Can’t make that meeting on the other coast? Don’t feel like going into the office today? Send one of the new breed of personal and corporate robots – a telepresence robot – instead. Meet Anybot, AVA, Luna and VGo – described by some as remote-control avatars, these telepresence robots can assist you – or even be you – in many work and other settings. From sitting in on a meeting for you (teleconferencing you in with audio and video) to following you around on medical rounds, there is a telepresence robot for you (if you can afford the price tag).

How many times have you wanted to smack the cell phone out of your texting teen or twenty-something’s hand while you are talking to them? Or while they are eating dinner with you? Is your irritation at your date’s texting his buddies during your first date reasonable? Is it ok to break up with someone by email or text message? Do you have to accept the Facebook friend request from your co-worker? The answer to these, and more – oh so many more – pressing digital manners questions are in a new book – just in time for the holidays – from New York Times Social Q’s columnist Philip Galanes – Social Q’s: How to Survive the Quirks, Quandaries and Quagmires of Today.

You may be familiar Meetup.com, in fact you may even belong to a Meetup group or even a few Meetup groups, or participate in a Meetup meetup or two. The Meetup concept is simple: join a Meetup group (or found your own new Meetup group), which is hosted on the Meetup.com system, but with the express purpose of the Meetup group meeting in person. And that, says Meetup.com founder Scott Heiferman, is the whole purpose of the Meetup group concept which, says Heiferman, he founded in direct response to 9/11: to use the Internet to get off the Internet.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) has said that they will be closing up to 3700 regional post offices in an effort to stem a financial hemorrhage that will see them as much as $8.3 billion in the hole this year alone. The post office closing list includes possible post office closures in nearly every state, although most of the locations on the post office closure list are considered to be poorly performing branches.

More and more it’s becoming commonplace to see a QR code – or “QR barcode” – in all sorts of places. In part that’s because there is a free app for nearly every smart phone that includes a QR code reader (most bar code scanner apps also include a QR code scanner). Also, it’s pretty easy to make a QR code; you just go to a QR code generator website, plug in your info, and voila, you have your very own QR code.

You may not think that answering the question “What is a heat dome” has anything to do with the Internet, but here’s why it does: With this incredible, massive, near-national heat wave, news outlets across the country are throwing out the term ‘heat dome’, and people are taking to the Internet to find out just what the heck a ‘heat dome’ is, and it’s nearly impossible to find a site that will tell you what is a heat dome! So, here we are, filling that void on the Internet, and telling you what a heat dome is.

It’s been a long time in coming, but the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which is responsible for creation, approval, and overseeing of Internet domains (primarily the TLD space) has set in motion the final approval of the .XXX domain (also being referred to, at least in email, as the “dot-ex-ex-ex” domain, so as to avoid spam filters). Only adult entertainment industry sites, with adult-themed content, may use .XXX domains. But not everybody loves it – in fact that free speech foundation, The Free Speech Coalition, lead by Executive Director Diane Duke, is boycotting the .XXX domain, even though, as Dianne Duke seems to overlook, there is no suggestion that anybody will be required to use the .XXX domain.

We have often taken flack for saying that children have no business being on Facebook (or the Internet in general), and that parents really don’t understand the dangers of letting your child on the Internet without adequate supervision and precautions. Now a group of police officers is saying the same thing, going so far as to say that you need to have your child’s Facebook password, and monitor their activity on Facebook – even if it means stealing their Facebook password to do it.

A recently released study has discovered that teenagers who do an excessive amount of texting are more likely to also be involved in riskier behaviors, including drinking alcohol, experimenting (or worse) with other drugs, and being active sexually, even to the point of promiscuity. This excessive texting is being dubbed “hypertexting”.

Most people are familiar, at least in name, if not content, with the Hague and Geneva conventions, even if only from hearing the terms on Hogan’s Heros. Along with outlining how enemy prisoners can and can’t be treated, they are intended, in part, to help protect civilians during times of war, by outlining rules of war – rules for the etiquette of war, if you will – despite that seeming a blatant oxymoron. Some of these rules rise to the level of law, and violations of these laws are considered “war crimes”, and the leaders of countries who don’t follow the rules can be tried in an International War Crimes Tribunal. The big question right now is whether cyberwar, and related cybercrimes, fall under the governance of these rules, and whether they should.

Once upon a time, kids didn’t carry cell phones and smart phones. Texting didn’t exist, and telephone calls were made on analog phones which teens would tie up for hours on end. That has all changed with the advent of the electronic society, and with it, the methods of punishing children and teens have also changed. Now kids who misbehave have such activities as “screen time” and “texting privileges” removed. That’s right, we are living in an age of digital grounding – where instead of being literally grounded from going places, kids are having their electronic gadgets removed or their use of them restricted.

Will today’s children have to change their names to escape their digital past? In a nutshell, this disturbing possibility is what Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, suggested could happen in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, as reported by the Daily Telegraph.

Let’s face it, one of the things that the Internet is great for is research. We decided to showcase this today by writing a definitive article on how to load a dishwasher. This is for all those men and women who find themselves rearranging the dishes in the dishwasher after their spouse, or children, or significant other, has already loaded it. (Oh c’mon, you know you do it.) Now, it’s easy enough to type “how to load a dishwasher” into Google, and come up with over a million results.

A study conducted earlier this year has found that children between the ages of 8 and 18 are staring at an electronic screen, and using electronic media and electronic devices, a stunning 8 to 10 hours a day! That’s the equivalent of a full-time job or better, just using iPods, computers, cell phones, televisions, and other electronic devices!

The whistle-blowing, secret-revealing, classified document-exposing website, WikiLeaks.org, has posted tens of thousands of classified documents – many of them field reports, all of them related to the war in Afghanistan – which taken together paint a picture of exactly how the U.S. war in Afghanistan and Pakistan is going, and has been going. The WikiLeak documents, spanning the period from 2004 up through last year, and estimated at between 75,000 and 90,000 in number, and labeled by WikiLeaks “The Afghan War Diary”, represent one of the single biggest leaks in United States history. These Afghan War Diaries have the White House and the rest of the U.S. administration in a tizzy, revealing, as they do, unreported civilian casualties, an allegation that Pakistan is backing the Taliban in Afghanistan, and information about the elusive “Task Force 373” (being misreported in some coverage as “Task Force 273”), which is purported to be the unit used to target and take out high ranking enemy persons of interest.