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Posted on Techdirt - 2 July 2011 @ 12:00pm

Christopher S. Little's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week

from the favorite-my-favorites dept

This week's Favorites post comes from Christopher S. Little, who usually goes by another name in the comments, but didn't want us to face any sort of trademark threats...

I've been given the honor of writing up my favorite posts of the week, and what a week it's been. I was asked on Tuesday and even then I knew I'd have a problem picking just a few. It took a lot of thinking, but I did find myself coming back to a few again and again.

First up is Monday's post about the Supreme Court finally weighing in on the laws requiring stores to not sell violent games to minors. Now, I understand why some people want these laws, but it's not the government's place to say.  It's the job of the parent to say yes or no to the child not the government's. I'm also very happy to see that the judges realized that gaming is not any more different from movies than movies were from books. I do remember Lord of the Flies being more disturbing than Grand Theft Auto. Too bad California is going to try again.

Second on my list is Capcom deciding that they don't want you to play again from the beginning. One of my hobbies is video games (collecting, learning the history) so this one hits close to home. I don't know much about this game, but I expect it's setup like Portal.  You have missions and once you beat the first one you unlock the second and so forth.  Well, that's not too bad for you, but what about the next guy?  What about the guy ten or twenty years from now trying to catch up on the history of this great game he just got into called Resident Evil 22 (or whatever)?  The odds of finding an unused copy that far in the future are slim.  On top of that, add the feeling that you can't really show you did those things.  You can't show your friend that you deleted your game and come back a few days later with it 100% completed.  With that hanging over your head even actually doing it yourself feels cheapened. 

Third is the Google+ beta. I'll usually give anything Google at least one try, but their past social networks were underwhelming.  So I was a little suprised to not only see Mike posting about it but liking it as well.  That was enough to make me take a second look.  Then he pointed out the Circles function and how you can easily delete your account.  Apparently both those functions exist in Facebook, but are so hard to get to that I didn't even know they existed.  I admit, I may have been played by Google.  Once I saw that they got so overloaded with requests they had to stop accepting them, it piqued my interests.  As Marcus Carab pointed out, who ever heard of Google running out of resources?

I have to give an honorable mention to the string of Righthaven posts that show the disaster that is their legal strategy. It's good to not only see the suits be smacked down, but also to see that claims are being filed against them. There need to be easier ways to enforce the consequences for abuses like this.

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