The key difference between programmers and actors/screenwriters/directors is that big publishing houses like Activision probably regard them as expendable. I'm sure the bean counters figure if the geeks organize, they'll just fire them and hire cheap replacements in China/India.
Which would be just as well, because the quality of the product and support will plummet, ensuring the death of the beast.
Anyone remember the Simpsons episode where Maggie copies Itchy & Scratchy? Homer gets (hilariously) hurt and Marge goes on a crusade against animated violence.
The genius of the episode was that Groening and crew hit 3 birds with one stone:
The absurdity of eliminating violence from media, given that life is prone to violence-- just watch a 2-year-old be denied what she really wants, and you'll see this point very quickly.
The fact that kids do, in fact, spend way too much time in front of a glowing screen instead of enjoying the world as their predecessors did.
The natural tendency of such crusades to try to moralize everything (as it becomes a power game), as Marge's group did in trying to prevent the showing of Michelangelo's David statue for nudity.
Follow the money (if that's even possible). If the guy is a tenured professor, he won't waste his time on such a bullshit "study" unless:
He's a genuine kook a la Jack Thompson, or
He was paid to write the study.
Plenty of groups (I call 'em Pains in The Asses of PTAs for short) out there want to strictly regulate video game violence as if it were effective because it gives them a convenient scapegoat and it reassures them that they are not the ones who are doing it wrong until the next bogeyman is selected.
does anyone else find it comic and rather ironic that almost exclusively because the countries involved have tried to keep this a secret, that ACTA negotiations now get far more attention online than they would otherwise?
Fixed that for you.
Your point would hold if the major news outlets in the US are reporting this story. Instead they focus on what high-profile individual is having extramarital sex with whom.
There is no liberal media; there is only the corporate media, and ACTA serves to further their interests. I'll lay you 10 to 1 that the moment a reporter tries to get a story on ACTA is the moment he is threatened with job loss from his editor or executive.
Canada may be reasonable (which may change with all the pressure the industry is putting on that government), but New Zealand has tried to follow Australia's lead in censoring the 'net. I'm afraid businesses have seen what can be accomplished by implicitly buying politicians in the US and decided to make that a global business model.
(IANAL; I've talked to lawyers and generally have an idea of how courts work (thanks NYCL), but this is still not legal advice)
Since the samples were anonymized, it will be difficult (though not impossible) to pin a 4th Amendment penalty to this-- the courts often care about "actual damages", where someone was demonstrably harmed by some actions, and anonymizing the samples was as much a CYA move as it was to "protect" the newborns sampled.
A possible line of attack is that such actions taken without any consultation with the parents means that neither the parents nor the newborns had any expectation that this sort of data collection was happening-- i.e., the hospitals and government acted in exceedingly bad faith. Any actual lawyers on/. can probably punch a few holes in that argument legally or procedurally.
IMO, if I were a plaintiff, I'd demand the heads of the responsible department and hospitals, but given the general willingness to flee responsibility at any cost, I'd settle for a very, very stiff fine (7+ figures) + attorney's fees.
You didn't mention that the Lacks cancer cells were unusual in this way: they don't die under normal conditions, so they never needed to be preserved by freezing. That's why the hospital et al. saw so much value in them-- the cells may hold clues in terms of delaying or stopping human aging, a modern "Fountain of Youth", as it were.
The issue described in TFA, as often is the case when parents are involved, is disclosure. Most parents won't have that much of a problem with the practice you've described-- but hackles are raised if this sort of thing involving their children is done without their knowledge or consent.
And as a matter of fact, the Lacks family, for the most part, either was unhappy with the consequences of being a part of the research (too much publicity) or couldn't understand what was going on. Here is a Fresh Air interview of a freelancer who wrote a book on Henrietta Lacks.
To an industry who has said on the record that making even an archival copy of a CD is piracy, yes that Kindle e-book is illegal.
To an industry whose very existence is based on an essay deriding the practice of freely sharing software (which Linux, in turn, owes its very existence to), downloading the Linux kernel source and GNU sources is illegal.
Or at least, to these fat cats, "there oughta be a law against it". And so they lobby.
