OVERREACTION OR WARRANTED PUNISHMENT?
A woman in Ohio has gotten a lot of reaction from her peers for sending the following letter to the local paper...
You can never really be too safe with the Internet and your kids these days. Because of this, my husband and I won't let our 14-year-old daughter have a MySpace page.
We also have set hours that she's allowed to go on the Internet... because we don't want her exposed to the many "adult" sites online.
Well, you know how you can check out the history of sites that have been visited on your web browser? Well my husband and I did that... and found out that our daughter LIED to us... and she actually has a MySpace page.
My husband and I took out her bedroom door because we can't even trust her now... and we monitor her whenever she uses the Internet.
Do other parents agree that a 14-year-old has no business being on MySpace? Or was our punishment too harsh?
Well, we heard from you this morning, and you (for the most part) thought the punishment was absolutely justfied. We did hear from some who thought the punishment was excessive, and the parents should have worked with their child to teach them appropriate internet usage instead of banning it altogether, but everyone was agreed... parents need to be parents, not friends, to their kids.
3 TRILLION... HOW BIG IS THAT?
Yesterday, President Bush rolled out his latest federal budget proposal... which is the money the government needs for the coming year. The budget calls for $3 TRILLION.
That's right, $3 TRILLION. For some perspective of just how truly massive a number that is, consider this:
Written out, a trillion is a one followed by TWELVE zeroes. It is a million times a million. Or a thousand times a billion.
In terms of outer space, a light year... which is the distance light travels in a year... is about 6 trillion miles.
Right now, there are 6.8 billion people in the world. If the U.S. government divided the budget evenly, everyone in the world would get $441. If the money was split among just the 300 million Americans, everyone would get a check for $10,000.
If you were to count to a trillion at a rate of one number per second, it would take you almost 95,000 years.
Want to travel 3 trillion miles? No problem. You just have to circumvent the globe a mere 120 million times. Or take 17,000 round trips to the sun.
DANCING WITH THE STARS RUMORS
ABC will announce the cast of the upcoming, sixth season of "Dancing with the Stars" later this month. But as usual, there's all manner of speculation and rumor online.
Here's a convenient list of all the rumored names we've heard so far:
--73-year-old Florence Henderson... (--the mom from "The Brady Bunch")
--Kristy McNichol... (--the '70s child star who played Buddy on "Family".)
--Former "Charlie's Angel" Cheryl Ladd...
--62-year-old Priscilla Presley...
--Marla Maples... (--Donald Trump's ex.)
--Former Olympic figure-skater Kristi Yamaguchi
--"Bachelor" host Chris Harrison
--"Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" designer Paige Hemmis
--Donny Osmond
--Tennis star MONICA SELES
--And (deaf actress) MARLEE MATLIN...
