Word: chip
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...retaining wall from an adjoining house, hand grenades were thrown at the embassy guardhouse and about 25 rebels belonging to a group known as the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement stormed into the compound. As the insurgents engaged police in a ferocious gun battle, everyone--Peruvian ministers, blue-chip business tycoons, assembled diplomats and their wives--dropped to the ground. "Don't lift your head," the rebels barked, "or it'll be shot...
Here is what nobody has bothered to mention in all the talk about how V chips are going to protect our kids from the smut and violence on television: in most American households, the only people who understand how to program modern electronic devices are the children. So the V chip will presumably have to be managed by the very people it is meant to control...
...thinking that it won't work that way. From what you've read, you understand the V chip to be so simple to use that a grownup can do it. That's what was said about VCRs. Yet we all know people like Bennett and Linda Weber, whose travails I reported on a year or two ago. The Webers thought they were pleased that their 26-year-old son Jeffrey had finally moved out of the house, and then they realized they had lost the ability to tape...
Someday, of course, people of Jeffrey's generation will be the parents in control, and they will be casually hooking up V chips to CD-ROMs and the Internet so that their children can play nonviolent, smut-free, four-dimensional Parcheesi with friends in Bangalore while listening to symphonic background music. Until then, though, any attempt at a techno-fix like the V chip will put the inmates in charge of the asylum...
...might well include everything from Boy Meets World to a racy episode of Seinfeld. In truth, the system seems motivated less by an urge for simplicity and more by a desire to avoid the red-flag V rating, which would probably scare off many advertisers--and, once the V chip comes into operation, erode the ratings of violent shows. "I think the industry has gone out of its way to develop a rating system that will not tell parents whether there is violence in a program," says Kathryn Montgomery, president of the Center for Media Education...