When I was younger, it was always a privilege to catch a bit of the Dr. Demento show on the radio...usually on a car trip home from somewhere...usually wasn't up late enough, and/or listening to a local station that carried it. I don't think now that there's a local station here that does, though I've long given up on FM Radio. I'll remember what I can fondly, yet, I'll remain more pissed that Adam Corolla left Loveline shortly after I left high school--he made that show funnier than anything.
This is once again one of those numbers that will be thrown around by IP holders to get attention from the politicians. And yet the study does the same idiotic assumption as all the other ones.
Saying one download is one lost sale is idiotic. It has never been true and never will be. It's probably off by at least a factor of 10.
On a wide scope, I can wholly agree with this statement; when you look at piracy on the whole, a good part of it (and probably most appreciably with music) is people wanting to sample before they plop down some cash on the real deal.
In a single incident, however, I can see the legitimacy of the IP holders' argument; if person A downloads item X, and subsequently persons B through F snatch that item from person A, its not an unreasonable conclusion to say that person A potentially caused five lost sales to the company. Using this reasoning, however, to obtain insane settlements as in the Tenenbaum or Masset cases, is inexcusable, and why the apparent lack of needing to prove actual damages to guide any additional award (treble damages and the like) given by the DMCA is fundamentally broken.
Yeah, that must be accurate, because I'm sure they factored in things like:
1) People downloading way more than they could ever afford to buy
This is probably the biggest of the bunch...personally, and I know a few similar like-minded people, if I could snag half the games I wanted at no cost, I'd have more games than I would know what to do with. Real world, though, I'll go and buy the best of the ones I want, based on what others tell me of them, and either ignore the rest or wait until they're on some sort of clearance/resale rack at low cost (where the game manufacturers are realising no to low profit on it).
we have 100/10 internet and IP TV for about 65euro/month.
I don't even have the opportunity, without leasing a dedicated line (for gobs of money, haven't even thought of pricing it), for 100/10 access (as a minimum), where I am (Champaign IL, where the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is, home of NCSA). My piddly 12/2 connection tends to barely max at 8/1, though Comcast tries to blame it on my equipment (though I've been through two modems issued by them, 4 routers, all different makes, and 4 NICs (only one of which was a 10Mbps Ethernet card). This, for US$40/mo...and that's the goddamned PROMOTIONAL price, if I've read my bill right.
As a Yankee, I really can't wrap my head around this whole capped usage bit (except in the mobile space)...when Comcast announced their 250GiB data cap a long time back, I was a little peeved, until I realised that there wasn't really much chance of me breaching it. A 10GiB data cap though, I could burn through easily during the normal TV season run, watching my shows an the like. Intellectually, I realise there's only so much the proverbial tubes can handle at once; however the rest of me thinks, why weren't larger 'tubes' built in the first place? The whole situation seems to be that usage has exceeded what companies are willing to shell out to build out, and it's become an 'opportunity' to monetise the whole situation.
and I have 22/8 to the home, and 50/10 for my office - both of which I get (and then some) consistently in real world testing
You must either be a corporate plant, or living in the middle of nowhere. I've got 12/2 where I'm at, yet I've never--NOT EVEN at 2 in the morning when usage should be pretty damn well at a minimum--been able to perk above 8/1.1. A couple years ago, when the line was 10/1.5, downlink was never above 6, but uplink usually exceeded 2. The excuse, regardless, is always the same; the advertised rates are PEAK rates (though, on uplink only, I've been able to exceed them), that vary based upon blah-dee-blah-dee-blah. Frankly, it comes down to a lack of planning an execution when getting their cable/fiber laid, and overselling the area with promise of decent rates. Sadly, their Terms of Service pretty much prevent it being a case of Bait and Switch; the one area they seem to put a gob of money into is their Legal department.
Nothing makes that 'Thank you for choosing Comcast' bit worse than the following 'Our offices are currently closed' when your cable just crapped out.
