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But this is all beside the point. The point is that this clearly violates the law. The law says that:

(d) All artificial or prerecorded telephone messages delivered by an automatic telephone dialing system shall:
(1) At the beginning of the message, state clearly the identity of the business, individual, or other entity initiating the call

Now listen to one actual phone call, this one placed five times just today to a female Democrat over 50. See?

Not disagreeing with you, but that USF charge will not cover desktop or laptop computers. They fall under an ineligible type of technology for that program. Look here to see what can be used with the program.

I think every school would jump at the chance to provide every student with a laptop instead of making a cart of 24 "normal" laptops available.

Have you ever had to file for Erate funds? Do you fully understand what the program does? If you did, you would NOT be saying to kill the program. This program helps keeps schools and libraries connected to the Internet. It gives us discounts on our telephone service and Internet service. It also helps provide internal connections for buildings that do not have the wiring in place for Internet. I file all my library's Erate paperwork. I understand the process. I can not stop others from abusing the system, but I can tell you that those that abuse it are NOT in the majority. It must be awful easy to criticize something you have no clue about. Read through the reference area on tbe Universal Service's website. http://www.sl.universalservice.org/reference/

You libertarian twits and Republican dweebs never miss a chance to bash government whenever a corruption scandal makes its way into to the news, do you? If you weren't so blinded by your idiot ideologies, you'd see the cause of the corruption didn't stem from lack of oversight from the government, but from the non-profit Universal Service Administrative Company which adminsters the program for the FCC. And guess who makes up the Universal Service Administrative Company? Why it's the telecommunications companies, that's who. They're the ones that has allowed the financial abuse to go unchecked. In other words, it's corporation who failed to police themselves, and it's corporations that ripped off the taxpayers. So it isn't governmental corruption that's present here, it's the business-as-usual corruption of corporations.

Actually phones *are* somewhat guaranteed by the government. It's usually called Universal Lifeline service, read all about it here. Basically the govt. says that phone service is a necessity of modern life and that it is an important goal to provide telephone service at a reasonable cost to all Americans.

SC Laws don't necessarily make sense, but the intent of the law is to make sure that at least one computer in every library has free, unfiltered internet access, regardless of the stuff you can get to.

But there are other issues here as well. South Carolina has implemented a statewide network backbone that all of the K-12 public schools, libraries and distance education centers can connect to, free of charge, that's right, unmetered high-availability, high-speed access to the internet. Some of this is made possible by a federal program called E-rate (http://www.sl.universalservice.org) that pays a certain percentage of the cost of technology expenses for connections to the internet etc.

This FEDERAL program has guidelines and restrictions that require protection for children using the stuff the FEDGOV pays for, (http://www.sl.universalservice.org/reference/CIPA .asp), or you don't get your "financial assistance."

This may be the reason that this law was enacted.

Anyone ever see those commercials with that goofy Matthew Lesko and all the government money available that you don't know about? This is one of those plans.

SC Laws don't necessarily make sense, but the intent of the law is to make sure that at least one computer in every library has free, unfiltered internet access, regardless of the stuff you can get to.

But there are other issues here as well. South Carolina has implemented a statewide network backbone that all of the K-12 public schools, libraries and distance education centers can connect to, free of charge, that's right, unmetered high-availability, high-speed access to the internet. Some of this is made possible by a federal program called E-rate (http://www.sl.universalservice.org) that pays a certain percentage of the cost of technology expenses for connections to the internet etc.

This FEDERAL program has guidelines and restrictions that require protection for children using the stuff the FEDGOV pays for, (http://www.sl.universalservice.org/reference/CIPA .asp), or you don't get your "financial assistance."

This may be the reason that this law was enacted.

Anyone ever see those commercials with that goofy Matthew Lesko and all the government money available that you don't know about? This is one of those plans.