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FCC Mulling More Control For Electronic Media
A recent Notice of Inquiry from the FCC is looking for opinions on how the "evolving electronic media landscape" affects kids, and whether the FCC itself should have more regulatory control over such media. The full NOI (PDF) is available online. "FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski included a statement with the NOI in which he noted that 'twenty years ago, parents worried about one or two TV sets in the house,' while today, media choices are far more widespread for children, including videogames, which 'have become a prevalent entertainment source in millions of homes and a daily reality for millions of kids.'"
it's always "protect the children" I spent all of my childhood past the age of 8 online and did I get abducted? did I become a horrible person? no did I become much more resourceful and patient in understanding computers? yes did I learn? yes enough ideas without statistics I say
The worst problem with video games and things like that is the lower level of physical activity among the young.
Earlier there was the option to stay in and be bored or go out and face the elements. This day you go out on the net and there is no need for a garden, football or playing in the mud.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I agree 100%... The more "responsibility" the government takes, the less the parents will take. And IMHO that's the fundamental problem that has yet to be addressed... Fewer and fewer parents actually parenting and taking responsibility for their own children.
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Fuck you very much the FCC; fuck you very much for fining me. Five thousand bucks a fuck so I'm really out of luck: thats more than Heidi Fliess was charging me. So fuck you very much the FCC, for proving that free speech just isn't free. Clear Channel's a dear channel so Howard Stern must go. Attorney General Ashcroft doesn't like strong words and so. He's charging twice as much as all the drugs for Rush Limbo, so fuck you all so very much.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Ok, I've been looking but I don't see anywhere on the FCC website to actually give them feedback.
There is a war going on for your mind.
While the FCC thoroughly investigated Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, they allowed Clear Channel to buy up all the radio stations without even blinking. When Sirius and XM wanted to merge, they took years to decide whether strong competition against terrestrial radio should be allowed (Clear Channel and the NAB lobbied against the merger hoping both Sirius and XM would fail). The FCC is useless and should not be given more power.
Seems like someone in your government has seen our ofcom here in the UK and thinks it would be a good thing. I reckon that if you can't control firearms, why worry about electronic media.
Read the request for comments, and replace "electronic media" with "community playgrounds". You'll find that most of the comments still apply - they give children educational opportunities but come with a small risk of children being exposed to something inappropriate and run a very small risk of children being targeted by those who would do them harm.
Personally, I have a 7-year-old daughter, and the TV is relegated to the basement where it has no influence over our lives. Despite the fact that I am an acknowledged geek, my daughter is not on the Internet and won't be for a while yet. This has nothing to do with the dangers from strangers, but the negative influence electronic media have on the developing mind, and is based on a request from her school to minimize what they call "screen time".
Having said all that, this is a conscious choice I make for my daughter, because I feel it is in her best interests. I personally feel this is a conscious choice that every American family should make, and I'm a rather vocal proponent of "kill your television" (at least until the kids reach their teens and the major brain development is completed). I am NOT, repeat NOT in favor of giving the US Government the power to dictate this to every family. This should be a decision that every family makes on their own.
As to "protecting the children from inappropriate content", what "inappropriate content" are we protecting them from, exactly? As far as I'm concerned, the most damaging thing you can do to a young mind is fill them with violent conflict, because it takes a lot of time and emotion to process that conflict and understand it, and that's time better spent by the brain developing free play skills and engaging in creative activities. Are we afeared that a couple of titties or a wanker might permanently scar the them for life? That's nothing compared to the impact that commonly-accepted kids programs are already having. So if the FCC is looking to regulate this, they've already approved what is probably the LEAST appropriate content possible. Bus has left the station, folks, and the FCC missed it.
Make your own decisions for your own family. Don't allow the government to do it for you. This one's gotta go down. The government has no place dictating this.
Oh, and for you parents out there, I urge you to please consider "killing your television". Please. As a conscious and informed decision, not as a government mandate.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I don't want my internet to be as dull and uninteresting as broadcast TV (no nudity, no curse words). If you don't like your children seeing such things, change the channel, don't buy cable, install filtering software, don't let the kids use the computer unless you're there, and so on.
Or adopt a more-adult attitude or realizing your kids are going to be having sex someday. Now is as good a time as any to teach them about the birds and bees, and stop having a fit if they see a naked body.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Growing up, I knew several families who restricted their kids from watching The Simpsons. I think those type of standards are sorely lacking thesedays and we should use them as positive examples to reassert control. Now they've got the twitters, these children are beginning to secretly rape themselves.
