The unreasonable part is that you're putting a tax on something that is ridiculously changeable. Right now 1 Terabyte seems a lot, so to pay an extra few euro for a hard drive seems ok.

In 2002 the Canadian copyright lobby proposed a levy of 0.8 per megabyte on removable flash media and 2.1 per megabyte on non-removable storage in an audio player (in addition to the existing levy on blank audio tapes / cd's).

That means that the 16GB SD card I bought recently for my camera would have cost not $10 but $141 and a 32GB media player would be an extra $688.

Those sizes were unheard of in 2002 but only ten years later are commonplace. In another ten years, a gigabyte tax will probably be just as absurd.

That's incorrect, Canada does not have this tax on storage devices or media players.

The copyright lobby has tried and failed a few times to have the copyright levy extended from blank media. As of right now the levy is only on blank cd's. http://www.cpcc.ca/en/the-cpcc/private-copying-tariff

It means the video is still unavailable on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLTZgqSAjQs You'll get the following kind message:

"Blackfella's Guide to ..."
This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Tanya Steele.
Sorry about that."

Seems to me that the Youtube pulling is a more recent development as it appeared to be available as of the writing of TFA: "The trailer for the video is now on YouTube. Click here to watch the trailer." The original complaint had to do with the video being pulled from Vimeo.

"Credit is very nice, at the end of the day it is getting the job done that matters"

Maybe to the owners and shareholders but not for anyone else. Having worked under both good and bad managers, and now in a position of leading my own team, I have to say you'd be crazy to ignore this. The worst case is not people leaving your company. The worst case is turning great employees into average employees.

Have there been any cases where Skype was used for legal purposes? I could see a couple problems...

1) it's being peer to peer so no server logs to say if a conversation really happened as claimed, even if they're logged
2) the proprietary logging formats are very difficult to locate and export data from, even within the Skype client

I use Skype extensively for work but I still ask for email copies of anything important.

I do almost the same thing with my netbook and my notebook but instead of the full drive I have a Truecrypt mount for documents and portable apps. If I need to quickly fire up the machine and get on the net I can - but if I want access to any of my documents, bookmarks, Eclipse workspace or my portable apps, I have to mount the drive. We've made this a standard practice for all company notebooks where I work - very little speed compromise and stolen or lost computers pose very little risk (as long as they were off at the time).

Blocking phone numbers is meaningless - the spam calls you get originate from VOIP services where setting a caller id is trivial. None of those phone numbers are actually the number of the caller. You basically end up with the phone provider being in the exact position of an ISP in blocking spam - do you really want them to decide which phone calls you get and which you don't, based on criteria you have no control over? ISP's at least have some experience doing this now but it's pretty new for the telecoms.

"V" may be right, bullets may not be effective against ideas, but that doesn't make ideas any less vulnerable to far more mundane threats like a lack of money or leadership.

IANARC (I am not a Roman Catholic) but I did RTFA. Am I still allowed to comment? :)

I really hate to spoil the party that seems to happen every time the Roman Catholic church is mentioned on Slashdot but nowhere in the article does anyone say that the Internet promotes *anything* or say that the Internet is to blame for anything.

They're simply saying that the Internet has fuelled an exchange of information that is a game-changer in the arena these particular clergy are interested in. I don't think anyone on /. could disagree with that. The original article barely mentions the Internet at all.

There are plenty of articles about the RC Church far more deserving of comment. This one's a non-starter.

Uh oh... the last time you lot started talking like this there was something of an incident in the Boston Harbour.

Personally, I'd love to see you do it again with the recording industry. You cannot imagine the warm fuzzy feeling I get imagining crates and crates of the latest Britney Spears album sinking to the bottom of the harbour.