+5 Insightful? "DMCA itself is good"? Are you serous? It most definitely is not "good": that abomination should never, ever have been signed into law in its current form. Have you read it? If not, I suggest you do. Yes, SOPA is worse, but keep in mind that an MPAA law firm wrote the DMCA, and handed the thing to their tame Congressman for submission. We know this because a reporter extracted the metadata from the original Word document, and found the names of all the attorneys that had modified or reviewed it. It was not designed to balanced or fair, or to be a reasonable augmentation to copyright to accommodate technological advances. It was, purely and simply, all they thought they could get away with at the time. Look at the history of copyright extension in the U.S. the DMCA was only one of a long line of unholy modifications to copyright law that have done nothing but screw the American people, harm the public domain, and tie up an incredible quantity of court time on issues that often have nothing to do with copyright! It's an excellent period in U.S. history to become an "intellectual property" (whatever the Hell that actually means) lawyer, I suppose. That's another reason why these laws get passed: certain sectors of the legal profession make a lot of money.

So now, a decade down the road, they're pulling out all the stops, buying all the Congresspeople they can, to finally and permanently remove copyright from its Constitutionally-mandated role to "promote the advancement of the useful arts and sciences." Remember who you are dealing with here: you cannot argue with them, you cannot reason with them, and they absolutely will not stop. Period. End of statement.

Personally, I believe the practice of public officials taking bribes from foreign-owned corporations should be considered treasonous. But that's just me. I also have a fond wish that the Department of Justice would expel the ex-RIAA attorneys that our friend and savior Barack Obama appointed, and go after the corporations and corrupt Federal officials that have turned our patent and copyright systems into a corporatist welfare system.

I don't expect to get much joy there either.

Probably because they haven't been sued yet. A number of software companies have been put out of business because of the copy-protection provision of the DMCA. Possibly an exception was allowed for that purpose, I don't know. But I doubt it.

No, I have a pretty good idea just how bad it is: I agree with you. Congress has their own private healthcare system: they don't care what happens to us because, like most of the laws they make, they don't have to suffer the consequences of their malfeasance.

I've heard that before. And if you'd stop jerking your knee and read my post, you'd understand that my complaint is not with the idea of socialized medicine, but with the implementation. For the most part, our Federal Government has failed miserably at delivering anything resembling cost-effective, comprehensive medical care. And don't even bother to bring up Medicare: it's rife with fraud and isn't remotely comprehensive ... I had to go down that road with my father once his private insurer (Aetna, as it happens) jacked up his premiums to over twenty grand a year. Fortunately he suffered total renal failure, which is one of the few conditions that will automatically get you Medicare regardless of age since he was only fifty-nine at the time. They would cover treatment and medication that was directly related to his kidney issue and dialysis (for which I was grateful) but that was it, and I went way into the red covering everything else out of my pocket.

Point is, I for one do not trust my government (any of my various governments) to be able to competently manage anything as complex as national health care with out bungling it, or becoming completely subservient to the private sector. Either way, the American people get screwed.

True, as it happens. And "what you heard" is irrelevant: it's apparent that you don't understand what is really going on here. And, as I pointed out, America has turned into a corporatist nightmare, so you the dichotomy between the public and private sectors is no longer so clear-cut.

That, actually, is the crux of the matter. Any discussion of whether socialized medicine is "better" or "worse" than private insurance must take into account the relative trustworthiness of a given country's bureaucracy. Ours has proven itself, time and time again, that it cannot be trusted with our money. Neither, unfortunately, can our private insurers, which leaves us in something of a bind. The solution to such problems has traditionally been heavily-regulated private-sector organizations providing the actual service, with the government making damn sure they do it right. The heavily corporatist leanings of our current regime makes that unworkable, and the idea of giving those 535 sociopaths collectively known as "Congress" complete control over our health care is not a viable solution here either. That should scare anyone who is paying attention to what the United States Federal Government has become, that is, a danger to itself and everyone subject to it.

When you get right down to cases, insurance of any kind is fundamentally socialist in nature. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea of many paying into the kitty, and some withdrawing in time of need. A number of very large corporations self-insure their employees: that can work out much better than private insurance. In any event, the issue is primarily one of administration: Germany, for example, does very well with socialized medicine because they have a fundamentally more trustworthy bureaucratic setup than the United States has ever had. Consequently, socializing our medical system, especially the way Obama wants to do it, is probably doomed to failure. Even if it proves effective, odds are it will be so expensive that we'll go broke trying to maintain it.

I've had Windows 7 BSOD (actually, I've seen a few different colors), usually because of a driver problem at startup. The last one was due to a multi-port USB -> RS232/485 serial converter. Installed the drivers and *POW*, instant BSOD when we restarted the system. To Win7's credit, we let it run an automatic repair (which took about an hour) and when it was done everything worked fine. I have no idea what it did, but it did manage to fix itself.

The converter used an FTDI chipset: I've had driver issues with those things before, on a number of products from different vendors that all used one of FTDI's chipsets.

Yes, because when I think of efficient, reasonable-priced, effective health care delivery ... I think GE and Microsoft.

This isn't going to end well. Not for their customers at any rate.

Not really, at least not in any meaningful sense. Just like how copyright law allows you to make duplicates of copyrighted material for personal use ... but denies you the right to acquire the tools needed to do that in most cases. A right that you have but do not have the power to exercise is not a right but is, in the end, a privilege. On that may be revoked at any time.

So what? Don't try to make this into an Android vs iOS issue, because it's not. The real question is: who put it there, and who decides whether it's enabled?

Put it this way: there's no real percentage to installing anything like this for Google or the hardware manufacturers, whose credibility would be shot once it gets out. So far as I'm aware, no such application exists in the Android Open Source Project source tree: if there were, we'd have heard about it by now considering how many eyes are on that code. Most likely it's the carriers that are installing this for their own purposes (nefarious or not, we don't know yet.)

If it bothers you that much, buy the phone direct rather than from a provider and check it to see if it has CarrierIQ on it. Alternatively, root it and install Cyanogenmod or some other decent third-party ROM. I run CM myself, and it doesn't have CarrierIQ. Keep in mind that the big boys generally have source code access to the phones they sell. In the case of Android, well, that's because it's an open source operating system, which allows them to do anything they wish including installing unwanted system apps. Even with Windows Mobile and iOS, odds are they have agreements with Microsoft and Apple to allow them some level of access to the source. Even if that weren't so, if AT&T were to tell Apple "ship this app or we won't let your iOS on our network", well, believe me that app will be there ... Apple is not your friend in this regard.

Basically, if you're buying a computer system from an untrustworthy source (and none of the major cellular providers qualify as trustworthy) you can expect this kind of nonsense to occur regardless of the device or its operating system. Google allows the entire world to see what is in its stock firmware releases, so if something untoward appears on your device, you have a pretty good idea who put it there.

Not really. Because, when you get right down to it, the only real enemy of government officials are their own citizens who might fight to displace them.

It would make for an interesting botnet, wouldn't it? Just run a process on fifty or sixty million machines whose only task is to crawl the Web. Wouldn't even need to use a noticeable amount of bandwidth or CPU time. Just sit in the background hitting sites.

You could call it "TrackTHIS!".

That's very true: I'd known of Wikileaks for years, but his name never really came up in relation to it, not in the regular media anyway. Once his crowd started hitting a little too close to home they took more direct measures. I'm surprised that one of the multi-billion-dollar outfits whose dirt he's been publishing hasn't had him killed yet, although they might be afraid of creating a martyr. The Wikileaks crowd is pretty damned hard to intimidate, it seems.

Who knows ... if HIllary Clinton gets her way, the CIA might get tasked to bump him off. I was appalled at the members of our government who publicly called for his assassination. That's the kind of thing that people should remember when it comes time to cast their votes.

Yes, my Debian servers run software RAID. For what I do at home it's more than adequate, and it is damn fast.