It would be an odd conception of the First Amendment... that would allow a state to prevent a boy from purchasing a magazine containing pictures of topless women in provocative poses, but give that same boy a constitutional right to train to become a sniper at the local arcade without his parents' permission.
Superstition has won the day, and the arcade business in Indianapolis will suffer for it.
The law requires coin-operated games featuring graphic violence or strong sexual content to have warning labels and be kept at least 10 feet from nonviolent game machines. The machines must also be separated by a curtain or wall so minors cannot see them. The law bars people under age 18 from such games unless accompanied by a parent or guardian.
Businesses would be fined $200 per day for a violation; three violations in a year could lead to the revocation of a business's amusement location license.
Let's say you are one of those people who believe in this fascist law. Can you argue, with a straight face, that this is a fair way to handle arcades, when movie theaters and Blockbuster (which does rent R-Rated tapes, after all) aren't subject to the same Draconian laws?
No what's really happening here is the arcade industry is being deliberately targetted for destruction by the forces of ignorance.
sounds like Are you a Red Dupe? from the fifties. (Although I should point out that the communist quotes in the AD are self-contradictory... you have to read all of them.)
..legitimate political debate has no place on Slashdot?
Sick of joyless fanatics who claim, "since this is a technical forum, you damned idiot, not a pulpit for you to expound your personal political views" when it is clearly not, as the point has often been made that it is "News for Nerds, Stuff that matters?"
Would you like to look up from your monitor once in a while, and talk about issues in the wide world that are destroying your Liberty, without having to focus in on computers all the time?
Of course, since it's an open board, I can't promise you'll never see a joyless, unhappy poster trying to silence political views that he disagrees with. However, he would have to come up with a better excuse for his desire to silence opposing views than "it's a technical forum."
I'm probably not the first person to notice this, but did anyone ever notice that things which are outside of the control of the big media companies are always the things that mainly get blamed for this type of thing. For example, what does Doom have to do with the Internet, really? My brother has Doom for his Nintendo 64, and he actually considers Goldeneye to be more violent. Notice that Doom and Quake get knocked by the media, but I've never heard a sigle negative comment about Goldeneye.
The truth is, this crusade was created by the big media for two reasons:
1. Encouraging public hysteria always brings ratings.
2. Anything which might cause a person to go to the movies less or watch TV less, which is not also a profit generator for big media, is the enemy.
We do have a serious problem in our culture. Tipper and I have worked on the problem of violence and entertainment aimed at children. She's worked on it longer than I have, but I feel very strongly about that. And if I'm elected president, I will do something about that. But I think that we -- I think we have to start with better parenting. -- Al Gore, The Same Debate
The truth is that Americans, en masse, have decided that they want to give up the benefits of living in a free society in exchange for the "benefits" of living in an autocratic state.
The truth is that the Republicans decide, after the string of school shootings that the best way for them to defend their positions on guns was to ratchet up the Culture War. The Democratic presidential ticket is just as right wing on the Culture War as the Republicans are, there is no significant difference between the two tickets on the First Amendment.
I'm probably tilting at windmills with my Libertarian vote, but as far as I'm concerned a vote for the two party system is a wasted vote, and I don't feel like sitting home on election day feeling irrelevant as the Democratic and Republican sharks circle around the US Constitution deciding with part to chomp off next.
As a game developer recently wrote in Computer Gaming monthly, games are going to take the fall for Hollywood, because Hollywood has more clout with the old men than the Gaming Industry. The studies which supposedly "prove" that violent video-games lead to violence in real life are junk science (see my sig), but that won't matter to people who believe that creation science is not an oxymoron. (Or even to some others, who may scoff at people who believe in creation science but will choose to believe the nonsense behind these studies because it fits in with their world view, or gets them money and political power.)
America is not a free country, it is only free compared to worse places. When you go to a movie, you don't see the same one they can show unedited in Europe. When you play a game, you play a different version than they play in Japan. It's a new age of censorship, with the government putting legal muscle behind region based censorship.
We will continue to hear, from the fascists who now populate the Republican and Democratic parties that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." If you can put aside the reality of life in modern America and believe that, I envy you. Unfortunately, I am incapable of destroying my powers of reason to the point where I can agree with such a statement.
We are heading into a new dark age, and no one is putting on the brakes. Where is a public voice against censorship? Where is a cry for reason over emotion?
Ok, a few years back I bought a monorail PC which came with one of those "restore factory install only" disks. The computer was a Monorail. After messing around with the computer a lot, I found out from the company how to get it to reinstall my factory Win95 on a blank, partitioned hard drive. Basically, it was very simple, but if you didn't know it, it was a killer. When you booted from the CD-ROM and got into recovery mode, the disk would run a program to re-install Windows on a partition called MONORAIL. If you were starting with a blank hard drive, of course, the disk would crash when it tried to find the non-existent MONORAIL partition. (If you knew about this gimmick, though, you could create your own MONORAIL partition, and everything would be peachy-keen.)
My suggestion to anyone with one of those crummy OEM copies of Win is to try the this technique when you go to reinstall Win from the recovery disk. I mean, how many different ways are there to screw the customer that don't require something really fancy? I'll bet dollars to donuts that other Win95/98 PC manufacturers use this technique (that a pre-existing, correctly named partition must be on the hard drive) to appease Sauron and his Nazguls.
