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It seems history repeats itself.

this has even more detail, from the Library of Congress (US) no less...

Even if some Marine Lieutenant Colonel writes a memo advocating actions to take during nuclear war or mass insurrection, that doesn't either make it national policy or legal. It is nonsense.

Report says North authored plan to suspend Constitution

Reached by telephone Sunday at his home in northern Virginia, Brinkerhoff denounced as 'ridiculous' the report involving him and the Marine now at the center of the Iran-Contra scandal.

Saying he left government in 1982, Brinkerhoff added, 'There never was a plan to install martial law or martial rule. The whole purpose of emergency preparedness is and was to maintain civil rule.

'A lot of memos and lot of plans were written. We have a responsibility to plan for mobilization in case of emergency or war. As far as some evil plot ... it simply is untrue.'

The missing idea is known as MILITARY SUPPORT TO CIVIL AUTHORITIES: THE ROLE OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE IN SUPPORT OF HOMELAND DEFENSE

That's not martial law.

Rights & Access This recording is protected by state copyright laws in the United States. The Library of Congress has obtained a license from rights holders to offer it as streamed audio only. Downloading is not permitted. The authorization of rights holders of the recording is required in order to obtain a copy of the recording. Contact jukebox@loc.gov for more information.

Of course the question who these "rights holders" are, and if anything was given in return for this "license", is unknown.

I have every reason to believe that Romney would have gathered the same group of advisers around him that had encouraged W to go too far and pushed their propagandizing of the Red states to new heights in hopes of dragging a few trillion more dollars out of the American public while turning the odometer over from IRAQ to IRAN, as a popular poster in US military sites so proudly proclaimed

He actually did this. Basically his foreign policy during his campaign was PNAC alumni and FPI members. It wasn't any kind of mistake or coincidence that he titled his foreign policy page "New American Century". This wasn't a dog-whistle. It was a shout with a bullhorn.

Marco Rubio has taken the same slogan. It's not a coincidence either.

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-...

Notice that this isn't MSNBC pointing this out.

What Breitbart doesn't do is fully explain what it means and who it is. They certainly do link to Sourcewatch, but people hardly click through.

American Enterprise Institute -> PNAC ->FPI

They're not going away and their modus is to find a stooge to manipulate. And they've found at least one.

BTW, I just discovered the Library of Congress has archived the PNAC site.

It's never going away or going to be scrubbed. How cool is that?

http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/...

--
BMO

Maybe if you're talking about just the text. A lot of books have photos. And the LoC also has the National Film Registry.

In fact, the LoC had 186 TB of digital content over 9 years ago.

FYI, the Big Bang Theory isn't astrophysics.

Really? That's odd, I wonder why it's covered in this book and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and... etc.

Please learn a teensy tiny bit about the fields of knowledge you wish to dismiss.

Please learn a teensy tiny bit about the fields of knowledge you're discussing before you correct people.

Like I said:

It took from 1863 to 1869, and was built with largely minority and immigrant workers using manual methods (and dynamite)...

As I recall, the land around the track was "given" to the railroad as compensation for building the tracks.

The DMCA safe harbor protects them as long as they take it down immediately on request, and google is big enough to weather any lawsuit. Now if you or I were running an app store...

No, the DMCA provides no safe harbor for anyone profiting directly from the unauthorized sale of copyrighted works, intentional or otherwise. As long as the Google bookstore gets a cut of the profit on the sale, there's no safe harbor.

First, I don't believe that's correct. The DMCA doesn't seem to mention profit anywhere except in relation to whether something is a nonprofit institution of higher education.

Second, direct vs. indirect profits are when an infringer has both direct profits from the infringement (selling the infringing work) as well as indirect profits (add-on non-infringing sales of other works that may have been caused by the sale of the infringing work). For example, if I sell you pirated software plus a "service and warranty package", that's both direct profits and indirect profits.

We seem to be saddled with you freely inventing nonsense contrary to history.

