It will be a cold day in hell when the people of the US realize that those elected to congress actually need to KNOW their shit, rather than just talk it... Meaning that EVERYONE elected needs to prove they know what in the hell they are doing, technical and otherwise, rather just knowing how to talk the talking points...

Thats not the problem, the real problem is....

Thinking of the children only applies when your civilian I guess and not employed by a billion dollar governmental agency apparently...

On a side note...

FTFA....

"The TSA released a statement Tuesday saying it explained to the family why additional security procedures were necessary and that agents didn't suspect or suggest the child was carrying a firearm."

So they did all this, not because the felt there was a potential threat - but because of why? Then you have this story as well where after the family was allowed through, the TSA spent an hour looking for them to force them back for a rescreening. Considering that they apparently dont do very well at actually finding potentially dangerous items (hell even my own Dad found he had a 4" blade on his carry on items he forgot about) the only 'reason' for all this is to keep the general populace in check and forced into submission?

It is accepted, and happening more and more - thats the problem, whether they get b*tch slapped for it will all depend on if they are caught and there is some one to stand up to them (ACLU and the mother of the girl in this case) who can argue better in court than their lawyers.. They absolutely don't think there is anything at all they did in the wrong - they're even surprised :-/

FTFA: School Superintendent Greg Ohl said the district had not yet been served with the lawsuit and he withheld comment until he had more information.

"We're taken aback by it," he said.

Those internal communication mean nothing - and here lies one of the core problems with all this.. The **IAA wants to pass the the buck and have the providers police their users. The only problem with that, is that any sys admin/tech support employee is *not* a lawyer (most likely), and if they want to keep their customer(s) - just because they find an mp3/divx/avi/iso file, they need to make sure that 1) it is copyrighted and 2) MORE importantly, that the customer does *not* have the right to re-distribute the given material and that is impossible to tell unless your an expert in the area. If employee X does not have that information and just because they see an mp3 file with the name Brittany Spears in it they suspend the entire account - they could be loosing a customer very quickly if it was legit and not to mention a potential law suit, as in think "slamming Brittany Spears" or something.

I work for a fairly large web hosting company, and we used to police our selves - if during any routine investigation (as in if someone reported a problem with their account) and we found anything suspicious we would suspend if it was "seemingly" obvious, although two specific incidents changed our policy on that relatively quickly. The first had to do with a Microsoft Development edition of some sort - it turned out the customer was a reseller and had the full right to have that on his site for purchase/download. The second was with a small record label out of the UK, iirc, selling/offering their own goods. Both incidents highlighted the fact that we were not qualified to tell whether something was illegal or not - so we essentially backed completely off, and unless we get a DMCA notice or one sent to the customer - all we do IF we see something very, very suspicious and they are somehow in violation of our RUP/TOS - then we only send them a ticket, if they dont respond with in a given amount of time that is something else entirely.

The point being, is that just because something seems to be illegal - doesn't mean it is, you/we have NO idea if the customer in question has some kind of weird contract with the copyright holder and if they are in violation of it or not - THAT is up to a judge and/or contract attorney to decide, no one else. We see stuff all the time across our large fleet of servers, and the fact that internal communications between employees reflect this is only pointing out something interesting is all. Whether something is actually illegal or not, is a point of contract law - not mere speculation of someone NOT well versed in this.

The flip side of this issue is that the Internet is a VERY large place, and it's simply next to impossible to check every nook and cranny for your various IP'd material - which where logically the rights holders would try and force the providers to police them self, which as noted above is impossible as well.

Conclusion - simply trying to fit a square block (brick and mortar business model) into a round hole (cyber space) just does not fit :-P

I've been thinking about that subject lately, what would be very interesting, telling and very eye opening is for a bill of that nature to even get to congress/senate or even better for the people of the US to have a vote on it (is that even possible anymore?). If the it was out of the congress/senates hands to vote on it - it would only be up to the big media corps, to try and sway you on how letting the big corporations finance the government is best for YOU - no matter how you twist that around, even the biggest idiots/morons would be able to see how corrupt this government has become.

I'm no Apple fan, but their R&D has been increasing year after year - the percentage is dropping because they are making more...

$2,398,000,000 (2.2% of est $109,000,000,000) 2011
$1,760,400,000 (2.7% of $65,200,000,000) 2010
$1,329,900,000 (3.1% of $42,900,000,000) 2009
$1,105,000,000 (3.4% of $32,500,000,000) 2008
$792,000,000 (3.3% of $24,000,000,000) 2007
$714,100,000 (3.7% of $19,300,000,000) 2006
$556,000,000 (4% of $13,900,000,000) 2005
$331,200,000 (4% of $8,280,000,000) 2004
$496,000,000 (8% of $6,200,000,000) 2003
$437,600,000 (8% of $5,470,000,000) 2002
$428,800,000 (8% of $5,360,000,000) 2001
$399,000,000 (5% of $7,980,000,000) 2000

(same link)

Well, at least we can sleep safely tonight knowing that it wasn't our government directly that was responsible for the censorship right? I mean we all know they are pawns of our mighty corporations as they are bought and paid for many times over - hell they apparently get ALL their advice from them as well...

As we noted in our post, the government relied on an executive at the RIAA to claim that the works it used as evidence to seize the domain were infringing -- despite the fact that the RIAA was in no position to know if the rightsholders had authorized the music sent to the site (and, in one case, despite the fact that the musician was not affiliated with the RIAA).

Personally, I think we are simply F'd!! But what do I know? /sigh

Didn't you hear? It was already reformed, just last week - it's not about inventions anymore, it's about $$$ and who can file the paper work first..

The problem with that is the wording, even now they offer the UNLIMITED DATA plans and they are for real - they just don't mention or clarify, that even though you have unlimited data, you will have to pay for anything over X amount - regardless that you have to pay for it, it's still unlimited although so is the cost. The UNLIMITED DATA plans can also mean that in any 1 hour period you can download as much data as you want, the next hour however you may be severely throttled but you do still have the UNLIMITED DATA.

It's a play on words is all it is, "unlimited bandwidth" doesn't clarify *what* is unlimited regarding the bandwidth. I worked for a company once where the CEO purposely used this same play on words, only in the fine print of the TOS it defined 'unlimited bandwidth' as using up as much as the 100mb pipe you could at any given time, the 'total' amount of bandwidth used over a monthly period was a different story all together and *not* unlimited.

I was woken up by my Mom calling me in a hotel room, flown in for an interview in Corpus Christi from LA. When the second plane was confirmed and the 3rd plane hit the the pentagon I was with an apartment recruiter looking for a place to live.

FUCK YOU! for telling our men and women off who are going into harms way for us, when everything went down I was of same mind set and I wanted to kick some shit. You sound like someone who would have tossed sand bags and maybe handed out food supplies, but still complained at the end of the day about a soar back or a broken finger nail.

You fail to forget that our military is NOT civilian based - in that you have no choice to ignore the law, you have ORDERS TO FOLLOW - those orders ultimately come from the President and the Pentagon - if THEY are misguided and corrupt thats a different story all together, it does NOT change the bravery and heroism of OUR men and women! It takes fight, courage and discipline to go into these war zones and come out still being able to shit - courage and discipline will only get you so far in a war zone, the 'fight' will get you the rest of way..

You can win a damn chess game from a freak'n pawn - do you blame the pawn or those who moved the pawn into place?