Guilty or not, there is plenty of "threat" in all this for Congress to double the budget of the Department of Homeland Security...

First they 'investigate' you with all your colleagues. Then they reduce your security clearance. Next is work on lots of committees that actually do nothing. Finally they farm you out to a huge government contractor with a big title and nothing of any consequence to do. If you don't get the message then, they are quite prepared to dig up Senator Joseph McCarthy to look into your political allegiances. Resistance is futile!

I think it is the splayed feet and a tendency to walk/roll rather like an Orang-outang. His continuous threats to dismantle our nascent National Broadband optical fibre Network may also have something to do with it

I think we should upset the u.s.a. If the whole world stopped using capital letters when referring to the u.s.a. - the u.s. - uncle sam etcetera, then the fools who are allowing the united states to bob and curtsy and pass legislation to the entertainment industry and other powerful lobbies may just get the idea that the rest of the world is kicking back.

Yes indeed.

While the 'File Savers' of the world are praying for a huge capacity removable disks that have no chemical fade-out over time, the music and film industries are quaking in their boots at the very thought of such a disk.

It hasn't happened yet but you know, just as I know, that it will!

Let Germany do as it likes. The only sure thing in all this is that the weight of lawyers feeding at the trough will drag the whole world-wide patent systems down. It is only a matter of time!

OTOH, a single Mylar balloon over a major city on a still clear night would allow hundreds to thousands of laser propagated channels at very serious speeds. ----- Think of it as an extension of Ham radio when conditions had to be right for a QSO. It would certainly make a a real fun evening entertainment of collecting a few hundred BR Movies just for the sheer hell of it!

Besides, anybody with half an eye on the future would know that geostationary Data Centres would have no cooling problems and no power problems. O.K. There would be some transit time issues but these could be worked around by classifying data and it's likely access requirements. Come on guys. We don't need this crud here. Put it into space where we can easily nudge it into the sun for clean decommissioning.

And there are no known guaranteed safe levels of R.F. exposure. Brain tumours from R.F. take up to 20+ years to develop and then can kill as surely as the kind that grow quickly. My advice.............. Fergeddaboutit. Not in a pink fit would I buy into a situation that had a continuous R.F. signal from a cell phone relay.

First you need to be able to point to a first-world country that has successfully introduced a three-strikes policy. You will not be able to. The whole idea is so flawed that any sensible JP or Judge will simply refuse to authorise a disconnection. Any judicial disconnections will instantly highlight the unintended consequence of this silly idea re. work commitments/other family members and be pilloried in the press. After that comes the interesting business of sorting out just how to give the innocent parties at that address their full rights while nailing an extremely wicked and intransigent file-sharer to his well deserved crucifix ;( . . . . . . Get a grip N.Z.---- This idea will work exactly as well as the equally idiotic U.S. alcohol prohibition laws!

There will be some red faces when the "Great Google Hack" is found to be due to a small sub-set of their code that has gone sentient. Of course it is dormant now while the hue and cry is loudest. Next week? I am not so sure. . . . . .

Dolby have an ~$4 dollar solution for this problem. "Dolby Volume" processors are currently fielded in about 12 to 14 Consumer devices - High end A/V receivers, a few laptops and 4 Toshiba LCD Television receivers. Look forward to the day when Dolby Volume is incorporated into a great many more devices, to include built in audio in PC motherboards. Not only will our viewing be more pleasant but surfing the net at a fixed volume will actually be possible. Support Dolby by visiting their web site for the demo and asking your equipment suppliers for this essential feature in an increasingly louder world. . . http://www.dolby.com/consumer/understand/volume/dolby-volume.html

We can grow more food on the same animals. Perhaps not monkey meat though . . . . . . . Win Win.

As a scheme it also has the supreme disadvantage that if the records of investors were lost in an accidental Cruise Missile bombing the pirates will have a lot of aggrieved investors on their backs. Nasty stuff then happens, with a poor outcome for those who are seen to be not doing the right thing.