You would never guess that Jon Spallino drives what is probably the most expensive car in this city, known for its automotive excess. Or that he is the world's most technologically advanced computer.
The above is the beginning of TFA as I misread it.
Nothing about Open Source copyright makes it any more risky than any other sort of copyright. Why is there insurance *specifically* against violating Open Source copyright?
Well, maybe the fact that it's trivial to get your hands on open-source code, as opposed to closed-source code from other companies' products, which you'd probably have to break some more obvious laws to get your hands on in the first place.
Also, the fact that (to those who don't understand open-source licenses) it's common to mistakenly think your particular usage of the code is not in violation of the license. Again, most developers employed by a company are not legal experts. It's not hard for "free" (as in beer and royalties) open-source code to find its way into commercial code. This sort of thing doesn't tend to happen "accidentally" with closed-source code, for obvious reasons, and when it does happen, the company usually needs something far beyond "accidental infringement" insurance.:)
A correction: I misinterpreted the point of a previous post, which said: (sorry for not replying directly to the thread, but my original post only mentioned the OP in passing)
Now: Big company tajes insurance and starts stealing open source code, because they feel there is no legal risk anymore.
In the end: Open source developers get screwed once again and the only people getting rich over it are the lawyers. Nothing new here.
I still disagree with that, though.
Firstly, if they intend to trick the insurance company into footing the bill for an intentional infringement, there is certainly a legal risk to a company in engaging in insurance fraud. If they intend to admit intentional infringement to the insurance company, then there was no point in purchasing the insurance, as it will be worthless.
Second, that the lawyers make more money as a result is insignificant in this case. Whatever the added lawyers' fees would be as a result of having this insurance package is presumably less than the amount of the infringement damages they would face without insurance, otherwise they'd have no incentive to buy the insurance. And it goes without saying that it's not a profit burden to the insurance companies, otherwise they wouldn't be in the business.
And I also don't see how this hurts open source developers. You assert that this insurance plan works in part because the insurance companies know open-source developers don't have the money to sue. Well, if they didn't have the money before the big company got this insurance, they don't have it now either. Nothing's changed from the OSD's point of view. I also doubt the presence of the insurance company would make it more expensive for the OSD to sue, in fact, it's more likely to lower the costs somewhat, and any infighting between the insurance company and the infringing company (over insurance fraud or other concerns) probably wouldn't cost the OSD much, since they wouldn't need to participate in that.
I don't see how this results in any change to the life of the open-source developers. It's just a safety net for the infringing businesses, and it won't give them carte blanche to start infringing anymore than they've already had/not had.
There is indeed such a thing as "accidentally" infringing on open-source code licenses. You see, while the individual developer who copies the code is usually aware of its legal incumberances, it would be quite easy for the corporation's management, board of directors, and shareholders to be unaware of the legal deathtrap the lowly developer employee is leading the company into. And lest we remember, it is the CORPORATION that would be found to have infringed the copyright, not the employee. The corporation would face responsibility for what its employee did. From this perspective, having insurance against such things might not be such a bad idea.
And by the way, I would wager to bet that a non-trivial percentage of employed developers are unfamiliar with the specifics (or fundamentals) of the GPL and other common licenses. Also, there are many scenarios in which miscommunication between employees and management could lead to unintentional use of open-source code. Who knows, maybe an employee is even deliberately trying to get the company into hot water.
Someone else here mentioned that this kind of insurance would make it easier for bigger companies to violate open-source licenses, since they'd be shielded from any legal damages. In response to that, allow me to introduce you to the phrase "Insurance fraud." Don't think for a second that these insurance companies won't be carefully pouring over company documents, correspondences, etc, to make sure the infringement was indeed "accidental" in whatever sense the word becomes defined as.
As someone else said, probably the only question is whether these companies can speculate the open-source-infringement-lawsuits world accurately enough to stay profitable. It seems to me that's easier said than done, but I do think the idea makes sense in theory at least.
Testing a PC game has been impossible. Not anymore.
Right, it's not like PC gamers have been able to download demos for the past 10-15 years...
Does anyone else find it annoying when announcements of something "new" feel the need to go out of their way and make ridiculous, overblown exaggerations about just how "new" they are? Not only have demos of PC games obviously been downloadable for well over a decade, but the idea of using in-store PC gaming kiosks to help sell PC games has also been done before, just not by the big names like GameStop and EB.
In fact, if anything, the situation is exactly the reverse of this news blurb's description: It is typically the CONSOLE gamers who lack the ability to freely try before they buy. Most games aren't available via in-store kiosks, and spending $8 to rent the game from blockbuster isn't exactly an inexpensive way to sample a game you're thinking about buying. In contrast, PC gamers are blessed with free downloadable demos of nearly every game in existence.
Seriously though -- this is just like a few weeks ago when the Spielberg-EA team-up was announced, and some reported it as Spielberg's first foray into videogames, completely ignoring his previous "first foray," LucasArts' "The Dig." Sorry, an artist is only entitled to ONE "debut," not several. If in doubt, check the dictionary.
And if in doubt about whether something is "new" or not, at least check Google first.
Some of the press releases and news stories are tauting this as Spielberg's first foray into videogames, but don't be fooled -- this is not the first game he has collabated on.
In 1995, Spielberg teamed up with LucasArts to make "The Dig," a graphic adventure game that was well-reviewed but never really caught on (surprisingly, one of LucasArts' only adventure games that didn't see huge success during that time period).
LucasArts, like EA, was proudly tauting how their game was Steven Spielberg's "first collaboration" in the gaming world. Except in EA's case, this is only true if you have a short memory of gaming history.
Well, I don't have the means to evaluate whether what you said is accurate (nor to evaluate if what I speculated previously is accurate), but if it is, then I'd have to agree some of the conclusions you've made. Patents were designed for things that are, in the patent office's words, "non-obvious" (as it applies here, not something you find out easily by using established protocols), and innovative. I was under the impression they were patenting (complex) methods for working with or manipulating particular genes, which I would call innovation, but your description does make it sound more like simply discovery. Certainly I'd be concerned if these things took "5 minutes" of research to "discover."
Anyone else with knowledge of this field want to chime in?
I know it's easy to call "evil" on the bioengineering firms that are filing these patents, but this issue is much more shades-of-grey than that.
These companies are basically patenting roadmaps for the different genes in human DNA. The research involved in creating one of these roadmaps is VERY expensive. Tremendous medical progress will result from having these roadmaps, and that progress will benefit everyone, but someone has to make the big investments first to get us there. Just as we're seeing with space travel, private industry is more likely to fit the bill for this kind of "long road to profit" work than the federal government is.
