Well, scratch that last one. According to a Pew Internet and American Life study (PDF), it looks like Internet-and-technology-savvy families—or at least the heads of them—have learned to prioritize. While face time at dinner is markedly less, even nearly nonexistent, and while parents work more, the survey suggests that leisure activities, hobbies, and TV viewing are being sacrificed instead of family time.

Instead of wirelessly pulling families apart, the survey showed that married-with-children households were more likely to have a couple of networked computers in the house in addition to multiple cell phones among parents and kids, and that these families put that technology to work. They check in with each other more often and have more shared experiences—what Pew calls “Hey, look at this!” experiences.

Despite that, because of the Internet, parents are working longer hours and the family is less likely to eat dinner at the same time, a quarter of respondents said they felt their families were closer than their pre-Internet families, thanks to interconnectivity the Internet and mobile phones allow. About 60 percent said there has been no affect on closeness while 11 percent reported feeling less close.

What they’re sacrificing instead appears to be leisure time. While 49 percent of employed adults are very satisfied with the amount of time they spend with their families, only a third are very satisfied with time available for hobbies, clubs, relaxing, or other free time activities. They’re also watching less TV; about 25 percent of Internet-connected families say the Internet has decreased the amount of time they watch TV.

You can bet the amount of TV watched will continue to decline. While 89 percent of those over 65 watch TV almost every day, only 58 percent of those 18-29 do so. Just 12 percent of senior citizens attribute less TV watching to the Internet, compared to 29 percent of their younger counterparts.

A lot of that may ring true for you, if you’re in a married-with-children situation like me. More often than not, my wife pings me via Gmail chat requesting I stop by the store to pick something up; the teenager disappears to his room for hours at a time but eventually plops down at the home office computer to share his latest online discovery (usually a game or some monster he’s created). TV? Well, “watching” is a flexible word. Let’s just say the set is usually on.

We still manage to eat dinner together, though.

Some more statistics from Pew’s study on how the Internet affects families:

• 58% of those living in married-with-children households own two or more desktop or laptop computers.
• Nearly two-thirds of those living in multiple-computer households (63%) link those computers in a home network.
• Both spouses use the internet in 76% of married-with-children households, as do 84% of their children aged 7-17.
• 65% of married-with-children households with a child between the ages of 7-17 contain a husband, wife, and child who all use the internet.
• 89% of married-with-children households own multiple cell phones, and nearly half (47%) own three or more mobile devices. Children in these households are somewhat less likely to own a cell phone than they are to go online: 57% of these children (aged 7-17) have their own cell phone.
• 64% of couples who both own a cell phone contact each other at least once a day to coordinate their schedules
• 47% of couples who have one or no cell phones do this at least once a day
• 42% of parents contact their child/children daily using a cell phone, and 35% do so using a landline telephone

Edelman, Wal-Mart’s PR firm, had that music to face this week after it was revealed that Wal-Marting Across America was a PR stunt. Edelman decided it best to announce Thursday that there are a couple of other morally flexible (meaning fake) Wal-Mart blogs out there, once they looked up the definition of “transparency.”

Working Families for Wal-Mart, a praise-singing “grassroots” advocacy group formed in December 2005, and its subsidiary, The Paid Critics blog, a forum for outing the union groups funding prominent anti-Wal-Mart critics, were both established by Edelman employees.

Paid Critics’ main foe appears to be Brian McLaughlin, “an ally of Wal-Mart Watch” and “Wake-Up Wal-Mart,” who incidentally (they really want you to know) fleeced Little Leaguers for $100,000.

That’s a lot of booster money. I was lucky to get $10 in my half-a-milk-carton.

Paid Critics, once anonymous, now names Edelman employees Miranda Gill, Brian McNeill and Kate Marshall, whose clients include Working Families For Walmart.

In case your irony sniffer isn’t working right. PR flacks are being paid to criticize those that are paid to criticize their clients at a blog called PaidCritics.com. That’s irony so pure it rivals Ivory Soap.

It was very clear last summer that the anonymous ease with which a blog could be created would lead to crafty ne’er-do-wells pulling the equivalent of a PR sleight of hand.

Blogoriented.com is no more, but when it first arrived on the scene in Summer ’05, the PR world was abuzz with ethical questions about the concept of fraudulent blogs to boost a company’s or a product’s image. Its absence to date is evidence of a few possibilities: it was a prophetic hoax; it was not profitable; or the founders finally decided they couldn’t live with themselves.

Even from the launch, the supposed Chinese-based blog outsourcing self-doubting company founder was quoting the Bible:

This was the moral speed bump on the road to creating “standard” American blogs for generating product buzz. They even gave examples:

And so the seed was planted as the less morally-restricted (or morally flexible, if you prefer) in the PR and marketing world began wringing their hands in anticipation. This is brilliant. The best medium ever created.

But what old media failed to teach them, and what they didn’t quite have a handle on when they started, was that transparency in this new media world is the only protective cup there is.

Transparency is no longer an option, as when the blogosphere you’ve tried so hard to impress and connect with discovers there really is just a man behind the curtain (and they will, too), that image you’ve looked to promote is shattered right along with that porcelain faade.

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Congress is unsure, though, how exactly you tax zeroes and ones — or even if virtual assets can be taxed.

But you know, where there’s a bill, there’s a way.

Reuters’ embedded Second Life virtual reporter, Adam Reuters (is there an Eve Reuters?), is reporting that the so-called virtual economies of MMORPG games like World of Warcraft and EverQuest are booming. People buy and sell goods just like you would in the real world, except that the goods are imaginary, even if the money’s real.

“You could argue that to a certain degree the law has fallen (behind) because you can have a virtual asset and virtual capital gains, but there’s no mechanism by which you’re taxed on this stuff,” Joint Economic Committee’s senior economist Dan Miller told Mr. Reuters.

One day, they’ll find a way to tax profitable ideas – while they’re still in your head.

Maybe they can put that tax money toward social programs like MMORPG Anonymous, a future offshoot of Families Against EverQuest.

Or how about subsidized gym memberships?

Tanning bed vouchers?

Or maybe tax relief with the Get-A-Life tax credit. For every girl you can prove you talked to outside the basement, you can write off $5. Okay, $100, because that’s kind of scary. But your mom and your sister don’t count.

Don’t expect a resolution too soon, as lawmakers and economists are trying to wrap their heads around this virtual economy thing. They’ve approached Sen. Ted Stevens to inquire how, exactly, money is transferred through the tubes. Is that like at the bank drive-through?

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Anecdotal evidence may suggest that technology can isolate family members from one another, but the study refutes that.

“The study shows that regardless of their size or composition, today’s families value time-honored traditions like dining together, and they’re using technology to help manage busy, family-centered lives,” said Wenda Harris Millard, Yahoo’s chief sales officer, in the press release.

“Technology is essential to family life, not because people love gadgets, but because it helps them do what they want to do,” she continued. Findings from the research project supported that statement – 70% of the people involved “agreed that technology allows them to stay in touch with family,” and 54% felt “that without technology they wouldn’t be able to stay in touch with friends and family.’”

Technology is allowing something else that wouldn’t normally be possible. U.S. respondents defied the normal definition of a day by listing “on average, a total of more than 43 hours of daily activities.” A number of these activities, such as “listening to the radio” and “commuting,” could of course overlap. Joe Uva, the president and CEO of OMD Worldwide, offered a positive interpretation of those busy schedules.

“It’s clear that within the 43-hour day,’ families are making concerted efforts to spend time together and to live out a new family value that says we control technology – it does not control us.’”

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

Network processors in traditional communications systems help to power many access and edge networking applications such as DSLAMs, wireless access switches and enterprise router line cards. Now, Intel’s NPUs are also being used in embedded networking applications in industrial automation environments — instead of custom components. The benefit to equipment manufacturers is a faster time-to-market with customizable components.

“The performance and flexibility of our network processor technology has become very attractive to new networking segments such as automation and control,” said Doug Davis, vice president and general manager of the Infrastructure Processor Division, Intel Communications Group. “Network processors are no longer just about relentless pursuit of line speed; they now need to combine more features and flexibility that allows customers to customize designs for their individual specifications.”

The Intel IXP460 and Intel IXP465 network processors are the latest additions to the Intel IXP4XX product line and offer a higher speed Intel XScale core, expanded connectivity options as well as enhancements to improve end system reliability and security.

These features are what helped attract such customers as Rockwell Automation to use Intel’s network processor technology. “Rockwell Automation has chosen to develop its next-generation products using Intel network processors instead of custom ASICs and other technologies. This allows our engineers to focus on our value-add,” said Scot Tutkovics, software engineering manager, Rockwell Automation. “The IXP465 meets our demanding design requirements including low power consumption, a high degree of reliability, built-in Ethernet, USB, real-time synchronization and other networking capabilities.” HP is also planning to use the IXP46X in a future line of high-end printers because of the scalable processing performance and on-chip integration of a wide variety of functions and interfaces.

The Intel IXP2325 and Intel IXP2350 network processors targeted for network access and edge applications, combine data plane and control plane processing capabilities in a single chip and are Intel’s first network processors built on 90nm process technology.

These NPUs deliver up to 2-Gbps line rates, while offering developers significant savings in part count, power consumption and board area. The IXP23XX network processors use the same hardware and software architecture as the rest of the IXP2XXX product line. “Using the scalable Intel network processor architecture for several of our product lines provides substantial savings of time and effort in both hardware and software design,” said Youngky Kim, senior vice president, Samsung Telecommunication Systems Division. “The performance and features of the IXP2350 allow us to apply these advantages to our next-generation wireless system design.”

Intel and members of the Intel Communications Alliance also announced development tools, hardware platforms, software building blocks, and application-specific software solutions to support the IXP23XX and IXP46X product lines.

Intel NPUs that were announced today at the Intel Developer Forum in Moscow will be shown at the Network Systems Design Conference, San Jose, Calif.; Oct. 19-21, Intel Developer Forum in Taiwan, Oct. 26-27; and Rockwell Automation Fair, Orlando, Fla., Oct. 27-28.

The IXP46X is sampling and priced at approximately $19 to $75 in quantities of 10,000, depending on speed and temperature requirements. The IXP23XX is also sampling with a price range depending on speed of approximately $84 to $142 in quantities of 10,000.

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products.