So the internet is poised to allow non-latin characters for domain names in mid-November.  What does this mean for you?

It means a whole new wave of spam for http://www.???.com.

Oh shit, you probably have no idea what that means, do you? (Hell, neither do I.)

While us latin-y people are grumbling about how it’s going to make our lives worse (it is – thanks internet geniuses), millions of people around the world will be able to go to their own regional web sites and look for ??, ??????? ????, ???????????, and ??????? ? ??????? ???????. (The first person to decipher those phrases in the comments gets a personalized photoshopped picture of what I imagine the winner to look like in very very low lighting, possibly naked, but you can’t tell by looking.)

I’m on the fence on the issue – I think it’s great that people can use their own cabbage-y sounding languages to browse to their local fish market’s web site to see what the catch of the day is, and millions of Chinese people can link the fuck out of our sites and bewilder our traffic tracking. (Oh hey, all of a sudden I have a trillion hits on my blog coming from ???????.com, is that good?)

But on the other hand, I think people should be forced to speak English, if for no other reason than I’m a asshole.