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From a purely analytical standpoint, the developing world overpopulation is a problem of our making. All those charities that advertise on TV that you can save a kid in the 3rd world for just 30 cents a day are making it possible for that overpopulation to continue.
In nature, if a species gets too populated for the food supply, individuals starve until the population is reduced to the point that the food supply can fully support it again.
So if you're going to attack the problem from an overpopulation standpoint, you have to literally stop feeding the overpopulation.
It sounds very harsh, but the alternative is to develop more technology and farming techniques to produce more food, at which point the population will again swell beyond our ability to feed it, and meanwhile we are using even more energy resources to make the increased food - energy resources which will one day run out. In short: The more we figure out how to up the food supply, the worse the crash will be when it comes.
That's not a very politically correct viewpoint, I admit, but it is a realistic one.
I can understand Frodo - presumably Bilbo would have interacted with him in the Shire. but Legolas? Shouldn't he still be screwing around in Mirkwood at the time of the Hobbit?
And the Lucky 13 never go to Lothlorien, so why would they see Galadriel? Same goes for Saruman.
I'm not one of those LOTR critics who thinks Jackson screwed up by having too much Arwen in the trilogy, but this might be going a little far.
I'll agree that an arbitrary line is not ideal, but the alternative is to set up some sort of psych testing to determine when someone is mature enough to be an adult. That would be unwieldy, time-consuming, expensive, and prone to failure.
I think my solution provides an avenue for taking into consideration whether or not it was violent. Rape is rape - sex without consent. If you beat the hell out of her while raping her, you get battery charges and/or aggravated-rape charges.
I think it's important to keep in mind what "consent" really means, which is not just "she said yes, so I'm home free," or "I said I'd shoot her husband if she didn't say yes, and so she said yes, and so it's not rape."
Consent must be willingly given by a person who is legally capable of giving it. That's why it's also rape if the 40 year old has sex with a 40 year old severely-retarded woman who does not have the mental faculties necessary to legally give consent. I advocate not complicating the definition of rape. If they are able to give consent and they do, it's not rape. If they can't, or don't, it is. Easy as that.
In this specific case? Yeah, maybe. In the law? No... no such distinction is really made. For the sake of this argument the fact that she was 13, rather than 17, should really be irrelevant.
Well, I'd be fine with that, except that the discussion we're all replying to about eleventyfive posts up involves a girl who was younger than 17. If we want to argue pure legal theory, sure, 17 is 13, just as 17 is the same as 13 when it comes to drinking, voting, entering into contracts, and signing up for the army. Legally speaking, kids are not considered competent to make such decisions. The line was drawn at the 18th birthday, with a few rare exceptions.
Where you might be having the hangup about sex with a 17 year old is the case in which the 18 year old boyfriend has sex with his 17 year old girlfriend. It should be noted that there are already statutory rape exceptions in many of the laws which exempt such acts from being statutory rape.
That said, I think you'll probably agree, thinking back to your time in high school, that the average 17 year old is only marginally, if at all, more capable of resisting sexual coercion by an adult than a 13 year old. And in fact, I'd venture to say you're more likely to have the 13 year old say no than the 17 year old in many cases.
I find it noteworthy that you didn't call it rape except when you were trying to explain what is so bad about it.
An effort to be relatively non-inflammatory.
What does "statutory" mean? The dictionary says it means "enacted, created, or regulated by statute". The law can't "create" rape, and it regulates rape like it regulates any other crime - it makes it illegal. So aren't all rape laws "statutory"? What does the term "statutory rape" even mean? What I take it to mean is "nobody would call this rape if we didn't make a law, so we're making a law to call it rape."
And I take it to mean "Some asshole will weasel out of getting in trouble for screwing a 13 year old by claiming she wanted it. Let's make sure he can't do that."
The "statutory" prefix is throwing the accused a fish. "Yeah, sure guy, if you wanna say she was willing, have at. But it's still rape."
Do we have to call it "rape" before we can convince people that it's bad, and should be illegal?
Rape is generally defined as having sex with someone without their consent. It does not always have to be violent. Slipping a woman some roofies or getting a girl extremely drunk and then having sex with her is also rape, even if she doesn't try to fight you off.
As minors cannot legally give consent to anything, having sex with a minor is automatically having sex with them without consent. The statutory prefix stems from the law which says the minor is legally incapable of consenting to something for which you must have consent in order to do legally.
