When has America been a free country? Seriously, go read "A People's History of the United States". We've been a heck hole for ages. Hell, the reason we have a Senate is to keep the pleebs from voting themselves land (google it). We've always been a country by the wealthy & for the wealthy. We've always put property rights first and human rights second. I don't know why get so confused when we do stuff like this. We've been doing it since the country was founded...

I haven't read the law in detail but you might be right. That said my understanding from readying summaries from folks who had actually read it ( :P kinda sounds like that bit from Spaceballs, doesn't it? ) was that so long as google wasn't moderating the store then they were more or less in the clear. It was written like common carrier laws. e.g. you can't prosecute the phone company when somebody plans a bank robbery on their cell phone.

In any case from a practical standpoint I'm sure google would win. They've got the money to fight it out and there's plenty of network operators who'd want to maintain some protections. Sorta like how if I link to a pirate song facebook doesn't get sued even though they made money off the ads they served.

Yes and no. There's a lot of evidence his company was encouraging employees to upload copyrighted works. Now that said the massive amount of resources devoted to bringing him down is frustrating...

you'd have to kill our Jury trial system. That's why nobody ever brings these cases to trial. The defense & prosecution each get to pick jurors and It's easy to find one "Tough on Crime" juror who will always side with the prosecutor. They indited those cops in Baltimore but it's just for show and to calm things down. After the dust settles they'll drop the charges. Not because they're complacent, but because they know they can't win, even if the police turned out to be guilty.

The DMCA safe harbor protects them as long as they take it down immediately on request, and google is big enough to weather any lawsuit. Now if you or I were running an app store...

You seem to be confused. They're not incompatible ideas. We can protect our middle class work force without hating brown people. It's like that Bruce Springsteen song, "We take care of our own". You have to be OK yourself before you can help others. Now, this _does_ mean we curtail some of our excesses. But one thing at a time please. Let's stop the race to the bottom first

btw, The false dichotomy you're bringing up is another example of the sort of debate framing that's going on. Nice troll too, btw.

Socialism and Protectionism are _not_ easy answers. That's what makes them real answers. Real answers are _hard_. We're facing a lot of complex problems with a large and incredibly powerful group of individuals trying to sabotage any attempt to solve them.

This is always been a problem of socialists. Our rhetoric sucks because we don't have a grand ideal to lean on. It's so much _easier_ to say if we leave things alone their sort themselves out. It _sounds_ better and it _feels_ better. Sure, it's wrong. But it's a tough sell.

It's like when you were a teenager and didn't want to listen to your parents. I mean that exactly. Your parents weren't right about everything, but if you're middle class enough to be reading this they were probably right about 90%. But nobody remembers that 90%, just the 10% of the time they were wrong. Socialism has the same problem.

And no, Russia and China aren't socialists. Next question please. It takes more than words to be socialist, just like it takes more than sex to be a parent.

into the ideals that were pounded into his skull since childhood. That's the problem. The free market has failed us middle class techs. We can't possibly compete with people who lack food security. Yes, the H1-B program increases the GDP, but that's useless to the middle class since we're getting a smaller and smaller piece of the pie. The solution is protectionism and socialism, but the 1% have spent our whole lives demonizing these things.

Ask yourself what your high school economics class was like. Were you ever taught there was any way but free market laissez faire economics? Heck, in my class they didn't even bother demonizing it, it just wasn't taught. Libertarianism was a fait accompli. The grandparent, like a lot of /.ers is fighting the same uphill battle. It's the same reason the right wing just won the UK. You take control of the basic discussion and thought processes. Hell, look what we're doing. We're not talking about our standard of living, we're talking about "Job Creators". They've framed the debate in such a way that we can't even start to talk about the real issues.

and I'd like to see it made illegal to tow with a chain (or worse one of those canvas rope thingy's I've seen). For pete's sakes people get a flatbed or at least a proper tow dolly.

Screw protecting the consumer and their maybe $1000 worth of crap in the back of a pickup. What I want to know is that _I'm_ protected from half assed and overworked driver with no insurance moving shit on their days off instead of resting thanks to America's race to the bottom economy.

didn't even bother to read the summary let alone TFA did you? This is about insurance, keeping track of who has it and making sure they're in a position to pay. $1 mil is small potatoes if you get hit by an uninsured driver and injured. A bad accident can result in decades of medical bills and with America's screwed up health care system can run way past that.

where you walk into an advertising and you're agreed to be imprinted with an addiction to Popsi or some cigarettes. Really lookin' forward to that. Like how some of our best computer scientists are working for google trying to figure out how best to make us look at ads. Thanks future!

Except for a few top guys and the occasional person who wins the lottery in life pay is what is was 20 years ago after 20 years of inflation. Companies are merging left and right and everytime they do it's another round of layoffs. Offshoring and onshoring (via H1-B) are nuts. If you work in IT you're probably seeing something like a 70% Indian workforce with only the occasional American to fill a spot when they ran out of visas. Meanwhile it's a statisical fact that productively is way way up, meaning you're doing more work. Even if the tools are better it still means you're responsible for a hell of a lot more. How the hell would that _not_ be stressful?

Only because our President threatened to go back and add conditions regarding bonuses and other regulatory measures in exchange for letting the banks hold on to the TARP money. Shortly after that all these troubled companies had plenty of cash to pay back the gov't with. Hate to say it but if the other guy one I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have gotten that money back. That's a pretty big risk for 8%

it let you trade in your car for a huge tax break. Often more than the vehicle was worth. But to do that you had to be able to afford to buy a new car from a dealer. What ended up happening was poor people kept their high pollution clunkers while the upper middle class traded in their 4-5 year old cars for new ones. The law specified that cars & trucks traded in had to be destroyed (since the point was to get polluters off the road). So what you had was a bunch of modern, zero emission cars & trucks being trashed while the poor were busy hacking their stuff from the late 80s early 90s together to keep it running. Meanwhile it had the added benefit of massively raising the price of used cars (since several million left the supply chain as junk) further encouraging the poor to keep their clunkers. It was an unmitigated disaster that we're only just now recovering from.

I've got a 17 year old kid I'm buying a car for and this damn program is gonna add $2k to the cost of it, so I'm more than a little bitter. Gotta have a car though, the bus trip from our apartment to the college is 90 minutes one way. Good luck making it through a rigorous course load with 3 hours out of your day every day. I suppose if she wanted to be a philosophy major...