I record my sleeptalking
Why aren't parents being held responsible for censoring their own children? It's the parents the put the computer in their room in the first place. Why should the government have to control what kids have access to?
You think YOU had a dangerous childhood??
Hell, I grew up with no cell phones, my parents both worked, yet I came home to a house alone (when very young I walked 2 blocks to and from school), I played in the neighborhood with neighborhood kids, roamed all over (again without tracking and cell phones), I ran around in the woods with BB and pellet guns, we 'stole' wood from local houses being built to build makeshift skateboard ramps (and sometimes forts in the woods). Goodness, when we went to a mall, my parents would set up a meeting time and place, and we'd go our separate ways for 2-3 hours at a time, yes, I wondered around unsupervised?!?!? Yep, I dove off diving boards in swimming pools! I got dropped off to hang at the arcades for hours at a time. I had a pretty wide area to cover at any given time by walking, bicycling, skateboarding....while never wearing a helment.
Yep, it is amazing myself and my friends made it past puberty!! By today's scared standards of treating children, we should have all been killed by and accident, if not abducted, raped and killed first...and of course, our parents would have been arrested for child neglect.
Amazing we all made it to even see the dawn of the internet and video games with good graphics...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
As a child's environment is controlled, you can choose to artificially make it whatever you want. For example, you can decide to educate your child in an environment similar to yours, removing all advances in communications beyond what existed when you were two years old.
Or, you could choose to remove all electric equipment. Or central heating. Or current water. It's an experiment bet.
You're betting your child will be better (happier?) if it grows up in an environment similar to what children in the early nineties had.
I'm betting mine will be happier being a member of his own generation, thus growing up with a direct connection to all information, good and bad; exactly as he'll have when he reaches an age when I'm not there to keep the artificial environment around him.
Can somebody explain to me some legal theory under which the FCC -- or the federal government, for that matter -- has any authority to regulate the content of videogames?
I understood the rationale behind regulating broadcasting. If stuff is going out over the public airwaves, then the public -- by proxy of their humble servants in the government -- should have power to oversee its contents, to ensure that broadcasts are of benefit to the general populace.
Videogames, last I checked, were not broadcast over the public airwaves. They are bought and sold as private transactions.
And before anybody says "commerce clause". . . I can see how that would enable the federal government to regulate or tax the sale of games across state lines, regardless of their content. But if they started evaluating the contents and discriminating between games, then that bumps up against the 1st Amendment.
Caveat: I am not a constitutional scholar. (However, some people who apparently *are* constitutional scholars seem to have appalling ignorance of, or disregard for, these issues.)
It'd be a huge stretch to declare video games and home entertainment systems to be under the umbrella of the FCC, and any kind of censorship or regulation on their part would be a massive expansion of their purpose and powers. I just don't see this happening.
The FCC is one of the most important governmental agencies with regards to technology and culture, yet the FCC doesn't seem to have any clue what it's supposed to be doing. They consistently eliminate or nullify their most valuable powers (ensuring fair and beneficial use of the public airwaves), while trying to grab ridiculous and useless ones to replace them (censorship, this nonsense).
is a tried and true practice.
As such, they try and pick a category which is nearly indefensible. Children work very well.
The trick is not allowing yourself to be intimidated by this type of tactics. Look at the debates over health care, stimulus, and such. Who do they put into the argument who doesn't have bearing on what you were addressing? Children, the poor, the elderly, or the "insert favored group here". All in an attempt to change the discussion just enough to devalue your stand.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Firearms are just another means of killing people, Ideas could instill hundreds, thousands or millions with the desire to kill(hence the revolutions of the past) and they'll achieve it with/without firearms if motivated enough. I imagine many governments see ideas as far more dangerous than guns.
...your childhood sounds pretty fun.
FDR's Thought Police: Still Alive, Still Censoring.
The FCC shouldn't fine a network over an inadvertent nipple slip.
Mostly like the (somewhat broken) MPAA, there should merely by ratings and guidelines that enable parents to make decisions for themselves on how to raise their kids.
I don't want my daughter playing Grand Theft Auto. But I certainly don't want anyone telling me how to raise my kid. Voluntary rating systems are the way to go. However, unlike the MPAA, the rules for how the ratings are determined should be transparent.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493459/
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
We both must be about the same age - I'm 45. It just kills me that we have to have "play dates" for my kids to play with other kids, and my kids don't venture into the woods the way I liked so much as a kid. We agree that today's environment of fear is just that - pointless fear, driven by the media.
