As a music lover, you have access to more and better music than ever before, largely thanks to the Internet. No one is forcing you to listen to that mainstream crap, you know.
If the RIAA gets their way with SoundExchange, you will no longer have net radio that's not "mainstream" in the US. You will still be able to download things yourself and make random playlists, but the magic of just tuning in and being offered interesting new music will go down the tubes. This is the only way the RIAA will be able to survive and force their goofey subscription model on everyone. It did not work in a free market.
Sure, all of us would like the market to more effectively reward the people actually creating music. Because recording and distribution are now dirt cheap, a free market would do just that.
The problem is that SoundExchange is extending the dead hand of their government granted Radio Empire into the future with bad laws. If existing agreements are not honored, the whole system collapses into a RIAA farce, which will reward artist just as well as the old farce did. That's what they are talking about here:
The important thing to remember, both stations stressed, is that they have no problems paying the royalties if so compelled provided SoundExchange asks reasonable rates and existing agreements are understood.
My hope is that if SoundExchange comes to us requesting royalties for Artist A on Label Z, our contract in place with Label Z would take us out of any obligations, says Wohlstadler.
The way the law is written, that is anything but sure. If participation in SoundExchange is compulsory, it's game over for free internet radio. The fees will bankrupt most stations and the RIAA will once again be the only promotion vehicle around. If fees can't be paid directly to publishers, artists will be stuck with the same dirtbags that have ripped them in the past. Is there anyone who trusts big media with accounting anymore? Sound Exchange is blatant and unAmerican corporate welfare.
An AC, who probably works for M$, expresses shock and outrage that anyone would suggest mail list astroturfing:
I couldn't believe someone would be actually capable of trying to pin *this* on Microsoft
Why not? M$ has a long history of GPL FUD and a large part of it is to tell people to use BSD instead. Theo's missive clearly expressed exasperation with mail list trolls who may very well be M$ agents. Everything free is a M$ target and that includes BSD. As you might gather from the court document I linked to above, there's nothing M$ likes better than to make their competitors fight each other.
Did someone from Microsoft piss on your flowers or kill your dog or something?
If you want a particular function, app, service, etc to be completely GPL, WRITE THE FUCKING THING YOURSELF!
That might not be so hard with free code sitting in front of you. That's the beauty of free software. As easy as it may be, it's a duplication of effort and it kind of makes the dual licensing look silly.
What exactly is a dual license if the GPL provisions don't apply or have force because of the BSD portion? There's a fundamental difference in licensing philosophy that can't be ironed out by using both. People who strongly believe in the gpl don't want people using their code the way bsd allows and will never be able to "give back" in any other way than with gpl'd code of their own.
At the same time, what's the big deal with people stripping out the bsd portion? If the bsd people are really OK with the software being distributed as binaries by people who will NEVER give back anything, why would they be so angry at people who will only give them gpl'd code?
It all looks like a tempest in a teapot from lists that have have been played by the usual suspects in Redmond. When someone is an implacable ass, there's often a reason.
GPL and BSD people can live and let live. While it might be argued that BSD code can be used directly by the enemies of software freedom, no one would seriously propose that either the BSD or GPL camp would like to eradicate or subjugate the other.
That's fun to imagine, but you know that no M$ employee could do something so out of bounds. We've seen the months of effort it takes to get approval for anything in the story of M$'s entry to web search and in Joe's Excel work. Both decisions were overseen by Bill Gates himself along with lots of other brass. We've also seen what happens to ordinary employees who write something wrong in their blog.
In this case, it's clearly a concerted effort. Weir points out similar outrageous and crazy behavior from M$ reps in several other parts of the world. The ballot stuffing, public official lobby, smear atacks, back room maneuvering and ooxml itself represent a desperate attempt to remain relevant in an increasingly standards based and free software world. They are pouring all of their effort and bile into it. Dealing with them is increasingly unpleasant and the backlash is growing.
Sure but nothing will actually support it, and those products that do support it will support it in a half-baked, crippled way. MS always used to make sure Word could read WordPerfect documents perfectly, but couldn't create them worth a darn. Expect this type of behavior to continue.
Office 2007 does not even have working support of older M$ formats. Footnote numbering is broken if you save OOXML to WORD.DOC and macros are broken between versions of Excel. I expect to hear similar things powerpoint and other formats as a few foolish people around me continue their Office 2007 trial. As usual, data goes in but does not come out and you can't really co-operate with people who are not on the same point release.
This is stunning behavior, even for M$. A reasonable XML format should support all previous version behavior perfectly because the internal representation does not have to change. The transition should be easier than any previous M$ Office "upgrade" but it is in fact worse than others. For all of their bluster, they have not lived up to the 6,000 pages of specs they are now trying to force on the world as an ISO standard. Un-Fucking-Believable.
There's been no established connection between GM crops and bee populations.
Oh, it's hard so say but there is evidence that's more convincing than cell phone towers.
bees eat pollen [which lack GM proteins]
Don't forget nectar, fruit juice and other stuff. They pollen for proteins, especially while "milking" to feed the queen, so any modified proteins will get into the population and effect the colony.
You don't need GM to kill bees anyway. Pesticides do the job too.
Mr. Ballmer said: 'Just tell me it's not Google,'' Lucovosky said in his statement. Lucovosky replied that he was joining Google. 'At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office,' Lucovosky recounted, adding that Ballmer then launched into a tirade about Google CEO Eric Schmidt. 'I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google.'
How many years do you think it will take before some court proves this was intentional?
I'm not sure how this is so scary. This is something that happens naturally, so it's presumably been going on since long before humans were around.
Intensive agriculture is the very antithesis of natural selection. Natural selection has given us cotton that bugs can eat and we can wear. GM is giving us cotton that bugs can't eat and there's evidence that we should not wear it either.
Harmful organisms we accidentally create may revert to harmless forms given normal evolutionary timeframes. Want to wait a few thousand years to find out?
Newer concerns are better written and documented here by a Monsanto whistle blower. We already know that the industry was sloppy because unapproved GM crops have contaminated the US rice supply. It may be that the people who worried about GM crops were right and evidence of genes crossing species is just one of the many things they feared. Genetic sequencing is new and bound to bring big surprises.
It's good practice to keep an open mind but be careful until you know things are safe. A couple of historical examples show how caution works and what industry does when it's not careful. People who hear about the use of lead and arsenic in paint and wallpaper often wonder how people could be so stupid as to have that kind of thing in their homes. The answer is that printers and painters overstepped their knowledge and embraced new toys that made them money. At the opposite end of the of caution is Rontgen, the discover of Xrays. He was very careful to shield all of his sources with lead bricks because he did not know what his newly created rays would do to him. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not die of cancer. People continued to expose themselves needlessly for half a century before sane practices were finally codified.
To speak of Vista's "failure" in the marketplace is desperately premature, if not inane.
A new OS or fork that fails to gain more than 4% of the user base in 9 months could only be considered a success in Redmond. We have already been through a Christmas and back to school sale. Why should next year be any different? M$ still thinks xbox and zune are competitive, so what do I know?
If you want to talk about desperate, think about M$'s position. Release a brand new OS and a brand new Office suit and then see no difference to your bottom line. See banks, airlines, hardware stores and others deploy rival software, "where it counts". See vendors sell the same rival software. Their software is buggy because they opted for the great content lockdown instead of taking care of things that mattered.
This discovery is unsetling and I hope that it's an error. There's already evidence that pesticide resistance from GM crops has turned up in weeds. Gene swapping in the wild might happen more often than we would like. Some of the unpleasant possibilities include food you can't eat, cotton you can't wear and weeds you can't get rid of.
Im someone who tends to see the world as a brittle shell over a twitching mass of sexual longings, and my games tend to devolve into love-dodecahedrons as everyone has had a passing moment with everyone else. It could easily be argued that Im not writing about everyone, but just myself.
Will people horde it underground? Will I be able to trade ETFs of it on the NYSE? Will the federal reserve bank be responsible for limiting the number of fibers laid in order to curb inflation?
People will and already do work on it's creation and storage. They are thwarted by incumbents and regulations.
People also trade it's value. This is how P2P works and it's infinitely more fair than any central exchange.
One of the requirements of money is that it is standardised across the economy.
There is no such thing as a standard store of value because each person has their own tastes. All that is really required is that everyone knows that others think the thing has value, which is why sea shells, gold and other useless things will do.
There's some sophistry going on here in calling the thing of value, "bandwith". What actually has value is the thing conveyed. That invites all sorts of idiotic comment from copyright warriors who still get their information from paper and other difficult places. Bandwith that has nothing at the end of it is worthless. Bandwith that ends at my hard drive might have something you want that can't be delivered by the creator without help. I might let you have it if you let me have something in return. That is a trade of stored value and it can motivate people to do things.
Of course, just like real currency, bandwith currency only works where there's freedom. If you and I are not free to trade things of value, neither of us will get what we want. We all live with fiat currency, and bandwith will be suppressed as surely as gold and precious metals are. Governments will not allow you to have a free store of value because fiat currency represents a substantial tax they are unwilling to give up.
You are a bandwidth sink... you're not part of a route to anywhere (for good reason). Any files sent to or "through" your house have to travel down your internet connection and then go right out the same line.
In a world of ends, one nowhere is as good as another.
The files sent to my house may indeed pass by my neighbors or you but not when they want them. You will have to give me something to make them available to you again. That something might be to store a little on your own. The combined bandwith of thousands of machines is far greater than any "source" site can deliver.
The unit used in trades like this is often called currency. It is a universally agreed on store of value, like gold. Each person may value the currency more or less but all know that others value.
The short version: your leet files make my wife happy.
offline update is terrific; its basically a script that wgets the patches directly from Microsoft,
The geinous of M$ can not be understated. Rather than let people share the burden of distributing their "patches" (efficiently)they will make everyone go to them. We have just seen how well they do at an easier task.
It won't be long before they only allow "authenticated" clients to download.
The contrast between this and the free software world could not be greater. Every gnu/linux distro has been easy to keep up today for the last ten years and there are verified mirrors everywhere. When you download a package from a mirror, you can md5 sum check it against the original source and most package managers do this automatically. M$ on the other hand, won't even let you distribute what they consider "free". Be wary when someone from M$ advocates BSD, love of your freedom is not the reason for their advice.
You people are stupid-crazy and M$ should spend their money on code. Even if I was Twitter, I would not play the game by your rules and no one else cares.
Vista is what it is, a bloated, DRM filled, resource hog designed to take more of your computer away from you and in exchange it gives you unrecognized drivers, unsupported software and nothing but aggravation.... It's just a matter of how long until Microsoft admits they've created a loser and perhaps we can get to real innovation.
Kind of sucks to be a game company at that rate. They get split down the middle. I wonder how their OpenGL and PS toolsets are coming along and if those will provide better payback. Perhaps Nvidia, Intel and ATI can publish and follow specs so free software makers can offer the best platform choices of all.
Why bother with that when their desktop is already part of a botnet? I'd hesitate to put anything sensitive on someone else's machine, but you are fooling yourself if you think an airline datamining it's passengers will make any difference in the overall lack corporate security. When you put it into an insecure OS, you should assume it's gone.
After we landed in Orlando I talked the flight crew into rebooting the entire system so I could take this picture.
Despite the hostile shake rattle and roll environment, you know they mostly reboot when they want to not at random. Notice how it was not a big deal for them to oblige the picture taker? They knew all of them would come back up.
Well twitter, I'm sure you'll find a way to blame this on Microsoft as well
I'm sure he'll be right again. It only takes a decade or so for M$'s email to spilled in court. You know, the kind of stuff Twitter routinely quotes, that makes you put your fingers in your ears and call people names because you don't have real answers.
I can't see how this could move forward unless the identities are revealed. How else are you going to serve a summons to "LawGuy69" and "LegallyBlonde11111one"? The laws regarding serving summons are pretty explicit.
From what the article said, there's a clear case of libel here. The remarks were untrue, malicious and there's considerable damage. It's surprising that people would take an internet forum attack seriously, but lawyers are slow learners. If the people responsible for that little fuck fest are unmasked, they are going to be made to pay. In cases like this, the damage is what counts even if it now looks foolish.
The unmasking should be easy, if StanfordTroll and friends really are law students. I doubt they have a botnet, so they should be easy enough to root out from records the ISPs keep. If they are not really students or are more sophisticated than average, there's a more interesting story here. I would not put it past either political party to engage in these kinds of attacks for political ends.
The rub is not the burning of the trolls but the lack of anonymity for whistle blowers and others actually reporting news that might embarrass the powers that be.
Slashdot Mirror
As a music lover, you have access to more and better music than ever before, largely thanks to the Internet. No one is forcing you to listen to that mainstream crap, you know.
If the RIAA gets their way with SoundExchange, you will no longer have net radio that's not "mainstream" in the US. You will still be able to download things yourself and make random playlists, but the magic of just tuning in and being offered interesting new music will go down the tubes. This is the only way the RIAA will be able to survive and force their goofey subscription model on everyone. It did not work in a free market.
Sure, all of us would like the market to more effectively reward the people actually creating music. Because recording and distribution are now dirt cheap, a free market would do just that.
The problem is that SoundExchange is extending the dead hand of their government granted Radio Empire into the future with bad laws. If existing agreements are not honored, the whole system collapses into a RIAA farce, which will reward artist just as well as the old farce did. That's what they are talking about here:
The way the law is written, that is anything but sure. If participation in SoundExchange is compulsory, it's game over for free internet radio. The fees will bankrupt most stations and the RIAA will once again be the only promotion vehicle around. If fees can't be paid directly to publishers, artists will be stuck with the same dirtbags that have ripped them in the past. Is there anyone who trusts big media with accounting anymore? Sound Exchange is blatant and unAmerican corporate welfare.
An AC, who probably works for M$, expresses shock and outrage that anyone would suggest mail list astroturfing:
I couldn't believe someone would be actually capable of trying to pin *this* on Microsoft
Why not? M$ has a long history of GPL FUD and a large part of it is to tell people to use BSD instead. Theo's missive clearly expressed exasperation with mail list trolls who may very well be M$ agents. Everything free is a M$ target and that includes BSD. As you might gather from the court document I linked to above, there's nothing M$ likes better than to make their competitors fight each other.
Did someone from Microsoft piss on your flowers or kill your dog or something?
M$ pisses on everything that's not M$.
If you want a particular function, app, service, etc to be completely GPL, WRITE THE FUCKING THING YOURSELF!
That might not be so hard with free code sitting in front of you. That's the beauty of free software. As easy as it may be, it's a duplication of effort and it kind of makes the dual licensing look silly.
What exactly is a dual license if the GPL provisions don't apply or have force because of the BSD portion? There's a fundamental difference in licensing philosophy that can't be ironed out by using both. People who strongly believe in the gpl don't want people using their code the way bsd allows and will never be able to "give back" in any other way than with gpl'd code of their own.
At the same time, what's the big deal with people stripping out the bsd portion? If the bsd people are really OK with the software being distributed as binaries by people who will NEVER give back anything, why would they be so angry at people who will only give them gpl'd code?
It all looks like a tempest in a teapot from lists that have have been played by the usual suspects in Redmond. When someone is an implacable ass, there's often a reason.
GPL and BSD people can live and let live. While it might be argued that BSD code can be used directly by the enemies of software freedom, no one would seriously propose that either the BSD or GPL camp would like to eradicate or subjugate the other.
Yes, it's a joke but it goes on too long to be funny.
That's fun to imagine, but you know that no M$ employee could do something so out of bounds. We've seen the months of effort it takes to get approval for anything in the story of M$'s entry to web search and in Joe's Excel work. Both decisions were overseen by Bill Gates himself along with lots of other brass. We've also seen what happens to ordinary employees who write something wrong in their blog.
In this case, it's clearly a concerted effort. Weir points out similar outrageous and crazy behavior from M$ reps in several other parts of the world. The ballot stuffing, public official lobby, smear atacks, back room maneuvering and ooxml itself represent a desperate attempt to remain relevant in an increasingly standards based and free software world. They are pouring all of their effort and bile into it. Dealing with them is increasingly unpleasant and the backlash is growing.
Sure but nothing will actually support it, and those products that do support it will support it in a half-baked, crippled way. MS always used to make sure Word could read WordPerfect documents perfectly, but couldn't create them worth a darn. Expect this type of behavior to continue.
Office 2007 does not even have working support of older M$ formats. Footnote numbering is broken if you save OOXML to WORD.DOC and macros are broken between versions of Excel. I expect to hear similar things powerpoint and other formats as a few foolish people around me continue their Office 2007 trial. As usual, data goes in but does not come out and you can't really co-operate with people who are not on the same point release.
This is stunning behavior, even for M$. A reasonable XML format should support all previous version behavior perfectly because the internal representation does not have to change. The transition should be easier than any previous M$ Office "upgrade" but it is in fact worse than others. For all of their bluster, they have not lived up to the 6,000 pages of specs they are now trying to force on the world as an ISO standard. Un-Fucking-Believable.
Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen, the discoverer of X-rays, died of carcinoma of the colon in 1923.
He was 78 years old and his cancer was not radiation induced. Those kinds of cancers were more common before refrigeration reduced the need for cured meats.
There's been no established connection between GM crops and bee populations.
Oh, it's hard so say but there is evidence that's more convincing than cell phone towers.
bees eat pollen [which lack GM proteins]
Don't forget nectar, fruit juice and other stuff. They pollen for proteins, especially while "milking" to feed the queen, so any modified proteins will get into the population and effect the colony.
You don't need GM to kill bees anyway. Pesticides do the job too.
Oh, they know it's a M$ born disease but they might not know exactly how it works or how to get rid of it.
On a side note, we can remember that Ballmer promised to bury Google. Remember?
How many years do you think it will take before some court proves this was intentional?
I'm not sure how this is so scary. This is something that happens naturally, so it's presumably been going on since long before humans were around.
Intensive agriculture is the very antithesis of natural selection. Natural selection has given us cotton that bugs can eat and we can wear. GM is giving us cotton that bugs can't eat and there's evidence that we should not wear it either.
Harmful organisms we accidentally create may revert to harmless forms given normal evolutionary timeframes. Want to wait a few thousand years to find out?
Weeds have already been given pesticide resistance through regular polenation and natural selection. This is bad enough because it defeats the purpose and there are plenty of studies that GM crops are harmful to wildlife, including mysteriously disappearing honey bees.
Newer concerns are better written and documented here by a Monsanto whistle blower. We already know that the industry was sloppy because unapproved GM crops have contaminated the US rice supply. It may be that the people who worried about GM crops were right and evidence of genes crossing species is just one of the many things they feared. Genetic sequencing is new and bound to bring big surprises.
It's good practice to keep an open mind but be careful until you know things are safe. A couple of historical examples show how caution works and what industry does when it's not careful. People who hear about the use of lead and arsenic in paint and wallpaper often wonder how people could be so stupid as to have that kind of thing in their homes. The answer is that printers and painters overstepped their knowledge and embraced new toys that made them money. At the opposite end of the of caution is Rontgen, the discover of Xrays. He was very careful to shield all of his sources with lead bricks because he did not know what his newly created rays would do to him. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not die of cancer. People continued to expose themselves needlessly for half a century before sane practices were finally codified.
To speak of Vista's "failure" in the marketplace is desperately premature, if not inane.
A new OS or fork that fails to gain more than 4% of the user base in 9 months could only be considered a success in Redmond. We have already been through a Christmas and back to school sale. Why should next year be any different? M$ still thinks xbox and zune are competitive, so what do I know?
If you want to talk about desperate, think about M$'s position. Release a brand new OS and a brand new Office suit and then see no difference to your bottom line. See banks, airlines, hardware stores and others deploy rival software, "where it counts". See vendors sell the same rival software. Their software is buggy because they opted for the great content lockdown instead of taking care of things that mattered.
Didn't I just read in the Slashdot Vista news earlier "The service pack is said to improve performance and stability, not to add features."
M$ often gives out contradictory statements. Their business model is as new feature free as Windoze itself.
This discovery is unsetling and I hope that it's an error. There's already evidence that pesticide resistance from GM crops has turned up in weeds. Gene swapping in the wild might happen more often than we would like. Some of the unpleasant possibilities include food you can't eat, cotton you can't wear and weeds you can't get rid of.
Breathless prose:
Yes, I'd say he was writing about himself.
Will people horde it underground? Will I be able to trade ETFs of it on the NYSE? Will the federal reserve bank be responsible for limiting the number of fibers laid in order to curb inflation?
People will and already do work on it's creation and storage. They are thwarted by incumbents and regulations.
People also trade it's value. This is how P2P works and it's infinitely more fair than any central exchange.
One of the requirements of money is that it is standardised across the economy.
There is no such thing as a standard store of value because each person has their own tastes. All that is really required is that everyone knows that others think the thing has value, which is why sea shells, gold and other useless things will do.
