About the porn, my point is not about what mature teenagers want to do sexually...I don't know what you are talking about there and I am not talking about 'mature' teenagers... I'm saying that if you, as a parent, watched pornos with your children (not teenagers), you would be arrested, and nobody would have a problem with that (hopefully).
But you kill virtual hookers with your kids to get a hundred bucks (again, not mature teenagers.....I'm talking 7-year-olds, here), and you don't have a problem with *that*?
I weep for your children if the typical friday night family gathering for you is to make your way through GTA showing your child (not teen) how much blood you can get out of running over a pedestrian.
And please, don't project your childhood onto everybody else and make generalizations about me. Everybody has a story of how they grew up, and you haven't heard everybody's story.
I guess it depends on if you are following the story or just playing in the environment of GTA. If you want to just drive around and enjoy the gameplay of living in a virtual environment, then there are lots of games that are good for that, including GTA.
But the bread and butter of GTA is the violence you inflict on innocents and not-so-innocents. In order to progress in the game or to "score" you have to inflict this violence. So if you are letting your kids play GTA and showing them the good stuff and not the bad, then KUDOS, you are a good parent! You are providing guidance and framing the game in a positive way, as any parent should do with any video game.
You are absolutely correct that if you play the game in a benign way, there's no argument to be made that it is unhealthful to a child. Likewise, if you show a child a porno movie, but cut out all of the sex scenes, the child will be more confused than corrupted.
The issue here is that parents should be as responsible as you are at a minimum. Not that a law or a politician can make this happen, but it needs to be in the forefront of the minds of all parents...that they should frame the violence of today's world in comprehendable terms to a child, not expose them to unreasonable violence and actually give them commendation and higher game scores for more violent actions.
I don't know what your point is about predator...I was just saying you must be young to have watched that movie in your childhood.
About the rest of your comment; in my area it is illegal for a teenager to buy pornography. It is also a crime for an adult to show pornography to a minor. The seller or provider (store owner or parent) will be prosecuted if they are responsible. Do you think this is wrong? Are you saying that if a family wants their children to watch porn with them, they should have every right to?
While there is no direct evidence that porn makes you more likely to be a sexual criminal, it is still regulated by the government (through these laws), to help prevent minors from obtaining this material. This is exactly my point with the extreme violence in GTA. Not other video games that have violence, but specifically the type of game that connects violence against innocent people with being successful and 'winning' the game.
Surely you realize that children are the most vulnerable members of society. The young and inexperienced are more susceptible to good and bad things than teens and adults. Therefore, while we should not completely shield them from the reality of violence in society, we should ensure that the exposure they have is meaningful and constructive, not destructive and rewarding of the wrong values.
GTA exposes children to the reality of a violent world we live in, but it drives home the message that if you "kill the bitches" then you win the game. Wrong message. Now, if you were playing a cop, who was killing the bad guys, you are closer to a good message, but you are still teaching the vulnerable children that killing people is the way to get things done, which just isn't a tenable moral position.
Maybe this will mean less evangelizing. I have no problem with other people using Macs, but I am sick of people telling me that I should use a Mac. If I wanted one, I would get one. I can make decisions for myself!
Those games you mention are nowhere near the same as GTA. Not even the same galaxy.
So, how do you teach your children anything valuable out of GTA? The goals of the game seem pretty clear to me. Violate every law imaginable and do so in as violent a way as possible, and you get a better score. Where's the moral in that story? The only path in that game is the "evil conquest path".
I certainly don't have a problem with children playing video games, but when they are as 'over the top' as GTA, they should absolutely be restricted, just as movies and pornography are.
Off-topic for the actual news story, but you really should either be a parent or ask a parent about how this affects a child, regardless of crime statistics.
Even if crime is abolished because of video games "virtualizing violence", I still don't want my child running around the back yard pretending to be a machine-gun-toting villain gunning down our neighbor's little girl calling her a "hooker". This is why I don't want my 7-year-old to play GTA.
Absolutely we cannot censor this content, but common sense says there should be limits placed on children, and those limits should come from parents, not from politicians.
Posts like yours, seemingly encouraging the use of video games as a tool against crime is wrong-headed. How about the Columbine shootings, which were directly related to the video games those kids played. Did the video games really help diffuse their hatred? You seem to be playing with fire to see if it can stop the inferno.
I hope to god you are not a parent, and judging by your movie-watching as a child (predator), you are obviously quite young and have a lot to learn.
Until now, I thought that parents who let their kids play GTA and the like were just not paying attention to them. And here, I find that you actually WANT them to play violent video games. Maybe participating in simulated violence doesn't affect YOU in a negative way, but don't assume that it affects everybody else the same way.
I guess it all depends on how you want to raise your children. If you don't have a problem with your 7 year old child running around the back yard pretending to be a machine-gun toting villain blasting away their friends calling them "hookers" (like my brother-in-law), then by all means, at least show them how to do it the right way and give them GTA for Christmas. Only time will tell if that child grows up to be a killing villian, but at that point there's not much you can do about it.
I think that is the point....that parents should wake up and BE PARENTS.
If any politician says something that they believe is true, they will be accused of pandering to one side or the other. It's a wonder why politicians say anything at all!
Not true! Visual media is absolutely more commanding and representative than books. A book requires you to imagine things, whereas a video game shows you how to do it first hand. Take this example:
Read the following to a 9-year-old and what do you think they will imagine:
Betty circled her lips around Tom's rock-hard cock and drive her mouth down, encouraging him to drain himself into her. As she wildly orgasmed, Harry drove his member deep into her from behind.
Now show a video that shows the exact same action and what do you think will be more harmful to the child?
I would argue that the passage of text would probably confuse the child more than damage them. They wouldn't know what the words meant, assuming they had not been exposed to them before. However, with the video, they see exactly what is going on in a physical sense. They see body parts comparable to their own, and what is being done with them.
Absolutely video has more power to educate and corrupt our children than books do.
How many times did you let her play it? No doubt that playing it a few times is merely a shock to the system, not a life-changing event. But playing it every day for a few months, which is what is being decried here, is obviously harmful to some people.
You are close, but not completely correct. It's not just liberal politicians, it's all politicians. These antics have never been more obvious than with our current Republican president, and the Republican whip of the House of Representatives (Tom Delay) is probably the most guilty of this.
The sad fact is, that in order to get elected today, you have to pander to media, which, for (all) politicians, means holding press conferences and saying things that make headlines.
Of course, you seem to be just a liberal-basher instead of a critical thinker, so I suppose my comment doesn't matter much to you.
Apparently the only reason this is a story for a lot of you is the fact that it's HC saying it. Whatever. The real story is that kids ARE playing this game, regardless of which kids...mine or yours.
Of course, there should not be censorship of this or any other game....but people need to realize that what they let their children do will impact them. Just like what you feed them will impact them. If you feed them McDonalds every day, they will get fat. If you let them play GTA all the time, they will become violent.
Parents need to take responsibility for their children; that's the real point here, not some political play by a Senator.
However, if something is reproducable again and again...such as a repeatable scientific experiment...then shouldn't it be treated with less skepticism? If the tests specific steps are known, and the experiment yields the same results, then how can the results be 'tainted' in any way...regardless of who funded the experiment?
However, if the Windows user has Automatic Updates turned on, then the answer is no. This is because Windows XP SP2 eliminates each of the functional deficiencies you mention.
The other 2 Windows features that are typically brought up as unsecure functionality include DCOM and Memory Buffer manipulation. Coincidentally, both of these are also fixed with SP2.
Hopefully the typical Windows user (and also the typical Mac user) has Automatic Updates turned on.
Likewise, if you turn on Automatic Updates in Windows you should be completely fine. If you have it turned on, then you have SP2, which absolves your machine of each of the major big-name viruses and worms that have hit Windows in the last several years. Attachment Execution Protection, Memory Execution Protection, DCOM Authentication and the Windows Firewall prevent these vulnerabilities from happening.
IMHO everyone should have the Automatic Updates feature in any OS turned on.
Don't forget the other interesting features of SP2, such as Attachment Execution Protection, which should prevent the propogation of most viruses in email attachments. Also, there are memory protection features in SP2 that prevent code from using an overflow to access the LocalSystem. And in SP2, DCOM now requires authentication in order to allow the code to execute.
These three new features alone would have stopped just about every big-name virus that made the press.
Wouldn't you agree, then, that if Napster had every recording made, it would be the holy grail?
You gotta admit it would be pretty cool if you could just pay once and listen to any piece of music whenever you wanted to. As is, the moment I tried to get a recording they didn't have, the service is worthless, because then I'll have to go buy it, blowing my margins!