Of course, one day we will have to eliminate Windows from Linux PCs altogether.
Unfortunately, that day isn't here yet. Its coming soon, though.
We all know what this article is for. Basically, it's "let's calm down all the young people who are mad at me so they won't vote for Nader or some other non-Two party candidate come election day. That way, the day after I'm elected I can resume the war against the First Amendment, and we in the Democratic party won't have to worry about a credible alternative to the two party system."
Of course, I'm a Browne voter myself, but I don't think Harry is even on Lieberman's radar scope.
Anyone who's against video game censorship enough that it was going to effect their vote who votes for Gore/Lieberman based on this is an idiot. I have a bridge in New York I'd like to sell these voters.
Anyone who's worried that Lieberman has really sold out his right wing, pro-censorship ideals should rest assured. This is just a cynical election year ploy, sometimes you have to pretend to be something you aren't to win elections. Don't worry, once Lieberman is in, the video game industry will suffer for it.
But I had fun telling my wife when she saw a big picture of Austin on the cover of some TV magazine. She asked, "Who's that?" (This was before she saw any of the movie.) I said, "He's a famous sex symbol in the United States, women love him and men want to be him.":)
As she saw images of Austin everywhere it became much easier to convince her of this...
Seeing the movie hasn't changed it, most of the jokes went right over her head, and she didn't even watch the whole thing.
Understand though, my wife's idea of what an attractive man looks like skews away from the American norm by quite a bit. She doesn't get the whole grunge look... so it was plausible to her. Nice short hair (on a man), clean shaven and neat, well kept clothing are her idea of nice looking style. Basically, a "square" look that would fit in with the 1950's. Most of our popular American rock groups do not dress like this, though...
Besides, Mr. Powers sort of is a sex symbol, yes? He certainly sees a lot of "action."
The only thing I'd add to it is that I think the reason why we have so much freedom today is that greater technology automatically me greater ability for bloody-minded busybodies to interfere in the lives of complete strangers
Of course, I meant to say "so little freedom" instead of "so much freedom." Probably all the double think I've had to swallow (especially lately, it being an election year) has affected my mind, making it difficult to say, "Big Brother is ungood."
Is one of the most intelligent things I have ever read on Slashdot.
The only thing I'd add to it is that I think the reason why we have so much freedom today is that greater technology automatically me greater ability for bloody-minded busybodies to interfere in the lives of complete strangers.
Unfortunately, without some new technology that actually enhances freedom (cheap, reliable spaceflight?) to counter our current control-every-aspect-of-an-individual's life technology, I don't think we can go back to the good old days...
I really prefer the Age of Reason myself, especially to the coming Age of Eternal Darkness... (brought to you by a partnership between Sony and the American Family Association, tm, all rights reserved.)
Where do you get your definition of "right" and "not a right?"
There are only two kinds of rights. Inalienable rights, which are rights which can't be taken away. For example, the government can't order you to commit suicide, without using the threat of death or a fate worse than death against you. This is why we call the Right to Life an inalienable right.
All other rights are enshrined in law. In our society, rights are defined in the constitution and interpreted by the courts. The most recent interpretations by the courts on video games, Federal judge dismisses lawsuit against movie, video game makers have been that video games are not responsible for murders committed by people who happened to play one once. This being the case, video games are supposed to fall, legally, well within the realm of our First Amendment Rights protection, even considering the Supreme Courts recent creation of the 'secondary effects' doctrine. Nude-dancing case threatens free speech. Not that I agree with this moronic ruling by our wonderful Reagan/Bush appointees, but even considering the Supreme Court has been willing to undermine the First Amendment, video games are still protected. Maybe not for much longer, with the Hell hole people like you are turning this country into. (I really must get around to building a bunker, one of these days.)
The fact a few people aren't going to be able to play Daytona is unlikely to worry them.
Question: If the law says that you aren't allowed to play Datoyna, what backs that up? Is it, "please don't play Daytona," or is it more like, "If you operate an illegal arcade, you will be sent to prison where you will be subjected to torture and death." Note, I'm not picking on Malaysian prisons, torture and death are a big part of the American prison system. Heck, Malaysian prisons might actually be better than US prisons, if rape and sexual abuse aren't considered a "normal and just" part of "rehabilitation" as it is in the prison system of the "freedom loving" (tee-hee) United States. They don't have to be, you know, we Americans have just decided that the best way to turn criminals into responsible citizens is to have them gang raped for a few years, work out in the prison weight room during that time until they get nice and strong, and then turn them loose on the US population. I certainly consider that a sane way to run a criminal justice system. (please note sarcasm in preceeding sentence) It amazes me that the American population, en masse seem to have decided we want torture and rape as part of our criminal justice system, but then we still get offended when one of our citizens goes to Singapore and has to get caned. But, I mean, America is a great place to live which has no problems, right?
So, basically, if somebody in Malaysia decides to earn money by operating an illegal arcade out of his van, what will happen to him? In China, middle aged ladies are beaten by police and killed in prison because they want to do Falun Gong breathing exercises.
I think Amnesty International is more concerned with state torture and judicial murder, not so much the crimes that these countries use as an excuse for their Draconian punishments.