There's some sophistry going on here in calling the thing of value, "bandwith". What actually has value is the thing conveyed. That invites all sorts of idiotic comment from copyright warriors who still get their information from paper and other difficult places. Bandwith that has nothing at the end of it is worthless. Bandwith that ends at my hard drive might have something you want that can't be delivered by the creator without help. I might let you have it if you let me have something in return. That is a trade of stored value and it can motivate people to do things.
Of course, just like real currency, bandwith currency only works where there's freedom. If you and I are not free to trade things of value, neither of us will get what we want. We all live with fiat currency, and bandwith will be suppressed as surely as gold and precious metals are. Governments will not allow you to have a free store of value because fiat currency represents a substantial tax they are unwilling to give up.
You are a bandwidth sink... you're not part of a route to anywhere (for good reason). Any files sent to or "through" your house have to travel down your internet connection and then go right out the same line.
In a world of ends, one nowhere is as good as another.
The files sent to my house may indeed pass by my neighbors or you but not when they want them. You will have to give me something to make them available to you again. That something might be to store a little on your own. The combined bandwith of thousands of machines is far greater than any "source" site can deliver.
The unit used in trades like this is often called currency. It is a universally agreed on store of value, like gold. Each person may value the currency more or less but all know that others value.
The short version: your leet files make my wife happy.
offline update is terrific; its basically a script that wgets the patches directly from Microsoft,
The geinous of M$ can not be understated. Rather than let people share the burden of distributing their "patches" (efficiently)they will make everyone go to them. We have just seen how well they do at an easier task.
It won't be long before they only allow "authenticated" clients to download.
The contrast between this and the free software world could not be greater. Every gnu/linux distro has been easy to keep up today for the last ten years and there are verified mirrors everywhere. When you download a package from a mirror, you can md5 sum check it against the original source and most package managers do this automatically. M$ on the other hand, won't even let you distribute what they consider "free". Be wary when someone from M$ advocates BSD, love of your freedom is not the reason for their advice.
You people are stupid-crazy and M$ should spend their money on code. Even if I was Twitter, I would not play the game by your rules and no one else cares.
Vista is what it is, a bloated, DRM filled, resource hog designed to take more of your computer away from you and in exchange it gives you unrecognized drivers, unsupported software and nothing but aggravation. ... It's just a matter of how long until Microsoft admits they've created a loser and perhaps we can get to real innovation.
Kind of sucks to be a game company at that rate. They get split down the middle. I wonder how their OpenGL and PS toolsets are coming along and if those will provide better payback. Perhaps Nvidia, Intel and ATI can publish and follow specs so free software makers can offer the best platform choices of all.
what a great way to spy on naive commuters
Why bother with that when their desktop is already part of a botnet? I'd hesitate to put anything sensitive on someone else's machine, but you are fooling yourself if you think an airline datamining it's passengers will make any difference in the overall lack corporate security. When you put it into an insecure OS, you should assume it's gone.
I love this comment:
Despite the hostile shake rattle and roll environment, you know they mostly reboot when they want to not at random. Notice how it was not a big deal for them to oblige the picture taker? They knew all of them would come back up.
Well twitter, I'm sure you'll find a way to blame this on Microsoft as well
I'm sure he'll be right again. It only takes a decade or so for M$'s email to spilled in court. You know, the kind of stuff Twitter routinely quotes, that makes you put your fingers in your ears and call people names because you don't have real answers.
I can't see how this could move forward unless the identities are revealed. How else are you going to serve a summons to "LawGuy69" and "LegallyBlonde11111one"? The laws regarding serving summons are pretty explicit.
From what the article said, there's a clear case of libel here. The remarks were untrue, malicious and there's considerable damage. It's surprising that people would take an internet forum attack seriously, but lawyers are slow learners. If the people responsible for that little fuck fest are unmasked, they are going to be made to pay. In cases like this, the damage is what counts even if it now looks foolish.
The unmasking should be easy, if StanfordTroll and friends really are law students. I doubt they have a botnet, so they should be easy enough to root out from records the ISPs keep. If they are not really students or are more sophisticated than average, there's a more interesting story here. I would not put it past either political party to engage in these kinds of attacks for political ends.
The rub is not the burning of the trolls but the lack of anonymity for whistle blowers and others actually reporting news that might embarrass the powers that be.