Can someone tell me what a "cable" is? I am looking at the link in the story, and it looks like the kind of thing you'd see slowly printing off of a teletype machine in a 1970s political thriller.

What is the purpose of sending cables rather than encrypted e-mails?

Who maintains the "cable" system and what standard does it run on? Is it like old-school TTY or is it like fax or what? Do these get delivered over regular phone lines or some other network? What kind of "cables" are involved in transmitting "cables?"

I am genuinely curious.

Back in 1985 or so, I remember reading all of the anti-piracy stuff that was being put out by software companies, all of which essentially amounted to this argument:

If people pirate stuff, there won't be any monetary incentive to create, and:

* The video game industry will dry up and no one will make any more video games.

* The business software industry will dry up and no one will make any business software.

* The record industry will die and no one will make any music.

In 2011, is there any more appropriate reply than "LOL"?

At bare minimum, they need to stop making stupid arguments. "We are losing revenue which we could rightfully pocket if piracy were stopped" is far more honest here, however anyone else feels about piracy. Or "sharing." Or whatever people call it.

People need to drag out the "Don't Copy That Floppy!" stuff from the early days, and rather than laugh at how dated the pitch looks, use it as an example of how fucking stupid the argument is, as it has no basis whatsoever in reality. I seriously wonder who the affected industries think they're impressing with the "OMG piracy - the pump don't work 'cos the vandals took the handle! SOFTWARE FAMINE ICE AGE WASTELAND COMING!" argument, because this is such a laughably shit argument.

The First Amendment issues are obvious here, but I have to say, we relegare ourselves to a pack of dumb animals if we make the point that watching something or reading something or playing violent video games means we're going to freak out and imitate or otherwise follow the directions of anything contained within.

We are not three year olds. We can watch hateful, obscene, or otherwise nasty crap and we can make the decision not to be a bunch of zombies about it. Unless and until we insist that people think for themselves and be responsible for their actions, (and law should mandate it - meaning, you can't use "I watched a bunch of nasty stuff and it influenced me therefore the crime I committed isn't my fault" argument) we condemn ourselves to a kind of tyranny where government is the adult who steps in and treats us like impressionable toddlers. Freedom is contingent upon critical thinking and personal responsibility, and I am not willing to accept shackles because there are a smattering of idiots among us who are incapable of it.

The logic that we have to stop thoughtcrime because it might spread or influence people is chilling.

The United States needs to ignore the UK's demand, and the UK, if it insists, can certainly petition google to take action on this.

But unless we rely on the idea that free people in a free society can think critically, why not just invite the government into our lives completely? Why even have a free society, if we're really just animals, a few videos away from going on some kind of horrible killing spree? Why go through the pretense of insisting that human beings are capable, through independent thought and taking responsibility for their actions, of liberty?

The "categorically not allowed in the UK" bit could not, as an American, concern me less -- and should the United States attempt the same kind of argument with the UK in the future, the UK can and should ignore the United States's demands to infringe the right of people to say and read/watch what they like.

The alternative, where the government makes this decision that there's just stuff we can't watch, is scary.

My favorite is the misspelling of "retarded" in the annotation. Few things warm my heart more than that.

You know who else used a similar throttling scheme?

Nazi Germany.

Maybe what we should do is start a "Psst, do you REALLY need that Internet connection?" campaign veiled as a frugality-during-the-recession thing for all of these assholes who apparently use 5 gig a month on their Internet plans.

Just start cold calling people.

Be all up in shawtys grill like,

"Sup boo, says here y'all only use like 5 gigs of data a month."

"Well I just sometimes like to e-mail my grandson."

"Do you think that the expense of an Internet connection for a responsible senior on a fixed income is justifiable during these troubled times? Go to the library yo."

And so on.

Then we can shut these fucking companies up already about how their average customer apparently uses the Internet to write "LOL cupcakes" on Twitter every 4 days, and that represents the average Internet user.

Increasingly, I think if you found these "average Internet users," they'd be the same people who have recalibrated the taste buds of people in this country so that you can't actually get *hot* as in *spicy* food anywhere. I just picture those assholes sitting there twittering "omg this salsa is hot 8P" while scarfing down corn chips with Old El Paso "MEDIUM" salsa.

I hate those assholes. They're ruining it for everyone.

I think it'd be an interesting thing if music players had a way of kicking micropayments to the artists in question, especially considering how pliable I am (and probably other music fans are) during something like the guitar solo in Pink Floyd's "Time." Or pick whatever moves you.

On portable players, which will probably at some point all be connected to the Internet somehow, these micropayments could be queued, to dump when next plugged into a networked computer. Desktop players could do it directly. Each could potentially draw out of a Paypal account. You could imagine a button on the players specifically for this purpose. A "love" button.

What's interesting to me about this is it would link the music and the musician directly to the fan through the musical experience itself, while cutting out the increasingly unncessary industry entirely. I don't know of many music fans who are opposed to paying artists - it's paying the cigar chompers that they tend to object to.

As "piracy" of electronic data cannot be controlled whatever anyone thinks of the morality of it, I also like the bounty idea, which I've brought up in other places. An artist records an album and holds it up until an account is filled with a pre-determined amount of his choosing, say $250,000, at which time the music is released, universally. This would allow hardcore fans to pull campaigns together to compensate artists while unleashing *their* favorite music upon the world as a kind of gift. Artists could determine exactly how much they needed to make in advance. If fans of things will camp out for tickets days in advance, you could even picture them holding bake sales to raise ransom money for new albums.

It would encourage artists to make use of pre-existing social media like facebook and even (double shudder) myspace, mailing lists, and so on, and stay connected to fans. It would further alleviate the stress of seeing ones works spread across the Internet, because that would be the expected result once the bounty was paid. It would contribute to a massive worldwide cultural database. It would involve fans in promoting and being a giant online "street team" for music they love.

Music fans would become patrons of their favorite artists. The two ideas above in combination would allow a bulk sum to be paid on delivery, plus "residuals" as people are all enraptured at 3am dancing around spastically to "Transmission" who want to kick the surviving members of Joy Division a little love.

There are of course issues with this which would need to be worked out. It would probably involve most artists going independent (though I can see some kind of artistic co-operative, or co-operatives forming to make promotion and online distribution - that is to say hosting mp3 - no, flac or something like it - files online - easy to do).

Well thank God, because now people won't download shit for free anymore and instead buy it on amazon.com.

I'm going to send you to a vivisectionist.

Oh GOD, it will never end now. Entire new generations will be quoting this stuff over and over until we all gouge our eyeballs out with sporks. Monty Python, the Led Zeppelin IV of humor, will continue to be the millstone around all of our necks.

Seriously I love Python, I guess. I think I do. I forget. I think after the 50,000th time of having to sit through Holy Grail, I could no longer tell how I once felt.

I'm going to cry.

Thank you Python, thank you - it's wow, I'm inspired like I am by the Top 500 Classic Rock Songs of All Time they do around Labor Day each year because like Layla or Hotel California, I just gotta hear the Parrot sketch ONE MORE TIME because it is so funny, it's like, oh, saying a Rosary or something, you don't really get the whole gestalt of the experience until the 9000th Hail Mary.

Someday when we are all extinct aliens will be digging through our garbage and they will record one thing in their logs: "We left after exploring only .0000000000000000005% of Internet content because we couldn't take the 'Knights Who Say Ni!' references *ANYMORE*."

Oh god, kill me now. I suppose I should look on the bright side (err, yeah). I've got at best another 40 years left or so on this planet.