Required viewing before enacting such punishment-based copyright legislation should be the movie 'Caddyshack'... so that they can get a stark reminder that the game of 'whack-a-mole' usually has no winners.

Somehow watching Bill Murray's epic fail in his attempts at getting those groundhogs should be enough for them to understand that this is a pointless battle that will never, ever be won.

Well, it probably won't happen not the least because the copyright holder would demand payment for letting them watch it!

The next video would be one of Gabe Newell discussing the success Steam has had in making users pay for reasonably-priced content with a convenient platform and easy-to-use interface.

[/wishful_thinking]

I generally agree with the view that we are going down a slippery slope when it comes to individual liberties being subverted to fit the model of special interest groups like the copyright cartel. A couple of things I thought about.

-1) It's worth remembering that Hollywood became what it was when the young movie industry felt stifled and encumbered by Thomas Edison's legal challenges asking everyone to pay license fees to use his inventions on the East Coast, so they decided to move West. (sounds familiar?...) People and companies will move again if there is no breathing room left in the US.

-2) Between China and India there are over 2.5 billion people on the planet to whom this makes no difference whatsoever, as for all intents and purposes, copyright enforcement is non-existent. The market they create is too big to ignore, and general-purpose computing boxes that are fully open and customizable will always be around because of them.

It's very simple. Just calmly tell them you want to opt out. By now they are used to the idea that a small percentage of us will refuse, and they'll just go through with their manual search without much of a fuss. While you are being searched, it's usually pretty easy to mention in passing to that TSA agent that beyond the unknown potential cumulative damage to frequent flyers like myself who would be made to pass through this devices fifty to sixty times a year, they themselves are all possibly working in an unsafe environment, around devices which have been rushed to market without proper long-term testing and whose effects are in truth at best poorly understood; therefore those who remain close to them for long periods of time may be candidates to develop some future problems from this, themselves being - of course - very much included. Let that sink in...

I would expect these units to be removed from all but the most sensitive locations in the not-too-distant future, and become reserved for people who already are a likely security risk, rather than for them to remain in use with the general public. All it'll take is one workplace hazard lawsuit by a TSA screening staff's lawyer looking for the glory of a precedent-setting decision with their names attached to it.

I just don't know how that's going to work out. For example I am getting a lot of free subscriptions to industry-specific magazines that used to be print, now digital-only. While I occasionally read an issue here and there, it certainly is far less than it used to be with the dead-tree edition.

While I understand that they have to go with the times, it seems to me that going digital-only has its own set of challenges, and that very few publishers have really bridged the gap that will make their digital publication attractive, with features that make it easy to search, cross-reference and with the types of niceties that would make someone want to pay for it, like a bonus yearly archive or something of that sort.

Honestly I am not sure that I will be renewing under those circumstances, just because I find that - for better or for worse - I tend to read less of those digital editions that I would if the same magazine was still in physical form.

There are many areas of our lives that this digital revolution has been totally restructuring, but while the cost-cutting and efficiency measures do make a great deal of sense when looking at it from the standpoint of a publication's survival, the way the customers relate to this new product is sometimes profoundly less of a pleasurable experience.

Another prime example of that is the tactile difference between holding a full LP sleeve in your hand, and looking at the .jpg image of it in iTunes. Yes, the information is there, but arguably it is much less of the immersive experience that it may have previously been; not that I am against digital, just pointing out that in the cost-cutting frenzy most haven't figured out how to replace the very experience provided by what they had with something that has the same impact (beyond the mere information contained in the article or just the song in the case of an LP). So for example in LJ's case, if they are in fact thinking that this is a good move, they should come up with innovative indexing features that allow the reader to have access to the information and browse articles a bit better than clunky .pdf files.

All of this cost-saving is great, but I sort of deplore that what replaces it doesn't nearly have the same level of convenience and friendliness yet. The challenge is therefore for digital publishers to come up with new killer features and ways to organize the information they are presenting in a way that leverages the platform they are on rather than using it as a crutch, and which will ultimately motivate their readership to subscribe. Make it a compelling upgrade, not a letdown!

Using apps like Little Snitch, it's trivial to block the server requests (which happen about once a day) that the OS is making when it tries to 'phone home'.

They actually come in groups of three, including iphone-wu.apple.com, location.apple.com or something of that ilk.

This is obviously much more of an issue on any iOS device, where the user has little to no control of what's taking place behind the fancy window dressing, and for which no such firewall is made available for purchase through Apple's app store that I know of.

Anyway, for a computer that's staying in one place, a case could be made for the lack of need to know it is staying there all the time. Butt off my activities unless you give me the opt-in choice to be the one that decides whether to provide your company with this information or not. In fact, it could be argued that for home computers the only use for this sort of stuff is targeted advertising somewhere down the road, once users have accepted the idea that being tracked is normal.

Another potential crime which is not often spoken about was that in doing so, he also inadvertently managed to prove that the then-governor of Alaska was using her private email account for conducting state business, something against which there are very strict compliance rules, and that according to many was a clear breach of protocol on her part. These emails are supposed to be archived and later visible to anyone who wishes to see how state business is conducted, but cannot if she used a private account. In a similar vein, the Republicans in power during the Bush years suffered an unfortunate and accidental 'total erasure' all their emails from the White House servers including any backups there may have been for a period of well over a year, which only the more cynical among us would link to the possibility that this may just have been done so that no incriminating evidence could ever be found with regards to what was really discussed when the war in Iraq was started under false pretenses, and other trivial, inconsequential matters. "Real Americans" would far more readily accept the idea that the government losing all of this data and never keeping a single backup of it was a totally unexpected thing, and that's that.

Yes, I think that what this young man did is reprehensible, but so are the other points above, none of which ever got pursued (to my knowledge). That stinks of a real and pretty obvious double-standard of accountability. Sweeping them under the carpet by employing some other distraction was the only magic trick required...

No wonder they hate ***leaks so much. The sort of action which might just begrudgingly force them to come clean about their own practices and start having to play by the rules themselves. For that reason, expect stiffer sentences for similar crimes in the future, to prevent anyone from ever seeing all of this dirty laundry being aired.

Inbefore the obligatory quote from Terry Gilliam's prophetic movie masterpiece Brazil with the mistake between 'Buttle' and 'Tuttle', and the ensuing pandemonium.

Since I am currently being in the middle of re-reading Kim Stanley Robinson's most excellent trilogy Red Mars :: Green Mars :: Blue Mars. (Google it yourself), couldn't help but chuckle a bit at this poll's title.

A recommended thumbs-up read for any Sci-Fi buff out there, thought-provoking, far more detailed and realistic than just about anything out there.

Since it is unlikely I will be able to make this trip in my lifetime, these books are the next best thing to help me feel what it would be like to go there as an interplanetary settler.

Might this be a rare case of cooler heads having prevailed? One would certainly hope so, but that's probably not the real reason.

Regardless of what caused this backtracking, with the economy in the toilet, deterioration conditions in Afghanistan and a few other really urgent considerations like the upcoming mid-term elections, could the Obama administration have decided to pick battles to fight that will actually matter?

It would be interesting to revisit this thread and all of its comments in 10 years' time to compare notes on what really happened.

By then it may feel so anachronistic and quaintly out of place that the reader might well wonder why no lawmaking body could foresee the consequences of infinite copying, the end of artificial scarcity coming, and all of the consequences thereof.
No matter what SCOTUS ends up with as an opinion, the realities on the ground will be so different by then that one can wonder how much this really matters at all. (sorry for the cheerleader)

Maybe the real deal will be something along the lines of what Charles Stross wrote in his most excellent book Accelerando ?
The carcasses of the record business purchased by Russian organized crime and turned into a for-profit extortion racket, exacting demands for payment on things that were created by people who died fifty years ago...