ve fallen out of whatever it was I originally felt for iTunes.

Several months ago, I ditched the iTunes store for Amazon MP3 because I could find songs that were priced the same or lower and they weren’t “protected”. Last week, Amazon offered unlimited space for music on its cloud drive with any paid upgrade. So I forked over the twenty bucks and began transferring my entire library. Now I have access to all my music on up to eight devices without having to constantly sync one up with another. My iTunes playlists were imported so I didn’t have to redo any of that.

After a week of road testing the Cloud Player on my Mac, iPad (yes, two Apple products and I still want to be done with iTunes) and Android phone I can easily see that this is a relationship that may last a while.

Yes, Spotify just moved across the ocean and started flirting with me by extending an early invitation to try it out. I’ve only been using it for a day and can see some potential but there have been some glitches that I wouldn’t expect from a platform that’s already in full use elsewhere.

The transfer does take a long time (several days for people who had hundreds of CDs ripped to iTunes) but that’s one of the last inconvenient things you’ll have to deal with regarding your music collection and its accessibility.

The unlimited space offer won’t last forever and Amazon hasn’t stated how long it will be available. Any purchases you make from Amazon MP3 don’t count against the space you have on the cloud drive so there should be plenty for you if you happen to come across some previously lost CDs (as I just did) even after the offer expires.

My hard drive feels freer than it has in years and I’m already starting to forget what iTunes looks like.

I think I’ll go outside and enjoy some music.