Wow! I was thinking if nobody'd posted a link to Lessig's recent stuff, that I'd get an easy +5 and feel good about myself doing it. Now I see the first mention of it is currently sitting at +2 and I just feel sad. The corrupting influence of money on the US government is a crucial problem we have to solve right away, and I hope a lot of slashdot readers get that and want to help.
Maybe I'm reading too much into moderation. In fact, I hope the parent isn't highly up-moderated because everyone already knows about fix congress first.
Thanks for the overview of the clinical trials procedure. You clearly know a lot about it. One thing I wanted to point out is that while placebo-controlled designs are probably the most reliable, in many contexts (including a cancer treatment) it would be unethical to give patients a placebo (i.e. a treatment expected to do nothing) rather than a treatment that might actually help them.
Basically, if there is a treatment that is known to be at least somewhat effective, that's your control rather than a placebo. It might be that the definition of placebo has shifted to include any standard non-experimental treatment, but that would be news to me.
I bet they will never push for a law against violent MOVIES, what with Hollywod present in the state. Games, however, are mostly made out-of-state, e.g. Austin TX has a lot of video game companies.
I think the general thrust of your comment is correct. The video games lobby is nowhere near the Hollywood lobby. However, I live in Los Angeles and within a few miles of my house are offices of EA, THQ and Activision. According to the ESA, California companies employ the most people, accounting for 40% of the employment in the US video game industry. Texas is also in the top 5. I think this kind of brouhaha has more to do with relative age. Movies have been around for as long as our baby boomer overlords can remember. Video games (particularly in their current form) have not. They are newer, so they're a more convenient scapegoat.
I read a blog post about this case pointing out that East Bay Express also happens to run a restaurant rating service. Conflicts of interest don't always lead to problems, but the conflict should be kept in mind when evaluating the article's claims.
While I can't disagree completely, it seems that some authority figures are using YouTube to get their message out. The California Department of Motor Vehicles has its own YouTube channel with over 17k subscribers. I don't know how many subscribers you need on YouTube to be popular, but 17k seems like a lot.
I guess the New York Times wrote an article about the whole thing. You can check it out: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/22/us/22dmv.html
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn