Isn't it sad to see the inconsistency? Why can you look at virtual child porn but some people would say that burning a flag should be illegal? Which causes the greater social harm? I'm sorry, but I'm enough of a believer in the core principles of freedom on which the US is based to tolerate a protester burning a flag. I'm a little more uncomfortable with the thought of a sicko deriving pleasure from pictures of, say, my 11-year-old niece's head pasted on a nude adult's body. *shudder*
My only response to you is that the inconsistency results first from the fact that, as someone else pointed out, democracy and the core values thereof are HARD AS HELL to get right, and, second, from kneejerk responses that are more judicial legislation than legal analysis. In other words, we need to think -- and think very, very hard -- about these types of issues before we ask either our judges or legislators to decide things FOR US. And we need to make sure that when we finally ask them to take some sort of judicial or legislative action that they are extremely well educated about the substantive issues at stake rather than any political ones.
There's a pretty good debate lurking in there about whether "entirely content neutral" means what it says or, like "strict scrutiny" is sometimes malleable to meet a legal goal. After all, at one point the Court said that a ban on nude dance clubs was a valid restriction because it pertained to the state's police power (public safety, morality, etc.), and was not a content-based restriction on nude dancing as such.
So, by the Court's earlier shenanigans, a party might only have to show that banning GTA:VC would prevent violence and thereby serve the state's compelling interest in maintaining public safety through the least restrictive alternative (of course, a ban probably wouldn't be the least restrictive alternative, if a strong disclaimer on the box and at load time could be shown to be sufficient for reasonable persons).
As for what you blockquoted, I was making a political point, not a legal one: folks, voters, those people who don't really care that much about enthusiastic democracy, might get it in their heads that video games are just about a bunch of sniveling computer geeks and not worthy of the same protection as "A Modest Proposal" or flag-burning.
One tiny disagreement: actual incitement probably would NOT be protected, any more than inciting a mob to violence would be.
Aside from that, excellent response. And, you're absolutely right, the container probably wouldn't matter. But I want to pound into people's heads that we're not talking about banning a game here, we're talking about banning the ideas contained in the game. Simplifying the debate simply to a kneejerk reaction against banning games makes it too damn easy for the other side to diminish the pro-speech arguments.
Maybe it's too subtle a distinction, but I think it's critical, for the same reason that it's critical to distinguish between guns and bad gun users, or between police officers and illegal searches: the instrumentality and the act are not the same thing, and if anyone thinks that yanking this game will actually deal with the handful of mentally-unbalanced people who would interpret the message to be actual incitement, they're wrong. Those poor, misguided souls would find another way to lose touch with reality.
All programs may be speech, but not all programs are protected speech, any more than any words that come out of your mouth are protected. If you yell "Fire!" in a burning theater, you're going to jail. If you decrypt and rip a copyrighted DVD with DeCSS... Well, the first result is decidedly mixed feelings.
Guns are legal (in the US) even though they can be used for illegal purposes. DeCSS... does it have any legitimate legal uses? Every bit of my concept of reality screams that yes, it does, if only to allow people to view legally purchased DVDs on legally purchased hardware with legally developed operating systems that just happen not to have any legally developed software to play DVDs. On the other hand, every bit of my concept of reality screams that assisted suicide should be legal, but it's not, is it? Sometimes what is legal does not coincide with what is right (it's legal to use the death penalty, and many don't think that's right; it's legal to have an abortion, and many people don't think that's right; it's illegal to use pot, and many think pot is no different from alcohol).
This is somewhat offtopic, but you asked what I thought about DeCSS and all software being speech. The short answer goes back to where I started: it's probably speech, but it may not be protected speech.
*snicker* And then we eat their babies? Or is it our babies? I get confused....
See, benzapp (unless I'm wildly mistaken, heh) gets the fantasy-reality thing.
Me, I'm just waiting for Doom III to come out... I've been feeling morally ambiguous about whether I should slaughter any demons I come across, so I need the game to tell me.
