As a separate point though, I have to say that LUS' Fiber to the Home initiative is great even if it falls apart completely this afternoon. The local cable company (Cox) has seriously improved their offerings since it became obvious that they would have to compete with a viable opponent. I have 15/2 cable service at a reasonable price, and I've gotten close max throughput every time I've tested. Last time I downloaded Fedora I got a fairly sustained 1MBps and I was downloading to my laptop over a wireless "g" network. I'll probably switch to the municipal fiber when it comes out, but it's nice to know that there's a viably alternative.
(On the other hand LUS' online bill pay system sucks! It only works with IE, and then it's not reliable unless it's IE 6. So.. wait, I have to have Windows to pay my bill online, and preferably a really old Windows to boot? I keep a windows VM on my Mac purely to pay my electric bill and use Visio once in a while.)
The Lafayette Utility System guys are out at my house right now painting little squiggly lines to lay in my fiber (I saw them when I went home to grab my lunch). I really hope this service is as good as they are hyping. Hell, I'd settle for half as good. We'll see.
Dude.. You live in Chicago, it's a grid, lucky you. Try to find your way around Houston or New Orleans without help sometime. It's a bona fide nightmare. New Orleans has streets that are parallel in one place and intersect in others, they call it a the "Crescent City" for a reason. It also has streets change names at random places for reasons that, while historically interesting, make no navigational sense. New Orleans is a bit unique by any standard, but most of what I like to call the "post-WW II Southern Cities" are huge sprawling things with little planning and often several "downtown areas" interspersed with residential subdivisions and bedroom communities. I've been to New York and Chicago, their well planned grid and awesome public transportation are things to be envied... Most of us do, because we don't have them.
If you happen to live in the city you were born in (or have spent years in), and don't travel; then I can certainly see your point. If I still lived in New Orleans, I could get to any of 3 dozen excellent restaurants without a GPS, and possible after having been blinded in a horrible street car accident. I don't live in New Orleans anymore though, so i find my GPS occasionally useful for finding well hidden locations in my new town. Recently when I went to Houston for a few days on business I found it invaluable. It guided me to everything from the hotel to the great downtown restaurant a local suggested. Let me tell you... Houston is a mazed without help. I don't use my GPS daily, and possibly not even weekly, but it is well worth the couple of hundred bucks I spent on it.
My city power company is planning to do just that. It's an ambitious plan and I'm curious to see its long term outcome. I've read literature both for and against the idea, and found that while I really want cheap high-speed Internet access, several municipalities have had trouble making them revenue positive (necessary, not for profits obviously, but to pay for upgrades and repay the loans and bonds that initially fund the project.) I think Lafayette may have more success than other places, we're fairly large, fairly rich (in a Louisiana sense), and have a reasonably technical user base (Big university, Lots of Oil Industry, even our own little super computing facility), but these things are hard to predict. Certainly I plan to sign up, It would be hard pressed to be worse than Cox.
Wait.. A record label? Are you thinking of the Apple record label founded by the Beatles? Totally different company, in fact there was some legal wrangling a couple decades ago between the two, and some more recently when Apple Computers decided to start selling music. Also they don't tell you how to store your music, they make a recommendation that you are free to ignore. Go ahead and hate them, but at least make sense.
That still leaves a valid argument for "Jobs is a really smart and savy guy, who's intelligence and vision have led to Apple's success, in spite of the fact that he's an asshole." It's even remotely possible that a person with Job's intelligence and vision who wasn't an asshole could do even more. I'm not saying it's true (and you'd likely never find the person in question), but it's not clear that there is necessary correlation between "Steve Jobs can be an real ass" and "Apple is successful".
Competition does help increase bandwidth, I can say that with some certainty. Every since our power company got approval to install a Fiber to the Home system, Cox has been juicing up the bandwidth. I have about 15 Mbps now, and I actually get it most of the time. LUS is promising 20-100Mbps connections through Fiber to the Curb. Given the total lack of applications that need 15 Mbps, let alone 100 on the Internet; bandwidth has become the least of my concerns for picking a service once LUS finishes laying the network next year.
Monopolies are created by entrenchment. Cox cable is the monopoly here. They own all the fiber, they own all the conduit. It would cost a new company millions, if not billions to lay down a new infrastructure. Our local power company is doing Fiber to the Premise, and even with owning a huge network of poles and conduit, it's going to cost a fortune. Only with the help of local government (which is issuing bonds to pay for part of the project) and the firm support of the majority of the residents are they even attempting it. Imagine the costs for a company with no government backing and no pre-existing infrastructure trying it.
