Child Online Protection Act is a violation of the 1st Amendment!

Quoted from ABC News:

The 3rd U.S. Circurt Court of Appeals upheld on Tuesday a 2007 lower-court decision that the Child Online Protection Act violated the First Amendment since it was not the most effective way to keep children from visiting adult websites.

This is already the case in other countries, like the UK, where it’s illegal for companies to ask for personal information to be used for any reason, because it can lead to identity theft. This is why age verification in Second Life has not done a damn thing, since no one is bothering to use it.

All this means it’s that it’s completely flawed to enforce this.  Furthermore does it really matter if some punk kids gets to see porn? You can already find porn doing a Google image search. All you have to do is disable “safe search” which only takes a couple clicks to do, and it doesn’t ask you if you’re an adult, let alone verifies that.

So is all of this really “for the children” as everyone likes to spin this as, or are business (like second life) just trying to cover their legal asses if some kid is exposed to “adult” materials.  It’s not like the child is going to sue a business because they found porn, but their parents will! If parents are going to be upset over that and bother to sue web companies left and right from their kids keep finding online; why didn’t they put that energy and effort in monitoring their children’s browsing habits in the first place?

Is it really that neccesary to assume others will babysit our kids online, while risking personal privacy? Well in this day in age governments and companies would like to throw out priviacy rights anyway, all in the name of national security.

Now if we can get the Patriot Act, and the DMCA to be shown how much they violate the first amendment, and once Bush is out of office, maybe we can breath a sigh of relief and feel as if the world is acctually improving for once since 9/11/2001.

I love Music games

Anyone who knows me, already knows this.  Both Rock Band and Guitar Hero will be releasing new titles this fall, and it sounds like both games will be compadible with all the hardware I already have.  The new Guitar Hero, which they will be adding drums and vocals, will be made compadible with my Rock Band gear.  YAY! I really didn’t want to buy another $200 worth of hardware that adds more clutter to my room, and I already own 4 fucking guitars.

But both games play a little diffrently from each other.  For example, Guitar Hero’s drum kit has more pads than the Rock Band drum kit. So how exactly will this work using my Rock Band drums with GH?  Will I be stuck playing on medium level, so to avoid using that extra pad?  Or will the songs just have a diffrent note-chart depends on the hardware you have plugged in?  Sounds like an aweful amount of redundant work to be done.  They even talk about being able to use a midi-drum kit you can use to play, but I forget if it’s with RB or GH.  Ah well im not into drums that much anyway. With that said, I’m more inclined to get the newer GH guitar that apparently has “slide sensors.”  They didn’t get into any details as to WTF that is at E3, but it might be related to my theory about string bending, since it still has 5 buttons on the neck.  I’m thinking each button has a slide sensor on them.  A slide sensor for going up and down the neck seem a little pointless since there’s only 5 buttons at the end of the neck.  We shall see.

Do not turn my 360 into a Wii

Avatars? Really? Microsoft, can you not be any more blaitiant at your rip off of Ninteno’s Mii characters? They will probably charge us Microsoft points for every article of clothing and attachment we can put on our Avatars. I was hoping Microsoft would just take over Linden Labs, and import Second Life into the Xbox 360 to compete with Sony’s “Home” and Nintendo’s Mii.  I was kina hoping to at least start that roumor.  >sigh<

Granted these “avatars” are more fleshed out than a Mii, and the characters are taller and the bodies are more realistic, yet still looking cartoony like a Mii. They Actually have arms, rather than a pair of floating balls for hands.  But still the heads look way too much like Mii characters.

Doctor Who

I KNEW IT!  I was right! Russell T. Davies is a fucking genius! I love stories that REMEMBER past events and use them to help them out in current story line, with out becoming a soap opera (like BSG is). Star Trek almost never did this, and story lines remained contained with in the 45 minute episodes. Anyway don’t want to spoil Doctor Who season 4 episode 13 to anyway. But it is the end of the season, until the Xmas special. Wewt CYBERMEN!

Up in smoke!

My main windows PC’s power supply went bad on me.  When I turn it on it just turns it self off. Some times it will get into windows but if I do anything like run SL, it turns it self off.  The power supply is making weird noises that’s a little hard to describe (faint clicking sparking noises), but something went wrong.

So now im on my ubuntu PC, I get SL working on it rather well. So then I decided to turn it off for the night, but ubuntu didn’t really turn off the PC.  I saw it restart and then I could smell the burning of electronic equipment! OH SHIT! I thought my CPU burned out, or something.  Yet again this PSU went up in smoke.  so now TWO power supplies bit the dust.  What the hell is going on here?

For months now my local power company PG&E power to my house has been flakey at best.  Last May (the day GTA4 was released) they took our power offline to replace a power pole a few houses down.  Since then the lights would constantly flicker and act weird.  They noticed this and was also fixed quickly after they turned off our power yet again.  But for the past month it’s been really bad at least for one circuit in my home.

My uninterpretable power UPS is constantly “clicking” going to battery power and back to AC power.  Over and over dozens of times a day.  Especially when the air conditioner kicks on (which is on a separate 220 circuit), but it never did that BEFORE, at least not this often! Even when the air isn’t on, the UPS is clicking between battery power and AC power.

At first I thought my UPS was just old and I needed a new one.  So for $50 I got a new one, and it behaves just like my OLD one constantly clicking power between battery and AC.  ARG!!  So now my old UPS is giving power backup to my HDTV, cable box, as well as my home network (cable modem, and router) and it’s plugged into a different wall outlet and it clicks on occasion, but NOT as often as it used too before on the other outlet and it’s not as noticeable at all.

Now I have two PC power supplies that have died.  One still works but it’s faulty, and the other just burned out. I don’t know if the burned out one is due to a fluke with unbuntu since it didn’t shut down proper (if it was I’ll NEVER use linux again, Windows never FRIED any hardware).  So now I pulled out another PSU from another computer to get my linux box running again so I can post this.

But I’m also thinking that this can be blamed on PG&E for the fauly noisy power that keeps dropping voltage on me. But it’s really hard to prove that they caused this damage. Especially when it seems it’s an issue on this one circuit, and the others don’t seem to be effected by it.  But even then the AC turning on shouldn’t effect it either.  Sure it might cause the room lights to blink for a millisecond, but not actually make my UPS think it’s been unplugged and start BEEPING at me.

At least it’s ruining power supplies and not the rest of my computers hardware.  But it’s just as annoying, and crippling.  Plus that smell of burnt electronics will linger in my room for days.

I hate stress….  Time to power down this machine again and hopefully the PSU doesn’t take a smoke break on me.

Guitar Hero Areosmith

Guitar Hero Areosmith (GHA) a decent game, but it’s really just a rehash of Guitar Hero 3 (GH3). There’s no change in game play, they didn’t add anything new, and there is no DLC for this title, but it does have XBL play like GH3.  In fact GHA is just a reskined GH3, it even uses the EXACT same tutorial session (except the ending dosen’t mention “Hit me with your best shot” song.)

It’s also a LOT easier compared to the impossible songs on the last venue on GH3 in expert. I’ve still not finished GH3 on expert because it’s just fucking impossible. Only idiot savants can beat this game on expert. In fact GHA only has about 40 songs, so the whole game can be finnished off in a few hours in a single setting.

At first while playing it, I didn’t like any of the songs. The first few venues of songs weren’t really all that great, and not all of them are Areosmith songs.  But the “story mode” for single play sorta summirieses the carrer path of Areosmith, and recreates the venues they played at.

There were some supprises that I enjoyed where DMC (from Run DMC, the one with glasses) came on stage and started sing.. er rapping “Kind of Rock” as well as “Walk this way” later on in carrer mode.  There was also some Ted Nugent (Cat Scratch Fever) which I enjoyed (Nuuuuuudge! \m/)

There’s only one guitar battle boss you have to deal with towards the end of the game. Which was arguably GH3 drawback, especially when you fight Lou at the end. You fight against Joe Perry, and even on expert it wasn’t that difficult for an experienced player. I was able to beat him on my first try, even though I assumed I would fail multiple times.  After you finish the game, there’s another song you get to play as the credits roll, just like on GH3 playing TTFAF, but you don’t really need to play it.

So the game was a lot more FUN than GH3 was.  GH3 for me was just too fucking hard and it became UN-FUN for me where GH2 was always a joy (and considering GH2 had a diffrent development team).  GHA brings back the fun that GH3 stole from me (and had been replaced by Rock Band for months now).  However with short set list, about half the content compared to the other GH titles, no DLC, and it’s obvious re-vamp of GH3 (so there was little development) and not much replay value why is this game selling for $60?

If you’re eager to play this, borrow or rent this game and then buy it once it drops in price.  Or at least buy it with out the guitar. Like I really need more plastic guitars here. I already have my Xplorer, wireless Les Paul, and my two Rock Band guitars. And the one that comes with GHA is just another Les Paul with a diffrent face plate.

The new Guitar Hero 4 may make me get a new guitar, since it SOUNDS like they are adding a new function or feature to it, as well as adding drums and vocals. The new guitar will probably have extra buttons (yet old guitars are still playable) but even a 6th (or more) button that sounds good to me.

Oh as for Guitar Hero on tour, for the Nintendo DS; I’ll pass. I don’t own a DS, don’t plan too, and the way the game is played, with only 4 buttons just looks way too akward.  And it dosen’t sound like it’s getting good reviews anyway.  It might be good for someone who’s never played Guitar Hero before, but it’s too weird for anyone who’s had experiance with using a guitar controller.