Of course doing this to Half Life now reminds me of what the German censors did to Cabinet of Dr. Caligari a few generations earlier in Weimar Germany. Half Life is a game that makes a not-exactly-subtle point about the US government (about as subtle as the one The X-Files makes, but it happens to be something I believe), and it is making it about the US government today. (Which is, if the US government ordered its troops to fire on its own innocent citizens, would they do it? The game answers with a resounding yes!) By replacing the human troops with robot drones, they are placing the game in the future, which mutes its political message.
Ok, I was reading about the fact that they have similar laws in China. It didn't eliminate arcades though, but it proved to be a boon for organized crime in China. (Of course, the arcade owners have to make payments to the local Communist party bosses.) I don't know too much about Malayasia, but I know that in my wife's native Thailand, they are prudish about movies and stuff, and censor them, and prostitution is technically illegal but...
This stuff is all on the surface, and all aimed mostly at the upper class Thai's, like my wife and her family. However (and I'm not trying to embarrass the Thai government into "cleaning things up" here I'm a Libertarian and I think prostitution ought to be decriminalized), Bangkok is not exactly known as the puritan capitol of Asia.
Incidentally, my wife can't understand why Austin Powers is popular in the United States. My brother tried to show it to her and her cousin, and they whispered to me part way through it "can we stop watching the movie now." Of course, it didn't help when I kept telling them that he was a popular sex symbol in the US and considered the ideal man...
Incidentally, in the United States, we have de facto restriction in a lot of areas of the country over what types of games are allowed in arcades. Games which use plastic guns are particularly targetted, as part of the propaganda campaign against the Second Amendment. Unfortunately, restrictions like these are very bad for arcades in the US, which seems to be a constantly shrinking market.
Basically, the Malaysian government is just more honest than the US government. If the US government wants something banned or censored, they just make the companies pretend they are doing it of their own free will. Of course, the companies wouldn't do it if people didn't threaten legislation, regulation, and litigation against them. The American people let the government get away with this, because we like to preserve the illusion in our country that the Bill of Rights means something and that we are freer than the rest of the world (yeah, life might be better in the US but we are not particularly free, we are just a fairly rich country.)
So, don't worry about the condescension you'll probably hear from/.ers on this, things are bad all over. If they aren't as bad here yet as they are in Malaysia (and they may be) its just a matter of time till they are.
I'm kind of sick of people claiming that people in the US should just shut up about the grim, Puritan Jihad that's going on in this country because other parts of the world are "so much worse." First of all, I happen to know that you make trade offs for living in the US, and that there are good things you give up as well as bad. Mainly, though, I think that the grim, humorless people who are rising to power in this country are a real threat. Both Weimer Germany, before Hitler, and Russia after the Liberal revolution, before Lenin, were temporarily free societies. All it takes to destroy that is a group of grim, humorless fanatics who are willing to use force against the populace to "save them from themselves."
These are the people behind all the Culture War crusades currently going on, and these people are dangerous.
This is sort of similar to asking who major officials in the Chinese communist party are answerable too. The answer is, "The people, but they'll have to be really mad and include a considerable portion of the army and police force or else they'll be crushed."
Whenever I look at the situation today, I think of Omni Consumer Products in the movie Robocop. To quote Clarence Bodakker when he was trying to stop Robocop from beating him to death, "I work for Dick Jones. Dick Jones is OCP. OCP runs the cops, you're a cop."
The cops basically do work for OCP nowadays, and not for the people. They aren't protecting or serving anyone but their corporate masters in matters like these. Every year, the corruption destroying the United States government spreads like a cancer, but the people remain complacent.
Plenty of other countries have complacent populations in the face of government corruption, in fact many countries are far more opressed by their governments than United States citizens are. But the massive corruption in the US government is dangerous because the US is a powerful country with a large standing army. If the US is a defacto "world's policeman," feeling that it has the right to use its troops whenever it feels it is morally justifiable, what can the rest of that world do if that policeman is corrupt?
..because Sony did it with the Playstation. I fixed my Playstation so that it would be region free. (Ok, when I opened it up and I saw how complicated it was, I sent it to my friend and he soldered the chip in for me.) Everything went well for a while, I was no longer held hostage to American taste in games, American senseless censorship, stuff like that. I hadn't yet concieved the idea that region coding was morally wrong, so I was still throwing money into the gaping maw of the hideous monster that is $ony.
Then, one day, I decided to buy Dino Crisis (the American version, no less). I stuck the disk in my PSX, and I got some Japanese text, which I assume said, "How dare you try to play our disk in your region free player, stupid consumer-drone!" inside a "not" sign (a circle with a slash through it, like the Ghostbusters symbol or a No Smoking sign.)
At that point I mostly stopped buying PS games, and I'm only planning on buying one more (Lunar: Eternal Blue it has sentimental value from my SegaCD days, and my/. user ID was taken from it). I'll also never buy any more Sony products, or any encrypted DVDs, period.
My advice to everyone in my family was to just not buy a DVD player. (I will certainly never own such a thing myself, under any concievable circumstances.) They completely ignored me and dismissed me as a crackpot (which is what they do with most of my crusades) and bought a DVD player anyway. They conceeded many of my points, but they figure that if legal DVD stuff becomes a problem, they'll be able to find illegal DVD stuff on the black market. (Amazingly enough they are probably right, I know three people who can get black market goods myself, mostly from them bragging about it.)
