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The only long term solution is depoliticization. The very reason that people need to actually care about these things is that the government can come after them in the first place. Solution? Strip the government of such power. Unfortunately, the government can exert a wide range of controls today. It can harass you from anything to the tax code to basic traffic violations to willfully misconstruing something you do. The fewer tenticles that the government has into society, the fewer avenues it has to suppress dissent.

It's worth nothing that the political blogosphere has already started to consolidate along "MSM lines." I predict that within five or six years that "blogging" will be just another way of maintaining an information-rich website. Now, no snickering about how valuable that information might be from the anti-bloggers. The point is that "blog software" represented a commoditization of CMS software in a way that your average user could handle and is thus a step forward. It is now much easier thanks to WordPress and Movable Type for people to maintain small websites, and WordPress can handle very big ones as well.

The problem with the blogosphere is that it is "democratic" by nature, but the future evolutions like vlogging and podcasting will not be democratic. They can't be. If you aren't making serious advertising money, the bandwidth fees from your amateur video hour would actually run into bankrupting-levels if a blogger got hit with several "instalanches" in one month on top of say, 10,000 regular viewers a month.

The interesting part is the software. WordPress has proven to be particularly powerful in terms of forming the framework for websites, as ZDNet has proved with their TechBlogs.

Aside from the legal meddling of state social workers, there are fewer problems that parents face today than they did before. Parents actually have the ability to extend their standards to places where they would normally have no control, like the television when they're working late. The V-Chip allows a parent who actually has to work late, rather than just to buy that new beamer, to control the content that is accessible. All media today is rated down to minute details to allow the rushed parent a fine-grained survey of all possibly objectionable content within ten seconds, literally. Anyone out of high school with a literacy rate above the fifth grade should be able to grok a ESRB rating in ten seconds or less.

We actually have lawsuits brought by parents who seriously think that others should do more of their job for them!. This is a generation of parents that is so self-indulgent that it wants to legislate its personal preferences onto content providers because it cannot even be bothered to buy the content it enjoys!

The irony of it is that most the people really pushing these laws are left of center! The very people who whine, piss and moan about "puritans" on the right! Last I checked, a puritan is someone who forces their views on someone else at gun point when they're not harming anyone or anyone's property. It's nice to see that the political social conservatives have competition, albeit in a dark sort of way.

I plan to be a full-time father, including sacrificing my material possessions for my kids. Someone once commented to the effect that it's not wise to try to gain the whole world at the expense of your spiritual life. I believe he also commented before some self-righteous liberals and conservatives of his day killed him for defying them, that there would come a day when parents would see their children so throughly abandon the right path that they would curse themselves for being fertile.

A lot of the network neutrality supporters don't even understand the issue at all. Take this for example, where the NYT and a lot of bloggers think of this as an attack on the web, as though telecoms really want to block off websites instead of regulate bandwidth to things that are going to consume terabytes or more of bandwidth like hi-def video services.

The approach that would work best for assuaging free speech concerns is to beef up common carrier laws. Extend common carrier status laws to the point that any ISP or telecom that blocks legal speech in the United States loses all common carrier protection through every service it provides. Yes, make it a legal corporate death penalty statute so that the MPAA and RIAA can literally sue Verizon into irrecoverable bankrupcy through the DMCA if they start playing speech king-maker.

And here's the funny thing about the "democracy" angle. When domain names were "democratically" controlled, they were much more expensive than they are today. Democracy sucks ass at allocating resources compared to a competitive free market. I'll take my chances with the market over protections for either side, thank you.

The next time you get surprised by Congress' tone deafness, remember that they can get all worked up about a colleage getting raided, but not about a 80 year old couple getting raided under obviously horrendously false pretenses. They don't care about serving the public. Their approval ratings, both parties, are starting to approach single digits. If there was ever a time that it should be obvious that we live under the rule of an unaccountable, bifactional ruling party it would be now.

The telecoms have resorted to blatantly socialist rhetoric lately. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are "da Man" who is trying to keep the people down by "making them pay the whole bill."

WTF?! Google, Microsoft and Yahoo probably pay more per month than all broadband users in the US combined for their bandwidth. The telecoms are just trying to avoid an ugly truth: $15 DSL that is 50% the speed of a several hundred dollar T1 is not a viable business. What we need is metered bandwidth.

Metered bandwidth would be good for several reasons. First of all, it would in the long run reduce the cost of providing extremely fast service to most people because they don't use that much bandwidth. Most broadband users could easily get by on 5GB/month for $10-$15, then $0.25-$0.50/GB downstream after that. Second, it would provide a financial disincentive for people to use file sharing software for illegal reasons, thus providing the "social solution" to the "social problem" of how to handle mass copyright infringement without DRM or legislation. Third, it would distribute the costs of funding network development fairly.

If 1% of a broadband service's users are using up to 40% of the bandwidth (which Comcast has said is their problem), that's a lot of people paying to subsidize the costs of 1% enjoying the "full benefits" of the network. Why shouldn't that 1% pay for downloading 50GB,100GB (or in one guy's case, 600GB) of data?

I don't want to subsidize the infrastructure with my taxes anymore, and I don't want to pay the same rate for my ~5GB-10GB/month of bandwidth use as someone who uses 100GB+. I also don't want the government telling private businesses that they cannot reserve part of their networks for their own services. As long as they are providing you with the QoS that they advertise and contractually agree to provide you, why do you care if Verizon keeps 80% of the network for their IP TV service? If we get up to 10mbps as the standard rate, and they keep 40mbps for themselves, is that 10mbps any slower? Of course not. Your piece of the pie just keeps becoming more and more in real numbers as their network expands.

In theory, Tony Blair writes, traditional court processes and attitudes to civil liberties could work. But the modern world is different from the world for which these court processes were designed. This view that due process is obsolete explains the Prime Ministers conduct; it explains the connection between extradition without safeguards, detention without trial, Asbos without criminal offences, subjective and discretionary judgments, police powers to arrest, and increasing ministerial powers. They are all characteristic of Blair legislation; they all avoid due process of law.

-From this article

I've never understood why American conservatives support him as a leader, rather than simply appreciate his support in the war on terror. He has many anti-conservative positions and is a member of the Fabian Society. He's Britain's problem, but it's high time that American conservatives realize what American libertarians have known about Blair for a while: he's not our ally at all beyond the War on Terror. In fact, Blair was not only a close supporter of Clinton, but is far worse as a leader than Clinton in most respects. I'd take the latter over the former any day (as long as it's Bill, not Hillary).

Ya gotta hand it to Blair, though. He's honest about holding a totally "fuck you" attitude toward civil liberties whereas Bush still genuflects before that "God damn piece of paper" (as Bush supposedly called the US Constitution) that those "dead white men" with their libruhl idears wrote up after kicking out Blair's predecessors 2 centuries ago.

People like Rep. Sensenbrenner in Congress who advocate totalitarian controls over your internet use or a private business that can't legally tell you what to do except through a contract you signed with them? Quite frankly with the way that Congress is these days, I wouldn't trust them to regulate our local parking meters, let alone our section of the Internet.

As far as anti-competitive behavior, like the Madison River issue, goes, there are existing federal legal mechanisms for handling them. It's not anti-competitive for Verizon to only sell 25% of their network. It's their loss if their customers want to pay for better access, but can't get it because Verizon is reserving too much of its network for its own service.

The problem is, as always, government regulation at every level. There are enormous government-imposed costs on starting your own broadband or television service. The best way to create a competitive market is genuine deregulation, like ending all taxes and regulations on the construction and development of local private networks. All of them. Toss that spawn of satan out with the bathwater and be done with it.

Now let me ask y'all this. If Sensenbrenner gets his way, raise your hand all of you who want the government to be your ISP via municipal services. That's a straight ticket to getting no sympathy from the court when your privacy rights are screwed by the government.

And I sure as hell support this domain. Why? It's the only way to let us conservative Christians block porn that won't get struck down by the courts.

I'm tired of the pornographers whining about the "ghettoization of their free speech." Why don't we just let them sell their goods in the kids' section of a book store? Pornography is not sexual speech. Should it be outlawed? No, each adult has to work on their own morality and forcing them won't make the right moral changes to fix society.

Let's call a spade a spade. Pornography is only art if you consider a picture of the virgin Mary painted in elephant dung to be art. I consider Playboy's photos to be low class art. A typical porn site is not even remotely art or expressive except in the lowest, most attavistic sense. There are two good reasons for not banning porn: we don't want judges and legislators legally defining what is and isn't art and it's a private moral issue that cannot be stopped by the stroke of a pen.

You got it all wrong. We're back to protecting the kids. Get your talking points right, junior. It'll be back to the terrorists in a year when that's back in style--or when Bush needs to stop making history as the first President to get negative approval rating numbers.

Then they'll be regulated as a monopoly because no one will be able to argue with a straight face that there is a free market for telecoms. With monopoly status, they won't be able to argue that they are being forced to cut their prices down to unsustainable levels. Cheap broadband is nice and all, but if it's too cheap they aren't making enough money to support their infrastructure which is why access sucks in most of the country. As I've been saying, I'd rather they charge me $100/month for real 3mpbs up AND down than charge me $15-$40 a month for 3mpbs with an invisible cap on its monthly use. It makes more sense for them too. If they provide the bandwidth each month, Apple and others can provide the content which makes their service worth paying a premium for.

Back in 1996 when my family got Internet access, dialup access was almost the norm among the middle class families where we lived in coastal North Carolina. We weren't uber-elite, we weren't ahead of the curve by any wide margin. We were like most of our middle class neighbors. My parents at least tried to monitor what I did, and they instilled a healthy fear of revealing my information online because I wasn't an adult and couldn't defend myself against sex offenders.

Fast forward to today. It's quite common for young teens and late preteens to play "taunt the pedophile" with naughty, often slutty, pictures. Parents don't even try to monitor their kids' access by randomly checking on them, reading through their history (rarely worked, but at least our parents tried back then a lot harder than most today). Many, many parents today just don't want to be bothered. It's not their fault that junior is living a completely parent-free life the moment he goes online. Oh no. Parents can't be expected to be the boss in their own homes!

I've said it once, I'll say it again. Too many parents today regard the Internet as Happy Playland(tm) and don't even bother trying to protect their kids today. Then again, maybe this is necessary because too many of my peers in college had a dreadfully naive view of basic security. It's about being a responsible parent. When you had that child, you took on the responsibility of being a parent. That means you sacrifice personal time and career where necessary to raise them. I'm sick of people who insist that they can have it all, while they do half-assed jobs as parents in the name of finding "personal fullfillment" through everything but being a good parent raising a new generation worthy of those who made this country great.

