Yes, they voted themselves a paid one-month vacation, by a margin of one vote.Almost directly down party lines. All republicans save four voted nay, to stay in session and hammer out issues except for four who abstained. 17 democrats joined said republicans, 6 abstained. The rest of the democrats voted themselves a vacation.
Irrelevant actually, nothing they pass now will be go to the other house, it's already recessed.
How dare a company who pulls in 76 Billion in quarterly net profit - who self insures their properties - demand cash help from the government when they have a fire/accident/storm damage?
If someone says "I'll bash your head in!" the only way to determine that the threat is credible is after the bash my head in or are caught outside my house with a brick in hand repeating the threat.
Might I suggest you yell that from about 100' away from Herr Bush, with no brick in your hand.... I think you'll find the standard for credible threat to be somewhat lower than you suggest.
Except of course that he was not the administrator of the board in question, nor he posted any posts on the matter at all and was simply sued in error as the two hysterical harpies fired their lawsuits blindly at random targets:
DeWitt pointed out that in an online letter to another blogger, Ciolli and his partner Jarret Cohen identified themselves as AutoAdmit's administrators and defended its "free, uninhibited exchange of ideas."
Sounds like they had reason to believe him to be the administrator, since he claimed to be.
Riiiiight. From the Colli's suit papers: "109: Mass media outlets, including Countdown with Keith Obermann and National Public Radio reported that Mr. Ciolli was guilty of defamation, copyright infringement and other torts...."
Then I suggest Mr. Colli sue them - the presence of a lawsuit accusing someone of misconduct is just that, an accusation. If those mass media outlets reported him as guilty of rather than accused of it's not the fault of the people suing him.
As for the rest, muckracking is only useful in politics.
I hope they realize that they could and should have handled this differently, maybe turning the threats made over to the police and the university, maybe just handling it themselves by posting annonymous responses or maybe just ignoring it. They definately shouldn't have sued the site owner.
They did pass it to the University, and they did pass it to the police - who put it down as Frat Boy pranks. When they put up counter responses it became more graphic & abusive. And it's really tough to ignore it when you're told you can't get an internship because the first thing that comes up on a Google search of your name is that you are a slut who slept your way into lawschool.
They tried to have the site owner either take the posts down or reveal who the posters were so they could sue them, he refused on both counts - so yes, suing to have the courts require him to remove the libelous posts is acceptable. Attaching him to the libel suit wasn't good tactics however - unless it turns out he participated in the postings.
Before you mod me flamebait, consider the implications of such an action. Ordinarily, on the internet, people are able to ignore the trolls.
AC's name is Dave Bubbleshits & he lives over in the blue house behind the college. He's a dumb bitch-ho who should be raped daily.
There's a huge difference between anonymous flamebait directed at other anonymous people. These guys weren't directing it that way. They were giving specifics, in some cases names. This wasn't your normal trolling, this was cyberstalking & cyberbullying at it's worst. Done in person, it would be bad enough, but 4 years later, those comments are still the first thing anyone - including a prospective employer - sees when they Google these women's names. A libel is definitely called for here.
Where did you get the idea that someone somewhere has to believe the slander or libel
The US standard is if a person could 'reasonably believe' the statement. "Jane's slept with the entire state of OH" isn't reasonably believable. "Jane slept with the entire football team" is.
Which boils down to what I said before: a "libel" suit filed anonymously makes absolutely no sense. It is a contradiction in terms.
That depends on what is sealed in the court records & what isn't. The whole point of filing Jane Doe is to distance their names from the libel in the posts, not to be anonymous. Tacking their names to the top of hundreds of more documents that reference the posts is only going to bring those posts back to the top of the search list for their names. If you can't understand that, then your being deliberately obtuse, have no understanding of how employers hire people, or are a troll.
Ciolli's lawsuit is a different matter entirely: he is retaliating against the two who attacked him. His libel suit makes all the sense in the world. He did not attempt to file it anonymously.