Now, I'm not completely in agreement with the idea of being able to patent these roadmaps, but you can't have a debate on this without examining the alternatives:
1) If the populace were more enthusiastic about making serious bioengineering progress, the government could perhaps spend more money on this research, resulting in more of these roadmaps being public domain right off the bat, and thus allowing more private companies to compete with products based on those roadmaps. On the other hand, making the roadmaps might be expensive, but so is everything in the business plan that follows it. So, increased potential competition might actually discourage competition, though I'm sure in the end supply-and-demand guarantees that someone will take the plunge and try to profit from making next-generation genomics-derived products and services, so maybe my point here isn't valid.
2) I'm not a bioengineering expert, but it seems to me that trade secrets would be more appropriate than patents here. Company X spent $50 million figuring out a gene? OK, well, let them keep the results to themselves, they can release products based off of it, and the only people they'll have to worry about competing with are the other ones who independently spent $50 million to figure out that same information. This seems a more fair compromise, rather than demanding full exclusivity. I am, of course, assuming that it's easy to keep this information secret while simultaneously releasing products derived from it, and, not being an expert in the field, I don't know if this is possible or not.
3) On the other hand, using patents has its advantages to the public good. Firstly, given the still-limited spending on research into this area, it *is* somewhat wasteful for multiple companies to simultaneously invent the same wheel, when there are so many other wheels companies could be inventing at this very opportune point in time. So, in other words, there's SO MANY opportunties opened up by biotech, genomics, nanotech, etc, that we might be better off encouraging companies not to compete for the time being. There's enough "killer apps" for everyone, in this case.
4) Another advantage of patents to the public good: After 20 years, when the patents expire, the expensive-to-produce roadmaps are both freely available AND public domain, so anyone can obtain and make use of them. By contrast, if companies went the trade secret route, there's no real motivation to ever release the roadmaps to the public domain at all, nevermind in as little as 20 years.
Of course, none of these points of view are perfect. But I present them simply because I don't think the knee-jerk "patents are evil, patenting human genomes is ESPECIALLY evil" applies here. Given the various possibilities, I think the patent situation is one of the better ones. Of course, it would be better if one company didn't own such a large percentage of the patents.
Certainly I can't think of any entirely perfect way for all this to unfold, but however it unfolds, the benefits to come from all of this will be unfathomable. Really it's just a question of
1) How QUICKLY will progress in these fields be made?
and
2) How long will it take to trickle down and become affordable to the masses?
They misunderstand. "Wireless" means "over the air," not "sans wire"!
Come back when you can actually transit power through the air....on second thought, no, I don't really want to be anywhere near that, that can't possibly be safe.
Did they take into account the information that is being created as they are indexing? Do they plan on live indexing everything that's being made. Information doesn't stop getting created just because they've stored everything that's already been done.
Funny you mention that. In some versions of Superman, Brainiac, a living computer whose mission is to gather all information about every planet in the universe, entered into the world of villainry because he logically reasoned that the only way he could ever "complete" his mission would be to gather information about each planet and then destroy the planet, since allowing the planet to continue existing would result in a never-ending cycle of new information that would need to be recorded, making it impossible to ever reach a "done" state. Not surprisingly, then, Brainiac's goal is ultimately to destroy the entire universe.:)
Mr. Carrol is good for one thing, and that is writing MS puff pieces. We, as readers, can't determine if the content are indeed his own personal thoughts, if they're what Microsoft is paying him to say, or if he just thinks he might get ahead with his employer for saying them. And that makes it bad journalism and lacking in any semblance of integrity.
I respect your opinion on this, but I think it's exactly the opposite. See, everyone has biases. You can hire someone who only works for ZDNet, and he still has biases, intentional or otherwise. As an alert reader, you always want to know an author's bias, so you can consider how it may be coloring what you're reading.
This Mr. Carrol, for instance, no doubt has other biases, beyond working for Microsoft. But the Microsoft bias is such a strong one (they give him money, it doesn't get much stronger than that) that it's reasonably safe to imagine his Microsoft bias overrides any weaker, more subtle biases.
As I see it, listening to the opinions of someone whose bias is not so black-and-white as "the guy works for Microsoft" is much MORE dangerous than listening to the opinions of someone whose bias is that simple. While a "I don't take money from anyone but ZDNet" writer's bias would be very difficult to figure out, Mr. Carrol's bias can be much more easily determined.
In other words, just because Writer X doesn't pull punches on anyone, and "calls 'em as he sees 'em," that doesn't mean he's not seeing things through the biases he's accumulated over his lifetime, and as the reader, it'd be near-impossible to figure out exactly what those biases are (Writer X may not even know what they are!).
Now, are you likely to get "unbiased" opinions from Mr. Carrol? No. They'll no doubt be pro-microsoft. But the alert reader can at least be on guard, able to weigh all Mr. Carrol's comments against the known bias of "this guy works for Microsoft." They can't do that with a writer whose bias they can't figure out.
Remember, this is an editorial. There's no such thing as an unbiased editorial. You say it's problematic that you don't know if Mr. Carrol's views are his own or Microsoft's. I say it doesn't matter, you run into the same problem either way. Mr. Carrol, if he wants his opinion to be respected, needs to convince his readership that his opinions don't come from Microsoft's PR department, just as an "independent" columnist with no obvious connections to any companies still has to prove to his readership that his opinions are his own, and that they are not colored by political connections, life experiences, or other sources of bias which he has not disclosed.
If you ask me it's the latter columnist that we need to be more wary of. We too easily assume that a writer with no overt ties to any biasing influences doesn't have more subtle biases or connections we don't know about.
Now, of course, if we were talking about news articles, then the answer would be that NO bias should be tolerated, and it would be incumbent upon ZDNet to make sure all biases, both subtle and overt, didn't find their way into those pieces. Sadly the mainstream news doesn't work this way.
It's worth noting that John Carrol is a Microsoft employee, who also writes for ZDNet. The journalistic integrity here is absolutely zero.
It's only worth noting because of Slashdot's tendency not to RTFA, in which it's clearly stated that he works for Microsoft.
This seems to be an ongoing theme here, to bash the journalistic integrity of people just because it's en vogue to do so. This is an opinion piece by someone working for Microsoft. Neither the editorial nature of this article nor the author's connection to Microsoft is obscured.
And on that note, there's nothing wrong with hiring someone who works for a company to write an editorial about issues affecting that company's industry. What's the problem with giving the oft-bullied pro-Microsoft person a chance to give an opinion?