Then you're saying that it's more OK to kill one person than it is to kill two people, and it makes no sense to use the word OK to describe either of those.
The law backs up that concept. If you are found guilty of murdering two people, you get punished for both crimes.
It was meant to be rhetorical, and the answer "obviously not". I only meant to get you to engage a little more and stop making it out to be, as it seemed to me at least that you were making it out to be, entirely black and white. But I do apologise for suggesting that.
Good 'nuff for me. The original issue is, however, pretty black and white. If you're 40 and you're having sex with a 13 year old, you are doing the wrong thing, whether she wants it or not.
17 is getting into a potential gray area morally (though certainly not in law if we're still talking about a 40 year old guy) but fortunately for my argument we weren't talking about near-adults. We were talking about middle school kids.
Actually, yes, I do believe that the punishment should be the same for having sex with a 13 year old whether she consented or not. It's not like it's hard to avoid the punishment. Don't have sex with children, and you'll be fine. If you want to tack on a battery charge for the violence element of the forced rape, that's fine, but the actual rape charge should carry the same consequences. A 13 year old girl cannot consent to sex, even if you ask her nicely, and therefore whether you think she consented or not, she didn't consent, ergo it is still rape.
I don't think you can say, with a straight face at any rate, that "if something is wrong it can't be more OK," and then go on in the next sentence to explain that there are varying degrees of wrong. If something is less wrong than something else then by definition it is more right, and "more OK" as I used it is, obviously, a synonym of "more right."
Oh, and the insult I referred to was your suggestion that I "get uncomfortable" with nuanced thought.
Ah, now you bring out the insult (that I'm quite positive you'd never dare to say if you were face to face, ITG) to try and prop up your advocacy for child molesters.
Legally, if an adult has sex with a 13 year old, the adult is 100% at fault no matter what he claims were his reasons for raping her.
I'm not discounting your notion that 13 year olds shouldn't be running around soliciting sex from anyone, adult or not. They shouldn't. However, adults should not, ever, under any circumstances, take them up on the offer, and when they do, claiming "but she wanted it" should not mitigate the penalties.
Beyond matters of law, an adult should have sufficient restraint to resist the advances of a child, and if he doesn't, then he must be considered every bit as dangerous as the adult who actively seduces children. After all, what is his threshold for believing that the girl is being seductive? She's wearing a skirt? She smiled at him? "Oh, well, hell, the little slut wanted it and how could I say no?"
"Yes but what if the kid really wanted it" is the argumentative territory of NAMBLA and other child molestation advocates. I'm disturbed that you've so eagerly picked up their banner.
No, it isn't a straw man. You're changing the parameters of the original supposition. Now you're telling me that we have 13 year olds soliciting sex from older guys. Before the condition was a 13 year old soliciting sex from an older guy, and the older guy taking her up on the offer. There's a significant difference.
You're also injecting a red herring; The level of perversion of the 13 year old is irrelevant. The older guy is expected to resist whatever urge he may have to have sex with a child, whether the child is coming on to him or not. Children are, both legally and logically, not trustworthy when it comes to making important decisions. That's why they can't vote, or enter into contracts, and that's why statutory rape laws say that an adult having sex with a 13 year old is rape even if she really wanted it.
"The Japanese people, rightly, are hailing the personnel at the site as heroes. Not the least impressive aspect of their performance is the way they appear to be tackling the situation with such professionalism as not to carelessly risk their own well-being."
So, nothing in OP's point really changes.
That said, I'll agree with your article that the media hypes. . Everything. . to the nth degree, and that this practice severely detracts from its credibility, but in this case there is I think legitimate cause for concern. The Japanese nuclear industry does not exactly have a sterling record for safety or transparency.
Note that both of those articles were written over a decade before this incident, and by well-respected news agencies. Japan has a long and, frankly, sordid history of poor safety practices in the nuclear industry. Whether this incident will be a major disaster or a minor incident as your source predicts remains to be seen, but that people are worried is hardly surprising.
After all, if you're face to face with a cobra, you're probably going to be nervous even if one guy claims that its poison glands have been removed.
What frightens me is that you appear to believe that a 13 year old child asking for sex makes it somehow more OK for a 40 year old man to have sex with her. I'm going to go ahead and assume that you're not a child molester, and so I'll recommend that you familiarize yourself with "statutory rape."
