While I would prefer that Amazon carry a full range of titles encompassing all speech, they are a company, not the government. They are free to carry or not carry whatever titles they choose. While I see no upside to them in not offering a full range, it is their prerogative to select their own wares.

The alternative is that we would force retailers to carry products that they do not wish to carry, which is not something that I see happening in a sane world.

Frankly if they don't do the cheesy-as-hell activation fee like Intel is proposing I'm sold.

If the only citation you can come up with is Wikipedia then either you aren't doing your job or the citation is suspect. I find no issue with the court's decision, I'd be more inclined to beat the prosecutor with a wet noodle for failing to find a more reliable source.

Why waste time on cop cars, cops don't make the laws. Put them on the cars of judges and politicians.

"My my judge, it appears that your car likes to drive to the local titty bars at least twice a week. Funny how those cars do love the titties."

"Mr. Senator, can you tell me why it is that your car was parked outside of a known gay bar? Were you doing research for your anti-gay legislation....2 times a week for the last month?"

BP is probably not a good analogy to this as there is to my knowledge no evidence that federal involvement from the initial blow out would have made any difference. The feds don't have a solution to capping the well either (and in fact failed rather disastrously in keeping BP in compliance with existing government overseen safety regulations).

I concur that both feds and civilians would work better in concert than opposition, but for civilian networks you are dealing with an area in which the feds have absolutely no expertise. Every network is configured differently, with different requirements, different hardware and different security concerns. To allow feds access to those networks under the auspices of "security" is a ludicrous proposition. If the feds want to improve security they should look at the government computers (which most government offices receive a failing security grade for) and concentrate on making sure that there is absolutely no kind of all encompassing override (like a government backdoor) that could be exploited by attackers.

Do you remember Katrina? Do you really want the feds fucking with your network? It is far more plausible to believe that civilian networks will rebound faster from a cyber attack without federal interference because most civilian networks are run by people who do that sort of thing for a living, with their networks, configured properly for their use. Do you really think some random fed network guy is going to be able to reconfigure your network from afar without prior knowledge of how you have it configured? How will they know your user names? How will they access your backups? How will they know which entries on your administrator list are valid administrators and which ones are planted by cyber attackers?

Jeff Green is the former excellent editor of Computer Gaming World magazine. He's always been on the level.

Given how much programming in COBOL is analogous to building computers with vacuum tubes, I think that celebrations are not really called for. I'm thinking we need a Dr. Kevorkian style mercy killing here.

I second this one. Filterware is a bogus solution in just about any case, as there will always be sites it doesn't filter that it should and sites that it does filter that it shouldn't. The best solution is to put the computer in a place where you can always see what is being looked at.

My son's computer is directly beside mine.

Also, as embarrassing as it may be for you, teaching your children comprehensive sex education at an early age won't hurt them any.

Simply, I think they don't get SciFi. The SciFi Channel, named after the genre itself ran John Edwards for months and currently devotes at least one day a week to people going around with IR cameras going "I feel a presence". What's another name for "really really bad science fiction movie"? "SciFi Channel Original Feature". I keep waiting for them to redo Night of the Lepus when they run out of types of lizards, snakes, and gothic masonry.

People whose perception of the world is filtered through a layer of ratings analysis are often not the best judge of quality scifi.