There is a lot of ground to cover before the government of NZ or its neighboring nations even remotely resemble the governments you've listed, and alarmist attitudes contribute nothing to reasoned debate.

Censorship and enforcement of copyright protection are completely different topics. If you believe anyone should be permitted to distribute materials protected under the copyrights of others without permission and without repercussions from a court system designed to handle such matters (which NZ actually has, if you care to visit the link I provided earlier), you're welcome to speak against copyright in principle. However, it is the law, whether you like it or not.

Speaking as someone who has served aboard an Ohio class submarine, I cannot stress strongly enough how incredibly wrong you are.

What I take issue with is misrepresentation of the current state of affairs and sensationalist/deceptive reporting. Sure, anything could happen, but it isn't happening now. As things stand at present, NZ actually appears to have a fairly standard method of dealing with claims in court. If that changes, I would absolutely encourage anyone and everyone to scream bloody murder. Unfortunately, sensationalist crap like this "story" do nothing but make people who care about the topic look like a bunch of nutjobs in the meantime, and probably serves to damage the cause of freedom.

TFA doesn't do a very good job of referencing relevant materials. It appears NZ has a copyright tribunal that hears cases of alleged copyright infringement and makes rulings based on evidence submitted by both parties, and there is an appeals process that goes through a high court. I'm not intimately familiar with the nuts and bolts of NZ law, but at a minimum TFA could have done a bit more to provide useful information. While the copyright tribunal is mentioned in passing, no link is provided. Then again, this is TorrentFreak we're talking about.

I was really poking fun at weight vs. mass, but okay.

Great, but since "heavier" is a term tied to weight, where are these tons located? Using your units of measure, if the feathers are on Earth and the gold is on the Moon, the gold would be lighter.

It already works, although there are issues with older browsers and libraries not supporting it. I happen to use SNI for my stuff, but unfortunately others cannot afford to lose compatibility with older browsers.

I'm guessing you would be more interested in the term as it applies to "tossing."

Good heavens, a Slashdot article where that's actually on topic... what is the world coming to?

Sir, I actually clapped as I read this. Well done, seriously.

Where can I find that tweet?

I think you're forgetting that Libya does not control the public root. INAIC does, and I somehow suspect the entire ly TLD going dark "because a maniacal dictator said so" wouldn't last terribly long.

Root servers for the ly TLD:

• dns.lttnet.net
• auth02.ns.uu.net
• ns-ly.ripe.net
• phloem.uoregon.edu
• dns1.lttnet.net

All of these would have to inoperable before all .ly domains would stop resolving, and there's still the matter of caching at intermediate DNS servers until the TTL expires for records. Additionally, bit.ly isn't hosted within Libya. In short, I don't expect bit.ly to be going down over this.

I've been had.

Where, precisely, in that post did I mention LOIC? To put it simply, anyone using that particular method to participate in a DDoS attack is a moron, and deserves what's coming to him. However, since you mentioned the civil aspect of this issue, I'll once again wish you "good luck" in getting any compensation whatsoever out of anyone actually subject to a civil penalty in such a case. Your armchair lawyering aside, history has more than adequately demonstrated the folly of what you're advocating. Oh, and don't forget about the technical consultation fees required to actually get beyond the "reasonable doubt" aspect of the case, the sheer enormity of the number of potential defendants you'll need to chase down, the legal fees involved in putting the matter through the courts (time isn't free, even if you're an attorney yourself), additional repercussions and continued attacks from those who are displeased by such actions, etc.

Once again, "good luck with that."

You've just demonstrated a severe lack of knowledge about the basics of DDoS operations. It is most assuredly not trivial, especially when tens of thousands of compromised machines owned by people who are barely aware of the location of the power switch are involved. Even assuming a handful of folks were stupid enough to carry this out in a manner that were to permit their apprehension, there are probably going to be jurisdictional issues to contend with (likely crossing national borders), coupled with the age old adage that "you can't get blood out of a stone." In other words, good luck identifying any actual willful participant, and good luck getting any money out of said person should you manage to drag him into court.

tl;dr version == Ha, good luck with that.