I think the best way to avoid falling into the trap of giving money to Sony, AOL/Time/Warner, and the rest of the MPAA/RIAA racketeers is to not buy their players. If I had known when I bought my Playstation what I know now about Sony, I would never have bought their game console in the first place, and wouldn't have so many PSX games. (Darn it, I've always been one of these fools who legally purchases copies of games! If I were crooked, I could have just got my friend to sell me cheap CD-R versions. I guess the old saying is true, "Never give a sucker an even break!" But then I'm still living in a dream world where game designers are decent guys like Mark Blank or Dan Bunten, not evil multinationals like Sony.)
Boycott's don't work, or at least I'd like to know one case where a boycott has actually worked against a multinational (the ones from the Christian Right don't count, they succeed sometimes because of intimidation and scare tactics, not purely because the member of the AFA aren't going to buy a product. i.e. Take the show off or the FCC will get you, etc..) But at least if I opt out of a corrupt system, I don't have to feel like I'm getting screwed over. Incidentally, in an interview in a new issue of PC Gamer, a game designer sounded pretty upset about a deal he made with Sony. He basically ended by saying, "But it's Sony, what can you do, expect bend over and like it." That sentiment can pretty much be aimed at all multinationals, like AOL/Time/Warner. However, they still haven't enacted laws to force us to buy their infernal gadgets, so we can still decide not to live under their laws.
The biggest problem Linux, BSD, and Apple all face is the fact that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." For example, my shop now requires everyone to use a standard Win2000 machine (incidentally, the switch was forced before they actually had licenses). I have had arguments because I prefer to do my text editing in Notetab Light instead of Notepad. (I had to prove that formatting problems Notepad was showing could be sorted out by Wordpad as well as Notetab Light.) Even our graphics artist has an idle Win2000 machine sitting under his desk while he does all his work on the Mac Powerbook the company also bought for him.
The reason for this is an irrational fear my new boss has about anything non-Micros~1. You won't convince him (I believe its because he feels he would be at a disadvantage in a non-MS shop and might lose his position.)
He's the same way about programming languages. The guy who he replaced was a staunch old time UNIX guy and Linux advocate. Well, some of the computers we inherited from that time are still running Linux, and they have various useful system utilities written in TCL. One of the tasks I was recently assigned was replacing these TCL scripts with Java programs that would do the exact same things. Why? Because my boss knows Java and doesn't want to learn anything about TCL or any other language except for Visual Basic.
Bill Gates is potrayed as a Borg for a reason you know, Micros~1 doesn't mainly sell operating systems, business applications, games or programming tools. No, what they really sell is conformity, they've figured out how to harness the great forces of social inertia and fear of innovation for their own benefit.
I think it is the general feeling among Americans that Swedish women are sexy, coupled with the fact that a famous H-anime series (H referring to the erotic in Japanese) is called Cream Lemon and angel is common in the titles of both H and non-H anime and manga is what he meant.
So, if he had said, corny H-anime, it would probably have been less confusing... or not.
If a Canadian politician had called a member of the media a "major league asshole" he'd be cleaning his desk out within a week.
Remember, though, Canadians are more polite in their use of language than Americans, generally speaking.... for an American that's like calling someone a jerk.
I'm a big fan of the historical novels of Colleen McCullough, such as The First Man in Rome and others. One of the things that shows up in these historical novels a lot is the phenomenon of the educated Greek slave who had sold himself (it was almost always a him) into slavery for several reasons. While the slave had given up his freedom, in many ways he had made a smart decision:
1. His life was better than his country of origin, where poverty was a problem.
2. He could earn money (yes, even as a slave) and eventually hope for manumission(freedom).
3. If freed (and this was his expectation), he would be a Roman citizen. This meant he would be part of the most important country in the world, be sure to have access to all the great technological advances in the Western World, could vote in elections, and have access to social welfare programs (such as the state wheat that was the right of every Roman citizen).
But slavery was risky, a slave could have a really bad owner. An owner didn't have to free him, and could have him whipped or crucified. However, despite all this, Rome did not have a shortage of well educated Greek slaves who had become slaves voluntarily.
I guess that the rewards of possibly getting Roman citizenship and a much better life outweighed the risk of getting a really horrible owner.
Although I know that Coca-Cola likes to take credit for inventing the modern image of Santa Claus, I think they are wrong. This description of Santa:
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.
His eyes -- how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.
I think it is more the case of a corporation taking a popular mythological figure, who can't object, being mythological, and having him hawk their cheesy wares.
Sort of like what some companies have been doing with God lately...
See the difference between Sony and Sega is that Sega (Service Games), much like Nintendo (which were a playing card company before they got into video games) is first and foremost a game company.
Sony is a consumer electronics mega-company, they remind me of OCP in the Robocop movies. One of the things I hate about their new console is it is obviously an "everything box" and not primarily a game machine.
I'm pretty depressed about the whole console scene lately, the last time a more generally oriented consumer company (Time/Warner, after they purchased Atari) took over the industry, it was a disaster.