If you want to look at an editorial more deserving of this kind of criticism, jump back a week or two to the FOX News online editorial arguing why Massachusetts' pro-OpenDocument bill is a bad idea. Now THERE'S an editorial that A) seriously blurs the line between fact and opinion, by obfuscating the article's status as an editorial and by being written in a news-article fashion, and B) completely fails to disclose the author's connections to Microsoft, while providing a totally one-sided editorial that doesn't even seem to acknowledge the existance of a counterargument. This piece, as least, is implicitly understanding of the fact that a large body of people disagree with the conclusions of the article.
You know, although I do think it's really important to discover if there's *any* life on Mars, I think ultimately humanity is being foolish by not focusing in other, more fruitful directions.
It would be an interesting discovery if we found life on Mars, because it would be our first opportunity to examine a lifeform (however simple) that is not of Earthly origin.
But, I can't help but feel like a lot of the focus on finding life on Mars is for a more basic reason: we're eager to find ANY life on ANY other planet, just so we can finally put to bed the question of whether there's life elsewhere in the universe. Mars may represent the easiest way to meet that goal, since it's the most promising planet that we can actually land a ship on in a timely fashion.
And although I'd love to see it happen, it's sort of a stupid reason to focus on Mars. Why? Because this question of "is there life out there" is all but a foregone conclusion. Honestly, what scientist, from a scientific perspective, thinks we are the only planet with biological life on it? The scenario in which we really are alone in the universe is the statistically improbable one. It's only our emotional sense of galactic loneliness and our overblown sense of how special and unique we are that makes us think it's a significant possibility.
Why is it the majority of the population believes in the existance of God, a being with no scientific basis, but yet we can't just accept that it would be one of the biggest surprises in the history of humanity if we one day discover that we ARE, in fact, alone in the universe.
So I'm just asking whether there's more to be learned from the intense studies being done on Mars, than if that effort were spent focusing on other NASA-like things, such as figuring out how to build better and faster spaceships to take us further from Earth so that we might discover more INTERESTING lifeforms than microscopic bacteria.
Is what we're finding on Mars really more important than expanding our overall space explorations, or are we simply allowing ourselves to be biased from this foolish desire to prove to ourselves that we're not alone in the universe?
Besides, don't you think it would be a lot more efficient to travel through space looking for giant giveaways of intelligient life, like, say, planets that look like ours, satellites and space stations orbiting planets, or OTHER spaceships flying around? Wouldn't we be making much faster progress if we just ASSUMED there is life in the rest of the universe and GET OVER our need to examine every last speck of Mars?
Speaking at a conference on piracy in London, Wright described the studio's entry into online movie services as "something we have to do."
Wow, way to be enthusiastic about it. What were we talking about, getting a root canal?
It's not like the non-pay version was "crippled"..
on
Opera Free as in Beer
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· Score: 1
Prior to this announcement, Opera made the commercial version of their browser available for free, with exactly the same features as the pay version, with the one limitation being an advertisement banner across the top. The banner was not especially obtrusive, especially since it could be set to text-only Google advertisements.
If anyone was "holding out" on using Opera before, because they didn't want to pay for it, they're simply stupid. If you wanted to use Opera, you should already be using it.
On a related note, you would think Opera made more money from the Google Ads running along the top of the 90% of their non-paying customers than from the registration fees of the paying 10%.
But far be it from me to tell Opera how to run its business. I don't see anyone else making a profit directly off of their browser technology...
A device that bathes the region in front of it with infrared light. When an intense retroreflection indicates the presence of a human retina, the device then fires a localized flurry of bee stingers directly at that point. Thus, the human goes blind.
Maybe we could also come up with a device that detects the presence of a video camera, and pitches a high-speed baseball at the person holding it, thus causing much pain and probably breaking their expensive antipiracy-repellant camera.
I don't dispute that the general media's science reporting is abysmal. The whole "authority figure" aspect alone, that most Americans don't think to question the "authority" of one scientist unless it's at the behest of another scientist, is deeply problematic, as is the endless tendency to say things like "a study PROVED that X is caused by Y," asserting that every hypothesis in every study should be considered true until "proven" otherwise.
However, to be fair to science journalists, they're not as uniformly bad as is suggested. The good ones aren't usually "journalism majors" in college. They're either individuals who have actual experience in science and no formal training in journalism, who decide to go into the science reporting field, or they're enrolled in an actual, specific "Science Journalism" or "Scientific Writing" major, offered at most colleges with good journalism departments. A number of these programs have one particular corequisite to the major that throws a monkey wrench in the criticism of this author's editorial: These programs often require a dual major or at least a minor in one of the school's SCIENCE degrees!
Yes, in order to complete the Science Journalism major, you'd have to also takes lots of courses in biology, or chemistry, or mechanical engineering, or *something* so that you'd have a chance in hell at living up to your name of "Science Communicator." The idea that in order to be a good communicator of science you have to actually have some experience in science, does not fall on deaf ears.
Of course, if your major is in science journalism, your ideal job is with New Scientist, or any of the other science magazines, journals, or publications, because you'll actually get to do serious work there. The lowest option on the totem pole is to work for some big mainstream newspaper where your science-ignorant editor, or your editor's science-ignorant editor, is going to butcher every piece you write, leaving you to waste all your energy fighting to maintain your credibility instead of doing more important things like covering science news.
So do we need more good science reporters to replace the bad ones? Yes. We also need like-minded editors, and mainstream newspapers and TV news broadcasts with an actual interest in giving us good science reports. But let's not pretend this is a hopeless and universal problem. There's a lot of good science reporting going on, just not enough to trickle down to the lowest common denominator -- the mainstream media.
Replacements for Word are easy to come by, and OpenOffice is not the first to provide a real threat to Word. Yes, the proprietary DOC format does provide a lot of resistance, but it's only part of the picture.
Same deal with Excel. I mean come on, they just ran a story today about VisiCalc...it's not like it's hard to make an Excel clone in 2005.
PowerPoint is...well, frankly, if you're making presentations that use more than the basic, most common functionality of PowerPoint and its competitors, you're probably doing more than is necessary. PowerPoint is designed to aid you in making presentations. If you want to make fancy videos, use whatever software they use to make commercials.
But OUTLOOK...Outlook is the one reason I and many businesses I know do not switch away from Office. The makers of OpenOffice are doing a great job, but they or someone else needs to step up to the plate and make an Outlook killer, if anyone really wants to get out from under Microsoft's monopolistic heel.
You know what would be great? A standardized, open email standard designed to replace the Outlook-Exchange Server system. There's a bunch of companies making so-called "Exchange killers," but so far none of them have brought their products to a point where they work well enough.