The idea that the iPad's "magical properties" would render it superior to netbooks reminds me of a stand-up comic/magician in Japan whose act consists of the usual parlor tricks with the gag that he plays the character of a smiling con man:
(Very rough paraphrase) "Now I'm going to put this card that you marked into this ordinary box. Now wouldn't it be fun if it turned up in this other box? As it turns out, I've prepared just such a card in advance..."
The original (Magi Shinji, I think his stage name was) retired and left his "disciple" to run the act, but unfortunately, the disciple doesn't do the con job quite as well.
The jury's still out on whether a big iPod Touch would be superior to low-cost netbooks, IMO. Sure, Jobs might like the iPad a whole lot better, but as I recall, he also designed the G4 Cube and Lisa. No one's perfect.
The entire problem with the argument "If you ignore the quacks, no one will listen to them" is that less-informed people (e.g., government officials) will listen to them anyway in the name of "balance and fairness".
I was thinking that myself; if their backplane is being saturated, surely there's a way to throttle the import process using the datacenter network hardware, QoS, or something similar? For that matter, why don't they have a redundant network so that the production net isn't impacted by datacenter ops (I know, I know... cost)?
I'm pretty sure that's what Faraday cages are for. I know that EMP bombs (AKA nuke detonation in the upper atmosphere) is a favorite doomsday scenario, but with the right electrical hardening (re: Switzerland), they're pretty easy to defend against.
Now, fires (and by "fire" I mean something like "thermite"), floods, dirty bombs, and earthquakes, on the other hands...
This poorly functioning government is a direct result of the dual conservative mantras: 1) deregulation of markets is necessary for them to perform well and 2) less government is better.
If conservatives were honest with themselves, the mantra is: Destroy the parts of government that we don't like and won't get us voted out of office. It started with Nixon when he set out to destroy certain elements of LBJ's (then-new) departments by appointing political allies as secretaries or heads of said departments, and it's been the same song and dance ever since when a Republican was elected into the White House: Appoint buddies or idiots to the departments you don't like or care about, and use their failures as an excuse to eliminate them.
You'll notice that even though they talk a nice campaign speech about privatizing Medicare/Social Security (and some completely insane twits like Bachmann will say this crap even off the campaign trail-- though to be honest, she's always campaigning because she is both disturbed and foolish enough that she has to in order to remain in office), when reforms to shrink them come up they're among the first to cry "they're killing our seniors!!"-- not to mention, part D, one of the biggest and least efficient expansions of Medicare in recent history, was passed by a Republican Congress/President using budget reconciliation. They are not interested in shrinking government to a mythical "efficient size", despite what activists like Grover Norquist may say, they want only the parts that empower them. How else would they condone an OLC who almost authorized the creation of a Presidency above Constitutional authority?
It's just yet another example of conservatism claiming to know what's best for public policy and governance, and demonstrating that they are completely incompetent and/or ignorant that human nature will always thwart their best-intended theories.
Better idea: Use a tape that wouldn't leave adhesive behind (3M makes several kinds of this stuff). Then, before you return to school with the laptop, remove the tape and clean the area.
It's a bit pricier, but it rams a nice potassium spike in the potential "I see marks on the camera" counterargument.
And by all means, take their asses to court-- I would normally give them the courtesy of trying to explain their behavior, but there's a lot about this that indicates a lot of hidden, rotten stuff on the administrators' end. These administrators are abusers of power, and the only language they will ever understand is a summary judgment against them.
With some of my colleagues, I began a reverse engineering effort against LANRev in order to determine the nature of the threat and possible countermeasures. Some of the things we found at first left us aghast as security pros: the spyware "client" (they call it an agent) binds to the server permanently without using authentication or key distribution. Find an unbound agent on your network with Bonjour, click on it, you own it. The server software, with an externally facing Internet port... runs as root. I'm not kidding.
So his little spyware server is also a reverse rootkit for the district servers. If he didn't update the server software in a hurry, that is an incredible invitation for hackers, like leaving an unfirewalled Windows PC directly connected to the Internet.