Actually, I'd say that both should be protected because they're so clearly works of fantasy. The court, however, is going to be grappling with whether a participatory environment (actual incitement, shall we say) differs from a non-participatory one (inferred incitement?). I'm not a judge, but that seems to be one of the key distinctions. Again, if I were a judge, I would probably say that the message, while distasteful, is not an incitement to do actual violence and that any violence which results from playing the game would be an unforeseeable result of the game's publication. After all, most of the judges on the bench today probably grew up playing cowboys and Indians, and I doubt they have any institutional hatred of Native Americans merely because they participated in a participatory fantasy (sorry for the repetition of words).
No, for me, personally, the issue is exactly the same as the Hustler-Jerry Falwell dispute, where the court decided the Hustler ad was clear fantasy. Anyone who thought Larry Flynt actually thought that Falwell had intercourse with his mother was not reasonable.
Hell, Methuseus, if we took all immersion out of fiction we'd be left with a pile of howto manuals for murder, etc., which to me would be FAR more damaging than a wholly immersive fantasy world that you know is fantasy.:)
Don't even get me started about America's Army. (And, just to get this cleared up right away, I'm on your side.) To me, America's Army blurs the dividing line that GTA:VC does not. It's very clear to me that GTA:VC is, at worst, a way to live out a terrible fantasy (mindless, consequence-free killing). America's Army seems to want to channel that killing instinct and desire into something that is very, very close to the real world and, in fact, should ideally result in people signing up to do it for real.
No, you're absolutely right. I addressed this in another reply, but I was merely drawing the distinction between the game as speech and the game's contents as speech. To me, no, a game isn't speech.
But you're absolutely right to bring up America's Army because it is so insidiously evil. Getting inside the heads of kids with a giveaway that depicts realistic combat, and using that as a recruiting tool? Hell, if that's not incitement to violence I don't know what is. I support the US military and the men and women who serve, but, to me, America's Army is a desperate and wrong-headed tool completely against the principles on which I thought the military was based (preventing war by being strong, considering war as the last alternative -- also, note I'm talking about the military here, not their political masters).
No, Comen, I agree. I completely agree. But we need to think very, very clearly about what it is that we're defending here. If too many people get it in their heads that free speech = killing Hatians, then free speech may fall in popularity.
Read farther. I said the game isn't freedom of speech, but the game may contain elements of speech.
As for Zork, I don't think there are any Grues around to object to me yelling "Kill the gr-- *MPMPH!!*:)
But, seriously, I'm a HUGE HUGE HUGE proponent of free speech, but I get worried when people confuse the vessel of expression with the expression itself. A guy was let off for wearing a jacket which said "Fuck the draft!" inside a courthouse. The jacket wasn't free speech; the message contained on the jacket was free speech. By saying a game is free speech, people run the risk of confusing the matter and a) associating valid speech with an undesirable container (nude artistic dancer) or b) associating invalid speech with a desirable container ("Kill the Hatians!" inciting real violence through a fun game). I don't necessarily disagree with you, and I'd be wholly against the banning of the game, but I just want to clarify for myself what speech is.
Oh, and as for comparing Zork to a book, a book tells you the butler did it; the game asks you actually to do it. It's a pretty major distinction to me.
Anyway, to me it's a sad lawsuit. Maybe it's doubly sad because we live in a world where killing virtual Hatians is fun, but, again, chess simulates war, so that sort of "fun" has been around a long, long time.
A game is absolutely not freedom of speech. And I'm a liberal (well, mostly). A game is a (usually) commercial attempt to engage our minds, hearts, and wallets through software. It's a device from which we derive pleasure and which, in turn, provides pleasure to the shareholders of the software company which produced it, or to the members of the open source community which did the same, whether through simple good karma or through positive uptick in the value of the company.
It is not a politically expressive act protected by the First Amendment, though it may contain protected speech within it.
Here's the thing that gives me trouble. I've played GTA:VC, and I've enjoyed it. It's fun. It's funny. It's very, very well-produced and the voice acting is some of the best I've seen in a game (hell, with that cast, I'd hope so). And it's really no worse than Scarface, Miami Vice, the Sopranos, or any other pop culture creation based in drugs and organized crime.
The difference is that you/watch/ Scarface, but you/participate in/ Vice City. You don't watch the fictional leader bash in someone's head with a baseball bat (switching movies), you choose to do it yourself, and that's where the battle-line is: Do we allow or prohibit people from living out fantasies inside a computer game? Do we say that "Kill the Hatians!" is as wrong inside a computer game as an incitement to violence as it would be in the real world? What about a fictionalized non-participatory movie about Hatians in Miami which contained the line "Kill the Hatians!"? Would that pass muster because it doesn't contain the participatory aspect of a game like Vice City?
I don't know, and really the only thing that this whole debate has caused for me is a lot of soul searching about why I should derive pleasure from killing virtual Hatians and stealing virtual cars. Great game, great gameplay, bad context.
Then again, chess simulates war.
This will indeed be an interesting case to watch. The requested damages are so small ($15k?) that it hardly seems like a frivolous lawsuit. I guess the decision will come down to whether games are considered to be passive entertainment (in the same way that a play that requires audience participation might be), or an active extension of the real world, where an incitement to kill in the virtual world may carry over into the real.
One last thought: the Supreme Court tossed out a case against Hustler magazine which had published a parody ad which, basically, said that Jerry Falwell had done incredibly bad things to his mother. The grounds? That nobody could possibly believe that the ad was serious.
Well, the funny part is that it took that many comments to find one. I mean, I thought surely we'd be suffering from a raging case of Ring Around the Slashdot for the next week or two...
I'd like to tip my hat to the slathering hordes who managed NOT to make a RoTK joke for at least 20-25 comments.
Anyway, today I likened seeing a former quasi-boss' transformation during the course of his divorce to watching the Smeagol-to-Gollum transformation (spoilers? I hope not...), so something's definitely catching...
Also, the first thing I thought of when I read "Spam Ring" was something really, really gross... like "Goatse meets Milkshake" or something... I mean, it was bad. Very bad.
(This post brought to you by ADD for Amer...oooh, pretty lights...)
You know how someone likes each other, and starts passing notes back and forth... They are crying in the back seat of a car, for their mommy to come forward
I welcome a fellow Southerner to Slashdot.
Seriously though, mixed metaphor gone all to hell dude... *shudder* That's like Luke/Leia weird.
Shit. Geekquake.
On the other hand, yes, if I called my sister FatWallet (or Best Buy, for that matter), she'd probably hit me.
I know you've been modded (unfairly) as flamebait, but it's still amazing, especially if it's been going on for a decade or more. (Plus it sounds as good as some of the hardcore stuff that people accept as music.)
I don't think it's musical, and I don't think it's good, but AT LEAST it demonstrates that a lot of human music is mechanical and rote enough that machines can be programmed to do it with live instruments (rather than by synthesizer/digitizer).
From a less cynical perspective, it's great to see a) that robots can be made to do such impressive things with instruments and b) that human hands are still sooooo much more complex and beautiful that the same sounds can be produced by human hands without a godawful collection of pumps and levers hovering tenuously over the strings.
Note to self.. don't leave comments screen open for an hour while you run to the store and then expect the rest of/. not to have answered a basic question.
Hit the "maximize" button on the toolbar. Oddly for an Apple product, that's quite unintuitive, but it's there, and the result is indeed tiny, pretty, and useful.:)
Lab Tech 1: Hey, n00b, c'mere. We've got a test for you to run. Lab Tech 2: Ok, man, what do you need me to do? Lab Tech 1: Hold this in your right hand, and when I say "go" hold it over this bunsen burner. Lab Tech 2: Ok! Lab Tech 1: *runs* Ok, n00b, do it!
CNN Anchor: At this hour, we're tracking a major fire at an industrial park outside San Jose, CA.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it sad to see the inconsistency? Why can you look at virtual child porn but some people would say that burning a flag should be illegal? Which causes the greater social harm? I'm sorry, but I'm enough of a believer in the core principles of freedom on which the US is based to tolerate a protester burning a flag. I'm a little more uncomfortable with the thought of a sicko deriving pleasure from pictures of, say, my 11-year-old niece's head pasted on a nude adult's body. *shudder*
My only response to you is that the inconsistency results first from the fact that, as someone else pointed out, democracy and the core values thereof are HARD AS HELL to get right, and, second, from kneejerk responses that are more judicial legislation than legal analysis. In other words, we need to think -- and think very, very hard -- about these types of issues before we ask either our judges or legislators to decide things FOR US. And we need to make sure that when we finally ask them to take some sort of judicial or legislative action that they are extremely well educated about the substantive issues at stake rather than any political ones.
There's a pretty good debate lurking in there about whether "entirely content neutral" means what it says or, like "strict scrutiny" is sometimes malleable to meet a legal goal. After all, at one point the Court said that a ban on nude dance clubs was a valid restriction because it pertained to the state's police power (public safety, morality, etc.), and was not a content-based restriction on nude dancing as such.
So, by the Court's earlier shenanigans, a party might only have to show that banning GTA:VC would prevent violence and thereby serve the state's compelling interest in maintaining public safety through the least restrictive alternative (of course, a ban probably wouldn't be the least restrictive alternative, if a strong disclaimer on the box and at load time could be shown to be sufficient for reasonable persons).
As for what you blockquoted, I was making a political point, not a legal one: folks, voters, those people who don't really care that much about enthusiastic democracy, might get it in their heads that video games are just about a bunch of sniveling computer geeks and not worthy of the same protection as "A Modest Proposal" or flag-burning.
You and I probably agree pretty closely on this.
One tiny disagreement: actual incitement probably would NOT be protected, any more than inciting a mob to violence would be. Aside from that, excellent response. And, you're absolutely right, the container probably wouldn't matter. But I want to pound into people's heads that we're not talking about banning a game here, we're talking about banning the ideas contained in the game. Simplifying the debate simply to a kneejerk reaction against banning games makes it too damn easy for the other side to diminish the pro-speech arguments. Maybe it's too subtle a distinction, but I think it's critical, for the same reason that it's critical to distinguish between guns and bad gun users, or between police officers and illegal searches: the instrumentality and the act are not the same thing, and if anyone thinks that yanking this game will actually deal with the handful of mentally-unbalanced people who would interpret the message to be actual incitement, they're wrong. Those poor, misguided souls would find another way to lose touch with reality.
All programs may be speech, but not all programs are protected speech, any more than any words that come out of your mouth are protected. If you yell "Fire!" in a burning theater, you're going to jail. If you decrypt and rip a copyrighted DVD with DeCSS... Well, the first result is decidedly mixed feelings.
Guns are legal (in the US) even though they can be used for illegal purposes. DeCSS... does it have any legitimate legal uses? Every bit of my concept of reality screams that yes, it does, if only to allow people to view legally purchased DVDs on legally purchased hardware with legally developed operating systems that just happen not to have any legally developed software to play DVDs. On the other hand, every bit of my concept of reality screams that assisted suicide should be legal, but it's not, is it? Sometimes what is legal does not coincide with what is right (it's legal to use the death penalty, and many don't think that's right; it's legal to have an abortion, and many people don't think that's right; it's illegal to use pot, and many think pot is no different from alcohol).
This is somewhat offtopic, but you asked what I thought about DeCSS and all software being speech. The short answer goes back to where I started: it's probably speech, but it may not be protected speech.
*snicker* And then we eat their babies? Or is it our babies? I get confused....
See, benzapp (unless I'm wildly mistaken, heh) gets the fantasy-reality thing.
Me, I'm just waiting for Doom III to come out... I've been feeling morally ambiguous about whether I should slaughter any demons I come across, so I need the game to tell me.
Actually, I'd say that both should be protected because they're so clearly works of fantasy. The court, however, is going to be grappling with whether a participatory environment (actual incitement, shall we say) differs from a non-participatory one (inferred incitement?). I'm not a judge, but that seems to be one of the key distinctions. Again, if I were a judge, I would probably say that the message, while distasteful, is not an incitement to do actual violence and that any violence which results from playing the game would be an unforeseeable result of the game's publication. After all, most of the judges on the bench today probably grew up playing cowboys and Indians, and I doubt they have any institutional hatred of Native Americans merely because they participated in a participatory fantasy (sorry for the repetition of words).
:)
No, for me, personally, the issue is exactly the same as the Hustler-Jerry Falwell dispute, where the court decided the Hustler ad was clear fantasy. Anyone who thought Larry Flynt actually thought that Falwell had intercourse with his mother was not reasonable.
Hell, Methuseus, if we took all immersion out of fiction we'd be left with a pile of howto manuals for murder, etc., which to me would be FAR more damaging than a wholly immersive fantasy world that you know is fantasy.
Don't even get me started about America's Army. (And, just to get this cleared up right away, I'm on your side.) To me, America's Army blurs the dividing line that GTA:VC does not. It's very clear to me that GTA:VC is, at worst, a way to live out a terrible fantasy (mindless, consequence-free killing). America's Army seems to want to channel that killing instinct and desire into something that is very, very close to the real world and, in fact, should ideally result in people signing up to do it for real.
No, you're absolutely right. I addressed this in another reply, but I was merely drawing the distinction between the game as speech and the game's contents as speech. To me, no, a game isn't speech.
But you're absolutely right to bring up America's Army because it is so insidiously evil. Getting inside the heads of kids with a giveaway that depicts realistic combat, and using that as a recruiting tool? Hell, if that's not incitement to violence I don't know what is. I support the US military and the men and women who serve, but, to me, America's Army is a desperate and wrong-headed tool completely against the principles on which I thought the military was based (preventing war by being strong, considering war as the last alternative -- also, note I'm talking about the military here, not their political masters).
No, Comen, I agree. I completely agree. But we need to think very, very clearly about what it is that we're defending here. If too many people get it in their heads that free speech = killing Hatians, then free speech may fall in popularity.
Read farther. I said the game isn't freedom of speech, but the game may contain elements of speech.
:)
As for Zork, I don't think there are any Grues around to object to me yelling "Kill the gr-- *MPMPH!!*
But, seriously, I'm a HUGE HUGE HUGE proponent of free speech, but I get worried when people confuse the vessel of expression with the expression itself. A guy was let off for wearing a jacket which said "Fuck the draft!" inside a courthouse. The jacket wasn't free speech; the message contained on the jacket was free speech. By saying a game is free speech, people run the risk of confusing the matter and a) associating valid speech with an undesirable container (nude artistic dancer) or b) associating invalid speech with a desirable container ("Kill the Hatians!" inciting real violence through a fun game). I don't necessarily disagree with you, and I'd be wholly against the banning of the game, but I just want to clarify for myself what speech is.
Oh, and as for comparing Zork to a book, a book tells you the butler did it; the game asks you actually to do it. It's a pretty major distinction to me.
Anyway, to me it's a sad lawsuit. Maybe it's doubly sad because we live in a world where killing virtual Hatians is fun, but, again, chess simulates war, so that sort of "fun" has been around a long, long time.
A game is absolutely not freedom of speech. And I'm a liberal (well, mostly). A game is a (usually) commercial attempt to engage our minds, hearts, and wallets through software. It's a device from which we derive pleasure and which, in turn, provides pleasure to the shareholders of the software company which produced it, or to the members of the open source community which did the same, whether through simple good karma or through positive uptick in the value of the company.
/watch/ Scarface, but you /participate in/ Vice City. You don't watch the fictional leader bash in someone's head with a baseball bat (switching movies), you choose to do it yourself, and that's where the battle-line is: Do we allow or prohibit people from living out fantasies inside a computer game? Do we say that "Kill the Hatians!" is as wrong inside a computer game as an incitement to violence as it would be in the real world? What about a fictionalized non-participatory movie about Hatians in Miami which contained the line "Kill the Hatians!"? Would that pass muster because it doesn't contain the participatory aspect of a game like Vice City?
It is not a politically expressive act protected by the First Amendment, though it may contain protected speech within it.
Here's the thing that gives me trouble. I've played GTA:VC, and I've enjoyed it. It's fun. It's funny. It's very, very well-produced and the voice acting is some of the best I've seen in a game (hell, with that cast, I'd hope so). And it's really no worse than Scarface, Miami Vice, the Sopranos, or any other pop culture creation based in drugs and organized crime.
The difference is that you
I don't know, and really the only thing that this whole debate has caused for me is a lot of soul searching about why I should derive pleasure from killing virtual Hatians and stealing virtual cars. Great game, great gameplay, bad context.
Then again, chess simulates war.
This will indeed be an interesting case to watch. The requested damages are so small ($15k?) that it hardly seems like a frivolous lawsuit. I guess the decision will come down to whether games are considered to be passive entertainment (in the same way that a play that requires audience participation might be), or an active extension of the real world, where an incitement to kill in the virtual world may carry over into the real.
One last thought: the Supreme Court tossed out a case against Hustler magazine which had published a parody ad which, basically, said that Jerry Falwell had done incredibly bad things to his mother. The grounds? That nobody could possibly believe that the ad was serious.
Who knows.
Way, way, way off topic, but that's by FAR the funniest comment of the year.
Of course, the year is exactly 20 hours old at this point, but, damn.
Oh, and White Stripes suck.
Since it's an X-Box, will it have a Green Screen of Death? Has a pretty sort of ring to it.
Alt. funny: Man, I thought CE handhelds were bulky.. there's no way I'm fitting THIS thing in my pocket.
Ok, it wasn't that funny.. meep...
Yep.. Little Boy was the first to go, but Fat Man followed in due course.
Well, the funny part is that it took that many comments to find one. I mean, I thought surely we'd be suffering from a raging case of Ring Around the Slashdot for the next week or two...
I'd like to tip my hat to the slathering hordes who managed NOT to make a RoTK joke for at least 20-25 comments.
Anyway, today I likened seeing a former quasi-boss' transformation during the course of his divorce to watching the Smeagol-to-Gollum transformation (spoilers? I hope not...), so something's definitely catching...
Also, the first thing I thought of when I read "Spam Ring" was something really, really gross... like "Goatse meets Milkshake" or something... I mean, it was bad. Very bad.
(This post brought to you by ADD for Amer...oooh, pretty lights...)
I'm from Ohio! ....
(Red vs. Blue reference, you scoundrels!)
bullshit.
zombie TEXAS pedophiles!
(ooo, Republicans!)
*runs
I welcome a fellow Southerner to Slashdot.
Seriously though, mixed metaphor gone all to hell dude... *shudder* That's like Luke/Leia weird.
Shit. Geekquake.
On the other hand, yes, if I called my sister FatWallet (or Best Buy, for that matter), she'd probably hit me.
oh, right on. should probably enable those.
I know you've been modded (unfairly) as flamebait, but it's still amazing, especially if it's been going on for a decade or more. (Plus it sounds as good as some of the hardcore stuff that people accept as music.)
I don't think it's musical, and I don't think it's good, but AT LEAST it demonstrates that a lot of human music is mechanical and rote enough that machines can be programmed to do it with live instruments (rather than by synthesizer/digitizer).
From a less cynical perspective, it's great to see a) that robots can be made to do such impressive things with instruments and b) that human hands are still sooooo much more complex and beautiful that the same sounds can be produced by human hands without a godawful collection of pumps and levers hovering tenuously over the strings.
I for one welcome my new lead underpants.
(gotta protect the boys)
Note to self.. don't leave comments screen open for an hour while you run to the store and then expect the rest of /. not to have answered a basic question.
*kicks self in balls*
Hit the "maximize" button on the toolbar. Oddly for an Apple product, that's quite unintuitive, but it's there, and the result is indeed tiny, pretty, and useful. :)
Yeh, especially since everyone was in black & white back in those days. And they walked really fast.
:P
And they'd never heard of a thing called space.
*grumble-kids-grumble...
and here I was worried this was going to be some sort of pathetic..er, I mean "cute but flawed" anti-gun rant.
Lab Tech 1: Hey, n00b, c'mere. We've got a test for you to run.
Lab Tech 2: Ok, man, what do you need me to do?
Lab Tech 1: Hold this in your right hand, and when I say "go" hold it over this bunsen burner.
Lab Tech 2: Ok!
Lab Tech 1: *runs* Ok, n00b, do it!
CNN Anchor: At this hour, we're tracking a major fire at an industrial park outside San Jose, CA.