Until you can get a GOOD replacement for Outlook and Exchange Server, big corporations and governments will not switch away from Office. Seriously, it's the elephant in the room.
The word processor and the computerized spreadsheet have been around forever. They reached their "works perfectly for what 95% of people do with it" state nearly a decade ago. Microsoft, and most other big software companies, have this absurd notion that their customers should be forced to buy the same software over and over again, just because. The truth is, if Microsoft never released another version of Excel, no one would care. We'd keep using Excel 97, in fact. And Word, well, Word 2002 still has some usability issues, but that's just because Microsoft can't seem to get it right no matter how many times they try.
But my point is, software should not be re-bought until something better comes along. And not better at doing some useless function nobody cares about, like adding VOIP to your text document. It needs to actually be better at something that *matters* to the people upgrading. And since word processors and spreadsheet program already do what 95% of people want perfectly well as it is, this means it's extremely unlikely MS or anyone will be able to improve the experience with new upgrades, which means there's no reason people should be paying for a new version of Word year after year.
Well, impressive though it is, it still sucks compared to the Holodeck, because the holodeck employed hard-light constructs. Things not only looked real, they FELT real. I haven't the slightest idea how they intend to accomplish that, other than interfacing with the brain and convincing it that it did in fact collide with an object that doesn't really exist.
Opera may have something to brag about, or they may not. Current wisdom suggests even they don't necessarily know (though the download count on their site might give them a rough estimate).
Thus far they've been hiding behind the veiled argument that "you can't say we're not successful because nobody, including us, knows how successful we are!"
And they're not *really* throwing away that argument. The new user statistics will still be an underestimate of the total userbase, because it won't factor in people who are still spoofing as IE with an older version of the software.
And there's a lot of good reasons not to upgrade.
Opera doesn't have any auto-update feature and, at least in my experience, has a tendency to forget settings and sessions when you upgrade versions, so I imagine many users don't upgrade until there's a newer version with a feature they want enough to bother with the whole process.
And, an obvious and more relevant argument here, the ability to identify your browser as IE is a FEATURE. In older versions, you can still CHOOSE to identify yourself as Opera, if you want to help boost the stats of your browser of choice. But I, like many I'm sure, leave it as IE or Mozilla because it's more convenient than switching everytime I go to a site that doesn't let in Opera. So if you take away that feature in a future version, thus breaking compatibility with many sites, this may lead to more webmasters fixing their sites for Opera, but the more likely and more immediate result will be users either abandoning Opera or, more notably, NOT UPGRADING. Version 8.0 works fine, so why upgrade and lose the FEATURE that lets me view my favorite sites?
And, of course, the significant number of people who choose not to upgrade in the near future, and Opera's inability to estimate what percentage of the userbase these people comprise, means they get to have their cake and eat it too. If the browser statistics in the near future show Opera with a huge boost (and it's actually a 2-for-1 gain since every user they gain in the statistics is a user IE/Firefox loses), they can say "I told you so" and brag about their larger userbase.
And if the new statistics aren't particularly impressive, they can STILL say the stats are not accurate because some "unknowable" percentage of Opera users are still using the older version of the browser.
So, smart strategy I suppose. I have a hunch that the percentage of Opera users who set their browsers to identify as IE may be an overwhelming majority, so the impact this move might have on the browser stats *might* be pretty staggering. Then again, it might not be. Opera is my browser of choice and I think it beats the stuffing out of both IE *AND* Firefox, so I wish the company well. But the bottom line is we're stll a long ways away from having browser stats that accurately represent Opera's userbase.
Exactly. The government (and any other interested party) should focus on making it easier to let individual parents restrict the content their children see, NOT on toning down or otherwise altering the original content.
This is the difference between being a parent to your own kids and telling (forcing) other parents how to do their job the way you see fit. One is an admirable goal. The other is utterly reprehensible.
Don't bother trying to track them down. Mediaweek...found that amongst "standard" complaints...99.8% came from the Parents Television Council.
Oh no, I fully understand that ~99% of FCC complaints are via the PTC, but despite that, these are STILL individual parents filing complaints. They just do it like sheep (and are encouraged like sheep) via the FCC's website (which is why I said "they passionately write the FCC via the PTC's website").
BUT, it would still be interesting to know how many of these parents are themselves simply lazy parents and how many are legitimately doing everything they can do on their own to be control what their children watch.
That is, it would be embarrasingly hypocritical if these same "proactive" parents complaining to the FCC are in fact simply too lazy to be responsible and hard-working parents of their own children.
If half of that already dubious (and meaningless) 99% who file complaints aren't even taking advantage of the things society and the government have ALREADY done to help them, like using their TV's built-in V-Chip, it would not only be another example of why these particular parents should not be taken seriously, but also a reminder that these ~1000 or so parents, along with the PTC, who are self-proclaimed model parents (as in, they think they're better and more responsible parents than everyone else). should not be allowed to represent the majority interests of parents in our nation. And, most certainly, an example of why this handful of non-diverse complaint filers should not be a significant influence in shaping policy or FCC regulations, as they are/are attempting to be.
My point: For all we know these people are worse parents than 99% of the parents they criticize as acting "irresponsibly."
just because you as a parent pay attention to the games your child plays doesn't mean your neighbor does. your kid and theirs happen to be friends, and he has every game on earth. your kid will be playing that game.
Yes, and when my neighbor lets their kid play with BB guns and I find that unacceptable, I have three options:
1) Talk to the neighbor and encourage them to stop letting their child use BB guns.
2) Ask my neighbor to restrict the use of BB guns when my child is over playing with their child.
3) Disallow my child to play with the neighbor's child.
All of these may sound extreme but this is what parents of young children do all the time and it's not only normal but very beneficial for parents whose children are friends to talk to each other.
The same standard of parenting can be applied to playing with fireworks, watching movies, and, yes, playing videogames.
Is it EASY to exercise this much control on your kids? No, not at all. It's a lot of hard work. But where did anyone ever get the idea from that parenting was supposed to be easy?
There's a good reason everyone keeps saying parents need to take responsibility for all this: Because it's true, and it's BEEN true for thousands of years. People seem to think this is a new problem...
Be glad you didn't live in Rome back in the day. The emperor didn't even have an FCC to listen to your complaints about how horrible and violent the gladiator battles were. And they were pretty damn popular, not to mention that they were REAL violence and death for entertainment, the brutality of which doesn't even have any equivalent in today's society.
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You would never guess that Jon Spallino drives what is probably the most expensive car in this city, known for its automotive excess. Or that he is the world's most technologically advanced computer. The above is the beginning of TFA as I misread it.
