Christopher S. Little's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
from the favorite-my-favorites dept
This week's Favorites post comes from Christopher S. Little, who usually goes by another name in the comments, but didn't want us to face any sort of trademark threats...
I've been given the honor of writing up my favorite posts of the week, and what a week it's been. I was asked on Tuesday and even then I knew I'd have a problem picking just a few. It took a lot of thinking, but I did find myself coming back to a few again and again.
First up is Monday's post about the Supreme Court finally weighing in on the laws requiring stores to not sell violent games to minors. Now, I understand why some people want these laws, but it's not the government's place to say. It's the job of the parent to say yes or no to the child not the government's. I'm also very happy to see that the judges realized that gaming is not any more different from movies than movies were from books. I do remember Lord of the Flies being more disturbing than Grand Theft Auto. Too bad California is going to try again.
Second on my list is Capcom deciding that they don't want you to play again from the beginning. One of my hobbies is video games (collecting, learning the history) so this one hits close to home. I don't know much about this game, but I expect it's setup like Portal. You have missions and once you beat the first one you unlock the second and so forth. Well, that's not too bad for you, but what about the next guy? What about the guy ten or twenty years from now trying to catch up on the history of this great game he just got into called Resident Evil 22 (or whatever)? The odds of finding an unused copy that far in the future are slim. On top of that, add the feeling that you can't really show you did those things. You can't show your friend that you deleted your game and come back a few days later with it 100% completed. With that hanging over your head even actually doing it yourself feels cheapened.
Third is the Google+ beta. I'll usually give anything Google at least one try, but their past social networks were underwhelming. So I was a little suprised to not only see Mike posting about it but liking it as well. That was enough to make me take a second look. Then he pointed out the Circles function and how you can easily delete your account. Apparently both those functions exist in Facebook, but are so hard to get to that I didn't even know they existed. I admit, I may have been played by Google. Once I saw that they got so overloaded with requests they had to stop accepting them, it piqued my interests. As Marcus Carab pointed out, who ever heard of Google running out of resources?
I have to give an honorable mention to the string of Righthaven posts that show the disaster that is their legal strategy. It's good to not only see the suits be smacked down, but also to see that claims are being filed against them. There need to be easier ways to enforce the consequences for abuses like this.
Re:
(untitled comment)
Re: Re: Re: Re: Mixed feelings
Two, there are other countries out there with lots of guns and no mass shooting issue. That suggests that the issue is not with the guns, but with the people. Magically removing all guns might stem the tide, but it's not going to stop.
So quit bitching about guns, find the source of the problem, and solve it. It ain't as easy as shouting "BAN GUNS" and doing absolutely nothing productive, but it at least would be going in the right direction./div>
Re: Re: Re: Opening up libel laws
Re: Is this how it starts...?
No, of course not. Historians won't exist. Revisionists will./div>
Re: Re: Re:
The only reason there's even that much detail in the article is to show that this is a real thing happening, not a hypothetical situation that people could just shrug off./div>
Re: Re: Re:
And this is why Tim's comment "Self-driving cars are an inevitability" is wrong. Just like how people's fears of Google Glass killed the product, people's fears of self driving cars will kill that as well. Seriously, how many people will be willing to get a self driving car if they're worried about other people assaulting them out of fear?/div>
Re: Denying a Trademark doesn't violate rights
So the choice is remove all trademarks or quit limiting them based on arbitrary morality./div>
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Re:
Re: Re: Re:
So your argument is that we shouldn't have set top box competition because cable companies offer online streaming if you already pay for the higher channels and already pay for a set top box?
"There are also cable cards."
That require a set top box to work because the higher channels are encrypted to force you to pay for a set top box./div>
Re: My dream...
Re:
Re: Too bad...
It shows an inherent flaw in public opinion. It's the exact reason why our court systems were created. Too bad the court system has lost track of that purpose./div>
Re:
I don't doubt that there will be addons like NoScript and AdBlock that let you white list websites for DRMed content, and I don't doubt that there will be addons to completely bypass the DRM as well.
I hope the W3C understand what they're getting into. The companies that are requesting DRM in HTML5 will be coming back to the W3C at least once a week to update the DRM because the previous version has been cracked./div>
Re: What TOR is
(untitled comment)
The list just keeps growing, doesn't it./div>
(untitled comment)
So if there are 2,500,000,000 heartbeats in a lifetime and the book is for your future 2,000,000,000 heartbeats, does that mean it's a children's book? That cover doesn't look like it would draw too many five year olds./div>
Re:
Still the only router software that I've ever seen that requires setting the password. All others, professional or residential, have default passwords that can be found by a simple Google search./div>
Re: Thank you for addressing this.
Tech lingo is a bitch, I hope that helped./div>
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