Dungeons & Dragons could “foster an inmate’s obsession with escaping from the real-life correctional environment, fostering hostility, violence and escape behavior,” prison officials said in court. That could make it more difficult to rehabilitate prisoners and could endanger public safety, they said. [...] The court, which is based in Chicago, acknowledged that there was no evidence of marauding gangs spurred to their acts of destruction by swinging imaginary mauls, but it ruled nonetheless that the prison’s decision was “rationally related” to legitimate goals of prison administration.

Lesson of the day: balancing tests suck and place far too much deference on imaginary issues dreamed up by paranoid government officials.

Despite the widespread availability of pirated releases, The Avengers just scored a record-breaking $200 million opening weekend at the box office. While some are baffled to see that piracy failed to crush the movie’s profits, it’s really not that surprising. Claiming a camcorded copy of a movie seriously impacts box office attendance is the same as arguing that concert bootlegs stop people from seeing artists on stage.

Spoiler: piracy only hurts movies when the movies are intentionally withheld from the public. Where the public can pay to see a good movie for a reasonable price, it will do so. When it is withheld from the public via an exorbitant price, an awkward method of access (blu-ray discs, exorbitant pricing strategies, etc), or delayed releases (that is, most “international releases”), the public will turn to piracy.

A self-described “plus sized” college student who was told she was “obviously pregnant” and “not pretty enough” to dance on a platform in a bar in Iowa is claiming she was discriminated against by the bar’s bouncers.

Long story short: Jordan Ramos, a fat 21 year old college student, was told by bouncers not to get on an elevated platform in a bar with her friends. She believes, probably correctly, that this was because she is fat, as her ostensibly thinner friends were allowed on the platform. There’s some indication that the bouncer thought she was pregnant at the time as well, though her general appearance was probably the dispositive factor in not allowing her on the platform. She is now going to the national news media to whine about this.

My response to this whole situation is easy to guess, so I’ll just say it: this is stupid. Ramos should know better, and whining about this whole situation makes her seem petulant.

Bars and clubs of the type girls like Ramos attend are unique in that they actually have to care about their reputation. Clubs make money by bringing in lots of attractive girls, which in turn bring in lots of interested guys who are willing to spend money on themselves and attractive girls. By fostering a perception of being “popular” — whatever that means in a community — clubs make a ton of money via drink sales and door charges. Accordingly, clubs have a strong incentive to encourage attractive girls to dance in a readily visible area and an even stronger desire to prevent fat girls like Ramos from getting on the platform. It sounds mean, but it’s reality, and only the absolutely deluded (or the absolutely drunk) don’t know about it.

Clubs also have a strong interest in not having elevated platforms break. Clubs are pretty nasty, loud, and dangerous places anyway — allowing 200+lb girls on raised platforms (especially where those platforms are usually not that well constructed) is a stupid idea. Ego is one thing, the reality of gravity is another.

Finally, we shouldn’t hate on the club that allegedly discriminated against Ramos too much. If the bouncer legitimately thought Ramos was pregnant (plausible, I suppose, given her apparent size), then he/she would have every reason in the world to prevent Ramos from making stupid decisions like dancing around in precarious areas. One may also kinda have hoped that the bouncer would have kicked her out (alcohol is a teratogen), but whatever.

Long story short, Ramos is a whiner, and needs to stop making a national issue out of her weight. If she has issues with people discriminating on her based upon her decision to eat too much and move too little, she should do something to change her body, not whine to the news and bring her weight problems to the attention of the entire nation.

According to Bloomberg, an online petition was started when it was learned that Starbucks was using an ingredient made of dried insects to color some of its Frappuccinos and pastries.

A red dye made from cochineal insects, found in Mexico and South America, was found in the company’s Strawberries & Creme Frappuccino, Strawberry Banana Smoothie, Birthday Cake Pop, Mini Donut with pink icing, and Red Velvet Whoopee Pie.

Spoiler: it’s a red dye frequently used in a lot of things, including meats, sausages, cherries, jams, etc.  God forbid these same consumers ponder where gelatin comes from.

Street Fighter X Tekken producer Tomoaki Ayano is disappointed that hackers are already playing with the dozen fighters planned as downloadable content for his game. Speaking with GameSpot, the developer expressed dismay at the hackers’ actions but acknowledgement of their skill.

Let’s recap:

1. Ayano makes expensive (~$60?) game
2. Ayano puts content on the disc of that game that he makes sure gamers cannot normally access
3. Ayano demands $20 for that extra content after waiting a while to build demand
4. Ayano now disappointed that people are just unlocking the content themselves without paying him $20

Sad.

Because someone named Mike from North Korea really cares about the LGBT community.

But let’s be realistic here: this is not going to happen. If the iPod hasn’t been subjected to genericide, the iPad certainly won’t. Even if the iPod did suffer genericide in fact that simply hasn’t been litigated, I find it hard to believe that the term “iPad” has in fact become synonymous with “any tablet out there,” especially considering the strong connection with the “i” prefix and the Apple brand that has been built over the years. In other words, there might be an argument to be made that many people confuse all tablets with Apple products bearing the “iPad” designation, but I doubt there is much of an argument that they term competitor’s products as “iPads”. But oh well.

“It’s akin to requiring someone’s house keys,” said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former federal prosecutor who calls it “an egregious privacy violation.”

I don’t think it could be said any better. While I empathize to some degree with employers who want to protect themselves from stupid employees who do nothing but party and drink all day, my empathy does not go so far as to allow them to demand personal information about job applicants. Job applicants are usually given a raw deal as it is, allowing employers a virtually limitless source of data invites little other than employment opportunity discrimination and irrational knee-jerk reactions by HR departments.

According to Daily Disruption:

According to an interview with Sherman conducted by Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson three years ago, when the music industry decided to end its lawsuit campaign against end-users suspected of digital piracy in favor of the Graduated Response partnership that was just being forged with the ISPs, the heavy lifting identifying alleged infringers will be done by the RIAA (and, presumably, the MPAA), which will then “pass that information on to ISPs, who will notify (and eventually sanction) users without turning personal information over to the music industry.” [...] CBET also reported, “Participating ISPs can choose from a list of penalties, or what the RIAA calls ‘mitigation measures,’ which include throttling down the customer’s connection speed and suspending Web access until the subscriber agrees to stop pirating. The ISPs can waive the mitigation measure if they choose and not one of the service providers has agreed to permanently terminate service.”

Long story short, this means two big things. One, it means that the RIAA and MPAA will be able to effectively destroy users’ internet using alleged instances of copyright, turning ISPs into de facto copyright tribunals and creating the consumer-business relationship into an adversary system. Two, it will begin to impose the costs of copyright enforcement onto general ISP users, who will in essence be punished because the MPAA/RIAA is maintaining a dying business model.

An interesting question will be the status of independent, smaller ISPs after this process develops. Smaller ISPs may find a niche in a market of users where the ISPs effectively, through a series of contracts and careful network planning, provide no network monitoring or control over their users, thus providing the users unrestricted access to the Internet and preventing the MPAA/RIAA from gaining access to consumer records. Suffice to say, various issues regarding the liability shield provisions of the DMCA aside, I’d pay for such a connection.

This is rather contrary to Bioware’s various claims that the DLC was made after the development of the game and had nothing to do with the main title. It appears that, in reality, Bioware made a part of the game, ripped it out of the game, then sold it back to gamers for $10 (after they paid well over $60 for the original game). Great.