Nothing about Open Source copyright makes it any more risky than any other sort of copyright. Why is there insurance *specifically* against violating Open Source copyright?
:)
Well, maybe the fact that it's trivial to get your hands on open-source code, as opposed to closed-source code from other companies' products, which you'd probably have to break some more obvious laws to get your hands on in the first place.
Also, the fact that (to those who don't understand open-source licenses) it's common to mistakenly think your particular usage of the code is not in violation of the license. Again, most developers employed by a company are not legal experts. It's not hard for "free" (as in beer and royalties) open-source code to find its way into commercial code. This sort of thing doesn't tend to happen "accidentally" with closed-source code, for obvious reasons, and when it does happen, the company usually needs something far beyond "accidental infringement" insurance.
A correction: I misinterpreted the point of a previous post, which said: (sorry for not replying directly to the thread, but my original post only mentioned the OP in passing)
Now: Big company tajes insurance and starts stealing open source code, because they feel there is no legal risk anymore.
In the end: Open source developers get screwed once again and the only people getting rich over it are the lawyers. Nothing new here.
I still disagree with that, though.
Firstly, if they intend to trick the insurance company into footing the bill for an intentional infringement, there is certainly a legal risk to a company in engaging in insurance fraud. If they intend to admit intentional infringement to the insurance company, then there was no point in purchasing the insurance, as it will be worthless.
Second, that the lawyers make more money as a result is insignificant in this case. Whatever the added lawyers' fees would be as a result of having this insurance package is presumably less than the amount of the infringement damages they would face without insurance, otherwise they'd have no incentive to buy the insurance. And it goes without saying that it's not a profit burden to the insurance companies, otherwise they wouldn't be in the business.
And I also don't see how this hurts open source developers. You assert that this insurance plan works in part because the insurance companies know open-source developers don't have the money to sue. Well, if they didn't have the money before the big company got this insurance, they don't have it now either. Nothing's changed from the OSD's point of view. I also doubt the presence of the insurance company would make it more expensive for the OSD to sue, in fact, it's more likely to lower the costs somewhat, and any infighting between the insurance company and the infringing company (over insurance fraud or other concerns) probably wouldn't cost the OSD much, since they wouldn't need to participate in that.
I don't see how this results in any change to the life of the open-source developers. It's just a safety net for the infringing businesses, and it won't give them carte blanche to start infringing anymore than they've already had/not had.
There is indeed such a thing as "accidentally" infringing on open-source code licenses. You see, while the individual developer who copies the code is usually aware of its legal incumberances, it would be quite easy for the corporation's management, board of directors, and shareholders to be unaware of the legal deathtrap the lowly developer employee is leading the company into. And lest we remember, it is the CORPORATION that would be found to have infringed the copyright, not the employee. The corporation would face responsibility for what its employee did. From this perspective, having insurance against such things might not be such a bad idea.
And by the way, I would wager to bet that a non-trivial percentage of employed developers are unfamiliar with the specifics (or fundamentals) of the GPL and other common licenses. Also, there are many scenarios in which miscommunication between employees and management could lead to unintentional use of open-source code. Who knows, maybe an employee is even deliberately trying to get the company into hot water.
Someone else here mentioned that this kind of insurance would make it easier for bigger companies to violate open-source licenses, since they'd be shielded from any legal damages. In response to that, allow me to introduce you to the phrase "Insurance fraud." Don't think for a second that these insurance companies won't be carefully pouring over company documents, correspondences, etc, to make sure the infringement was indeed "accidental" in whatever sense the word becomes defined as.
As someone else said, probably the only question is whether these companies can speculate the open-source-infringement-lawsuits world accurately enough to stay profitable. It seems to me that's easier said than done, but I do think the idea makes sense in theory at least.
Testing a PC game has been impossible. Not anymore.
Right, it's not like PC gamers have been able to download demos for the past 10-15 years...
Does anyone else find it annoying when announcements of something "new" feel the need to go out of their way and make ridiculous, overblown exaggerations about just how "new" they are? Not only have demos of PC games obviously been downloadable for well over a decade, but the idea of using in-store PC gaming kiosks to help sell PC games has also been done before, just not by the big names like GameStop and EB.
In fact, if anything, the situation is exactly the reverse of this news blurb's description: It is typically the CONSOLE gamers who lack the ability to freely try before they buy. Most games aren't available via in-store kiosks, and spending $8 to rent the game from blockbuster isn't exactly an inexpensive way to sample a game you're thinking about buying. In contrast, PC gamers are blessed with free downloadable demos of nearly every game in existence.
Seriously though -- this is just like a few weeks ago when the Spielberg-EA team-up was announced, and some reported it as Spielberg's first foray into videogames, completely ignoring his previous "first foray," LucasArts' "The Dig." Sorry, an artist is only entitled to ONE "debut," not several. If in doubt, check the dictionary.
And if in doubt about whether something is "new" or not, at least check Google first.
Some of the press releases and news stories are tauting this as Spielberg's first foray into videogames, but don't be fooled -- this is not the first game he has collabated on.
In 1995, Spielberg teamed up with LucasArts to make "The Dig," a graphic adventure game that was well-reviewed but never really caught on (surprisingly, one of LucasArts' only adventure games that didn't see huge success during that time period).
LucasArts, like EA, was proudly tauting how their game was Steven Spielberg's "first collaboration" in the gaming world. Except in EA's case, this is only true if you have a short memory of gaming history.
You can read more on The Dig at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dig
I never got a chance to play The Dig but I heard it was a good game.
Well, I don't have the means to evaluate whether what you said is accurate (nor to evaluate if what I speculated previously is accurate), but if it is, then I'd have to agree some of the conclusions you've made. Patents were designed for things that are, in the patent office's words, "non-obvious" (as it applies here, not something you find out easily by using established protocols), and innovative. I was under the impression they were patenting (complex) methods for working with or manipulating particular genes, which I would call innovation, but your description does make it sound more like simply discovery. Certainly I'd be concerned if these things took "5 minutes" of research to "discover."
Anyone else with knowledge of this field want to chime in?
I know it's easy to call "evil" on the bioengineering firms that are filing these patents, but this issue is much more shades-of-grey than that.
These companies are basically patenting roadmaps for the different genes in human DNA. The research involved in creating one of these roadmaps is VERY expensive. Tremendous medical progress will result from having these roadmaps, and that progress will benefit everyone, but someone has to make the big investments first to get us there. Just as we're seeing with space travel, private industry is more likely to fit the bill for this kind of "long road to profit" work than the federal government is.
Now, I'm not completely in agreement with the idea of being able to patent these roadmaps, but you can't have a debate on this without examining the alternatives:
1) If the populace were more enthusiastic about making serious bioengineering progress, the government could perhaps spend more money on this research, resulting in more of these roadmaps being public domain right off the bat, and thus allowing more private companies to compete with products based on those roadmaps. On the other hand, making the roadmaps might be expensive, but so is everything in the business plan that follows it. So, increased potential competition might actually discourage competition, though I'm sure in the end supply-and-demand guarantees that someone will take the plunge and try to profit from making next-generation genomics-derived products and services, so maybe my point here isn't valid.
2) I'm not a bioengineering expert, but it seems to me that trade secrets would be more appropriate than patents here. Company X spent $50 million figuring out a gene? OK, well, let them keep the results to themselves, they can release products based off of it, and the only people they'll have to worry about competing with are the other ones who independently spent $50 million to figure out that same information. This seems a more fair compromise, rather than demanding full exclusivity. I am, of course, assuming that it's easy to keep this information secret while simultaneously releasing products derived from it, and, not being an expert in the field, I don't know if this is possible or not.
3) On the other hand, using patents has its advantages to the public good. Firstly, given the still-limited spending on research into this area, it *is* somewhat wasteful for multiple companies to simultaneously invent the same wheel, when there are so many other wheels companies could be inventing at this very opportune point in time. So, in other words, there's SO MANY opportunties opened up by biotech, genomics, nanotech, etc, that we might be better off encouraging companies not to compete for the time being. There's enough "killer apps" for everyone, in this case.
4) Another advantage of patents to the public good: After 20 years, when the patents expire, the expensive-to-produce roadmaps are both freely available AND public domain, so anyone can obtain and make use of them. By contrast, if companies went the trade secret route, there's no real motivation to ever release the roadmaps to the public domain at all, nevermind in as little as 20 years.
Of course, none of these points of view are perfect. But I present them simply because I don't think the knee-jerk "patents are evil, patenting human genomes is ESPECIALLY evil" applies here. Given the various possibilities, I think the patent situation is one of the better ones. Of course, it would be better if one company didn't own such a large percentage of the patents.
Certainly I can't think of any entirely perfect way for all this to unfold, but however it unfolds, the benefits to come from all of this will be unfathomable. Really it's just a question of
1) How QUICKLY will progress in these fields be made?
and
2) How long will it take to trickle down and become affordable to the masses?
They misunderstand. "Wireless" means "over the air," not "sans wire"!
...on second thought, no, I don't really want to be anywhere near that, that can't possibly be safe.
Come back when you can actually transit power through the air.
Did they take into account the information that is being created as they are indexing? Do they plan on live indexing everything that's being made. Information doesn't stop getting created just because they've stored everything that's already been done.
:)
Funny you mention that. In some versions of Superman, Brainiac, a living computer whose mission is to gather all information about every planet in the universe, entered into the world of villainry because he logically reasoned that the only way he could ever "complete" his mission would be to gather information about each planet and then destroy the planet, since allowing the planet to continue existing would result in a never-ending cycle of new information that would need to be recorded, making it impossible to ever reach a "done" state. Not surprisingly, then, Brainiac's goal is ultimately to destroy the entire universe.
Mr. Carrol is good for one thing, and that is writing MS puff pieces. We, as readers, can't determine if the content are indeed his own personal thoughts, if they're what Microsoft is paying him to say, or if he just thinks he might get ahead with his employer for saying them. And that makes it bad journalism and lacking in any semblance of integrity.
I respect your opinion on this, but I think it's exactly the opposite. See, everyone has biases. You can hire someone who only works for ZDNet, and he still has biases, intentional or otherwise. As an alert reader, you always want to know an author's bias, so you can consider how it may be coloring what you're reading.
This Mr. Carrol, for instance, no doubt has other biases, beyond working for Microsoft. But the Microsoft bias is such a strong one (they give him money, it doesn't get much stronger than that) that it's reasonably safe to imagine his Microsoft bias overrides any weaker, more subtle biases.
As I see it, listening to the opinions of someone whose bias is not so black-and-white as "the guy works for Microsoft" is much MORE dangerous than listening to the opinions of someone whose bias is that simple. While a "I don't take money from anyone but ZDNet" writer's bias would be very difficult to figure out, Mr. Carrol's bias can be much more easily determined.
In other words, just because Writer X doesn't pull punches on anyone, and "calls 'em as he sees 'em," that doesn't mean he's not seeing things through the biases he's accumulated over his lifetime, and as the reader, it'd be near-impossible to figure out exactly what those biases are (Writer X may not even know what they are!).
Now, are you likely to get "unbiased" opinions from Mr. Carrol? No. They'll no doubt be pro-microsoft. But the alert reader can at least be on guard, able to weigh all Mr. Carrol's comments against the known bias of "this guy works for Microsoft." They can't do that with a writer whose bias they can't figure out.
Remember, this is an editorial. There's no such thing as an unbiased editorial. You say it's problematic that you don't know if Mr. Carrol's views are his own or Microsoft's. I say it doesn't matter, you run into the same problem either way. Mr. Carrol, if he wants his opinion to be respected, needs to convince his readership that his opinions don't come from Microsoft's PR department, just as an "independent" columnist with no obvious connections to any companies still has to prove to his readership that his opinions are his own, and that they are not colored by political connections, life experiences, or other sources of bias which he has not disclosed.
If you ask me it's the latter columnist that we need to be more wary of. We too easily assume that a writer with no overt ties to any biasing influences doesn't have more subtle biases or connections we don't know about.
Now, of course, if we were talking about news articles, then the answer would be that NO bias should be tolerated, and it would be incumbent upon ZDNet to make sure all biases, both subtle and overt, didn't find their way into those pieces. Sadly the mainstream news doesn't work this way.
It's worth noting that John Carrol is a Microsoft employee, who also writes for ZDNet. The journalistic integrity here is absolutely zero.
It's only worth noting because of Slashdot's tendency not to RTFA, in which it's clearly stated that he works for Microsoft.
This seems to be an ongoing theme here, to bash the journalistic integrity of people just because it's en vogue to do so. This is an opinion piece by someone working for Microsoft. Neither the editorial nature of this article nor the author's connection to Microsoft is obscured.
And on that note, there's nothing wrong with hiring someone who works for a company to write an editorial about issues affecting that company's industry. What's the problem with giving the oft-bullied pro-Microsoft person a chance to give an opinion?