It's simple math, really. Spending $180 every year for the rest of your life for music may not make financial sense if you only typically buy 5 or 6 albums a year. For others who spend, maybe $200 a year on music (10 physical CDs or 200 songs on iTunes), it starts to make financial sense. Throw in the ability to listen to some music you've never heard before without having to shell out another $10 and it starts to sound better. And have you ever had buyers remorse after getting a CD that turned out to be crappy? Well, now you don't have to regret it as much, since there was no incremental cost for the music!
Of course, Napsters specific problem is that they don't have every album. In order for a subscription model to feed my musical appetite, it would have to have any recording. Alas, it's no longer a good deal!
Ignorant fundamentalists absolutely do have power over what the rest of the country sees. These zealots are Supreme Court Justices, Senators, Presidents, US Representatives, State Legislators, journalists and media magnates and other powerful personalities. The only way to not be affected by this particular wave of fundamentalism is to live in a hole.
In this specific case, the ignorant fundamentalist that said that he would boycott the movie was directly attempting to control what other people see. He could have just said: "I don't like it...not my style". Instead, it's "don't show this to anybody else (even if they agree with it) or I'll boycott" Obviously, IMAX is to blame for not calling his pathetic bluff. At least censorship is blatantly evil, this stuff is evil disguised as purity.
I think this is the most telling part of the article, and also something that really exposes the author's lack of experience in IT:
"Take one common question I see, getting an iPod to work in Win 98."
If he heard this question more than once in his lifetime, I would be shocked. It's more likely that he's a self-serving, lying journalist. It makes the whole article invalid, in my mind.
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About the porn, my point is not about what mature teenagers want to do sexually...I don't know what you are talking about there and I am not talking about 'mature' teenagers... I'm saying that if you, as a parent, watched pornos with your children (not teenagers), you would be arrested, and nobody would have a problem with that (hopefully).
But you kill virtual hookers with your kids to get a hundred bucks (again, not mature teenagers.....I'm talking 7-year-olds, here), and you don't have a problem with *that*?
I weep for your children if the typical friday night family gathering for you is to make your way through GTA showing your child (not teen) how much blood you can get out of running over a pedestrian.
And please, don't project your childhood onto everybody else and make generalizations about me. Everybody has a story of how they grew up, and you haven't heard everybody's story.
I guess it depends on if you are following the story or just playing in the environment of GTA. If you want to just drive around and enjoy the gameplay of living in a virtual environment, then there are lots of games that are good for that, including GTA.
But the bread and butter of GTA is the violence you inflict on innocents and not-so-innocents. In order to progress in the game or to "score" you have to inflict this violence. So if you are letting your kids play GTA and showing them the good stuff and not the bad, then KUDOS, you are a good parent! You are providing guidance and framing the game in a positive way, as any parent should do with any video game.
You are absolutely correct that if you play the game in a benign way, there's no argument to be made that it is unhealthful to a child. Likewise, if you show a child a porno movie, but cut out all of the sex scenes, the child will be more confused than corrupted.
The issue here is that parents should be as responsible as you are at a minimum. Not that a law or a politician can make this happen, but it needs to be in the forefront of the minds of all parents...that they should frame the violence of today's world in comprehendable terms to a child, not expose them to unreasonable violence and actually give them commendation and higher game scores for more violent actions.
I don't know what your point is about predator...I was just saying you must be young to have watched that movie in your childhood.
About the rest of your comment; in my area it is illegal for a teenager to buy pornography. It is also a crime for an adult to show pornography to a minor. The seller or provider (store owner or parent) will be prosecuted if they are responsible. Do you think this is wrong? Are you saying that if a family wants their children to watch porn with them, they should have every right to?
While there is no direct evidence that porn makes you more likely to be a sexual criminal, it is still regulated by the government (through these laws), to help prevent minors from obtaining this material. This is exactly my point with the extreme violence in GTA. Not other video games that have violence, but specifically the type of game that connects violence against innocent people with being successful and 'winning' the game.
Surely you realize that children are the most vulnerable members of society. The young and inexperienced are more susceptible to good and bad things than teens and adults. Therefore, while we should not completely shield them from the reality of violence in society, we should ensure that the exposure they have is meaningful and constructive, not destructive and rewarding of the wrong values.
GTA exposes children to the reality of a violent world we live in, but it drives home the message that if you "kill the bitches" then you win the game. Wrong message. Now, if you were playing a cop, who was killing the bad guys, you are closer to a good message, but you are still teaching the vulnerable children that killing people is the way to get things done, which just isn't a tenable moral position.
Maybe this will mean less evangelizing. I have no problem with other people using Macs, but I am sick of people telling me that I should use a Mac. If I wanted one, I would get one. I can make decisions for myself!
Those games you mention are nowhere near the same as GTA. Not even the same galaxy.
So, how do you teach your children anything valuable out of GTA? The goals of the game seem pretty clear to me. Violate every law imaginable and do so in as violent a way as possible, and you get a better score. Where's the moral in that story? The only path in that game is the "evil conquest path".
I certainly don't have a problem with children playing video games, but when they are as 'over the top' as GTA, they should absolutely be restricted, just as movies and pornography are.
Off-topic for the actual news story, but you really should either be a parent or ask a parent about how this affects a child, regardless of crime statistics.
Even if crime is abolished because of video games "virtualizing violence", I still don't want my child running around the back yard pretending to be a machine-gun-toting villain gunning down our neighbor's little girl calling her a "hooker". This is why I don't want my 7-year-old to play GTA.
Absolutely we cannot censor this content, but common sense says there should be limits placed on children, and those limits should come from parents, not from politicians.
Posts like yours, seemingly encouraging the use of video games as a tool against crime is wrong-headed. How about the Columbine shootings, which were directly related to the video games those kids played. Did the video games really help diffuse their hatred? You seem to be playing with fire to see if it can stop the inferno.
I hope to god you are not a parent, and judging by your movie-watching as a child (predator), you are obviously quite young and have a lot to learn.
Until now, I thought that parents who let their kids play GTA and the like were just not paying attention to them. And here, I find that you actually WANT them to play violent video games. Maybe participating in simulated violence doesn't affect YOU in a negative way, but don't assume that it affects everybody else the same way.
I guess it all depends on how you want to raise your children. If you don't have a problem with your 7 year old child running around the back yard pretending to be a machine-gun toting villain blasting away their friends calling them "hookers" (like my brother-in-law), then by all means, at least show them how to do it the right way and give them GTA for Christmas. Only time will tell if that child grows up to be a killing villian, but at that point there's not much you can do about it.
I think that is the point....that parents should wake up and BE PARENTS.
If any politician says something that they believe is true, they will be accused of pandering to one side or the other. It's a wonder why politicians say anything at all!
These games are just like porn. They should be required to hold the same exact standards or manufacture and sale.
This is the easiest way to ensure that we maintain freedom from censorship, yet protect the innocent from harm.
Not true! Visual media is absolutely more commanding and representative than books. A book requires you to imagine things, whereas a video game shows you how to do it first hand. Take this example:
Read the following to a 9-year-old and what do you think they will imagine:
Betty circled her lips around Tom's rock-hard cock and drive her mouth down, encouraging him to drain himself into her. As she wildly orgasmed, Harry drove his member deep into her from behind.
Now show a video that shows the exact same action and what do you think will be more harmful to the child?
I would argue that the passage of text would probably confuse the child more than damage them. They wouldn't know what the words meant, assuming they had not been exposed to them before. However, with the video, they see exactly what is going on in a physical sense. They see body parts comparable to their own, and what is being done with them.
Absolutely video has more power to educate and corrupt our children than books do.
How many times did you let her play it? No doubt that playing it a few times is merely a shock to the system, not a life-changing event. But playing it every day for a few months, which is what is being decried here, is obviously harmful to some people.
You are close, but not completely correct. It's not just liberal politicians, it's all politicians. These antics have never been more obvious than with our current Republican president, and the Republican whip of the House of Representatives (Tom Delay) is probably the most guilty of this.
The sad fact is, that in order to get elected today, you have to pander to media, which, for (all) politicians, means holding press conferences and saying things that make headlines.
Of course, you seem to be just a liberal-basher instead of a critical thinker, so I suppose my comment doesn't matter much to you.
Apparently the only reason this is a story for a lot of you is the fact that it's HC saying it. Whatever. The real story is that kids ARE playing this game, regardless of which kids...mine or yours.
Of course, there should not be censorship of this or any other game....but people need to realize that what they let their children do will impact them. Just like what you feed them will impact them. If you feed them McDonalds every day, they will get fat. If you let them play GTA all the time, they will become violent.
Parents need to take responsibility for their children; that's the real point here, not some political play by a Senator.
However, if something is reproducable again and again...such as a repeatable scientific experiment...then shouldn't it be treated with less skepticism? If the tests specific steps are known, and the experiment yields the same results, then how can the results be 'tainted' in any way...regardless of who funded the experiment?
Check out Attachment Execution Protection in Windows XP SP2. If a Windows user has Automatic Updates turned on, then they've got this.
However, if the Windows user has Automatic Updates turned on, then the answer is no. This is because Windows XP SP2 eliminates each of the functional deficiencies you mention.
The other 2 Windows features that are typically brought up as unsecure functionality include DCOM and Memory Buffer manipulation. Coincidentally, both of these are also fixed with SP2.
Hopefully the typical Windows user (and also the typical Mac user) has Automatic Updates turned on.
Definitely all due respect to you, but it sounds as if you are contradicting yourself...
A distrubing trend I see with many Mac converts is they believe themselves to be invincible to malware/viruses/exploits/etc.
But then you say:
there doesn't seem to be much in the way of viruses
And:
I wouldn't worry about software at this point.
If we reassure eveybody that there isn't a problem, then aren't we contributing to those who wrongly feel invincible? Kind of like:
"Don't worry the fire 10 floors below us is under control, there's nothing to worry about".
It's funny that just as Microsoft fixes this problem (Windows XP SP2 Memory Protection Execution), it crops up on the Macintosh. It's Bizzarro World!
Likewise, if you turn on Automatic Updates in Windows you should be completely fine. If you have it turned on, then you have SP2, which absolves your machine of each of the major big-name viruses and worms that have hit Windows in the last several years. Attachment Execution Protection, Memory Execution Protection, DCOM Authentication and the Windows Firewall prevent these vulnerabilities from happening.
IMHO everyone should have the Automatic Updates feature in any OS turned on.
Don't forget the other interesting features of SP2, such as Attachment Execution Protection, which should prevent the propogation of most viruses in email attachments. Also, there are memory protection features in SP2 that prevent code from using an overflow to access the LocalSystem. And in SP2, DCOM now requires authentication in order to allow the code to execute.
These three new features alone would have stopped just about every big-name virus that made the press.
My sister bought her Mac Mini specifically because she's not savvy. She rightfully feels that she should not HAVE to be savvy to own a computer.
Wouldn't you agree, then, that if Napster had every recording made, it would be the holy grail?
You gotta admit it would be pretty cool if you could just pay once and listen to any piece of music whenever you wanted to. As is, the moment I tried to get a recording they didn't have, the service is worthless, because then I'll have to go buy it, blowing my margins!
It's simple math, really. Spending $180 every year for the rest of your life for music may not make financial sense if you only typically buy 5 or 6 albums a year. For others who spend, maybe $200 a year on music (10 physical CDs or 200 songs on iTunes), it starts to make financial sense. Throw in the ability to listen to some music you've never heard before without having to shell out another $10 and it starts to sound better. And have you ever had buyers remorse after getting a CD that turned out to be crappy? Well, now you don't have to regret it as much, since there was no incremental cost for the music!
Of course, Napsters specific problem is that they don't have every album. In order for a subscription model to feed my musical appetite, it would have to have any recording. Alas, it's no longer a good deal!
Ignorant fundamentalists absolutely do have power over what the rest of the country sees. These zealots are Supreme Court Justices, Senators, Presidents, US Representatives, State Legislators, journalists and media magnates and other powerful personalities. The only way to not be affected by this particular wave of fundamentalism is to live in a hole.
In this specific case, the ignorant fundamentalist that said that he would boycott the movie was directly attempting to control what other people see. He could have just said: "I don't like it...not my style". Instead, it's "don't show this to anybody else (even if they agree with it) or I'll boycott" Obviously, IMAX is to blame for not calling his pathetic bluff. At least censorship is blatantly evil, this stuff is evil disguised as purity.
I think this is the most telling part of the article, and also something that really exposes the author's lack of experience in IT:
"Take one common question I see, getting an iPod to work in Win 98."
If he heard this question more than once in his lifetime, I would be shocked. It's more likely that he's a self-serving, lying journalist. It makes the whole article invalid, in my mind.