Selling games to minors that don't fit into the ESRB ages should be a crime.
If people really are all that concerned, wouldn't community pressure be enough?
In a lot of neighborhoods across America, you can't buy pr0n in convenience stores anymore. Not because of laws, but because community groups shamed the stores into taking it off their shelves with threats of boycots and/or very visible campaigns against it.
If you had a couple blue-haired ladies in front of every EB store (or whatever) holding up signs that say "This store sells filth to minors", they would probably be very motivated to meet with community groups and find an arrangement which everybody can live with. If that means that the people of Jerkwater, Iowa wants all the GTA games behind a beaded curtain, that's between them and the store owners in that town.
Then again, I'm a crackpot libertarian. I've got this crazy notion that people can work shit like this out for themselves without the aid of the nanny state.
Well, the PSP is made by a major movie company. Yet, oddly, you can still buy any UMD movie on other formats.
Likewise, you can buy the same albums you see in iTMS from your local CD store, or in some cases from other music download sites. So what, exactly, is the problem?
I used to buy a lot of music from iTMS, but since I've started using my computer as the main playback device on my living-room stereo, I've come to demand lossless formats. Besides, if you want the full album it's usually a better deal to hunt down a used CD.
(I now generally only buy iTMS songs if it's just one tune that I want, and I'm mostly going to be listening in the car or some other setting where I don't care about hi-fi. For example, I recently downloaded "All the Time in the World" by the Subdudes. It's a great summer crusin' song, but I don't give a crap about the rest of the album. So that amounts to about three or four songs a month, which is a fairly small fraction of my music purchases. If iTMS starts offering lossless formats, I might go back to buying large quantities from them, since it is a hell of a lot more convenient than driving to the store... but for now I'm mostly off the bandwagon.)
That I bought a laptop which, reports have it, stains easilly from the oil in people's hands, but can also be cleaned without much effort?
That the poor bastards who bought nano iPods under the delusion that they were indestructible discovered that they can get scratched up?
Would you be happier if I join in the chimes of whiners? Okay, how's this.
When the FUCK are they going to make a music player that does gapless playback? Come on, Apple, how hard can it be? Stop worrying about low-res video and FM add-ons, and get on the stick about this major problem!!!
There. Some nice, perfectly legitimate Apple-bashing. I hope that makes your day a little brighter. Cheers.
Was a new state law really needed for something like this? Wouldn't it have made sense to simply apply the same rules that currently apply to the distribution of R-rated movies on DVD?
At least this wasn't a federal initiative. If the people of Louisiana have a problem with this law, they can certainly let their government know about it.
(Although, considering all that's happened in the last year, I can't imagine that current local leaders in that state have a very long and rosy political career ahead of them anyway. It's kind of tough to rein in a lame-duck government which is already world-famous for corruption. The people of that state who don't like this law might just have to wait for the next administration to work on getting it reversed.)
If by saying none of it "is any damn good" you mean that none of it suits your tastes, that's probably correct. But what harm are MySpace kiddies doing to you by having their gaudy, flashy websites full of music you hate? You only see it if you go to those sites.
I thought the "Big Picture" of the Internet was to promote intelligence and not mindless consumerborg groupthink. But I digress, I'm sure Guttenberg had a similar idea about promoting literacy so people could read the Greek and Latin Classics but instead we got people reading get-rich-quick schemes and dieting books.
GIGO.
The great thing about neutral communication carriers, like the Internet, is that you can find pretty much anything you are loooking for. The fact that some bloggers are providing information you don't want does not prevent you from getting the information you do. Why get your panties in a twist?
BTW, I find that Guttenberg rocks if you enjoy H.G. Wells or other public domain authors. Who cares if it also has a lot of books which don't interest me? What's the harm?
Probably something to do with the surface they chose to use. It has kind of a grainy texture, unlike the smooth surface of most laptop palm rests. I haven't had this discoloring problem on my MacBook, but it is still fairly new.
Overlooked in this story is the fact that many people report that cleaning the smudges off is relatively trivial.
The MacBooks are said to discolor a little faster than past systems, although I have a MacBook and have not experienced this problem. (Yet.)
However, from all reports I've seen, the "Mr. Clean Magic Eraser" (that self-desolving cleaning sponge) takes care of the problem in a matter of seconds, so it would appear that this is really just yet another "ZOMG! The car keys and sand in my pocket scratched up my Nano!!!1!" story.
I think you're forgetting the fact that PayPal also stores checking account information, which is far, far more difficult to get money back from in the event of identity theft.
Which is one of several reasons why linking your bank accounts directly to PayPal is a terrible idea, no matter how much they like to push it on you.
If you use PayPal at all, only link it to a credit card which you've kept at a low limit. PayPal has long shown themselves far too irresponsible to be trusted with any of your real money.
Right. The staggering number of sexual crimes against women and girls are because the victim is "stupid about sex" This MUST be why 1 in 5 female undergrads are sexually assulted sometime during their 4(+) years at university.
The vast majority of those sexual "assults" on campus? They go like this:
Girl goes to party, has a couple drinks and some fun. Scumbag gets girl drunk and/or slips her a roofie. Scumbag takes advantage of nearly unconcious girl. Girl is too ashamed to report anything to the authorities, but does check the box in anonymous survey which asks if she was ever raped.
This has nothing to do with kids agreeing to "hook up" with old men, which is most certainly being stupid about sex.
Most teen statutory rape crimes would actually be consensual sex acts, if we considered the consent given by a teen to an adult to be legal consent.
Your daughter might be meeting boys her own age who are every bit as "predatory" as the Dirty Old Men that people seem to think MySpace is brimming over with.
Besides, sexual predators are easy as hell to catch on sites like this. Here's how:
1. Make a bogus web page saying you are a 14-year old girl. 2. Include a couple photos of Medow Sopranno from season 1, claiming that they are you. 3. Post a few blog entries about how you hate your parents and you're feeling very sexually confused and restless.
If and when some old dude hits on you, arrange a sting operation with local law enforcement.
Your trying just a little too hard to defend what amounts to an even crappier version of geocitites.
If you also considered Geocities to be a Bad Thing, then clearly personal web pages are something which bother the heck out of you. Why even read this thread?
Personally, I think all of these services are fantastic. Personal blogs like Girl Friday are endlessly more entertaining than any site which Big Media is putting out there.
Finally, I think it's sad and pathetic to see people on slashdot complaining about the "mental diarrhea" of free personal web sites. What makes posting here so superior to some teenager blogging about whatever's on her mind?
Wikipedia is an information site in which users are allowed to provide text content (with links ot the occasional picture or media file.)
MySpace is a GUI-driven interface for slapping together your own personal page, chock full of all kinds of goofy customization options. Furthermore, it's a site where clean mark-up doesn't matter in the least. Nobody is likely to visit your MySpace page other than friends of yours. As long as their browsers can render the page, there's no reason for anybody to care how badly it's coded.
Show me a simple web design GUI which doesn't produce crappy mark-up, and your rage against MySpace is almost valid.
What percentage of users would really use the MySpace branded search?
The point is, when people are on their MySpace home page, which engine gets to be the one that gets used when users click on the built-in "search" button.
I don't know what percentage of web users would use something like that, but I'm going to guess that the percentage of MySpace users who are trying to search MySpace for stuff would approach 100%.
MySpace text is black on white by default. If it's hard to read, it's because the teenybopper who customized her site chose to make it that way.
Bad markup under the hood is a more valid criticism of MySpace pages, but we're not talking about building the next Amazon.com here. We're talking about a service that provides quick-and-dirty tools for high school and college kids to slap together collections of their favorite pictures, links to videos on YouTube, rants about their favorite bands/movies/whatever, and also allows public & private messages, blogging, etc.
