I saw this on CNN today. Years ago I was talking with a friend and said that all porn should be moved to .sex or .prn, but .xxx would work just as well. Moving it all over to .xxx would allow parents, schools, and employers to block one domain and solve all their pornography problems. I myself have never had any luck with the IE filters. They always seem to block completely appropriate content and leave me having to run downstairs to punch in a password so the kids can finish their school report. But this idea of .xxx, this is an idea I can get behind. It would make porn easier to block and easier to find, whichever side of the fence your on. It would also make it a hell of a lot harder to accidently stumble upon.

I’ve been mulling my ‘A Difficult Dinner’ novel over for the last couple of weeks. Originally I had thought that I could write daily on ‘Blackmoon’ and do the finishing edit of Dinner. Yeah, that didn’t work out. All it did was overwealm me, which caused me to stop writing for a bit. Well, I’m back on the wagon now and planning on staying there.

Monday I had my buddy Doug come over and work over my ideas for ‘A Difficult Dinner,’ including changes to the ending and patching some holes in the story. We worked on that for about four hours and it really got my writing juices going. then on Tuesday I wrote out some more notes and started the rewrite on the novel.

I added about 700 words to the first chapter. Words that should have been there to begin with, not words just for the sake of words. And I’m starting to get a handle on the new and improved ending. My goal is to get this out the door by the end of April. That gives me a month and a half. I’m sure I can do that.

Back to work. Need to get this done if I’m going to get my stack of rejection letters going.

So I see on CNN.com that Bill Gates is proposing we pay for “Stamps” to send email. This got me thinking about a article that I read a while back in PC Magazine. See, I think that we should pay for our internet usage by the bandwidth we use. Much the same way we pay for electricity or natural gas. I don’t know about the logistics of doing this, but it seems that it could be done, and in doing so would address a lot of issues. Don’t get me wrong. I love the idea of a flat fee for all the internet I can use. But, I don’t think it’s really working.

I don’t think that email stamps are the answer, in fact I see them as a hurdle to progress and efficiency. It seems to me that internet service should be metered and users should pay for the amount of service they use, instead of paying an arbitrary and often unfair flat fee. If metering were universally implemented, most of the problems with the Internet would be resolved.

Here’s some of the advantages that I see for pay-by-use internet. It’s a fair method of charging for service, metered pay plans would reduce spam, improve performance, cut back on denial-of-service attacks, and reduce the use of file-sharing programs (i.e. Kazaa, LimeWire, eDonkey, etc…). Metering would also reduce the amount of trivial downloading done on the internet and reduce the amount of needless 24-hour streaming of media. Equitable pricing mechanisms can account for streaming sessions versus e-mail and surfing. As an added benefit, because of metering there would be an improvement in behavior on the web. Friends, family, and colleagues would be far less likely to send us every cute/funny thing that they’ve seen on the net if they were forced to be more judicious in using the internet.

To make this work we need to ensure that the average user pays less, not more, for a web connection. Only the heaviest users would then have to pay more than what they are paying now. A lower cost for the average household would speed the propogation of the internet accross the country. Let’s get broadband internet in every home in the country. The ISPs can make their money upselling additional services to their basic service. Why should we have to pay for someone else’s connection. I propose that we only pay for what we use.