That's where it does go to intent. If the cop tells the guy that he's a 13 year old girl, and then the guy starts having graphic conversations with "her" and then arranges to meet "her" for sex, and then shows up where he arranged to meet "her," you have a pretty solid indicator that he intended to have sex with a 13 year old girl. Once fantasizing about sex with a 13 year old girl turns into you acting on that fantasy, you're dangerous and need to be locked away before you find an actual 13 year old girl and lure her in.
In the example I gave, we've gone far outside of the realm of thought crime and into the realm of proving that the bastard is going to rape children if you let him.
I have. I work in television, so I've watched an awful lot of TV, and sometimes have to watch even if I don't like it.
I'll admit that Survivor as a concept could have been good (and btw the photography and editing still sucks, but beyond that. . ) except that they had to make it like every other show on television. Instead of actually tossing these people into a "survival" situation and rolling tape to see what happened they turned it into an idiot game show where the producers ginned up conflicts between the "tribes" and encouraged various dramatic situations to unfold, all while still claiming it to be "reality."
Just because *you* like them doesn't make them not-crap;)
From a production values standpoint, they're ALL crap. Shaky camera work, bad editing (especially audio, where it's painfully obvious when they're recombining segments of an interview to make the subject say something other than what she said), etc.
They might be entertaining, and even enjoyable, but they're still crap from a "good television" standpoint.
The analogy breaks down because trying to run someone over with a car is not protected by the constitution.
Further, this article did not say that he *tried* to get the plaintiff fired, so unless you're aware of something that wasn't stated in the article, I'm not sure how you can say that.
Now, I do understand that laws can be screwed up, but the argument that I seem to be seeing here is that if I catch my coworker with child pornography on his computer and I tell someone about it, he can sue me if he loses his job over it.
Let's also not forget that under that interpretation of the law, this blogger (assuming the article is correct in asserting that he actually had evidence of the plaintiff's wrongdoing) is between a rock and a hard place. If he tells someone about it, he gets financially wiped out in a civil suit. If he hides the information, he's an accessory to the crime.
If indeed that is how the law is structured, then it is a serious flaw that must be addressed.
The only place he might have a point is not that demand for real games will go down, but that production of them will. If I can spend a week coding a Farmville clone, and make millions, vs paying a team of game designers and programmers for a year to develop a game and make millions, I'm gonna make FarmvilleClone. The profit margin is that much higher.
We've already seen it happen in TV with the explosion of reality shows. They're crap, every last one of them, but they're all over the place. Even Big Brother kept being renewed despite the first season having ratings somewhere south of the sub-basement. Why? Because even with crap ratings, they made more money on it than they would have from a traditional scripted show.
It's all about profits and profit margins. Quality will always take a back seat to money, and if you can manage to convince a gillion people to play your stupid little incessant-click game, you get rich a lot faster than the company who spends all that time making something good.
I can take credit for things that I did not necessarily intend to happen. Not that I know jack about this particular blogger, but if he's like most gotcha-bloggers, he set out to write something scathing about someone. He most likely did not sit down to the keyboard thinking "Awright! This'll get the SOB fired!" And proving that he did would be pretty much impossible unless he comes straight out and admits it.
Also, bearing in mind that I'm not a lawyer, I would think that the contract disruption laws you mention should also only apply when the intent is malicious and the facts are untrue. If I know that someone is a scammer, and I publicize that information in order to stop more people from being scammed, I should not be punished for it.
Otherwise, we're all risking financial ruin every time we tell someone not to send money to that Nigerian prince. . .
The guy worked for the University of Minnesota - a public school funded in part by tax payers. It is therefore absolutely a public case.
Who can call themselves journalists is irrelevant. The 1st amendment does not say "freedom of speech only if you are a journalist."
And whether it is a public or private case is and should be immaterial. If Northside told the truth, then he should be absolutely protected from retribution. Legal trickery should not trump the 1st amendment.
I assure you that if I were a blogger, and I found out that someone who I was for whatever reason covering was up to his ears in criminal activity, I would rightfully expect to be able to tell people about it without being held liable for it.
Put another way, what this case really says is "don't say anything negative about anyone, ever, whether it's true or not, because if they have to face any consequences for what they did, it will be your fault." That's a(nother) direct attack on the first amendment.
Even if we go to your model, you still have AT&T (or whoever your local ISP is) as the deliverer, wanting more money. We're not arguing about the distributor here, we're arguing about the delivery infrastructure.