Particularly aggrivating for me is how my state (Illinois) handles regulating cable companies; the prevailing law (220 ILCS/5 - Public Utilities Act) changes on occasion, and includes the following bit:
All cable or video providers in this State shall comply with the following customer service requirements and privacy protections. The provisions of this Act shall not apply to an incumbent cable operator prior to January 1, 2008. For purposes of this paragraph, an incumbent cable operator means a person or entity that provided cable services in a particular area under a franchise agreement with a local unit of government...
The date given there changed with a 2009 version of the law, and indicated Jan 1, 2007 as the date, which was before Comcast took over operations from Insight (thus making them NOT incumbent, until the current version). Interesting in the bit, is that they at least WERE required to maintain staffing 24/7...and because the relevant law has been updated, I guess they're no longer subject, which sucks for we consumers who would like to at least have some lube when we get fucked.
I bet there were a ton of meetings about how to balance out increased workload with less staffing and the administrator's solution was "please".
Increased workload with less staffing...now, I would presume that a doctor ordering some manner of labwork would have a legitimate reason for doing so (i.e., not testing an infant for HIV when clearly neither parent has it). Therefore, giving the lab techs an out on doing it, particularly when the reason is as idiotic as this, is only a detriment to getting things done.
If your problem is more work and less people to do it, your solution is to find a way to either decrease the work--difficult with this situation--or get more people. That way, you're not messing around with the health of people you've been hired (directly or indirectly) to help.
More like she needed a better computer that could handle her haphazard exploits on the internet more than I needed a new shiny toy. I can wait a year; if I'd forced her to wait a year, there would be smouldering ashes on the floor by now, accompanied by a keyboard missing several keys. I can only maintain a semi-stable XP machine for so long, at this point I consider a high-risk 2.5 years an accomplishment.
Anybody with higher expectations should stick to last years technology and get the best of *that* instead of the newest $uberware to come out.
I take that to an extreme; the PC I'm using now is about 5 years old, has no real scalability at this point, but it still works great (especially when I got rid of the Windows user who was using it, and swapped it to Ubuntu) for my purposes. Yeah, it'd be nice to have something nice and shiny and new, but it's not worth the goddam headache.
This is why I hesitate to be an early adopter of new technology. There's always real-world conditions that occur when a wider sample size comes available (i.e., the Release to Market) than can be reproduced in a lab during testing--and that's true of virtually ANY product. While the problems generally are fixable, it's a pain in the rear to deal with them in the interim. I'll let others be the guinea pigs, thank you very much.
There is enough story in the first game to make a good 2-3 movies. The problem would be costs causing cuts in parts.
That's gonna be the big problem...if they go episodic, as the game franchise has gone, it's still going to be hard as hell to fit into a reasonable film (100-130 minutes); you can't segment it much more than the games have been, because the cliffhanger effect would wear out very quickly.
In any case, this has a good chance of being a trainwreck, a pretty good chance of capturing the fan audience, and a slim chance of being a box office champion. On a semi-related sidenote, it has an excellent chance of being distributed as a TS torrent...but if it gets good reviews and whatnot, I might opt to pay $10 (to hell with the popcorn and soda) and actually venture out to a theatre to see it.
IMHO, Banks should use a dedicated, private network that does NOT have ANY endpoints connected to the public internet for just this reason.
Would there not be some point in transit between, say, a point-of-sale cardreader or an ATM, that could be similarly compromised? It wouldn't necessarily be easy, but where there's a will, there is a way. Even if every unit had it's own dedicated line from itself to the bank, those cables have to run somewhere, and you can't necessarily keep them under constant supervision. It might reduce the number of points of failure (as far as security mechanisms are concerned), but by no means would it eliminate them.
Symbian hasn't been used exclusively as a Smartphone OS, though the offerings of Symbian devices do include a good number of them. Further, there haven't been a large number of Symbian-based smartphones (in the U.S, that is; I'm not sure of other areas of the world); the most recent that I can remember is the Nokia E71x. To count Symbian as a true smartphone player at the current time is a little generous.
Re:For the patent FUDsters sure to follow....
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Patents are broken.
Software patents are broken; patents for physical items are maybe a little jankety, but not completely broken (yet).
When it comes to software patents, it comes down to the thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters eventually pounding out the complete works of Shakespeare; it may not be in chronological order, either. The same holds true with software; enough people coding things will ultimately come up with a way of doing things that looks similar to another way for doing the same things, but there's better than even odds that they came to it a different way--thus why god knows how many viable filesystems exist, computing architectures exist (and have gone by the wayside), and so forth.
I won't go as far as to say that software patents shouldn't exist; they should, however, be required to be extremely specific, demonstrative, and as narrow in scope as possible. Patenting a concrete, complete, polished product is one thing; patenting a method, a concept, an abstract is completely another.
The risk isn't different, it's more the willingness of the user to take that risk. The casual user is more willing to take the handset at face value than risk bricking it to get a few plums that they may never use; this, of course, is opposed to those plums being made available as a matter of course.
As far as purchase of non-branded phones, I wasn't strictly speaking of Symbian; Symbian devices are pretty well featured across the board, aside from the aforementioned hardware differences, which in some cases can be quite attractive to some users (Camera quality and whatnot, though I fail to see the point of a 5+MP camera on a phone that lacks a flash). When you get into the smartphone market, WinMo and possibly some Android devices--not sure on these, because I haven't done much research--, unbranded, can be pretty pricey (take the somewhat-antiquated Xperia X1 by way of example--I'm a bit out of the loop on more recent samples), and boast features that domestic handsets can't match for their OS--a given that the European market generally tends to get the better hardware and software than we get in North America, given the tendency for pushing customization and such.
Can't you just debrand the phone? It was awlays quite straightforward with Symbian devices. As far as "skyrocketing you into another price bracket"...OTOH you can choose more affordable models and get cheaper plan/prepaid (yeah, I know, US specifics)
De-branding gets down to desire, and there's always the risk of your PC writing a 0 where there's supposed to be a 1 and bricking the device...it scares a lot of people off, even though it's more or less a freak accident. Then there's WinMo devices which are a little bit trickier, and Blackberry devices that I vaguely understand, let alone understanding the undoing of the branding.
So far as going with less expensive models and whatnot, you're going with fewer features, particularly here in the states; hell, I've seen a prepaid phone that not only had no camera, you couldn't use MMS with it--absurd in this day in age, look at how many were up in arms when the original iPhone wasn't MMS ready. If the phone doesn't have a good amount of oomph to begin with, what's the point?
I love everything about Android except one thing: Vendor/carrier OS upgrades.
Sadly, it's not just Android that gets wrecked by Vendor/Carrier tweaks; and the larger the carrier is, the worse it seems to get. Symbian devices that are/were carried by AT&T, for example, are incredibly gimped, and that made me very sad--unfortunately, buying un-branded, non-locked (for the GSM/UMTS crowd, not entirely up on how it goes for CDMA folks) devices skyrockets you into another price bracket, unless you've got the desire to work with 3rd party homebrew software, or money to shell out...it's gonna suck.
If you then make it a condition that no AG or politician that may be under some kind of investigation can perform essential functions of their office (and for AG, investigations & prosecutions are a major part),...
This isn't a case of may be under investigation--this guy is under investigation, and this is a critical difference. If it were limited to, say, wrongdoing by someone in the AG's office, not the AG himself, it would be a wholly different matter.
then you've effectively shut down nearly all oversight and curbs on corruption.
Thus why Special (or Independent) Prosecutors exist; and in this instance, this manner of party could be selected by the PA Legislature to remove all doubt that s/he is tainted by the AGs office. There are safeguards for this sort of thing, it's fairly difficult to think that a large number of persons, even if the Legislature is heavily in favour of his party, would blithely ignore ethics to ensure it all goes smoothly for the party.
Why does it seem like every time a conservative, with no clear and/or credible evidence of any wrongdoing on his part regarding the investigation in question,
Party affiliation aside, the fact is if the evidence were either clear OR credible, the need for an extensive investigation is obviated; that's the point of an investigation is to obtain clear and/or credible evidence to move to the courts. And in any case, once the spotlight turns significantly, for an official in any position of trust or authority on a matter--whether an Attorney General, a judge, or a Chief Executive--recusal is proper even if only to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. When it looks like you might be hiding something, the fact is, that's what the court of public opinion is going to arrive at. Take the case of Rod Blagojevich, for example; to be technical, he was impeached by the Illinois House twice (a technicality of the Senate not being able to try after the first, due to the end of the term; this required the articles be re-presented by the new House)--the votes to impeach, and the vote to remove, were overwhelming in their majority, with few people even in his own party, whether elected officials or common folk being on his side. It's not always about party lines, as you indicate, particularly when you're using your position to cover things up.
There's a larger problem with the whole thing, though; he is being investigated, and yet he is issuing a subpoena related, possibly, to that investigation. There's only a few possible motives for him doing such a thing, and not many of them are to help along the investigation of himself. Thus why independent prosecutors exist, and should be used for this sort of thing; the investigation of Clinton is about the closest situation I can think of at the moment--his AG couldn't be in on it because he's a Cabinet member, appointed by and serving at the leisure of the President--thus, easily influenced by him, making him possibly ineffective at the job.
It won't impinge free speech, but eventually it all gets unsealed, and their identities go public for anyone who can fill out a FOIA request to find--and being that the Library of Congress is now archiving tweets, there's no way to guarantee that something that was said previously (even if the accounts never get used again) won't someday come back to bite them in the ass. Thus, this whole thing creates a bit of a sticky situation.
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When I was younger, it was always a privilege to catch a bit of the Dr. Demento show on the radio...usually on a car trip home from somewhere...usually wasn't up late enough, and/or listening to a local station that carried it. I don't think now that there's a local station here that does, though I've long given up on FM Radio. I'll remember what I can fondly, yet, I'll remain more pissed that Adam Corolla left Loveline shortly after I left high school--he made that show funnier than anything.
This is once again one of those numbers that will be thrown around by IP holders to get attention from the politicians. And yet the study does the same idiotic assumption as all the other ones.
Saying one download is one lost sale is idiotic. It has never been true and never will be. It's probably off by at least a factor of 10.
On a wide scope, I can wholly agree with this statement; when you look at piracy on the whole, a good part of it (and probably most appreciably with music) is people wanting to sample before they plop down some cash on the real deal.
In a single incident, however, I can see the legitimacy of the IP holders' argument; if person A downloads item X, and subsequently persons B through F snatch that item from person A, its not an unreasonable conclusion to say that person A potentially caused five lost sales to the company. Using this reasoning, however, to obtain insane settlements as in the Tenenbaum or Masset cases, is inexcusable, and why the apparent lack of needing to prove actual damages to guide any additional award (treble damages and the like) given by the DMCA is fundamentally broken.
Yeah, that must be accurate, because I'm sure they factored in things like: 1) People downloading way more than they could ever afford to buy
This is probably the biggest of the bunch...personally, and I know a few similar like-minded people, if I could snag half the games I wanted at no cost, I'd have more games than I would know what to do with. Real world, though, I'll go and buy the best of the ones I want, based on what others tell me of them, and either ignore the rest or wait until they're on some sort of clearance/resale rack at low cost (where the game manufacturers are realising no to low profit on it).
we have 100/10 internet and IP TV for about 65euro/month.
