Call it co-operative journalism, open jouralism, whatever, but open source isn't just another word for mass co-operation between loosely associated people. No one is licensing "source code" in a open source like license in a blog. Maybe this sounds like nitpicking, but I find tying the two concepts together via the term "open source" to be confusing to both concepts.
There is no source code to journalism (beyond raw data), and I don't see people licensing their words on blogs under an open source license.
Slightly off topic, but if it's really performance you want, why don't people just use Postgres? It's had a much better feature set for years, and is starting to get enterprise level features. It seems like MySQL is somehow the default choice for open source projects, but as far as I can tell it offers no advantages and many disadvantages over postgres. Is it just MySQL is slightly easier to setup?
So if no one is offended, why are they doing it? All devout christians aren't alike. Some get their panties in a bunch over any mention of satan. I know one woman who was convinced celebrating halloween was tantamount to satan worship.
Why is FreeBSD listening to a bunch of vocal morons? These nuts think everything from Proctor & Gamble to Apple Computer have satanic logos. (And I believe this site is the real deal, not a hoax). This is nothing but the Political Corectness of the right. Why is anyone listening to these fanatics?
Ever heard of the Dirt Devil? How about the Sun Devils? Ever been served devils food cake at a restaraunt? The truth is there's tons of products that use devils as mascots, etc. I don't hear any sane person calling for a name change of these products/sports teams. (Insane people will complain about anything and everything, they should be ignored). The Swastika on the other hand is (outside India at least) almost universally associated with Nazi Germany. See the diference?
Only one person? That's hardly a chorus of people. Why does everything have to be decided on a lowest common demoninator of offense? If 99% don't find it offensive, screw the other 1%.
We don't hear much about the PC of the right, but this is it. PC has long been associated with idiotic bending-over-backwards to not offend causes that the left likes (minorities, disabled, etc). This seems a prime example of an organization bending to the whims of the right.
It seems just like Fox changing the name "Best damn superbowl roadshow" to "Best darn superbowl roadshow"
The chance of the GPS system failing is almost precisely the chance of general war
Or the chance of a large solar storm affecting radio transmissions. Wars also actually DO happen. You've also conveniently ignored the fallibility of GPS receivers. Don't act like this is some kind of pork-barrel project that costs billions of dollars (or in this case German Marks). Maintaining an automated lighthouse has to be about dirt cheap.
So anyone who now believes in a "public good" is a socialist? It's not about "charming lighthouses", it's about backup technology when the system fails. GPS receivers, while cheap are not infallable. The GPS system, while reliable is still vulnerable to solar storms, politics, and failed satelites.
Obviously lighthouses aren't 100% reliable either, but they aren't a single system like GPS that has the potential for the whole system to fail. Lighthouses don't rely on equipment in boats that can fail. All you need is a pair of eyes.
My venerable Abit BX6 2.0 motherboard bit the dust about 6 months ago due to faulty capacitors. I'm still a bit peaved since it wasn't a dirt-cheap motherboard.
You must have had bad luck. Everyone I've ever known who had a C-64 talks about the tank-like nature of the machine. These were all kids who dropped them down flights of stairs, spilled coke in them (worked after a cleaning), and generally abused the machines like kids do. They just don't break.
I'm afraid I don't understand your horror. Did the guy intentionally destroy the rental car? If not do you think he should have felt shamefull about it? It's not as if you're borrowing a car from your friend. Part of the money you pay for the car is to cover the risk+insurance on it.
Esp. if these people are going to be using it like a textbook, it's going to be much more memory intensive than CPU intensive......
Displaying text to a user is about as memory non-intensive as you can get. My old commodore 64 could do that just fine on a 1mhz processor and 16 bit bus. Memory intensive operations are more like 3D-graphics operations, massive database access, and probbably certain scientific simulations.
The tricky part is the hard drives. They really want to see +/- 12V.
In a sub $100 laptop you can bet a LOT of money that there's not going to be a hard drive. Flash memory would easily be the best choice for non-volatile memory.
Mars was in its closest orbit in 60,000 years when it launched, so it reached there in 7 months.