Truly implementing good error handling in web pages is something that would take a lot more effort for most people than with Swing or Windows Forms. You need to not just alert the user, but highlight their mistake which means good page layout and cooperation with your JavaScript. Highlight the field that is invalid and provide a well-designed error message explaining what went wrong.

One of the biggest problems out there is that web development is not taught in CS. Like most CS geeks, I picked up what I've learned through my own studies, few of which included how to integrate CS concepts into web page development. You either tend to see material and classes that teach web development from a page designer's perspective, or from the perspective of an enterprise architect. None of the formal classes I took in any of the different majors that touch on web development taught how to do something as simple as this for separating the JavaScript from the HTML.

"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."

--Samuel Adams

Yahoo is better than IBM in 1939 in shades and degree, not principle. There is nothing so craven as a man or men who value profit and wealth greater than liberty.

Who wants to take a bet that Reps. Lantos and Smith will have a field day with this? Btw, they are the real deal as they were in the minority that voted against renewing MFN for China the last time it came up, in 1999.

I think it makes more sense for Google to buy them because of the close ties that Firefox and Opera have with them. Not only that, but it gives Google a credible product for mobile platforms and a way of pushing their search engine on mobile devices the way that Microsoft uses Internet Explorer to push MSN on desktop PC and laptop users that use Windows.

Besides, it would only add a lot of confusion for Microsoft's developers. Now, if Microsoft were to make it so that Opera's rendering engine became a replacement for Internet Explorer's that might be something else, but at this point, they've probably got too much money invested in IE for them to drop any part of it without a court order.

If Google wants to survive in the long run, they will need to stop playing favorites based on political ideology. They give, IMO, too much lee way for their adsense and google news people to restrict access. One blogger I know of was rejected as a "racist" because she questioned whether Nelson Mandela really should be called a hero. The irony of it is that my blog is far more politically incorrect than hers and AdSense for some reason accepted me. I wrote a letter to Google about the behavior of their AdSense policies and News development team, but they did the customary Google response which was "we don't care."

The thing that Google needs to wake up and realize is that they have been caught doing genuinely evil things like letting Hamas use AdSense to promote their recruitment and training centers, and Yahoo has survived enough big companies attacking them to make them a longterm threat. The real war is between Google and Yahoo, not Google and MSN, and Yahoo understands clearly how being apolitical is necessary to really become a hub for finding and accessing data online.

Don't be surprised if in a few more years of broadband development, that Yahoo is able to position itself as an alternative to many cable TV providers. Expect them to start providing premium content alone or in conjunction with Apple. If that happens, Google is actually going to be screwed because the market for that sort of media is huge and the amount of money that Yahoo will have will dwarf Google. Sooner rather than later, Google's stock price will crash down to maybe $20-$30 a share unless they really do some death-defyingly radical things every so often over the next several years that the market likes. In fact, I'd wager that if Yahoo can get deep into providing on-demand TV services, that in five years they'll be able to buy Google in cash unless Google really does become the "Microsoft of search services."

When done right, sports and martial arts hone the violent instincts in young men and women to be disciplined and under control. Aggressiveness is actually a good thing when it is controlled by other impulses. Afterall, how many women out there would feel safe with a man whose first reaction is to just "talk it over" when he sees another man really accosting his girlfriend or wife?

I completely support the right of Rockstar to produce games like GTA, but I believe that ones like GTA are not cathartic. I despise the PTC even more than most here because of their rhetoric which clashes with a Biblical notion of parental responsibility, but I have to grudgingly agree that GTA is not good for many younger players. It's not like Quake or Unreal Tournament where you're shooting really fake-looking people to death, but you're graphically beating to death a guy who's similar to the hobo you might encounter walking down town. Most violent games are safe and cathartic because either the violence is for a "noble cause" or it's just mindless mayhem. GTA is very violent, very straight to the point about targetting certain groups, kinda realistically actually, that do exist in society and that many people might encounter on a daily basis.

As always, the real people to blame are the distributors like Wal-Mart. Rockstar deserves its FTC investigation for fraud, but let's not forget the fact that it was Wal-Mart, Target, etc. that put those copies of GTA in junior's hand in the first place. Rockstar, as bad as they may be, can't enforce that because they're just the company the makes the game.

I've said for a while that what we need is a return in this country to a real gun culture. We need the average kid to grow up in a Swiss-style family where the parents train them how to use it, and instill respect for weapons from an early age. We used to have that here and the violent crime rate was lower because since they were small kids, the general public knew what weapons were and understood the need for discipline. Most violent tendencies can be controlled through discipline. What we have to do is instill good training, respect and rational thought into our kids from an early age. If we did that, then crimes would be rarer, our jocks would be less likely to be anti-social assholes and society in general would be healthier.

Looks like someone had a little bit of competition on the "natural male enhancer" front...

Given the fact that the TSA just got caught trying to continue TIA, I think that this is the last thing we need. It starts out very innocently. The industry adds something like this and pretty soon we have followup laws that begin to gradually force software to make full use of any sort of identity layer. Anonymity becomes nearly impossible, and for many countries that means that the Internet loses its alleged immunity to censorship.