To put it into terms that Senators should be able to understand, if I set up a toll road between the factory and the buyer, whether the factory contracts with a distribution company or buys its own trucks, I'm still gonna be there in my toll booth bilking as much money as I can from whoever drives by.
Whether AT&T is charging a distribution company or the actual content producer, it's still going to charge someone, and that someone is going to pass that charge on to whoever buys its product.
Not only that, but the old moneyed corporations will simply out-money upstarts like Netflix. There are plenty of ways to wrap a lawsuit into miles of red tape, and if you have enough money to pay the legal team to do it, they'll happily sit there filing motion after motion, each of which has to be reviewed and argued by teams of lawyers from both sides who bill at north of $500 an hour, per lawyer.
Eventually Netflix and the others will run out of money to pay the lawyers, and so the other side will win by default.
A lot of us would just keep the PS2 we already had, and then buy a PS3 if we decided we wanted to play those games as well. You really can hook 2 consoles up to 1 TV.
I don't buy a console expecting backwards compatibility. It's nice if it has it, but not a requirement. If I had a bunch of PS2 games I wanted to play, I'd get a PS2.
Well, if my car's throttle is sticking, I can go in and fix what's broken so that it doesn't stick any more. Gran Turismo should simulate that by letting me adjust controller settings.
Gran Turismo, btw, is the ONLY simulator I've ever used (and that's the bulk of my gaming) that doesn't allow controller config.
Yeah, I know it's no longer universally true, although the PS3 example, I think, isn't a good one because I'm missing out on a couple of USB ports and a few things that don't impact gaming. That goes to what I was talking about with "levels" of consoles being centered around non-core-system features.
And you're right about having to buy specific peripherals for specific games, but that's been true since the earliest consoles. You had to buy paddles to play Kaboom on the Atari 2600, after all. But you didn't have to go out and upgrade the system's processor or graphics. Even if you bought a game made 10 years after the system debuted, it would still run on an original 2600. Same with the PS3. A new PS3 game will run on a first-gen PS3. You might have to buy a motion controller, or upgrade the hard drive, but you won't have to upgrade the running hardware.
Try running a new game on a 10 year old PC and you'll find yourself having to upgrade, at minimum, the motherboard, chip, ram, video card, power supply, and an OS upgrade to boot.
Additionally, the upgrades that you mentioned aren't going to change the operating characteristics of the console. Throwing in a new or bigger hard drive won't change anything about programming the game to work on the console beyond possibly a section on what to do if a hard drive is detected. If consoles start allowing users to upgrade processor, video, etc then game programmers are going to start to have to worry about whether or not their game will work on a whole variety of hardware - or in short as others have noted, you'll end up with a PC equivalent.
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Fixed for ya ;)
From a purely analytical standpoint, the developing world overpopulation is a problem of our making. All those charities that advertise on TV that you can save a kid in the 3rd world for just 30 cents a day are making it possible for that overpopulation to continue.
In nature, if a species gets too populated for the food supply, individuals starve until the population is reduced to the point that the food supply can fully support it again.
So if you're going to attack the problem from an overpopulation standpoint, you have to literally stop feeding the overpopulation.
It sounds very harsh, but the alternative is to develop more technology and farming techniques to produce more food, at which point the population will again swell beyond our ability to feed it, and meanwhile we are using even more energy resources to make the increased food - energy resources which will one day run out. In short: The more we figure out how to up the food supply, the worse the crash will be when it comes.
That's not a very politically correct viewpoint, I admit, but it is a realistic one.
I've been schooled! ;)
I see I need to go back and read the books.
I can understand Frodo - presumably Bilbo would have interacted with him in the Shire. but Legolas? Shouldn't he still be screwing around in Mirkwood at the time of the Hobbit?
And the Lucky 13 never go to Lothlorien, so why would they see Galadriel? Same goes for Saruman.
I'm not one of those LOTR critics who thinks Jackson screwed up by having too much Arwen in the trilogy, but this might be going a little far.
I'll agree that an arbitrary line is not ideal, but the alternative is to set up some sort of psych testing to determine when someone is mature enough to be an adult. That would be unwieldy, time-consuming, expensive, and prone to failure.
I think my solution provides an avenue for taking into consideration whether or not it was violent. Rape is rape - sex without consent. If you beat the hell out of her while raping her, you get battery charges and/or aggravated-rape charges.
I think it's important to keep in mind what "consent" really means, which is not just "she said yes, so I'm home free," or "I said I'd shoot her husband if she didn't say yes, and so she said yes, and so it's not rape."
