Author: Kristian Fiskerstrand

4 down, 1 to go

I had my fourth exam for the semester today, a boring five hour exam in Business and Society II, mostly just politics really, so hopefully I managed to stay objective enough for a decent grade.

With four down, it leaves me with a final exam in Finance Wednesday the 20th of December. This is a three hour multiple-choice exam and a rather interesting subject, so I'm actually looking forwards to it, in sorts.

I'm driving back home to my home town and my family after a quick trip into the office Thursday, and staying back home for the christmas days before returning back home to get some work done before new years eve. It is fairly chaotic in the office these days, as a new law regarding service pensions have been introduced with a deadline 31st of December 2006. At least 80,000 companies still lacks this service pension, abbreviated OTP in Norwegian, and many of them will be on my email and phone the last days of the year to get everything signed and ready.

German politicians wants penal law to include violent games

Christian democrats all over the world are unreasonable, uninformed or outright crazy, but the Germans seems to top the list at the present time.

The most recent idea is to use the penal code against violent games, punishable with up till two years imprisonment, for violent behavior in online games. Now, Germany has already taken censorship of games to a new level, for instance the German version of the popular game Counter-Strike where whenever a player gets killed, it disappears in thin air instead of, as in the original version ending on the ground in a pool of blood.

The reason for the debate is the school tragedy in Nordrhein-Westfalen last month, where an 18 year old went rampaged and shot and hurt 37 people before committing suicide. The individual was later categorized as a loner, with an interest for weapons and violent games. This has led to at least two politicians in Bayern wanting to use the current paragraph 131 to also include violent games.

Personally this reminds me of Eric Arthur Blair's ( George Orwell's) book 1984, in which thought crime is punishable. This is also a phenomenon found in the movie Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise. A scary thought.

I've even checked the calendar, but it isn't the first of April as far as I can tell.

Source. Der Spiegel