They've had them on comic books for about 50 years.
Look up the Comics Code Authority sometime. In the mid-1950s, comics were in the same position that video games are today: blamed for all manner of juvenile delinquency. A moral crusade was launched, congressional hearings were held, and in order to protect their business, the comic book industry put together the code. Newsstands wouldn't stock any comics without the Code seal on them, and to get that seal, the book had to be the equivalent of a PG rating. Maybe a G by today's standards.
The end result was that only G-rated comic books survived outside the underground publishing circuit. Crime and horror genres disappeared entirely. EC comics, known for titles like Tales from the Crypt and True Crime, had to drop their entire line, leaving behind only Mad Magazine (now owned by Time Warner).
Keep in mind that this all happened without actual government legislation. Just hearings and hysteria.
In the late 1970s, after some rewrites of the Comics Code, the major publishers started to experiment with non-approved books. There was a Spider-Man story that involved drug use -- portrayed negatively, of course, but just portraying it would have violated the code -- which went out without the seal and still managed to get onto the stands and into the hands of readers. By the mid-1980s, even DC started selling some comics labeled "For mature readers only," later collecting those series into the launch of the Vertigo label. The Code has been relaxed again and again, and Marvel even dropped it in the late 1990s in favor of its own rating system, which featured movie-style PG labels and a music-style "parental advisory" for their 18+ comics.
It took 30 years to for the comic book industry to start climbing out of the PG-only ghetto, end even now, 50 years later, you still find people who will challenge an obviously-not-for-kids comic book because it has material inappropriate for kids. Check out the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund for more info on that fight.
When did representatives lose the ability to get the facts and communicate them to their constituents, rather than enact farcical legislation that will accomplish nothing?
5204 BC, on what would now be called July 23. A Wednesday, I believe. Around three o'clock in the afternoon.
If a 10 year old tries to get an R rated movie, they can't. Same should go for a M rated game.
Sure, but as others have pointed out, that's store and theater policy, not law.
Adding legal restrictions to the equation brings up first amendment issues. You have to work out what is and is not protected expression. Once you decide, you set a legal precedent, and you may find yourself banning things you didn't intend. (Consider how much Renaissance artwork wouldn't pass a ban on nudity without an exception for artistic merit.) Never underestimate the law of unintended consequences.
It also adds a whole new layer of classification. Many games are already rated, but the law doesn't rely on existing rating systems, it adds a new one. Imagine having a separate movie rating system for each state, on top of the RIAA system we have now.
We already have the ESRB ratings. Why add another layer of bureaucracy -- with philosophical drawbacks, no less -- that won't accomplish anything more than just telling stores to enforce the ratings we already have?
I just feel that unless I chose to see the ads, I shouldn't see any just because someone I know chose to instead.
The difference is that they didn't choose to *see* ads, they chose to *display* ads.
If I drive past a billboard, the owner of the land didn't decide "I want to see a billboard in this spot." He decided, "I want other people to see a billboard on this spot," and made arrangements with advertisers.
Nah, MySpace displays more (and more annoying) ads than would fit into LiveJournal's ad policy. And as I understand it, MySpace users don't have a choice. LJ users can still opt for free (no ads except on sponsored blogs) or paid (no ads anywhere) accounts instead of sponsored.
I had the misfortune to look at a MySpace page on Monday. I recall thinking, "Wow, if LiveJournal made their pages look like this, people would revolt."
Then on Tuesday, LJ announced the new ad-supported account type.
Though if they stick within the current guidelines for ads, they should avoid ever reaching MySpace-level depths of advertising glut.
Personally, as long as they continue to offer free-without-ads accounts and paid-without-ads, that's fine... except for the fact, as you pointed out, that they swore never to provide ad space. I figure people and businesses have the right to change their minds, but they phrased it as a promise, which does make this change disturbing.
This is also available for linux, but I haven't gotten it working properly (or really tried, for that matter). I believe the packages are called Howl and mdnsResponder.
I have a Fedora Core 4 system that advertises Netatalk shares and HTTP via mDNSresponder. Fedora 5 has dropped Howl in favor of Avahi -- another zeroconf implementation -- though I haven't done anything with it yet.