Consent must be willingly given by a person who is legally capable of giving it. That's why it's also rape if the 40 year old has sex with a 40 year old severely-retarded woman who does not have the mental faculties necessary to legally give consent. I advocate not complicating the definition of rape. If they are able to give consent and they do, it's not rape. If they can't, or don't, it is. Easy as that.
Well, I'd be fine with that, except that the discussion we're all replying to about eleventyfive posts up involves a girl who was younger than 17. If we want to argue pure legal theory, sure, 17 is 13, just as 17 is the same as 13 when it comes to drinking, voting, entering into contracts, and signing up for the army. Legally speaking, kids are not considered competent to make such decisions. The line was drawn at the 18th birthday, with a few rare exceptions.
Where you might be having the hangup about sex with a 17 year old is the case in which the 18 year old boyfriend has sex with his 17 year old girlfriend. It should be noted that there are already statutory rape exceptions in many of the laws which exempt such acts from being statutory rape.
That said, I think you'll probably agree, thinking back to your time in high school, that the average 17 year old is only marginally, if at all, more capable of resisting sexual coercion by an adult than a 13 year old. And in fact, I'd venture to say you're more likely to have the 13 year old say no than the 17 year old in many cases.
An effort to be relatively non-inflammatory.
And I take it to mean "Some asshole will weasel out of getting in trouble for screwing a 13 year old by claiming she wanted it. Let's make sure he can't do that."
The "statutory" prefix is throwing the accused a fish. "Yeah, sure guy, if you wanna say she was willing, have at. But it's still rape."
Rape is generally defined as having sex with someone without their consent. It does not always have to be violent. Slipping a woman some roofies or getting a girl extremely drunk and then having sex with her is also rape, even if she doesn't try to fight you off.
As minors cannot legally give consent to anything, having sex with a minor is automatically having sex with them without consent. The statutory prefix stems from the law which says the minor is legally incapable of consenting to something for which you must have consent in order to do legally.
The law backs up that concept. If you are found guilty of murdering two people, you get punished for both crimes.
Good 'nuff for me. The original issue is, however, pretty black and white. If you're 40 and you're having sex with a 13 year old, you are doing the wrong thing, whether she wants it or not.
17 is getting into a potential gray area morally (though certainly not in law if we're still talking about a 40 year old guy) but fortunately for my argument we weren't talking about near-adults. We were talking about middle school kids.
Actually, yes, I do believe that the punishment should be the same for having sex with a 13 year old whether she consented or not. It's not like it's hard to avoid the punishment. Don't have sex with children, and you'll be fine. If you want to tack on a battery charge for the violence element of the forced rape, that's fine, but the actual rape charge should carry the same consequences. A 13 year old girl cannot consent to sex, even if you ask her nicely, and therefore whether you think she consented or not, she didn't consent, ergo it is still rape.
I don't think you can say, with a straight face at any rate, that "if something is wrong it can't be more OK," and then go on in the next sentence to explain that there are varying degrees of wrong. If something is less wrong than something else then by definition it is more right, and "more OK" as I used it is, obviously, a synonym of "more right."
Oh, and the insult I referred to was your suggestion that I "get uncomfortable" with nuanced thought.
Ah, now you bring out the insult (that I'm quite positive you'd never dare to say if you were face to face, ITG) to try and prop up your advocacy for child molesters.
Legally, if an adult has sex with a 13 year old, the adult is 100% at fault no matter what he claims were his reasons for raping her.
I'm not discounting your notion that 13 year olds shouldn't be running around soliciting sex from anyone, adult or not. They shouldn't. However, adults should not, ever, under any circumstances, take them up on the offer, and when they do, claiming "but she wanted it" should not mitigate the penalties.
Beyond matters of law, an adult should have sufficient restraint to resist the advances of a child, and if he doesn't, then he must be considered every bit as dangerous as the adult who actively seduces children. After all, what is his threshold for believing that the girl is being seductive? She's wearing a skirt? She smiled at him? "Oh, well, hell, the little slut wanted it and how could I say no?"
"Yes but what if the kid really wanted it" is the argumentative territory of NAMBLA and other child molestation advocates. I'm disturbed that you've so eagerly picked up their banner.
No, it isn't a straw man. You're changing the parameters of the original supposition. Now you're telling me that we have 13 year olds soliciting sex from older guys. Before the condition was a 13 year old soliciting sex from an older guy, and the older guy taking her up on the offer. There's a significant difference.