He's also inviting possibly ticked-off students to take revenge on school servers. I think he'll be out of a job unless he really sweet-talks the board.
Parental authority alone can't be the deciding factor, no matter how well-meaning the parents, because sooner or later you get a situation like in Japan, where children will run roughshod over one another and the teachers/administrators are powerless to do anything for fear of a parent's lawsuit over how their little angel was treated.
Nor can we accept a situation where the administrators rule supreme (i.e., the status quo in the US public system). In either extreme, there is great potential for abuse, and in the end, the kids are the ones who suffer the most.
There has to be a balance struck between these two, because I guarantee you they will jockey for power-- adults can be frighteningly petty, and some have no compunction against using children to get their way.
"Inappropriate behavior" n. Anything the school deems inappropriate. "Bart Simpson was given detention by Principal Skinner for inappropriate behavior observed on a school-issued laptop. He was brushing his teeth."
If class action is granted, this will hardly make the plaintiffs wealthy, unless there were 5 of them (hah!) and the school is hit with a 7-figure judgment.
But on the whole, I agree with you-- the parents should have gone to the cops/DA first to try and press charges. Of course, the DA may have scoffed at them for offering him a case that's not an easy way to the AG office, and they're now going the civil route as a result.
Oh, it was fun when there was an actual, well, community (ca. 1998)... Nowadays, battle.net is little more than hardcore WoW players who essentially want you to get out of their way* and the occasional D2/Brood War/WC3 player who acts like a spoiled six-year-old. You have to convince friends to go and login when you want to play multi outside of a LAN party (and if Blizzard cuts TCP/IP play out of SC2, that would be a serious mistake), and that's not always possible. How they're going to improve that for someone like me who would rather not squeeze another player's virtual nuts escapes me, but then, I suppose I'm vastly outnumbered.
* Okay, I confess: I don't play WoW. I have played RO, however, and I imagine the player-to-player experience would be similar: "Hey no KS" *string of expletives and abuse* ; hardcore MMORPG players are some of the most selfish bastards I have ever encountered, and I've seen a lot of selfish bastards in meatspace.
They've even sent out a new argument: "CO2 ain't that bad, plants consume it!" So if they can't convince people that AGW is nonexistent, they go for trying to prove that one of the prime suspects is benign or even beneficial, as if that would somehow outweigh the consequences.
But then again, logic means nothing to them, as long as they can deceive the public.
Slashdot Mirror
The key difference between programmers and actors/screenwriters/directors is that big publishing houses like Activision probably regard them as expendable. I'm sure the bean counters figure if the geeks organize, they'll just fire them and hire cheap replacements in China/India.
Which would be just as well, because the quality of the product and support will plummet, ensuring the death of the beast.
Anyone remember the Simpsons episode where Maggie copies Itchy & Scratchy? Homer gets (hilariously) hurt and Marge goes on a crusade against animated violence.
The genius of the episode was that Groening and crew hit 3 birds with one stone:
Follow the money (if that's even possible). If the guy is a tenured professor, he won't waste his time on such a bullshit "study" unless:
Plenty of groups (I call 'em Pains in The Asses of PTAs for short) out there want to strictly regulate video game violence as if it were effective because it gives them a convenient scapegoat and it reassures them that they are not the ones who are doing it wrong until the next bogeyman is selected.
Fixed that for you.
Your point would hold if the major news outlets in the US are reporting this story. Instead they focus on what high-profile individual is having extramarital sex with whom.
There is no liberal media; there is only the corporate media, and ACTA serves to further their interests. I'll lay you 10 to 1 that the moment a reporter tries to get a story on ACTA is the moment he is threatened with job loss from his editor or executive.
Canada may be reasonable (which may change with all the pressure the industry is putting on that government), but New Zealand has tried to follow Australia's lead in censoring the 'net. I'm afraid businesses have seen what can be accomplished by implicitly buying politicians in the US and decided to make that a global business model.
