I thought this was pretty funny, but an interesting use of technology. It's the TV Guardian, with the tag line "cuss busters for television and videos". It mutes phrases with "foul words" to protect your precious children's ears.

The way it works is by intercepting the closed captioning signal, and whenever a word in their list is detected, it mutes that whole audio portion. It also modifies the caption with a more "appropriate" word. Be sure and check out the chart on imitators, which compares TV Guardian with a "cheap foreign knock-off".

I think what bugs me about this is this idea that "if only 'bad' words weren't said on television, TV would be perfectly safe for my children!" Please. Your kid hearing the occasional swear word is not going to kill them. How about, oh I don't know, monitoring what your kids watch instead of just plunking them in front of the TV? Are people going to start letting their kids watch the Sopranos because the swear words have been taken out?

It's like this letter I saw in Time magainze, where a woman wrote that she wouldn't allow her kids to see Titanic because Kate Winslet is shown topless. Oh okay, but that whole part about fifteen hundred people dying a horrifying nightmarish death, that part was fine.

A little perspective, that's all I ask.