In other words, in spite of the ugliness, it pretty much allows anybody who wants it to be their own old-school BBS Sysop.
MySpace (along with LiveJournal, Xangxa, and a few others) are delivering exactly what the World Wide Web was originally promised to be: A place where everybody can be a content publisher. IMHO, People who whine about the broken HTML and/or the goofy choices some people make with their pages are losing sight of the Big Picture.
Some advertisers are reluctant to be associated with the freewheeling site, which has concerned some as a potential hunting ground for sexual predators
Perhaps this will discourage some search engines from working with mySpace as well?
Better stay away from the shopping malls too.
MySpace is no different from anywhere else that teens hang out with minimal supervision. If you are worried that Max Cady might be out there in the shadows, teach your daughters not to be stupid about sex. The "real world" outside is vastly more dangerous for children than any social web network.
It would, perhaps, be more accurate to say that the RIAA is comprised of its member organizations; i.e. the labels.
No, "employed by" is more accurate than "comprised of." Sony is not owned by the RIAA. Sony pays the RIAA, through membership fees, to streamline collection of licensing money for the artists on their label.
I am not disagreeing with you that the label is the relevant party. I am simply pointing out that the RIAA in certain terms shares identity with the label. They are part of the legal branch of the label. Created by and subsidiary to the labels and not simply "for hire."
Certain terms, which does not include the drafting of contracts. The RIAA collects and distributes royalties, they don't negotiate contracts. Sony, and the labels they own, have their own in-house lawyers for that.
Again... the Pizza guy is just as relevant to this discussion as the RIAA lawyers.
I am, in most respects, agreeing with you. What I am doing, however, is pointing out that the very reason for the existence of the RIAA is to give the appearance of seperation from the label.
And I am, in most repects, agreeing with you, except to point out that every time somebody says "Fucking RIAA" whenever one of the "big four" labels screws somebody over, they are contributing to the maintenance of that illusion.
It's much more accurate to say "A Sony-owned record label is screwing Weird Al out of most of the money which comes in from downloads, which we suspect is sadly typical of current big-label contracts."
When I was in Japan in April, I had to walk all over Akihabara to track down a copy of "Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex" for the PSP. Everybody had ordered a bunch of copies, but nobody could keep it in stock. I also saw a bunch of people on the JR Line with their noses burried in PSP systems.
Obviously the PSP is doing better over there than the Nintendo fanboys would have you believe.
Over here, my brother, myself, and one other person are the only PSP owners I know of. The DS seems to be a bit more popular, and that will probably be even more the case once people start snapping up the DS-Line.
Well, if you live out where your nearest neighbor is a half-mile away, nothing is within easy walking distance... But that's the trade-off for living out in the country.
You get away from it all, but you're away from it all.
Does the PSP have any games other than poor PS1 ports (which for the most part I didn't want to play on the PS1) and Lumies yet?
Yes. Yes it does.
I think the DS Lite kicks ass, but the PSP also has some very cool games. Liberty City Stories alone makes it worth getting, if you like the GTA series.
(Warning: Play it with headphones if you are out in public. The language in that game would make the cast of The Sopranos blush.)
Besides, pretty much everybody in the US can already use the Internet for free. We have these things called public libraries. Most people live within walking distance of one, and most of them have computers available with Internet access, as well as a WiFi hub for anybody with a laptop and a card.
On top of that, a lot of places leave wide-open WiFi in every major city all over the world. I've found WEP-free connections in both Ely, Minnesota and Tokyo, Japan.
All this "Internet Disadvantaged" crap is nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
Selling games to minors that don't fit into the ESRB ages should be a crime.
If people really are all that concerned, wouldn't community pressure be enough?
In a lot of neighborhoods across America, you can't buy pr0n in convenience stores anymore. Not because of laws, but because community groups shamed the stores into taking it off their shelves with threats of boycots and/or very visible campaigns against it.
If you had a couple blue-haired ladies in front of every EB store (or whatever) holding up signs that say "This store sells filth to minors", they would probably be very motivated to meet with community groups and find an arrangement which everybody can live with. If that means that the people of Jerkwater, Iowa wants all the GTA games behind a beaded curtain, that's between them and the store owners in that town.
Then again, I'm a crackpot libertarian. I've got this crazy notion that people can work shit like this out for themselves without the aid of the nanny state.
Well, the PSP is made by a major movie company. Yet, oddly, you can still buy any UMD movie on other formats.
Likewise, you can buy the same albums you see in iTMS from your local CD store, or in some cases from other music download sites. So what, exactly, is the problem?
I used to buy a lot of music from iTMS, but since I've started using my computer as the main playback device on my living-room stereo, I've come to demand lossless formats. Besides, if you want the full album it's usually a better deal to hunt down a used CD.
(I now generally only buy iTMS songs if it's just one tune that I want, and I'm mostly going to be listening in the car or some other setting where I don't care about hi-fi. For example, I recently downloaded "All the Time in the World" by the Subdudes. It's a great summer crusin' song, but I don't give a crap about the rest of the album. So that amounts to about three or four songs a month, which is a fairly small fraction of my music purchases. If iTMS starts offering lossless formats, I might go back to buying large quantities from them, since it is a hell of a lot more convenient than driving to the store... but for now I'm mostly off the bandwagon.)
You're an awesome apologist.
Okay, I give up. What am I apologizing for?
That I bought a laptop which, reports have it, stains easilly from the oil in people's hands, but can also be cleaned without much effort?
That the poor bastards who bought nano iPods under the delusion that they were indestructible discovered that they can get scratched up?
Would you be happier if I join in the chimes of whiners? Okay, how's this.
When the FUCK are they going to make a music player that does gapless playback? Come on, Apple, how hard can it be? Stop worrying about low-res video and FM add-ons, and get on the stick about this major problem!!!
There. Some nice, perfectly legitimate Apple-bashing. I hope that makes your day a little brighter. Cheers.
Was a new state law really needed for something like this? Wouldn't it have made sense to simply apply the same rules that currently apply to the distribution of R-rated movies on DVD?
At least this wasn't a federal initiative. If the people of Louisiana have a problem with this law, they can certainly let their government know about it.
(Although, considering all that's happened in the last year, I can't imagine that current local leaders in that state have a very long and rosy political career ahead of them anyway. It's kind of tough to rein in a lame-duck government which is already world-famous for corruption. The people of that state who don't like this law might just have to wait for the next administration to work on getting it reversed.)
Just fyi, all it took to scratch a first-revision nano was a moderately soft fabric
Oh noes!!!
Just because there's an easy solution doesn't mean it's not a problem.
This is true. There's an easy solution, but it's still a problem.
It's a problem with an easy solution.
Your point?
If by saying none of it "is any damn good" you mean that none of it suits your tastes, that's probably correct. But what harm are MySpace kiddies doing to you by having their gaudy, flashy websites full of music you hate? You only see it if you go to those sites.
I thought the "Big Picture" of the Internet was to promote intelligence and not mindless consumerborg groupthink. But I digress, I'm sure Guttenberg had a similar idea about promoting literacy so people could read the Greek and Latin Classics but instead we got people reading get-rich-quick schemes and dieting books.
GIGO.
The great thing about neutral communication carriers, like the Internet, is that you can find pretty much anything you are loooking for. The fact that some bloggers are providing information you don't want does not prevent you from getting the information you do. Why get your panties in a twist?
BTW, I find that Guttenberg rocks if you enjoy H.G. Wells or other public domain authors. Who cares if it also has a lot of books which don't interest me? What's the harm?
Probably something to do with the surface they chose to use. It has kind of a grainy texture, unlike the smooth surface of most laptop palm rests. I haven't had this discoloring problem on my MacBook, but it is still fairly new.
Overlooked in this story is the fact that many people report that cleaning the smudges off is relatively trivial.
The MacBooks are said to discolor a little faster than past systems, although I have a MacBook and have not experienced this problem. (Yet.)
However, from all reports I've seen, the "Mr. Clean Magic Eraser" (that self-desolving cleaning sponge) takes care of the problem in a matter of seconds, so it would appear that this is really just yet another "ZOMG! The car keys and sand in my pocket scratched up my Nano!!!1!" story.
I think you're forgetting the fact that PayPal also stores checking account information, which is far, far more difficult to get money back from in the event of identity theft.
Which is one of several reasons why linking your bank accounts directly to PayPal is a terrible idea, no matter how much they like to push it on you.
If you use PayPal at all, only link it to a credit card which you've kept at a low limit. PayPal has long shown themselves far too irresponsible to be trusted with any of your real money.
Right. The staggering number of sexual crimes against women and girls are because the victim is "stupid about sex" This MUST be why 1 in 5 female undergrads are sexually assulted sometime during their 4(+) years at university.
The vast majority of those sexual "assults" on campus? They go like this:
Girl goes to party, has a couple drinks and some fun.
Scumbag gets girl drunk and/or slips her a roofie.
Scumbag takes advantage of nearly unconcious girl.
Girl is too ashamed to report anything to the authorities, but does check the box in anonymous survey which asks if she was ever raped.
This has nothing to do with kids agreeing to "hook up" with old men, which is most certainly being stupid about sex.
Most teen statutory rape crimes would actually be consensual sex acts, if we considered the consent given by a teen to an adult to be legal consent.
Your daughter might be meeting boys her own age who are every bit as "predatory" as the Dirty Old Men that people seem to think MySpace is brimming over with.
Besides, sexual predators are easy as hell to catch on sites like this. Here's how:
1. Make a bogus web page saying you are a 14-year old girl.
2. Include a couple photos of Medow Sopranno from season 1, claiming that they are you.
3. Post a few blog entries about how you hate your parents and you're feeling very sexually confused and restless.
If and when some old dude hits on you, arrange a sting operation with local law enforcement.
Done.
Your trying just a little too hard to defend what amounts to an even crappier version of geocitites.
If you also considered Geocities to be a Bad Thing, then clearly personal web pages are something which bother the heck out of you. Why even read this thread?
Personally, I think all of these services are fantastic. Personal blogs like Girl Friday are endlessly more entertaining than any site which Big Media is putting out there.
Finally, I think it's sad and pathetic to see people on slashdot complaining about the "mental diarrhea" of free personal web sites. What makes posting here so superior to some teenager blogging about whatever's on her mind?
Wikipedia is an information site in which users are allowed to provide text content (with links ot the occasional picture or media file.)
MySpace is a GUI-driven interface for slapping together your own personal page, chock full of all kinds of goofy customization options. Furthermore, it's a site where clean mark-up doesn't matter in the least. Nobody is likely to visit your MySpace page other than friends of yours. As long as their browsers can render the page, there's no reason for anybody to care how badly it's coded.
Show me a simple web design GUI which doesn't produce crappy mark-up, and your rage against MySpace is almost valid.
What percentage of users would really use the MySpace branded search?
The point is, when people are on their MySpace home page, which engine gets to be the one that gets used when users click on the built-in "search" button.
I don't know what percentage of web users would use something like that, but I'm going to guess that the percentage of MySpace users who are trying to search MySpace for stuff would approach 100%.
Great. So now it will be easier for the NSA to datamine myspace.
LOL
Are terror cells encoding their communications to appear as fangirl shrines to Korean boy bands?
Actually, now that I see it written out like that... It sounds like a pretty clever idea.
Good thing they don't read Slashdot.
MySpace text is black on white by default. If it's hard to read, it's because the teenybopper who customized her site chose to make it that way.