The Quakers

By 1680, 10,000 Quakers had been imprisoned in England, and 243 had died of torture and mistreatment in the King's jails. This reign of terror impelled Friends to seek refuge in New Jersey in the 1670s, where they soon became well entrenched. In 1681, when Quaker leader William Penn (1644-1718) parlayed a debt owed by Charles II to his father into a charter for the province of Pennsylvania, many more Quakers were prepared to grasp the opportunity to live in a land where they might worship freely. By 1685 as many as 8,000 Quakers had come to Pennsylvania. Although the Quakers may have resembled the Puritans in some religious beliefs and practices, they differed with them over the necessity of compelling religious uniformity in society.

Since members of the LDS faith freely practice it, build new temples, and live in all parts of the country you seem to have that wrong as well.

However, if it's in the public domain, there is no monetary incentive to locate, digitize, and restore such a film. It either sits in a vault somewhere, decomposing (maybe even on nitrate film - egad!), or maybe it was transferred onto videotape before its copyright expired. So, it's either not available at all, or maybe isn't available in the best possible quality.

This is why we have public repositories like the Library of Congress. It should be their mandate to preserve and make available works that have passed into the public domain. We also have museums and non-profit organizations that do similar things for movies.

Basically, there are a number of entities that exist for the public good that would be more than happy to get their hands on works that have passed into the public domain, restore them and get them transferred to digital media so they can be enjoyed for many generations to come. Of course, these organizations require people to know about them (or to bother to use Google to find them) and help fund their efforts.

The GAO is Congress's research arm,

Huh, I would have sworn that role belongs to the Congressional Research Service http://www.loc.gov/crsinfo/ since it is their entire damn name!

As anyone who has experienced Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" can attest, while the subject has never been described as classically "beautiful," the photograph is normally described as beautiful (and powerful) by almost everyone who has seen it.

when did we become a nation of wimps?

It was all downhill since we decided (contrary to the Founding Father's advice and implorations) to make it the government's responsibility to take care of "the most vulnerable". The list of "vulnerable" has been increasing since and the number of the benevolent and caring government officials needed to take care of them has been increasing along with it. As has been the "caring" class' voting power — while you were kept focused on the "military industrial complex"...

The lost "War on Poverty", for example, has cost $22 trillion — three times more than all of America's military wars combined (inflation-adjusted). If the overhead costs (pay and other expenses of the government officials doing the wealth-redistribution) was at the idealistic 23% of that, we paid them about $5 trillion dollars over the 50 years.

If it is acceptable for 15% to remain on the dole, is it really that much of a stretch, that the 100% need to be told, when to stay home a few days (weeks, months) per year?

One of the few things the U.S. government does right.

National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped from the Library of Congress.

Actually the number of laws each year is going up. Not that I can give you any statistics because no one knows how many there are... No wonder innocent people will admit guilt. With the sheer ridiculous number of laws out there, no one is truly innocent in the US.

http://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/...

It was introduced in the middle of last year in the House, where it was summarily sent to a subcommittee to die. It had no chance as a bill with zero Republican sponsors ever passing the House, just as it will quickly die in this Congress.

The US is a Christian nation

Which explains Thomas Jefferson's comments in this letter:

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his Government, that he owes account to none other than the head of state, who rules by divine right, for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach both actions and opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make plenty of laws respecting an establishment of religion, provided that everything remains Christian and all those bloody heretics get the heck out,' thus building a wall around Church and State."

I can't believe that anyone could misunderstand that.

the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions

That's the whole point in throwing the book at someone and then extracting a plea deal.

Without plea deals the system would grind to a halt.

Without criminalizing forms of speech the system would be freer to deal with actual crime. The legitimate powers of government reach actions only, not opinions.

And Grassley had what kind of input? He wasn't even a cosponsor of the bill. I guess he had a chance to speak - and was ignored. Which is probably why he also didn't vote for PPACA.

Seriously, if they are archiving the source code to Duke Nukem, then surely they can archive the NetBSD Source tree?