Right, as opposed to 7 months and 20 minutes. The orbits of earth and mars are fairly circular, so the closeness of the orbit of mars+earth a few years ago is only a tiny percentage closer than they get every few years.
And you've missed the point entirely. Some parents don't like violent video games, just like some parents don't like the bible. Why should the anti-video game parents get a law, and the anti-bible parents not? Your comparisons to porn, smoking, etc are irrelevant. We're talking about something in your own home which you should have some kind of control over. It's the same arugment as banning Huck Finn. Don't like your kids having access to certain media? Either trust them, or turn your house into a police state. I've never seen a Bible marketed toward children with pictures of homosexuals being abused, nor of any other glorification of things which are today considered morally wrong.
The bible does encourage people to belief homosexuality is morally wrong. I find that belief morally wrong. I'm sure there's all kinds of cartoon bible tracks encouraging people to think fornication, contraception, etc are morally wrong. I find that literature morally wrong. I'll bet you there's a bunch of Vegan nutjobs that think that anything encouraging meat eating is morally wrong. Why do your beliefs about what messages are morally wrong get to be banned from sale to kids, and mine and others don't?
What about videos of women being raped? What about videos of murder? Surely you can't believe it's healthy for children to be exposed to these things, particularly if these things glorified.
Actual videos of women being raped? Actual snuff films? I'm pretty sure those are already illegal for everyone. Children can see fake murders and rapes already on TV all the time. They don't seem to be destroyed by it. You have just about as much control over the TV as you do a video game, less actually since a video game has actual media associated with it. Anyway, you're really bluring the issue here. We aren't talking about videos of people being murdered, raped, etc, we're talking about the huge category of "violent video games", whatever that means. Is space invaders violent? Asteroids?
You've also moved away from your original argument, which was I need this law because I can't control my kids. Now it seems to be we need this law because all kids need to be protected. If violent video games are so harmfull (like smoking) shouldn't all kids be banned from them no matter what parents think? I'm pretty sure smoking is still illegal if the kid is under 18, even if the kids parents buy them and fully approve. If it's morally ambiguous and parents should decide, then it just seems to be a law to help you enforce your moral beliefs on your kids, to the detriment of everyone else.
WPA, which is the new standard, is vulnerable to a brute force attack when it is set up in 'personal mode', i.e. shared secret and not auth against a RADIUS server.
This is totally off the topic, but WPA is only vulnerable if you use short passwords. If you use passwords of 20 or greater characters, you're not vulnerable to a brute force attack. Really any symetric encryption algorithm with a poorly chosen or short password is vulnerable to an offline brute-force attack. Simply get a block of known text, a block of that text encrypted, and setup your brute force attack encrypting the known text with different passwords until you get the sample encrypted text. WPA is no different from AES in that way.
Considering that he was able to obtain a list of usernames and passwords as well as change the prices charged for WiFi access -- anything from "Free" to perhaps hundreds of dollars per hour -- he could have either caused the station to lose revenue or, at worst, jacked up the price, use others' login accounts, and maybe their credit cards would have been automatically billed without them knowing.
Holy smokes! Call the fire department!! Why does everyone get all hopped up whenever CCs are involved, as if this is the ultimate security breach and CCs normally have tight security sit in steel vaults until a computer or the internet comes along? On a daily basis you give your CC to all kinds of different businesses and low paid employees. Any one of which could get your CC # and bill it for whatever they want. Compared to normal security breaches that exist every day, this one is pretty minor. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that the GP article was just fear mongering. The whole "what could he do" thread is just scaring people with the unknown. What could he do? Not a hell of a lot.
There's a reason for police there's a reason for locks on doors, there's a reason for computer security, and there's a reason I don't leave my lunch out when my cat is in the room. Somebody's going to take advantage, and I'm going to get screwed.
If this isn't the largest piece of FUD I've seen this month, I don't know what is. Good god man, it's just wireless internet access. Get a grip. There's no magic train derailing webapp on the website. The ticketing isn't tied into the system. It's about as harmless as some idiot flooding the bathroom at the train station. A pain in the ass? Absolutely. A reason to start wondering in deeply fearfull tones "what could he do? Umm.. no.
