Just to clarify, as much as I hate the DRM provisions, and as stupid as they're being about them, the SOPA-style provisions were never in the bill in the first place. The copyright lobbyists wanted them put in, but they were denied in these hearings.

See, this is why I get upset when people say "Write your MP!" when we ask what we can do about shit like this. What do you do when writing your MP just gets you a form letter completely ignoring your points? It's clear they don't/won't listen.

I didn't personally follow up on that, but if that is indeed the case, ouch. That means that news company effectively gave up their copyrights for nothing.

In principle, yes, but I thought one of the strikes against them was that they didn't actually own the copyrights to anything they were suing over. They had the "right to sue" only, but the judges rules that you can't transfer only the "right to sue" of a copyright. It has to be the whole thing. If they don't actually own the copyrights, they don't have to forfeit anything.

Oh I'm not saying they shouldn't be doing this, given how the current system works. It's totally prudent on their part.

That's great and all, but the very existence of a "defensive patent" portfolio/company indicates to me that the system is totally broken.

The market of "people who don't have Internet access" is becoming increasingly smaller all the time. I hardly think the general argument of "there are only a limited number of spots, therefore the record labels serve a purpose to control access to those spots" applies to the general market of "all people who want to listen to music". Most of them have Internet access.

YouTube may be only able to show so much on its front page at a time, but it can change more rapidly, there are powerful and easy to use search capabilities that go far beyond just what is on the front page, and theoretically there can be an infinite number of YouTubes. Nobody is stopping anyone from creating their own site to promote certain types of music, or whatever niche you listen to.

The point I'm trying laboriously to get to is that for the vast majority of the music listening public, you're not limited to listening to whatever happens to be on the radio. The need for a record label to compete for limited airtime to promote their artists just to make them visible to you just isn't there anymore.

The "limited number of slots" argument might apply if you're talking about say radio airplay or music videos on a single channel that can only show so much. With the Internet, there are effectively an unlimited number of slots, thus vastly lowering or negating entirely the need for a middle man such as a record label.

This must not be in Canada, where Radio Shack has become "The Source" and been transformed from an actual electronics store to a cell phone reseller. For a little while, they still had hobbyist electronics stuff in the back, but now it's all gone. I bought a 12V DC power supply from there once for my model railroading and the guy who rang it up knew neither what it was nor what you would use it for. The only reason I knew they had it was because their online inventory said so.

I know that's why I switched to Ubuntu at work over Fedora. We use iMacs because they're a really convenient all-in-one hardware package, and we blow them away and put Linux on them. Ubuntu supports the video drivers needed for the ATI mobile card used in them. Fedora doesn't. I had video glitches and lockups on Fedora. I have none on Ubuntu (now Kubuntu because I hate Unity for dev work). That's the end of the story for me personally.

Did anyone else read that acronym as DARMOK at first glance? I keep picturing Picard getting Data to filter the spam in his inbox...

Okay, so I'm infringing on two IP laws: their trademarked character, and their copyrighted artwork. If I call the game Super Same-io Bros. instead and change all the Mario text to Same-io, but still use Nintendo's sprites and artwork, I'm still infringing on their copyrighted work. My point was that you cannot copy copyrighted art if you just "don't make a profit". That's ludicrous.

So I guess I can create a free open-source Super Mario Bros. game and use all Nintendo's copyrighted sprites and artwork then? I'm not making a profit off it, so it should be fine, right? Yeah, good luck trying that.

I don't care if they have. I've already switched to Thunderbird. The migration to the Akonadi backend in kmail2 was a complete disaster. The upgrade migration tool for your existing mailbox didn't work at all. I didn't care about losing it, so I started fresh. I still couldn't get the damn thing to stop spitting up errors when trying to apply my filters, even after recreating my entire folder structure from scratch and updating all my filters. Half the time it spat out errors when checking the mail too. Fuck kmail2.

As a TekSavvy customer, I can guarantee you we either aren't being throttled, or we're getting around it. I used to be on their DSL service provided by Bell's last mile, and I've since switched to their cable service on Rogers' last mile. It's true Bell throttled all of their lines, including the wholesale customers, but TekSavvy specifically supported MLPPP on their precisely to get around this, so it wasn't an issue for anybody who was actually, you know, tech savvy (pun intended).

Rogers doesn't throttle their wholesale customers at all. It's always possible they might start, but with Bell backing off throttling now, Rogers is the only major ISP left who is actually throttling at all in Canada, as far as I'm aware. I think it's highly likely Rogers will soon be going the same route, and extremely unlikely that they'll go the complete opposite direction and start throttling everybody the way Bell was.

If the reason for this change really is because they've got all their customers on UBB plans, then the independents like TekSavvy have an even bigger advantage over them than before. Their caps are huge in comparison (300 GB on every one of their plans, and unlimited options available).