All of the major utilities were able to be built because of local government support of the projects at the time they were "new". Either the governments pays for the infrastructure and spins it off to a company to run, the government pays for the infrastructure and runs it, or through a combination of subsides and and a temporary or permanent monopoly the government helps a company pay for the infrastructure.
Wireless infrastructure is a completely different and much less expensive matter. Cell towers aren't cheap, but compared to running cable to every residence they're practically free. (Which is why in many underdeveloped areas you see more cell phones than land lines.)
Ok, Early adopter here... Love my iPhone... But to claim that the iPhone started the smartphone market is a wee bit of a stretch... Like a really huge wee bit.
With a minimum of effort I've learned to type just as fast on my iPhone as I could on my Treo. That's not really an issue. The iPhone keyboard is even more usable in the dark, because it's part of the back lit screen, so that's not an issue. Having not thrown my iPhone against any brick walls yet, I can't speak to it's durability, but it seems solid enough. I guess if "looking like a business tool" requires being clunky and goofy looking then the iPhone doesn't have that, it's slim and fluid looking. I will say though, that I used to have big problems with my Treo falling off my belt, and that hasn't happened yet with the iPhone. Its design seems to lend itself better to belt case. That, of course, is a perfectly anecdotal statement, and other may not have the problems with the Treo/BB design that I did, or maybe my belt case was crap.
In my personal experience users want three things from smart phones. A calendar, mail, and web browsing. I never disliked the calendar on my Treo, and don't dislike the one on my iPhone, so even there. I think Mail is slightly better on the iPhone than on any other device I've used, but I will admit to not being found of the lack of attachments. So we'll call that slight advantage to RIM/Palm. Web browsing on the other hand is so much better on the iPhone that I can't even really express it. It's like the difference between a pointed stick and a well made rapier. Blazer made most sites completely unusable, and Opera never did work right on the Treo. I prefer Firefox to Safari on the Mac, but Safari is so much better than Blazer that the two almost cannot be called the same type of software. On top of that is the fact that having my music on my phone is really convenient, and the few apps i really miss from the Treo will hopefully be coming now with the SDK.
I'm not saying that iPhone is perfect for every user, but I will say that the complaints you level don't seem very reasonable. Once the CiscoVPN client is in place and I get a decent SSH client (and maybe a few games), it will be damn near a perfect device in my book.
OpenMoko and Android are concept drawings right now. By the time they are real products the iPhone either will be, or will very soon be, out from under AT&T exclusive contract. Apple either will have or will soon be renegotiating their contracts from a position strength having already delivered a successful product. The entire playing field will have changed at least once, maybe twice before the open platforms are ready. Trying to make a prediction based on the current environment is chancy at best
After a couple of decades real actors will become as anachronistic as real special effects are today.
I hope not. Even animated movies benefit from the personalities installed in the characters by their voice actors. The total removal of acting from the process of movies making would make it an entirely different art form.
Theater and movies are separate art forms. Movies are as much about post-processing and the directors vision as they are about the production itself. Watch a video shoot of a play sometime, even a really good one. It's nether as good as a movie or a real play would have been. The two don't mesh. You are right that if movies suddenly all went away (as in my fictional EMP), people would start watching plays instead; but short of such a disaster, one is not going to replace the other.
I'm sorta-kinds in industry (I work for a facility that offers general High performance computing services, one of the things we do is post processing for small movie houses), and I get to go to a few small scale premiers here and there. One in particular sticks out in my mind. It about a young man, who, in a fit of post-college "OMG I'm Broke" goes to work with his uncle doing insurance adjustments in Post Katrina New Orleans. The thing was filmed literally in a couple weeks wandering around New Orleans in public places (and a few bits of abandoned private property that they "borrowed"). The actors worked for food and a share of the hopeful eventual profits. This thing was as on the cheap as possible. It was an enjoyable film, but also one that felt like it could have been a lot better if there had been money to do it "right". The director himself admitted this. It cost a couple hundred thousand dollars.
This tells me that for even a really professional job, even with special effects or any strange "extras", a movie done "right" is a million dollar project. The Coens might be able to make movies with this kind of price tag, or even a bit more, on their own (though they'd be taking a big risk with their own money), but movies would become a rich man's game. Only people with a few mil to invest in a project would be able to make the simplest movies. You'd need to put together a conglomerate of investors to make a "Lord of the Rings". Trust me, add the cost of sets, costumes, make up, cameras, camera rigs, film (not so much any more), editing time, simple effects generation, actors, lighting, techs, food for all of these people (you can't just have them all go to lunch from noon to 1, you have to feed them) on location travel, etc, and even the most simplistic "this could have been made on a budget" movie costs millions.