You're also injecting a red herring; The level of perversion of the 13 year old is irrelevant. The older guy is expected to resist whatever urge he may have to have sex with a child, whether the child is coming on to him or not. Children are, both legally and logically, not trustworthy when it comes to making important decisions. That's why they can't vote, or enter into contracts, and that's why statutory rape laws say that an adult having sex with a 13 year old is rape even if she really wanted it.
From your article:
"The Japanese people, rightly, are hailing the personnel at the site as heroes. Not the least impressive aspect of their performance is the way they appear to be tackling the situation with such professionalism as not to carelessly risk their own well-being."
So, nothing in OP's point really changes.
That said, I'll agree with your article that the media hypes. . Everything. . to the nth degree, and that this practice severely detracts from its credibility, but in this case there is I think legitimate cause for concern. The Japanese nuclear industry does not exactly have a sterling record for safety or transparency.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/652169.stm
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,992195-1,00.html
Note that both of those articles were written over a decade before this incident, and by well-respected news agencies. Japan has a long and, frankly, sordid history of poor safety practices in the nuclear industry. Whether this incident will be a major disaster or a minor incident as your source predicts remains to be seen, but that people are worried is hardly surprising.
After all, if you're face to face with a cobra, you're probably going to be nervous even if one guy claims that its poison glands have been removed.
What frightens me is that you appear to believe that a 13 year old child asking for sex makes it somehow more OK for a 40 year old man to have sex with her. I'm going to go ahead and assume that you're not a child molester, and so I'll recommend that you familiarize yourself with "statutory rape."
That's where it does go to intent. If the cop tells the guy that he's a 13 year old girl, and then the guy starts having graphic conversations with "her" and then arranges to meet "her" for sex, and then shows up where he arranged to meet "her," you have a pretty solid indicator that he intended to have sex with a 13 year old girl. Once fantasizing about sex with a 13 year old girl turns into you acting on that fantasy, you're dangerous and need to be locked away before you find an actual 13 year old girl and lure her in.
In the example I gave, we've gone far outside of the realm of thought crime and into the realm of proving that the bastard is going to rape children if you let him.
I have. I work in television, so I've watched an awful lot of TV, and sometimes have to watch even if I don't like it.
I'll admit that Survivor as a concept could have been good (and btw the photography and editing still sucks, but beyond that. . ) except that they had to make it like every other show on television. Instead of actually tossing these people into a "survival" situation and rolling tape to see what happened they turned it into an idiot game show where the producers ginned up conflicts between the "tribes" and encouraged various dramatic situations to unfold, all while still claiming it to be "reality."
Just because *you* like them doesn't make them not-crap ;)
From a production values standpoint, they're ALL crap. Shaky camera work, bad editing (especially audio, where it's painfully obvious when they're recombining segments of an interview to make the subject say something other than what she said), etc.
They might be entertaining, and even enjoyable, but they're still crap from a "good television" standpoint.
The analogy breaks down because trying to run someone over with a car is not protected by the constitution.
Further, this article did not say that he *tried* to get the plaintiff fired, so unless you're aware of something that wasn't stated in the article, I'm not sure how you can say that.
Now, I do understand that laws can be screwed up, but the argument that I seem to be seeing here is that if I catch my coworker with child pornography on his computer and I tell someone about it, he can sue me if he loses his job over it.
Let's also not forget that under that interpretation of the law, this blogger (assuming the article is correct in asserting that he actually had evidence of the plaintiff's wrongdoing) is between a rock and a hard place. If he tells someone about it, he gets financially wiped out in a civil suit. If he hides the information, he's an accessory to the crime.
If indeed that is how the law is structured, then it is a serious flaw that must be addressed.
The only place he might have a point is not that demand for real games will go down, but that production of them will. If I can spend a week coding a Farmville clone, and make millions, vs paying a team of game designers and programmers for a year to develop a game and make millions, I'm gonna make FarmvilleClone. The profit margin is that much higher.
We've already seen it happen in TV with the explosion of reality shows. They're crap, every last one of them, but they're all over the place. Even Big Brother kept being renewed despite the first season having ratings somewhere south of the sub-basement. Why? Because even with crap ratings, they made more money on it than they would have from a traditional scripted show.
It's all about profits and profit margins. Quality will always take a back seat to money, and if you can manage to convince a gillion people to play your stupid little incessant-click game, you get rich a lot faster than the company who spends all that time making something good.
