The story deals with a new study released by the Office of National Drug Control Policy that looks at drug-related videos. The study found that 5 percent of Internet teens saw at least one such video in June - the month the study was conducted. Among the content seen in these videos was footage of teens driving while getting high.

John Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, says:

Parents would be horrified to think that people are sneaking into their house to encourage their kids to build a bong or to chug on beer at age 13. The fact is those people are sneaking into your house through your Internet connection on your computer.

When I hear that 5 percent of Internet-using teens saw these drug-related videos in a given month, I have to admit I’m a little surprised. I expected the number to be higher.But surely we can toss this drug thing into the larger issue of kids and the Internet.

Whenever I talk to parents, I like to ask: What sort of steps do you take to monitor your kids’ Internet activity? Do they have a computer in their room? Do you use any sort of content-blocking programs? Do you ever look at the browser history, etc.?

Could we, possibly, be taking it a little too far? Personally, I find myself limited largely to Facebook - where most of my friends are - though I do dabble a bit in LinkedIn and Flickr.

Some suggest that perhaps we’ve taken this thing to bizarre levels.Here’s an amusing article at PCMag.com, where writer Jennifer L. DeLeo offers her take on the 10 most absurd social networks.

Some that made her list: Geek Match Making,  RedKaraoke,  nclüdr, and Line for Heaven.

But my personal favorite has to be Hot Enough. It’s a social network set up for those who are, according to the site, above average.

Hollywood already does a good job of making us feel like we’re fat and old; we don’t need a site that rates us on whether we’re hot-or not. And yet, there is one, and it’s called HotEnough.org. In order to get your photo up on Hot Enough, you must send three photos, including one body shot. The dating site’s editors will go through a screening process, separating the attractive and athletic from the ugly and unhealthy. Anyone scoring between eight and 10 points is considered hot enough. There’s even a section for baby boomer hotties. Oy vey!

“There are ways of improving cell phone battery life, but there are very few ways of improving the batteries themselves,” said Kevin Burden, ABI Research’s mobile devices research director. “Essentially, battery technology is governed by God - there are just no new elements showing up in the Periodic Table.”

It does remind me of one of my favorite features of my phone. I have it set to turn itself off every night around midnight and then turn itself back on eight hours later.

From the article, here are a few tips to prolonging the life of your battery.

• A battery’s life is determined by a combination of the number of times it can be charged and by time itself, says Buchmann of Cadex Electronics. “Batteries age from the day they’re manufactured,” he said. “Even if you’re not using the battery, it ages.” Most lithium-ion batteries will last for between 300 and 500 charges. But if you let the battery run down too much before charging, that can hurt its lifespan, he says.
• Heat - especially in the car - is not your cell phone battery’s friend. It’s one of the elements that can shorten battery life the most, Buchmann says, so don’t leave a cell phone on the dash or put it in the glove box.
• Turn off the Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi and 3G radios in your phone when you’re not using them, and dim the backlight on the phone’s screen, says Burden of ABI Research.

I’d “sit” down at a virtual table with 9 other players. I worried that some of my opponents might actually be working together, talking by phone while playing the game. And there was always the possibility, I feared, that someone at the table had the ability - through a computer hack - to see everyone else’s cards.

Well, here’s a story that reinforces those fears. Seems a well-known Las Vegas poker player has been implicated in an alleged cheating scheme at the UltimateBet.com poker site. The story doesn’t offer much in the way of details about the alleged scheme. But apparently it was pretty successful.

The amount of money allegedly stolen from players in the high- and no-limit games on UltimateBet has not been made public, but the KGC news release said that the site has so far returned $6.1 million to players impacted by the cheating.

In these days of social networking, it is perhaps fitting that protesters are actually using Facebook to protest against Facebook. They’ve formed a group, “1,000,000 AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK LAYOUT!” to voice their outrage over the change.