(IANAL; I've talked to lawyers and generally have an idea of how courts work (thanks NYCL), but this is still not legal advice)
Since the samples were anonymized, it will be difficult (though not impossible) to pin a 4th Amendment penalty to this-- the courts often care about "actual damages", where someone was demonstrably harmed by some actions, and anonymizing the samples was as much a CYA move as it was to "protect" the newborns sampled.
A possible line of attack is that such actions taken without any consultation with the parents means that neither the parents nor the newborns had any expectation that this sort of data collection was happening-- i.e., the hospitals and government acted in exceedingly bad faith. Any actual lawyers on /. can probably punch a few holes in that argument legally or procedurally.
IMO, if I were a plaintiff, I'd demand the heads of the responsible department and hospitals, but given the general willingness to flee responsibility at any cost, I'd settle for a very, very stiff fine (7+ figures) + attorney's fees.
You didn't mention that the Lacks cancer cells were unusual in this way: they don't die under normal conditions, so they never needed to be preserved by freezing. That's why the hospital et al. saw so much value in them-- the cells may hold clues in terms of delaying or stopping human aging, a modern "Fountain of Youth", as it were.
The issue described in TFA, as often is the case when parents are involved, is disclosure. Most parents won't have that much of a problem with the practice you've described-- but hackles are raised if this sort of thing involving their children is done without their knowledge or consent.
And as a matter of fact, the Lacks family, for the most part, either was unhappy with the consequences of being a part of the research (too much publicity) or couldn't understand what was going on. Here is a Fresh Air interview of a freelancer who wrote a book on Henrietta Lacks.
I suppose that's the best a state government in a straight-jacket can come up with...
To an industry who has said on the record that making even an archival copy of a CD is piracy, yes that Kindle e-book is illegal.
To an industry whose very existence is based on an essay deriding the practice of freely sharing software (which Linux, in turn, owes its very existence to), downloading the Linux kernel source and GNU sources is illegal.
Or at least, to these fat cats, "there oughta be a law against it". And so they lobby.
The idea that the iPad's "magical properties" would render it superior to netbooks reminds me of a stand-up comic/magician in Japan whose act consists of the usual parlor tricks with the gag that he plays the character of a smiling con man:
The original (Magi Shinji, I think his stage name was) retired and left his "disciple" to run the act, but unfortunately, the disciple doesn't do the con job quite as well.
The jury's still out on whether a big iPod Touch would be superior to low-cost netbooks, IMO. Sure, Jobs might like the iPad a whole lot better, but as I recall, he also designed the G4 Cube and Lisa. No one's perfect.
Seriously. If you can change your wifi network name to "isuckdonkeynuts", you can change the security settings and encryption passphrase.
Heck, you could hide such an embarrassing network ID...
Since Blizzard is going for equivalent functionality through battle.net, I'd say... no.
The entire problem with the argument "If you ignore the quacks, no one will listen to them" is that less-informed people (e.g., government officials) will listen to them anyway in the name of "balance and fairness".
Sound familiar?
Fired? He probably raised page views and ad revenue. He'll get a raise.
You should try to understand how journalism works-- it's not about the truth, it's about how much money you can wring out of your master's contracts.
I was thinking that myself; if their backplane is being saturated, surely there's a way to throttle the import process using the datacenter network hardware, QoS, or something similar? For that matter, why don't they have a redundant network so that the production net isn't impacted by datacenter ops (I know, I know... cost)?
I'm pretty sure that's what Faraday cages are for. I know that EMP bombs (AKA nuke detonation in the upper atmosphere) is a favorite doomsday scenario, but with the right electrical hardening (re: Switzerland), they're pretty easy to defend against.
Now, fires (and by "fire" I mean something like "thermite"), floods, dirty bombs, and earthquakes, on the other hands...
If conservatives were honest with themselves, the mantra is: Destroy the parts of government that we don't like and won't get us voted out of office. It started with Nixon when he set out to destroy certain elements of LBJ's (then-new) departments by appointing political allies as secretaries or heads of said departments, and it's been the same song and dance ever since when a Republican was elected into the White House: Appoint buddies or idiots to the departments you don't like or care about, and use their failures as an excuse to eliminate them.