Ciolli's an asshat who grabbed the first amendment flag and waved it over a stinking pile of shit screaming he has no duty to be a decent human being. That's fine and he probably didn't have a legal responsibility to pull down the posts when asked, doesn't make him less of an asshat.
As for not filing it anonymously, he's not trying to disassociate his name from libelous comments about his sexual exploits which are the top selections for every search of his name.
If you were one of 3 blond women in the 8:30 Legal Research class & had someone on the college message board repeatedly saying "I'm going to ass rape the blond bitch in my 8:30 Legal Research class", you would probably take it a bit more seriously than a whiny anime complaint. This wasn't "hey she's got nice tits", these were comments which started out as libel, labeling them 'whores who fucked their way into college', & progressed into threats when they took a stand against the libel.
Libel isn't a protected form of speech under the constitution, neither are threats of physical or mental harm. Being anonymous is fine, using that anonymity to break the law and then whine when people try and find you is stupid.
The guys who posted this crap were over the line, the admin should have handled it - he was a 3rd year law student and should have been able to see that it wasn't protected speech. His waving the 1st amendment flag here is an insult to it's purpose.
I certainly won't lose any sleep over a bunch of frat boy jocks getting bitch slapped over their behavior.
Not a really interesting story but it's proof that with some intimidation, big brother can force you hand over your legal surveillance footage.
No, they can intimidate you into doing it, but they can't force you to do it - they just take great pains to disabuse you of the idea that there is a difference.
IIRC, most of the 'secure' systems he accessed were FTP servers set to allow anonymous access & default access w/ 'password'. The damage he did was to the ego of the military - it's OK to point out the Emperor has no clothes, but be darned sure that the general can't hear you when you comment on his missing pants. After all, he's the one with the guns.
In general, he's willing to be tried as a hacker, but the US govt is waving the terrorist flag around & that's a charge he's not willing to face. Also, the damage claim is fairly ridiculous, these were unsecured servers - anything on them was long ago compromised. Charging him for the price of cleanup that would have had to be done if a new admin had pointed out that someone had set the FTP server to anonymous is stupid.
Surprisingly, my bio degree actually helps here. A plasmon is a portion of an EM wave that extends beyond it's carrier. It is directly related to the EM wave itself, but it's coupled to it, not a part of it.
If you bounce a IR beam through a prism, you get total reflectance, with no IR extending through the back end of the prism. However, if you apply a material to the back of the prism, it's presence can mess with your IR beam. This is the principle behind Attenuated Total Reflectance (ATR) Spectroscopy.
What these guys are doing is using the internally reflected light rays to create a series of these plasmons which act like a diffraction grating that straightens out the light so the individual rays are parallel to each other in 1 dimension. The goal in using the co-centric circles is to force the rays into parallel with a reference center ray. If they can do that, then by tweaking the plasmons with an external EM field, they can distort it to alter the path of the reference ray- thus 'steering' it.
With that invalidated, other search engines can legally use PageRank, without giving Google a dime, which could give them the same searching power as Google.
Actually, they can develop their own version of PageRank. In order to use PageRank itself, they would have to license it as the code behind it is still under copyright. Running a copy without paying Google is infringing, and using it for a 3rd party site would be 'exceeding authority' for computer access.
According to some articles, he made about 3.5 mil. A big chunk of that went to RICO & Lawyers. If they find out he made more than that - well then they take him back for tax evasion.
I've known several female police officers. If there wasn't sexual harassment going on I would be stunned.
Q: Why are most female police officers absolute cunts?
A: Because the ones who have a soul were driven off the job.
A large number of cops are exactly the pigs we refer to them as - they are bullies with badges with way too much testosterone and not enough brains. Female cops do not fit into their little world except as meter maids and clerks - and they have no objection to showing them exactly that.
One former female cop I know spent part of a shift bagging several hundred used condoms that had been dumped into her car. Another did the same with tampons & pads.
Propositions are a constant & threats are not uncommon following rejection.
Discipline for shit like this is usually an unofficial "don't do it again" or "sensitivity training" which just pisses them off more.
It doesn't matter how good a parent I am or that I wouldn't buy them "Grand Theft Auto" (or whatever), all kids find ways to sneak things into the house and there is no possible way to monitor what they are doing every minute of every day.
Yep, and guess what - before GTA there was watching TV shows that you weren't supposed to, and smuggling in the Playboy Joe stole from under his father's mattress. Before that there was playing show-me-yours in the woods with the girl from the farm next door.
The point is that it's your job as a parent to make sure they have a grasp of what's right & wrong and correct them when you catch them doing what you think is 'wrong'. Guess what, when they turn 18 they don't magically become wise, and a whole shitload of the wisdom we expect them to have comes from fucking up earlier. The trick is to make sure that when they do it's not going to hurt anyone to badly.
It makes it mandatory the ESRB rating is voluntary. Take Two can release GTA with a photo-quality Hot Coffee scene tomorrow without going through the ESRB and sell it via snail-mail into NY state. With this law, they can't do that. This prevents the phenomena that is happening now with the 'By the Unrated Version' adds you see on television for movies that got trimmed to make an R rating.
If the console makers decide that the parental controls are a pointless addition to the system that is costs more than the public is willing to pay, they can remove it. Under this law, they can't & still sell into NY state.
Look no farther than the UK & Australia - both have restrictions on video games being sold without ratings, and several games have simply been refused ratings. Not a Mature rating, not a Adult only rating, just "We won't" and that is the end of the game.
So, governments are instituted in order to secure rights of life and liberty. Why? Not because those things are useful, but because we think they are inherent to humans. Yeah, that would be an issue of morality.
Read Locke, Hobbes, & Voltaire. No these are not issues of 'morality', they are the structures deemed to be necessary for the foundation of a stable society. If one is not secure in the right to life, then there is no point in any other right, law, or moral construct. If liberty can be denied at whim, then there is likewise no point in the other strictures as failure to obey has no consequences beyond those of obedience.
You recognize a property right. That is a moral right. You recognize a right to life, of which one should not be unjustly deprived. That is also a moral right.
They are not 'moral rights', they are strictures imposed upon members of a social organization for the benefit of those protected. The failure to protect the life of a member of society leaves the entire construct of society moot. The prohibition against theft is not a 'moral issue' it is a ruling imposed to constrain the violence inherent in a materialistic society. I will point to the worst aspects of Communist Russia's corruption and crime to show how badly it works out when materialism is melded with the lack of ownership. In balance, I will point to tribes in the Amazon & Deep Africa where there is no individual ownership of objects & the relative lack of violence over objects in such societies.
I'm not saying it is. Just because laws have a connection to morality does not mean that therefore all morality must be codified into law. Besides, we recognize other moral imperatives, too, like rights to privacy and to be free from unreasonable surveillance.
The right to be free from unreasonable surveillance is inherent in the right to privacy. However, again, this is not a 'moral' right. It is simply an expedient means by which to ensure that members of a society can be assured that their thoughts and actions can occur in an environment free from the chilling effects of big brother. A very strong desire in a bunch of men committing treason.
Morality and morals deal with right and wrong. Governments don't actually concern themselves with right and wrong. They concern themselves with the smooth operation of society. A society does not operate smoothly without certain strictures upon it's citizens. Some of them are obvious - failure to prohibit killing of members of society. Some less so - the limitation of where you can place certain businesses.
Ideally, law is the basis for society - it is the lowest common denominator we can all agree on. Morality is subject to the community in question and is not suitable for law. Once you breach those principles, people lose respect for the law and conversely regard legal as moral.
How is this different then the requirements on food packaging? Why isn't there an uproar over adding new requirements on food packaging?
Food has a significant health risk to it, games don't. Note that the only things that are required to be on food labels are facts - ingredients & nutritional content. There is no labeling requirement that Twinkies be marked as 'Junkfood - high sugar content' and Raman Noodles as 'Junkfood - excessive sodium'.
So you take a game like "Grand Theft Auto", which is named after a felony, and comes with subtitles like "Vice City", and which has a back cover talking about guns and gangsters, and if that's not enough for you, comes with an M rating with a clear label of "Blood and Gore Violence".
Remember some dumb bitch got up in front of congress & told them that she didn't realize when she bought it that there was 'stealing' involved in the game.
Government is all about legislating what is moral. It's called criminal law. Also, arguments about legislating morality are pretty much irrelevant to this discussion, since we're simply talking about a labeling requirement and the inclusion of a feature that allows (and does not require) content discrimination.
Wow, that's a twisted view the founding fathers would shit over.
Government has no business in legislating morality. Government is supposed to be in the business of regulating & maintaining the social contract under which the people governed agree to live by. Morality has nothing to do with it.
Society as a whole agrees that stealing deprives people who have an object of the use of that object. Theft is codified as bad -> illegal.
Society as a whole agrees that killing someone is bad as it deprives someone of their life & society of their future contributions, but it may be necessary in some circumstances. Killing is codified as bad - with exceptions made for justifiable homicide & genuine accidents.
Society as a whole agrees that roads and bridges are needed & the cost should be supported by the whole of society since everyone benefits from them. Taxes are codified & failing to pay taxes is codified as a crime.
That is the business of government. What 2 - or 6 - consenting adults choose to do in their bedroom isn't. That's their business & their business alone. Even if society as a whole views it as immoral, it's not the government's job to restrict those actions as those actions don't affect society.
The government has no compelling interest to regulate what type of entertainment is available within it's boundaries - providing the production of that material doesn't violate any other law. What type of entertainment makes it into your house - is your responsibility and doesn't effect society as a whole.
The government does have a compelling interest in regulating where types of entertainment are available to the extent that those forms of entertainment may disrupt society as a whole --- IE. no football on Main Street. By extension, this has grown into zoning regulations to protect the 'property value' of people who have invested in the area governed - IE no hide tanning in the residential zone.
The problem is that this type of regulation lends itself entirely too easily to abuse based on personal, moral, or financial considerations. A hide tanning operation next to a residential area will drive property values through the floor - they say the job gets better after you loose your sense of smell. Why would a small sex toy shop with a nice sign & only lingerie in the window do the same when a lingerie shop with the same window won't?
Per a huge body of judicial president, the government is supposed to have a compelling interest prior to creating a law and that law is supposed to be 'least restrictive'. This law fails both.
Parents may simply refuse to allow their children to buy or play unrated ones within their house. The absence of a rating is itself an indication that the game requires adult review prior to being provided to children. Thus there is no compelling interest for the government - with or without a rating, the parent has final say in acceptability. In fact the law fully fails to address the glimmer of compelling interest they might be able to get through a court - preventing children for playing certain games deemed harmful - by placing the final decision back in the hands of a parent.
Both the V-Chip measure & the rating system are designed to relieve parents of the responsibility of enforcing their decisions. This is not the job of a government - especially not at the cost of limiting the free expression of game designers by creating artificial levels of 'acceptability'. If parents what a 'V-Chip' supported game console, let them petition the manufacturers & let them pay for it.
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious. It may be redundant but I don't see how it's censoring anything. Unless of course it's been decided that controlling what your kids have access to is limiting free speech...
Because it mandates speech be rated by a controlling board that neither the speaker nor the public have input into. Believe it or not, the games & movies don't have to be rated. Stores generally won't touch them with a 10' pole if they're not, but they don't have to be. It's voluntary on the part of the distributor. Now, if you as a parent care about that, you simply don't buy a game that's not rated.
Bluntly, it's not censorship, however it is 'abridging free speech'. The 2 are not synonymous.
Slashdot Mirror
Irrelevant actually, nothing they pass now will be go to the other house, it's already recessed.
How dare a company who pulls in 76 Billion in quarterly net profit - who self insures their properties - demand cash help from the government when they have a fire/accident/storm damage?
They won't pay at all. All theft/loss policies have clauses regarding seizure by the government.
