Content Specific Camcorder Jamming for Digital Projectors Requested ATP funds: $2,000 K Cinea plans a two-year project to develop and test prototype technology for distorting unauthorized recordings of digital movies without affecting human visual perception of the original version. Based on a previous feasibility study, the company will modify the timing and modulation of the light used to create the displayed image such that frame-based capture by recording devices is distorted.
Next year they will probably give a grant to the camera manufacturers to develop technology that will defeat this. Really... where does the NIST get off on taking sides in a political issue like this. Let the movie companies worry about copy protection, and don't spend my tax money on it.
46.2-910. Motorcyclist to wear helmets, etc.; certain sales prohibited; penalty.
A. Every person operating a motorcycle shall wear a face shield, safety glasses or goggles, or have his motorcycle equipped with safety glass or a windshield at all times while operating the vehicle, and operators and any passengers thereon shall wear protective helmets.
That's nothing... some other Virginia laws of note:
18.2-361. Crimes against nature.
A. If any person carnally knows in any manner any brute animal, or carnally knows any male or female person by the anus or by or with the mouth, or voluntarily submits to such carnal knowledge, he or she shall be guilty of a Class 6 felony, except as provided in subsection B.
This means that oral or anal sex between consenting adults is illegal. About 25 states have similar laws.
18.2-322. Expectorating in public places.
No person shall spit, expectorate, or deposit any sputum, saliva, mucus, or any form of saliva or sputum upon the floor, stairways, or upon any part of any public building or place where the public assemble, or upon the floor of any part of any public conveyance, or upon any sidewalk abutting on any public street, alley or lane of any town or city.
Any person violating any provision of this section shall be guilty of a Class 4 misdemeanor.
18.2-344. Fornication.
Any person, not being married, who voluntarily shall have sexual intercourse with any other person, shall be guilty of fornication, punishable as a Class 4 misdemeanor.
Christian bias: 5.1-136. Free passes or reduced rates.
No air carrier subject to the provisions of this chapter shall, directly or indirectly, issue or give any free ticket, free pass or free transportation for passengers, but nothing in this section shall apply (1) to the carriage, storage or handling of property free or at reduced rates, when such rates have been authorized or prescribed by the Commission for the United States, state or municipal governments, or for charitable purposes or to or from fairs and expositions for exhibition thereat, or (2) to the free carriage of homeless and destitute persons and the necessary agents employed in such transportation, or (3) to mileage, excursion or commutation passenger tickets.
Nor shall anything in this section be construed to prohibit any air carrier from giving reduced rates or free passage to ministers of religion, or regular traveling secretaries of the Young Men's Christian Association or Young Women's Christian Association, whose duties require regular travel in supervising and directing Young Men's Christian or Young Women's Christian Association work, secretaries of duly organized religious work, or to indigent persons, or to inmates of the Confederate homes or State homes for disabled soldiers and sailors, or to disabled soldiers and sailors, including those about to enter, and those returning home after discharge; nor from giving free carriage to its own officers, employees, and members of their families, representatives of the press and members of the Department of State Police or to any other person or persons to whom the giving of such free carriage is not otherwise prohibited by the law; nor to prevent the principal officers of any air carrier from exchanging passes or tickets with other air carriers of any air, motor vehicle, steamship, or electric railway companies for their officers, employees and members of their families.
18.2-314. Failing to secure medical attention for injured child.
Any parent or other person having custody of a minor child which child shows evidence of need for medical attention as the result of physical injury inflicted by an act of any member of the household, whether the injury was intentional or unintentional, who knowingly fails or refuses to secure prompt and adequate medical attention, or who conspires to prevent the securing of such attention, for such minor child, shall be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor; provided, however, that any parent or other person having custody of a minor child that is being furnished Christian Science treatment by a duly accredited Christian Science practitioner shall not, for that reason alone, be considered in violation of this section.
So, in Virginia, it's OK to let your kids die from preventable infections, so long as you have some Christian voodoo doctor pray over them.
There are plenty of other fucked up laws that need to be repealed. This is just a taste.
I've had worse. I had some guy call me, thinking my company was involved with a certain product just because I mentioned that product in an email to a list, and forgot to remove my business sig block. My message was of a general nature, I have no idea how he got the idea that he had ordered said product from me.
The receptionist called my office and said "Theres some guy on the phone ranting about something I can't understand, but he wants to talk to you". After I tried to explain to him what was going on, and he tried to get me to sell him some hardware, he hung up on me and called the receptionist back, wanting to talk to someone else.
Virginia: 18.2-422. Prohibition of wearing of masks in certain places; exceptions.
It shall be unlawful for any person over sixteen years of age while wearing any mask, hood or other device whereby a substantial portion of the face is hidden or covered so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, to be or appear in any public place, or upon any private property in this Commonwealth without first having obtained from the owner or tenant thereof consent to do so in writing. However, the provisions of this section shall not apply to persons (i) wearing traditional holiday costumes; (ii) engaged in professions, trades, employment or other activities and wearing protective masks which are deemed necessary for the physical safety of the wearer or other persons; (iii) engaged in any bona fide theatrical production or masquerade ball; or (iv) wearing a mask, hood or other device for bona fide medical reasons upon the advice of a licensed physician or osteopath and carrying on his person an affidavit from the physician or osteopath specifying the medical necessity for wearing the device and the date on which the wearing of the device will no longer be necessary and providing a brief description of the device. The violation of any provisions of this section shall constitute a Class 6 felony.
18.2-422. Prohibition of wearing of masks in certain places; exceptions.
It shall be unlawful for any person over sixteen years of age while wearing any mask, hood or other device whereby a substantial portion of the face is hidden or covered so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, to be or appear in any public place, or upon any private property in this Commonwealth without first having obtained from the owner or tenant thereof consent to do so in writing. However, the provisions of this section shall not apply to persons (i) wearing traditional holiday costumes; (ii) engaged in professions, trades, employment or other activities and wearing protective masks which are deemed necessary for the physical safety of the wearer or other persons; (iii) engaged in any bona fide theatrical production or masquerade ball; or (iv) wearing a mask, hood or other device for bona fide medical reasons upon the advice of a licensed physician or osteopath and carrying on his person an affidavit from the physician or osteopath specifying the medical necessity for wearing the device and the date on which the wearing of the device will no longer be necessary and providing a brief description of the device. The violation of any provisions of this section shall constitute a Class 6 felony.
It's illegal in most states to conceal your face in public, i.e. by wearing a mask, unless your work dictates it, or it is a "recognized holiday", whatever that means.
I have found Mozilla to be quite sluggish in many areas.
Me too. It's mostly UI slowness. When I type into the URL box, I don't expect latency!
Another thing is the terribly jerky scrolling.
I use Opera. Main things I Opera has that Mozilla lacks, IMO... UI snappiness, smooth scrolling, and the ability to magnify web pages. Don't reply that you can change the font sizes of the web pages, unless you have used Opera's magnify, you won't know what I mean. Opera changes not just the fonts, but magnifies *everything*... graphics, flash plugins, anything. This is a real boon for accessibility, or for people like me that have good vision but hate to squint to read tiny web pages.
Wow, thanks for clearing that up. I knew I wasn't dreaming it:)
However, most programs still don't seem to implement a seperate copy/paste from the selection copy/paste. Gnome-terminal for example, only has a paste menu command, not a copy, mixing the two types...
Aren't there still a lot of problems with this then? Your use of the past tense makes it sound like all the bugs are fixed.
Do you forsee an end to the "write once sell many" paradigm of commodity software? Red Hat's stated business goal is to turn a "multibillion dollar software industry into a multimillion dollar one". Are the days of getting rich by resting on one's laurels and selling licenses over?
Yeah, they offered me some subscription to some lame Windows magazine, I stuck their card in an envelope and wrote them a letter demanding a refund instead.
I'm still waiting, CMP, if you are reading this.:)
Although, BYTE had been degenerating into a Java and buzzword circle jerk, with few interesting articles.
It interesting to see mature responses to differences of opinions with your employers. Other recent high profile employer/employee splits *cough*bero*cough* showed a real lack of maturity.
Perens is a model of how to influence people to your point of view, and it sure doesn't involve leaving in a hissy fit when your companies views diverge from your views.
Then maybe you can call it lots of bugs in lots of apps. It used to be worse I think... it seems like they are fixing it slowly. Copying text out of the Sylpheed preview pane only works sometimes.. and that's a standard GTK app. There are more examples of this bugginess I'm sure.
Another issue is two button mice... A new user may not enable 3 button emulation, and even if they do, clicking both buttons at the same time isn't exactly an easy feat... I myself wind up right or left clicking sometimes and I have used Linux for several years now. Wheel mice are also problematic for new users, inadvertantly pasting when they try to scroll...
I don't have all the answers. The problem does seem to be getting better, but I don't think we can write it off as a non-problem either.
I'm not saying Windows is better... when I wind up using a coworker's Windows computer, I am annoyed by all the extra steps too...
When you say there is a standardized interface, there is sorta. Cut/copy/paste still act differently in different applications. Other apps have to (or do, even if they don't have to) break the X rule of "only one thing can ever be highlighted at a time system-wide"... which leads to more confusion.
Just because it doesn't work like you expected it to, doesn't mean it's wrong
It is less flexible though, having no way to "trust" the clipboard will retain its contents. If I accidentally highlight a single character, it's gone...
Not a matter of right or wrong, just talking about ways it could possibly be improved.
I'd settle for a consistant way to do it that works 100% of the time though.
If you're more inclined to use the ctrl-c ctrl-v methodoly
Yeah, but it's not consistant. Users should not need to know which GUI toolkit their app was coded in. There are also consistancy problems, some apps try to implement their own way of doing the clipboard, and it's entirely possible to have something on the "clipboard" (for lack of a better word) that is different depending on where you paste.
And then there is the issue of doing on-the-fly text replacements. As far as I know, there is no way to copy some text, highlight other text, and paste, replacing the other text with the text you copied. This sounds like something that doesn't come up much, but it really does.
Suppose I want to copy a URL and open it in a browser window that already has a URL in the Address box. In Windows, one would just double click the old URL to highlight it, then paste the new one which deletes the old one. Another way would be to double click the old URL to highlight it, then hit backspace to delete it, then paste the new one, but you can't do that, because that copies the old URL.
So... I usually just resort to opening a fresh browser window, or clicking at the end of the old URL and holding down backspace. Maybe I am just an idiot, but this seems stupid.
I'm not saying cut/copy/paste should act exactly like windows, but it should at least be consistant, which it really isn't. I've adjusted to using X and various apps now, so I don't notice it as much anymore, but when I first switched from Windows, it was one of the most frustrating things I had to deal with.
but anyone with a clue will not buy a MX chipset or a stripped down ATI product.
There we go again with the elitist crap. Have you ever considered that it's possible to have a clue, and at the same time, choose not to get the highest end video card? Not everyone thinks games are the most important part of "computing".
The BitKeeper license is simply the logical extension of the GPL viral clause. Instead of coercing people to only use free software bitkeeper forces you to only use their software.
What the hell are you talking about? You don't even have to agree to the GPL to use GPL software! The GPL only comes into play if you want to distribute a work based from the source code of a GPL program.
You can even use stuff like gcc to produce code under whatever license you like, as you own the output you cause a GPL program to create (in all but a couple minor exceptional circumstances, where the program outputs parts of its own source code).
That's a very progressive policy. I know they have more patience than I do. When one of the employees at work was completely using 100% of our T1, I just blocked his Kazaa port completely. Fuck em... You are supposed to work at work (or post on Slashdot), not download movies at 170KB/Sec, killing the bandwidth for everyone else.
I think selective blocking abusers isn't too bad a policy.
P2P clients are just so incredibly wasteful, and have so many connections going at a time that it's hard to throttle them or limit their bandwidth.. I think it's incredibly shitty that this Kazaa2 will maliciously circumvent bandwidth limits... at what point does something cease to be legitimate traffic and become more like a virus?
That's sort of how committees and subcommittees work. Generally, if you really don't like a law, you need to catch it while it is still in subcommittee or committee and try to present your case there. Often these meetings are open to the public (at least on the state level, not sure about federal), and you might get to make your case if time allows. Attending these meetings is also a good way to catch your rep and talk to him in the hall afterward, or to get the scoop by listening to the smalltalk before and after the meetings.
You can get involved as you want to usually, it just takes the time and effort.
I agree with you, this is a foreign policy issue, and it's probable that the FBI overstepped their bounds. My reply to this story was early after it was posted, with nearly all the other replies being "bash america" posts that made this sound like these guy were innocent martyrs for some cause. The huge bias and blanket statements of the submitted story probably had a lot to do with this. My post may seem more dismissive now that the discussion is more balanced.
Funny that the people who were railing blindly against this were talking about freedom, but so easily led around by the nose from a single, highly biased snippet.
Slashdot Mirror
They would likely be chemically extracted after harvesting.
:)
Of course, this will probably produce tons of toxic wastes for the environmentalists to bitch about. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Maglite flashlight... steamy bathroom..... naked Taco... heh Thanks... I won't be sleeping tonight.
Content Specific Camcorder Jamming for Digital Projectors
Requested ATP funds: $2,000 K
Cinea plans a two-year project to develop and test prototype technology for distorting unauthorized recordings of digital movies without affecting human visual perception of the original version. Based on a previous feasibility study, the company will modify the timing and modulation of the light used to create the displayed image such that frame-based capture by recording devices is distorted.
Next year they will probably give a grant to the camera manufacturers to develop technology that will defeat this. Really... where does the NIST get off on taking sides in a political issue like this. Let the movie companies worry about copy protection, and don't spend my tax money on it.
46.2-910. Motorcyclist to wear helmets, etc.; certain sales prohibited; penalty.
A. Every person operating a motorcycle shall wear a face shield, safety glasses or goggles, or have his motorcycle equipped with safety glass or a windshield at all times while operating the vehicle, and operators and any passengers thereon shall wear protective helmets.
Seams to be a terrible law to me.
That's nothing... some other Virginia laws of note:
18.2-361. Crimes against nature.
A. If any person carnally knows in any manner any brute animal, or carnally knows any male or female person by the anus or by or with the mouth, or voluntarily submits to such carnal knowledge, he or she shall be guilty of a Class 6 felony, except as provided in subsection B.
This means that oral or anal sex between consenting adults is illegal. About 25 states have similar laws.
18.2-322. Expectorating in public places.
No person shall spit, expectorate, or deposit any sputum, saliva, mucus, or any form of saliva or sputum upon the floor, stairways, or upon any part of any public building or place where the public assemble, or upon the floor of any part of any public conveyance, or upon any sidewalk abutting on any public street, alley or lane of any town or city.
Any person violating any provision of this section shall be guilty of a Class 4 misdemeanor.
18.2-344. Fornication.
Any person, not being married, who voluntarily shall have sexual intercourse with any other person, shall be guilty of fornication, punishable as a Class 4 misdemeanor.
Christian bias:
5.1-136. Free passes or reduced rates.
No air carrier subject to the provisions of this chapter shall, directly or indirectly, issue or give any free ticket, free pass or free transportation for passengers, but nothing in this section shall apply (1) to the carriage, storage or handling of property free or at reduced rates, when such rates have been authorized or prescribed by the Commission for the United States, state or municipal governments, or for charitable purposes or to or from fairs and expositions for exhibition thereat, or (2) to the free carriage of homeless and destitute persons and the necessary agents employed in such transportation, or (3) to mileage, excursion or commutation passenger tickets.
Nor shall anything in this section be construed to prohibit any air carrier from giving reduced rates or free passage to ministers of religion, or regular traveling secretaries of the Young Men's Christian Association or Young Women's Christian Association, whose duties require regular travel in supervising and directing Young Men's Christian or Young Women's Christian Association work, secretaries of duly organized religious work, or to indigent persons, or to inmates of the Confederate homes or State homes for disabled soldiers and sailors, or to disabled soldiers and sailors, including those about to enter, and those returning home after discharge; nor from giving free carriage to its own officers, employees, and members of their families, representatives of the press and members of the Department of State Police or to any other person or persons to whom the giving of such free carriage is not otherwise prohibited by the law; nor to prevent the principal officers of any air carrier from exchanging passes or tickets with other air carriers of any air, motor vehicle, steamship, or electric railway companies for their officers, employees and members of their families.
18.2-314. Failing to secure medical attention for injured child.
Any parent or other person having custody of a minor child which child shows evidence of need for medical attention as the result of physical injury inflicted by an act of any member of the household, whether the injury was intentional or unintentional, who knowingly fails or refuses to secure prompt and adequate medical attention, or who conspires to prevent the securing of such attention, for such minor child, shall be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor; provided, however, that any parent or other person having custody of a minor child that is being furnished Christian Science treatment by a duly accredited Christian Science practitioner shall not, for that reason alone, be considered in violation of this section.
So, in Virginia, it's OK to let your kids die from preventable infections, so long as you have some Christian voodoo doctor pray over them.
There are plenty of other fucked up laws that need to be repealed. This is just a taste.
I've had worse. I had some guy call me, thinking my company was involved with a certain product just because I mentioned that product in an email to a list, and forgot to remove my business sig block. My message was of a general nature, I have no idea how he got the idea that he had ordered said product from me.
The receptionist called my office and said "Theres some guy on the phone ranting about something I can't understand, but he wants to talk to you". After I tried to explain to him what was going on, and he tried to get me to sell him some hardware, he hung up on me and called the receptionist back, wanting to talk to someone else.
Some people are just stupid beyond belief.
Virginia:
18.2-422. Prohibition of wearing of masks in certain places; exceptions.
It shall be unlawful for any person over sixteen years of age while wearing any mask, hood or other device whereby a substantial portion of the face is hidden or covered so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, to be or appear in any public place, or upon any private property in this Commonwealth without first having obtained from the owner or tenant thereof consent to do so in writing. However, the provisions of this section shall not apply to persons (i) wearing traditional holiday costumes; (ii) engaged in professions, trades, employment or other activities and wearing protective masks which are deemed necessary for the physical safety of the wearer or other persons; (iii) engaged in any bona fide theatrical production or masquerade ball; or (iv) wearing a mask, hood or other device for bona fide medical reasons upon the advice of a licensed physician or osteopath and carrying on his person an affidavit from the physician or osteopath specifying the medical necessity for wearing the device and the date on which the wearing of the device will no longer be necessary and providing a brief description of the device. The violation of any provisions of this section shall constitute a Class 6 felony.
18.2-422. Prohibition of wearing of masks in certain places; exceptions.
It shall be unlawful for any person over sixteen years of age while wearing any mask, hood or other device whereby a substantial portion of the face is hidden or covered so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, to be or appear in any public place, or upon any private property in this Commonwealth without first having obtained from the owner or tenant thereof consent to do so in writing. However, the provisions of this section shall not apply to persons (i) wearing traditional holiday costumes; (ii) engaged in professions, trades, employment or other activities and wearing protective masks which are deemed necessary for the physical safety of the wearer or other persons; (iii) engaged in any bona fide theatrical production or masquerade ball; or (iv) wearing a mask, hood or other device for bona fide medical reasons upon the advice of a licensed physician or osteopath and carrying on his person an affidavit from the physician or osteopath specifying the medical necessity for wearing the device and the date on which the wearing of the device will no longer be necessary and providing a brief description of the device. The violation of any provisions of this section shall constitute a Class 6 felony.
It's illegal in most states to conceal your face in public, i.e. by wearing a mask, unless your work dictates it, or it is a "recognized holiday", whatever that means.
I have found Mozilla to be quite sluggish in many areas.
Me too. It's mostly UI slowness. When I type into the URL box, I don't expect latency!
Another thing is the terribly jerky scrolling.
I use Opera. Main things I Opera has that Mozilla lacks, IMO... UI snappiness, smooth scrolling, and the ability to magnify web pages. Don't reply that you can change the font sizes of the web pages, unless you have used Opera's magnify, you won't know what I mean. Opera changes not just the fonts, but magnifies *everything*... graphics, flash plugins, anything. This is a real boon for accessibility, or for people like me that have good vision but hate to squint to read tiny web pages.
Wow, thanks for clearing that up. I knew I wasn't dreaming it :)
However, most programs still don't seem to implement a seperate copy/paste from the selection copy/paste. Gnome-terminal for example, only has a paste menu command, not a copy, mixing the two types...
Aren't there still a lot of problems with this then? Your use of the past tense makes it sound like all the bugs are fixed.
Do you forsee an end to the "write once sell many" paradigm of commodity software? Red Hat's stated business goal is to turn a "multibillion dollar software industry into a multimillion dollar one". Are the days of getting rich by resting on one's laurels and selling licenses over?
Yeah, they offered me some subscription to some lame Windows magazine, I stuck their card in an envelope and wrote them a letter demanding a refund instead.
:)
I'm still waiting, CMP, if you are reading this.
Although, BYTE had been degenerating into a Java and buzzword circle jerk, with few interesting articles.
It interesting to see mature responses to differences of opinions with your employers. Other recent high profile employer/employee splits *cough*bero*cough* showed a real lack of maturity.
Perens is a model of how to influence people to your point of view, and it sure doesn't involve leaving in a hissy fit when your companies views diverge from your views.
Didn't you see Sneakers?
Then maybe you can call it lots of bugs in lots of apps. It used to be worse I think... it seems like they are fixing it slowly. Copying text out of the Sylpheed preview pane only works sometimes.. and that's a standard GTK app. There are more examples of this bugginess I'm sure.
Another issue is two button mice... A new user may not enable 3 button emulation, and even if they do, clicking both buttons at the same time isn't exactly an easy feat... I myself wind up right or left clicking sometimes and I have used Linux for several years now. Wheel mice are also problematic for new users, inadvertantly pasting when they try to scroll...
I don't have all the answers. The problem does seem to be getting better, but I don't think we can write it off as a non-problem either.
I'm not saying Windows is better... when I wind up using a coworker's Windows computer, I am annoyed by all the extra steps too...
When you say there is a standardized interface, there is sorta. Cut/copy/paste still act differently in different applications. Other apps have to (or do, even if they don't have to) break the X rule of "only one thing can ever be highlighted at a time system-wide"... which leads to more confusion.
Just because it doesn't work like you expected it to, doesn't mean it's wrong
It is less flexible though, having no way to "trust" the clipboard will retain its contents. If I accidentally highlight a single character, it's gone...
Not a matter of right or wrong, just talking about ways it could possibly be improved.
I'd settle for a consistant way to do it that works 100% of the time though.
If you're more inclined to use the ctrl-c ctrl-v methodoly
Yeah, but it's not consistant. Users should not need to know which GUI toolkit their app was coded in. There are also consistancy problems, some apps try to implement their own way of doing the clipboard, and it's entirely possible to have something on the "clipboard" (for lack of a better word) that is different depending on where you paste.
And then there is the issue of doing on-the-fly text replacements. As far as I know, there is no way to copy some text, highlight other text, and paste, replacing the other text with the text you copied. This sounds like something that doesn't come up much, but it really does.
Suppose I want to copy a URL and open it in a browser window that already has a URL in the Address box. In Windows, one would just double click the old URL to highlight it, then paste the new one which deletes the old one. Another way would be to double click the old URL to highlight it, then hit backspace to delete it, then paste the new one, but you can't do that, because that copies the old URL.
So... I usually just resort to opening a fresh browser window, or clicking at the end of the old URL and holding down backspace. Maybe I am just an idiot, but this seems stupid.
I'm not saying cut/copy/paste should act exactly like windows, but it should at least be consistant, which it really isn't. I've adjusted to using X and various apps now, so I don't notice it as much anymore, but when I first switched from Windows, it was one of the most frustrating things I had to deal with.
but anyone with a clue will not buy a MX chipset or a stripped down ATI product.
There we go again with the elitist crap. Have you ever considered that it's possible to have a clue, and at the same time, choose not to get the highest end video card? Not everyone thinks games are the most important part of "computing".
The BitKeeper license is simply the logical extension of the GPL viral clause. Instead of coercing people to only use free software bitkeeper forces you to only use their software.
What the hell are you talking about? You don't even have to agree to the GPL to use GPL software! The GPL only comes into play if you want to distribute a work based from the source code of a GPL program.
You can even use stuff like gcc to produce code under whatever license you like, as you own the output you cause a GPL program to create (in all but a couple minor exceptional circumstances, where the program outputs parts of its own source code).
Because of unfair playing conditions, and also because he didn't have access to DB before the match.
Why would this matter? You are either able to beat arbitrary opponent "n" or you aren't. Sounds like a bunch of whining to me.
That's a very progressive policy. I know they have more patience than I do. When one of the employees at work was completely using 100% of our T1, I just blocked his Kazaa port completely. Fuck em... You are supposed to work at work (or post on Slashdot), not download movies at 170KB/Sec, killing the bandwidth for everyone else.
I think selective blocking abusers isn't too bad a policy.
P2P clients are just so incredibly wasteful, and have so many connections going at a time that it's hard to throttle them or limit their bandwidth.. I think it's incredibly shitty that this Kazaa2 will maliciously circumvent bandwidth limits... at what point does something cease to be legitimate traffic and become more like a virus?
That's sort of how committees and subcommittees work. Generally, if you really don't like a law, you need to catch it while it is still in subcommittee or committee and try to present your case there. Often these meetings are open to the public (at least on the state level, not sure about federal), and you might get to make your case if time allows. Attending these meetings is also a good way to catch your rep and talk to him in the hall afterward, or to get the scoop by listening to the smalltalk before and after the meetings.
You can get involved as you want to usually, it just takes the time and effort.
I agree with you, this is a foreign policy issue, and it's probable that the FBI overstepped their bounds. My reply to this story was early after it was posted, with nearly all the other replies being "bash america" posts that made this sound like these guy were innocent martyrs for some cause. The huge bias and blanket statements of the submitted story probably had a lot to do with this. My post may seem more dismissive now that the discussion is more balanced.
Funny that the people who were railing blindly against this were talking about freedom, but so easily led around by the nose from a single, highly biased snippet.