For what it's worth, the FDP (3rd/4th strongest political party) voted unanimously against the censorship law and has made digital freedom in general one of the major points of their campaign platform for the election this year.
Maybe, but the FDP wants to form a coalition solely with the CDU (Schaeuble, von der Leyen & Co). Tell me how that will work out?
TYPICAL GERMAN politics, come up with a screwy law, and make it even more screwy! So I guess what I can take from this is that child porn is ok to see at a university, but not a corporation or large ISP... Yeah that makes sense, really does...
I guess they introduced these exceptions because implementing the censorship infrastructure on the ISP side takes a great deal of time & money. Obviously only big ISPs can afford that
The big parties of the German government once again proved that they're just doing what they want and not what the citizens want! That's why I'm going to vote for the Piratenpartei (Pirate party) on September 27.
Being a Java enthusiast, I must reply to your arguments regarding Java:
1) The next major release of Java (Java 7) is going to be 100% open source. Even if Sun (or IBM for that matter) drops the language, which is very unlikely, Java is going to persist as it has a strong community.
2) It's true that the evolution of the Java language has been quite slow and conservative in the past. But I believe that the rise of new dynamic and hip languages with indeed cool features didn't pass Sun without notice. Java 7 is going to have closures, for example. If you want closures and other syntactic sugar right now, have a look at Groovy, which is a scripting language based on the JDK. You can even compile Groovy code to 100% pure Java classes!
Remember to say hello to your bank teller.