Of course, Sega takes part of the blame. The whole SegaCD/32X/Saturn debacle just ended up alienating consumers who didn't like spending money on systems just to see them abandoned.
Sega isn't in as much trouble as people think, what's really killing them is: a) Third party developers abandoning them for Sony (just like back in the days when you made games for Nintendo, or else) and b)People who wait for a system from Sony to come out despite all the negative things I've read about the Japanese rollout.(Were the Japanese beta-testers or is it just a bad system? Either way, it's pretty clear that if the same console were rolled out by a no-name company it would have already been sunk in the market.)
Someone moderated the above post as Off Topic. It is not Off Topic because the person who posted the above article wrote something sarcastic about only 9 people having bought Dreamcasts.
Basically, I think this post was modded down by a Sony partisan. If this were ordinary "my console of choice is better than your console of choice" childishness, I might leave it alone, but considering that Sony is a ringleader in both the RIAA, MPAA it disgusts me that a moderator obviously wants to see them with a monopoly in the console market as well. Can't anyone see past their stupid console partisanship and see that Sony is an evil, destructive force in American politics and society? I believe that PS 2 is going to be junk, and that Sony plans to leverage their marketshare to get developers to abandon competing consoles. Sega certainly isn't perfect as a corporation, but they aren't nearly in the same league of either power or nastiness as Sony.
I disagree about Seaman, though. I think Parappa the Wrapper was considered just as risky and experimental when it was released as Seaman is.
Is the United States moving toward a one party system, in which there are no significant differences between the candidates from either party? People talk about Clinton's move to the center, but what they really mean is that he moved to the right. Gore is even further to the right than Clinton, and Lieberman seems (to me, anyway) even further to the right than Gore.
I'm a Libertarian and I'll be voting for Harry Browne. I think the reason why I finally decided to become a Libertarian is because it seems like their is a growing anti-literacy lobby in this country. There seem to be people around who simply oppose to much book learning and independant thought, and there numbers seem to be growing. Has anyone ever looked at the American Family Associations Website? I think that one of the things that disturbs me most about their condemnation of Harry Potter (for example) is that he shows "disrespect to authority figures." I have heard this argument for censorship in at least on other context, in the case of the early 20th Century German film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The film originally had a twist ending, in which the evil doctor controlling the murderer turned out to be the head of the local insane asylum. However, German censors decided that this sent the wrong message, and forced the film makers to add a second twist ending, in which the whole story turned out to be a delusion of a mental patient and the asylum administrator was actually kindly. The strong belief in German society at that time, that authority figures should never be questioned, was one of the defenses later used at the Nuremberg Trials.
Obviously, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman are not Nazi's, but then neither were the German censors who altered Cabinet. These censors were merely part of a system that made someone like Hitler possible.
I'm sure that someone will point out that Reverand Wildmon, of the AFA, and his ilk are part of the right and therefore supporters of George W. Bush. I do not dispute this, I know Bush was trying to curry favor with these people during his appearances at places like Bob Jones University, where inter-racial dating was forbidden because it was "against scripture" (a low point in American politics).
I'm glad I'm a Libertarian, I don't have to make a choice between two tickets that support censorship.
Slashdot Mirror
Federal judge dismisses lawsuit against movie, video game makers
But the times, they are a changin' Judge Upholds Video Game Ban
To quote the judge:
Superstition has won the day, and the arcade business in Indianapolis will suffer for it. Let's say you are one of those people who believe in this fascist law. Can you argue, with a straight face, that this is a fair way to handle arcades, when movie theaters and Blockbuster (which does rent R-Rated tapes, after all) aren't subject to the same Draconian laws?No what's really happening here is the arcade industry is being deliberately targetted for destruction by the forces of ignorance.
America, a Free Country? Not anymore.
Vote Libertarian!
sounds like Are you a Red Dupe? from the fifties. (Although I should point out that the communist quotes in the AD are self-contradictory... you have to read all of them.)
Sick of joyless fanatics who claim, "since this is a technical forum, you damned idiot, not a pulpit for you to expound your personal political views" when it is clearly not, as the point has often been made that it is "News for Nerds, Stuff that matters?"
Would you like to look up from your monitor once in a while, and talk about issues in the wide world that are destroying your Liberty, without having to focus in on computers all the time?
Well, try Libertyboard.
Of course, since it's an open board, I can't promise you'll never see a joyless, unhappy poster trying to silence political views that he disagrees with. However, he would have to come up with a better excuse for his desire to silence opposing views than "it's a technical forum."
The truth is, this crusade was created by the big media for two reasons:
1. Encouraging public hysteria always brings ratings.
2. Anything which might cause a person to go to the movies less or watch TV less, which is not also a profit generator for big media, is the enemy.
Think about it.
The truth is that the Republicans decide, after the string of school shootings that the best way for them to defend their positions on guns was to ratchet up the Culture War. The Democratic presidential ticket is just as right wing on the Culture War as the Republicans are, there is no significant difference between the two tickets on the First Amendment.
I'm probably tilting at windmills with my Libertarian vote, but as far as I'm concerned a vote for the two party system is a wasted vote, and I don't feel like sitting home on election day feeling irrelevant as the Democratic and Republican sharks circle around the US Constitution deciding with part to chomp off next.
