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All the evidence shows that ...kids raised in gay households are 2-3x as likely to consider themselves gay as kids raised in a straight household.

I know this is troll feeding, but GADDAMMIT!! NO IT FUCKING DOESN'T. Here and here and here. You fucking asshole.

ALL of the evidence shows EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT YOU SAID.

American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry is not protesting him!

Boy 13-year old,
where are your mamá & papá for your biggest responsabilities?

I haven't read any info on the correlations you mention, but I posted this link above. There's a plethora of articles that draw that correlation. Granted correlation != causation; the former is much easier to prove than the latter.

However the case is compelling, and why wait for a proof of causation before you take some kind of action? If curbing children's access to video game violence can save even on kid's life, I'm all for it. Restricting access to violent video games surely won't harm any child will it?

Just referring to articles like this

There's a strong correlation that cannot be ignored. While causation is harder to prove than correlation, when the correlation is strong, it's compelling to want to do something.

I applaud them for trying.

you don't see romeo and juliet blamed for suicides though.. strange that.

Are you kidding? Or just a moron? Suicide is the third leading cause of death among 15 to 25 year olds. Each year, 500,000 from this same age group attempt suicide. Source: American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

For ages 15-19, homicide is the #2 cause of death, suicide is #3. #1 is "accidental death". Source: Child Trends Databank.

Romeo and Juliet are definitely "blamed" for some suicides. Some teens actually recreate the scene in high detail -- others are just "influenced" into believing that their 15-year-old "love" is so important, so desparately true, that they kill themselves when it doesn't work out.

Am I saying that we should ban showings of "Romeo and Juliet"? Naturally not. We should be teaching our kids, or in general, quit having kids if we don't want to take responsbility for teaching them. Although by age 15, I would argue that kids should have responsibility for themselves, but they don't know it because their parents, teachers, and a zillion other people are busy taking responsibility from/for them.

You get to drive at 16 (most states). At 18, you can vote, be called for jury duty, and in the case of boys, be drafted by the Army and forced to kill or be killed. At 21, you can buy a drink.

So when do kids become adults? I am very very sure that they have no idea. The same people which tell them to "act responsibly" and to "be an adult" also tell them exactly what choices to make: "don't have sex", "don't drink", "don't smoke".

Meanwhile the circle of blame keeps going around and around and around. The real change which needs to happen is not in the video game industry, or the gun industry, or the media. It is entirely in the upbringing of children to become responsible adults. Something is very fundamentally broken with respect to that right now.

Anyway, no matter who is "to blame" some innocent people were shot and killed, by a pair of human beings with the ability to load and fire a deadly weapon. If you as a parent are not willing to invest the time and resources into educating your child, they will grow up and develop anyway, developing physical and mental powers which exceed their ability to decide when and what to do with it.

So please, please, stop breeding if you are a moron. There's a good chance you will raise a mindless killer.

Also, take into consideration that the incorporation of these standards into vendors' products is excruciatingly slow at best. Several years ago, vendors had the idea that we can take care of all of your healthcare information systems needs -- "Our system does it all!". Well, they soon learned that healthcare information systems were extremely complex and they couldn't manage/keep resources to maintain/produce such huge systems and still make a profit. Enter the age of the "Best of Breed" system. "Our system just does these few things, but it does 'em really well! You just need to buy/build an interface to get it talking to your other systems!" Many of us that work in healthcare IT cringe whenever someone mentions an interface. The results you get from stringing together lots of interfaces can often be like playing the telephone game - send a piece of information from one system through one or more interfaces, to another system and hope like hell it makes sense on the other end.

You guys are on the right track when you talk about security. I worked at one hospital that was in the "Top 10" hospitals in US News and World Report a couple of years ago and some of the stuff I saw floating across the network was scary. We had some clinical systems that sent their userid/pw across as plain text. Packets floating across the network often contained patients names, clinic notes, diagnoses, lab test results, etc., all in PLAIN TEXT! It was amazing how much information I could obtain by using an evaluation copy of a packet analyzer on an unsecured network port at this institution.

One scary trend I've noticed lately is all of the people/vendors that want to download patient information to PDA's without having adequate security on the PDA. I'm just waiting for some doc to lose his Palm and have some kind soul find it and turn it over to the local media. :)

There are lots of other issues that futher complicate the whole healthcare information system issue such as institutional politics, workflow/usability issues, etc., but I don't have time to get into them right now.

Personally, it sounds to me like these guys need a serious whack with a clue-by-4... that or they need to get out and do a bit more research on the subject at hand..

But, I do see a problem with this: Children with ADD (as you know) do have a tendency to drift from doing what they are actually working on. Especially to things that do not pose a challenge to them.
When I would come home from grade school, I would plop myself in front of the video game consol and not look up for hours on end. Legos had the same effect on me as well where I would create and destroy worlds all before dinner.
Then, came the time to do home work. Home work? What's that? There was more interesting worlds to explore within the world of building blocks and little people.

Now, I have read in places and magazines where there had been the children that had ADD seem to have been "cured". When, in fact, the children with ADD had become adults with ADD. There is also an organization called CHADD that deals with Children and adults with ADD.

Also, schools who would have "problem children" and usually quick to diagnose these children, just because they fit into a certain category of symptoms. The children are given a label and put on drugs without a thorough diagnosis.

Now, thru CHADD, and other organizations, adults who are diagnosed with ADD seem to have found a nitch in where they belong in today's job market.
Those jobs do include:

• Emergency rooms
• Help Desks
• Computer programmers
• Other computer related fields
• and others I may have forgot

The above poster ZanshinWedge is one of the proudest longtime members of BWUG.

I, being a loyal follower of ZanshinWedge have found true serenity and happieness in learning, not just from his oh so insightful posts on Slashdot, but more from his teachings at The Open Source Legislative Focus Foundation.

In the OSLFF ZanshinWedge has taught many of us the finer tactics of "arrogance in thread" and "flame and get karma". The best part of this is that like ZanshinWedge , you really don't need to know anything about what you're posting. A simple ME TOO! post works just fine.

I may be out of line here, but I think I speak for everyone when I say that I think ZanshinWedge is the most insightful, interesting and mature poster we have on slashdot. I don't think anyone here would ever call him a whore, a bedwetter or a loser.

Moderators, now that you know ZanshinWedge is truly deserving, make sure you drop a few points on him. He's deserves them for his insightful and interesting comment. Don't forget, all 22320 of us Meta-moderate, we'll make sure you get recognized for your efforts.