The current floor space is approximately 600,000 square feet or 55741.8 square meters or .021522039 square mile. The state of Delaware is approximately 2026 square miles. Therefore, the size of the methane hot spot is around 94136.23 times the size of the Library of Congress.

Note that this leaves out the sizes of the Annex, built in 1930, and the Madison building, built in 1981. The Madison building is over 2 million square feet.

The New Deal didn't work either.
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/cl...

Nonsense, an editorial screed by the New Yorker is meaningless. And if you want to bring context into it, you'll lose even harder.

Firstly, judicial review wasn't even a principle until Marbury v Madison in 1803. So we're talking about the 19th century only.

In cases in the 19th Century, the Supreme Court ruled pretty much only that the Second Amendment does not bar state regulation of firearms. (For example, in United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, 553 (1875), the Court stated that the Second Amendment âoehas no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government,â and in Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, 265 (1886), the Court reiterated that the Second Amendment âoeis a limitation only upon the power of Congress and the National government, and not upon that of the States.â )

Although most of the rights in the Bill of Rights have been selectively incorporated into the rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment and thus cannot be impaired by state governments, the Second Amendment has never been so incorporated.

It's only since 1939 United States v Miller, that federal court decisions considering the Second Amendment have largely interpreted it as preserving the authority of the states to maintain militias - not the '150 year history' stated in the deliberately-misleading text of the quoted article.

(much of the above is clipped verbatim from http://www.loc.gov/law/help/se...)

In fact, it's ONLY in the latter 20th Century that we've even HAD this debate, as all constitutional commentary and understanding previous to that was universal in its understanding of the 2nd Amendment as an individual right, *not* dependent on being in a militia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Of course, you further disregard that according to the US code, all males from 17-44 *are* by default in the militia. (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/311)

When the AHRA was talking about DARDs, they were thinking DAT and to a lesser extent MiniDisc, not CDs or MP3s. So, the RIAA's gamble was that they were trying to get the Rio PMP300 treated like a DAT device, which failed because it's not an audio recorder. You couldn't use a line-in jack to record MP3s to that thing.

What boggles me is that the parallel out jack on the PMP300 doesn't constitute transmission. Eh, wtf.

The Letter of the law though, on what is a DARD is quite clear:

(3) A "digital audio recording device" is any machine or device of a type commonly distributed to individuals for use by individuals, whether or not included with or as part of some other machine or device, the digital recording function of which is designed or marketed for the primary purpose of, and that is capable of, making a digital audio copied recording for private use, except forâ"

source: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/...:

So the fact that Ford and GM advertise you can rip CDs into this thing makes it a DARD.

I think what may be a crippling blow here to the plaintiffs is that CDs do NOT implement any copy protection and this thing doesn't *record* audio.

However, the court or the jury may see otherwise.

The White House should respond by providing links to state and federal representatives if they want the law changed.

Why? Can an organization like Tesla not find people smart enough to look them up? Are we not smart enough to know where to look? Or so disengaged we don't know which ones to write? For those like that, here's a start. Tesla should be happy that the administration didn't actively try to work against them.

This is a rich boy whining that he's being oppressed by the system. The only thing that irks me is the fanboys here that seem to want to change this because of "bright, shiny" and "change is good". Note that the jobs Tesla would provide if they got the ability to sell their cars direct probably number many less than the ones provided by current dealerships (and the counterparts needed in the auto companies to deal with said dealers) and that unemployment is still a problem here. Again, Elon should feel lucky that the WH staff didn't send a response about how things are fine as they are and tell him to STFU. That's what you would have gotten if you wanted something. Ask marijuana growers (a much bigger market than electric cars) in Washington or Colorado about that.

Just google 'cuba embargo "business with the US"' or 'cuba embargo extraterritorial', you'll find many examples...