Anyway, some things are different today. My introduction to porn was sneaking peaks at my Dad's Playboy magazines, which he would read while Mom cleaned and cooked and held down a job. Dad's back then had it all - no poopy diapers, wives who did all the housework and had paying jobs, and who felt guilty if you didn't get enough sex...
Today, kids don't get that sneak-peek into porn when they finally become curious about sex. And, let's face it... Playboy had a sense of class and beauty missing from redtube.com. Instead, eight-year girls type "hot guy" into Google, and get hard-core video. Their intro into the idea of sex is likely going to be a foot-long dong butt-f*cking a teenager.
I took advice I got here on slashdot, and use the free opendns.com DNS filter. I also use addblock plus in firefox on all our computers. OpenDNS gives me some control over the content filiter - I use the low settings, only blocking phishing and hard-core porn. These tools are waaaaay better than anything the FCC might dream up. Instead of more government censorship, how about a program for training/educating parents, so we can all learn how to take advantage of the excellent, and free tools that already exist out there? Something as simple as requiring ISPs to send information packets about Internet filtering might do the trick. Perhaps requiring the installers who do house visits to train how to filter, not just how to use the DVR. All parents know how to record Pokemon. How many know how to protect their kids from googling "hot guys"?
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Bonus Citation.
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Hasn't the internet been changing rapidly since you were a kid? While porn has long been on the internet, there is a lot more Adult content online now besides porn. Violent movies and games often have far less safe guards for restricting access to minors. While I don't think that the government is capable of comprehensively protecting kids from the evils of the internet, some guide lines for larger content providers would not be out of the order. Parents need to be the responsible party and pay attention to what there kids are doing/seeing with all the content devices out there like consoles, PCs, Cell Phones and now e-readers! I have yet to hear about Sex-ting with calculators yet though.
Before government control the internet for the kids was bad. Now it is good.
Anyone who can't see this obvious truth is clearly racist.
the innocents WILL be protected/salvaged.
mynuts won; to be censored post haste.
You're doing what nearly everyone here would recommend - directing her to useful material and supervising her access to the 'net.
Sounds fine to me!
You were lucky.
When I was young we couldn't get cell phone service, dsl nor did we have bicycles and we lived in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.
Every night at midnight we'd have to get up out of the shoebox and lick the road clean with our tongues, then we'd go to work 24 hours at the mill for fourpence every six years . . . or was that "sixpence every four years"?
Try telling that to the FCC today. . . they won't believe you.
The Nanny state. The "useful idiots" who voted this crowd in are getting what they deserve.
If the government said, "Y'know, we'd like to exert more control over the blogosphere, over all electronic media, really: restrict what is said, know the identities of who is saying it, get a firm handle on who is on the mailing lists of Markos Moulitsas and Rush Limbaugh... whaddya say, citizens, can we do that?" the answer would be a resounding, "Over Our Dead Body."
The "kids" thing is the spoonful of sugar that makes the tyranny go down...
True, but guns make the task a whole lot easier.
it's always "protect the children" I spent all of my childhood past the age of 8 online and did I get abducted? did I become a horrible person?
Well, you're here, aren't you? ;)
Free Martian Whores!
simple response .. GET FUCKED
Standard: for international, attachments, lawyers.
http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs2/proceeding/view.action?name=09-194
Express: for individuals. Note that the proceeding number is 09-194 and it's not in the list.
http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs2/upload/express
You can talk about it all day long here, but until you submit a comment it doesn't matter.
Back when you were 8 it was much different and there was much less available. Today's internet is quite different.
I wish there was something better in place to allow parents easier control so the gov. doesn't need to get involved and people who just don't give a crap don't have to be bothered. Personally, I use OpenDNS but not all parents might know how to and it can't block everything.
From a parent's perspective, try to imagine having a 7 year old daughter who is having nightmares because she looked up 'kitten' while you were making dinner and she came across kitten mutilation and just watched someone butcher a live cat for fun. Some limits need to be put in place because there are really sick people out there. 'Click here to proceed' and 'you must be 18' just won't cut it.