If you want to look at an editorial more deserving of this kind of criticism, jump back a week or two to the FOX News online editorial arguing why Massachusetts' pro-OpenDocument bill is a bad idea. Now THERE'S an editorial that A) seriously blurs the line between fact and opinion, by obfuscating the article's status as an editorial and by being written in a news-article fashion, and B) completely fails to disclose the author's connections to Microsoft, while providing a totally one-sided editorial that doesn't even seem to acknowledge the existance of a counterargument. This piece, as least, is implicitly understanding of the fact that a large body of people disagree with the conclusions of the article.
fast user switching? Have you ever seen a linux workstation with virtual terminals?
More importantly have you ever seen how slow Fast User Switching is?
You know suddenly I have a new, profound, non-sarcastic appreciation for the blue screen of death.
You know, although I do think it's really important to discover if there's *any* life on Mars, I think ultimately humanity is being foolish by not focusing in other, more fruitful directions.
It would be an interesting discovery if we found life on Mars, because it would be our first opportunity to examine a lifeform (however simple) that is not of Earthly origin.
But, I can't help but feel like a lot of the focus on finding life on Mars is for a more basic reason: we're eager to find ANY life on ANY other planet, just so we can finally put to bed the question of whether there's life elsewhere in the universe. Mars may represent the easiest way to meet that goal, since it's the most promising planet that we can actually land a ship on in a timely fashion.
And although I'd love to see it happen, it's sort of a stupid reason to focus on Mars. Why? Because this question of "is there life out there" is all but a foregone conclusion. Honestly, what scientist, from a scientific perspective, thinks we are the only planet with biological life on it? The scenario in which we really are alone in the universe is the statistically improbable one. It's only our emotional sense of galactic loneliness and our overblown sense of how special and unique we are that makes us think it's a significant possibility.
Why is it the majority of the population believes in the existance of God, a being with no scientific basis, but yet we can't just accept that it would be one of the biggest surprises in the history of humanity if we one day discover that we ARE, in fact, alone in the universe.
So I'm just asking whether there's more to be learned from the intense studies being done on Mars, than if that effort were spent focusing on other NASA-like things, such as figuring out how to build better and faster spaceships to take us further from Earth so that we might discover more INTERESTING lifeforms than microscopic bacteria.
Is what we're finding on Mars really more important than expanding our overall space explorations, or are we simply allowing ourselves to be biased from this foolish desire to prove to ourselves that we're not alone in the universe?
Besides, don't you think it would be a lot more efficient to travel through space looking for giant giveaways of intelligient life, like, say, planets that look like ours, satellites and space stations orbiting planets, or OTHER spaceships flying around? Wouldn't we be making much faster progress if we just ASSUMED there is life in the rest of the universe and GET OVER our need to examine every last speck of Mars?
Speaking at a conference on piracy in London, Wright described the studio's entry into online movie services as "something we have to do."
Wow, way to be enthusiastic about it. What were we talking about, getting a root canal?
Prior to this announcement, Opera made the commercial version of their browser available for free, with exactly the same features as the pay version, with the one limitation being an advertisement banner across the top. The banner was not especially obtrusive, especially since it could be set to text-only Google advertisements.
If anyone was "holding out" on using Opera before, because they didn't want to pay for it, they're simply stupid. If you wanted to use Opera, you should already be using it.
On a related note, you would think Opera made more money from the Google Ads running along the top of the 90% of their non-paying customers than from the registration fees of the paying 10%.
But far be it from me to tell Opera how to run its business. I don't see anyone else making a profit directly off of their browser technology...
A device that bathes the region in front of it with infrared light. When an intense retroreflection indicates the presence of a human retina, the device then fires a localized flurry of bee stingers directly at that point. Thus, the human goes blind.
Maybe we could also come up with a device that detects the presence of a video camera, and pitches a high-speed baseball at the person holding it, thus causing much pain and probably breaking their expensive antipiracy-repellant camera.
I don't dispute that the general media's science reporting is abysmal. The whole "authority figure" aspect alone, that most Americans don't think to question the "authority" of one scientist unless it's at the behest of another scientist, is deeply problematic, as is the endless tendency to say things like "a study PROVED that X is caused by Y," asserting that every hypothesis in every study should be considered true until "proven" otherwise.
However, to be fair to science journalists, they're not as uniformly bad as is suggested. The good ones aren't usually "journalism majors" in college. They're either individuals who have actual experience in science and no formal training in journalism, who decide to go into the science reporting field, or they're enrolled in an actual, specific "Science Journalism" or "Scientific Writing" major, offered at most colleges with good journalism departments. A number of these programs have one particular corequisite to the major that throws a monkey wrench in the criticism of this author's editorial: These programs often require a dual major or at least a minor in one of the school's SCIENCE degrees!
Yes, in order to complete the Science Journalism major, you'd have to also takes lots of courses in biology, or chemistry, or mechanical engineering, or *something* so that you'd have a chance in hell at living up to your name of "Science Communicator." The idea that in order to be a good communicator of science you have to actually have some experience in science, does not fall on deaf ears.
Of course, if your major is in science journalism, your ideal job is with New Scientist, or any of the other science magazines, journals, or publications, because you'll actually get to do serious work there. The lowest option on the totem pole is to work for some big mainstream newspaper where your science-ignorant editor, or your editor's science-ignorant editor, is going to butcher every piece you write, leaving you to waste all your energy fighting to maintain your credibility instead of doing more important things like covering science news.
So do we need more good science reporters to replace the bad ones? Yes. We also need like-minded editors, and mainstream newspapers and TV news broadcasts with an actual interest in giving us good science reports. But let's not pretend this is a hopeless and universal problem. There's a lot of good science reporting going on, just not enough to trickle down to the lowest common denominator -- the mainstream media.
Replacements for Word are easy to come by, and OpenOffice is not the first to provide a real threat to Word. Yes, the proprietary DOC format does provide a lot of resistance, but it's only part of the picture.
Same deal with Excel. I mean come on, they just ran a story today about VisiCalc...it's not like it's hard to make an Excel clone in 2005.
PowerPoint is...well, frankly, if you're making presentations that use more than the basic, most common functionality of PowerPoint and its competitors, you're probably doing more than is necessary. PowerPoint is designed to aid you in making presentations. If you want to make fancy videos, use whatever software they use to make commercials.
But OUTLOOK...Outlook is the one reason I and many businesses I know do not switch away from Office. The makers of OpenOffice are doing a great job, but they or someone else needs to step up to the plate and make an Outlook killer, if anyone really wants to get out from under Microsoft's monopolistic heel.
