The suit contends that the $20-billion-a-year video game industry will not effectively regulate itself, and that court intervention is necessary to keep violent games out of the hands of minors.
Without those controls, "it is guaranteed that more monsters will be created and more school killings will occur," according to the lawsuit.
The part which really catches my eye is 'more monsters will be created'. Hrm. What they intend to say is that violent video games will 'create more monsters', but that simply is not true, of course. I played a ton of wolfenstein, doom, quake, duke nukem, etc, etc, and I am a completely nonviolent person, in 'real life' I am a pacifist. So obviously something else is going on.
But what I see on this board is a mixture of two things:
blame the bullies
blame the parents
blame guns
I'll tackle them one at a time.
Blame the bullies. Well, not many people were more bullied and ridiculed than me all through school, yet as aforementioned I am not violent and don't even really hate those people.
Blame the parents. Well, I had an abusive father, my grandfather killed himself, etc, etc, and again I am not violent at all.
Blame the guns. Well, I had plenty of access to guns and boxes and boxes of 'ammo' in various unlocked desks and cabinets and I did not shoot anyone.
So what IS the answer? Well I don't know, really. It sure as hell ain't religion (athiest here, sorry) or nice teachers (they actually made fun of me in front of the classes as well).
The only thing I can really guess is that the shooters in the Columbine case were just plain mentally ill and their parents/teachers/etc failed to recognize that and get them help. The lawsuit as I see it should be directed right there (and it has, the shooters' families were sued). I'm not sure it is the school's responsibility to check for this kind of thing, but these 'shooters' were minors, correct? Do teachers have a duty to check for signs of abuse or neglect?
But isn't that what they are trying to do with all this suspending of people who wear black, etc? I dunno, something is screwed up with the school system, the family system, with the whole country.
Anyway I am DEFINATELY not trying to place blame on anyone, it is none of my business to do such a thing. I just don't see how this lawyer thinks he has a snowball's chance in hell of even making this case last more than a few minutes of a judge's time.
And, as usual, I set out to say something and have no idea what I just said. Oh well.
we'll put them on giant monolithic blocks, etched in binary (the univerisal language) and bury them in dry ice-caves on mars. when mankind is ready, they will find them.
ack, i loved the first of the goodkind books but hated the rest of it.
ahh... memories of feist's belgariad and the 'death gate cycle' by weis and hickman flash through my mind. now THOSE were addictive.
as yet another aside, Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, etc)'s re-release of 'The Big U' really tickled my fancy also. A lot of people didn't like it, I couldn't put it down.
i never liked jordan much, but really liked tad's memory, sorrow, and thorn series. fwiw, i read about everything and like most of it, but after battling against the first few chapters of the jordan 'wheel of time' thing i kept giving up. if nothing else, this story gives me the hankering to go back and re-read tad's series.
also, i've read tailchaser's song and liked it. please, no flames.
i waited for 3 years for this game, bought it the day it came out, found out they weren't joking about the 3D accelerator requirements and that my six year old PC has no chance whatsoever of running the game, ever.
what i would really like to see is a very nice graphics library which sits on top of both KDE and Gnome. that way i could write 1 app and both desktops could grok it.
it is a lot like i have been saying a lot, when people complain about 'no way out' of doing something. it is pretty simple: do not buy the items which have these strange proprietary auto upgrade 'features' if that feature bothers you a lot. wait until the hack-it-yourself linux version comes out, or whatever, but there is a lot of whining about corporate business models (Music companies and their unrippable CDs, auto-upgrading TiVo) and the 'way out' is, as always, simple as not buying something which is not open. maybe talk to RMS about that...
... is seriously on-screen violent. not counting, say, grenades thrown into barracks, arnold kills at least 110 people on screen in this, one of the worst movies of all time. (but also very, very funny when watched in the correct light. in this manner it is not unlike 'Soldier' with Kurt Russell. Battlefield Earth, of course, has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever.)
maybe it was good ole april 1 being on a sunday, but i never really got into the spirit of things this year. i really love it when april 1 falls on a friday, you can spend a week at work sizing which coworkers to really nail. when it's on the weekend i'm usually too busy catching up on sleep to get off any serious plans.
while you can't police people's thoughts (yet, i'm sure the idea is patent pending somewhere), i for one would like conspiraries to commit serious, irreversable crimes like murder, rape, armed robbery SHOULD be a crime. there is no way to determine if four guys who meet every night to plan how to kill old man Walker next door and get away with it are serious, but i for one would rather they go to jail BEFORE they kill someone, not after.
i'm not talking about conspiracy to steal candy bars from the local 7-11, i'm talking about a group of 6 frat boys actually discussing a definite plan to gang rape a 13 year old girl, etc. that should be a crime. there's a difference between writing a story about such a horrible act, and -actually making a definate plan to commit the act-.
anyway don't want to really, really get up on the high horse since i haven't even decided how far along the line should be between free speech and protection of the public.
oooohhhh that's a good one. but possibly they had no idea what they were talking about, picking RFC numbers out of the air. doesn't sound like a bad idea, take every RFC combination and patent combining the two.
simple. by the time this actually becomes a reality we all have palm XXXV implants in our brains with all the IP addresses and we can access them wirelessly by a simple thought, seeing the web page displayed in glorious 3d directly into our optic nerves.
but point well taken:)
give them the IP address, it'll be MUCH easier. most of the sites i visit a lot i address by IP address anyway already. since all the metros went to 10 digit local phone numbers (have to dial the area code first anyway) remembering an IP address isn't much harder.
sounds good to me. any ideas for a port number? let's get started, no use in sitting aronud. hey while we're at it why don't we come up with a open, standards-based naming registrar and do away with NSI and this patent squabble in one fell swoop?
dibs on microsoft.com in the new DNS...
i agree with the tenor of your post, but i have to dispute a bit of the tone. i could see your demanding 'democracy' if the ietf had never been formed and usa companies had 'no plan' of ever supporting russian-language domain names.
the internet was invented with the usa in mind, and maybe it was a bit shortsighted for the first protocols to be based upon ASCII and not internationalized. however there was no way of knowing then what we know now: that the internet is a truly international entity.
the IETF is trying to make internet naming more international and it will happen. but you are right, the patent mess makes me sick also, this little company trying to be 'smart' and saying 'ha ha, i filed the patent even though you developed the standard and the solution long before'. this patent will be thrown out or ignored.
not trying to be mean, but sometimes i get tired of people pointing fingers at the conutry in which i live. we're trying our best, but 250 million decent people are easily outweighed by 100 extremely rich people. so i guess i join your plea for Democracy, but hey, the IETF is at least trying.
Slashdot Mirror
i looked around and around the libranet site but couldn't find a 'download' link anywhere. any help would be appreciated...
- blame the bullies
- blame the parents
- blame guns
I'll tackle them one at a time. Blame the bullies. Well, not many people were more bullied and ridiculed than me all through school, yet as aforementioned I am not violent and don't even really hate those people. Blame the parents. Well, I had an abusive father, my grandfather killed himself, etc, etc, and again I am not violent at all. Blame the guns. Well, I had plenty of access to guns and boxes and boxes of 'ammo' in various unlocked desks and cabinets and I did not shoot anyone. So what IS the answer? Well I don't know, really. It sure as hell ain't religion (athiest here, sorry) or nice teachers (they actually made fun of me in front of the classes as well). The only thing I can really guess is that the shooters in the Columbine case were just plain mentally ill and their parents/teachers/etc failed to recognize that and get them help. The lawsuit as I see it should be directed right there (and it has, the shooters' families were sued). I'm not sure it is the school's responsibility to check for this kind of thing, but these 'shooters' were minors, correct? Do teachers have a duty to check for signs of abuse or neglect? But isn't that what they are trying to do with all this suspending of people who wear black, etc? I dunno, something is screwed up with the school system, the family system, with the whole country. Anyway I am DEFINATELY not trying to place blame on anyone, it is none of my business to do such a thing. I just don't see how this lawyer thinks he has a snowball's chance in hell of even making this case last more than a few minutes of a judge's time. And, as usual, I set out to say something and have no idea what I just said. Oh well.which parents, the parents of the shooters or the parents of the bullies?
we'll put them on giant monolithic blocks, etched in binary (the univerisal language) and bury them in dry ice-caves on mars. when mankind is ready, they will find them.
god, i am stupid sometimes. and yes, i loved both series.
ack, i loved the first of the goodkind books but hated the rest of it. ahh... memories of feist's belgariad and the 'death gate cycle' by weis and hickman flash through my mind. now THOSE were addictive. as yet another aside, Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, etc)'s re-release of 'The Big U' really tickled my fancy also. A lot of people didn't like it, I couldn't put it down.
i never liked jordan much, but really liked tad's memory, sorrow, and thorn series. fwiw, i read about everything and like most of it, but after battling against the first few chapters of the jordan 'wheel of time' thing i kept giving up. if nothing else, this story gives me the hankering to go back and re-read tad's series. also, i've read tailchaser's song and liked it. please, no flames.