As of now, the group has more than 2.67 million members. And apparently they are planning a two-day boycott on Oct. 18 and 19.

It’s not the only Facebook group created to protest the new design, which, according to Facebook, has now become the default for almost all of its members. Another group called “Petition Against the New Facebook” has more than 1.6 million backers, while the group “I hate the new Facebook” has 1.5 million supporters.

It’s likely that there is a lot of overlap among these groups’ supporters, but if the largest group contains all of those opposed to the new design, that’s still a significant number of unhappy members. Facebook has 100 million active users.

As you might expect, those numbers are strongly affected by younger cell phone users. The 13 to 17 year-old age group sent or received 1,742 text messages against 231 phone calls.

The oldest users - those 65 and up - still lag considerably, with 99 phone calls and 14 text messages per month.

Still, this isn’t just a teen movement. The 35-44 age group had 236 text messages and 223 phone calls.

Apparently the rise in popularity of the full QWERTY-style keypads has contributed considerably to the text-heavy trend.

I can see this in my own life. I find myself sending so many more text messages now that I have a phone with a full keypad. And I also find myself writing messages that consist of more than just four or five words.

So do you text more than you talk? Why or why not?

This Reuters story  says the nation’s largest cable provider plans to use software that will essentially figure out which users are hogging more than their share of bandwidth. During peak hours, traffic from those users will be given lower priority than other users.

It said that when a subscriber’s traffic is assigned a lower priority status its traffic could be delayed if the network is congested but would not be delayed if there is no congestion.

The cable company’s plan follows a rebuke by the Federal Communications Commission which said the cable company went too far in blocking traffic from some users.

The disclosure by Comcast was welcomed by Free Press, one of the groups that filed the complaint that spurred the FCC’s involvement. However, the group’s director, Ben Scott, said he was concerned both about the company’s continuing efforts to reverse the FCC ruling and a stipulation that it reserves the right to change its network management practices without notice after Jan. 1.

 ”Given the years it took to uncover the company’s current blocking, we need assurances that we are not going back down that dark path. Transparency should never have an expiration date.”

Included is a motorized sprayer, a doorbell that plays mp3 files, and a retractable ceiling fan.

And then there’s the hanging alarm clock:

For decades designers have come up with different ways for us to wake: vibrations, wind chimes, mood lighting, and “explosive” sounds. But the Hanging Alarm Clock ($39) certainly takes the cake as one of the most ridiculous alarm clocks ever. The clock is designed to be suspended from the ceiling above your bed. When the alarm goes off (to the tune of the Close Encounters of the Third Kind theme song, no less), you have to reach up to hit the snooze button, and the clock will retract upwards. The idea is that you’ll have to keep reaching up to turn off the alarm clock until you’re out of bed anyway.

At one point, she asks, “Will it tell us which lane to get in?”

Nah, I told her. I don’t think these things are quite that detailed.

At least not yet.

Here’s a story on MSNBC, by Suzanne Choney, about the next generation of GPS devices. Changes are coming.

The market is an intensely competitive one, even more so now with an increasing number of GPS-capable cell phones and consumers who are tightening their spending. GPS manufacturers are working to distinguish their units by offering software features for tasks like changing lanes and smarter routing to avoid traffic.

In particular, I’m thinking about those parents who aren’t gamers. In some ways, it’s sort of like asking someone to approve or disapprove of a food dish they’ve never tasted.

Or, in the words of Monica Evans, an assistant professor of computer game design at the University of Texas at Dallas: “It’s not like picking up a book, where you can skim the pages to see what it’s all about.”

I don’t have kids myself. And my dogs - while quite smart - lack the dexterity required to operate game controllers. But I wonder how you parents go about the business of monitoring gameplay.

Do you do anything more than rely on video game ratings? In the Pew study about teens and gamin, 74 percent of parents said they always or sometimes check those ratings before letting kids play a game. And nearly half said they have stopped their kids from playing a particular game.