You know what would be great? A standardized, open email standard designed to replace the Outlook-Exchange Server system. There's a bunch of companies making so-called "Exchange killers," but so far none of them have brought their products to a point where they work well enough.
Until you can get a GOOD replacement for Outlook and Exchange Server, big corporations and governments will not switch away from Office. Seriously, it's the elephant in the room.
The word processor and the computerized spreadsheet have been around forever. They reached their "works perfectly for what 95% of people do with it" state nearly a decade ago. Microsoft, and most other big software companies, have this absurd notion that their customers should be forced to buy the same software over and over again, just because. The truth is, if Microsoft never released another version of Excel, no one would care. We'd keep using Excel 97, in fact. And Word, well, Word 2002 still has some usability issues, but that's just because Microsoft can't seem to get it right no matter how many times they try.
But my point is, software should not be re-bought until something better comes along. And not better at doing some useless function nobody cares about, like adding VOIP to your text document. It needs to actually be better at something that *matters* to the people upgrading. And since word processors and spreadsheet program already do what 95% of people want perfectly well as it is, this means it's extremely unlikely MS or anyone will be able to improve the experience with new upgrades, which means there's no reason people should be paying for a new version of Word year after year.
Well, impressive though it is, it still sucks compared to the Holodeck, because the holodeck employed hard-light constructs. Things not only looked real, they FELT real. I haven't the slightest idea how they intend to accomplish that, other than interfacing with the brain and convincing it that it did in fact collide with an object that doesn't really exist.
Opera may have something to brag about, or they may not. Current wisdom suggests even they don't necessarily know (though the download count on their site might give them a rough estimate).
Thus far they've been hiding behind the veiled argument that "you can't say we're not successful because nobody, including us, knows how successful we are!"
And they're not *really* throwing away that argument. The new user statistics will still be an underestimate of the total userbase, because it won't factor in people who are still spoofing as IE with an older version of the software.
And there's a lot of good reasons not to upgrade.
Opera doesn't have any auto-update feature and, at least in my experience, has a tendency to forget settings and sessions when you upgrade versions, so I imagine many users don't upgrade until there's a newer version with a feature they want enough to bother with the whole process.
And, an obvious and more relevant argument here, the ability to identify your browser as IE is a FEATURE. In older versions, you can still CHOOSE to identify yourself as Opera, if you want to help boost the stats of your browser of choice. But I, like many I'm sure, leave it as IE or Mozilla because it's more convenient than switching everytime I go to a site that doesn't let in Opera. So if you take away that feature in a future version, thus breaking compatibility with many sites, this may lead to more webmasters fixing their sites for Opera, but the more likely and more immediate result will be users either abandoning Opera or, more notably, NOT UPGRADING. Version 8.0 works fine, so why upgrade and lose the FEATURE that lets me view my favorite sites?
And, of course, the significant number of people who choose not to upgrade in the near future, and Opera's inability to estimate what percentage of the userbase these people comprise, means they get to have their cake and eat it too. If the browser statistics in the near future show Opera with a huge boost (and it's actually a 2-for-1 gain since every user they gain in the statistics is a user IE/Firefox loses), they can say "I told you so" and brag about their larger userbase.
And if the new statistics aren't particularly impressive, they can STILL say the stats are not accurate because some "unknowable" percentage of Opera users are still using the older version of the browser.
So, smart strategy I suppose. I have a hunch that the percentage of Opera users who set their browsers to identify as IE may be an overwhelming majority, so the impact this move might have on the browser stats *might* be pretty staggering. Then again, it might not be. Opera is my browser of choice and I think it beats the stuffing out of both IE *AND* Firefox, so I wish the company well. But the bottom line is we're stll a long ways away from having browser stats that accurately represent Opera's userbase.
Exactly. The government (and any other interested party) should focus on making it easier to let individual parents restrict the content their children see, NOT on toning down or otherwise altering the original content.
This is the difference between being a parent to your own kids and telling (forcing) other parents how to do their job the way you see fit. One is an admirable goal. The other is utterly reprehensible.
Don't bother trying to track them down. Mediaweek...found that amongst "standard" complaints...99.8% came from the Parents Television Council.
Oh no, I fully understand that ~99% of FCC complaints are via the PTC, but despite that, these are STILL individual parents filing complaints. They just do it like sheep (and are encouraged like sheep) via the FCC's website (which is why I said "they passionately write the FCC via the PTC's website").
BUT, it would still be interesting to know how many of these parents are themselves simply lazy parents and how many are legitimately doing everything they can do on their own to be control what their children watch.
That is, it would be embarrasingly hypocritical if these same "proactive" parents complaining to the FCC are in fact simply too lazy to be responsible and hard-working parents of their own children.
If half of that already dubious (and meaningless) 99% who file complaints aren't even taking advantage of the things society and the government have ALREADY done to help them, like using their TV's built-in V-Chip, it would not only be another example of why these particular parents should not be taken seriously, but also a reminder that these ~1000 or so parents, along with the PTC, who are self-proclaimed model parents (as in, they think they're better and more responsible parents than everyone else). should not be allowed to represent the majority interests of parents in our nation. And, most certainly, an example of why this handful of non-diverse complaint filers should not be a significant influence in shaping policy or FCC regulations, as they are/are attempting to be.
My point: For all we know these people are worse parents than 99% of the parents they criticize as acting "irresponsibly."
just because you as a parent pay attention to the games your child plays doesn't mean your neighbor does. your kid and theirs happen to be friends, and he has every game on earth. your kid will be playing that game.
Yes, and when my neighbor lets their kid play with BB guns and I find that unacceptable, I have three options:
1) Talk to the neighbor and encourage them to stop letting their child use BB guns.
2) Ask my neighbor to restrict the use of BB guns when my child is over playing with their child.
3) Disallow my child to play with the neighbor's child.
All of these may sound extreme but this is what parents of young children do all the time and it's not only normal but very beneficial for parents whose children are friends to talk to each other.
The same standard of parenting can be applied to playing with fireworks, watching movies, and, yes, playing videogames.
Is it EASY to exercise this much control on your kids? No, not at all. It's a lot of hard work. But where did anyone ever get the idea from that parenting was supposed to be easy?
There's a good reason everyone keeps saying parents need to take responsibility for all this: Because it's true, and it's BEEN true for thousands of years. People seem to think this is a new problem...
Be glad you didn't live in Rome back in the day. The emperor didn't even have an FCC to listen to your complaints about how horrible and violent the gladiator battles were. And they were pretty damn popular, not to mention that they were REAL violence and death for entertainment, the brutality of which doesn't even have any equivalent in today's society.