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User: Seumas

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  1. Re:Some people... on GTA V Proves a Lot of Parents Still Don't Know or Care About ESRB Ratings · · Score: 1

    It baffles me how we age ten or so years and then become amnesic to what our capacities were as teenagers. Fuck, the shit I did as a teenager (or even younger, sometimes) is more than adult me could probably cope with, today. Somehow, I processed that shit, grew up, and moved on into adulthood (at some questionable capacity, I suppose). Awhile ago, twelve year olds ruled vast empires. Today, you're still a precious protected darling at the age of fucking twenty-five.

    Unless your children have specific problems that make certain content very questionable for them, the real things you need to worry about with your children are neglect, abusing them, the degree of religion or crazy mumbo-jumbo you raise them in, the family life you wrap around them. A bitter divorced mommy and daddy pawning the child against one another and spewing venom to little Billy about the other parent is going to far more long-term damage than shooting a bunch of make-believe bikers with a make-believe shotgun in a two-dimensional make-believe world on your screen.

  2. Re:Some people... on GTA V Proves a Lot of Parents Still Don't Know or Care About ESRB Ratings · · Score: 1

    This story can be summarized as follows:

    You are not making the same parenting choices that I want you to make, so clearly the system is broken!

    Here's the thing - it depends on your kid and nobody knows your kid better than you. It also depends upon the age. So what if you buy the game for your reasonable fifteen year old? There is worse violence and sexual content in your average coming of age comedy and action flick. The exception might be the torture scene which I was kind of angry at being forced to play through (there is no way to make choices to avoid it). It was a pretty horrifying scene -- though it was then followed up with some comedy to reinforce the point it was clearly trying to make (SPOILER BUT ONLY SORTA: The government forces you to torture a guy who keeps telling you he will tell you whatever information you need, but you keep torturing him anyway).

    I played and created D&D campaigns when I was seven. I consumed online porn in the late 80s and early 90s, as early as twelve (okay, yes, then I consumed online porn in the late 90s, the 00s, the teens...). I read Tommyknockers when I was twelve. I watched Poltergeist and Nightmare on Elm Street when I was four. Children are not these malleable, impressionable, precious little glass objects that are going to be permanently damaged because you allowed them to read, watch, listen to, or play something that is above their chronological age by a couple of years. Unless there is something particular about your child that would give you reason to not want that -- in which case, that's what parenting is for.

    If your store is requiring adults with children when purchasing M rated games and your employees are drawing the attention of parents to the rating and the reference to content in the game on it and the parents are making their rightful choice to let their children buy and play it, then *the system is fucking working*.

  3. Re:Bullshit PR is Bullshit on Google To Encrypt All Keyword Searches · · Score: 1

    Yeah, Google -- man up!.... Google...

  4. Re:This makes no sense. on New York Turns Rest Stops Into 'Texting Zones' · · Score: 1

    If it is such life threatening behavior (and it certainly seems that it is), why don't they make the penalty significant enough that you will not want a ticket or will never do it again? It's like drunk driving. If people really gave a fuck about the dangers drunk drivers pose to the rest of the public, they would enforce a "caught once, suspended license for five years - caught twice, suspended forever. Caught on suspension, serve a year in prison" law.

    When you're only making it a nuisance, you're less interested in limiting the danger and more interested in generating continued revenue from it. You can't gain more revenue for the system from people who learn their lesson the first time.

    It sounds like putting up signs (that they know will have no impact) is a way to appear that they're doing something without actually impacting the revenue they generate by handing out tickets.

  5. Re:This makes no sense. on New York Turns Rest Stops Into 'Texting Zones' · · Score: 1

    If you don't get cell service in your car on the interstate, then you aren't texting while driving *anyway* . . . because, you know, no cell service.

    If you're installing special cell service towers in these rest stops, then that's worth mentioning (along with toilets and picnic areas), but it doesn't seem worth promoting specially by renaming the stops.

    If you're just doing this as some sort of safety effort (which seems to be the case), then renaming a rest area to a "texting area" makes about as much sense as renaming it any other number of things you can also do at rest areas, besides rest. Rest stops. Stretch stops. Walking stops. Urination stops. Masturbation stops. Cell phone stops. Reading book stops. And if we're renaming them after social efforts under the premise that changing the name will some how change behavior, let's get up some "Don't Do Meth Areas" and "Don't Beat Your Children Areas"...

    It seems they were already properly addressing the problem in the correct way. A thing is illegal and they issue tickets when they catch people doing the illegal thing. if that isn't having enough of an impact, then increase the penalty. If people are seriously dying because fucking idiots are surfing on their iphone while driving, then punish them with more than a $100 fine. Maybe suspend their license on a first offense or issue a large fine to the company behind the truckers doing it while driving company rigs.

    Someone else really nailed it, I think, when they suggested this sounds like some brown-noser's little pet feel-good project. :/

  6. Re:Bullshit PR is Bullshit on Google To Encrypt All Keyword Searches · · Score: 2

    The whole Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Whoever + NSA thing is like this:

    You're making out with a chick that is maybe not so hot. You're having a good time and you're both getting your rocks off, but you wouldn't want your friends and family to catch you.

    One day, your buddies drop on by early and catch you mac'n on said girl. Startled, you push her away and are very vocally all "eeew yuck! Get off me! what are you doing?!" and telling your friends (who keep teasing you about it for the next month) about how you two totally were not making out and how you totally are not into her and you didn't want to make out with her and would never do so in a million years.

    But you go back to making out with her, anyway. You're just way more careful about making sure you don't get caught.

  7. Re:Illusion of privacy on Google To Encrypt All Keyword Searches · · Score: 1

    When your executives are so flippant about privacy issues (hello, Schmidt!), it's hard to take them at their word.

    When their actions match their words, I'll take it.

  8. This makes no sense. on New York Turns Rest Stops Into 'Texting Zones' · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Why couldn't you pull over and send text messages from a rest area, before it was named a texting area? This sounds stupid.

  9. Re:In other news on Apple Starts Blocking Unauthorized Lightning Cables With iOS 7 · · Score: 1

    It wouldn't be so bad *maybe* if they at least offered options. A replacement thunderbird charging cord for an ipad is about $20 and it's only the short default size. You can get a non-Apple replacement for about a third of the price. And for half the price, you can even get one that is twice as long (long enough to actually be useful).

  10. News feed? on Facebook Launches Advanced AI Effort To Find Meaning In Your Posts · · Score: 1

    Why are we referring to social network streams of bullshit as "my news feed"?

    I have a news feed. It's via RSS. Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and the rest are "social feeds" . . . and that's being lenient with the meaning of the word "social".

    Also, you don't need AI. I can tell you that most of y[our] "social feed" breaks down to the following: Your friends/random people/acquaintances/family (based on their posted content and comments) are ignorant, bigoted, racist, narrow-minded, and self-involved.

  11. Re:Give consumers more privacy? on Google May Replace Cookies With Unique AdIDs · · Score: 1

    Probably for the same reason I get all the buttplug ads on Amazon. :P

  12. Re:Give consumers more privacy? on Google May Replace Cookies With Unique AdIDs · · Score: 2

    Ultimately, internet advertising is a long-running scam that people will catch on to. People were sold a bunch of bullshit about the glory of advertising online. Scamsters tried to sell advertisers on the wonders of targeted demographics, precise statistics, interactivity, etc. The truth turned out to be that the statistics are meaningless, because they're often gamed and click-bot farms are abundantly scamming bucks off the advertisers. It also turned out that the interactivity didn't add anything to the impression they leave with viewers, because most people dislike online ads, have learned to block them out, or actually block them due to principal, being obnoxious, or relating to malware and tracking.

    Content producers get screwed, too, because those from traditional mediums saw ad revenue dry on in a lot of places as it was redirected to the internet. Internet content producers found that it was hard to compete in a world where someone else is willing to provide what you provide, but for free -- and that it is hard to make money selling something that is infinite. There's a reason television and other mediums can get $30 CPM, but your commercial tech journalism website (that just regurgitates the day's news found elsewhere) has to settle for $3 CPM.

    At some point, this will all collapse and they will have to find new methods of revenue to support themselves than internet advertising. In the meantime, it's just a lot of scummy bottom-feeders trying to change and manipulate the small details until the very final moment they're forced to give up the ship.

  13. Re:Give consumers more privacy? on Google May Replace Cookies With Unique AdIDs · · Score: 3, Funny

    It is common knowledge that advertising data miners can determine with startling accuracy the identity of an individual with only a few accumulated pieces of correlated information referenced against a large commercial database of activity. This provides a further consistent identifier to tie all those strings together, while giving the impression that the identifier is to prevent identification. This is not about what they can conclude about your identity just from one website unto itself.

  14. Re:Give consumers more privacy? on Google May Replace Cookies With Unique AdIDs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Anonymous identifier.

    Let's just say that repeatedly until the problem sinks into all of our brains.

  15. Really? on California Becomes First State In Nation To Regulate Ride-Sharing · · Score: 1

    Yay! We're being regulated!

    That's a "boost"?

  16. Re:Again, the ends justify the means? on California School District Hires Firm To Monitor Students' Social Media · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Doesn't matter. We've now had enough generations of public education breeding conformity into people that they have little or no expectation of privacy and almost no knowledge of their protected liberties.

    Think of it this way: You and I probably remember a time when you didn't even need ID to get on a domestic flight and you could walk someone right up to their gate and see them off.

    Anyone born in the last two or so decades won't remember this. They'll be familiar with an experience where you are treated like a criminal by a bunch of low-wage thugs with plastic badges who grope you and inspect you . . . and who also expand their scope to far outside the airport, to nearly any public place. Kids born today will only know a world where everything they do any time and anywhere is monitored, documented, archived, shared, and used against them by their government. If this is what they grow up around, what will they *allow* to change during their time, that kids born in five or ten years will, then, consider normal for *them*?

    All of this originates with the expectations and demands set at home and school. Authority must be followed. Questions are not allowed. Critical thinking is discouraged. Individualism and standing up for yourself makes you a target.

  17. Re:they are doing it wrong on Toronto Family Bans All Technology In Their Home Made After 1986 · · Score: 1

    Their true motives and narrow mindedness shows when they, rather than picking specific types of technology or something, choose "the year *WE* were born".

    These are the same kind of obnoxious twats we all have known throughout our lives, only their children are young enough that it can be imposed upon them. I wouldn't be surprised if they forced the same music on them that they grew up with (whatever music it is people who are only in their 20s grew up with).

  18. Probably. on Stephen Colbert and the Monster Truck of Tivos · · Score: 1

    When you're picking out a DVR for your home, it's probably still 1996.

  19. Re:In other news on Social Media Is a New Vector For Mass Psychogenic Illness · · Score: 2

    Except when bukkake is involved. Bukkake requires facial queues.

  20. Re:Treason.. or... on Yahoo CEO Says It Would Be Treason To Decline To Cooperate With the NSA · · Score: 2

    MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

  21. Re:Treason.. or... on Yahoo CEO Says It Would Be Treason To Decline To Cooperate With the NSA · · Score: 1

    Standing up and risking fines or imprisonment is for the little guy. The citizen. We can't have CEOs of the largest corporations in the world making this sort of righteous stand. It's not like they could muster the resources to publicize what was happening to them, or fund a defense team, or a lobbying team to work on their behalf, or have powerful connections to help them. And it's certainly not like you would muster up intense support and loyalty from customers, future customers, and everyone in general by taking such a meaningful stand.

    Nope. Keep your mouth shut. Keep your $500/hr shiatsu massages in your corporate office, and shrug a big dumb brainless don't-give-a-shit shrug when it is revealed that your entire company bent over every time the government demanded it.

    PS: It isn't "treason", just because you do something the government doesn't like.

  22. Re:In other news on Social Media Is a New Vector For Mass Psychogenic Illness · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Truth may sound like, but not actually be, snark.

  23. Re:Confusing summary on PS Vita TV's Killer App: Remote Play · · Score: 1

    Correct. You can stream to your PS Vita from the PS4 the same way the NVIDIA Shield streams from your PC.

    The PS Vita TV does the same thing, but with TV-OUTs so you play it on another television.

    This may have limited appeal, but for those who want it, it'll be terrific.

  24. Re:Wait... Hasn't... What? on PS Vita TV's Killer App: Remote Play · · Score: 1

    I currently have four PS3s and three of them are strictly for myself, so I can have access to them in different places of the house that I might want ot enjoy them. One in the sunroom, one in the home theater, one in the home office. Having the ability to just plug in a little box that costs half as much or a third as much and have the same experience is pretty awesome.

    I'm also looking forward to using the regular PS Vita for remote play.

  25. Re:Too late on PS Vita TV's Killer App: Remote Play · · Score: 1

    This will allow you to play video games, which OSX and Apple TV will not (at least, not with the same selection and capacity).

    Also, the only benefit of this device is that it will let you play them remotely (meaning elsewhere in the same house, I believe) on another TV. The regular PS VITA will also stream games from your PS4 like the Wii U does.