Bad markup under the hood is a more valid criticism of MySpace pages, but we're not talking about building the next Amazon.com here. We're talking about a service that provides quick-and-dirty tools for high school and college kids to slap together collections of their favorite pictures, links to videos on YouTube, rants about their favorite bands/movies/whatever, and also allows public & private messages, blogging, etc.
In other words, in spite of the ugliness, it pretty much allows anybody who wants it to be their own old-school BBS Sysop.
MySpace (along with LiveJournal, Xangxa, and a few others) are delivering exactly what the World Wide Web was originally promised to be: A place where everybody can be a content publisher. IMHO, People who whine about the broken HTML and/or the goofy choices some people make with their pages are losing sight of the Big Picture.
Awww... What's the matter, kid? None of the girls would put you in their "Top 8"?
Some advertisers are reluctant to be associated with the freewheeling site, which has concerned some as a potential hunting ground for sexual predators
Perhaps this will discourage some search engines from working with mySpace as well?
Better stay away from the shopping malls too.
MySpace is no different from anywhere else that teens hang out with minimal supervision. If you are worried that Max Cady might be out there in the shadows, teach your daughters not to be stupid about sex. The "real world" outside is vastly more dangerous for children than any social web network.
It would, perhaps, be more accurate to say that the RIAA is comprised of its member organizations; i.e. the labels.
No, "employed by" is more accurate than "comprised of." Sony is not owned by the RIAA. Sony pays the RIAA, through membership fees, to streamline collection of licensing money for the artists on their label.
I am not disagreeing with you that the label is the relevant party. I am simply pointing out that the RIAA in certain terms shares identity with the label. They are part of the legal branch of the label. Created by and subsidiary to the labels and not simply "for hire."
Certain terms, which does not include the drafting of contracts. The RIAA collects and distributes royalties, they don't negotiate contracts. Sony, and the labels they own, have their own in-house lawyers for that.
Again... the Pizza guy is just as relevant to this discussion as the RIAA lawyers.
I am, in most respects, agreeing with you. What I am doing, however, is pointing out that the very reason for the existence of the RIAA is to give the appearance of seperation from the label.
And I am, in most repects, agreeing with you, except to point out that every time somebody says "Fucking RIAA" whenever one of the "big four" labels screws somebody over, they are contributing to the maintenance of that illusion.
It's much more accurate to say "A Sony-owned record label is screwing Weird Al out of most of the money which comes in from downloads, which we suspect is sadly typical of current big-label contracts."
When I was in Japan in April, I had to walk all over Akihabara to track down a copy of "Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex" for the PSP. Everybody had ordered a bunch of copies, but nobody could keep it in stock. I also saw a bunch of people on the JR Line with their noses burried in PSP systems.
Obviously the PSP is doing better over there than the Nintendo fanboys would have you believe.
Over here, my brother, myself, and one other person are the only PSP owners I know of. The DS seems to be a bit more popular, and that will probably be even more the case once people start snapping up the DS-Line.
Well, if you live out where your nearest neighbor is a half-mile away, nothing is within easy walking distance... But that's the trade-off for living out in the country.
You get away from it all, but you're away from it all.
Does the PSP have any games other than poor PS1 ports (which for the most part I didn't want to play on the PS1) and Lumies yet?
Yes. Yes it does.
I think the DS Lite kicks ass, but the PSP also has some very cool games. Liberty City Stories alone makes it worth getting, if you like the GTA series.
(Warning: Play it with headphones if you are out in public. The language in that game would make the cast of The Sopranos blush.)
Good point.
Then again, nobody forced him to buy the Jail Blazers, nor to sign the rock-heads he filled that team up with.
Besides, pretty much everybody in the US can already use the Internet for free. We have these things called public libraries. Most people live within walking distance of one, and most of them have computers available with Internet access, as well as a WiFi hub for anybody with a laptop and a card.
On top of that, a lot of places leave wide-open WiFi in every major city all over the world. I've found WEP-free connections in both Ely, Minnesota and Tokyo, Japan.
All this "Internet Disadvantaged" crap is nonsense.