Re:Get behind this! (Score 2, Informative)

This seems like one of the places that would truly be helped by the resurrection of the ?software as free speech? argument.

This bill is the equivalent of setting up regulations on software and computer equipment. The only times that products have been regulated is when public safety at-large is in question (i.e., car industry, children?s toys, food suppliers, air travel, etc...). Is there a legitimate reason to think that the public needs protection, M$ jokes aside, from software and hardware developers. There are already regulations in place to make sure computers and their software do their correct job in places where other agencies are already in place. Any company that has to follow FDA regulations has to follow many regulations the make sure that computers used to produce FDA regulated products work correctly. Many other agencies have, or will have, these types of regulations as well. What they end up being is very strict ISO-9000 like documentation systems used to show that a computer works, and here?s the proof.

Public safety is not what is being protected by this bill. The only benefactors of this bill are going to be media corporations and the companies that are going to manufacture the new, much more expensive, computer hardware.

The software side will be no better. In order to compete in a world where development times are artificially longer and testing periods overly regulated a company is going to have to sell this software at sky-high prices. But wait, software giants aren't going to feel this as much as start-ups or other smaller competitors. These larger companies will be able to under cut the competitor?s prices without having to improve anything of real consequence in their software. In fact this will only be validation by congress that M$ tactics are reasonable tactic, and the whole country will have to take a few progress steps backwards.

To think, at the beginning of this century, congress is trying to undo the affirmation of rights (and further even, they are taking them away) given to us at the beginning of last century by the anti-trust laws. In light of this and what has been happening the country and the world, I hope that we will still have our rights. The bill of rights is unchangeable and are copied in the constitution as the first 10 amendments. To change any of the first 10 amendments you would have to change the bill of rights. This is why there are two documents and why one can?t be changed. The rights are in the constitution to make them law but are in the bill of rights to make sure that no one can blur them.