Then, the big marketing giant hit. Suddenly, LA started pumping out SW games like they were going out of style. As a result, we ended up with a lot of mediocre SW games.
Now admittedly I'd gotten out of playing these games by then, but wasn't this around 1999 -- in other words, about the time the Star Wars prequels started coming out?
Actually, it looks like you can get a $15/month plan if you have DSL/cable/etc. already. They used to call it a "bring your own connection" plan, but they seem to have lumped it in with a 10-hours-of-dialup plan
$26/month seems to be their AOL-and-a-connection pricing, whether it's DSL or dial-up.
Because they switched to a more detailed numbering scheme with 1.5.
Given: x.y.z.w
x.y are the major/minor version numbers. z is for an update that changes the API. w is for an update that doesn't change the API.
This way they can distinguish between updates that are likely to break* extensions (Firefox 1.5.1) and those that theoretically should not (Firefox 1.5.0.2).
*By which I mean actually breaking functionality, requiring programming changes to the extension -- not just needing to bump the extension's compatibility label.
Fixed in: Firefox 1.5
Firefox 1.0.8
Thunderbird 1.5
Thunderbird 1.0.8
SeaMonkey 1.0
Mozilla Suite 1.7.13
That's literally Firefox 1.5, not Firefox 1.5.0.2, which means that the bug was fixed months ago in the latest stable releases of Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey. The reason this advisory is dated April 13 is that the older releases -- Firefox 1.0.x, Thunderbird 1.0.x, and the Mozilla Suite -- just got updated with the fix.
Spam would be one person trying to send an email to hundreds of people, not hundreds of people trying to send an email to a few people each.
Of course, from the reciving server's perspective, it's hard to tell the difference between hundreds of people trying to send the same email to a few people each, and hundreds of zombies trying to send the same email to a few people each.
This is one of many things that make accurate automatic spam classification a difficult problem, and why false positives continue to be a problem.
Here's another example of how easily a glitch could block a domain name incorrectly.
This case dealt with URLs in the message body, but let's consider a similar circumstance with the sending address and mail server name.
Suppose AOL decides to block mail from servers that claim to be part of aol.com, but aren't at one of their own IP addresses. Now suppose someone miscodes the filter to match "aol.com" instead of ".aol.com". So when they test it with fakename.aol.com, it trips the rule and triggers a "possibly forged" warning. Then something comes in from mail.dearaol.com... which also triggers the rule.
Obviously, this isn't going to block a message from mail.com.com with "www.dearaol.com" in the body, but it should illustrate how easily a well-intentioned but badly-implemented rule could block legit mail.
(Not that I'm convinced it was really a "glitch," just that it seems that it's possible.)
That's been a mantra among the anti-spam community for years. According to that doctrine, AOL is perfectly within its rights to block whatever the hell it wants subject to its users' preferences.
That's a key issue: AOL's mail filters are not accountable to MoveOn, the EFF, Craigslist, or anyone else involved in DearAOL. They are accountable only to AOL and AOL's users.
Well, assuming the encryption scheme is good enough, it should be hard to spoof the header tokens. And the graphic that indicates "certified" mail is supposed to appear in the mail client UI (yes, it requires client support), not in the viewing area. So they'd have to spoof the UI, which is trickier than spoofing the layout or sticking a logo in the message body.
All of which, of course, doesn't mean that people will actually pay any attention to it.
CertifiedMail is here to certify the delivery of spam by the "important" spammers who have the resources to pay for it.
Those who can pay, yes, and also agree to abide by responsible mailing list practices, use only opt-in lists (it doesn't require confirmed opt-in, unfortunately) with working unsubscribe procedures, eschew email harvesting and list sharing, use accurate headers, maintain a low level of complaints... and submit to a background check to show that they aren't spammers.
If they enforce their TOS, it'll be really difficult for spammers to get on their list, and harder for them to stay.
But it's OK to ignore all that, 'cause it doesn't make good copy. It's so much more satisfying to claim that this will only legitimize spam, because, y'know, it's being used by AOL, and AOL is evil.
Are you kidding? This is what they've been saying all along. The media frenzy has been... inconsistent with what AOL, Goodmail, and Yahoo! have actually been saying in their press releases.
Of course, AOL wasn't terribly consistent even with themselves early on, but if you think Goodmail billed this as an anti-spam solution, you've clearly only been paying cursory attention to the story.
If I'm expecting emails from my bank, I'll be putting them on my safelist anyway!
And when the cleverly-crafted phish comes in, the one that uses the right layout, the right wording, the right logos, a browser vulnerability to disguise the fact that it's going to the wrong website?
Most people here will probably recognize it by the fact that your bank wouldn't be asking for your SSN online, or you'll use your bookmark to visit the site instead of the fiendish link. But for the average Joe, this could help him tell the difference between the real mail from his bank and the phish that claims to be.
1. What are these teens doing instead of playing games? Socializing is definitely a good bet. Maybe they're spending more time online in non-gaming pursuits. Maybe they're seeing more movies (probably not, I'm sure there's astudy somewhere showing movie attendence continuing to plummet even among the coveted teenage audience). There are only 24 hours in a day, and unless they're sleeping more, if they've cut back on games that means something else is more interesting.
2. What do the numbers say for the same age? The question, as they've framed it, tells you a lot about trends over age, but not over time. It tells you how this year's 16-year-olds have changed since they were 15, but it says nothing about the habits of this year's 16-year-olds vs. last year's 16-year-olds.
You could easily have a situation in which every single person surveyed plays games less than the year before, but the influx of younger teens into the survey's range keeps the overall levels of game play the same.
Slashdot Mirror
So - you would be in favor of ratings on books?
They've had them on comic books for about 50 years.
Look up the Comics Code Authority sometime. In the mid-1950s, comics were in the same position that video games are today: blamed for all manner of juvenile delinquency. A moral crusade was launched, congressional hearings were held, and in order to protect their business, the comic book industry put together the code. Newsstands wouldn't stock any comics without the Code seal on them, and to get that seal, the book had to be the equivalent of a PG rating. Maybe a G by today's standards.
The end result was that only G-rated comic books survived outside the underground publishing circuit. Crime and horror genres disappeared entirely. EC comics, known for titles like Tales from the Crypt and True Crime, had to drop their entire line, leaving behind only Mad Magazine (now owned by Time Warner).
Keep in mind that this all happened without actual government legislation. Just hearings and hysteria.
In the late 1970s, after some rewrites of the Comics Code, the major publishers started to experiment with non-approved books. There was a Spider-Man story that involved drug use -- portrayed negatively, of course, but just portraying it would have violated the code -- which went out without the seal and still managed to get onto the stands and into the hands of readers. By the mid-1980s, even DC started selling some comics labeled "For mature readers only," later collecting those series into the launch of the Vertigo label. The Code has been relaxed again and again, and Marvel even dropped it in the late 1990s in favor of its own rating system, which featured movie-style PG labels and a music-style "parental advisory" for their 18+ comics.
It took 30 years to for the comic book industry to start climbing out of the PG-only ghetto, end even now, 50 years later, you still find people who will challenge an obviously-not-for-kids comic book because it has material inappropriate for kids. Check out the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund for more info on that fight.
When did representatives lose the ability to get the facts and communicate them to their constituents, rather than enact farcical legislation that will accomplish nothing?
5204 BC, on what would now be called July 23. A Wednesday, I believe. Around three o'clock in the afternoon.
(Sorry, I'm in a cynical mood right now.)
If a 10 year old tries to get an R rated movie, they can't. Same should go for a M rated game.
Sure, but as others have pointed out, that's store and theater policy, not law.
Adding legal restrictions to the equation brings up first amendment issues. You have to work out what is and is not protected expression. Once you decide, you set a legal precedent, and you may find yourself banning things you didn't intend. (Consider how much Renaissance artwork wouldn't pass a ban on nudity without an exception for artistic merit.) Never underestimate the law of unintended consequences.
It also adds a whole new layer of classification. Many games are already rated, but the law doesn't rely on existing rating systems, it adds a new one. Imagine having a separate movie rating system for each state, on top of the RIAA system we have now.
We already have the ESRB ratings. Why add another layer of bureaucracy -- with philosophical drawbacks, no less -- that won't accomplish anything more than just telling stores to enforce the ratings we already have?
What a load of bollocks.
Of course, according to this statute, bollocks would be banned as well.
I just feel that unless I chose to see the ads, I shouldn't see any just because someone I know chose to instead.
The difference is that they didn't choose to *see* ads, they chose to *display* ads.
If I drive past a billboard, the owner of the land didn't decide "I want to see a billboard in this spot." He decided, "I want other people to see a billboard on this spot," and made arrangements with advertisers.
Nah, MySpace displays more (and more annoying) ads than would fit into LiveJournal's ad policy. And as I understand it, MySpace users don't have a choice. LJ users can still opt for free (no ads except on sponsored blogs) or paid (no ads anywhere) accounts instead of sponsored.
I had the misfortune to look at a MySpace page on Monday. I recall thinking, "Wow, if LiveJournal made their pages look like this, people would revolt."
Then on Tuesday, LJ announced the new ad-supported account type.
Though if they stick within the current guidelines for ads, they should avoid ever reaching MySpace-level depths of advertising glut.
Personally, as long as they continue to offer free-without-ads accounts and paid-without-ads, that's fine... except for the fact, as you pointed out, that they swore never to provide ad space. I figure people and businesses have the right to change their minds, but they phrased it as a promise, which does make this change disturbing.
Yes, it's very much like Eudora's three-tiered business model:
Free version with limited features.
Ad-supported version with full features.
Paid version with full features.
This is also available for linux, but I haven't gotten it working properly (or really tried, for that matter). I believe the packages are called Howl and mdnsResponder.
I have a Fedora Core 4 system that advertises Netatalk shares and HTTP via mDNSresponder. Fedora 5 has dropped Howl in favor of Avahi -- another zeroconf implementation -- though I haven't done anything with it yet.
This will cause an incredible thirst for lattes and koolaid.
Or even koolaid lattes.
Then, the big marketing giant hit. Suddenly, LA started pumping out SW games like they were going out of style. As a result, we ended up with a lot of mediocre SW games.
Now admittedly I'd gotten out of playing these games by then, but wasn't this around 1999 -- in other words, about the time the Star Wars prequels started coming out?
The difference in enjoyment between Kings Quest and Monkey Island is immeasurable..
Of course, it's been said that half the fun of the King's Quest series was finding the different ways your character could die...
Actually, it looks like you can get a $15/month plan if you have DSL/cable/etc. already. They used to call it a "bring your own connection" plan, but they seem to have lumped it in with a 10-hours-of-dialup plan
$26/month seems to be their AOL-and-a-connection pricing, whether it's DSL or dial-up.
Because they switched to a more detailed numbering scheme with 1.5.
Given: x.y.z.w
x.y are the major/minor version numbers.
z is for an update that changes the API.
w is for an update that doesn't change the API.
This way they can distinguish between updates that are likely to break* extensions (Firefox 1.5.1) and those that theoretically should not (Firefox 1.5.0.2).
*By which I mean actually breaking functionality, requiring programming changes to the extension -- not just needing to bump the extension's compatibility label.
If you look at MFSA2006-19 for instance, it says:
That's literally Firefox 1.5, not Firefox 1.5.0.2, which means that the bug was fixed months ago in the latest stable releases of Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey. The reason this advisory is dated April 13 is that the older releases -- Firefox 1.0.x, Thunderbird 1.0.x, and the Mozilla Suite -- just got updated with the fix.
Spam would be one person trying to send an email to hundreds of people, not hundreds of people trying to send an email to a few people each.
Of course, from the reciving server's perspective, it's hard to tell the difference between hundreds of people trying to send the same email to a few people each, and hundreds of zombies trying to send the same email to a few people each.
This is one of many things that make accurate automatic spam classification a difficult problem, and why false positives continue to be a problem.