Thanks to the internet, I don't have to drive my kids to the red light district so they can play in the park across from prostitutes and sex shops while watching drug dealers sell drugs and having other kids show them how to sniff chemicals to get high or become bulimic because it's beautiful.. The internet brings that all to my living room. Oh and I can check email too.
'dong', 'butt-f*cking'?
I wish they had a fucking filter for this type of shit so I could avoid the posts of dumb cunts who self-censor with bullshit replacements for curse words.
Either use the right ones or none at all, you're neither looking cool nor adding emphasis to your statements when you incorporate those words into your posts.
Not to justify the "think of the children" antics that politicians so love these days, but the "I survived just fine!" tirade always strikes me as amusing.
Regardless of the risks, the fact that you're fine is no shock because there will always been somebody to tell that story. The kids that don't make it aren't around to tell their story.
To put it into statistical perspective, lets exaggerate a bit (ok, a lot :)) and say that all those activities you listed has a 40% chance of resulting in death or dismemberment. Is that an acceptable statistic? Absolutely not, yet you'd still have 60% of people sarcastically proclaiming "Hey I did all that stuff as a kid. How did I possibly survive!?!?". The answer is simple: you survived because you were in the group that fell on that side of the equation. That doesn't mean though that any legislation that drops that accident rate from 40% to 0.05% is wasted effort though.
Now, that's not to say that the FCC is right here. I'm just saying that there's a line somewhere between nanny state saying "no porn on the internet because it's bad for the kids" and giving all the kids dynamite at school because a few will still happen to grow up and proclaim that their survival is proof that the activity is safe.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Is it any different if a person butchers a cat for food? My parents participated in butchering chickens as when they were children. My siblings and I watched our father butcher a deer about once per year. Maybe it's sick to raise children without an understanding and appreciation of where their food comes from.
No one is forcing you to give your children unsupervised access to the internet, but for some reason you want to force the entire rest of the world to change their behavior to suit your particular parenting style.
BREAKING: "FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski included a statement with the NOI in which he noted that 'twenty years ago, parents worried about their children having only a small vocabulary,' while today, word choices are far more widespread for children, which 'have become a prevalent entertainment source in millions of homes and a daily reality for millions of kids.'"
FCC is looking for opinions on how our "evolving language" affects kids, and whether the FCC itself should have more regulatory control over such language. FCC is creating a new language, "newspeak," which will allow parents to rest at ease that their children are not being exposed to language and thought that could corrupt their minds. The full NOI (PDF) is available online.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
I agree. The sheer level of vulgarity in content is so different. Porn isn't the only thing either.
I had a friend who's daughter searched for 'kitten' and found some sick site where they mutilate cats. Several parents in different associations bombarded the host of the site and we got it shut down.
There is some really disgusting stuff out there and it's all just 3 clicks away. I've said it before, I wish there were some plan in place to allow parents more control so people who just don't care are not bothered with this subject.
Speaking of which, for all those who are so vocal against this but do not have children... this subject does not pertain to you. Please close this tab and go back to watching porn.
A better way to use anecdote would be to ask, "How many of the people I went to grade school with were abducted by strangers" vs. "How many of the people I went to school with were hurt in car accidents?"
If you are talking about things that parents can do themselves you are correct but if you plan to use the force of law to regulate my behavior then it absolutely pertains to me, children or not.
They also ignore the reality of saturation marketing, not just targeted at children generally but specifically adjusted to each childs profile to more effectively control the decisions and to more accurately distort the child's future psychological growth to more profitably align with the highest bidders marketing dollars.
Consider the real underlying nature of that profession. Adults trained as psychologists who use their education and skills to manipulate vulnerable children so that they can be more profitably be monetized. Not only do those adults shameless manipulate children against the child's best interest, these adults take pride in their ability to, let's see, create peer pressure responses where children who do not adhere to the current marketing promotions are ostracized and punished by other children, where future unhealthy psychological conditions are imprinted upon the children so they are forced to attempt buy the way out of the unhappiness forced upon them by adults and of course to get tchildren to manipulate the choices of their parents.
Considering the motivation, nothing but greed, the unfair advantage of adults manipulating children and the inherent harm that results, it really it is a matter of marketing executives molesting the minds of the world's children, psychological pedophiles of the worst order, it really is nasty stuff.
