I never used Mega Video for anything, legit or infringing. I have no opinion of Kim Dotcom. But really, is Dotcom or Ochocinco really worse than "Miller" or "Johnson"? So someone in your history was a miller at some point, now all of his descendants are? Some guy's dad on your history was named John, yay! At least Dotcom and Ochocinco have real personal relevance to those gentlemen. <sarcasm>Anyone with a stupid last name like "smith" should think about changing it to something modern. How many smithies are there in ten people, 0.2? 0.1? Retarded last name.</sarcasm>

Is Kim Dotcom a "douche"? I don't know, I've never met him. Even if he was, though, he still doesn't deserve two government colluding and breaking laws to arrest him. I don't need a third-person written wikipedia article to determine that you, however, are a judgemental prick.

As an American living and abiding by one of those "other cultures" let me just say no. NO! NO! NO! Japan is one of those other cultures. There is no concept here of joint custody. A good friend of mine hasn't seen his boys in three years now, despite desperately wanting to. His ex-wife's psycho parents agreed with you that letting him see his children would "confuse" them, thus they told their daughter to move and not tell him where and refuse to divulge the information. He has no legal recourse.

Unless the mother gives up the right or is mentally unfit, custody defaults to the mother here. Despite the fact that my son obviously prefers me more, were I ever to get that divorce that I think of sometimes, I know there's more than a 90% chance that I would never see him again. So I don't want to hear you bitch about your inconvenience that your ex still has some rights that she never exercises anyway and pine for another culture where such a minor inconvenience wouldn't have occurred.

Considering that people play Arena Football for $400 a game, I think they'd jump at the chance to get paid that much to be on a nationally televised game.

Wow, just... wow. I'm no Libertarian, but that article made me ill. Subsidies and government mandated price-fixing? Why don't they get on with it and make libraries illegal and require everyone to buy a fucking book a week?

Despite such an effective deterrent, it's funny how new criminals seemed to pop up anyway. The way you say it, it's almost like there was no crime back then.

There are sometimes I wish Slashdot went over +5...

I think for that reason my analogy is spot on. DNT closes the curtains, where as tracking would have them open.

What you are saying is, it's totally fine with you for a computer to watch you take a shower and store it on a "secure" server somewhere for the rest of your life + however many years. Also, I never said anything about showers, I said peep into your window at all times. That includes things from the shower (watching pron) and generic sitting on the couch scratching your balls (posting on /.). I don't want anybody collecting data on whether my left side or right side itches more and how that interplays with my desire to eat white bread.

As stated, I would object to that IE message. I wouldn't object to something like:

Then the default action (so when the user who has just skipped reading the previous message) is to DNT.

As for the complaints of bias, I'm not sure if you are talking about your message or the letter from the ad shills. Your message is biased in favor of tracking (that whole "stuff you're probably not interested in" line makes it biased), while my message is biased against tracking. If you meant the letter from the shills, I would think equating DNT to adblock would be enough evidence of a strong bias.

Last, my analogy already told you why I think it's worse that no DNT by default. It's like buying a new house with the curtains open and some machine recording your every action. Sure you could close the curtains after the fact, but when they're set up funky and you have to jump through hoops to, there'll be more people who don't.

I just finished reading the letter and found it disgusting. If you took it out of "the internet" and put it in the real world things like

would read more like

To top it off, they have gems like this

They're acting like MS is installing adblock and turning it on by default. What MS is doing is making the internet more like TV, where the adds are dumb and have to be generally targeted at the type of site, as opposed to creepily personalized.

One big thing about this law is a DMCA-like crack down on circumventing DRM and most Japanese language articles about this talk about it including making copies of movies or CDs that you rent. I didn't go to a rental store today, but it's always been one of my personal pleasures to walk into a movies store and the main display when you walk in is piles of blank CDs and DVDs. The largest chain Tsutaya often doubles as a bookstore with books and magazines teaching you how to rip CDs and DVDs were prominently displayed. I might go down tomorrow to see if it's changed at all. Though when the price of a new CD is generally $30+, it makes a lot of sense that most Japanese people would just rent and rip.

Wild Bill Hickok is that you?!

I love laws like this! What happens when the Prime Minister's account posts "Yer teh G4yz!" all over the place? Why must people who make laws be so stupid and ignorant of anything technological?

This. This is the post I was going to make when I first read this article. What happens when some zombienet decides it doesn't like a site? Say I've got a phishing site and I blast the real site into oblivion while my site goes up. I saw let's beat them to it and just spam the fuck out if *AA sites. Here's the link. Let's have at it: http://support.google.com/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1114905&page=ts.cs

I weep for the US education system...

Hello Thank you for checking in. I'm always curious to see how it's going in the bizarro world of Forever Now. Good to know nothing has changed since last time, nor the time before that, or before that, or before that, or before that. In the world of Forever Now, "insurance" is a scam and everyone knows it because nothing bad ever happens because nothing ever changes. Fire extinguishers? Non existent! Why should they? No one will ever use them. Waste of money!

Seriously, are you that short-sighted or just that stupid? Ever sick person was once "young and healthy".