As a game developer recently wrote in Computer Gaming monthly, games are going to take the fall for Hollywood, because Hollywood has more clout with the old men than the Gaming Industry. The studies which supposedly "prove" that violent video-games lead to violence in real life are junk science (see my sig), but that won't matter to people who believe that creation science is not an oxymoron. (Or even to some others, who may scoff at people who believe in creation science but will choose to believe the nonsense behind these studies because it fits in with their world view, or gets them money and political power.)
America is not a free country, it is only free compared to worse places. When you go to a movie, you don't see the same one they can show unedited in Europe. When you play a game, you play a different version than they play in Japan. It's a new age of censorship, with the government putting legal muscle behind region based censorship.
We will continue to hear, from the fascists who now populate the Republican and Democratic parties that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." If you can put aside the reality of life in modern America and believe that, I envy you. Unfortunately, I am incapable of destroying my powers of reason to the point where I can agree with such a statement.
We are heading into a new dark age, and no one is putting on the brakes. Where is a public voice against censorship? Where is a cry for reason over emotion?
Not in American political life, that's for sure!
My suggestion to anyone with one of those crummy OEM copies of Win is to try the this technique when you go to reinstall Win from the recovery disk. I mean, how many different ways are there to screw the customer that don't require something really fancy? I'll bet dollars to donuts that other Win95/98 PC manufacturers use this technique (that a pre-existing, correctly named partition must be on the hard drive) to appease Sauron and his Nazguls.
Of course, one day we will have to eliminate Windows from Linux PCs altogether.
Unfortunately, that day isn't here yet. Its coming soon, though.
We all know what this article is for. Basically, it's "let's calm down all the young people who are mad at me so they won't vote for Nader or some other non-Two party candidate come election day. That way, the day after I'm elected I can resume the war against the First Amendment, and we in the Democratic party won't have to worry about a credible alternative to the two party system."
Of course, I'm a Browne voter myself, but I don't think Harry is even on Lieberman's radar scope.
Anyone who's against video game censorship enough that it was going to effect their vote who votes for Gore/Lieberman based on this is an idiot. I have a bridge in New York I'd like to sell these voters.
Anyone who's worried that Lieberman has really sold out his right wing, pro-censorship ideals should rest assured. This is just a cynical election year ploy, sometimes you have to pretend to be something you aren't to win elections. Don't worry, once Lieberman is in, the video game industry will suffer for it.
But I had fun telling my wife when she saw a big picture of Austin on the cover of some TV magazine. She asked, "Who's that?" (This was before she saw any of the movie.) I said, "He's a famous sex symbol in the United States, women love him and men want to be him." :)
As she saw images of Austin everywhere it became much easier to convince her of this...
Seeing the movie hasn't changed it, most of the jokes went right over her head, and she didn't even watch the whole thing.
Understand though, my wife's idea of what an attractive man looks like skews away from the American norm by quite a bit. She doesn't get the whole grunge look... so it was plausible to her. Nice short hair (on a man), clean shaven and neat, well kept clothing are her idea of nice looking style. Basically, a "square" look that would fit in with the 1950's. Most of our popular American rock groups do not dress like this, though...
Besides, Mr. Powers sort of is a sex symbol, yes? He certainly sees a lot of "action."
Sigh... I love my wife...
Re:Get a Life
Is one of the most intelligent things I have ever read on Slashdot.
The only thing I'd add to it is that I think the reason why we have so much freedom today is that greater technology automatically me greater ability for bloody-minded busybodies to interfere in the lives of complete strangers.
Unfortunately, without some new technology that actually enhances freedom (cheap, reliable spaceflight?) to counter our current control-every-aspect-of-an-individual's life technology, I don't think we can go back to the good old days...
I really prefer the Age of Reason myself, especially to the coming Age of Eternal Darkness... (brought to you by a partnership between Sony and the American Family Association, tm, all rights reserved.)
Where do you get your definition of "right" and "not a right?"
There are only two kinds of rights. Inalienable rights, which are rights which can't be taken away. For example, the government can't order you to commit suicide, without using the threat of death or a fate worse than death against you. This is why we call the Right to Life an inalienable right.
All other rights are enshrined in law. In our society, rights are defined in the constitution and interpreted by the courts. The most recent interpretations by the courts on video games, Federal judge dismisses lawsuit against movie, video game makers have been that video games are not responsible for murders committed by people who happened to play one once. This being the case, video games are supposed to fall, legally, well within the realm of our First Amendment Rights protection, even considering the Supreme Courts recent creation of the 'secondary effects' doctrine. Nude-dancing case threatens free speech. Not that I agree with this moronic ruling by our wonderful Reagan/Bush appointees, but even considering the Supreme Court has been willing to undermine the First Amendment, video games are still protected. Maybe not for much longer, with the Hell hole people like you are turning this country into. (I really must get around to building a bunker, one of these days.)
Oh, right, I keep forgetting the American mantra. If we Americans keep pretending really hard that we live in a free and enlightened country, it will be true no matter what the pesky facts say...
Of course, in the episode that achieved that by executing all the unhappy citizens.
Ah well, a small price to pay for order, eh?
So, basically, if somebody in Malaysia decides to earn money by operating an illegal arcade out of his van, what will happen to him? In China, middle aged ladies are beaten by police and killed in prison because they want to do Falun Gong breathing exercises.
I think Amnesty International is more concerned with state torture and judicial murder, not so much the crimes that these countries use as an excuse for their Draconian punishments.
Typical.
This stuff is all on the surface, and all aimed mostly at the upper class Thai's, like my wife and her family. However (and I'm not trying to embarrass the Thai government into "cleaning things up" here I'm a Libertarian and I think prostitution ought to be decriminalized), Bangkok is not exactly known as the puritan capitol of Asia.
Incidentally, my wife can't understand why Austin Powers is popular in the United States. My brother tried to show it to her and her cousin, and they whispered to me part way through it "can we stop watching the movie now." Of course, it didn't help when I kept telling them that he was a popular sex symbol in the US and considered the ideal man...
Incidentally, in the United States, we have de facto restriction in a lot of areas of the country over what types of games are allowed in arcades. Games which use plastic guns are particularly targetted, as part of the propaganda campaign against the Second Amendment. Unfortunately, restrictions like these are very bad for arcades in the US, which seems to be a constantly shrinking market.
Basically, the Malaysian government is just more honest than the US government. If the US government wants something banned or censored, they just make the companies pretend they are doing it of their own free will. Of course, the companies wouldn't do it if people didn't threaten legislation, regulation, and litigation against them. The American people let the government get away with this, because we like to preserve the illusion in our country that the Bill of Rights means something and that we are freer than the rest of the world (yeah, life might be better in the US but we are not particularly free, we are just a fairly rich country.)
So, don't worry about the condescension you'll probably hear from /.ers on this, things are bad all over. If they aren't as bad here yet as they are in Malaysia (and they may be) its just a matter of time till they are.
I'm kind of sick of people claiming that people in the US should just shut up about the grim, Puritan Jihad that's going on in this country because other parts of the world are "so much worse." First of all, I happen to know that you make trade offs for living in the US, and that there are good things you give up as well as bad. Mainly, though, I think that the grim, humorless people who are rising to power in this country are a real threat. Both Weimer Germany, before Hitler, and Russia after the Liberal revolution, before Lenin, were temporarily free societies. All it takes to destroy that is a group of grim, humorless fanatics who are willing to use force against the populace to "save them from themselves."
These are the people behind all the Culture War crusades currently going on, and these people are dangerous.
Whenever I look at the situation today, I think of Omni Consumer Products in the movie Robocop. To quote Clarence Bodakker when he was trying to stop Robocop from beating him to death, "I work for Dick Jones. Dick Jones is OCP. OCP runs the cops, you're a cop."
The cops basically do work for OCP nowadays, and not for the people. They aren't protecting or serving anyone but their corporate masters in matters like these. Every year, the corruption destroying the United States government spreads like a cancer, but the people remain complacent.
Plenty of other countries have complacent populations in the face of government corruption, in fact many countries are far more opressed by their governments than United States citizens are. But the massive corruption in the US government is dangerous because the US is a powerful country with a large standing army. If the US is a defacto "world's policeman," feeling that it has the right to use its troops whenever it feels it is morally justifiable, what can the rest of that world do if that policeman is corrupt?
Then, one day, I decided to buy Dino Crisis (the American version, no less). I stuck the disk in my PSX, and I got some Japanese text, which I assume said, "How dare you try to play our disk in your region free player, stupid consumer-drone!" inside a "not" sign (a circle with a slash through it, like the Ghostbusters symbol or a No Smoking sign.)
At that point I mostly stopped buying PS games, and I'm only planning on buying one more (Lunar: Eternal Blue it has sentimental value from my SegaCD days, and my /. user ID was taken from it). I'll also never buy any more Sony products, or any encrypted DVDs, period.
My advice to everyone in my family was to just not buy a DVD player. (I will certainly never own such a thing myself, under any concievable circumstances.) They completely ignored me and dismissed me as a crackpot (which is what they do with most of my crusades) and bought a DVD player anyway. They conceeded many of my points, but they figure that if legal DVD stuff becomes a problem, they'll be able to find illegal DVD stuff on the black market. (Amazingly enough they are probably right, I know three people who can get black market goods myself, mostly from them bragging about it.)
I think the best way to avoid falling into the trap of giving money to Sony, AOL/Time/Warner, and the rest of the MPAA/RIAA racketeers is to not buy their players. If I had known when I bought my Playstation what I know now about Sony, I would never have bought their game console in the first place, and wouldn't have so many PSX games. (Darn it, I've always been one of these fools who legally purchases copies of games! If I were crooked, I could have just got my friend to sell me cheap CD-R versions. I guess the old saying is true, "Never give a sucker an even break!" But then I'm still living in a dream world where game designers are decent guys like Mark Blank or Dan Bunten, not evil multinationals like Sony.)
Boycott's don't work, or at least I'd like to know one case where a boycott has actually worked against a multinational (the ones from the Christian Right don't count, they succeed sometimes because of intimidation and scare tactics, not purely because the member of the AFA aren't going to buy a product. i.e. Take the show off or the FCC will get you, etc..) But at least if I opt out of a corrupt system, I don't have to feel like I'm getting screwed over. Incidentally, in an interview in a new issue of PC Gamer, a game designer sounded pretty upset about a deal he made with Sony. He basically ended by saying, "But it's Sony, what can you do, expect bend over and like it." That sentiment can pretty much be aimed at all multinationals, like AOL/Time/Warner. However, they still haven't enacted laws to force us to buy their infernal gadgets, so we can still decide not to live under their laws.
The reason for this is an irrational fear my new boss has about anything non-Micros~1. You won't convince him (I believe its because he feels he would be at a disadvantage in a non-MS shop and might lose his position.)
He's the same way about programming languages. The guy who he replaced was a staunch old time UNIX guy and Linux advocate. Well, some of the computers we inherited from that time are still running Linux, and they have various useful system utilities written in TCL. One of the tasks I was recently assigned was replacing these TCL scripts with Java programs that would do the exact same things. Why? Because my boss knows Java and doesn't want to learn anything about TCL or any other language except for Visual Basic.
Bill Gates is potrayed as a Borg for a reason you know, Micros~1 doesn't mainly sell operating systems, business applications, games or programming tools. No, what they really sell is conformity, they've figured out how to harness the great forces of social inertia and fear of innovation for their own benefit.
So, if he had said, corny H-anime, it would probably have been less confusing... or not.
1. His life was better than his country of origin, where poverty was a problem.
2. He could earn money (yes, even as a slave) and eventually hope for manumission(freedom).
3. If freed (and this was his expectation), he would be a Roman citizen. This meant he would be part of the most important country in the world, be sure to have access to all the great technological advances in the Western World, could vote in elections, and have access to social welfare programs (such as the state wheat that was the right of every Roman citizen).
But slavery was risky, a slave could have a really bad owner. An owner didn't have to free him, and could have him whipped or crucified. However, despite all this, Rome did not have a shortage of well educated Greek slaves who had become slaves voluntarily.
I guess that the rewards of possibly getting Roman citizenship and a much better life outweighed the risk of getting a really horrible owner.
I think it is more the case of a corporation taking a popular mythological figure, who can't object, being mythological, and having him hawk their cheesy wares.
Sort of like what some companies have been doing with God lately...
Sony is a consumer electronics mega-company, they remind me of OCP in the Robocop movies. One of the things I hate about their new console is it is obviously an "everything box" and not primarily a game machine.
I'm pretty depressed about the whole console scene lately, the last time a more generally oriented consumer company (Time/Warner, after they purchased Atari) took over the industry, it was a disaster.
Of course, Sega takes part of the blame. The whole SegaCD/32X/Saturn debacle just ended up alienating consumers who didn't like spending money on systems just to see them abandoned.
Sega isn't in as much trouble as people think, what's really killing them is: a) Third party developers abandoning them for Sony (just like back in the days when you made games for Nintendo, or else) and b)People who wait for a system from Sony to come out despite all the negative things I've read about the Japanese rollout.(Were the Japanese beta-testers or is it just a bad system? Either way, it's pretty clear that if the same console were rolled out by a no-name company it would have already been sunk in the market.)
Basically, I think this post was modded down by a Sony partisan. If this were ordinary "my console of choice is better than your console of choice" childishness, I might leave it alone, but considering that Sony is a ringleader in both the RIAA, MPAA it disgusts me that a moderator obviously wants to see them with a monopoly in the console market as well. Can't anyone see past their stupid console partisanship and see that Sony is an evil, destructive force in American politics and society? I believe that PS 2 is going to be junk, and that Sony plans to leverage their marketshare to get developers to abandon competing consoles. Sega certainly isn't perfect as a corporation, but they aren't nearly in the same league of either power or nastiness as Sony.
I disagree about Seaman, though. I think Parappa the Wrapper was considered just as risky and experimental when it was released as Seaman is.
I'm a Libertarian and I'll be voting for Harry Browne. I think the reason why I finally decided to become a Libertarian is because it seems like their is a growing anti-literacy lobby in this country. There seem to be people around who simply oppose to much book learning and independant thought, and there numbers seem to be growing. Has anyone ever looked at the American Family Associations Website? I think that one of the things that disturbs me most about their condemnation of Harry Potter (for example) is that he shows "disrespect to authority figures." I have heard this argument for censorship in at least on other context, in the case of the early 20th Century German film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The film originally had a twist ending, in which the evil doctor controlling the murderer turned out to be the head of the local insane asylum. However, German censors decided that this sent the wrong message, and forced the film makers to add a second twist ending, in which the whole story turned out to be a delusion of a mental patient and the asylum administrator was actually kindly. The strong belief in German society at that time, that authority figures should never be questioned, was one of the defenses later used at the Nuremberg Trials.
Obviously, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman are not Nazi's, but then neither were the German censors who altered Cabinet. These censors were merely part of a system that made someone like Hitler possible.
I'm sure that someone will point out that Reverand Wildmon, of the AFA, and his ilk are part of the right and therefore supporters of George W. Bush. I do not dispute this, I know Bush was trying to curry favor with these people during his appearances at places like Bob Jones University, where inter-racial dating was forbidden because it was "against scripture" (a low point in American politics).
I'm glad I'm a Libertarian, I don't have to make a choice between two tickets that support censorship.