If you make the case that you're not an participant in the activity then you can't be a participant. Cox was shielding the identities of the offending customers. That made them an active participant.

In other words, if you get a DMCA notice you can respond, "No, that should have gone to so-and-so with this contact information."

When you say, "Sorry, we're not the right people to contact. And no, we won't tell you who is paying us for that IP address," that doesn't work out in court. It obstructs the process. Bye bye liability shield.

1. Federal law enforcement has no jurisdiction over state matters. If a state A.G. finds something to accuse Assange of that's a state crime, the DoJ can't do anything about it.

2. Any decision by the DoJ is reversible by the President. Except for Trump, Presidents try to give the DoJ autonomy, but that's tradition not law.

3. Any decision made by the President alone is reversible by the President or the next President.

4. International treaties ratified by the Senate are enforceable on everybody, including the states and the next President.

5. The current extradition treaty with the U.K. does not authorize anybody to waive potential criminal penalties as a condition of extradition.

Sum these five factors and you get the result I posted above.

If they catch you in a friendly country, yeah. That's how espionage works. Bear in mind that the United States does not have an extradition treaty with China, so they'd have to catch you in a country which does.

Coerced, cajoled, encouraged. However you want to put it, Assange was an enthusiastic participant in espionage against the United States which was not mitigated by any journalistic targeting of some particular wrong. It was literally, "Information wants to be free and I want to be the hero who frees it!"

We can't actually make that promise. We can promise that the current administration won't seek the death penalty, but that promise would bind neither the next administration nor would it prevent any state from filing charges that carry the death penalty.

To make that promise, we would literally have to rewrite our extradition treaty with the UK and the Congress would have to ratify the new treaty.

The deal with the DMCA is that the service provider is not liable for infringement IF it takes prompt corrective action when notified by the copyright holder. IIRC, Cox was basically glad-handing the folks who filed DMCA take downs and doing nothing at all about the infringing customers. Consequently, they lost the DMCA's liability shield. Naturally this upsets them. But I don't think they have a viable appeal.

The Universal Service Fund was originally used to subsidize the up-front cost of installing a phone line when the cost exceeded the average. For example, in rural areas where long lines of wire are needed for every customer. If that were still the case, I would be 100% in favor of applying it to broadband.

The USF changed under Clinton. It's now used to subsidize general IT in rural schools and programs that pay ISPs to provide freeish service to poor people. It doesn't even do the modern version of its original job. You've heard reports of Comcast proposing to build cable Internet to someone for tens of thousands of dollars. If that were a "pots" phone line, the USF would have subsidized it, but it just doesn't do that any more.

So, as long as the USF is misused and required by law to be misused, the FCC is correct to refuse to add it to broadband lines.

I've never understood the value of C++. Basically everything C++ gets used for would be better done in Java or now Rust.

The same does not hold true for C. C is basically a friendly wrapper around assembly language and their remain lots of tasks for which staying close to the hardware is the best choice.

C++ started many moons ago as an enhancement of C, but it has long since evolved to a very different programming language. One that has the baggage of C without the advantages of a language whose authors could apply decades of newer learning to its basic design.

Abdeljawad lives with her Egyptian immigrant parents in Oklahoma but has frequent stints teaching overseas in the conflict region. This means extended stays and significant income from foreign sources entering and leaving her bank account. Combine this with social media posts that were extremely pro-Hamas, a terrorist organization.

If FBI agents weren't asking questions, they wouldn't be doing their jobs.

With the exception of the cell phones and whatever the heck it was that Mr. Anderson was selling at the start of the movie, every bit of tech *inside* the Matrix was at least 5 years out of date. I thought the point was to create some cognitive dissonance in the tech savvy audience that that the environment didn't quite align with the world as we know it even before we found out that it in fact wasn't the world as we know it.

The modern commercial Internet exploded onto the scene in 1995 becoming ubiquitous by 1999. Before that was NSF version of the Internet that nowadays is known as a "research educational network" or REN.

It was the public, commercial Internet which was missing from the Matrix's 1999. They didn't email. No web was browsed. It just wasn't there.

You're right, Morpheus did say, "You believe it's the year 1999 when in fact it's closer to 2199."

Nevertheless, the technology was wrong for 1999. The tech inside the Matrix was deliberately retro, even for its release date.

That was in the Matrix Reloaded. Released in 2003. Four years later.