(Or anywhere on the internet really.)  People will find your images, copy them, and use them for their own purposes.

I mention this because I have just heard about  Flickr user "Lara Jade" who recently discovered that a self portrait she photographed when she was 14 years old was used as the cover for a pornographic DVD without her knowledge.  The responses she has received from the DVD company border on the bizarre and betray an extremely warped sense of morality and personal responsibility.

Sadly for Lara Jade, she cannot afford the legal fees necessary to pursue the matter, especially since she lives in the UK and the photo was misappropriated by a company operating in the USA.

Read her story here.

Those of you who post personal or family photos are advised to publish them as "private" photos -- viewable only by people you name as family or friends.  This is not something I've ever worried about on my blog, but I am now wrestling with the idea of marking some of my photo albums as private.  If that happens, anybody who wants to view those albums will need to create a reader account so I can add you as an approved reader.  I haven't decided what I am going to do.  This could be a good opportunity to just switch to Flickr.  I'll have to think on it.

An Australian video game designer has caused a major uproar Down Under with his creation of a game based on the Virginia Tech massacre.

Called V-Tech Rampage, the game has several levels of "stealth and murder," reports The Sydney Morning Herald.

But what really is causing the kerfuffle--as if the game itself wasn't in bad enough taste--is that its designer, Ryan Lambourn, says he will take the game down from his Web site only if the public comes up with a $2,000 payoff.

For another grand, he'll apologize...

-- Game designer causes uproar with Virginia Tech game (Tech News Blog)

In another example of fundie Christian love and acceptance, a 13 year old girl in Hardesty, Oklahoma is now being homeschooled after having been basically run out of school by the local knuckledraggers.  Please watch this video. 

You're a brave girl Nicole.  Sorry for what you went through.  You should come live in Massachusetts.  We have plenty of religious nuts here too, but the area is pretty liberal, and therefore most of the Christians I know actually behave like Christians.

From University panel says student parody "harassed" blacks (AP via Boston.com):
...The parody of "O Come All Ye Faithful" calls black people "boisterous" and proclaims, "Born into the ghetto. O Jesus! We need you now to fill our racial quotas."

The lyrics also say, "No matter what your grades are, F's, D's or G's, give them all privileged status."...

I can understand that someone who is a conservative might have issues with affirmative action, a system that attempts to correct for the effects of years of injustice and discrimination.  But when you write "funny" songs called "Oh Come All Ye Black Folk" that indicate that black people come from the ghetto and have bad grades, you probably aren't doing your cause any favors.

But that's exactly what a Tufts University conservative campus newspaper "The Primary Source" did.  You can imagine how well the idea was received, especially since it was only last month that the same paper garnered the ire of Muslim students by posting parodies of Islamic Awareness Week advertisements in which they discussed brutality in Muslim countries.

There is a value sometimes in being shocking.  Sometimes it is necessary to shock someone into realizing that they are behaving in a manner they wouldn't tolerate from others.  Maybe that's what this paper was doing.  In order to be certain though, I'd need to see some shocking articles directed at white Christians, or something like that.  Barring that, it sounds like the students who imagine themselves to be Tuft's University's "one lone conservative voice" are abusing that voice by saying things that no decent conservative I know would say.

What do you think?