Video Game Prohibition

In June Louisiana Govenor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco signed the legislation HB1381 into law which prohibited certain video games from being sold to minors. The legislation is sponsored by Rep. Roy Burrell (D) and largely drafted by controversial anti-game attorney Jack Thompson who is looking to define violent games as "harmful to minors," using the same legal guidelines by which obscenity is determined. However, ,the Entertainment Software Association filed a lawsuit, which resulted in a temporary injunction against its enforcement.


HB1381 debates have been heated and gone from temporary to permanent and back into court where now a federal judge has ruled that the banned of the sale of violent video games to minors in Louisiana is unconstitutional.


Rep. Roy Burrell (R) and Jack Thompson produced supposed research that shows a contributory link between playing violent video games and real-world violence. The purpose of the research was to have it documented into the legislative record in an attempt to support the legislation's already shaky credentials. In addition, the law adapted the Miller obscenity test to the realm of violent video games, prohibiting their sale to minors if they:


1. Appealed to the minor's morbid interest in violence" according to "contemporary community standards,"


2. Depicted violence inappropriate to minors according to "prevailing standards" in the adult community, and


3. Lacked "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors."


If we are going to prohibit entertainment based on the above credentials than there is a Santa Clause list of entertainment that needs to be added starting with television.


Similar court hearings regarding video games have been unsuccessful. A US Appeals Court upheld a lower court's ruling that a similar Illinois law was unconstitutional.


Plaintiffs Entertainment Software Association, Video Software Dealers Association, and Illinois Retail Merchants Association sued several state and local officials seeking to enjoin the enforcement of Illinois’s Violent Video Games Law and Sexually Explicit Video Games Law.


This constitutes the Court’s findings of fact and conclusions of law under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 52(a). For the reasons stated below, the Court concludes that both statutes violate the First Amendment and therefore issues a permanent injunction against their implementation.

With video game legislation on a long losing streak, you would think that it's time for politicians to stop pandering to their constituents by continuing to introduce and pass legislation restricting the sale of some video games. No, we can now add Utah & Pennsylvania to the list of states examining the video game violence issue. A committee of the Pennsylvania House held a hearing in late August to consider the effects of violent games on children.


Rep. Ronald Waters (D) said, "I watch young people play these games, and they play them for long periods of time. It's hard for me to watch that kind of activity without wondering what kind of effects it's having on them. What are we doing subliminally to our children that we allow them to entertain themselves with this type of activity..."


The courts have spoken clearly and unanimously: video games are protected by the First Amendment and singling them out for regulation violates the Equal Protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.


Here are my thoughts and questions. Rep. Ronald Waters said


“It's hard for me to watch that kind of activity”


Why are you just watching them play the game? If you are so concerned about your child’s warfare, why are you not taking the video game set out of their hands and potentially out of the house and saying NO you can not play video games?


Why are people continually blaming the makers of these games and yet parents and friends of parents are buying them for children. That’s like buying a gun, handing it o a child, having the child shoot the family dog and than blaming the makers of the gun for they’re child shooting the family dog.


Stop and think a moment. If you do not ant your child playing these violent video games tell them they can not. Let they’re friends know they ca not play the games and tell your friends and relatives not to buy them for your children.


If you’re a parent be a parent and take some freaking responsibility for what you are allowing your child to see, touch, smell, hear and play.

Be a rebel - be a Video Game Designer!

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How to Improve WiFi Reception

Here are some quick tips to maximize your signal strength and minimize interference with a little wireless feng shui.

Genuine ways to Make Money on the Internet

Not included: Taking Surveys, Get Paid to Surf the Internet, MLM, Programs with a ton of negative user experiences (based on researching forums, googling them, etc.), Contest Sites, "Buy my DVD, CD, Audiobook", etc.

What IS included: Things you can use to legitimately make money online. Everything from product reviews to writing code, creating videos.


# Revver - I have no idea how I missed this on the first list. You basically upload your video to Revver and they attach an ad to it. You get 50% of what the ad makes. If any of you have been on YouTube or other video sites, you can easily understand that some videos, even bad ones at times, go viral and thousands of people see it, and your ad! If you want to see a sample of this, here is a link to Revver's 'most watched' page.

# Vizu - I really like the sound of this one and may try it on Dumb Little Man. Instead of putting ads on your site, you insert polls. You get paid based on the CPM (cost per thousand) that you set. The better positioning on your site, the better you will do. The nice part of this is that everything is embedded into your site allowing visitors to participate without leaving. That is key. PS - I learned about this site today from Digital Inspiration.

# Break - Upload your videos and pictures all day. If they like them and place them on their homepage, they will pay you $400 for original videos (you know, snowboarding off a house onto a trampoline and breaking your arm, etc) and up to $2000 for short films. They also have other random contests that pay out $50 a picture.

# CelltradeUSA Refer your visitors to CelltradeUSA. I wrote about them recently, but they offer an affiliate program now. In short, if people need to get out of a cell phone contract, cell trade helps them by matching them with someone that wants to enter into a phone contact without all the fees.

# Bitwine - If you are an expert or even mildly knowledgeable on something, Bitwine provides a way for you to set a per minute rate and charge people to talk to you in a private meeting space. Bitwine is currently in "beta" so they are waiving fees which at some point will most likely be a % of your earnings. This sounds similar to Ether, which is a service we discussed in July.

# Clickbooth - Clickbooth is a site that blog owners or site owners can join to place Cost Per Action ads on their site. It has a good base of advertisers and is similar to Commission Junction or Linkshare.


# Rent-A-Coder: As I type this, there are 2,299 requests on this site. These requests are opportunities for coders to earn money. Take on a project, get it done and get paid. I like this concept because Rent-A-Coders doesn't get paid a thing until you do therefore it is in their best interest to keep you busy.

# Shopping- Add widgets to your site that display products based on keywords. For the ultra-skilled, you can even customize the entire user experience by tapping into their API. I guarantee you've seen sites with this installed and you never realized it.

Lunch Savings Calculator

I love it when I can save a few dollars here and there and especially when I find a way to save larger amounts. Everyone knows that if they simply bring lunch from home they could save money. However, if your like me, than you may need to be shown just how much.

Lunch Savings Calculator website shows you how much you could have saved with a home lunch.

It’s rare for me to buy lunch from the restaurants where I work because it is expensive and I can enjoy my lunch reading or getting errands done instead. However I see a lot of the same people heading to the same restaurants again and again. So I’m going to guess at what they may spend on daily lunches.

Lets say a Cheap Home Lunch price is $1.50 per day.
Eating Out is say $8/day
250 days per year (50 weeks / 5 days a week)
Over a 10 year period
With an investment Yield of 5%

I would have saved over $11K.

From Just An Online Minute... from MediaPost

Online retailers appear poised to have a decent holiday season, at east judging by the preliminary numbers released this weekend by different easurement companies. At the same time, some e-commerce stores still have some work to do to shore up their sites for the remaining weeks in the holiday season.

Consider Walmart.com, which crashed Friday, unable to accommodate the influx of Web visitors. A representative said told CNNMoney.com that crash was "due to a higher than anticipated traffic surge"--an explanation that, if true, raises more questions than it answers.Consumers have many reasons to shop online--avoiding crowds, lines, shortages, transportation hassles. But a site crash on Friday, a day that company executives should have anticipated would have drawn extra traffic, doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Dictionary

equivocate: to be deliberately ambiguous or unclear.

travail: painful, arduous work; also, agony, anguish.

inclement: harsh; severe -- especially said of the weather.