One of the things that disturbs me about this sort of thing is that extreme rendition can work both ways. The Syrian government might want their back scratched for a change and Uncle Sam then turns over a few names held on US soil using USA PATRIOT Act powers to secret get the information. If our government is willing to ship people to get tortured, what makes anyone think that it's not immoral enough to scratch another, more abusive government's back a little by helping them clamp down on dissent?

Biometric information tied to your credit card would go a very long way toward solving many of these crimes. What we need are open standards for communicating and storing biometrics information. I should be able to look into a webcam with a retina scanner and it should be able to tell Amazon.com that I'm the person who owns the credit card being used. The problem with this system is that it'll end up making something like TIA more realistic because it'll be accompanied by laws that force software developers to make good use of it.

Most regulations, such as this one, exist not to protect anyone, but just to make lawyers rich. It doesn't matter which side the lawyer takes, plaintiff or defendant, they both stand to make good money off of ambiguous and overly broad laws. Stuff like this just proves the old saying, "in a town with only 1 lawyer, the lawyer will starve but in a town with 2 lawyers they will never go hungry."

On both sides of the border we make no pretense of electing people who actually know what they're doing. Almost every politician is a hack these days whether in America or Canada, and that probably applies to most countries in general. Look at that POS proposed by Leahy and Specter in the US recently. These lawyers and buisnessmen don't know a damn thing about the ramifications of their legislation most of the time, and when they do, malice is frequently their motivation for the diabolical implications of its scope. Is it any wonder why liberty-minded people tend to just eschew regulation altogether these days since most of the time, we have to choose between scoundrels and blithering idiots for our lawmakers?

Leopard? Maybe leper would be a more description of how the x86 buyers will be treated by the PPC users. Btw, I have the coverage mirrored here

The thing that seems so cool about this sort of thing is that it opens up the search service to the rest of us to help us make our content easier to find when it is updated. One thing that I have come to really respect about Google is that they don't rely on the government to beat Microsoft back down the way Netscape did. Google has managed to make a product that 47% of the US Internet users want to use, even though MSN is the default in IE. Remember Netscape 4? There's a reason that bloated POS failed, anyone who remembers the releases of it for the first six months that it went public knows EXACTLY why that was.

The only thing that Google can do at this point is continue to let some of their more biased employees run wild. They've been causing Google's Adsense and Adwords to take extremely partisan stances between the Dems and Reps, and that's gotten the ire of many on the right. My concern is primarily that Google will end up pissing off so many of these users that they will end up switching to MSN and helping Microsoft take Google down. Google is certainly not perfect, and I'm still wondering why Google News had the National Vanguard, a neo-nazi publication in their news feed list, but says that some of the bigger blogs like Michelle Malkin are not up to editorial snuff. Go figure, like the neo-nazis aren't biased or anything. Then there's their tendency to run ads for Hamas on their arabic pages.

Oh well, in many respects they still have a lot farther to go before they have tried as much evil as Microsoft and they are still more innovative, so time will tell.

Sigh, ok, I'll bite.

It's pretty obvious that you have a problem with gay people - I mean you call them "sexual deviants" on your web site http://www.blindmindseye.com/2005/04/23/more-bulls hit-courtsey-of-the-aclu/ which is something of a pejorative term to say the least.

This issue is not about being "polite and well behaved" which from your post appears to mean "not remind me that they exist". This issue is about people's freedom to work without a threat, explicit or implied that they could be fired on account of their sexuality.

People's sexuality is not some disposable, distinct part of their lives. If your sexual orientation is that of heterosexuality do you really regard your wife to be some distant part of your life? Do you never talk about your wife, what you did at the weekend or what you're doing after work with your co-workers?

In the workplace, people simply do not function with one another without at some point asking about their non-work lives. If a gay/lesbian person mentions their boyfriend or girlfriend and therefore implicitly lets their co-worker know about their sexual orientation, they should not be in fear of their job.

I find it bizzare that you seize upon the notion of someone being "rude" by using the example of a cliched gay slogan (that I'm yet to hear a single gay person use naturally). So to reiterate, this issue is not about "throw[ing] it in peoples' faces" (whatever that means) it's about people trying to get on with their lives, have normal conversations and not get fired as a result.

Since when has the public had a right to know about product specs that haven't been released and are being held under a NDA? This is not some Pentagon Paper revelation or finding out that an employee under a NDA saw dumping of toxic chemicals or a warning sticker on the product saying that exposure lead to cancer. This was an attempt to get people to violate their NDA so that these apple rumor sites could get the inside scoop before the mainstream media.

A lot of these chicken littles are focusing on this to exclusion of the FEC's remarks about federal regulation of online speech. How quickly the tune would change for bloggers like Michelle Malkin, if someone did this to them. Imagine if someone paid your spouse to take your journal information and then published your secrets online. You'd be livid too.

The problem with these rumor mills is that they make money by reporting on this that they have no intention of scrutinizing for accuracy whilst coyly suggesting that, "this is the unofficial truth from inside the company." It's one thing to make conjectures, to spout off and things like that. It is quite another to make a business out of what amounts to low-key libel. Apple's sales of the iPod shuffle according to one source I read may have been damaged because sites like ThinkSecret reported a price that Apple never claimed was possible and had no intention of selling at, thus creating an expectation that they themselves had never tried to create. That's not free speech, that's bordering on libel.

