Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
This clip from College Humor, 24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot, is hilarious and makes me appreciate the abundance of great new technologies that the last decade has brought us. The video features many recent and familiar, yet shockingly antiquated technologies.
Honestly, I don’t get it. Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, is mounting a strong challenge for the GOP nomination primarily by appealing to the social conservative wing of the party and religious groups. He uses rhetoric like this on the campaign trail:
“Over the past 30 years, a decline in moral character has produced a decline in the character of our society. Everything hinges on the men & women we choose to establish public policy. And their character depends on you. There is something you can do: you can live a God-centered life of high moral character, and you can support candidates who share your Christian standards.”
OK, that’s fine, but here’s what I don’t get. Why is Huckabee preaching the gospel of moral decline and cultural disintegration while also playing up endorsements from martial arts expert and actor Chuck Norris, professional wrestler Ric Flair, and rock-and-roll star Ted Nugent? Don’t get me wrong, I spent more time than I care to mention watching Chuck Norris movies and Ric Flair wrestling matches with my Dad growing up, and I used to own all of the Motor City Madman’s (that’s one of Nugent’s many colorful nicknames for you non-fans) albums in the late 1970s.
Slashdot reports that the “multiply” feature on Excel 2007 doesn’t work. (Seriously) A Slashdot commenter describes Microsoft’s response:
Microsoft already has a patch in the works to help users overcome this issue. Whenever the user types a ‘*’ in a formula, an animated sprite of Charles Babbage’s head will pop up. It will show this bubble caption:
“It looks like you’re trying to multiply two numbers. I can help show you how to use the Method of Finite Differences to find a good approximation of your answer using only addition and subtraction. Would you like me to bring up a wizard so that we can get started on finding an appropriate power series?”
Steve Jobs wants to sell you back copies of your own home movies for a $1.99 apiece! Or so declares this humorous Onion parody, (which almost sounds like it might have been secretly penned by our own Tim Lee!)
And while you’re over at The Onion site, you might also want to check out this funny take-off on the government’s ongoing lost laptop problems, which I’ve been writing quite a bit about here.
I spend a lot of time arguing with media critics who would like to see various types of content censored in the name of protecting children. Video games are usually at the top of their regulatory wish list. Some of these critics claim that video games are, at a minimum, creating a generation of slothful youth. But others make more grandiose claims that video games are training today’s youth to essentially be cop killers or serial murderers. That’s the conclusion of one book I read recently with the title (I’m not kidding) “Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill.” The authors of this over-the-top book argue that there is “a clear cause-and-effect relationship between screen violence and violent behavior.”
But it just isn’t true. As I documented in this recent study, juvenile murder, rape, robbery and assault are all down significantly over the past decade. Overall, aggregate violent crime by juveniles fell 43 percent from 1995-2004. And there are fewer murders at school today and fewer students report carrying weapons to school or anywhere else than at any point in the past decade. Other juvenile trends are improving, too. Alcohol and drug abuse among high school seniors has generally been falling and is currently at a 20-year low. Teen birth rates have hit a 20-year low in 2002 and fewer teens are having sex today than they were 15 years ago. High school dropout rates continue to fall steadily, as they have for the past 30 years. And although the teenage suicide rate rose steadily until the mid-1990s, it began a dramatic decline after that that continues today. (All these statistics are thoroughly documented in my study).
But let’s set aside these meddlesome things called facts for a moment and ask a different question: Are the “games” that kids play today really more dangerous than the games older generations played when they were children? Are the electronically-rendered games that kids play today really more dangerous than the games children played back in the “good ol’ days”?
What got me thinking about this website that one of my PFF colleagues brought to my attention entitled “The 10 Most Dangerous Play Things of All Time.” It’s a humorous look at some of the most dangerous toys and games of the past few decades. And when I say dangerous, I mean seriously dangerous toys–as in death, dismemberment or poisoning. That kind of dangerous. And I’m proud to say that even though I owned and played with 3 of the toys on the “most dangerous” list, I made it out of childhood alive and unharmed! Nonetheless, the list is frightening.
Well it didn’t take long for a young, rebellious punk to turn into a paranoid, condescending parent. I’m already talking to my kids in ways that used to make me resent my own parents. And I’m already beginning to think about how to watch over their every move like a hawk to make sure that they stay out of trouble.
The difference between raising a kid today versus the past, however, is that technology–much to the dismay of independent-minded children–makes this task even easier for parents. In my recent paper discussing how”Parents Have Many Tools to Combat Objectionable Media Content,” I mentioned how new cell phones targeted to kids come embedded not only with a variety of parental controls, but also GPS / geo-location technology. This enables parents to monitor the movements of their children wherever they may go.
Even though my kids are still too young to have their own cell phones, I’ve already begun thinking about how I might use such tracking technologies in the future. Even though both of my kids are under five years of age, I sometimes sit around thinking about what they are doing or exactly where they are at. This is despite the fact that I know exactly where my kids are: My daughter is always at her pre-school and my son is always at home with our nanny. Yet, I’m still paranoid, and sometimes find myself wondering if they are exactly where they should be. Could they have wondered off? Are the teachers or my nanny taking the kids places I don’t know about? Has someone snatched them?!?
I know this is all quite pathetic in one sense, but that’s the sort of paranoid thinking that sometimes goes on in the heads of parents. And in my most paranoid moments, I sometimes think how cool it would be if I could just convert the wi-fi radar on my laptop (which searches for nearby hotspots and maps them on a big radar screen on my computer) into a kid-tracker instead. It could track their cell phones, or their GPS-enable watches or lunchboxes. Or perhaps even the RFID chip I could plant under their skin!
Again, this is the sort of stuff that what have driven me into to hyper-rebellion as a kid, especially as a teenager. The thought of my parents tracking my every move would have driven me nuts, and I my computer-nerd brother and I probably would have worked hard to defeat or trick any geo-location technologies that our parents might have tired to use with us. (My brother would have probably reprogrammed them to trace our cats instead of us.)
Is there a happy balance here? I think so.
I could waste countless hours perusing patently silly, a blog featuring ridiculous “inventions” that have been granted patent protection.
What’s scary is that these inventions are mostly things that would be obvious (or obviously useless) to a sixth grader. If there are dozens of those, imagine how many thousands of illegitimate patents there are on subjects requiring some technical know-how to evaluate obviousness and usefulness.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