I don't even have the opportunity, without leasing a dedicated line (for gobs of money, haven't even thought of pricing it), for 100/10 access (as a minimum), where I am (Champaign IL, where the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is, home of NCSA). My piddly 12/2 connection tends to barely max at 8/1, though Comcast tries to blame it on my equipment (though I've been through two modems issued by them, 4 routers, all different makes, and 4 NICs (only one of which was a 10Mbps Ethernet card). This, for US$40/mo...and that's the goddamned PROMOTIONAL price, if I've read my bill right.
As a Yankee, I really can't wrap my head around this whole capped usage bit (except in the mobile space)...when Comcast announced their 250GiB data cap a long time back, I was a little peeved, until I realised that there wasn't really much chance of me breaching it. A 10GiB data cap though, I could burn through easily during the normal TV season run, watching my shows an the like. Intellectually, I realise there's only so much the proverbial tubes can handle at once; however the rest of me thinks, why weren't larger 'tubes' built in the first place? The whole situation seems to be that usage has exceeded what companies are willing to shell out to build out, and it's become an 'opportunity' to monetise the whole situation.
and I have 22/8 to the home, and 50/10 for my office - both of which I get (and then some) consistently in real world testing
You must either be a corporate plant, or living in the middle of nowhere. I've got 12/2 where I'm at, yet I've never--NOT EVEN at 2 in the morning when usage should be pretty damn well at a minimum--been able to perk above 8/1.1. A couple years ago, when the line was 10/1.5, downlink was never above 6, but uplink usually exceeded 2. The excuse, regardless, is always the same; the advertised rates are PEAK rates (though, on uplink only, I've been able to exceed them), that vary based upon blah-dee-blah-dee-blah. Frankly, it comes down to a lack of planning an execution when getting their cable/fiber laid, and overselling the area with promise of decent rates. Sadly, their Terms of Service pretty much prevent it being a case of Bait and Switch; the one area they seem to put a gob of money into is their Legal department.
Way to take things too seriously, douche.
Particularly aggrivating for me is how my state (Illinois) handles regulating cable companies; the prevailing law (220 ILCS/5 - Public Utilities Act) changes on occasion, and includes the following bit:
All cable or video providers in this State shall comply with the following customer service requirements and privacy protections. The provisions of this Act shall not apply to an incumbent cable operator prior to January 1, 2008. For purposes of this paragraph, an incumbent cable operator means a person or entity that provided cable services in a particular area under a franchise agreement with a local unit of government...
The date given there changed with a 2009 version of the law, and indicated Jan 1, 2007 as the date, which was before Comcast took over operations from Insight (thus making them NOT incumbent, until the current version). Interesting in the bit, is that they at least WERE required to maintain staffing 24/7...and because the relevant law has been updated, I guess they're no longer subject, which sucks for we consumers who would like to at least have some lube when we get fucked.
Linky to the legalese, if anyone cares...hosted on the IL General Assembly's page.
I bet there were a ton of meetings about how to balance out increased workload with less staffing and the administrator's solution was "please".
Increased workload with less staffing...now, I would presume that a doctor ordering some manner of labwork would have a legitimate reason for doing so (i.e., not testing an infant for HIV when clearly neither parent has it). Therefore, giving the lab techs an out on doing it, particularly when the reason is as idiotic as this, is only a detriment to getting things done.
If your problem is more work and less people to do it, your solution is to find a way to either decrease the work--difficult with this situation--or get more people. That way, you're not messing around with the health of people you've been hired (directly or indirectly) to help.
More like she needed a better computer that could handle her haphazard exploits on the internet more than I needed a new shiny toy. I can wait a year; if I'd forced her to wait a year, there would be smouldering ashes on the floor by now, accompanied by a keyboard missing several keys. I can only maintain a semi-stable XP machine for so long, at this point I consider a high-risk 2.5 years an accomplishment.
Anybody with higher expectations should stick to last years technology and get the best of *that* instead of the newest $uberware to come out.
I take that to an extreme; the PC I'm using now is about 5 years old, has no real scalability at this point, but it still works great (especially when I got rid of the Windows user who was using it, and swapped it to Ubuntu) for my purposes. Yeah, it'd be nice to have something nice and shiny and new, but it's not worth the goddam headache.
This is why I hesitate to be an early adopter of new technology. There's always real-world conditions that occur when a wider sample size comes available (i.e., the Release to Market) than can be reproduced in a lab during testing--and that's true of virtually ANY product. While the problems generally are fixable, it's a pain in the rear to deal with them in the interim. I'll let others be the guinea pigs, thank you very much.
But I won't pay to see it in 3-D. Ever. Biggest ripoff in cinema EVER--I go to see a movie to escape reality, not have shit 'flying' at me.
There is enough story in the first game to make a good 2-3 movies. The problem would be costs causing cuts in parts.
That's gonna be the big problem...if they go episodic, as the game franchise has gone, it's still going to be hard as hell to fit into a reasonable film (100-130 minutes); you can't segment it much more than the games have been, because the cliffhanger effect would wear out very quickly.
In any case, this has a good chance of being a trainwreck, a pretty good chance of capturing the fan audience, and a slim chance of being a box office champion. On a semi-related sidenote, it has an excellent chance of being distributed as a TS torrent...but if it gets good reviews and whatnot, I might opt to pay $10 (to hell with the popcorn and soda) and actually venture out to a theatre to see it.
IMHO, Banks should use a dedicated, private network that does NOT have ANY endpoints connected to the public internet for just this reason.
Would there not be some point in transit between, say, a point-of-sale cardreader or an ATM, that could be similarly compromised? It wouldn't necessarily be easy, but where there's a will, there is a way. Even if every unit had it's own dedicated line from itself to the bank, those cables have to run somewhere, and you can't necessarily keep them under constant supervision. It might reduce the number of points of failure (as far as security mechanisms are concerned), but by no means would it eliminate them.
Protip: Look for the quotation marks, it's a quote, not added by the person publishing to the frontpage.
Symbian hasn't been used exclusively as a Smartphone OS, though the offerings of Symbian devices do include a good number of them. Further, there haven't been a large number of Symbian-based smartphones (in the U.S, that is; I'm not sure of other areas of the world); the most recent that I can remember is the Nokia E71x. To count Symbian as a true smartphone player at the current time is a little generous.
Patents are broken.
Software patents are broken; patents for physical items are maybe a little jankety, but not completely broken (yet).
When it comes to software patents, it comes down to the thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters eventually pounding out the complete works of Shakespeare; it may not be in chronological order, either. The same holds true with software; enough people coding things will ultimately come up with a way of doing things that looks similar to another way for doing the same things, but there's better than even odds that they came to it a different way--thus why god knows how many viable filesystems exist, computing architectures exist (and have gone by the wayside), and so forth.
I won't go as far as to say that software patents shouldn't exist; they should, however, be required to be extremely specific, demonstrative, and as narrow in scope as possible. Patenting a concrete, complete, polished product is one thing; patenting a method, a concept, an abstract is completely another.
As far as purchase of non-branded phones, I wasn't strictly speaking of Symbian; Symbian devices are pretty well featured across the board, aside from the aforementioned hardware differences, which in some cases can be quite attractive to some users (Camera quality and whatnot, though I fail to see the point of a 5+MP camera on a phone that lacks a flash). When you get into the smartphone market, WinMo and possibly some Android devices--not sure on these, because I haven't done much research--, unbranded, can be pretty pricey (take the somewhat-antiquated Xperia X1 by way of example--I'm a bit out of the loop on more recent samples), and boast features that domestic handsets can't match for their OS--a given that the European market generally tends to get the better hardware and software than we get in North America, given the tendency for pushing customization and such.
Can't you just debrand the phone? It was awlays quite straightforward with Symbian devices. As far as "skyrocketing you into another price bracket"...OTOH you can choose more affordable models and get cheaper plan/prepaid (yeah, I know, US specifics)
De-branding gets down to desire, and there's always the risk of your PC writing a 0 where there's supposed to be a 1 and bricking the device...it scares a lot of people off, even though it's more or less a freak accident. Then there's WinMo devices which are a little bit trickier, and Blackberry devices that I vaguely understand, let alone understanding the undoing of the branding.
So far as going with less expensive models and whatnot, you're going with fewer features, particularly here in the states; hell, I've seen a prepaid phone that not only had no camera, you couldn't use MMS with it--absurd in this day in age, look at how many were up in arms when the original iPhone wasn't MMS ready. If the phone doesn't have a good amount of oomph to begin with, what's the point?
I love everything about Android except one thing: Vendor/carrier OS upgrades.
Sadly, it's not just Android that gets wrecked by Vendor/Carrier tweaks; and the larger the carrier is, the worse it seems to get. Symbian devices that are/were carried by AT&T, for example, are incredibly gimped, and that made me very sad--unfortunately, buying un-branded, non-locked (for the GSM/UMTS crowd, not entirely up on how it goes for CDMA folks) devices skyrockets you into another price bracket, unless you've got the desire to work with 3rd party homebrew software, or money to shell out...it's gonna suck.
If you then make it a condition that no AG or politician that may be under some kind of investigation can perform essential functions of their office (and for AG, investigations & prosecutions are a major part),...
This isn't a case of may be under investigation--this guy is under investigation, and this is a critical difference. If it were limited to, say, wrongdoing by someone in the AG's office, not the AG himself, it would be a wholly different matter.
then you've effectively shut down nearly all oversight and curbs on corruption.
Thus why Special (or Independent) Prosecutors exist; and in this instance, this manner of party could be selected by the PA Legislature to remove all doubt that s/he is tainted by the AGs office. There are safeguards for this sort of thing, it's fairly difficult to think that a large number of persons, even if the Legislature is heavily in favour of his party, would blithely ignore ethics to ensure it all goes smoothly for the party.
Why does it seem like every time a conservative, with no clear and/or credible evidence of any wrongdoing on his part regarding the investigation in question,
Party affiliation aside, the fact is if the evidence were either clear OR credible, the need for an extensive investigation is obviated; that's the point of an investigation is to obtain clear and/or credible evidence to move to the courts. And in any case, once the spotlight turns significantly, for an official in any position of trust or authority on a matter--whether an Attorney General, a judge, or a Chief Executive--recusal is proper even if only to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. When it looks like you might be hiding something, the fact is, that's what the court of public opinion is going to arrive at. Take the case of Rod Blagojevich, for example; to be technical, he was impeached by the Illinois House twice (a technicality of the Senate not being able to try after the first, due to the end of the term; this required the articles be re-presented by the new House)--the votes to impeach, and the vote to remove, were overwhelming in their majority, with few people even in his own party, whether elected officials or common folk being on his side. It's not always about party lines, as you indicate, particularly when you're using your position to cover things up.
There's a larger problem with the whole thing, though; he is being investigated, and yet he is issuing a subpoena related, possibly, to that investigation. There's only a few possible motives for him doing such a thing, and not many of them are to help along the investigation of himself. Thus why independent prosecutors exist, and should be used for this sort of thing; the investigation of Clinton is about the closest situation I can think of at the moment--his AG couldn't be in on it because he's a Cabinet member, appointed by and serving at the leisure of the President--thus, easily influenced by him, making him possibly ineffective at the job.
It won't impinge free speech, but eventually it all gets unsealed, and their identities go public for anyone who can fill out a FOIA request to find--and being that the Library of Congress is now archiving tweets, there's no way to guarantee that something that was said previously (even if the accounts never get used again) won't someday come back to bite them in the ass. Thus, this whole thing creates a bit of a sticky situation.
"So fell Lord Perth...and the countryside did shake with that thunder."