Might I suggest you yell that from about 100' away from Herr Bush, with no brick in your hand.... I think you'll find the standard for credible threat to be somewhat lower than you suggest.
To quote the Wall Street Journal:
Sounds like they had reason to believe him to be the administrator, since he claimed to be.
Then I suggest Mr. Colli sue them - the presence of a lawsuit accusing someone of misconduct is just that, an accusation. If those mass media outlets reported him as guilty of rather than accused of it's not the fault of the people suing him.
As for the rest, muckracking is only useful in politics.
They did pass it to the University, and they did pass it to the police - who put it down as Frat Boy pranks. When they put up counter responses it became more graphic & abusive. And it's really tough to ignore it when you're told you can't get an internship because the first thing that comes up on a Google search of your name is that you are a slut who slept your way into lawschool.
They tried to have the site owner either take the posts down or reveal who the posters were so they could sue them, he refused on both counts - so yes, suing to have the courts require him to remove the libelous posts is acceptable. Attaching him to the libel suit wasn't good tactics however - unless it turns out he participated in the postings.
AC's name is Dave Bubbleshits & he lives over in the blue house behind the college. He's a dumb bitch-ho who should be raped daily.
There's a huge difference between anonymous flamebait directed at other anonymous people. These guys weren't directing it that way. They were giving specifics, in some cases names. This wasn't your normal trolling, this was cyberstalking & cyberbullying at it's worst. Done in person, it would be bad enough, but 4 years later, those comments are still the first thing anyone - including a prospective employer - sees when they Google these women's names. A libel is definitely called for here.
The US standard is if a person could 'reasonably believe' the statement. "Jane's slept with the entire state of OH" isn't reasonably believable. "Jane slept with the entire football team" is.
That depends on what is sealed in the court records & what isn't. The whole point of filing Jane Doe is to distance their names from the libel in the posts, not to be anonymous. Tacking their names to the top of hundreds of more documents that reference the posts is only going to bring those posts back to the top of the search list for their names. If you can't understand that, then your being deliberately obtuse, have no understanding of how employers hire people, or are a troll.
Ciolli's an asshat who grabbed the first amendment flag and waved it over a stinking pile of shit screaming he has no duty to be a decent human being. That's fine and he probably didn't have a legal responsibility to pull down the posts when asked, doesn't make him less of an asshat.
As for not filing it anonymously, he's not trying to disassociate his name from libelous comments about his sexual exploits which are the top selections for every search of his name.
The women already have been refused jobs based on the controversy generated by the trolls comments - seems like a fair ballgame to me.
If you were one of 3 blond women in the 8:30 Legal Research class & had someone on the college message board repeatedly saying "I'm going to ass rape the blond bitch in my 8:30 Legal Research class", you would probably take it a bit more seriously than a whiny anime complaint. This wasn't "hey she's got nice tits", these were comments which started out as libel, labeling them 'whores who fucked their way into college', & progressed into threats when they took a stand against the libel.
Libel isn't a protected form of speech under the constitution, neither are threats of physical or mental harm. Being anonymous is fine, using that anonymity to break the law and then whine when people try and find you is stupid.
The guys who posted this crap were over the line, the admin should have handled it - he was a 3rd year law student and should have been able to see that it wasn't protected speech. His waving the 1st amendment flag here is an insult to it's purpose.
I certainly won't lose any sleep over a bunch of frat boy jocks getting bitch slapped over their behavior.
No, they can intimidate you into doing it, but they can't force you to do it - they just take great pains to disabuse you of the idea that there is a difference.
IIRC, most of the 'secure' systems he accessed were FTP servers set to allow anonymous access & default access w/ 'password'. The damage he did was to the ego of the military - it's OK to point out the Emperor has no clothes, but be darned sure that the general can't hear you when you comment on his missing pants. After all, he's the one with the guns.
In general, he's willing to be tried as a hacker, but the US govt is waving the terrorist flag around & that's a charge he's not willing to face. Also, the damage claim is fairly ridiculous, these were unsecured servers - anything on them was long ago compromised. Charging him for the price of cleanup that would have had to be done if a new admin had pointed out that someone had set the FTP server to anonymous is stupid.
Surprisingly, my bio degree actually helps here. A plasmon is a portion of an EM wave that extends beyond it's carrier. It is directly related to the EM wave itself, but it's coupled to it, not a part of it.
If you bounce a IR beam through a prism, you get total reflectance, with no IR extending through the back end of the prism. However, if you apply a material to the back of the prism, it's presence can mess with your IR beam. This is the principle behind Attenuated Total Reflectance (ATR) Spectroscopy.
What these guys are doing is using the internally reflected light rays to create a series of these plasmons which act like a diffraction grating that straightens out the light so the individual rays are parallel to each other in 1 dimension. The goal in using the co-centric circles is to force the rays into parallel with a reference center ray. If they can do that, then by tweaking the plasmons with an external EM field, they can distort it to alter the path of the reference ray- thus 'steering' it.
If he's convicted, there's a good chance he'll lose his Congressional Pension - given that the charges are essentially bribery & corruption.
Actually, they can develop their own version of PageRank. In order to use PageRank itself, they would have to license it as the code behind it is still under copyright. Running a copy without paying Google is infringing, and using it for a 3rd party site would be 'exceeding authority' for computer access.
According to some articles, he made about 3.5 mil. A big chunk of that went to RICO & Lawyers. If they find out he made more than that - well then they take him back for tax evasion.
I've known several female police officers. If there wasn't sexual harassment going on I would be stunned.
Q: Why are most female police officers absolute cunts?
A: Because the ones who have a soul were driven off the job.
A large number of cops are exactly the pigs we refer to them as - they are bullies with badges with way too much testosterone and not enough brains. Female cops do not fit into their little world except as meter maids and clerks - and they have no objection to showing them exactly that.
One former female cop I know spent part of a shift bagging several hundred used condoms that had been dumped into her car. Another did the same with tampons & pads.
Propositions are a constant & threats are not uncommon following rejection.
Discipline for shit like this is usually an unofficial "don't do it again" or "sensitivity training" which just pisses them off more.
Yep, and guess what - before GTA there was watching TV shows that you weren't supposed to, and smuggling in the Playboy Joe stole from under his father's mattress. Before that there was playing show-me-yours in the woods with the girl from the farm next door.
The point is that it's your job as a parent to make sure they have a grasp of what's right & wrong and correct them when you catch them doing what you think is 'wrong'. Guess what, when they turn 18 they don't magically become wise, and a whole shitload of the wisdom we expect them to have comes from fucking up earlier. The trick is to make sure that when they do it's not going to hurt anyone to badly.
Yes I am a stepfather.
It makes it mandatory the ESRB rating is voluntary. Take Two can release GTA with a photo-quality Hot Coffee scene tomorrow without going through the ESRB and sell it via snail-mail into NY state. With this law, they can't do that. This prevents the phenomena that is happening now with the 'By the Unrated Version' adds you see on television for movies that got trimmed to make an R rating.
If the console makers decide that the parental controls are a pointless addition to the system that is costs more than the public is willing to pay, they can remove it. Under this law, they can't & still sell into NY state.
Look no farther than the UK & Australia - both have restrictions on video games being sold without ratings, and several games have simply been refused ratings. Not a Mature rating, not a Adult only rating, just "We won't" and that is the end of the game.
Read Locke, Hobbes, & Voltaire. No these are not issues of 'morality', they are the structures deemed to be necessary for the foundation of a stable society. If one is not secure in the right to life, then there is no point in any other right, law, or moral construct. If liberty can be denied at whim, then there is likewise no point in the other strictures as failure to obey has no consequences beyond those of obedience.
They are not 'moral rights', they are strictures imposed upon members of a social organization for the benefit of those protected. The failure to protect the life of a member of society leaves the entire construct of society moot. The prohibition against theft is not a 'moral issue' it is a ruling imposed to constrain the violence inherent in a materialistic society. I will point to the worst aspects of Communist Russia's corruption and crime to show how badly it works out when materialism is melded with the lack of ownership. In balance, I will point to tribes in the Amazon & Deep Africa where there is no individual ownership of objects & the relative lack of violence over objects in such societies.
The right to be free from unreasonable surveillance is inherent in the right to privacy. However, again, this is not a 'moral' right. It is simply an expedient means by which to ensure that members of a society can be assured that their thoughts and actions can occur in an environment free from the chilling effects of big brother. A very strong desire in a bunch of men committing treason.
Morality and morals deal with right and wrong. Governments don't actually concern themselves with right and wrong. They concern themselves with the smooth operation of society. A society does not operate smoothly without certain strictures upon it's citizens. Some of them are obvious - failure to prohibit killing of members of society. Some less so - the limitation of where you can place certain businesses.
Ideally, law is the basis for society - it is the lowest common denominator we can all agree on. Morality is subject to the community in question and is not suitable for law. Once you breach those principles, people lose respect for the law and conversely regard legal as moral.
Food has a significant health risk to it, games don't. Note that the only things that are required to be on food labels are facts - ingredients & nutritional content. There is no labeling requirement that Twinkies be marked as 'Junkfood - high sugar content' and Raman Noodles as 'Junkfood - excessive sodium'.
Remember some dumb bitch got up in front of congress & told them that she didn't realize when she bought it that there was 'stealing' involved in the game.
Wow, that's a twisted view the founding fathers would shit over.
Government has no business in legislating morality. Government is supposed to be in the business of regulating & maintaining the social contract under which the people governed agree to live by. Morality has nothing to do with it.
That is the business of government. What 2 - or 6 - consenting adults choose to do in their bedroom isn't. That's their business & their business alone. Even if society as a whole views it as immoral, it's not the government's job to restrict those actions as those actions don't affect society.
The government has no compelling interest to regulate what type of entertainment is available within it's boundaries - providing the production of that material doesn't violate any other law. What type of entertainment makes it into your house - is your responsibility and doesn't effect society as a whole.
The government does have a compelling interest in regulating where types of entertainment are available to the extent that those forms of entertainment may disrupt society as a whole --- IE. no football on Main Street. By extension, this has grown into zoning regulations to protect the 'property value' of people who have invested in the area governed - IE no hide tanning in the residential zone.
The problem is that this type of regulation lends itself entirely too easily to abuse based on personal, moral, or financial considerations. A hide tanning operation next to a residential area will drive property values through the floor - they say the job gets better after you loose your sense of smell. Why would a small sex toy shop with a nice sign & only lingerie in the window do the same when a lingerie shop with the same window won't?
Per a huge body of judicial president, the government is supposed to have a compelling interest prior to creating a law and that law is supposed to be 'least restrictive'. This law fails both.
Parents may simply refuse to allow their children to buy or play unrated ones within their house. The absence of a rating is itself an indication that the game requires adult review prior to being provided to children. Thus there is no compelling interest for the government - with or without a rating, the parent has final say in acceptability. In fact the law fully fails to address the glimmer of compelling interest they might be able to get through a court - preventing children for playing certain games deemed harmful - by placing the final decision back in the hands of a parent.
Both the V-Chip measure & the rating system are designed to relieve parents of the responsibility of enforcing their decisions. This is not the job of a government - especially not at the cost of limiting the free expression of game designers by creating artificial levels of 'acceptability'. If parents what a 'V-Chip' supported game console, let them petition the manufacturers & let them pay for it.
The comparisons betw
Because it mandates speech be rated by a controlling board that neither the speaker nor the public have input into. Believe it or not, the games & movies don't have to be rated. Stores generally won't touch them with a 10' pole if they're not, but they don't have to be. It's voluntary on the part of the distributor. Now, if you as a parent care about that, you simply don't buy a game that's not rated.
Bluntly, it's not censorship, however it is 'abridging free speech'. The 2 are not synonymous.