Everytime that the Congress drafts a law that will give an agency any meaningful rule-making power it is delegating its authority to that agency. No one elected the FEC, they were appointed by a group of politicians from two large parties whose ideological differences, in practice, are weak at best. This alone is the big problem. Can anyone, really say that Bush has change the course of the federal government enough to be a meaningful departure from Clinton? America is effectively living under a 1 party system where the two wings of the same ideology work together through compromise. The Republicans are effectively our Menshaviks and the Democrats our Bolsheviks because the course of the Republican Party has been to advance more slowly the same agenda that the Democrats will take on rapidly. The Republicans are only better at it because they know how to "temporarily" roll back government while setting the stage for permanent involvement from Iraq to gun control to abortion to medicare.

I think that you don't give people enough credit here. It takes a lot of effort to start a blog that gets any meaningful number of visitors. The crowd of bigger blogs are in essence the gatekeepers of blogging in the sense that it can be quite hard to get a lot of regular readers (thousands to tens of thousands) without being on their good side. Well, some GOP or Democratic Party hack isn't going to waltz in before an election and get there overnight because the last thing the bigger blogs want is to be caught with their pants down like Rather, especially after some of them made such a big stink about how they took Rather down. What an irony that would be, eh?

Here is something that might work. Get rid of all of the individual campaign finance regulations, and then require that politicians do two things. First, require by law that all campaign funds be accounted for. Second, require the politicians to donate all of the money that is left over to charity. The problem is that a politician can become fabulously wealthy because the law lets them keep their extra campaign dollars. In Senate races, that can literally be tens of millions of dollars. Make it illegal for incorporated entities to give money, but allow them to run ads otherwise eventually your ability to make a Flash ad lampooning Bush, Kerry, whoever will become a "loophole." That was my prediction, anyway.

When this news hit, I took the position that Apple was actually correct. Freedom of the press is about a general right to publish your speech. To that end it is a corollary to the freedom of speech to keep the government from passing laws that say you can say whatever you want, provided that it never leaves your house and gets disseminated. It is far more important than letting some reporter find the latest story, it and the second amendment are the two things that guard your right to speak and be heard.

The issue here is that Apple finally had enough of Think Secret and sued them. This was a long time coming and TS knew they were violating the law. I don't think they should get press shield protection because of the fact that the people of California voted for their press shield constitutional clause in a popular referendum. If you want to change it, convince the people of California, but I as a Virginian am not concerned by this. I'd fight such a thing in my own state, but I certainly would not begrudge the right of the people of California to decide who should get extra protection.

Correct me if I am wrong, but there are already whistleblower laws that protect people brining evidence of wrongdoing forward, and those are at least federal if not in most state laws. If that be the case, then private citizens don't need shield law protection because there are already laws out there that protect them. The NY Times is getting hit hard for not revealing the identities of the people who revealed Valerie Plame. They violated national security for nothing and are now paying the price. As they should. Press shield laws are only good when they protect honest sources who are scared of retribution for brining a crime public.

When this news hit, I took the position that Apple was actually correct. Freedom of the press is about a general right to publish your speech. To that end it is a corollary to the freedom of speech to keep the government from passing laws that say you can say whatever you want, provided that it never leaves your house and gets disseminated. It is far more important than letting some reporter find the latest story, it and the second amendment are the two things that guard your right to speak and be heard.

The issue here is that Apple finally had enough of Think Secret and sued them. This was a long time coming and TS knew they were violating the law. I don't think they should get press shield protection because of the fact that the people of California voted for their press shield constitutional clause in a popular referendum. If you want to change it, convince the people of California, but I as a Virginian am not concerned by this. I'd fight such a thing in my own state, but I certainly would not begrudge the right of the people of California to decide who should get extra protection.

Correct me if I am wrong, but there are already whistleblower laws that protect people brining evidence of wrongdoing forward, and those are at least federal if not in most state laws. If that be the case, then private citizens don't need shield law protection because there are already laws out there that protect them. The NY Times is getting hit hard for not revealing the identities of the people who revealed Valerie Plame. They violated national security for nothing and are now paying the price. As they should. Press shield laws are only good when they protect honest sources who are scared of retribution for brining a crime public.

Gotta wonder if Jack Thompson has his greedy claws in this. He's almost singlehandedly made shifting the blame for violence among youth to video games an art form. What kind of society do we live in when a judge won't tell a lawyer to basically shut the hell up for arguing that a video game can cause insanity? I am desensitized to violence, very much so even, yet I recognize that murder is clearly wrong and still take a moral position against it and for its consistent and tough punishment. Desensitizing kids to violence does not lead the vast majority of them to violence, but when was the last time in America the minority were held responsible for doing wrong?

I agree though that violent games should be by default kept out of kids' hands, since parents won't do their jobs anymore. I'm fucking sick of these whiny parents who say they have no time to watch their kids. I have known families making less than $25,000 a year that work hard and that actually have a parent home to watch their kids and take care of them. It's called sacrificing, it means that you can't have it all, it means you have to actually prioritize and if your kids don't come before yourself then don't have them and get a cat. Yes, get a cat because cats are the only pets that tend to remain emotionally functional and happy when left alone 90% of the time. Such people couldn't even handle a dog well.

Here's an even better legal idea, though. Let's make the parents liable for what their kids do with those games. Why aren't Harris and Klebold's parents in prison for not taking the time to notice that their kids were storing pipe bombs in their rooms and garage? Oh look at our little boy, ain't his stockpile of explosives just swell? Then these parents turn around and want sympathy points because they have to "balance a career and a family." You know what, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. You aren't balancing a family, you are keeping pets and calling them children and you wonder why they turn into nutcases when they get picked on at school. They have no foundation at home to rely on in the face of adversity.

It doesn't even end there. One of my friends used to be a manager at KB Toys. I can't count the number of times both of us wanted to grab a lot of those kids by the seat of the pants and literally throw them face first out of the store for being roudy little brats that caused the workers no end of grief. All because the parents, who are often there, can't be bothered to tell their kid to stop being a brat or they'll regret the consequences. Spare the spoiling and apply the rod copiously and maybe your kids will behave. You don't negotiate with the little brats, you tell them what is what and make them realize that they are accountable for what they do.

What pisses me off about all of this is that so much crime committed by middle and upper class kids is because of this. One of my friends told me just the other night that a kid who used to play with her little sister just got arrested for armed robbery. His mother always bribed him into behaving well, never disciplined him, even when he was a real monster. Never at any time did his parents lay down the law with him and make sure that he knew that he was well within the same rules as everyone else in society and that there are painful consequences for breaking the rules. The result? In his mind, it's ok for him to go to a store with a friend and pull a gun on two clerks and rob the store.

If parents would do their jobs then a lot of these things would never happen. The reason that I could put up with terribly abusive academic environments and why I never identified with violent games is that my parents were actually there for me. As importantly, I rarely got away with anything. From the time I was 2 years old I knew the rules applied to me and my parents wouldn't hesitate to remind me that I am not special, that if I do bad, I have to be punished.

Then doesn't it belong to the employer?

Seriously, why do we need something like a blogger's "bill of rights?" If you do something on your employer's time that isn't related to your job, then you should consider yourself lucky that either your employer doesn't know or care. You could lose your job for blogging at work, unless maybe your blog is promoting the company's products and services and some manager thinks that is just good free advertisement.

The woman who proposed that blogger's bill of rights got fired because she posted on her blog pictures that could be offensive to some of her employer's customers and let people know where she worked. That's just about one of the things that you DONT DO online. You just don't post comments that can be connected with your employer unless your employer has given you the green light to do so.

I have always been taken aback by the argument from my fellow libertarians in favor of users fees. If there is any part of society we don't want operating on greed, it is an institution that has the ability to back up its rules with lethal force and the depravation of liberty and property. Take a good look at what the USPTO is doing today and look at what it used to do when it was paid for with tax revenues only.

I think there is a good libertarian case for why user fees are a terrible idea. I personally favor the use of consumption taxes as an alternative since they are the best of both worlds. They tie the government's revenues to the health of the society and yet they keep the government from gaining a financial incentive to disregard quality of service and ethics.

Have a national biometrics database connected to your SSN, name, etc.

Require every voter to submit to a comprehensive biometrics exam and tag their vote with the data. Second, anyone who accesses the system to have any interaction with the results whatsoever has to submit to a biometrics scan that gets their DNA, finger prints and retina scan as well as name and all that. Do not allow mass deletion of any data without at least five third parties and the press observing the action and recording it for public record. Finally, only allow mass deletion of data from the vote database after the election is over.

The only way that voter fraud is going to be majorly cracked down on without draconian measures is to eliminate entirely voter anonymity and to arrest anyone caught try to allow it to happen. Too often voter fraud gets pushed under the rug because politicians are afraid of shrill, reactionary activists screaming "disenfranchisement." Who who would have thought that the Democrats represent the dead or the Republicans the democratic voters who are Republicans in their heart (a la this current debacle)?

One could easily argue that mass voter fraud should be legally regarded as coup d'etat, not a low-level, insignificant crime. Seriously, voter fraud should be one of our most severe crimes once it reaches a certain level. It is attempting to overthrow an elected government by means other than armed thugs entering the parliament/congress and declaring an end to democratic government.

For a long time I have been critical of Bush and his policies. For those that are looking for a systematic reason why a conservative or libertarian shouldn't support Bush, I have one here. I think that I have covered basically all of the bases for those on the right, including most of the major reasons that hold outs use to support him.

What good are laws that are simultaneously unenforceable and make the people more contemptuous of the thought of paying for your products? If the labels had said publically, "we believe the No Electronic Theft Act more than adequately addresses online piracy, and the DMCA is bad for consumers" then they would have been the good guys. The people who pay attention to what they were doing at the time would have bought more CDs, and the RIAA would have been right, the NET Act was more than enough.

As I have pointed out on my blog before the solution to illegal file sharing is not in lawsuits, but in repealing the DMCA and replacing it with a "right of private action for prosecutions in IP." That's right, let copyright holders hire a lawyer and prosecute you. Think about it for a second. It makes them pay to prosecute you, which means your tax dollars don't get drained by endless hours of DOJ/US Attorney expansion and action. It also gives the copyright holders a real means to go after people that'd work in the USA. Lawsuits aren't too scary, private initivative on prosecution is to college students and other young file sharers. When 5,000 sit in prison, not getting hit up for a few grand, people will stand up and take notice.

Yes, it would cost the RIAA considerably more in the short term, but it'd put a deep chill on illegal file sharing use. I have lost my patience with people who steal from the labels and musicians and hide behind things like "oh I am just sampling." If I sample something off a newsgroup or something, I either delete it right away and buy the album or I delete it because it's pure shit not worth keeping on my hard drive or buying. A few of my friends work the same way, but most of my peers do not.

The only reason I still have some support for the "other side" is that if the RIAA and MPAA were left unchecked they'd make my computer into a VCR that can run Microsoft Office and licensed video games. But seriously, the copyright holders are not entirely wrong. There is a moral problem with those who say that no one gets hurt. We have already been forced to deal with the fact, thanks to people like Courtney Love, that the artists don't get a fair deal in most contracts. Are you going to compound that by making it even harder to get out of debt? I seriously doubt most of the whiners even buy merch or go see them live.

"Normal people" aren't nuanced, at least in America. They will end up just seeing a bunch of free loaders and will be too lazy to challenge the MPAA/RIAA's latest IT industry killing plan du jour. If you make moral arguments for your freedom to be left alone from the copyright holders, you have to be virtuous so that the people can see that you are a libertarian, not a libertine.

"Was"? Not sure if you're serious, but there are certainly some efforts to clone Apple's current work too...

The first step for the corporate elite in the 1870s-1930s was to try to remove the idea from the public consciousness that natural law is a legitimate basis for our legal system. Then it began to push for a steady expansion of intellectual property law into previously unacceptable domains. Originally patents were very hard to get, you had to produce something truly unique, now you can patent business models!

This is all part of a general push away from an ownership society to a corporatist renter society. Capitalism is not to blame here, fascism is, because it is capitalist doctrine that is directly at odds with copyright holders. Capitalism gave us the concept of a government protecting everyone's property rights and not regulating most aspects of the economy to ensure that no class of business had an advantage over another. It was fascism that gave birth to the idea of controlling the economy to "protect industry."

The software rental model is intended to be the final blow to the idea that customers should have a property right in software. Pseudo-capitalists can come out all they like about how "choice" is what really matters, but choice is utterly irrelevent in every respect when basic property rights are not an option anymore. When no one can own their software in any way, to any degree, the difference between competitors becomes inherently pathetic and trite, just like the major parties in 2000 and 2004.

So what happens? Software companies use patents to protect their business model where copyright law isn't enough, by going after upstarts offering an ownership-friendly model.

But what many geeks and nerds won't get out of this, is that this battle has been raging for not a few decades but for about 144, the first battle being the American Civil War. The public schools frequently gloss over three very curious facts about the Civil War, because that would make Abraham Lincoln look like the most fascist stooge in American history:

• The south seceded over the tariff, even Karl Marx said that the tariff, not slavery, was the issue.
• The founders of the CSA, when you read a bit of their writings, were rabidly anti-corporation by the standards of their day, and despised the system of "internal development" which was basically corporate welfare that was fueled by the tariff.
• Over 600,000 Americans, by today's population about 4,200,000-5,000,000 died in a war to protect the rights of corporations. Kinda hard to argue it was to protect slaves, and not corporations, seeing as how it came hot on the heels of the dred scott ruling.

Now does it become clearer, when you consider the almost 1 and a half century history of this fight, why the federal government really is a government of the people, by the people and for the corporations? Look at the push for things like UCITA, the goal is to essentially in the long run whittle down and destroy the state contract laws and nationalize them, so that the states, the governments much closer to you and your wishes, and thus further from corporate control than the feds, cannot protect you from the monied interests.

There never has been a conspiracy, because the elite has always had the audacity to operate in the open. For the last several decades, they have unabashedly eschewed any pretense of being Adam Smith-style capitalists and their economic model draws upon a more sophisticated, and moderately liberal version of Mussolini's fascist doctrines. What do you think, "protecting and advancing American economic interests" really means? Adam Smith would call it that vile system of Mercantilism which was an influence on socialism and at odds with laisez faire capitalism.

People have asked me why I vote libertarian, it is because they are capitalists. The party was born and bred from an ideological pedigree concerned with the minimization of the elite's power and influence and the preservation of an ownership society

As I have said before on my site, there is ample reason to believe that the police are the "standing army" that our founders warned us of. Let's look at what our founders worried about, what the police and military are today

Standing army of our founders' day and age:

• Enforced many of the laws. Remember the infamous Star Chamber courts for history classes? Military courts for civilians, often American colonists.
• Frequently violated the rights of the people, often in the name of law and order.
• Could basically do what they wanted when it was convenient for the state; not held to the strict standard that you have to disobey an illegal order.

The police of our day and age:

• Frequently take on what were once military jobs such as detaining unlawful combatants, fighting those who come to our soil to blow up your women and children (hey that was warfare, not terrorism just 30 years ago....)
• Frequently disregard the civil liberties of the public, including going so far as to try to instill the attitude that anyone more concerned with civil liberties than fighting crime is "pro-crime."
• Frequently disregard the rule of law when it means that one of their own will get "ratted out." The boys in blue are notorious for taking the attitude that a cop can "screw up" because "they are human" even when a civilian doing the same thing would get locked up. Ever heard of cases where the police didn't get busted because none of them would speak ill of even their corrupt comrades?

No knock raids, unprecedented surveillance, military grade equipment, they are a paramilitary, not "peace officers" anymore. Don't ever, ever make the mistake of assuming that they are peace officers anymore. Between their militarization in tactics/armament, and the legal powers that put us at a distinct disadvantage, they are closer to an occupying army than what they were originally created to be.

If you think that gun control is "common sense" yet you are worried about issues like police powers then ask yourself who you would really trust with a gun. The police, many of whom are neurotic, egotistical control freaks (that's why they are attracted to positions of power, surprise, surprise....) or your neighbor? How about your own family and friends. People you can trust.

See I trust the latter, because I come from a law enforcement family that has former law enforcement from both the state and federal agencies. I have seen many more law enforcement officers in personal settings than the average person so I have a good idea of what the personality types are. Trust me, people, especially those who think gun control is a good idea, these are often some of the last people that deserve a state sanction to abridge your liberties while carrying a firearm.

The best thing that could happen to our civil liberties would be for the average citizen to be able to own any weapon that the cops can use, for the government to not be able to register those weapons and for the people to have a right to use force to resist unlawful arrest. Oh wait, unlawful arrest basically doesn't exist anymore because who are you to tell a cop that they don't have a legitimate reason to detain your unconvicted (probably felon) ass? See my point?

Congress first of all doesn't particularly care about drafting laws that actually benefit copyright holders in general, rather they care about protecting the interests of the big donors and their pet causes. The DMCA's anti-circumvention statute actually hurts smaller businesses by cutting out "consumer reports" style reviews of DRM systems. Losing 25% of one's potential sales to piracy hurts a small copyright holder significantly more than a large one. In fact, it could make the difference between having a day job and being able to get better at one's creative endeavor.

Hatch has been steadily earning the name "RINO" in conservative circles for his "Republican In Name Only" politics. The RP may not be too conservative, but he's a flaming statist if there ever were one in the Senate. It's also alarming to see many self-proclaimed capitalists support this measure, as IPCentral, a capitalist IP blog and Motley Fool seem to think that INDUCE is common sense. Of course, IPCentral didn't have trackback enabled so I had to email a rebuttal to some of their arugments.

At this point I just don't understand the record labels. Why don't they push hard to get people buying on iTunes so that they can turn digital distribution into an even bigger cashcow? They seem to be convinced of the "justice" of their cause, so much so that they'd rather be dead right than wrong alive.

I don't even need to boycotte them anymore because Century Media and Projekt make most of my favorite music now. Lacuna Coil, a fast rising goth metal band that stole the show at Ozzfest 2004, is signed to CM, which is not affiliated with the RIAA according to the RIAA Radar. This is the future, people. Labels like Century Media know the writing is on the wall, and that being a member of the RIAA is as socially acceptable in the 21st century as declaring you're down with people who gas Jews and lynch black people for fun.

I have been playing around with this module a bit and have found it to be damn good at what it does. It really makes it easy for people to take advantage of XML for simpler operations which takes away an advantage of ASP.NET.

For many operations, SAX and DOM are simply too convoluted or complex. As long as you have an idea of what the document structure will be like in advance, you can quickly handle documents.

Here is an example from my site of what it looks like

It may not always be $0.99. There has been some discussion about raising the tracks to as high as $3.00 each!! Outrageous, isn't it, to think that a new album download could cost as much as 2x the in store price.

That was one of the reasons I cited when I posted a rebuttal on my site to an argument that was made at IPCentral's blog. I have noticed a curious tendency among the copyright expansionists: they don't want to get into pissing matches with other capitalists over their abuse of capitalism.

Bottom line is prepared for the music industry to once again forget market realities and raise the cost if they think they can get away with it. Non-functional copyrights like music and movies don't compete with each other in a free market fashion like software. Too much of what passes for "art" in this country is little more than bad entertainment.

I caught this story on OSNews yesterday and posted a rebuttal on my blog. This sort of thing probably doesn't carry a lot of weight with most of the defense types because the military is the very definition of mission critical, no pun intended. Peoples lives are at risk on a daily business in most jobs in the military these days. There is almost no price too high to pay for the freedom to design to specification that Linux provides.

Linux is certainly not ready to take over a lot of things yet, but it is good enough for many things that traditional defense contractors are involved with. I wouldn't trust it yet as an OS for our warships or other vehicles, but I would trust it for communication systems and things like that. For situations like that, a RTOS from a company like Green Hills may not provide enough benefit to justify the cost. Linux is free, their product isn't. They can try to get the military hooked for a while, but Linux will always be free and there are plenty of IT workers in the military who could work on existing RTOS Linux forks for military use.

Another thing that has to be kept in mind is that with the push for homeland security, the laissez faire attitude that has been prevalent toward security has to go. The miltiary wants transparency so it knows it's not getting something bugged all to hell by some Jihadi who wormed his way into Microsoft or Sun via the H1-B visa program. The Debian and Fedora teams are great for that very reason. Everything is open to public scrutiny, from the installer to every package so the military gets a chance to audit everything.

Free markets are great, but in this case the military has to perform a more core mission: defend the US from attack. If that means violating free market principles by pouring taxpayer dollars into a free OS for public use, then they should and most likely will do it eventually.