Singapore army gets new weapon

You might imagine that the Singaporean army might be full of birch-wielders, but certainly not magical revolutionaries.
Allow me to disabuse you as gently as I can. For a report from the AFP tells me that one of the world's more progressive nati
has decided to equip its ccripts and volunteers alike with Apple's most novel gizmo: the iPad 2.
Might they be using it to hone a few gaming skills on some intellectual first-person shooter? Not entirely, it seems.
Instead, wholesale abercrombie and fitch clothing the Singapore Ministry of Defense
announced that it will issue around 8,000 iPad 2s in order to take advantage of the general technological savvy of today's canny
but callow youths.
Perfect for night maneuvers?
(Credit: CC LWY/Flickr)
It seems that the high command is encouraging new recruits to use the iPad2's cameras to take images and video and then upload them
to the army's online platform, LEARNet, which is a curious acronym. Does anyone else get "Learn Extra-Terrestrialism" from it?
No matter. Singaporean soldiers will be encouraged to capture the attention of their commanders through Apple's beautifully
designed electronic status symbol. They will also be stimulated to enjoy group chats with their fellow military personnel. They
will also be able to order excellent satay from all of Singapore's fine and cost-efficient hawker centers.
Um, no. That last item is merely a wishful nod to the kind of ccript experience I wish I had enjoyed.
Still, I must confess that, having lived very happily in Singapore for two years, I didn't see soldiers doing a large amount of
shooting. Perhaps they did it during the times when I was asleep, or perhaps they employed some startlingly technological
silencers.
However, in a week in which it was reported that North Korea's soldiers were, sadly, malnourished, it is heartening to see that
Singapore is ensuring its own military will not be starved mentally, never mind physically.
The only question is whom the soldiers are going to fight. Perhaps Singapore could invade North Korea, just to put those iPad 2s
into full military action and to bring the North Koreans some decent food.
Brown v. EMA is the latest in a long line of efforts to curb or ban new technologies under the guise of protecting minors from
dangerous content. New media, including video games, extend metaphors of "realness" and fidelity in expressing ideas and
entertainment. As each new innovation reaches mainstream markets, it is invariably met with a kind of moral panic that often
translates into outrage and prohibition.
But the First Amendment, the majority concluded forcefully, is indifferent to the medium in which protected expression is
communicated. "California's effort to regulate violent video games is the latest episode in a long series of failed attempts to
censor violent entertainment for minors," the justices said.
Similar moral crusades accompanied the rise in popularity of earlier media, including movies, radio, television, and comic books.
The court wholesale abercrombie fitch devoted several pages to the history of these
efforts. In each case, violence depicted in new formats was described as more intense and more lifelike than previous technologies.
That difference became the basis for efforts by state and local governments to single them out for prohibition. In each case, the
courts held firm to the principle of the First Amendment and rejected the ban.
Even without legal support, moral panics over new media can have long-lasting effects. Fear of censorship, for example, has left a
legacy of self-regulation in each of these media, which can often be more severe and inflexible than what the government was trying
to do. Few film distributors will touch a film rated "X" by the Motion Picture Association of America, though no law requires them
to do so or even to uphold the restriction.
The video game industry itself created the Entertainment Software Rating Board, which, as the Federal Trade Commission noted,
"outpaces the movie and music industries" in restricting the access of minors to content rated "mature."
Comic books had, until recently, one of the most severe self-censoring bodies, the Comics Code Authority. The CCA was created by
publishers and distributors in 1954, when state and federal governments were threatening to restrict or ban wildly popular horror
and crime comics.
The code forced leading publishers out of business altogether and remained a powerful force for self-censorship even as comic book
readership moved from young children to young (and even not-so-young) adults. This year, recognizing at long last the
transformation of its audience and standards of acceptable content for children that have long since evolved from the 1950s, the
CCA disbanded.
California also tried to distinguish video games from earlier media innovati by pointing out that unlike violent literature,
video games are "interactive." But interactivity, the justices replied, is a form of all literature. The court here quotes Richard
Posner, a federal appellate judge and a leading First Amendment scholar. In a similar case decided in 2001, Posner wrote that the
more interactive literature is, the better it is. "Literature when it is successful draws the reader into the story, makes him
identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the
reader's own."
Confusing correlation with causation
The court wholesale abercrombie clothing was also dismissive of psychological evidence
introduced by California that purported to show a link between playing violent video games and violent behavior by minors. As I
wrote last year when the case was argued, the studies that demtrated that link were deeply flawed and at best showed
correlation, not causation, between the games and minor behavioral changes.
The justices were ciderably less generous in their reading of the studies, which have been rejected by every court to cider
them. "They show at best some correlation between exposure to violent entertainment and minuscule real-world effects, such as
children's feeling more aggressive or making louder noises in the few minutes after playing a violent game than after playing a
nonviolent game."
The studies themselves found no difference between violent video games and those, such as Sonic the Hedgehog, (rated E for
Everyone) that the rejected law would not have restricted. Indeed, the studies cited found similar effects from watching Bugs Bunny
carto, or from being shown a picture of a gun. "The cequence," the court said, "is that [California's] regulation is wildly
underinclusive when judged against its asserted justification, which in our view is alone enough to defeat it."