While there may be an argument that the "Music Industry" is at least partially redundant, and that the ability of everyday artists to sell themselves in a brave new digital world will eventually weaken or even kill the record company's strangle-hold, I feel this is much less likely with movies. There are two points to consider:
1) While it is possible to make a pretty good audio recording in a basement with a laptop, and possible to make a studio quality recording for a few hundred bucks of rental time in a studio, it is nearly impossible to make a movie with anything less than hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's for an independent film made on a shoe-string. For a studio quality movie, you're talking a few million minimum. People don't have the money to make video "content" without the backing of large studios. This isn't going to change, these expenses aren't (mostly) going to be affected by technology. They're related to the inherent expense of getting a lot of people and equipment together in one place, feeding them, paying them, making costumes for them, etc. Even if Apple announced tomorrow that it was offering free Power Macs with Final Cut Pro to movie producers, and special effects costs dropped to zero over night, it would still cost millions to make a good movie. Studios are more than middle men, they financiers.
2) Unlike music, which existed before the modern age, and has business models that could survive an EMP taking out every piece of electronics on the planet; movies are a whole cloth product of the "middle man" era. The studios "own" movie making in a way that the record industry can never "own" music making. I can go to a local bar an see a decent unsigned band, I could learn to play an instrument and make my own music if I wanted. I could never do this with movies (at least beyond the "slightly edited home video" level"). Even "independent" film makers are the owners or employees of studios, just smaller studios. The entire process of making movies, from the production to the distribution is tied to the studio model.
I just don't see "content" being separated from the "middle man" in this particular industry. At least not any time soon.
Once a year Hell, I live in a moderate sized city (~250K people). I work in a building that is almost two years old, across the street from a hotel that is nearly 4, and another large building that is close to 6. The entire area is an open field in Google's most up to date satellite imagery, let alone Street Views.
The cognitive dissonance of reading your post and your sig has me running insane little circles in my head. I will grant you that sometimes I enjoy insane little circles... but these are hurty ones....
Those tools are already being abused. The FBI has admitted to using warrentless wire tap provisions intended to fight terrorism on non-terrorism related cases. Not once, not a few times, thousands of times. Agents were either improperly trained on how to use the powers, or deliberately abused their powers. In either case, a bit scary, no? We have freedom and liberty for a reason, to sacrifice them for a very nebulous degree of safety (after all, point out one major terrorist plot that was stopped by these new powers) is foolishness of the highest order. I don't want to live in a country that is safe for "FREEDOM", but has no freedom.
Ehhh... Say what? All the software I have licensed is per core. They'd be foolish to do otherwise. The OS sees the cores as distinct processors for computational purposes (at least Linux does), usually only in the text descriptions of the hardware it the multicore nature of the system mentioned.
I saw a really interesting piece a while back that I sadly cannot find a link for. It essentially said that all of the "think of the children" stuff is not about protecting your kids, or my kids (not that I have any), or even $censor-person's kids. It's all about protecting some Platonic ideal Christian Every-child. The child of some mythical well meaning but clueless parent who has raised an incredibly innocent and fragile being, but lacks the wherewithal to protect them from the evils of the world. After all, you think your kids are smart, I (will probably) think my kids are smart, even $censor-person probably thinks their kids are smart and/or pure enough not to be affected adversely by this sort of thing. Our natural tendency is to think that we have raised our children right, and we can protect them from whatever evil we haven't prepared them for with our brilliant parenting.
It's other people's children, particularly other people that we don't know and can't predict the actions of, that they are trying to protect. It's their vision of America as a place where cute little blond haired girls with pig-tails need to be protected from evil that, by God, their parents might not even know exists that they are trying to protect. They don't want the government to raise their children, they would probably tell you, if you asked, that they don't want the government raising your children (you seem like a smart enough fellow after all), it's all those other anonymous children who the government needs to raise. The perfect innocent ones, with the pure but completely clueless parents who will happily buy their child (Child? An actual Angel) a game with cover art that looks like something out of Heavy Metal magazine, but will stop when they see the ESRB "AO" rating on the front.
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As a separate point though, I have to say that LUS' Fiber to the Home initiative is great even if it falls apart completely this afternoon. The local cable company (Cox) has seriously improved their offerings since it became obvious that they would have to compete with a viable opponent. I have 15/2 cable service at a reasonable price, and I've gotten close max throughput every time I've tested. Last time I downloaded Fedora I got a fairly sustained 1MBps and I was downloading to my laptop over a wireless "g" network. I'll probably switch to the municipal fiber when it comes out, but it's nice to know that there's a viably alternative.
(On the other hand LUS' online bill pay system sucks! It only works with IE, and then it's not reliable unless it's IE 6. So.. wait, I have to have Windows to pay my bill online, and preferably a really old Windows to boot? I keep a windows VM on my Mac purely to pay my electric bill and use Visio once in a while.)
The Lafayette Utility System guys are out at my house right now painting little squiggly lines to lay in my fiber (I saw them when I went home to grab my lunch). I really hope this service is as good as they are hyping. Hell, I'd settle for half as good. We'll see.
Dude.. You live in Chicago, it's a grid, lucky you. Try to find your way around Houston or New Orleans without help sometime. It's a bona fide nightmare. New Orleans has streets that are parallel in one place and intersect in others, they call it a the "Crescent City" for a reason. It also has streets change names at random places for reasons that, while historically interesting, make no navigational sense. New Orleans is a bit unique by any standard, but most of what I like to call the "post-WW II Southern Cities" are huge sprawling things with little planning and often several "downtown areas" interspersed with residential subdivisions and bedroom communities. I've been to New York and Chicago, their well planned grid and awesome public transportation are things to be envied... Most of us do, because we don't have them.
If you happen to live in the city you were born in (or have spent years in), and don't travel; then I can certainly see your point. If I still lived in New Orleans, I could get to any of 3 dozen excellent restaurants without a GPS, and possible after having been blinded in a horrible street car accident. I don't live in New Orleans anymore though, so i find my GPS occasionally useful for finding well hidden locations in my new town. Recently when I went to Houston for a few days on business I found it invaluable. It guided me to everything from the hotel to the great downtown restaurant a local suggested. Let me tell you... Houston is a mazed without help. I don't use my GPS daily, and possibly not even weekly, but it is well worth the couple of hundred bucks I spent on it.
My city power company is planning to do just that. It's an ambitious plan and I'm curious to see its long term outcome. I've read literature both for and against the idea, and found that while I really want cheap high-speed Internet access, several municipalities have had trouble making them revenue positive (necessary, not for profits obviously, but to pay for upgrades and repay the loans and bonds that initially fund the project.) I think Lafayette may have more success than other places, we're fairly large, fairly rich (in a Louisiana sense), and have a reasonably technical user base (Big university, Lots of Oil Industry, even our own little super computing facility), but these things are hard to predict. Certainly I plan to sign up, It would be hard pressed to be worse than Cox.
Wait.. A record label? Are you thinking of the Apple record label founded by the Beatles? Totally different company, in fact there was some legal wrangling a couple decades ago between the two, and some more recently when Apple Computers decided to start selling music. Also they don't tell you how to store your music, they make a recommendation that you are free to ignore. Go ahead and hate them, but at least make sense.
That still leaves a valid argument for "Jobs is a really smart and savy guy, who's intelligence and vision have led to Apple's success, in spite of the fact that he's an asshole." It's even remotely possible that a person with Job's intelligence and vision who wasn't an asshole could do even more. I'm not saying it's true (and you'd likely never find the person in question), but it's not clear that there is necessary correlation between "Steve Jobs can be an real ass" and "Apple is successful".
Competition does help increase bandwidth, I can say that with some certainty. Every since our power company got approval to install a Fiber to the Home system, Cox has been juicing up the bandwidth. I have about 15 Mbps now, and I actually get it most of the time. LUS is promising 20-100Mbps connections through Fiber to the Curb. Given the total lack of applications that need 15 Mbps, let alone 100 on the Internet; bandwidth has become the least of my concerns for picking a service once LUS finishes laying the network next year.
Monopolies are created by entrenchment. Cox cable is the monopoly here. They own all the fiber, they own all the conduit. It would cost a new company millions, if not billions to lay down a new infrastructure. Our local power company is doing Fiber to the Premise, and even with owning a huge network of poles and conduit, it's going to cost a fortune. Only with the help of local government (which is issuing bonds to pay for part of the project) and the firm support of the majority of the residents are they even attempting it. Imagine the costs for a company with no government backing and no pre-existing infrastructure trying it.
All of the major utilities were able to be built because of local government support of the projects at the time they were "new". Either the governments pays for the infrastructure and spins it off to a company to run, the government pays for the infrastructure and runs it, or through a combination of subsides and and a temporary or permanent monopoly the government helps a company pay for the infrastructure.
Wireless infrastructure is a completely different and much less expensive matter. Cell towers aren't cheap, but compared to running cable to every residence they're practically free. (Which is why in many underdeveloped areas you see more cell phones than land lines.)
Ok, Early adopter here... Love my iPhone... But to claim that the iPhone started the smartphone market is a wee bit of a stretch... Like a really huge wee bit.
With a minimum of effort I've learned to type just as fast on my iPhone as I could on my Treo. That's not really an issue. The iPhone keyboard is even more usable in the dark, because it's part of the back lit screen, so that's not an issue. Having not thrown my iPhone against any brick walls yet, I can't speak to it's durability, but it seems solid enough. I guess if "looking like a business tool" requires being clunky and goofy looking then the iPhone doesn't have that, it's slim and fluid looking. I will say though, that I used to have big problems with my Treo falling off my belt, and that hasn't happened yet with the iPhone. Its design seems to lend itself better to belt case. That, of course, is a perfectly anecdotal statement, and other may not have the problems with the Treo/BB design that I did, or maybe my belt case was crap.
In my personal experience users want three things from smart phones. A calendar, mail, and web browsing. I never disliked the calendar on my Treo, and don't dislike the one on my iPhone, so even there. I think Mail is slightly better on the iPhone than on any other device I've used, but I will admit to not being found of the lack of attachments. So we'll call that slight advantage to RIM/Palm. Web browsing on the other hand is so much better on the iPhone that I can't even really express it. It's like the difference between a pointed stick and a well made rapier. Blazer made most sites completely unusable, and Opera never did work right on the Treo. I prefer Firefox to Safari on the Mac, but Safari is so much better than Blazer that the two almost cannot be called the same type of software. On top of that is the fact that having my music on my phone is really convenient, and the few apps i really miss from the Treo will hopefully be coming now with the SDK.
I'm not saying that iPhone is perfect for every user, but I will say that the complaints you level don't seem very reasonable. Once the CiscoVPN client is in place and I get a decent SSH client (and maybe a few games), it will be damn near a perfect device in my book.
OpenMoko and Android are concept drawings right now. By the time they are real products the iPhone either will be, or will very soon be, out from under AT&T exclusive contract. Apple either will have or will soon be renegotiating their contracts from a position strength having already delivered a successful product. The entire playing field will have changed at least once, maybe twice before the open platforms are ready. Trying to make a prediction based on the current environment is chancy at best
After a couple of decades real actors will become as anachronistic as real special effects are today.
I hope not. Even animated movies benefit from the personalities installed in the characters by their voice actors. The total removal of acting from the process of movies making would make it an entirely different art form.
Theater and movies are separate art forms. Movies are as much about post-processing and the directors vision as they are about the production itself. Watch a video shoot of a play sometime, even a really good one. It's nether as good as a movie or a real play would have been. The two don't mesh. You are right that if movies suddenly all went away (as in my fictional EMP), people would start watching plays instead; but short of such a disaster, one is not going to replace the other.
See my reply to the above comment. You can keep costs down, but even the simplest movies cost a fortune to make.
I'm sorta-kinds in industry (I work for a facility that offers general High performance computing services, one of the things we do is post processing for small movie houses), and I get to go to a few small scale premiers here and there. One in particular sticks out in my mind. It about a young man, who, in a fit of post-college "OMG I'm Broke" goes to work with his uncle doing insurance adjustments in Post Katrina New Orleans. The thing was filmed literally in a couple weeks wandering around New Orleans in public places (and a few bits of abandoned private property that they "borrowed"). The actors worked for food and a share of the hopeful eventual profits. This thing was as on the cheap as possible. It was an enjoyable film, but also one that felt like it could have been a lot better if there had been money to do it "right". The director himself admitted this. It cost a couple hundred thousand dollars.
This tells me that for even a really professional job, even with special effects or any strange "extras", a movie done "right" is a million dollar project. The Coens might be able to make movies with this kind of price tag, or even a bit more, on their own (though they'd be taking a big risk with their own money), but movies would become a rich man's game. Only people with a few mil to invest in a project would be able to make the simplest movies. You'd need to put together a conglomerate of investors to make a "Lord of the Rings". Trust me, add the cost of sets, costumes, make up, cameras, camera rigs, film (not so much any more), editing time, simple effects generation, actors, lighting, techs, food for all of these people (you can't just have them all go to lunch from noon to 1, you have to feed them) on location travel, etc, and even the most simplistic "this could have been made on a budget" movie costs millions.
While there may be an argument that the "Music Industry" is at least partially redundant, and that the ability of everyday artists to sell themselves in a brave new digital world will eventually weaken or even kill the record company's strangle-hold, I feel this is much less likely with movies. There are two points to consider:
1) While it is possible to make a pretty good audio recording in a basement with a laptop, and possible to make a studio quality recording for a few hundred bucks of rental time in a studio, it is nearly impossible to make a movie with anything less than hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's for an independent film made on a shoe-string. For a studio quality movie, you're talking a few million minimum. People don't have the money to make video "content" without the backing of large studios. This isn't going to change, these expenses aren't (mostly) going to be affected by technology. They're related to the inherent expense of getting a lot of people and equipment together in one place, feeding them, paying them, making costumes for them, etc. Even if Apple announced tomorrow that it was offering free Power Macs with Final Cut Pro to movie producers, and special effects costs dropped to zero over night, it would still cost millions to make a good movie. Studios are more than middle men, they financiers.
2) Unlike music, which existed before the modern age, and has business models that could survive an EMP taking out every piece of electronics on the planet; movies are a whole cloth product of the "middle man" era. The studios "own" movie making in a way that the record industry can never "own" music making. I can go to a local bar an see a decent unsigned band, I could learn to play an instrument and make my own music if I wanted. I could never do this with movies (at least beyond the "slightly edited home video" level"). Even "independent" film makers are the owners or employees of studios, just smaller studios. The entire process of making movies, from the production to the distribution is tied to the studio model.
I just don't see "content" being separated from the "middle man" in this particular industry. At least not any time soon.
And faster than light communications, otherwise the message will reach us at eh same time as the radiation.
Once a year Hell, I live in a moderate sized city (~250K people). I work in a building that is almost two years old, across the street from a hotel that is nearly 4, and another large building that is close to 6. The entire area is an open field in Google's most up to date satellite imagery, let alone Street Views.
The cognitive dissonance of reading your post and your sig has me running insane little circles in my head. I will grant you that sometimes I enjoy insane little circles... but these are hurty ones....
Me too. Of course I spent a year in Iraq meeting thousands of Iraq Veterans.
Those tools are already being abused. The FBI has admitted to using warrentless wire tap provisions intended to fight terrorism on non-terrorism related cases. Not once, not a few times, thousands of times. Agents were either improperly trained on how to use the powers, or deliberately abused their powers. In either case, a bit scary, no? We have freedom and liberty for a reason, to sacrifice them for a very nebulous degree of safety (after all, point out one major terrorist plot that was stopped by these new powers) is foolishness of the highest order. I don't want to live in a country that is safe for "FREEDOM", but has no freedom.
Ehhh... Say what? All the software I have licensed is per core. They'd be foolish to do otherwise. The OS sees the cores as distinct processors for computational purposes (at least Linux does), usually only in the text descriptions of the hardware it the multicore nature of the system mentioned.
They are listening to their constituents. Scared yet?
I saw a really interesting piece a while back that I sadly cannot find a link for. It essentially said that all of the "think of the children" stuff is not about protecting your kids, or my kids (not that I have any), or even $censor-person's kids. It's all about protecting some Platonic ideal Christian Every-child. The child of some mythical well meaning but clueless parent who has raised an incredibly innocent and fragile being, but lacks the wherewithal to protect them from the evils of the world. After all, you think your kids are smart, I (will probably) think my kids are smart, even $censor-person probably thinks their kids are smart and/or pure enough not to be affected adversely by this sort of thing. Our natural tendency is to think that we have raised our children right, and we can protect them from whatever evil we haven't prepared them for with our brilliant parenting.
It's other people's children, particularly other people that we don't know and can't predict the actions of, that they are trying to protect. It's their vision of America as a place where cute little blond haired girls with pig-tails need to be protected from evil that, by God, their parents might not even know exists that they are trying to protect. They don't want the government to raise their children, they would probably tell you, if you asked, that they don't want the government raising your children (you seem like a smart enough fellow after all), it's all those other anonymous children who the government needs to raise. The perfect innocent ones, with the pure but completely clueless parents who will happily buy their child (Child? An actual Angel) a game with cover art that looks like something out of Heavy Metal magazine, but will stop when they see the ESRB "AO" rating on the front.