As for porn on the Internet, the reality is the Internet is an adult network not meant for children, if anybody is serious about a child safe Internet that is has to be completely separate from the interactions between adults and specifically monitored, secured and built around the education system and from which all marketing executives are specifically banned.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
To put it into statistical perspective, lets exaggerate a bit (ok, a lot :)) and say that all those activities you listed has a 40% chance of resulting in death or dismemberment. Is that an acceptable statistic? Absolutely not, yet you'd still have 60% of people sarcastically proclaiming "Hey I did all that stuff as a kid. How did I possibly survive!?!?". The answer is simple: you survived because you were in the group that fell on that side of the equation. That doesn't mean though that any legislation that drops that accident rate from 40% to 0.05% is wasted effort though."
Err...the point of my anecdotal rant wasn't so much that only I survived due to the things I did. It was more that my entire generation, and generations before mine that did just fine without 24/7 instant communications, and did just fine playing outdoors all the time doing things that would be considered too dangerous for little Johnny and Susie to do today.
My point is the mentality has changed so drastically, that our precious children are so helpless, and need overprotection...and now we're trying more and more to mandate it into LAW that affects not only kids behavior, but, also that of adults wanting to do adult things.
I have a hard time believing that there are more child sex offenders, abductors or what have you out there today than in past years. Maybe a few more, but, not so many as to warrant the fear and overprotection measures out there today. I say it is more the instant communication, and the multitude of 24/7 news channels that have to have something to report that is sensational enough to gather large commercial watching crowds.
But really, those things I listed I did as a kid, were NOT done alone...I had friends, lots of friends who were there doing that stuff with me. Most all kids my age were doing shit like that...it was known back then at "being a kid".
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Hell, I grew up with no cell phones, [...] while never wearing a helment.
Same here to all the above.
I contend that the world today is no less safe for kids, but that every single bad thing that may happen is broadcast nationally in lurid detail. My father-in-law is convinced that there's a pedo behind every tree and that I'm stupid for not being more worried about it (yes: those were his words). Does anyone know where I could find stats on things like abductions by strangers that would show wish view is more accurate?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Maybe your parents didn't love you.
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The, as you put it, "useful idiots" are getting what they deserve.
Problem is, everyone else is also getting what the "useful idiots" deserve.
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
There are SCADS of "plans" in place to afford you all the control you could want - right up to and including NOT putting a computer in your kid's room or even NOT having an internet connection to the house. On the shiny side of that there's DNS solutions, filtering software and even learning to use the goddamn HOSTS file in your own computer.
Your right to raise your kids does not trump another's right to indulge in whatever perversion tickles their fancy nor does it trump yet another's right to express said perversions. Deal with it.
so do poisons, knives, cars, broken shards of glass, icepicks, etc... i dont want them holding my hand for everything, i'd rather die free than live over-controlled!
Why do they need more power, they already control too much, I find this is just another way for them to go after certain cases and generate more legal revenue. I tend to think that a parent(s) know when their child has too much tv, so telling me they can sue the parents for allowing their kids to watch too much TV (a form of child abuse) is beyond what they should have the ability to do.
The FCC was needed way back when technology was being introduced to households, and most households were ignorant to too many facts and stats needed to make a proper assessment, but now we have multi-media outlets and internet and iphones.
To get the facts, we don't need a governing body to rule us...we can rule ourselves. The kids of today are light years brighter technology wise then yesterday's kids. They know how to use a microwave at the age of 8 (or so) without being stupid (unless the parents were stupid and the transfer is unavoidable). They know how to text and use cell phones at 10, and can carry one in school at 12,13, so that in any instance, they can contact authorities should they need.....yeah today's kids need less codling and more eye opening teachings.
I see the usual cohort of libertarian slashdotters is in full freak out mode because of this. But if they bothered to they would see: "The FCC also is asking commenters to "to discuss whether the Commission has the statutory authority to take any proposed actions and whether those actions would be consistent with the First Amendment."" Posting as AC to preserve karma.
enough ideas without statistics I say
That's a nice idea, but I'd like to see some statistics that back it up.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
I agree 100%... The more "responsibility" the government takes, the less the parents can take. And IMHO that's the fundamental problem that has yet to be addressed... Fewer and fewer parents actually parenting and taking responsibility for their own children.
There. Fixed that for ya.
But, no, seriously. if the governments says your child has to do a,b and c, and has to have x,y, and z (even though it means husband and wife must take second jobs in order to provide them), you've limited what the parents CAN do.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
"Speaking of which, for all those who are so vocal against this but do not have children... this subject does not pertain to you. Please close this tab and go back to watching porn."
What? Since when does having someone else crap out a badly copied, smaller version of you give you magical insight into raising children? If anything, the unreasoned, illogical, over-reactionary response most people have when faced with something that might someday have a small chance of doing even the slightest amount of damage to their children shows that an unbiased observer might have a more valid opinion.
"Thanks to the internet, I don't have to drive my kids to the red light district so they can play in the park across from prostitutes and sex shops while watching drug dealers sell drugs and having other kids show them how to sniff chemicals to get high or become bulimic because it's beautiful.. The internet brings that all to my living room. Oh and I can check email too."
Yes, thanks to the internet, all those things are now in YOUR HOME where YOU CONTROL them. Your anecdote didn't go, "...and then the internet reached out with its cabley tentacles, pinning me to the wall as it fixed my daughters head in place to ensure she saw the whole scene." Your story was "...and then I left my daughter alone with an obviously uncontrolled internet connection."
At 7 years old she should have a WHITELIST of sites to visit. Her nightmares are your fault.
I had a friend who's daughter searched for 'kitten' and found some sick site where they mutilate cats. Several parents in different associations bombarded the host of the site and we got it shut down.
Yes, please, we should elect you to run the coalition of angry people for our rights.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
This story is yet another example of why many suspect that the real reason behind the Net Neutrality laws is to establish the FCC as regulator the internet, paving the way for future content control regulations.
But really, those things I listed I did as a kid, were NOT done alone...I had friends, lots of friends who were there doing that stuff with me. Most all kids my age were doing shit like that...it was known back then at "being a kid".
Maybe I made a mistake by using the exaggerated example. In reality the differences are much smaller - MOST kids doing dangerous things will be fine.
Take for example safety seats and seat belts. When I was a kid we didn't use those child safety seats. All of us just sat in the vehicle normally for as far back as I can remember - not even wearing seatbelts 99% of the time. Pretty much every other kid I knew did the same. And you know what? None of the small children that I knew died from it back then. We all turned out fine. Does that mean that laws requiring safety/booster seats and seatbelts for children are unnecessary though? Of course not. Because even though I didn't know them personally, before such laws existed a lot of children WERE needlessly killed or injured in accidents because they weren't using such devices.
Wanna talk playground safety though, and I did have a friend when I was in high school whose 5 year old brother accidentally and fatally hung himself on a swing set. My brother broke his leg and my cousin his arm on trampolines. If the designers can learn something from such incidents and design a safer swing set or trampolin for example that would prevent such accidents, then I wouldn't be so quick to scoff at the choices merely because you never had such an accident or know someone who did yourself.
That doesn't mean that the internet should be regulated (that's taking the concept too far); I'm just saying that sometimes we make a mistake by rosily looking at all the things we did and survived and thinking that it's perfectly safe because of that.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Instead, eight-year girls type "hot guy" into Google, and get hard-core video. Their intro into the idea of sex is likely going to be a foot-long dong butt-f*cking a teenager.
What should come up, pictures of asexual or gay guys that look like 15-year-old girls? That's not healthy either, and your girls are going to be in for a surprise, if they don't grow up as lesbians. As a father you should educate them about lube, not erect a screen of fantasy (with gaping holes) in front of the world.
The FCC should back down. Leave the monitoring up to the parents. If the parents are overwhelmed with too much to monitor, stop buying your kids every piece of electronics known to man. The FCC doesn't need to regulate any more, in fact they need to regulate less. Parents need to own up to more personal responsibility with their children/kids/family.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Where's the 'democrat' keyword for this piece? Oh, right...you aren't a news blog, you're a collection of mutual masturbators. Sorry.
The more "responsibility" the government takes, the less the parents will take...
And that's what the current regime is counting on.
Excellent point! Thanks for pointing that out!
Anyone with mod points care to mod the parent up?
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Let parents choose to be parents or let little Johny or Jane grow up to another attendance mark at your slave labor camps ("prison") you are heavily invested in anyway.
Your closet pillow biting buddies in D.C. have the audacity to speak up against censorship in China and what in the flying fuck are you trying to do? Go ahead and try your best to emulate the Great Firewall of China because even their crack teams of geeks working round the clock year round with a pistol pressed against the backs of their heads cannot find and keep all the cracks sealed. A new network with the same desired freedom will be born because that is what people want. Your efforts will fail as completely as the anti-piracy efforts of greedy corporations and organizations.
Fuck you very much indeed FCC, you worthless sacks of shit needed about as much as a fresh sack of shit thrown on a dinner table set with a meal.
Seriously, if you choose to empower a word so much by your own free choice and will just please take a chainsaw to your own worthless pencil neck or best yet take a pencil and gouge out your own eyes and pop your own eardrums and enjoy your totally censored fantasy world (Be careful of Blinkin's brail magazines). If the very thought of basic biological functions that come natural such as sex scare you, sew your snatch shut or make yourself a eunuch.
Might want to start here: http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/ ... I tend to follow a similar ideology about child rearing myself. Hell look at the iconic movie "Stand By Me".
Same age? I'm 24 and I can relate to everything in the GP's post, except I had decent video games as well and was in middle school during AOL's prime. Its not all lost, just depends on the parents, the kids, and the environment.
The FCC's tasking is to maintain orderly control of a supposedly scarce resource, parceling out that resource fairly for the good of our society, and ensuring that users of the resource do not interfere with each others broadcasts so that its utilization is not compromised.
How this turned into a game of censorship is a story of failure of government, and failure of the citizens. Not to mention downright unconstitutional. There is no authority given to the government that allows it to implement censorship; and there is an explicit legal wall against it that can only be misinterpreted by idiots in the form of the first amendment to the US constitution:
Sadly, they never did a decent job of seeing to the good of our society, preferring to service the demands of corporations over any recognition that the citizens might have something to say as well. What do I mean? Well, where are the citizen's broadcast bands? Nowhere, that's where. This is not a technological problem, or a scarcity problem. We've simply been disenfranchised.
The Internet is not a scarce resource. We can make "more of it" simply by laying cable and deploying devices. It won't interfere with the rest of the Internet. It doesn't require parceling out; its nature is that the more entities connect to it, the more pipe we lay, the better it gets.
So what, we should be asking, is the FCC doing anywhere near it? Doesn't someone need their hand slapped about now?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
it's always "protect the children" I spent all of my childhood past the age of 8 online and did I get abducted? did I become a horrible person? no did I become much more resourceful and patient in understanding computers? yes did I learn? yes enough ideas without statistics I say
Yes, but consider that if you hadn't you'd have had time for learning how to use the Shift key, and how to punctuate.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'm 25 and I had a very similar childhood to cayenne8's. Maybe I was strange for my age but from what I saw I don't really think so. I think the fear and paranoia is much more recent than you think.
I don't know the exact statistics but I do know that the "Stranger Danger" movement was one of the most damaging things that could have been done. A VAST majority of abductions, molestation, killing, etc... of children is done by people they know and trust (usually a family member).
I think he meant: "Their intro into the idea of sex is likely going to be a foot-long monster cock anal gaping a barely legal teen."
Agreed. I can't get too worked up about non-custodial parent kidnappings. OK, so Dad (or Mom) didn't have the legal right of custody. That's a far cry from them being sold to a Satanic cult, or whatever the moral panic is this week.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Here.
Well, there's been CB and HAM for decades, really, but if you're emphasizing the broad in broadcast, then yeah, we largely sold out that use of the spectrum years ago, partly because that's mostly how we knew how to do it (aside from the ad hoc community or public access station), partly because it's always been that case that money talks.
But yeah, citizen's broadcast? Here, on the internet, the first really democratic broad communications medium.
Tweet, tweet.
With greater visibility on your post, others can realize the folly of your statements... This subject absolutely *does* pertain to me. Parenting is rough, but there is plenty that you can do to help your kids deal with the internet, and there is plenty other folks are doing to help *you* deal with your kids on the internet.
The internet is not a happy place, accept that and adjust your children's use of it. Let me put this as clearly as I can: It is not your job to police the internet for other people, however objectionable you find it.
+1 Disagree
Stop putting half your sentence in the topic. It breaks the flow and shows that you can't summarize the point you're trying to make.
That is a great post! Here is what your parents and grandparents went through when they were growing up. Then they had you!
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.
As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pick-up on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because we were usually ouside PLAYING!
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the street lights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. Still, we were O.K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 199 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms.
We had FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!
This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever! Our generation went to the moon.
The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!
All theory is gray
"We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 199 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms."
Let it be known, THAT part sucked hugely by comparison with the present and I would have been delighted to have a childhood with computers, cell phones, etc. The public library was a good place to learn, but not compared to the internet.
