News & Not News Megathread

Griffith

With the streak of a tear, Like morning dew
Girl, 9, kills gun instructor with Uzi

http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/26/us/arizona-girl-fatal-shooting-accident/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Sounds like the best lesson she could ever get, no joke. Also, because it's CNN it links to this:


Personally, I wait until age 10 before I bust out the uzis, but that's just me helicopter parenting. Thanks again for the perspective, CNN!
 

Griffith

With the streak of a tear, Like morning dew
Yeah, we can't put limits on these things. Hopefully she doesn't also kill her next instructor in six years when she gains the legal right to receive a permit to begin training to get a licence to... drive a car. Six years after that she can legally have a drink of alcohol.
 

Griffith

With the streak of a tear, Like morning dew
NightCrawler said:
As a 1st world country, the US is probably the most backwards of them all.

Umm, excuse me, it's called EXCEPTIONALISM! It means we're the BEST COUNTRY EVER no matter what the "facts" say. :daiba:

Rhombaad said:
We're definitely up there. :sad:

Yeah, right at the top. :badbone:
 
NightCrawler said:
http://nationalreport.net/15-year-old-swatted-domestic-terrorism/

I've heard of swatting before, but how exactly do people get each others home addresses when they do it? I'm not completely tech savvy, so I didn't know if there is a way to find it through your IP, or the people in question are just giving them their general location. Either way it's kind of scary..
 

Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
Tama said:
I've heard of swatting before, but how exactly do people get each others home addresses when they do it? I'm not completely tech savvy, so I didn't know if there is a way to find it through your IP, or the people in question are just giving them their general location. Either way it's kind of scary..

It's likely got more to do with usernames and the like. With the proliferation of social networks nowadays it's not very difficult to find a lot of things about someone just from a name or an email address.

As for the satirical news article NightCrawler posted, while that kind of sentencing would obviously be ridiculous, I think something really needs to be done about "swatting" before someone gets killed. For one thing the police ought to do at least a little investigating before raiding a house instead of relying on a single anonymous phone call.
 

Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
NightCrawler said:
I'm a layman in this subject. Do SWAT teams need warrants?

Not for emergency responses like those involved in "swatting" as far as I know. A single 911 call will do the trick.
 

Walter

Administrator
Staff member
NightCrawler said:
I'm a layman in this subject. Do SWAT teams need warrants?

They're supposed to get them from a judge prior to infiltration. But "exigent circumstances" are often used as the basis for barging in a home or building. This can be anything from "an officer heard a distressing noise" or they had a "tip" from a criminal informant (which can be easily concealed/fabricated if required).

I've worked as a reporter in a few small towns in the Southeast US -- Good 'ol Boy country. The scary thing to me about police abusing their authority are the stories you never end up hearing about, or at least can never prove. Extreme cases often rise to the headlines, but those are circumstances when cops got caught with their pants down, which isn't often in my experience. With the support network that small towns come prepackaged with, just imagine the amount of injustice that happen on any given week in smalltown America.
 

Rhombaad

Video Game Time Traveler
Griffith said:
Yeah, right at the top. :badbone:

:ganishka:

Walter said:
They're supposed to get them from a judge prior to infiltration. But "exigent circumstances" are often used as the basis for barging in a home or building. This can be anything from "an officer heard a distressing noise" or they had a "tip" from a criminal informant (which can be easily concealed/fabricated if required).

I've worked as a reporter in a few small towns in the Southeast US -- Good 'ol Boy country. The scary thing to me about police abusing their authority are the stories you never end up hearing about, or at least can never prove. Extreme cases often rise to the headlines, but those are circumstances when cops got caught with their pants down, which isn't often in my experience. With the support network that small towns come prepackaged with, just imagine the amount of injustice that happen on any given week in smalltown America.

Ugh. That's depressing. :sad:
 

Ratty

Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
Walter said:
They're supposed to get them from a judge prior to infiltration. But "exigent circumstances" are often used as the basis for barging in a home or building. This can be anything from "an officer heard a distressing noise" or they had a "tip" from a criminal informant (which can be easily concealed/fabricated if required).

This is such a prevalent problem that I once had it pointed out to me by the Professor in a criminal Justice Class that they even try to make it look "heroic" or "normal" on shows like Law & Order. Where investigating outside a perfectly quiet house one cop will turn to the other and say "Did you hear that? Sounded like a scream to me." before kicking the door in. And these are supposed to be the "good guys".

Of course shows like that are complete pro-Police propaganda full of misinformation. Like cops saying that not talking to them is "Obstruction of justice!" (It almost never is, and any statements you make to the police can be used against you but will be dismissed as hearsay if you try to use them in your defense. And the 5th amendment says you never have to bear witness against yourself.) and acting like every case goes to trial when something like 90% of cases in America are settled with plea deals for lesser charges. (Because even when the accused is innocent most people would rather, for example, sign a plea deal and get probation/a fine for something they didn't do then go to trial and risk going to jail for it.) To say nothing of openly portraying defense lawyers as villains because the police would never arrest an innocent person. :schierke: And so much more.
 

Griffith

With the streak of a tear, Like morning dew
Groovy Metal Fist said:
distrust between gamers and the gaming press (which never really had a good reputation to begin with) is the best way to sum it up.

Having read the article and all the discourse attributed to developers and gamers therein, are you sure "Dumb vs. Dumber" isn't the best way to sum it up? All these people seem to have the emotional maturity of adolescent wolverines.
 

Walter

Administrator
Staff member
Griffith said:
Having read the article and all the discourse attributed to developers and gamers therein, are you sure "Dumb vs. Dumber" isn't the best way to sum it up? All these people seem to have the emotional maturity of adolescent wolverines.

I'm pretty well versed with the dispute as well, and don't see why every troll on the Internet is suddenly in an uproar over nothing. I believe it's all been perpetrated by a few young kids who don't know much about the world but are filled with vitriol and must put it to some use.
 

Griffith

With the streak of a tear, Like morning dew
Walter said:
I'm pretty well versed with the dispute as well, and don't see why every troll on the Internet is suddenly in an uproar over nothing. I believe it's all been perpetrated by a few young kids who don't know much about the world but are filled with vitriol and must put it to some use.

Censorship man, my 1st amendment rights are being violated! Conspiracy!

Yeah, I certainly don't see the "gate" part of it. Just a lot of young people, developers and fans alike, in relatively close proximity via the internet, getting each other all worked up.
 
I think had the initial allegations like the harrassing/doxxing of a charity, Wolf Wozniak being piled on by Phil Fish, or the abuse of the DMCA been covered like any other scandals in the gaming press, this whole thing probably would have fizzled out in a few days. These were valid concerns, but that did not excuse trolls making death threats/hacking and hurling shit at developers/columnists.

When forum threads started getting shut down and columnists/developers started saying crazy things, people suddenly became more interested in people's patreons and past relationships. The initial allegations, the pro-GamerGate trolls, the thread deletions, and the anti-GamerGate trolls (the columnists in particular) made this issue a shitstorm.

A lot of things went wrong and now you have an escapist thread approaching 25,000 posts

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.858347-Zoe-Quinn-and-the-surrounding-controversy?page=1
 

Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
Groovy Metal Fist said:
This is probably the best news article summing up #GamerGate

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/09/04/gamergate-a-closer-look-at-the-controversy-sweeping-video-games/

As he points out, he can't possibly touch on everything, but distrust between gamers and the gaming press (which never really had a good reputation to begin with) is the best way to sum it up.

At this point, you would need a book to address all the accusations and industry/cultural trends involved in #GamerGate.

I'll have to agree; it's pretty comprehensive. However I think it would have benefitted from establishing at some point the background of sanctimonious articles that have cropped up over the past few years in the "gaming press". Those have covered various different things from women to LGBT to just plain online bullying, but the jist of it is that the false empathy/morality/intellectualism from third-rate "journalists" had most likely been annoying people for a good long while. I also disagree with his conclusions (what he says about DRM, how the press is "left-leaning", and the three "scandals" he identifies).

As I was telling Walter the other day, what I personally find amazing about this whole business is that I'm apparently the only one who remembers that the current "gamer culture" was fabricated by the same "gaming press" about 10 years ago. Before that people just played video games. Gamers are dead? Fine with me, and I've been playing video games for longer than most people involved in this argument have been alive.
 

Oburi

All praise Grail
Aazealh said:
As I was telling Walter the other day, what I personally find amazing about this whole business is that I'm apparently the only one who remembers that the current "gamer culture" was fabricated by the same "gaming press" about 10 years ago. Before that people just played video games. Gamers are dead? Fine with me, and I've been playing video games for longer than most people involved in this argument have been alive.

Well that's not hard, especially at your age. :troll:

But yea, it's just bullshit. Playing video games my whole life, seeing the "culture" develop into what it is today is a strange journey. It's done more harm than good in the minds of people who are outside, looking in.

I miss the 90's.
 

Griffith

With the streak of a tear, Like morning dew
Aazealh said:
what I personally find amazing about this whole business is that I'm apparently the only one who remembers that the current "gamer culture" was fabricated by the same "gaming press" about 10 years ago. Before that people just played video games.
Oburi said:
I miss the 90's.

We still had inexplicable advertising like this though...

playitloudad_060210.jpg


90's Gamers. :ganishka:
 

Walter

Administrator
Staff member
Griffith said:
We still had inexplicable advertising like this though...

90's Gamers. :ganishka:

Jesus that brings back some bad memories... US ads in general in those days were pretty embarrassing. Eventually the image being sold by advertising, that people who played games were some strange, exotic breed of people, was eventually embraced by the general public. But I think the transformative process we're really talking about came from the Internet. The mentality that the loudest voice gets heard the most eventually helped solidify that identity.

It's part of a larger conversation that is so self-evident to those who have been involved in it that I have trouble understanding what the argument is over.

The biggest impact felt by me over this whole fiasco is that one of my longtime favorite writers quit the industry after being harassed for speaking her mind.
 
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