Helms–Burton Act (a.k.a.) Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (LIBERTAD) Act of 1996

This law includes a wide variety of provisions intended to bring about "a peaceful transition to a representative democracy and market economy in Cuba":

- International Sanctions against the Cuban Government. Economic embargo, any non-U.S. company that deals economically with Cuba can be subjected to legal action and that company's leadership can be barred from entry into the United States. Sanctions may be applied to non-U.S. companies trading with Cuba. This means that internationally operating companies have to choose between Cuba and the U.S., which is a much larger market.
[...]
-Exclusion of certain aliens from the United States, primarily senior officials or major stock holders, and their families, of companies that do business in Cuba on property expropriated from American citizens. To date, executives from Italy, Mexico, Canada, Israel, and the United Kingdom have been barred.

US Fines Argentine Company $2.8 million for Cuba Embargo Violation

Will YOU stop being an idiot?

It's just goodies all around: according to unspecified intelligence, as examined to an unknown standard of proof, by unidentified parties, in secret, he was the alleged operational leader "taking on a continuous command function", which means he isn't entitled to the protections of a civilian under the Geneva convention, even though he is unaffiliated with any national armed force, and not directly engaged in any hostility at the time and place of his death.

Typical Slashdot - we certainly can't trust the words out of the very mouths of terrorists themselves declaring war and calling for the killing of Americans, Britons, or others in the West, their ties to multiple attackers, and active work as part of international terrorist groups. And unless all of the details of the intelligence used to find them and the technology and procedures used to attack them are revealed (thus negating their value in the future) we are on the verge of Big Brother. What a load of crap. It will be a minor miracle if we remain free of routine massacre in the years ahead.

...he isn't entitled to the protections of a civilian under the Geneva convention, even though he is unaffiliated with any national armed force, and not directly engaged in any hostility at the time and place of his death.

You're playing fast and lose on many levels. If you want the protections of the treaty you have to abide by the treaty. Al Qaida doesn't do that, so they don't get the protections. Civilians can't take up arms to wage war unlawfully and have the protections of the treaty. It is a basic enforcement mechanism. Civilians can take up arms and engage in warfare, lawfully, but they have to follow the rules.

The frequent attempts to white wash Anwar al-Awlaki's activities as a leader in al Qaida are appalling.

Who else would qualify for this rather unenviable status?

No mystery.

SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

---------

Could we be at war with the Sinola Cartel if we wanted to? The Crips?

Not unless they throw in with al Qaida or there is a new resolution.

The issue is that the US has always been an oligarchy of the rich, realistically it came into being due to a tax revolt.
Money out of politics is not only possible, if you look else where in the world with functioning democracies and functioning electoral systems you can find examples:

In Germany
http://www.theatlantic.com/int...

In Canada (with legislated limits)
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

or see Frances new laws limiting funding
http://www.loc.gov/law/help/ca...

If you believe that money is the only power then you have already been brainwashed to give up your democratic rights.

The average US Senate seat apparently costs ~ $7 million.

The entire Canadian Election spending per party ~ $21 million.

Obama spent well over $400 million for just his presidential campaign.

Think about what could be done with $379 million to address real problems in the US like education, healthcare etc....

The reason the rich are willing to waste their money is because they have too much of it (mainly because of tax law changes).
The average CEO salary in the US is now $10 million per year! Yet they pay less than 20% in taxes!

Even Warren Buffet thinks its time to tax the rich.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11...

If you did that the money that might otherwise be spent on political campaigns might actually do some good like funding education or public healthcare etc...

But then according to your brainwashing program the only power is money and any country that tries to democratically regulate the market (an artificial construct that only exists because of the enforcement of property laws) must a communist country (Canada) how else can we have publicly funded healthcare...
keep drinking the kool-aid, in the mean time we'll outlive you. Yes life expectancy is higher here, as is quality of life.

China did sign and ratify Kyoto. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... The US signed but did not ratify. During the negotiations, the Senate indicated it would not ratify unless China accepted some emissions guidelines. (Could have been an increase like Spain, we only wanted a commitment.) http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/...::

Minimum wage is not supposed to be a living wage because there are supposed to be entry level jobs for people who are starting out, not living on their own. If someone is qualified to responsibly manage having their own apartment, etc., then they're quite overqualified to tear movie tickets.

Actually, according to one of the sponsors (George Miller) of the 2007 minimum wage bill, that's not true. In fact, he said:

Congress has a moral duty to raise the minimum wage. Churches, synagogues, and other faith groups are calling on Congress to support the Fair Minimum Wage Act. In this country, an average CEO earns more before lunchtime in one day than a minimum wage worker earns all year. This is a moral outrage in the richest country on earth. With the costs of health insurance, gasoline, and college tuition increasing, it is important, now more than ever, that we raise the minimum wage so that these hard working Americans are able to meet basic human needs. Raising the minimum wage is not only the right thing to do, it is also economically prudent. Increasing the minimum wage will help boost the economy as a whole, putting more money into the hands of those people who need it and will spend it--indeed, spend it on basic necessities. Last year, some 665 economists, including several Nobel Laureates, signed a statement in support of raising the minimum wage. As they explained, the ``minimum wage helps to equalize the imbalance in bargaining power that low-wage workers face in the labor market. The minimum wage is also an important tool in fighting poverty.'' Raising the minimum wage is critical to fighting the middle class squeeze in this country. America's middle class is this country's economic backbone. It is what makes us strong. Yet the middle class is shrinking. Since 2001, the number of Americans living in poverty has increased by 5.4 million, to 37 million. More than one in six American children now lives in poverty. The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 is an important first step for this new Congress in its efforts to stand up for the middle class and to stem the squeeze.[Emphasis added]

Don't you just hate those pesky facts?

It is estimated that the LOC, including video and audio is about 3000 TB. So, you would need 17 of these tapes I guess.
http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpr...
Or was your question rhetorical?

Under a 2002 law it was made illegal to change the IMEI unless you're the manufacturer.

It's a Chuck Schumer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... bill that he introduces every couple of years, it gets thrown to the Judiciary committee, and then it dies in committee. Like clockwork. Here's the text of the current bill, which is presently dying in the Judiciary committee right now: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/...:

The people who care about this are the people who traffic in stolen phones, and the people who want to buy a handset and use the same SIM in a different GSM phone, or who want to change the MEID on a new phone so that they don't have to re-up their Verizon contract once they are paying month-to-month for their CDMA phone. And the phone companies, that want you to have to re-up your contract to get a new phone. It's the same reason there's about zero incentive to update the OS in Android phones, since if they never update the OS, in order to get the new +0.0.1 version number bump, you have to get a new phone, and the manufacturer gets to sell another phone, and the phone company gets to lock you into a new 2 year contract every 18 months when the new shiny object becomes available.

Since it's a PITA to get a phone unlocked for international roaming, since it has to be listed by ID with the cell network in the country you are traveling to, and it can take many weeks to get them to actually unlock the thing, and do the registration, most times it's just easier to clone the IMEI to your old phone, and then either destroy the old phone, or do an IMEI swap. This is a common "repair/refurbish" technique, and you'll notice that it's allowed under the Schumer bill.

You might also see both NASDAQ OMX Group and TeleCommunication Systems Inc. campaign contributions, and you'll notice contributions from Facebook in 2012, the year the bill was introduced, when Facebook was going big into the mobile market. http://influenceexplorer.com/p...

Little bit of vested interest there.

But what about those of us who want to rip Betamax, Casettes, Grammerphone Records and VHS?

Hell, what about Edison Cylinders?

The Senate amendment replaced the entire bill. That's not an amendment. That's a senate bill with an inaccurate title.

The constitution places no restriction on what such amendments may do. Therefore, replacing the contents of the entire bill is constitutionally valid.

Further, the House did not pass HR 3590 as it was passed by the Senate, which makes the entire conversation academic. If the House didn't pass the bill, there was nothing to amend.

Incorrect: roll call vote #165, 21st of March, 2010, 219 to 212.