Here's another example of how easily a glitch could block a domain name incorrectly.
This case dealt with URLs in the message body, but let's consider a similar circumstance with the sending address and mail server name.
Suppose AOL decides to block mail from servers that claim to be part of aol.com, but aren't at one of their own IP addresses. Now suppose someone miscodes the filter to match "aol.com" instead of ".aol.com". So when they test it with fakename.aol.com, it trips the rule and triggers a "possibly forged" warning. Then something comes in from mail.dearaol.com... which also triggers the rule.
Obviously, this isn't going to block a message from mail.com.com with "www.dearaol.com" in the body, but it should illustrate how easily a well-intentioned but badly-implemented rule could block legit mail.
(Not that I'm convinced it was really a "glitch," just that it seems that it's possible.)
That's been a mantra among the anti-spam community for years. According to that doctrine, AOL is perfectly within its rights to block whatever the hell it wants subject to its users' preferences.
That's a key issue: AOL's mail filters are not accountable to MoveOn, the EFF, Craigslist, or anyone else involved in DearAOL. They are accountable only to AOL and AOL's users.
It will never surpass Puzzle Pirates. Yarrrr!
Billions of blistering blue barnacles! What in the seven seas were they thinking!?!
Imagine a compromised machine.
At that point they're screwed anyway. I think phishing someone whose box is already rootkitted falls under the category of Overkill.
They'll just make it look very similar
Well, assuming the encryption scheme is good enough, it should be hard to spoof the header tokens. And the graphic that indicates "certified" mail is supposed to appear in the mail client UI (yes, it requires client support), not in the viewing area. So they'd have to spoof the UI, which is trickier than spoofing the layout or sticking a logo in the message body.
All of which, of course, doesn't mean that people will actually pay any attention to it.
CertifiedMail is here to certify the delivery of spam by the "important" spammers who have the resources to pay for it.
Those who can pay, yes, and also agree to abide by responsible mailing list practices, use only opt-in lists (it doesn't require confirmed opt-in, unfortunately) with working unsubscribe procedures, eschew email harvesting and list sharing, use accurate headers, maintain a low level of complaints... and submit to a background check to show that they aren't spammers.
If they enforce their TOS, it'll be really difficult for spammers to get on their list, and harder for them to stay.
But it's OK to ignore all that, 'cause it doesn't make good copy. It's so much more satisfying to claim that this will only legitimize spam, because, y'know, it's being used by AOL, and AOL is evil.
Are you kidding? This is what they've been saying all along. The media frenzy has been... inconsistent with what AOL, Goodmail, and Yahoo! have actually been saying in their press releases.
Of course, AOL wasn't terribly consistent even with themselves early on, but if you think Goodmail billed this as an anti-spam solution, you've clearly only been paying cursory attention to the story.
If I'm expecting emails from my bank, I'll be putting them on my safelist anyway!
And when the cleverly-crafted phish comes in, the one that uses the right layout, the right wording, the right logos, a browser vulnerability to disguise the fact that it's going to the wrong website?
Most people here will probably recognize it by the fact that your bank wouldn't be asking for your SSN online, or you'll use your bookmark to visit the site instead of the fiendish link. But for the average Joe, this could help him tell the difference between the real mail from his bank and the phish that claims to be.
1. What are these teens doing instead of playing games? Socializing is definitely a good bet. Maybe they're spending more time online in non-gaming pursuits. Maybe they're seeing more movies (probably not, I'm sure there's astudy somewhere showing movie attendence continuing to plummet even among the coveted teenage audience). There are only 24 hours in a day, and unless they're sleeping more, if they've cut back on games that means something else is more interesting.
2. What do the numbers say for the same age? The question, as they've framed it, tells you a lot about trends over age, but not over time. It tells you how this year's 16-year-olds have changed since they were 15, but it says nothing about the habits of this year's 16-year-olds vs. last year's 16-year-olds.
You could easily have a situation in which every single person surveyed plays games less than the year before, but the influx of younger teens into the survey's range keeps the overall levels of game play the same.