Why should any country grant an exemption from their law in response to the threats of a corporation. Only in the U.S. would such an idiotic proposal be taken seriously. China's censorship may suck, but they shouldn't grant any corporation a special exemption from it in response to threats. It isn't like there isn't any censorship in the U.S. DMCA take down? Ring a bell?

How exactly does slavery fit into your libertarian dream society?

Damn, what is that adage that has to do with carpentry, nails, and hammers?

These DRM schemes probably cost more money than they ever get back in increased revenue. People download games for free for all kinds of reasons. That in no way means that they would actually pay money for the game if they couldn't download it. There is zero correlation between the two things. It is just security programmers earning a paycheck :) (nothing wrong with that) I recall Starforce going uncracked for a long time, and being used in many commercial titles. Until Reloaded released a half-dozen Starforce protected games on Christmas day, along with extensive details on how to bypass Starforce. Interested that these are called "cracks." The more accurate term is "fixes." It is taking broken software and making it work... The ubiquity of internet connections makes it easier to do crazier and crazier schemes based on encryption, server interaction, and obfuscation, but it doesn't change the underlying fact that piracy has little to do with sales revenue.

I doubt it is "attacks." I bet that the losses from wasted employee time and incompetent expenditures on useless hard/software exceed the costs of attacks by a couple orders of magnitude.

and dumped in a land fill? But only after my teeth are knocked out and my fingerprints burned off.

Exactly right. Cable companies rely on content providers for revenue, so they naturally differ to their interests. Not to mention that Comcast owns cable channels, and is now buying NBC, or that they get tons of revenue off of PPV, all stuff that high speed internet, and high quality video on the web, would diminish revenue for.

WTF do you plan to do with a 500 fold increase? That is about the dumbest comment I have ever read.

If cable companies like Comcast weren't spending more on their cable franchises (monopoly licences/payoffs) than they are on capital. Comcast juices its customers relentlessly. I used to live in the downtown of an urban area about 1/4 mile from their DC, and of course paid the exact same, for the same s**t speed as someone in the middle of nowhere. Good stuff. Free markets rule!

I try to say this to "AI" researchers, and they usually get annoyed. It is very Douglas Adams. The point is that you can't emulate a system with infinite states using a finite machine. All you can emulate is a mechanical model of the underlying system, which is not the same thing. Even if you emulate at the neural level, you can't emulate the infinite input array of sensory information pouring over those neurons. It just won't work. But if people want to keep getting checks signed, and find people dumb enough to sign them, why argue?

Of course people should get paid for their work. If the cost of software goes down, the cost of a finished device goes down, and sales and profits for hardware manufacturers go up. Why do you think every major hardware company chips in on linux development? It is smart business. Google, Apple, and thousands of other smaller companies would not exist without open source software. Not only the software itself, but the skills of programmers who have learned the art through the availability of high quality open source code. There are a lot of people making a lot of money using open source software, which is great. The smart ones recognize this and give back to the community that made them. Where's the problem?

In order for CNN to turn into BBC CNN would have to fire everyone (management, staff, reporters, personalities), increase investment in actual reporting by about 1000X, and somehow find a staff of competent people to work for them, which would probably be hard to do in the U.S.

CNN is basically a very well funded high school "journalism" workshop. There product is garbage. It is embarrassing beyond belief.

The best cable news shows in the U.S. are The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The best real news program is Democracy Now. (Judging these things in terms of critical analysis, original reporting, coverage of uncovered stories, the people interviewed, seriousness of topics covered, etc.)

The only bias CNN has is towards incompetence and stupidity. Just about every news outlet in the U.S. has the same bias.

Bias is an irrelevant issue. All political parties and politicians are continually lying and attempting to mislead the public. Any competent news organization will always be "biased" against some political party or another if it is focused on the truth.

A good news organization maintains its bias for truth regardless of the subject of coverage. Even when a news organization fails in this respect, and exercises its bias for truth with only some subjects, it can still be useful. Once a news organisation abandons the bias for truth entirely, or is simply made up of people too incompetent to discern truth from fiction, then it is totally useless.

That is the bulk of the U.S. media.

Relevant information? hahahahaha!

Acorn corruption? WTF cares? With two consecutive administrations overseeing hundreds of billions of dollars in bank fraud, what is the relevance of Acorn's corruption?

Fox News is nothing but totally useless BS, mixed with the occasional bit of well crafted propaganda.

Fox News gets EVERYTHING wrong every day, because it has no purpose other than to entertain, make money, and occasionally do political favors for people who will help its owners make even more money.

The NY Times, and WA Post are government propaganda papers. It doesn't matter who pays the bills. It has nothing to do with R/D bias either. They serve that function for any administration.

The reason that newspapers are having problems making money is that all they do is reprint government and corporate press releases. Governments and corporations are quite willing to distribute their propaganda for free. Why should anyone pay for the privilege of reading that sh*te?