... "therefore, baby jesus arose from the grave and all good dogs go to heaven".

It baffles me how we age ten or so years and then become amnesic to what our capacities were as teenagers. Fuck, the shit I did as a teenager (or even younger, sometimes) is more than adult me could probably cope with, today. Somehow, I processed that shit, grew up, and moved on into adulthood (at some questionable capacity, I suppose). Awhile ago, twelve year olds ruled vast empires. Today, you're still a precious protected darling at the age of fucking twenty-five.

Unless your children have specific problems that make certain content very questionable for them, the real things you need to worry about with your children are neglect, abusing them, the degree of religion or crazy mumbo-jumbo you raise them in, the family life you wrap around them. A bitter divorced mommy and daddy pawning the child against one another and spewing venom to little Billy about the other parent is going to far more long-term damage than shooting a bunch of make-believe bikers with a make-believe shotgun in a two-dimensional make-believe world on your screen.

This story can be summarized as follows:

You are not making the same parenting choices that I want you to make, so clearly the system is broken!

Here's the thing - it depends on your kid and nobody knows your kid better than you. It also depends upon the age. So what if you buy the game for your reasonable fifteen year old? There is worse violence and sexual content in your average coming of age comedy and action flick. The exception might be the torture scene which I was kind of angry at being forced to play through (there is no way to make choices to avoid it). It was a pretty horrifying scene -- though it was then followed up with some comedy to reinforce the point it was clearly trying to make (SPOILER BUT ONLY SORTA: The government forces you to torture a guy who keeps telling you he will tell you whatever information you need, but you keep torturing him anyway).

I played and created D&D campaigns when I was seven. I consumed online porn in the late 80s and early 90s, as early as twelve (okay, yes, then I consumed online porn in the late 90s, the 00s, the teens...). I read Tommyknockers when I was twelve. I watched Poltergeist and Nightmare on Elm Street when I was four. Children are not these malleable, impressionable, precious little glass objects that are going to be permanently damaged because you allowed them to read, watch, listen to, or play something that is above their chronological age by a couple of years. Unless there is something particular about your child that would give you reason to not want that -- in which case, that's what parenting is for.

If your store is requiring adults with children when purchasing M rated games and your employees are drawing the attention of parents to the rating and the reference to content in the game on it and the parents are making their rightful choice to let their children buy and play it, then *the system is fucking working*.

Yeah, Google -- man up!.... Google...

If it is such life threatening behavior (and it certainly seems that it is), why don't they make the penalty significant enough that you will not want a ticket or will never do it again? It's like drunk driving. If people really gave a fuck about the dangers drunk drivers pose to the rest of the public, they would enforce a "caught once, suspended license for five years - caught twice, suspended forever. Caught on suspension, serve a year in prison" law.

When you're only making it a nuisance, you're less interested in limiting the danger and more interested in generating continued revenue from it. You can't gain more revenue for the system from people who learn their lesson the first time.

It sounds like putting up signs (that they know will have no impact) is a way to appear that they're doing something without actually impacting the revenue they generate by handing out tickets.

If you don't get cell service in your car on the interstate, then you aren't texting while driving *anyway* . . . because, you know, no cell service.

If you're installing special cell service towers in these rest stops, then that's worth mentioning (along with toilets and picnic areas), but it doesn't seem worth promoting specially by renaming the stops.

If you're just doing this as some sort of safety effort (which seems to be the case), then renaming a rest area to a "texting area" makes about as much sense as renaming it any other number of things you can also do at rest areas, besides rest. Rest stops. Stretch stops. Walking stops. Urination stops. Masturbation stops. Cell phone stops. Reading book stops. And if we're renaming them after social efforts under the premise that changing the name will some how change behavior, let's get up some "Don't Do Meth Areas" and "Don't Beat Your Children Areas"...

It seems they were already properly addressing the problem in the correct way. A thing is illegal and they issue tickets when they catch people doing the illegal thing. if that isn't having enough of an impact, then increase the penalty. If people are seriously dying because fucking idiots are surfing on their iphone while driving, then punish them with more than a $100 fine. Maybe suspend their license on a first offense or issue a large fine to the company behind the truckers doing it while driving company rigs.

Someone else really nailed it, I think, when they suggested this sounds like some brown-noser's little pet feel-good project. :/

The whole Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Whoever + NSA thing is like this:

You're making out with a chick that is maybe not so hot. You're having a good time and you're both getting your rocks off, but you wouldn't want your friends and family to catch you.

One day, your buddies drop on by early and catch you mac'n on said girl. Startled, you push her away and are very vocally all "eeew yuck! Get off me! what are you doing?!" and telling your friends (who keep teasing you about it for the next month) about how you two totally were not making out and how you totally are not into her and you didn't want to make out with her and would never do so in a million years.

But you go back to making out with her, anyway. You're just way more careful about making sure you don't get caught.

When your executives are so flippant about privacy issues (hello, Schmidt!), it's hard to take them at their word.

When their actions match their words, I'll take it.

Why couldn't you pull over and send text messages from a rest area, before it was named a texting area? This sounds stupid.

It wouldn't be so bad *maybe* if they at least offered options. A replacement thunderbird charging cord for an ipad is about $20 and it's only the short default size. You can get a non-Apple replacement for about a third of the price. And for half the price, you can even get one that is twice as long (long enough to actually be useful).

Why are we referring to social network streams of bullshit as "my news feed"?

I have a news feed. It's via RSS. Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and the rest are "social feeds" . . . and that's being lenient with the meaning of the word "social".

Also, you don't need AI. I can tell you that most of y[our] "social feed" breaks down to the following: Your friends/random people/acquaintances/family (based on their posted content and comments) are ignorant, bigoted, racist, narrow-minded, and self-involved.

Probably for the same reason I get all the buttplug ads on Amazon. :P

Ultimately, internet advertising is a long-running scam that people will catch on to. People were sold a bunch of bullshit about the glory of advertising online. Scamsters tried to sell advertisers on the wonders of targeted demographics, precise statistics, interactivity, etc. The truth turned out to be that the statistics are meaningless, because they're often gamed and click-bot farms are abundantly scamming bucks off the advertisers. It also turned out that the interactivity didn't add anything to the impression they leave with viewers, because most people dislike online ads, have learned to block them out, or actually block them due to principal, being obnoxious, or relating to malware and tracking.

Content producers get screwed, too, because those from traditional mediums saw ad revenue dry on in a lot of places as it was redirected to the internet. Internet content producers found that it was hard to compete in a world where someone else is willing to provide what you provide, but for free -- and that it is hard to make money selling something that is infinite. There's a reason television and other mediums can get $30 CPM, but your commercial tech journalism website (that just regurgitates the day's news found elsewhere) has to settle for $3 CPM.

At some point, this will all collapse and they will have to find new methods of revenue to support themselves than internet advertising. In the meantime, it's just a lot of scummy bottom-feeders trying to change and manipulate the small details until the very final moment they're forced to give up the ship.

It is common knowledge that advertising data miners can determine with startling accuracy the identity of an individual with only a few accumulated pieces of correlated information referenced against a large commercial database of activity. This provides a further consistent identifier to tie all those strings together, while giving the impression that the identifier is to prevent identification. This is not about what they can conclude about your identity just from one website unto itself.

Anonymous identifier.

Let's just say that repeatedly until the problem sinks into all of our brains.