If you weren't conformist, life was much more desolate than today. Yes, most of us survived the Hellmouths of old, but they still sucked! Kudos to anyone who actually pulled off an idyllic Mayberry childhood, but let's not get the idea that it was representative.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Mod poster up, strong doses of Python keep the forum honest..
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Can we please mod any "fixed that for you" posts down to oblivion? How about a special -100 for them, along with loss of all the posters karma forever.
http://www.tntshoes.com
This isn't about protecting the children at all. It's a shell game. Their aim is to grab power away from the private sector and sell it back to the highest bidder in the form of influence. The FCC is full of shit. The last people they care about are regular Americans.
Wanna talk playground safety though, and I did have a friend when I was in high school whose 5 year old brother accidentally and fatally hung himself on a swing set. My brother broke his leg and my cousin his arm on trampolines.
Hey, I love to talk about playground safety! ;D I fell off a monkey bars in sixth grade and got a concussion, and I know two other kids who did. I also know 2-3 kids who fell off our (12' high) swingset and got concussions. 7 years at that small elementary school with 80-100 kids at a time, and those were the only injuries I was made privy to. Then literally as soon as I migrated to the next school, they tore out all metal equipment and replaced it with interconnected plastic bubbles. Now that I am a parent it is unheard of for children under the age of.. what, 30? to attend playgrounds unsupervised. Being that time is money and parents don't have enough of that to run the house, kids plop in front of video games eating the only food most people can afford (chock full of PHVO + HFCS) and get diabetes.
If we've traded a <1% childhood possibility of concussion with a >20% childhood obesity rate, and school standards slipping in every metric as our children care less to learn about the world they no longer participate in, then I see that as the wrong direction to go in. It's not that we shouldn't want our children to be safe, it's just that safety has diminishing returns. Our kids must face some marginal level of risk in their lives or they will never reap rewards. That is one more metric as a culture and as a global community where we need to establish some reasonable balance.
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
Funny. However, that site... not funny.
My point in mentioning that was there was no gateway, warning/welcome page, nothing.
A few clicks and you get to see something that is considered a crime in this country. A little discretion wouldn't have been a bad idea for that site.
Yep. I know there are a lot of people who won't see it the same as I do especially on this site. That's why it makes a good place to discuss it. Granted most responses don't go all Paris Hilton and try to dismiss me. lol
Not all parents understand what a white list is or how to set one up. You and I as geeks do. I use OpenDNS at the router level and block specific IP addresses that make it through as I find them.
Some parents just don't know that much about the hardware or software. That is why I'd like to see a more simplified method than currently exists.
Did you bother to read the subject?
"A recent Notice of Inquiry from the FCC is looking for opinions on how the "evolving electronic media landscape" AFFECTS KIDS"
You may have a valid opinion but do you really think it is MORE valid than someone who actually has kids? Kids are the subject of the inquiry and the inquiry is what this debate is about.
If you purpose to know more than a parent on this subject you yourself must still be a kid.
True. In fact anyone who is around children, like teachers and librarians, qualifies. They do not have to have children to have valid points to express.
Keep in mind, we are talking about an NOI. NOTICE OF INQUIRY. This is about gathering info. In this case, the info is about the affects on kids.
I don't want to regulate anyone's behavior, I would like web content to be much more clear and easy to separate than it is today.
Thank you for a reply without being demeaning.
Point 1. To kill an animal for food is different than to kill for fun. Cats are considered household pets in this country and not a food source. This constitutes a crime via animal cruelty. The site didn't even bother to have a graphic warning because it isn't required.
Point 2. I don't want to change the behavior of the rest of the world. I would just like it if things were more clear as to what content was where so parents who do not understand technology don't have to fear turning on their computer just like they don't have to fear turning on their TV.
There might be some graphic material on TV but it's limited by time and there is a guidance system in place. That would be great for the internet. If a site is PG-13, you can set a basic filter up to block it.
I use OpenDNS at the router level and block IP addresses independently. Not all parents understand how to do this.
Just as a matter of practicality, how do you enforce this? How do you deal with content hosted on entirely different continents? Will people who publish web sites need to get licenses? In order to prevent unauthorized sites will you outlaw all operating systems that allow people to publish without a license?
The only way to achieve the environment you desire is the Chinese / Saudi Arabian full censorship route.
Discretion is great, and recommended. Without it, we don't expect many friends.
But your right to be angry ends at my right of the first amendment.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex