No, I wasn't smoking crack. I was watching their commercials and listening to their promises. It's a reasonable assumption, and the alternative (the new technology is at its core worse than the old technology) is unacceptable. If you think Cinglular GSM is getting 95% by all measures, then you're more gullible than you think *I* am. I don't have to give them anything - and nobody said "they won't work in your home - but golly please ask if you think that's a cool thing - we'll get somebody right on it..."
Even without the nonsense two weeks ago - it's still hardly service. It didn't work as voicestream, it still doesn't work as cingular. They do however claim you can't use just any old phone - and it seemed last time that sim cards were particular to a brand of phone, though that's not supposed to be so... They'll get you to pay the most for anything they can. This was supposed to be at least as serviceable as POTS, it ain't.
In the words of Woody Flowers, "The most important thing is to make sure that the most important thing remains the most important thing." At some point you have to look around the absolutes of file format particulars and the 'principles' of DRM. Why? Because the pros far outway the cons. I can play the music on three computers. I can carry it all around on my iPod. I can burn CDs all day long. For all practical purposes, it sounds great. The artists get paid. I don't get subpoenaed. Maybe I'm missing something but I'd really like to know the answe to this: what exactly is the untenable downside here? All I can see "bad" is that (1) I can't play the music on one computer when I'm miles away from the other (but that's what the iPod's for) and (2) I can't hand the files to everyone in the world just because i feel like it.
800 MHz iBooks with airport, and the extended warranty.
Overpurchase by 5% on the units. You won't have a care in the world for three years, repair wise compared to anything else.
Viruses? Feh. TCO? Much lower. Networking is self-configuring if you just RTFM.
Airport base stations judiciously placed. Secure the hell out of them, though - each school building will have a big 2.5GHz target painted on it from day 1.
An Xserve for each building, or use your existing servers (in the other articles, the wintel IT people are freaking about the added something or other.
As for the guns or butter arguments - they already have chalkboards, chalk, books, pencils, paper.
The average per pupil expenditure in the US is around $10,000 per year. If a $1200 iBook (that's their target price - easily done for an 800+airport+applecare in volume) lasts 3 years. I know. I bought a 500 the week they came out 2.5 years ago and it's still running circles around anything else from that long ago.
So the cost is $400 per year per student. That's 4%. try and reduce class size with that sort of increase. No can do.
Heh heh... Isn't this a bit too much like Richard MacDuff's Anthem software that turned corporate accounting files into music, so you cold 'listen' to good finances or bad?
As I recall, the head techie was Gordon Way, whom I always took to be a nod to Alan Kay, one of DNA's dear friends and a music geek himself.
I've been online since Delphi & MCIMail, The Well, AppleLink Personal Edition etc... I believed everything in "As We May Think" and in the Knowledge Navigator video(s).
Using OSX on a 'lowly' iBook 500 with a carefully cultivated suite of apps is getting close enough to the dream that I should stop dreaming and just revel in it. And get more done. Which I do.
It's not just the info at fingertips. I watched someone try to scan a book for a 60 year old article, then import it, try to OCR it and reformat it... nice, but it's on the web in text and I had it within seconds. Priceless.
I'ma teacher at a very non-traditional place with lots of need for proposals, classes, results, and lots of techie things happeneing anyway, but it's the everyday access that's needed, and the ability to do it all literally at your fingertips.
I can order the model rockets (in one typical case), check the weather for the best launch date, email all the parents to come see, fax the bus company to get the transportation, video and still photo the activities... create a summary of lessons that my students have done, download the stardust launch for them to see on a projection screen as part of class, prin their junior rocket scientist certificates, edit, compose and post their movies and pics to the web for all the parents to see, email parents or sms them or fax them to get all this done in the time it would take a staff of three twenty years ago.
could i just build the rockets,. launch the rockets and see how jazzed the kids were? sure. still do all that. plus add value to what the parents can get out of it too.
it's a faster more accessible source. i know i have the estes catalog around here somewhere, but where...
i know i have videos of other older launches, videodiscs of all of the apollo and shuttle test programs, but the batteries in the ldp remote are crusty, and well, this way all the kids can play the video to their heart's content...
i can send proposals as pdf attachments to email, submit all my nsf stuff online, if I don't know where I'm going this evening (vaguely know it's around yale somewhere) I jump to watson, get the address, see a map, add the location to my address book, sync my ipod before i leave and i'll get there one way or another. beats the big spiral bound map and hundreds of slips of paper i'd have carried around even 5 years ago.
i can do travel better. way better.
i can buy a car by driving around or going blind with classifieds in the local fish wrap
my wife and i can specify the house we want and get the info delivered to us without having to drive down roads nobody else drives down for days at a time trying to find that out of the way house or having to actually talk to a bevy of real estate agents ( i actually hear one of them refer to a old local place as an antique house - grrrrr... i prefer tocall them 'used houses' as in 'used cars' but don't get me started)
for that matter i can find out that a wedding can cost $1K or $100K and how to make it what we wanted, instead of taking someone's word on how much we should have spent.
ditto real estate. there's a wide range of what it will all cost when they fire the starter's pistol at the closing, and we know much more from the web - we could have just taken a single sources word for it, or bought a dozen books. an hour with safari and a broadband connection and we are much wiser. we hope.
i can get references to anything from various sources...
i can have my kids go research the mountains of little white lies us teachers have been spouting for years in the name of shorthand lessons... columbus, magellan, the pilgrims, abner doubleday, the wright brothers...
will i ever get rid of my books? never. ditto the back issues of bicycling or wired, my berke breathed paperbacks.
I'll always be able to put my hand on 'the compleat angler', 'a winter's tale'or the beaten copies of 'andromeda strain', 'banner in the sky', o
the casio gps watch can barely stay working for a few days on its batteries, ditto geko and emaps... ok they can pulse it etc... and then there's the faraday cage issues and i think i can tell which can has the $1K of electronics in it and not 12 oz of actual sloshy fizzy coke... sounds like someone made them a promise that's going to be hard to keep... and if they can track down a unit with this much stuff coming out of it, seems it should be easy enough for some others to do the same, then it turns into 'it's a mad mad mad mad world' just not as funny.
Cell phones are supposed to do AT LEAST what POTS did and THEN you add value. The sad truth is that too much of the time they're not even giving us a decent connected call like plain old copper. If the phone on your wall did this poorly, you'd yank it out and go back to hollering.
I had t-mobile (voicestream or whatever it used to be called) and it was crap. Put up with it for a year and a half, and it never got any bettter. And this was in the northeast, it's most saturated area.
Had dual mode Cingular, and it was good. And it had email from phone to phone as well.
Recently combined my wife's and my plans to the Cingular GSM system. And the free phone is a Siemens. Both are crap. Apparently SMS only (unless I can't read a manual). the Siemens phone is as anti-intuitive a piece of electronics as I have ever seen - slow - everything is stored on the sim card by default, and apparently it's a 110 baud transfer - actually getting to a menu or retrieving a number to dial takes a dog's age compared to other sims phones I've had.
Voice messaging is taking up to 1.5 days and often hours to register a voice message on a phone (yes - in range and turned on).
Cingular has no explanation for the strange series of beeps and boops the line makes when attempting to complete a call - they even say I need to call Siemens.
And yes, we're upset - because in the case of an emergency or work, the phone can be mission critical or life threatening. I once sat broken down in a hole in the Voicestream coverage on the Mass Pike for nearly two hours in the middle of the night. Yes, I would have been in the same situation without a cell phone - but the point is they claim convenience and service and safety (then make the fine print say don't ever count on us).
My wife misssed a major piece of work because the messages are taking hours, and she's not happy.
Two worst takeovers in New England history: Fleet taking over (your bank's name here) and SBC taking over SNET. (Dan Duquette is gone, so no use naming the third, but Jan 26, 2004 can't come fast enough - he still gets paid til then). Both have gone south on a rocket sled since - SNET were local folk who knew what was going on and knew who could solve a problem.
Their system has screwed the pooch, and we don't care how hard it is to fix - it's not our problem. It's theirs, and they need to get it done.
So far the comments have run the full gamut from "don't blame the game" to "put the parents to death", with a liberal sprinkling of "I play games, so this all sucks".
Lets take a step back.
Again, cuz some missed the first dozen posts clarifying this, the parents aren't suing - RTFA. But while we're on their case:
Blame the parents #1: They shouldn't be able to even view this game. Really? What does the ratings system do? Prevent them from buying the game? Not by a long shot. From the ratings web site:
"Although the ESRB does not have the authority to enforce the ratings at the retail level, we do work closely with retailers and game centers to encourage them to display ratings information and not sell or rent certain product to minors. In fact, many retailers have signed up for ESRB's Commitment to Parents program in which they pledge to use their best efforts not to rent or sell M-rated games to children under 17 without parental consent."
That's not law, that's not policy, it's weasel words. And the list of retailers in the U.S. who DO enforce is about a dozen. Neither the parents nor the retailer nor the ESRB even taken together are so much as a speed bump in this regard. Point: Contrary to what has been posted YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE OF AGE TO PURCHASE THIS GAME. And unless you actually have a means to enforce it, the rating that tells teens they can't have it only does one thing - it makes them want it even more. But everyone could have filled in the blank on that one.
Blame the parents #2: The gun. As has been pointed out, there is nothing required that keeps these kids from getting their hands on a legally purchased.22 rifle in that state. And I'll bet you there's as many legally purchased.22s that you could find going door to door than legally purchased picnic baskets. Point being that they could find one in less than an hour even if their parents were chapter and verse on access and locks.
Blame the parents #3: They should know what their kid(s) is (are) doing all the time and head this off. Right. Most of the people who are suggesting this are not parents. You're suggesting someting that is for all practial purposes impossible. That does not relieve the parents of liability, though.
New tack: "The games and their content is irrelevant, only idiots act out what's in a game." A nice-sounding very loud assertion, allegedly 'proven' by the fact that you or I would never do such a thing. Problem is, that most of educational psychology piles up a load of evidence that shows that children do in fact model behavior from live action, photo depictions, film/video depictions, and there's even third-decimal-place correlations to the age, gender, and role of the modelee to the modeler. And pay attention to the four part "Bandura" research that stresses the effect of attention, retention, reproduction and reinforcement - which are part and parcel of the first-person shooter game design - Feshback et. al simply look at television viewing. Observational learning, or modeling, is a major factor in all advertising, sales, clothing, etc. "I wanna be like Mike" (or Steve, or Linus, etc...) it really knows no boundaries.
Also drawing from ed psych, it's clear that adolescents have a very tenuous connection between their actions and consequences, and have a limited ability to predict or respond to the risk of their consequences. They really do have limited capacity to know what will happen in RL if they do something they have only seen non-RL.
Also, the plaintiffs are not asserting that every video game viewing results in a violent act - they're speaking to one incident, where the facts are feasibly linked, where the kids admitted that they were acting out the game. These kids will be charged with a crime - they are not blameless, they will be punished, the parents will suffer, and in addition, these victims see that if the kids were playing "Parappa" there wou
(and they're not the two you're thinking of, but I like the way you think)...for the apologists for the poor telemarketing drones who will lose their jobs:
buggy whips
Go ahead - we'll tell you not to call, you'll say we're trampling your rights, but hey - you're obsolete.
Not to mention "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins"
They're a bunch of double-standard-bearing tools who can't be any more creative about marketing than browbeating anyone they can find to shove home their apparently otherwise unsellable garbage.
We learned to drive with our knees from watching our pastor do it when we had to go serve mass at the local convalescent homes - he was good - could light his pipe while taking corners at high (to a fifth grader) speed steering with his knees.
I consider it a valuable skill and it was passed down from someone of great social and moral authority. I'll stop doing it when you pry my steering wheel from my cold dead knees!
I noticed what might be construed as a minor implediment to adoption and implementation in that YoU HaVE To bE StAnDInG StILL In A %$#% SwIMMING PoOL WiTH FoUR BLaSTED UgLY PLaSTIC PoDS ARoUND YoUR NoGGIN To MaKE A SImPLE STInKING PHoNE CaLL!
"Such potentially sensitive personal information, released publicly, can be abused for purposes ranging from unwelcome marketing to identity theft, fraud, stalking, and other criminal activities."
To paraphrase James Randi, if you're using the WHOIS database for marketing, ID theft, fraud, and stalking, you're doing it the hard way.
Golly, I just launch Watson on OSX and get name, address, phone number, punch in the info to Google and get a map and aerial photo of their house on MapQuest.
Not to mention picking up a freaking phone book in any public building in any location in the US...
Michael Jackson bought the rights to the library of songs. This has nothing to do with those or him.
Apple Corps - after the music library was transferred to other companies - owns the Apple trademark in US, UK, Switzerland for music production and manages all subsequent performances of the partners- Paul, RIngo, George and Yoko - from that point on. Those four (actually through their reps including Yoko) hold 25% of the corporation. Apple Corps has subsidiaries including Apple Records CA, Apple Records NY, Apple Music Publishing, Apple Films, Python Music, Maclen Music, & Subafilms. They went thru this when the put the Ensoniq chip in the IIGS. They have something of a point on the trademark confusion if AAPL continues to use "AppleMusic", but the consensus is (though they do not disclose actual earnings) is that Apple Corps loses money most years, so this could be a fishing expedition for some no-work income. Memo to Darl McBride... I bet this could be ironed out over a long lunch by reasonable people. And/or (duh) they could release their records since the end of the Beatles library to ITMS and make some money from it as well as sales.
Years ago, I was disgusted by a nearby U's handicapped van which looked not so much as anything but a prison wagon, navy blue, mesh in the windows and all... I had a brainstorm. Why not liven it up - light colors, some cool graphics - what better graphic than Cutter John loaded down with all the critters from the meadow, zooming off at warp factor 9... I called an old friend with a vehicle graphics biz. Got the labor ponied up. Called a distant relative in the paint biz. Paint would be mine. Called the Washington Post Writers Group and told them what I had in mind. They told me to hold on for a minute, then lots of phone noises, then Berke came on the line and asked me what I wanted to do. IIRC... -Will you make any money on this? -No, it's just something to do gratis. -Is it for a company? -No it's for a college. -OK, here's the deal: you have to use an existing drawing, you can't do your own version, or get something done new. -OK -You have to include the original signature, -OK -You have to add "copyright 19-- Washington Post Writers; Group, All Rights Reserved" -OK (long silence) - and how much for the rights? _ -Nothing. You're not making anything on this? -No -No one else will profit, right? -No. -That's it. -Thanks! -Send us a picure. -OK.
I contacted the handicapped student group on campus - they thought it would be much cooler - then I started talking to the powers that be at the university to get all the clearances, etc. Big mistake. More than a year later, we still hadn't gotten so much as any written response from anywone who had to OK it - sheesh. Maybe I gave up too easily, but it was enlightneing to see the attitude of an artist vs the attitude of a few campus honchi...
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No, I wasn't smoking crack.
I was watching their commercials and listening to their promises.
It's a reasonable assumption, and the alternative (the new technology is at its core worse than the old technology) is unacceptable.
If you think Cinglular GSM is getting 95% by all measures, then you're more gullible than you think *I* am.
I don't have to give them anything - and nobody said "they won't work in your home - but golly please ask if you think that's a cool thing - we'll get somebody right on it..."
Classic for home automation, 1400 for weather monitor.
Even without the nonsense two weeks ago - it's still hardly service.
It didn't work as voicestream, it still doesn't work as cingular.
They do however claim you can't use just any old phone - and it seemed last time that sim cards were particular to a brand of phone, though that's not supposed to be so...
They'll get you to pay the most for anything they can.
This was supposed to be at least as serviceable as POTS, it ain't.
So if I have an off-the-shelf router this side of my cable modem, what can be done to prevent my cable connection from being used for this?
And the why is the link to the story about the guy who was seemingly the origin of lots of spam.
I'll go re-rtfa, but such a fix didn't pop out so far...
In the words of Woody Flowers, "The most important thing is to make sure that the most important thing remains the most important thing."
At some point you have to look around the absolutes of file format particulars and the 'principles' of DRM.
Why? Because the pros far outway the cons.
I can play the music on three computers.
I can carry it all around on my iPod.
I can burn CDs all day long.
For all practical purposes, it sounds great.
The artists get paid.
I don't get subpoenaed.
Maybe I'm missing something but I'd really like to know the answe to this: what exactly is the untenable downside here?
All I can see "bad" is that (1) I can't play the music on one computer when I'm miles away from the other (but that's what the iPod's for) and (2) I can't hand the files to everyone in the world just because i feel like it.
Thay already have IT staff - they're the ones kvetching about having to layer macs on top of the wintel system in place.
800 MHz iBooks with airport, and the extended warranty.
Overpurchase by 5% on the units. You won't have a care in the world for three years, repair wise compared to anything else.
Viruses? Feh.
TCO? Much lower.
Networking is self-configuring if you just RTFM.
Airport base stations judiciously placed. Secure the hell out of them, though - each school building will have a big 2.5GHz target painted on it from day 1.
An Xserve for each building, or use your existing servers (in the other articles, the wintel IT people are freaking about the added something or other.
As for the guns or butter arguments - they already have chalkboards, chalk, books, pencils, paper.
The average per pupil expenditure in the US is around $10,000 per year. If a $1200 iBook (that's their target price - easily done for an 800+airport+applecare in volume) lasts 3 years. I know. I bought a 500 the week they came out 2.5 years ago and it's still running circles around anything else from that long ago.
So the cost is $400 per year per student. That's 4%. try and reduce class size with that sort of increase. No can do.
Heh heh... Isn't this a bit too much like Richard MacDuff's Anthem software that turned corporate accounting files into music, so you cold 'listen' to good finances or bad?
As I recall, the head techie was Gordon Way, whom I always took to be a nod to Alan Kay, one of DNA's dear friends and a music geek himself.
I've been online since Delphi & MCIMail, The Well, AppleLink Personal Edition etc... I believed everything in "As We May Think" and in the Knowledge Navigator video(s).
Using OSX on a 'lowly' iBook 500 with a carefully cultivated suite of apps is getting close enough to the dream that I should stop dreaming and just revel in it. And get more done. Which I do.
It's not just the info at fingertips. I watched someone try to scan a book for a 60 year old article, then import it, try to OCR it and reformat it... nice, but it's on the web in text and I had it within seconds. Priceless.
I'ma teacher at a very non-traditional place with lots of need for proposals, classes, results, and lots of techie things happeneing anyway, but it's the everyday access that's needed, and the ability to do it all literally at your fingertips.
I can order the model rockets (in one typical case), check the weather for the best launch date, email all the parents to come see, fax the bus company to get the transportation, video and still photo the activities... create a summary of lessons that my students have done, download the stardust launch for them to see on a projection screen as part of class, prin their junior rocket scientist certificates, edit, compose and post their movies and pics to the web for all the parents to see, email parents or sms them or fax them to get all this done in the time it would take a staff of three twenty years ago.
could i just build the rockets,. launch the rockets and see how jazzed the kids were? sure. still do all that. plus add value to what the parents can get out of it too.
it's a faster more accessible source. i know i have the estes catalog around here somewhere, but where...
i know i have videos of other older launches, videodiscs of all of the apollo and shuttle test programs, but the batteries in the ldp remote are crusty, and well, this way all the kids can play the video to their heart's content...
i can send proposals as pdf attachments to email, submit all my nsf stuff online, if I don't know where I'm going this evening (vaguely know it's around yale somewhere) I jump to watson, get the address, see a map, add the location to my address book, sync my ipod before i leave and i'll get there one way or another. beats the big spiral bound map and hundreds of slips of paper i'd have carried around even 5 years ago.
i can do travel better. way better.
i can buy a car by driving around or going blind with classifieds in the local fish wrap
my wife and i can specify the house we want and get the info delivered to us without having to drive down roads nobody else drives down for days at a time trying to find that out of the way house or having to actually talk to a bevy of real estate agents ( i actually hear one of them refer to a old local place as an antique house - grrrrr... i prefer tocall them 'used houses' as in 'used cars' but don't get me started)
for that matter i can find out that a wedding can cost $1K or $100K and how to make it what we wanted, instead of taking someone's word on how much we should have spent.
ditto real estate. there's a wide range of what it will all cost when they fire the starter's pistol at the closing, and we know much more from the web - we could have just taken a single sources word for it, or bought a dozen books. an hour with safari and a broadband connection and we are much wiser. we hope.
i can get references to anything from various sources...
i can have my kids go research the mountains of little white lies us teachers have been spouting for years in the name of shorthand lessons... columbus, magellan, the pilgrims, abner doubleday, the wright brothers...
will i ever get rid of my books? never. ditto the back issues of bicycling or wired, my berke breathed paperbacks.
I'll always be able to put my hand on 'the compleat angler', 'a winter's tale'or the beaten copies of 'andromeda strain', 'banner in the sky', o
the casio gps watch can barely stay working for a few days on its batteries, ditto geko and emaps... ok they can pulse it etc... and then there's the faraday cage issues and i think i can tell which can has the $1K of electronics in it and not 12 oz of actual sloshy fizzy coke... sounds like someone made them a promise that's going to be hard to keep... and if they can track down a unit with this much stuff coming out of it, seems it should be easy enough for some others to do the same, then it turns into 'it's a mad mad mad mad world' just not as funny.
Cell phones are supposed to do AT LEAST what POTS did and THEN you add value. The sad truth is that too much of the time they're not even giving us a decent connected call like plain old copper. If the phone on your wall did this poorly, you'd yank it out and go back to hollering.
I had t-mobile (voicestream or whatever it used to be called) and it was crap. Put up with it for a year and a half, and it never got any bettter. And this was in the northeast, it's most saturated area.
Had dual mode Cingular, and it was good. And it had email from phone to phone as well.
Recently combined my wife's and my plans to the Cingular GSM system. And the free phone is a Siemens. Both are crap. Apparently SMS only (unless I can't read a manual). the Siemens phone is as anti-intuitive a piece of electronics as I have ever seen - slow - everything is stored on the sim card by default, and apparently it's a 110 baud transfer - actually getting to a menu or retrieving a number to dial takes a dog's age compared to other sims phones I've had.
Voice messaging is taking up to 1.5 days and often hours to register a voice message on a phone (yes - in range and turned on).
Cingular has no explanation for the strange series of beeps and boops the line makes when attempting to complete a call - they even say I need to call Siemens.
And yes, we're upset - because in the case of an emergency or work, the phone can be mission critical or life threatening. I once sat broken down in a hole in the Voicestream coverage on the Mass Pike for nearly two hours in the middle of the night. Yes, I would have been in the same situation without a cell phone - but the point is they claim convenience and service and safety (then make the fine print say don't ever count on us).
My wife misssed a major piece of work because the messages are taking hours, and she's not happy.
Two worst takeovers in New England history: Fleet taking over (your bank's name here) and SBC taking over SNET. (Dan Duquette is gone, so no use naming the third, but Jan 26, 2004 can't come fast enough - he still gets paid til then). Both have gone south on a rocket sled since - SNET were local folk who knew what was going on and knew who could solve a problem.
Their system has screwed the pooch, and we don't care how hard it is to fix - it's not our problem. It's theirs, and they need to get it done.
San Francisco? Must be like that metric/english unit Mars screwup - I thought all orbiting objects and ice flows were measured in "Rhode Islands".
check out the cost of the hd that's inside an iPod and they're not making much at all on these things.
"Where the phone rings freely while you dine..."
"Where your privacy's cheap, and things that beep
"Don't stop slammers - even on their dime...."
Just when you thought it was safe to answer the phone...
Great. Cuz this iBook/Jaguar was just waaaaay too fast, man.
This is like climbing Mount Anthill. Because it's there. Well, it was when I started...
I read it correctly - I understand the shooting victims' families are suing.
Many posters have the impression that the two kids's parents are suing the game company.
Lets take a step back.
Again, cuz some missed the first dozen posts clarifying this, the parents aren't suing - RTFA. But while we're on their case:
Blame the parents #1: They shouldn't be able to even view this game. Really? What does the ratings system do? Prevent them from buying the game? Not by a long shot. From the ratings web site:
"Although the ESRB does not have the authority to enforce the ratings at the retail level, we do work closely with retailers and game centers to encourage them to display ratings information and not sell or rent certain product to minors. In fact, many retailers have signed up for ESRB's Commitment to Parents program in which they pledge to use their best efforts not to rent or sell M-rated games to children under 17 without parental consent."
That's not law, that's not policy, it's weasel words. And the list of retailers in the U.S. who DO enforce is about a dozen. Neither the parents nor the retailer nor the ESRB even taken together are so much as a speed bump in this regard. Point: Contrary to what has been posted YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE OF AGE TO PURCHASE THIS GAME. And unless you actually have a means to enforce it, the rating that tells teens they can't have it only does one thing - it makes them want it even more. But everyone could have filled in the blank on that one.
Blame the parents #2: The gun. As has been pointed out, there is nothing required that keeps these kids from getting their hands on a legally purchased .22 rifle in that state. And I'll bet you there's as many legally purchased .22s that you could find going door to door than legally purchased picnic baskets. Point being that they could find one in less than an hour even if their parents were chapter and verse on access and locks.
Blame the parents #3: They should know what their kid(s) is (are) doing all the time and head this off. Right. Most of the people who are suggesting this are not parents. You're suggesting someting that is for all practial purposes impossible. That does not relieve the parents of liability, though.
New tack: "The games and their content is irrelevant, only idiots act out what's in a game." A nice-sounding very loud assertion, allegedly 'proven' by the fact that you or I would never do such a thing. Problem is, that most of educational psychology piles up a load of evidence that shows that children do in fact model behavior from live action, photo depictions, film/video depictions, and there's even third-decimal-place correlations to the age, gender, and role of the modelee to the modeler. And pay attention to the four part "Bandura" research that stresses the effect of attention, retention, reproduction and reinforcement - which are part and parcel of the first-person shooter game design - Feshback et. al simply look at television viewing. Observational learning, or modeling, is a major factor in all advertising, sales, clothing, etc. "I wanna be like Mike" (or Steve, or Linus, etc...) it really knows no boundaries.
Also drawing from ed psych, it's clear that adolescents have a very tenuous connection between their actions and consequences, and have a limited ability to predict or respond to the risk of their consequences. They really do have limited capacity to know what will happen in RL if they do something they have only seen non-RL.
Also, the plaintiffs are not asserting that every video game viewing results in a violent act - they're speaking to one incident, where the facts are feasibly linked, where the kids admitted that they were acting out the game. These kids will be charged with a crime - they are not blameless, they will be punished, the parents will suffer, and in addition, these victims see that if the kids were playing "Parappa" there wou
(and they're not the two you're thinking of, but I like the way you think) ...for the apologists for the poor telemarketing drones who will lose their jobs:
buggy whips
Go ahead - we'll tell you not to call, you'll say we're trampling your rights, but hey - you're obsolete.
Not to mention "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins"
They're a bunch of double-standard-bearing tools who can't be any more creative about marketing than browbeating anyone they can find to shove home their apparently otherwise unsellable garbage.
We learned to drive with our knees from watching our pastor do it when we had to go serve mass at the local convalescent homes - he was good - could light his pipe while taking corners at high (to a fifth grader) speed steering with his knees.
I consider it a valuable skill and it was passed down from someone of great social and moral authority. I'll stop doing it when you pry my steering wheel from my cold dead knees!
I noticed what might be construed as a minor implediment to adoption and implementation in that YoU HaVE To bE StAnDInG StILL In A %$#% SwIMMING PoOL WiTH FoUR BLaSTED UgLY PLaSTIC PoDS ARoUND YoUR NoGGIN To MaKE A SImPLE STInKING PHoNE CaLL!
Ahem.
"Such potentially sensitive personal information, released publicly, can be abused for purposes ranging from unwelcome marketing to identity theft, fraud, stalking, and other criminal activities."
To paraphrase James Randi, if you're using the WHOIS database for marketing, ID theft, fraud, and stalking, you're doing it the hard way.
Golly, I just launch Watson on OSX and get name, address, phone number, punch in the info to Google and get a map and aerial photo of their house on MapQuest.
Not to mention picking up a freaking phone book in any public building in any location in the US...
Michael Jackson bought the rights to the library of songs. This has nothing to do with those or him.
Apple Corps - after the music library was transferred to other companies - owns the Apple trademark in US, UK, Switzerland for music production and manages all subsequent performances of the partners- Paul, RIngo, George and Yoko - from that point on. Those four (actually through their reps including Yoko) hold 25% of the corporation.
Apple Corps has subsidiaries including Apple Records CA, Apple Records NY, Apple Music Publishing, Apple Films, Python Music, Maclen Music, & Subafilms.
They went thru this when the put the Ensoniq chip in the IIGS.
They have something of a point on the trademark confusion if AAPL continues to use "AppleMusic", but the consensus is (though they do not disclose actual earnings) is that Apple Corps loses money most years, so this could be a fishing expedition for some no-work income. Memo to Darl McBride...
I bet this could be ironed out over a long lunch by reasonable people.
And/or (duh) they could release their records since the end of the Beatles library to ITMS and make some money from it as well as sales.
Years ago, I was disgusted by a nearby U's handicapped van which looked not so much as anything but a prison wagon, navy blue, mesh in the windows and all...
I had a brainstorm. Why not liven it up - light colors, some cool graphics - what better graphic than Cutter John loaded down with all the critters from the meadow, zooming off at warp factor 9...
I called an old friend with a vehicle graphics biz. Got the labor ponied up. Called a distant relative in the paint biz. Paint would be mine. Called the Washington Post Writers Group and told them what I had in mind. They told me to hold on for a minute, then lots of phone noises, then Berke came on the line and asked me what I wanted to do. IIRC...
-Will you make any money on this?
-No, it's just something to do gratis.
-Is it for a company?
-No it's for a college.
-OK, here's the deal: you have to use an existing drawing, you can't do your own version, or get something done new.
-OK
-You have to include the original signature,
-OK
-You have to add "copyright 19-- Washington Post Writers; Group, All Rights Reserved"
-OK (long silence) - and how much for the rights? _
-Nothing. You're not making anything on this?
-No
-No one else will profit, right?
-No.
-That's it.
-Thanks!
-Send us a picure.
-OK.
I contacted the handicapped student group on campus - they thought it would be much cooler - then I started talking to the powers that be at the university to get all the clearances, etc. Big mistake. More than a year later, we still hadn't gotten so much as any written response from anywone who had to OK it - sheesh. Maybe I gave up too easily, but it was enlightneing to see the attitude of an artist vs the attitude of a few campus honchi...
I wouldn't bet against:
My mother
A nun
Paul MacCready
Gene Krantz
Steve Case until 2001
Steve Jobs 1977-1983 & 2001-2003
Any of the Rutans
It just ain't smart.