However, I do agree that they have the power to restrict what is available to minors, so that it then becomes the choice of the parents to determine what their kids have access to
I guess I still think that it's not the government's job to limit access, but the parents' job to control their children. I think the fact that most parents both work and spend precious little time interacting with their kids doesn't mean we solve social problems by putting more laws on the books. People want to think they can leave their children unattended in society safely. That's bizarre to me. Kids lack discipline, they often don't understand the consequences to their actions, and need adults around to guide, instruct, love, and punish them. If the adults are there, you don't need a drinking age and video game restrictions. If they aren't there, no laws are going to stop that anyway. I never had a problem getting alcohol when I was a teenager.
I wasn't saying that alternatives didn't exist to things like GTA. What I am saying is that outlawing things like that has a high cost-to-benefit ratio. Why would kids rather beat up hookers than build something? Until you go after the root of that problem, does it really matter whether they play GTA or not? Take away their PS2, and they'll go stuff fireworks in stray cats and tag buildings. And if a parent has so little control of their 8 year-old child that they can't stop them from buying GTA, then there is little the government is going to be able to do for that kid.
I'm not opposed to the idea of restricting access to violent content to minors on pure principle. I 'm opposed to it because it's a band-aid on a bullet wound. It simply doesn't work. A fascination with violence can exist quite well with or without video games, and the government would be a better servant of the people (its true role, IMHO) by working to facilitate parents, teachers, etc. to develop people of character who do not desire to beat on hookers, rather than focusing on controlling people's actions. Enforcement of laws restricting things people want doesn't work (prohibition, drug war). If you want that behavior to change, you have to change what people want.
I would much prefer to live in a society where sick, violent, awful things are readily available and people choose not to partake of them rather than one in which access is restricted by the government. Look what happened the day the Taliban fell in Kabul. Everyone went crazy, shaving off their beards, music, dancing, etc. Not that those were necessarily bad things, but the iron hand of the Ministry of Preventing Vice and Promoting Virtue was only able to push those things to just beneath the surface. They didn't promote anything but superficial conformity.
I don't understand why people seem to think that the only response the government can have to something like this is some kind of regulation outlawing or restricting or whatever.
How about concerned parents petition the government to fund non-profit educational software development? How about people who don't think kids should be playing these games do something to provide an alternative? Saying "don't" without a "do" to replace it is ineffective and possible worse than saying nothing. I've always felt that the government should spend more on encouraging good social policy in soft ways rather than enforcement. The U.S. Army put out a wildly successful video game. Why can't the U.S. Department of Education? Why can't the Library of Congress develop tools to teach kids how to do research (as opposed to clicking "I'm Feeling Lucky" on google)?
Worse is, our politicians know that playing to fear, prejudice, and hate is a much faster ticket to politicial success than carefully developing and explaining thoughtful, informed public policy to a increasingly stupider population. Look at the drug war. Success results in more people in prison. I thought the point of good long-term policy was to keep people out of prison! In my more cynical moments I think that most people want to see drug users behind bars instead getting clean and competing with them for jobs.
Hopefully DeCSS will be one more in a series of flops that will lead the media industries to more reasonable, consumer based, less technologically heavy handed solutions.
There would have to be something on the order of a "regime change" in media companies for that to happen. They have made their money for so long through tight control of the works they distribute that they are unlikely to embrace change. Also, I think there is a matter of pride. These people are too proud and stubborn to let a bunch of filthy thieves (their term) win. They would rather destroy themselves trying to stop such a thing.
Witness the near-suicidal PR that the RIAA has been engaging for the last 3 years. Who knew that much about the RIAA? They suddenly went on the offensive, and record executives are some of the most vilified people by music fans. Not a good move there. And seemed to violate common sense -- a compulsive, knee-jerk reaction rather than a sound plan based on good business sense.
If there is going to be a change, the current crop of fools will have to be replaced. There's just no way Hillary Rosen can suddenly embrace MP3 and open, unlimited subscription-based, DRM-free, music distribution and save face.
Then again, Jack Valenti adjusted quite nicely to the VCR, so maybe I'm wrong. But I have a feeling we'll be hearing from him again ("DivX is like the beltway sniper...").
In fact, I'm writing a letter to my congressman to introduce legislation to prevent any butterflies from flapping their wings in Beijing. That ought to keep any crazy weather changes from happening.
If the class is interesting then the students will stay on task, not check their email and etc.
You know, some things are just not that interesting. I would amend the above statement to say that if the class lecture is necessary to understand the material, students will pay attention (the ones that don't will suffer and either learn to pay attention or fail). In most of my engineering classes, the material is all in the book, but the professor was instrumental in bringing out the concepts clearly. And there were classes for which the lectures were not helpful in understanding the material. I eventually stopped going to those.
I have three or so of those 5-lb IBM desk dominators that I grabbed from being tossed out at my old job. What's it worth to ya?
Re:These types of stories need MORE publicity
on
Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 1
There is, however, a place where the line should be drawn. When creators of parody sites or critical sites start publishing people's real life names, home addresses, and other personal information against their will, then they have gone to far.
I don't agree with that in cases where the person's information is already public. If you can find that information on the public internet, then why would repeating it be illegal? And if repeating it in the context of a parody doesn't make it less legal. Using someone's real name always raises the spectre of libel, however.
When you create a parody or critical web site, you do not know what kind of people will visit the site. Some of the people who visit the site may be very unstable individuals capable of all sorts of terrible things. For a host of reasons, they might decide to utilize the personal information in order to cause real physical harm to the person being criticised or that person's family.
This is in the realm of good judgement, but not law. Is People Magazine responsible for all the stalkers who fall in love with celebrities? According to your logic, one could say that People "incited" some mentally unbalanced person to go after Jennifer Aniston (hey, I said they were unbalanced). Do I think People Magazine contributes to the cult of celebrity which is detrimental to society? Yes. Do I think they are legally culpable for that? No. And unstable people watch CNN, too. If they see coverage of an oil spill on CNN and then go kill an oil company CEO, is CNN liable?
You can't know what effect your speech will have. And you can't make people responsible for how someone else might interpret that. Only when there is no room for interpretation, such as "kill him!" can you make a case for someone's words directly leading to a criminal act.
The Athenian democratic system allowed all citizens to vote on all laws - granted, their cities were smaller then & their definition of a citizen was basically a free, able-bodied male who would fight for the city if it was attacked
And, if IIRC, Athens at its height was a city of 25,000 citizens and 250,000 slaves. Now there's democracy at work!
I'll never give up my veal, veggie-boy
on
Lab-Grown Steak
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· Score: 2
The end of veal? No way! I likes my veal to come from real baby cows. I wont take no test-tube veal substitute! I say, let's exploit those dairy bull calves! They don't produce no milk, and we don't need all those guys growin' up and sexin' all the lady cows. Not as long as I have by electric stun-gun and trusty cattle throat-slitting knife will I give up veal. You'll have to pry it from my cold dead fork, covered in velvety mozzarella and rich tomato sauce!
No, it is not trivial. It certainly means we should have re-evaluated the decision making process, how intelligence was captured/analyzed, and how important cultural understanding of the enemy is. Just saying, well that's too bad, is saying, hey who cares, we're not going to try to change things so we don't make that mistake again.
No, I am not trying to demonize the US for the decision to drop the bomb. But the continued use of "we had to do it because an invasion would have been bloodier" is no more valid that if the cop still said, "the suspect had a gun, so I had to shoot" after it was proven that the suspect only had a cell phone.
I'm not attacking the decision at the time. What I have a problem with is the continued deception that there was no alternative. In the fog of war, it seemed best. But not anymore.
Your point about corrective action is exactly why this is important. The US can learn from this terrible mistake. The idea that Japan was going to fight so tenaciously, so suicidally, was based partly on racial stereotype and misinformation. In the midst (and also on the brink of) of war against another oft-maligned group of people, the muslims/Arabs, I think it is quite relevant. How well do we really know what the enemy is going to do? Many people are sure that Saddam is going to use chemical/bio weapons if we attack, and that we should respond with tactical nukes. Do we really want to do that to find out he was about to be overthrown by his own people or some other thing which made it unneccessary?
I agree that some of his arguments are weak. Microsoft's poor committment to security isn't even mentioned, which I think is going to be very damatging to them in the long-term.
However, I do think he is on target with businesses being frustrated with the licensing model. Microsoft has tightened the noose with every release, and it's pretty obvious to every CTO that they are exploiting their lock-in.
No. As Galbraith himself points, that the Bomb in itself did not end the War was learned afterwards. This was sure the feeling at the time, even if it was based on flawed evidence.
Yes, I know. That's why I said in my original post "As Mr. Galbraith points out, the US did not know that Japan was ready to surrender at the time." I don't understand why you disagree with me and then say the exact thing I said. Also, a number of generals and officials in the US believed the Japanese would surrender in time, although the belief that they would not won out in the end.
So if there is any propaganda, it lays on saying the invasion would have been worse instead of we thought the invasion would have been worse.
I think it is a little more than a small distinction. It's a bit like the cop who shoots someone because they think the person has a gun, and then it turns out it's a cell phone. Yes, the cop did what he thought was right, but the person still died needlessly.
Actually, the US did not have to drop the bomb. The US had no way of knowing for sure at the time, but that doesn't mean that you can still say afterwards that the US *had* to do it.
Instead, we were trying to develop a weapon which would obviate the need to land troops in Japan, which would have led to one of the bloodiest invasions ever. (Read about the Japanese preparations for the invasion - the villagers with pikes training to "stave" off armed infantry.)
According to John Kenneth Galbraith, who worked on an independent civilian commission appointed by President Roosevelt to study what really happened in the aftermath of WWII, Japan was ready to surrender before the A-Bomb was dropped.:
Didn't the dropping of the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki shorten the Pacific war?
The bomb did not end the Japanese war. This was something that was carefully studied by our bombing survey. Paul Nitze headed it in Japan, so there was hardly and bias in this matter. It's ironic that he has since become fascinated with the whole culture of destruction. The conclusion of the monograph called Japan's Struggle to End the War was that it was a difference, at most of two or three weeks. The decision had already been taken to get out of the war, to seek a peace negotiation.
The Japanese government, at that time, was heavily bureaucratic. The decision took some time to translate into action. There was also a fear that some of the army units might go in for a kind of Kamikaze resistance. The decision was not known in Washington. While the bomb did not bring an end to the war, one cannot say Washington ordered the attacks in the knowledge that the war was coming to an end.
Would not millions have been lost, American and Japanese, in the projected attack on the mainland, had it not been for the bomb?
That is not true. There would have been negotiations for surrender within days or a few weeks under any circumstances. Before the A-bombs were dropped, Japan was a defeated nation. This was realized.
I think the "we had to drop the A-bomb becauase the invasion would have been worse" story is a remarkably well done piece of propaganda which has endured to the point of becoming accepted fact. As Mr. Galbraith points out, the US did not know that Japan was ready to surrender at the time. However, it is wrong to keep using that story now, given that it is probably false. I would rather the US say, OK, we didn't know that Japan was going to surrender, but we wished we did because we wish we didn't drop the bomb on them.
As far as villagers training with pikes, that's probably on the same level as the bomb drills in US schools where everyone hid under their desk -- something to give ordinary citizens some feeling of security, nothing more.
First, where the hell are you going to send a check? Their fanclub? Do you know Timberlake's address? How about Snoop Dogg's address? How about Creed's address? Tim MCGraw? Whoever it is you listen to, you probably don't have any idea how to actually get money to them, unless they are local to you. And that's an altogether
different story.
Aside from the actual music, there are the studio people.
Bands pay for their studio time to produce the album. And they pay a lot for it. The "studio people" got their money already.
The cover art came from somewhere, and that person should be compensated.
If I download the MP3 for a song, why exactly should I pay for cover art?
...because explosions in space would sound exactly like non-explosions, and therefore, make for very dull audio.
begin the great space battle
"Roger, Red leader, I'm going in" twelve minutes of silence
"This is Red niner. We got 'em. Let's go home" end the great space battle
Define incompetence, then
on
Complications
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I wholeheartedly agree that doctors have an unrealistic expectation placed upon them. It is not that I expect the doctor to be correct every time. It is that I expect him to be competent. What do I mean by that? I compare it a bit to my own experience as a DBA. When I have a "sick" database, I don't just start operating. I gather information, check the docs, look for people with similar experiences (among my coworkers and on the web), determine possible courses of action, evaluate, decide, then plan the fix and finally, implement. Also, I prepare contingency plans in case the situation changes and control measures to evaluate progress along the way and take corrective action.
I expect a doctor to follow a similar process, maybe even more rigorously -- ater all, no one dies if my database does down in flames. However, there is the additional constraint of time, which may require parts of the process to be sacrificed. In my mind, competence is following this process and making sound judgements. Incompetence is hurrying so he can make his tee time.
Unfortunately, determining competence is complicated by the fact that it is fairly subjective. Someone has to look at all the facts and decide, did this guy screw up negligently? And that's the jury. Not that I think our court system is very good at getting to the truth and assigning proper damages.
I think that if something went wrong while in a doctor's care, if the doctor went to the patient, honestly explained the situation, and apologized sincerely, many (I won't say most) people would accept that. But hospitals are so terrified of lawsuits that they would never allow a doctor to do that, because it would be a huge liability, tantamount to a "confession" that could be used in court. And many doctors, I think, don't feel enough compassion for their patients to want to make that kind of gesture (maybe not, but that's my impression, given that doctors spend very little time with each patient).
So we're left with a situation that if anything goes wrong, we don't work it out mano a mano, but we go to court.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I still think that it's not the government's job to limit access, but the parents' job to control their children. I think the fact that most parents both work and spend precious little time interacting with their kids doesn't mean we solve social problems by putting more laws on the books. People want to think they can leave their children unattended in society safely. That's bizarre to me. Kids lack discipline, they often don't understand the consequences to their actions, and need adults around to guide, instruct, love, and punish them. If the adults are there, you don't need a drinking age and video game restrictions. If they aren't there, no laws are going to stop that anyway. I never had a problem getting alcohol when I was a teenager.
I'm not opposed to the idea of restricting access to violent content to minors on pure principle. I 'm opposed to it because it's a band-aid on a bullet wound. It simply doesn't work. A fascination with violence can exist quite well with or without video games, and the government would be a better servant of the people (its true role, IMHO) by working to facilitate parents, teachers, etc. to develop people of character who do not desire to beat on hookers, rather than focusing on controlling people's actions. Enforcement of laws restricting things people want doesn't work (prohibition, drug war). If you want that behavior to change, you have to change what people want.
I would much prefer to live in a society where sick, violent, awful things are readily available and people choose not to partake of them rather than one in which access is restricted by the government. Look what happened the day the Taliban fell in Kabul. Everyone went crazy, shaving off their beards, music, dancing, etc. Not that those were necessarily bad things, but the iron hand of the Ministry of Preventing Vice and Promoting Virtue was only able to push those things to just beneath the surface. They didn't promote anything but superficial conformity.
How about concerned parents petition the government to fund non-profit educational software development? How about people who don't think kids should be playing these games do something to provide an alternative? Saying "don't" without a "do" to replace it is ineffective and possible worse than saying nothing. I've always felt that the government should spend more on encouraging good social policy in soft ways rather than enforcement. The U.S. Army put out a wildly successful video game. Why can't the U.S. Department of Education? Why can't the Library of Congress develop tools to teach kids how to do research (as opposed to clicking "I'm Feeling Lucky" on google)?
Worse is, our politicians know that playing to fear, prejudice, and hate is a much faster ticket to politicial success than carefully developing and explaining thoughtful, informed public policy to a increasingly stupider population. Look at the drug war. Success results in more people in prison. I thought the point of good long-term policy was to keep people out of prison! In my more cynical moments I think that most people want to see drug users behind bars instead getting clean and competing with them for jobs.
Let's hope these two bleed each other as much as possible before realizing that they can gang up on the rest of us.
There would have to be something on the order of a "regime change" in media companies for that to happen. They have made their money for so long through tight control of the works they distribute that they are unlikely to embrace change. Also, I think there is a matter of pride. These people are too proud and stubborn to let a bunch of filthy thieves (their term) win. They would rather destroy themselves trying to stop such a thing.
Witness the near-suicidal PR that the RIAA has been engaging for the last 3 years. Who knew that much about the RIAA? They suddenly went on the offensive, and record executives are some of the most vilified people by music fans. Not a good move there. And seemed to violate common sense -- a compulsive, knee-jerk reaction rather than a sound plan based on good business sense.
If there is going to be a change, the current crop of fools will have to be replaced. There's just no way Hillary Rosen can suddenly embrace MP3 and open, unlimited subscription-based, DRM-free, music distribution and save face.
Then again, Jack Valenti adjusted quite nicely to the VCR, so maybe I'm wrong. But I have a feeling we'll be hearing from him again ("DivX is like the beltway sniper...").
In fact, I'm writing a letter to my congressman to introduce legislation to prevent any butterflies from flapping their wings in Beijing. That ought to keep any crazy weather changes from happening.
...Russian wants to be free
You know, some things are just not that interesting. I would amend the above statement to say that if the class lecture is necessary to understand the material, students will pay attention (the ones that don't will suffer and either learn to pay attention or fail). In most of my engineering classes, the material is all in the book, but the professor was instrumental in bringing out the concepts clearly. And there were classes for which the lectures were not helpful in understanding the material. I eventually stopped going to those.
I never get tired of that one...
I have three or so of those 5-lb IBM desk dominators that I grabbed from being tossed out at my old job. What's it worth to ya?
I don't agree with that in cases where the person's information is already public. If you can find that information on the public internet, then why would repeating it be illegal? And if repeating it in the context of a parody doesn't make it less legal. Using someone's real name always raises the spectre of libel, however.
When you create a parody or critical web site, you do not know what kind of people will visit the site. Some of the people who visit the site may be very unstable individuals capable of all sorts of terrible things. For a host of reasons, they might decide to utilize the personal information in order to cause real physical harm to the person being criticised or that person's family.
This is in the realm of good judgement, but not law. Is People Magazine responsible for all the stalkers who fall in love with celebrities? According to your logic, one could say that People "incited" some mentally unbalanced person to go after Jennifer Aniston (hey, I said they were unbalanced). Do I think People Magazine contributes to the cult of celebrity which is detrimental to society? Yes. Do I think they are legally culpable for that? No. And unstable people watch CNN, too. If they see coverage of an oil spill on CNN and then go kill an oil company CEO, is CNN liable?
You can't know what effect your speech will have. And you can't make people responsible for how someone else might interpret that. Only when there is no room for interpretation, such as "kill him!" can you make a case for someone's words directly leading to a criminal act.
And, if IIRC, Athens at its height was a city of 25,000 citizens and 250,000 slaves. Now there's democracy at work!
The end of veal? No way! I likes my veal to come from real baby cows. I wont take no test-tube veal substitute! I say, let's exploit those dairy bull calves! They don't produce no milk, and we don't need all those guys growin' up and sexin' all the lady cows. Not as long as I have by electric stun-gun and trusty cattle throat-slitting knife will I give up veal. You'll have to pry it from my cold dead fork, covered in velvety mozzarella and rich tomato sauce!
Fair enough. Thanks for clarifying.
No, it is not trivial. It certainly means we should have re-evaluated the decision making process, how intelligence was captured/analyzed, and how important cultural understanding of the enemy is. Just saying, well that's too bad, is saying, hey who cares, we're not going to try to change things so we don't make that mistake again.
I'm not attacking the decision at the time. What I have a problem with is the continued deception that there was no alternative. In the fog of war, it seemed best. But not anymore.
