One reason being he died unexpectedly (assassination). The Nobel Peace Prize also wasn't awarded that year due to no suitable living candidates, which can be considered an acknowledgement of him.
I wonder if COD:GHOSTS will beat this. From what I'm seeing, GTAV has a few advantages:
Non-yearly (or biyearly) release schedule for an extremely well-known franchise.
No outstanding publisher issues of note, especially gaffes related to gameplay "dumbing down"
A number of factors contributing to somewhat inflated review scores including normal reactions to AAA titles and the GTA series' tendency to hit the right buttons for reviews that doesn't necessarily reflect on gameplay
From my own observations, GTA is an entirely different market. Sure everybody knows about CoD but in reality, not a lot of the people I know will buy the new one (and that can be backed up by looked at BO2 preorders vs Ghosts) but almost everyone I've spoken to either has GTA, is buying GTA or hasn't got the means to play it.
I'm reading Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series right now, and I'm struck by the comparisons he makes between Soviet and Nazi military doctrines. Essentially, the former is controlled by individuals too paranoid to allow for any initiative on the part of individuals under their command, while the latter actively encourages initiative on the part of commanders and dog-faces (grunts). One side effect of this is that German soldiers get away with much less deferential behavior. The result are seen both in previous battles between the two, and with the conflict against the Lizards (invaders from another planet with a much more restrictive bent than even the USSR) where the Nazis generally perform much better given their technology.
I wonder if a similar level of encouraging initiative exists in technology due to the fact that there's a low ceiling on how far you can pass most decisions up before running into nontechnical persons. Looking at it from another side, technical careers might allow for more initiative simply by the ability to enter the market via unconventional means.
Unconnected to the above, it seems to me that these sort of leaks are easier to perform versus a lot of political actions especially with the technical skills of leakers. Leaks' effect per unit of time to follow through surpasses most anything else I can think of. The only real downside is the resultant criminal penalties. Infodumps like Swartz's are similarly relatively easy to perform.
Tbh I would expect higher intelligence among engineers vs the general public if only due to selection effects. Smart kids tend to be more pushed towards professions under that label and are better able to meet the challenges associated with getting a job there such as earning a degree or learning enough to be useful.
However, one could argue that such an agreement would only represent a codified social contract. Ie it's still "You aren't holding up your end of the bargain" rather than "the contract is for 2 hours/day with an optional extension of $100/hour each day."
Yes, you are correct. I wrote the comment too hastily. To expand a bit on this, the heuristic Thomas follows is "did the government simply do what a reasonable parent would do under the same circumstances?". Thomas' argument in Brown was that adults would still be able to purchase some of the violent video games, as would children with explicit adult permission -- but absent parental involvement a government would act similarly to an average parent (prohibit purchase of certain video games).
He used similar logic in case of school censorship (if a parent would reasonable want to prohibit a student from wearing a shirt with an illicit message) or search and seizure (if a parent would reasonable want to search a students' person in one case, so may a school do so).
Personally, I disagree with this logic: the government is not the parent and in all of the above cases the parent could still exercise authority without the statute at hand (a parent can prohibit a child from playing video games, wearing a certain t-shirt, etc...).
Furthermore it's often insufficient nuanced: the standard is too vague (two children of same age may differ wildly maturity wise, some children may become "emancipated minors", etc...).
I personally believe there should be a "gateway" for youth to have greater civil rights (the right to vote, emancipate themselves, work under adult labour laws, serve in the military, etc...) -- but I haven't spent much time thinking how such a gateway would work.
