Naturally for a person that is not on average income it's difficult to understand proportion.

Like a punishment (if found guilty) proportional to the crime (if proven as such).

Every so often someone calls for a tougher stance on copyright infringement. How about a more reasonable stance on copyright in general?
Maybe all this Gestapo copyright notions should be canned and a more enlightened, modern system be created?

I agree with some other posters, why not make false copyright complaints accountable? -You know for making lies available for download.

At the end of the day there is a SHORTAGE of qualified IT professionals. We need all the qualified tech workers we can get our hands on.

Big companies like FB, Microsoft, Google etc are SCARED SHITLESS from getting their image ruined by a big public discrimination lawsuit. You know why? because the maximum amount of compensation is UNLIMITED. That means it takes one badly handled discharge or some bigoted idiot to lose millions.

Why do you think they keep hammering their equality statements etc? A: Reputation, B: Fear of lawsuits

What about Amish people? how many Amish does FB employ? why are there no more Amish people in google? What about Sikhs in Microsoft?

Honestly, this is not tech news, this is garbage.

Let's face it, they are probably already doing most of what they propose to legislate, might as well make it official.

I guess it's still better than secret courts that approve actions that no one can oppose because that too is a secret.

It works really well for the US, why not for our good friends down under?

Innovate or die.

As usual the established trade is resisting any changes to the model. Why don't they take this moment & implement their own competing system & instead of owning cabs own an app?

But but but this is our lively-hood they tell you, think of the children! -no one said driving a car & knowing London's roads will land you a lifetime job.

We know this all too well, they will used their position and established financial base to throw an army of litigation at it and maybe they'll shut the app down but this is the beginning of the end because it's an eventuality.

So many people drive a 4 seat, 5 passenger vehicle with only themselves or perhaps another person with them. Why not use that?

You see, diamonds are not really worth anything, neither are black pearls...but once people started marketing those with other goods that had an established perceived value guess what happened?

Sure, cryptocurrency is not physical so cannot have a smell but if this fragrance is any good it ADDS to the perceived value of bitcoin.

I've seen and heard a lot of criticism of bitcoin for all sorts of reasons but at the end of the day we did once move from bartering apples for goat to coins to the gold standard to currency (Which IS virtual money) & we will move to an all digital economy. Maybe that will be bitcoin.

Perhaps an unpopular opinion but I think this is overall a good thing. It will require more discipline from police and help reduce the number of unjustified police action.

As the same time this will serve to catch criminals and is a precursor to automatic face recognition (like they have with car number plates)

Just remember the next time you see police, you're on camera.

I find it amusing that through the decades and centuries some fundamentalists, religious groups etc simply do everything they can no to not change.

Resisting change in new and interesting ways. They come up with new counter arguments, new legislation proposals, new interpretations of the same old texts.

That very same behaviour is evolutionary in nature. We need no other explanation to demonstrate that evolution as a fact is quite well grounded in fact.Sure there are gaps in our ability to explain everything but every time we have stepped forward and discovered something, solved what was thought to be impossible etc the arguments against evolution then evolved with the discovery. Much like the "Irreducibly complex" malarkey.

So some sect/faction/aspect/cult of Judaism or some other belief want X removed or have removed it from their school. Good. Evolution at work, they are one step closer to removing themselves from the gene pool. While some religious groups may have 11 - 15 kids per family religion overall is in decline.

We can argue these points on slashdot, religious people can counter argue and millions will read and judge for themselves -all very evolved.

You want security at the expense of usability? build layers!

A single system can be hacked, a single OS has bugs, a single app has backdoors, a single protocol has explots etc etc

Use LESS popular services in combination with layers of security. For instance; You can use the Tor Network to SSH into a proxy to tunnel chat with pidgin & OTR plugin. If you're even more paranoid assume your OS is already hacked, use some exotic image like Qubes, create temporary destructible VMs to carry information...there are options and many of them make basic functionality a nightmare.

If you really care that much about having your idle chitchat being "secure" you can always assume everything is being listened to. Good old fashion message encryption is probably much better than a special app.

I am quite happy there's more focus on security but let's be serious here, Tor is a target for snoops. they will find a way in because they already proved they can.

Forgive me if I'm wrong but given large volumes of traffic that are sold at the lowest rate, providers are not about to add hassle and overhead to their filtering...

So it's a "business decision" really. After all, is there anything to penalize network providers from not adding filters?

Personally I think this should really be in everyone's best interest given the implications of inaction, but how to start the ball rolling?

Now to explain that answer, simply...something tells me this might be a costly lesson...

I for one will be happy to pay for in-depth, impartial analysis that takes complex matters and explains them to me simply.

There are enough people out there interested in different things, there's a market there, somewhere. Regardless of that I'm sure most people are sick and tired of tabloids, newspapers with a political agendas and media moguls pushing their views.

I'll pay if you empower me with no BS knowledge and thus a real chance of understanding. Ask me, the potential buyer what I care about, what I'd like to know about and what I do not care for.

Information should be free, instead of asking how you can charge for information maybe you should consider how to monetize transferring free information? wait a moment that's call an ISP. Tax the ISP? -do you see where this is going?

So far we've all been reading what we like for free on the internet, what will your pay service do better? can you demonstrate you're giving me, the reader better value over "free!"? -if you cannot answer that question you should not bother with a pay wall. If you tax at the ISP level and they transfer costs to the customers then customer will move.

So really, what information is not easily accessible to the masses, without passes and logins? high quality research, specialist and niche information. Essentially the sort that has a very low readership and cannot fund itself on ad revenues. Someone will pay for that.

Pirate bay shows blockades have no effect. After all, what's a blockade that cannot block anything?

They can take it down, another one will come back. Since the days of the Lycos MP3 search engine file sharing has only increased...it's practically a miracle that the RIAA & MPAA have survived all those lost billions of dollars. After all they are constantly losing money to so called "piracy".

http://mafiaa.org/

he died doing what he loved. He will not be missed.

This is what your senior managers are often most concerned about.

The way I see it you need to figure out how much it costs the business if function X breaks. If the network fails, how much does the business lose per day.
Let's not forget there is an additional cost if the usual staff cannot do their work, time lost to restore backups etc.

Now factor the cost of getting some adhoc help via an external company in case of emergency. Eventually the network will fail and if you alone cannot fix it you'll need help.

Hopefully you now have some *realistic* and yet scary figures. You need to figure out what sort of resiliency the network has and what is the likelihood of a total catastrophic failure. The less redundant the setup, the higher the chance.

Bring this information to the relevant people and demonstrate how these risks are lowered with additional headcount/equipment.

If you have more than 5 minutes to think about this I'm sure you'll expand on this line of thought and come up with something even more polished.

Every time we complete some sort of cycle, discover a new tribe, a new people, new nation or continent, new media, new format, new distribution whatever, there's always this stupid witch hunt. -Oh no a person is saying/writing/portraying things I don't agree with, this must stop right now. Democracy is bad. Censor that shit right away! -burn all those books.

To make it worse there's this pseudo fanatical craze to get rid of nudity with a passion but violence? not so much. somehow nudity is worse...reminds me of the MPAA rating system. Sure you can show blood, but the naked human body? are you out of your mind?!

This is always the problem with controlled distribution, formats and media. Someone decides what's best for you.