Actually, the ACA began as HR 3590 with the title "Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009" with the purpose of "[t]o amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the first-time homebuyers credit in the case of members of the Armed Forces and certain other Federal employees, and for other purposes." Being a House Resolution, signified by the "HR" portion of the bill number, the bill for raising revenue did originate in the House, fulfilling the requirements of the Origination Clause, a.k.a., Article I, Section 7. Cf., http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.3590:

I think there are too many people who do not think but rather take whatever modified information in and believe it. If they are somewhat in the middle (not extreme to either left or right), they would be sceptical to any news like this.

First, the author of TFA has bias toward the far right. Therefore, the summarized information given in TFA is to both feed the same mind (right wing) and attack Democrat party. Even though I am not all for the current President, I feel that TFA is not telling the whole truth but rather oversimplify the raw data and exaggerate the analysis toward the author bias.

Let's look at http://www.whitehouse.gov/site... which is the data cited by TFA. It shows how much money, in each category, is distributed toward directly individual expenses. In the file, it shows that the highest payout to individual is Social Security ($807m) which is still much higher than the health & Medicare combined last year. The $430m is paid out to disability and pension [ http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/... ].

If you are going to argue about the amount of Medicare expenses going up from $200s millions in 2001 to $600s million in 2014, then I am guessing you are still blind with your bias. What you need to do is to create a line graph for Medicare expenses from the year 1999 to 2014. Then, look at the rate of change (line slope) and THINK. You will see that there is not much different in the line slope from 2004 to 2008 and 2008 to 2014. In other words, during the second term of Bush administration, the expenses were going up as fast (if not faster) as the Obama administration.

Therefore, the TFA is giving only the true raw data but analyses it badly by applying his bias. This kind of analysis ticks me off because it is similar to telling a lie with omission. When someone said it is all good, I doubt it is that good and may look for the catch. If I couldn't find the catch, I will give a benefit of the doubt. When someone said it is all bad, I would look into it because I want to verify the person's judgement regardless his or her credential. Error is in human nature and even a smart person could be wrong from time to time...

Sigh.

No, publicity rights are a branch of state tort law. Copyrights are a sui generis branch of federal law.

And a copyright release is just a copyright license (or more rarely, an assignment), which means that it pertains to a particular creative work. A publicity release has to do with using someone's face, image, statements, etc. While you could conceivably have them both in the same form, it's rare that you'd need to or want to.

And I assure you, they are not related even the teeniest tiniest bit. Not in their policy goals, or how they originated, or which governments created them, or who gets them, or how long they last, or what they cover. There is no commonality.

Are you too lazy to google for the difference between copyrights and publicity rights? Perhaps this web page from the Library of Congress will help you out: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/co...

A bill to require mobile service providers and mobile device manufacturers to give consumers the ability to remotely delete data from mobile devices and render such devices inoperable. I'm not sure where this shorter title that is traversing the internet is coming from, it was never a submitted title for the bill.

It's just stupidity by journalists, so don't be surprised. The official title of the bill is "A bill to require mobile service providers and mobile device manufacturers to give consumers the ability to remotely delete data from mobile devices and render such devices inoperable".

Well, I agree that the 1st amendment is not at issue here... but could somebody please explain to me specifically which article or amendment to the constitution grants the U.S. Federal government authority to ban voice telephone calls on a private flight?

Follow the link to the actual legislation where they state

Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution,
          specifically Clause 3 (related to regulation of Commerce
          among the several States).

And does this new law ban calls from the airline owed phones? Well, thay ARE voice calls, and the airline phones are moving at 600 MPH so I guess that qualifies them as mobile divices

Phones installed on the plane are specifically exempted.
The price of those is so high that no one would yak on them for the whole flight.
And those do not support incoming calls.
And the ear piece is especially amplified so loud that the user does not feel compelled to shout.