The purpose isn't to restrict access to these games for kids whose parents who want their kids to have access to them. It's to restrict access to these games for kids whose parent don't want them to have access to them.
And again, why do you need a law to control your own kids? Are these such incompetent parents that they can't seem to control what happens in their own house? Console games are tiny now, they fit in a pocket or between the pages of a book so easily that it's becoming very difficult for parents to track their kids usage of them.
Now you're just being a bit nutty. What CD/DVD fits between the pages of a book? The kid still has to play the damn video game.. if you feel the need to control them that much don't let them have a computer/console in their room. Put video cameras up to watch them 24/7. Install some kind of auditing program on the computer or console to see what they've been playing. You act as if you're totally powerless at controlling your kids and need the goverment to step in. In any case there's a bazzilion other things that some parents don't like and have a hard time controlling. The pages in that very book where thick CDs/DVDs can presumably hide could have Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher In The Rye, or Animal Farm in them. At various times parents have wanted to ban these books because they considered them "harmfull". Why does the governent need to clamp down on this because you can't control your kid?
What about people that want to control their kids access to The Bible because it has hatefull ideas against homosexuals in it? These parents would have an even tougher time controlling their kids access to the bible.. kids could take off a dust jacket of another book to hide its identity. Hell, they even make cartoon bibles explicitly appealing to minors! I assume you'd support a law restricting the sale of bibles and christian religious materials to minors then so parents that don't want their kids to have access to such materials can be happy? If you want to see a straw man, this was one as we're talking about an act that affects only minors with respect to material that many parents don't want them having access to, which is hardly 'everyone else.'
Of course you're imposing your beliefs on other people. You support laws trying to control access to something you don't personally like. That's not imposing your beliefs on others? Hey fine, but don't complain when I start pushing for controlling things I don't like. Rush Limbaugh, Christianity, George Bush, Reality TV, new age garbage, Fox News, eco-freak literature... ban kids access to it all unless parents buy it because I don't have enough control over my own kid to stop them from seeing this. Hey, you shouldn't complain because it's not limiting anyones freedoms because you can just buy each one for your kid, right? Once again, and I feel I've been very clear on this, this isn't about me imposing beliefs on you, this is about me imposing beliefs on my kids. And I think you've been extremely evasive. Why does the government need to step in because you can't control every moment of your kids lives?
He didn't "take control of a train station" he found a way into the administrative access to the wireless network. The fact that he did this at a train station is totally irrelevant and only serves to be inflammatory "what could terrorists do with this?" nonsense. I'd say this is about the equivalent of someone finding a breach of security of pay toilets. Just because it's technical and happened at a train station doesn't make it news.
Did he find a way of stealing credit card information? I didn't see that in the summary anywhere or through skimming the article. That may be a more serious security breach, but simply being able to turn on free or password access? Big deal.
Another diatribe I hear on this matter is, "It's fantasy, kids are capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality." First, not all kids are capable of making this distinction. Frankly, not all adults are capable of making this distinction.
I guess if the kid is under the age of 6 or 8, retarded, or brain damaged you're right. Otherwise all kids have the ability to distinguish between fantasy or reality. Every time the subject of morality comes up on Slashdot (typically someone imposing their morality on someone else), people come out of the woodwork declaring that morality is all just relative.
Uhh.. maybe because the discussions center around things that ARE relative? No on disagrees that rape and murder are wrong, but many people disagree that pre-marital sex is wrong. Stop trying to hide in a strawman argument. Video games like San Andreas glorify a lifestyle that's not one I want my kids growing up believing is an acceptable life path.
If you really believe that such games make kids believe that it's "an acceptable life path" then don't let your kids play it. Why do you have to enforce your beliefs on everyone else? Not everyone believes kids are just mindless robots that believe whatever they see in a frickin video game. Whether or not you believe it, psychologists (folks with degrees on this stuff) understand that a growing child is impressionable.
Psychology is mostly a lot of hot air that changes based on which way the wind is blowing. Anyway, if the kids are impressionable then it's YOUR JOB to teach them what you want, not the governments job to restrict what some parents don't want other kids to have access too. Maybe some kids would still turn into serial killers when they grow up, even having grown up in a totally sterile environment.
Serial killers? Where did that come from? Has anyone even possibly suggested that video games cause kids to turn into serial killers? Maybe masturbation does too, or whatever else it is that you personally don't like. I, as a parent, have the right to observe my child's reactions to his or her environment, and tailor the environment my child is exposed to in order that he or she grows up to be a productive member of society, and not the kind of kid who smokes / does drugs / carjacks people.
Absolutely. But what you're saying is you want to control what other kids are exposed to to become active members of society. This only enables me to do that to a higher degree.
Uhh.. you can't do that by monitoring what video games your kid has and plays? DO you really need to affect everyone else because you can't seem to control what goes on in your own house? I'm not telling you how to raise your child, buy your child all the corruption you can if that's the decision you make, just let me have control over what sort of corruption my kid gets.
No, but you ARE trying to control what other peoples kids can buy. You can ALREADY control what sorts of "corruption" your kid gets by just looking at what game they're playing, searching their room for said "corruption", or however it is you control your kid. Please explain why the government needs to step in because you have such limited control of what goes on in your own house? This doesn't block anyone's right to free speech. It just filters people's (lack of a) right to direct their free speech at minors through those minors' parents.
It does block kids rights to free speech. That's probbably constitutional as kids have been ruled to not have full access to constitutional protection. That's really beside the point though. The underlying question is why you want to impose your beliefs on everyone else (couched in the argument that you only want to control YOUR kids)?
Re:The company should own things that concern them
on
Who Owns Weblog Content?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Thing was, we did it from keystroke logs on her comp at work (legally obtained)
Monitoring someones personal life through keystroke logging? That's probbably legal, but really falls into the arena of scumbag behaviour.
Slashdot Mirror
Call it co-operative journalism, open jouralism, whatever, but open source isn't just another word for mass co-operation between loosely associated people. No one is licensing "source code" in a open source like license in a blog. Maybe this sounds like nitpicking, but I find tying the two concepts together via the term "open source" to be confusing to both concepts.
There is no source code to journalism (beyond raw data), and I don't see people licensing their words on blogs under an open source license.
Slightly off topic, but if it's really performance you want, why don't people just use Postgres? It's had a much better feature set for years, and is starting to get enterprise level features. It seems like MySQL is somehow the default choice for open source projects, but as far as I can tell it offers no advantages and many disadvantages over postgres.
Is it just MySQL is slightly easier to setup?
So if no one is offended, why are they doing it? All devout christians aren't alike. Some get their panties in a bunch over any mention of satan. I know one woman who was convinced celebrating halloween was tantamount to satan worship.
Why is FreeBSD listening to a bunch of vocal morons? These nuts think everything from Proctor & Gamble to Apple Computer have satanic logos. (And I believe this site is the real deal, not a hoax). This is nothing but the Political Corectness of the right. Why is anyone listening to these fanatics?
Ever heard of the Dirt Devil? How about the Sun Devils? Ever been served devils food cake at a restaraunt? The truth is there's tons of products that use devils as mascots, etc. I don't hear any sane person calling for a name change of these products/sports teams. (Insane people will complain about anything and everything, they should be ignored). The Swastika on the other hand is (outside India at least) almost universally associated with Nazi Germany. See the diference?
Only one person? That's hardly a chorus of people. Why does everything have to be decided on a lowest common demoninator of offense? If 99% don't find it offensive, screw the other 1%.
We don't hear much about the PC of the right, but this is it. PC has long been associated with idiotic bending-over-backwards to not offend causes that the left likes (minorities, disabled, etc). This seems a prime example of an organization bending to the whims of the right.