Your point about corrective action is exactly why this is important. The US can learn from this terrible mistake. The idea that Japan was going to fight so tenaciously, so suicidally, was based partly on racial stereotype and misinformation. In the midst (and also on the brink of) of war against another oft-maligned group of people, the muslims/Arabs, I think it is quite relevant. How well do we really know what the enemy is going to do? Many people are sure that Saddam is going to use chemical/bio weapons if we attack, and that we should respond with tactical nukes. Do we really want to do that to find out he was about to be overthrown by his own people or some other thing which made it unneccessary?
However, I do think he is on target with businesses being frustrated with the licensing model. Microsoft has tightened the noose with every release, and it's pretty obvious to every CTO that they are exploiting their lock-in.
Yes, I know. That's why I said in my original post "As Mr. Galbraith points out, the US did not know that Japan was ready to surrender at the time." I don't understand why you disagree with me and then say the exact thing I said. Also, a number of generals and officials in the US believed the Japanese would surrender in time, although the belief that they would not won out in the end.
So if there is any propaganda, it lays on saying the invasion would have been worse instead of we thought the invasion would have been worse.
I think it is a little more than a small distinction. It's a bit like the cop who shoots someone because they think the person has a gun, and then it turns out it's a cell phone. Yes, the cop did what he thought was right, but the person still died needlessly.
Actually, the US did not have to drop the bomb. The US had no way of knowing for sure at the time, but that doesn't mean that you can still say afterwards that the US *had* to do it.
Sorry, I meant President Truman. That's what I get for posting at 3AM.
Paul Nitze headed it in Japan, so there was hardly and bias in this matter.
Should actually read "...so there was hardly any bias in this matter."
According to John Kenneth Galbraith, who worked on an independent civilian commission appointed by President Roosevelt to study what really happened in the aftermath of WWII, Japan was ready to surrender before the A-Bomb was dropped.:
Taken from "The Good War," by Studs TerkelI think the "we had to drop the A-bomb becauase the invasion would have been worse" story is a remarkably well done piece of propaganda which has endured to the point of becoming accepted fact. As Mr. Galbraith points out, the US did not know that Japan was ready to surrender at the time. However, it is wrong to keep using that story now, given that it is probably false. I would rather the US say, OK, we didn't know that Japan was going to surrender, but we wished we did because we wish we didn't drop the bomb on them.
As far as villagers training with pikes, that's probably on the same level as the bomb drills in US schools where everyone hid under their desk -- something to give ordinary citizens some feeling of security, nothing more.
A fair question. Answer: http://www.fairtunes.com/
Aside from the actual music, there are the studio people.
Bands pay for their studio time to produce the album. And they pay a lot for it. The "studio people" got their money already.
The cover art came from somewhere, and that person should be compensated.
If I download the MP3 for a song, why exactly should I pay for cover art?
Lieutenant, that's just crazy enough to work!
begin the great space battle
"Roger, Red leader, I'm going in"
twelve minutes of silence
"This is Red niner. We got 'em. Let's go home"
end the great space battle
I expect a doctor to follow a similar process, maybe even more rigorously -- ater all, no one dies if my database does down in flames. However, there is the additional constraint of time, which may require parts of the process to be sacrificed. In my mind, competence is following this process and making sound judgements. Incompetence is hurrying so he can make his tee time.
Unfortunately, determining competence is complicated by the fact that it is fairly subjective. Someone has to look at all the facts and decide, did this guy screw up negligently? And that's the jury. Not that I think our court system is very good at getting to the truth and assigning proper damages.
I think that if something went wrong while in a doctor's care, if the doctor went to the patient, honestly explained the situation, and apologized sincerely, many (I won't say most) people would accept that. But hospitals are so terrified of lawsuits that they would never allow a doctor to do that, because it would be a huge liability, tantamount to a "confession" that could be used in court. And many doctors, I think, don't feel enough compassion for their patients to want to make that kind of gesture (maybe not, but that's my impression, given that doctors spend very little time with each patient).
So we're left with a situation that if anything goes wrong, we don't work it out mano a mano, but we go to court.