i waited for 3 years for this game, bought it the day it came out, found out they weren't joking about the 3D accelerator requirements and that my six year old PC has no chance whatsoever of running the game, ever.
what i would really like to see is a very nice graphics library which sits on top of both KDE and Gnome. that way i could write 1 app and both desktops could grok it.
it is a lot like i have been saying a lot, when people complain about 'no way out' of doing something. it is pretty simple: do not buy the items which have these strange proprietary auto upgrade 'features' if that feature bothers you a lot. wait until the hack-it-yourself linux version comes out, or whatever, but there is a lot of whining about corporate business models (Music companies and their unrippable CDs, auto-upgrading TiVo) and the 'way out' is, as always, simple as not buying something which is not open. maybe talk to RMS about that...
... is seriously on-screen violent. not counting, say, grenades thrown into barracks, arnold kills at least 110 people on screen in this, one of the worst movies of all time. (but also very, very funny when watched in the correct light. in this manner it is not unlike 'Soldier' with Kurt Russell. Battlefield Earth, of course, has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever.)
maybe it was good ole april 1 being on a sunday, but i never really got into the spirit of things this year. i really love it when april 1 falls on a friday, you can spend a week at work sizing which coworkers to really nail. when it's on the weekend i'm usually too busy catching up on sleep to get off any serious plans.
what i meant was is several friends of mine when i was in uni had japanese-character keyboards. they had some weird drivers just to write asci at all.
while you can't police people's thoughts (yet, i'm sure the idea is patent pending somewhere), i for one would like conspiraries to commit serious, irreversable crimes like murder, rape, armed robbery SHOULD be a crime. there is no way to determine if four guys who meet every night to plan how to kill old man Walker next door and get away with it are serious, but i for one would rather they go to jail BEFORE they kill someone, not after. i'm not talking about conspiracy to steal candy bars from the local 7-11, i'm talking about a group of 6 frat boys actually discussing a definite plan to gang rape a 13 year old girl, etc. that should be a crime. there's a difference between writing a story about such a horrible act, and -actually making a definate plan to commit the act-. anyway don't want to really, really get up on the high horse since i haven't even decided how far along the line should be between free speech and protection of the public.
isn't 'conspiracy to commit murder' a crime?
okay how often have you sat down at a keyboard in tokyo and typed 'slashdot.org'?
oooohhhh that's a good one. but possibly they had no idea what they were talking about, picking RFC numbers out of the air. doesn't sound like a bad idea, take every RFC combination and patent combining the two.
okay, i volunteer openearth.org as a mirror/site/whatever for such a project. anyone have experience drafting RFCs?
simple. by the time this actually becomes a reality we all have palm XXXV implants in our brains with all the IP addresses and we can access them wirelessly by a simple thought, seeing the web page displayed in glorious 3d directly into our optic nerves. but point well taken :)
good, good, now we are getting somewhere. how do we go about getting port 340 assigned as DNS2?
give them the IP address, it'll be MUCH easier. most of the sites i visit a lot i address by IP address anyway already. since all the metros went to 10 digit local phone numbers (have to dial the area code first anyway) remembering an IP address isn't much harder.
sounds good to me. any ideas for a port number? let's get started, no use in sitting aronud. hey while we're at it why don't we come up with a open, standards-based naming registrar and do away with NSI and this patent squabble in one fell swoop? dibs on microsoft.com in the new DNS...
i agree with the tenor of your post, but i have to dispute a bit of the tone. i could see your demanding 'democracy' if the ietf had never been formed and usa companies had 'no plan' of ever supporting russian-language domain names. the internet was invented with the usa in mind, and maybe it was a bit shortsighted for the first protocols to be based upon ASCII and not internationalized. however there was no way of knowing then what we know now: that the internet is a truly international entity. the IETF is trying to make internet naming more international and it will happen. but you are right, the patent mess makes me sick also, this little company trying to be 'smart' and saying 'ha ha, i filed the patent even though you developed the standard and the solution long before'. this patent will be thrown out or ignored. not trying to be mean, but sometimes i get tired of people pointing fingers at the conutry in which i live. we're trying our best, but 250 million decent people are easily outweighed by 100 extremely rich people. so i guess i join your plea for Democracy, but hey, the IETF is at least trying.
lucky bloke, how did you escape the (-1, Offtopic) fate my post got blasted with :(