You'll notice that even though they talk a nice campaign speech about privatizing Medicare/Social Security (and some completely insane twits like Bachmann will say this crap even off the campaign trail-- though to be honest, she's always campaigning because she is both disturbed and foolish enough that she has to in order to remain in office), when reforms to shrink them come up they're among the first to cry "they're killing our seniors!!"-- not to mention, part D, one of the biggest and least efficient expansions of Medicare in recent history, was passed by a Republican Congress/President using budget reconciliation. They are not interested in shrinking government to a mythical "efficient size", despite what activists like Grover Norquist may say, they want only the parts that empower them. How else would they condone an OLC who almost authorized the creation of a Presidency above Constitutional authority?
It's just yet another example of conservatism claiming to know what's best for public policy and governance, and demonstrating that they are completely incompetent and/or ignorant that human nature will always thwart their best-intended theories.
Better idea: Use a tape that wouldn't leave adhesive behind (3M makes several kinds of this stuff). Then, before you return to school with the laptop, remove the tape and clean the area.
It's a bit pricier, but it rams a nice potassium spike in the potential "I see marks on the camera" counterargument.
And by all means, take their asses to court-- I would normally give them the courtesy of trying to explain their behavior, but there's a lot about this that indicates a lot of hidden, rotten stuff on the administrators' end. These administrators are abusers of power, and the only language they will ever understand is a summary judgment against them.
So his little spyware server is also a reverse rootkit for the district servers. If he didn't update the server software in a hurry, that is an incredible invitation for hackers, like leaving an unfirewalled Windows PC directly connected to the Internet.
He's also inviting possibly ticked-off students to take revenge on school servers. I think he'll be out of a job unless he really sweet-talks the board.
Parental authority alone can't be the deciding factor, no matter how well-meaning the parents, because sooner or later you get a situation like in Japan, where children will run roughshod over one another and the teachers/administrators are powerless to do anything for fear of a parent's lawsuit over how their little angel was treated.
Nor can we accept a situation where the administrators rule supreme (i.e., the status quo in the US public system). In either extreme, there is great potential for abuse, and in the end, the kids are the ones who suffer the most.
There has to be a balance struck between these two, because I guarantee you they will jockey for power-- adults can be frighteningly petty, and some have no compunction against using children to get their way.
Before you continue your anti-government rant, answer this question: Are you saying that this wouldn't happen at a private school?
Because you can bet your pounded ass that power trips have nothing to do with the federal government.
"Inappropriate behavior"
n. Anything the school deems inappropriate. "Bart Simpson was given detention by Principal Skinner for inappropriate behavior observed on a school-issued laptop. He was brushing his teeth."
If class action is granted, this will hardly make the plaintiffs wealthy, unless there were 5 of them (hah!) and the school is hit with a 7-figure judgment.
But on the whole, I agree with you-- the parents should have gone to the cops/DA first to try and press charges. Of course, the DA may have scoffed at them for offering him a case that's not an easy way to the AG office, and they're now going the civil route as a result.
Oh, it was fun when there was an actual, well, community (ca. 1998)... Nowadays, battle.net is little more than hardcore WoW players who essentially want you to get out of their way* and the occasional D2/Brood War/WC3 player who acts like a spoiled six-year-old. You have to convince friends to go and login when you want to play multi outside of a LAN party (and if Blizzard cuts TCP/IP play out of SC2, that would be a serious mistake), and that's not always possible. How they're going to improve that for someone like me who would rather not squeeze another player's virtual nuts escapes me, but then, I suppose I'm vastly outnumbered.
* Okay, I confess: I don't play WoW. I have played RO, however, and I imagine the player-to-player experience would be similar: "Hey no KS" *string of expletives and abuse* ; hardcore MMORPG players are some of the most selfish bastards I have ever encountered, and I've seen a lot of selfish bastards in meatspace.
They've even sent out a new argument: "CO2 ain't that bad, plants consume it!" So if they can't convince people that AGW is nonexistent, they go for trying to prove that one of the prime suspects is benign or even beneficial, as if that would somehow outweigh the consequences.
But then again, logic means nothing to them, as long as they can deceive the public.