You make good points, but I'll counter with this:
I can take credit for things that I did not necessarily intend to happen. Not that I know jack about this particular blogger, but if he's like most gotcha-bloggers, he set out to write something scathing about someone. He most likely did not sit down to the keyboard thinking "Awright! This'll get the SOB fired!" And proving that he did would be pretty much impossible unless he comes straight out and admits it.
Also, bearing in mind that I'm not a lawyer, I would think that the contract disruption laws you mention should also only apply when the intent is malicious and the facts are untrue. If I know that someone is a scammer, and I publicize that information in order to stop more people from being scammed, I should not be punished for it.
Otherwise, we're all risking financial ruin every time we tell someone not to send money to that Nigerian prince. . .
The guy worked for the University of Minnesota - a public school funded in part by tax payers. It is therefore absolutely a public case.
Who can call themselves journalists is irrelevant. The 1st amendment does not say "freedom of speech only if you are a journalist."
And whether it is a public or private case is and should be immaterial. If Northside told the truth, then he should be absolutely protected from retribution. Legal trickery should not trump the 1st amendment.
I assure you that if I were a blogger, and I found out that someone who I was for whatever reason covering was up to his ears in criminal activity, I would rightfully expect to be able to tell people about it without being held liable for it.
Put another way, what this case really says is "don't say anything negative about anyone, ever, whether it's true or not, because if they have to face any consequences for what they did, it will be your fault." That's a(nother) direct attack on the first amendment.
Even if we go to your model, you still have AT&T (or whoever your local ISP is) as the deliverer, wanting more money. We're not arguing about the distributor here, we're arguing about the delivery infrastructure.
To put it into terms that Senators should be able to understand, if I set up a toll road between the factory and the buyer, whether the factory contracts with a distribution company or buys its own trucks, I'm still gonna be there in my toll booth bilking as much money as I can from whoever drives by.
Whether AT&T is charging a distribution company or the actual content producer, it's still going to charge someone, and that someone is going to pass that charge on to whoever buys its product.
Not only that, but the old moneyed corporations will simply out-money upstarts like Netflix. There are plenty of ways to wrap a lawsuit into miles of red tape, and if you have enough money to pay the legal team to do it, they'll happily sit there filing motion after motion, each of which has to be reviewed and argued by teams of lawyers from both sides who bill at north of $500 an hour, per lawyer.
Eventually Netflix and the others will run out of money to pay the lawyers, and so the other side will win by default.
Well, that's up to you.
A lot of us would just keep the PS2 we already had, and then buy a PS3 if we decided we wanted to play those games as well. You really can hook 2 consoles up to 1 TV.
I don't buy a console expecting backwards compatibility. It's nice if it has it, but not a requirement. If I had a bunch of PS2 games I wanted to play, I'd get a PS2.
Well, if my car's throttle is sticking, I can go in and fix what's broken so that it doesn't stick any more. Gran Turismo should simulate that by letting me adjust controller settings.
Gran Turismo, btw, is the ONLY simulator I've ever used (and that's the bulk of my gaming) that doesn't allow controller config.
Yeah, I know it's no longer universally true, although the PS3 example, I think, isn't a good one because I'm missing out on a couple of USB ports and a few things that don't impact gaming. That goes to what I was talking about with "levels" of consoles being centered around non-core-system features.
And you're right about having to buy specific peripherals for specific games, but that's been true since the earliest consoles. You had to buy paddles to play Kaboom on the Atari 2600, after all. But you didn't have to go out and upgrade the system's processor or graphics. Even if you bought a game made 10 years after the system debuted, it would still run on an original 2600. Same with the PS3. A new PS3 game will run on a first-gen PS3. You might have to buy a motion controller, or upgrade the hard drive, but you won't have to upgrade the running hardware.
Try running a new game on a 10 year old PC and you'll find yourself having to upgrade, at minimum, the motherboard, chip, ram, video card, power supply, and an OS upgrade to boot.
Additionally, the upgrades that you mentioned aren't going to change the operating characteristics of the console. Throwing in a new or bigger hard drive won't change anything about programming the game to work on the console beyond possibly a section on what to do if a hard drive is detected. If consoles start allowing users to upgrade processor, video, etc then game programmers are going to start to have to worry about whether or not their game will work on a whole variety of hardware - or in short as others have noted, you'll end up with a PC equivalent.