Instead of pontificating on non-related situations, why not read the whole bill here

Or, since it is so short, here it is:

HR 3676 IH

113th CONGRESS
1st Session

H. R. 3676
To establish a prohibition on certain cell phone voice communications during passenger flights, and for other purposes.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
December 9, 2013

Mr. SHUSTER introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure

A BILL
To establish a prohibition on certain cell phone voice communications during passenger flights, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the `Prohibiting In-Flight Voice Communications on Mobile Wireless Devices Act of 2013'.
SEC. 2. PROHIBITION ON CERTAIN CELL PHONE VOICE COMMUNICATIONS.

(a) In General- Subchapter I of chapter 417 of title 49, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
`Sec. 41725. Prohibition on certain cell phone voice communications

`(a) Prohibition- The Secretary of Transportation shall issue regulations--
`(1) to prohibit an individual on an aircraft from engaging in voice communications using a mobile communications device during a flight of that aircraft in scheduled passenger interstate or intrastate air transportation; and
`(2) that exempt from the prohibition described in paragraph (1) any--
`(A) member of the flight crew on duty on an aircraft;
`(B) flight attendant on duty on an aircraft; and
`(C) Federal law enforcement officer acting in an official capacity.
`(b) Definitions- In this section, the following definitions apply:
`(1) FLIGHT- The term `flight' means, with respect to an aircraft, the period beginning when the aircraft takes off and ending when the aircraft lands.
`(2) MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS DEVICE-
`(A) IN GENERAL- The term `mobile communications device' means any portable wireless telecommunications equipment utilized for the transmission or reception of voice data.
`(B) LIMITATION- The term `mobile communications device' does not include a phone installed on an aircraft.'.
(b) Clerical Amendment- The analysis for chapter 417 of title 49, United States Code, is amended by inserting after the item relating to section 41724 the following:
`41725. Prohibition on certain cell phone voice communications.'.

> yet they've had airline phones for years.

You can still use those phones:

"`(B) LIMITATION- The term `mobile communications device' does not include a phone installed on an aircraft.'." -- Bill Text

The 2009 Senate Bill that banned human-animal hybrids saw this coming.

Good job Congress.

Bill text.

That's about 875 micro-library-of-congresses per second, assuming 600 dpi LOC digitization. Getting close to breaking the coveted milli-LOC/s barrier!

I have never met someone claiming to be a Ron Paul Libertarian (of whom I've seen many comments here on Slashdot from) express opinions that promote the military-industrial complex, the keeping of secrets of government action by force or the trampling of individual rights.

Ron Paul -- obviously the definitive "Ron Paul (so-called) Libertarian" -- is anti-choice, anti-religious freedom (believes "The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers."), pro-censorship (introduced a Constitutional amendment to prohibit flag burning), anti-privacy, and supported the criminalization of homosexuality by state governments.

Paul is not libertarian in any meaningful sense of that word. He's anti-federalist, but fully authoritarian, happy to have government fsck you over if you step out of his vision of what a white Christian American should be...just so long as it's a state government. He's a terrible excuse for a human being and anyone supporting him should be deeply, deeply ashamed.

I see that Belgium seems to have a problem with "cribbage."

Belgium: Terror Suspects Convicted, Sentenced
Belgium | Al Qaeda's New Front

It's already illegal to change the IMEI number of a phone. It's not supposed to be able to be changed. If you remove the number from a phone, it won't be be able to register on the network anyway.

In USA it can give you 5 years in jail.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:S.3186.IS:
It's illegal just to possess hardware or software that is capable of doing it.

In 2007 the Democratic party controlled both houses under the 110th Congress. Representative Nick Rahal (D-WV) Sponsored the "Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007" with 198 cosponsors. Title III Subsection B was the only portion of this bill relating to "Lighting Energy Efficiency". So yes, a Republican President signed this bill but it was a Democrat raised bill and without signing it into law not only Subsection B but the whole bill wouldn't have passed. I doubt that those who voted for President Bush voted for these Democrat Senators and Representatives. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:H.R.6: