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The Pirate Bay Blocked In Italy
imhassan tips us to news that The Pirate Bay has been blocked in Italy. Other attempts to block the popular P2P site have been somewhat less than successful. From TorrentFreak:
"Pirate Bay's IPs and the domain name are inaccessible, as they are blocked by ISPs all over the country. Whether these blocks will be very effective, however, is doubtful, since The Pirate Bay has already announced several countermeasures. An insider working at an Internet provider in Italy told TorrentFreak that all the relevant large access ISPs in Italy have complied with the request to block the popular BitTorrent tracker, which was sent out yesterday. Italy is taking a stand against BitTorrent sites, so it seems. Two weeks ago, the largest Italian torrent site, Columbo-BT, was shut down by the same prosecutor who is responsible for the Pirate Bay block."
ISPs do not have common carrier status. This has been discussed before, but supposedly US law distinguishes between voice and data -- voice having common carrier status, data not.
Does Obama really think he'll force us into Alternative Energy technologies by giving us no other choices?
No, I think he knows that we'll be forced into alternative energy technologies by the Lomonosov-Lavoisier law. Our only real choice is to either slowly adjust our lifestyles now (by developing the alternative energy technologies quickly enough to handle our energy needs) or rapidly adjust our lifestyles later (in an economically catastrophic way).