How much do all those unconstitutional video game laws cost, anyway?

Around the USA, umpty states (it must be about a dozen now) have passed gaming bills that seek to impose fines for minors purchasing mature-rated video games and computer games. Every single one of these has been found to be unconstitutional, yet what is functionally the same bill keeps popping up in US state legislatures.

If you're a US taxpayer, and your state hasn't yet tried one of these - or is going around again, you may wish to speak with your congressman about this:

• Each of these bills is expensive to pass. If they're being really cheap and lazy and just copying a bill that was already struck down on constitutional grounds, that costs around US$50,000 from State taxes. If the bill isn't passed, you're looking at maybe half of that just for the attempt.
• If they're actually coming up with a modification or a new bill, you're looking at about US$250,000 from State taxes.
• When the bill is inevitably overturned for the simple reason that it violates the US Bill of Rights, it'll cost State taxpayers another US$250,000 or so, if the State decides to appeal.

So, everyone involved in passing the bills knows the bills cannot stand. If they don't, then you might want to find yourself another representative next time the elections roll around.

But if everyone knows - why spend all this money and fuss on them? Well, votes, really. This is all about public image. The whole thing is supposed to show that they care about your kids. If some of that money was going to potholes or schoolbooks or park maintenance, I might believe it, but no -- it's being burned, pretty much.

Be sure to tell your representative how you expect her to vote when it comes to your taxpayer money on the line here. A half a million or so buys a lot of schoolbooks, and fills a lot of potholes. You might think that the money was rather better spent than on vain posturing about video games.

As for any talk about red states or blue states or political affiliations... I don't really care. And neither should you, if your representatives aren't... you know... representing your state and community's best interests -- regardless of which party they are a member of -- then they're not really doing the job now, are they?

Goodnight Valleywag

After roughly two and a half years, failed technology rumor blog Valleywag was folded back into Gawker last year. Since then, what's left of VW has been trying to attract someone's attention. Anyone really. Like writing obituaries for companies that are reporting record profits.

Be that as it may, there's another word for Valleywag (and some other Gawker media). It's the same word that we apply to anyone who targets a committed, passionate group of people and teases them just to grab your attention.

'Griefer'.

Goodnight, Valleywag. You can warm your hands by the extra pageviews. Don't worry so much about the turning the lights off -- probably nobody's paying the bills anyway.

Sheer gall

Got into the bag, opened the plastic container, pulled it out. Currently devouring it on the living room floor.

Damnit. That was mine!

Some statistical feeds continue offline

I've been getting a lot of email since January about the statistical graphs, particularly the users-logged-in-over-the-last-60-days figure and the total signups. Fact is, that those parts of the statistical feeds from Linden Lab were frozen in January (around the 13th/14th of that month) and have not been updated since, though the data is still flowing for other parts of the feeds.

I've made some queries about it, but there has been no response. It's anyone's guess as to why the data is unavailable, especially as it happened shortly before an interview with Mark Kingdon, where he was talking about the quality and quantity of the available statistical data.

It's been more than three weeks of downtime on this data, so if it isn't an intentional outage, I guess it isn't a priority item to fix.