The Supreme Court is preparing to hear a case about freedom of speech on the internet.

Personally, I’m all for prosecuting people who’re obviously trying to market their pornographic materials to minors. (Though, that brings up memories of the Jesus Castillo case, which kind of worries me.) On the other hand, prosecuting webmasters because a minor could get to the pornographic material on their site…

I have to go back to my usual question when talking about exposing minors to stuff — where are the parents? Suppose a parent walks into a video store and their kid wanders off and goes into the Adult room in the back. My thought would be, “Hey, moron, why aren’t you watching your kid?” It’s the same thing with the internet. I know that parents can’t be around all the time, but they can take steps to discourage kids from looking for porn (putting the computer in a public area of the house is only the first step).

I have read a lot of news stories lately that make me wonder if the governement isn’t just interested in legislating morality and/or helping parents pass the buck.
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Video Games Make Kids Fat, Violent, Swedish Experts Say (Reuters).

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat. Video games do not make people fat. It doesn’t happen. If all you do is play video games, you won’t get fat, you’ll get thin, starve, and die. Period.

Yes, I understand that the gamer lifestyle tends to be sedentary, and that, combined with the unhealthy eating habits that are pretty ubiquitous in our society, does lead to unhealthy weights.

I love that there are parent groups out here arguing that video games have made their kids fat. I also love that they protest this, they want to make people “aware” of this danger. Our society knows the dangers that cause people to get fat, and it ain’t video games. If you sit around and read all day, while snacking on pizza, you’ll get fat. No one would argue that reading made you fat. They’d argue that your overall lifestyle (of which reading is a part) made you fat.

All of you parents out there who want to blame your kids woes on video games? Grow up. If you want your kids to get out more, make them get out more. You’ve got the title of parent. Try doing some parenting now.
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The war? It’s a figment of Sony’s imagination.

Nintendo is well known for making quality games and game systems. The GameCube may not have a huge library, but there are several games for it that are more addictive than caffeine (and judging by the number of Mountain Dew cans in my recycle bags right now, caffeine’s pretty addictive).

Sony proved, with the PoS that timing is more important than quality. The Playstation had graphics that looked more on par with the SNES (though it had the advantage of more storage space), but managed to compete with the N64 simply by virtue of being out there first. Sony’s giving up the timing advantage, and Nintendo has more than proven that they’re not going to skimp on their handheld systems.

So, we have a quality system coming out first, then we wait a while and get a handheld version of the PoS? I predict Sony’s out of this fight very quickly.

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