It seems just like Fox changing the name "Best damn superbowl roadshow" to "Best darn superbowl roadshow"
The chance of the GPS system failing is almost precisely the chance of general war
Or the chance of a large solar storm affecting radio transmissions. Wars also actually DO happen. You've also conveniently ignored the fallibility of GPS receivers. Don't act like this is some kind of pork-barrel project that costs billions of dollars (or in this case German Marks). Maintaining an automated lighthouse has to be about dirt cheap.
And where in the short story is anything mentioned about how the rental car was destroyed intentionally?
So anyone who now believes in a "public good" is a socialist? It's not about "charming lighthouses", it's about backup technology when the system fails. GPS receivers, while cheap are not infallable. The GPS system, while reliable is still vulnerable to solar storms, politics, and failed satelites.
Obviously lighthouses aren't 100% reliable either, but they aren't a single system like GPS that has the potential for the whole system to fail. Lighthouses don't rely on equipment in boats that can fail. All you need is a pair of eyes.
My venerable Abit BX6 2.0 motherboard bit the dust about 6 months ago due to faulty capacitors. I'm still a bit peaved since it wasn't a dirt-cheap motherboard.
You must have had bad luck. Everyone I've ever known who had a C-64 talks about the tank-like nature of the machine. These were all kids who dropped them down flights of stairs, spilled coke in them (worked after a cleaning), and generally abused the machines like kids do. They just don't break.
I'm afraid I don't understand your horror. Did the guy intentionally destroy the rental car? If not do you think he should have felt shamefull about it? It's not as if you're borrowing a car from your friend. Part of the money you pay for the car is to cover the risk+insurance on it.
When the textbook publishers are controlled by the Chinese goverment, you bet they will.
Esp. if these people are going to be using it like a textbook, it's going to be much more memory intensive than CPU intensive......
Displaying text to a user is about as memory non-intensive as you can get. My old commodore 64 could do that just fine on a 1mhz processor and 16 bit bus. Memory intensive operations are more like 3D-graphics operations, massive database access, and probbably certain scientific simulations.
The tricky part is the hard drives. They really want to see +/- 12V.
In a sub $100 laptop you can bet a LOT of money that there's not going to be a hard drive. Flash memory would easily be the best choice for non-volatile memory.
Mars was in its closest orbit in 60,000 years when it launched, so it reached there in 7 months.
Right, as opposed to 7 months and 20 minutes. The orbits of earth and mars are fairly circular, so the closeness of the orbit of mars+earth a few years ago is only a tiny percentage closer than they get every few years.
And you've missed the point entirely. Some parents don't like violent video games, just like some parents don't like the bible. Why should the anti-video game parents get a law, and the anti-bible parents not? Your comparisons to porn, smoking, etc are irrelevant. We're talking about something in your own home which you should have some kind of control over. It's the same arugment as banning Huck Finn. Don't like your kids having access to certain media? Either trust them, or turn your house into a police state.
I've never seen a Bible marketed toward children with pictures of homosexuals being abused, nor of any other glorification of things which are today considered morally wrong.
The bible does encourage people to belief homosexuality is morally wrong. I find that belief morally wrong. I'm sure there's all kinds of cartoon bible tracks encouraging people to think fornication, contraception, etc are morally wrong. I find that literature morally wrong. I'll bet you there's a bunch of Vegan nutjobs that think that anything encouraging meat eating is morally wrong. Why do your beliefs about what messages are morally wrong get to be banned from sale to kids, and mine and others don't?
What about videos of women being raped? What about videos of murder? Surely you can't believe it's healthy for children to be exposed to these things, particularly if these things glorified.
Actual videos of women being raped? Actual snuff films? I'm pretty sure those are already illegal for everyone. Children can see fake murders and rapes already on TV all the time. They don't seem to be destroyed by it. You have just about as much control over the TV as you do a video game, less actually since a video game has actual media associated with it. Anyway, you're really bluring the issue here. We aren't talking about videos of people being murdered, raped, etc, we're talking about the huge category of "violent video games", whatever that means. Is space invaders violent? Asteroids?
You've also moved away from your original argument, which was I need this law because I can't control my kids. Now it seems to be we need this law because all kids need to be protected. If violent video games are so harmfull (like smoking) shouldn't all kids be banned from them no matter what parents think? I'm pretty sure smoking is still illegal if the kid is under 18, even if the kids parents buy them and fully approve. If it's morally ambiguous and parents should decide, then it just seems to be a law to help you enforce your moral beliefs on your kids, to the detriment of everyone else.
WPA, which is the new standard, is vulnerable to a brute force attack when it is set up in 'personal mode', i.e. shared secret and not auth against a RADIUS server.
This is totally off the topic, but WPA is only vulnerable if you use short passwords. If you use passwords of 20 or greater characters, you're not vulnerable to a brute force attack. Really any symetric encryption algorithm with a poorly chosen or short password is vulnerable to an offline brute-force attack. Simply get a block of known text, a block of that text encrypted, and setup your brute force attack encrypting the known text with different passwords until you get the sample encrypted text. WPA is no different from AES in that way.
Considering that he was able to obtain a list of usernames and passwords as well as change the prices charged for WiFi access -- anything from "Free" to perhaps hundreds of dollars per hour -- he could have either caused the station to lose revenue or, at worst, jacked up the price, use others' login accounts, and maybe their credit cards would have been automatically billed without them knowing.
Holy smokes! Call the fire department!! Why does everyone get all hopped up whenever CCs are involved, as if this is the ultimate security breach and CCs normally have tight security sit in steel vaults until a computer or the internet comes along? On a daily basis you give your CC to all kinds of different businesses and low paid employees. Any one of which could get your CC # and bill it for whatever they want. Compared to normal security breaches that exist every day, this one is pretty minor. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that the GP article was just fear mongering. The whole "what could he do" thread is just scaring people with the unknown. What could he do? Not a hell of a lot.
It's a question of what he could do...
There's a reason for police there's a reason for locks on doors, there's a reason for computer security, and there's a reason I don't leave my lunch out when my cat is in the room. Somebody's going to take advantage, and I'm going to get screwed.
If this isn't the largest piece of FUD I've seen this month, I don't know what is. Good god man, it's just wireless internet access. Get a grip. There's no magic train derailing webapp on the website. The ticketing isn't tied into the system. It's about as harmless as some idiot flooding the bathroom at the train station. A pain in the ass? Absolutely. A reason to start wondering in deeply fearfull tones "what could he do? Umm.. no.
The purpose isn't to restrict access to these games for kids whose parents who want their kids to have access to them. It's to restrict access to these games for kids whose parent don't want them to have access to them.
And again, why do you need a law to control your own kids? Are these such incompetent parents that they can't seem to control what happens in their own house?
Console games are tiny now, they fit in a pocket or between the pages of a book so easily that it's becoming very difficult for parents to track their kids usage of them.
Now you're just being a bit nutty. What CD/DVD fits between the pages of a book? The kid still has to play the damn video game.. if you feel the need to control them that much don't let them have a computer/console in their room. Put video cameras up to watch them 24/7. Install some kind of auditing program on the computer or console to see what they've been playing. You act as if you're totally powerless at controlling your kids and need the goverment to step in. In any case there's a bazzilion other things that some parents don't like and have a hard time controlling. The pages in that very book where thick CDs/DVDs can presumably hide could have Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher In The Rye, or Animal Farm in them. At various times parents have wanted to ban these books because they considered them "harmfull". Why does the governent need to clamp down on this because you can't control your kid?
What about people that want to control their kids access to The Bible because it has hatefull ideas against homosexuals in it? These parents would have an even tougher time controlling their kids access to the bible.. kids could take off a dust jacket of another book to hide its identity. Hell, they even make cartoon bibles explicitly appealing to minors! I assume you'd support a law restricting the sale of bibles and christian religious materials to minors then so parents that don't want their kids to have access to such materials can be happy?
If you want to see a straw man, this was one as we're talking about an act that affects only minors with respect to material that many parents don't want them having access to, which is hardly 'everyone else.'
Of course you're imposing your beliefs on other people. You support laws trying to control access to something you don't personally like. That's not imposing your beliefs on others? Hey fine, but don't complain when I start pushing for controlling things I don't like. Rush Limbaugh, Christianity, George Bush, Reality TV, new age garbage, Fox News, eco-freak literature... ban kids access to it all unless parents buy it because I don't have enough control over my own kid to stop them from seeing this. Hey, you shouldn't complain because it's not limiting anyones freedoms because you can just buy each one for your kid, right?
Once again, and I feel I've been very clear on this, this isn't about me imposing beliefs on you, this is about me imposing beliefs on my kids.
And I think you've been extremely evasive. Why does the government need to step in because you can't control every moment of your kids lives?
He didn't "take control of a train station" he found a way into the administrative access to the wireless network. The fact that he did this at a train station is totally irrelevant and only serves to be inflammatory "what could terrorists do with this?" nonsense. I'd say this is about the equivalent of someone finding a breach of security of pay toilets. Just because it's technical and happened at a train station doesn't make it news.
Did he find a way of stealing credit card information? I didn't see that in the summary anywhere or through skimming the article. That may be a more serious security breach, but simply being able to turn on free or password access? Big deal.
Another diatribe I hear on this matter is, "It's fantasy, kids are capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality." First, not all kids are capable of making this distinction. Frankly, not all adults are capable of making this distinction.
I guess if the kid is under the age of 6 or 8, retarded, or brain damaged you're right. Otherwise all kids have the ability to distinguish between fantasy or reality.
Every time the subject of morality comes up on Slashdot (typically someone imposing their morality on someone else), people come out of the woodwork declaring that morality is all just relative.
Uhh.. maybe because the discussions center around things that ARE relative? No on disagrees that rape and murder are wrong, but many people disagree that pre-marital sex is wrong. Stop trying to hide in a strawman argument.
Video games like San Andreas glorify a lifestyle that's not one I want my kids growing up believing is an acceptable life path.
If you really believe that such games make kids believe that it's "an acceptable life path" then don't let your kids play it. Why do you have to enforce your beliefs on everyone else? Not everyone believes kids are just mindless robots that believe whatever they see in a frickin video game.
Whether or not you believe it, psychologists (folks with degrees on this stuff) understand that a growing child is impressionable.
Psychology is mostly a lot of hot air that changes based on which way the wind is blowing. Anyway, if the kids are impressionable then it's YOUR JOB to teach them what you want, not the governments job to restrict what some parents don't want other kids to have access too.
Maybe some kids would still turn into serial killers when they grow up, even having grown up in a totally sterile environment.
Serial killers? Where did that come from? Has anyone even possibly suggested that video games cause kids to turn into serial killers? Maybe masturbation does too, or whatever else it is that you personally don't like.
I, as a parent, have the right to observe my child's reactions to his or her environment, and tailor the environment my child is exposed to in order that he or she grows up to be a productive member of society, and not the kind of kid who smokes / does drugs / carjacks people.
Absolutely. But what you're saying is you want to control what other kids are exposed to to become active members of society.
This only enables me to do that to a higher degree.
Uhh.. you can't do that by monitoring what video games your kid has and plays? DO you really need to affect everyone else because you can't seem to control what goes on in your own house?
I'm not telling you how to raise your child, buy your child all the corruption you can if that's the decision you make, just let me have control over what sort of corruption my kid gets.
No, but you ARE trying to control what other peoples kids can buy. You can ALREADY control what sorts of "corruption" your kid gets by just looking at what game they're playing, searching their room for said "corruption", or however it is you control your kid. Please explain why the government needs to step in because you have such limited control of what goes on in your own house?
This doesn't block anyone's right to free speech. It just filters people's (lack of a) right to direct their free speech at minors through those minors' parents.
It does block kids rights to free speech. That's probbably constitutional as kids have been ruled to not have full access to constitutional protection. That's really beside the point though. The underlying question is why you want to impose your beliefs on everyone else (couched in the argument that you only want to control YOUR kids)?
Thing was, we did it from keystroke logs on her comp at work (legally obtained)
Monitoring someones personal life through keystroke logging? That's probbably legal, but really falls into the arena of scumbag behaviour.