If these students are standing on principle, why don't they use their real names? "Free speech" is the first amendment right not to be prosecuted by the government for your speech which is right I support. To be a member of any institution, you have to agree abide by their standards of conduct. Yale Law School is private institution can set any standard of conduct it deems appropriate and expell students who do not meet that standard of conduct.
Employers have the same right. These cowards making these slurs are hiding behind anonymity because they know no reputable law firm will hire people who say such things. The comments in question will get you fired if you make them at work. Educational institutions should have similar standards. To say otherwise, would mean you support the absolute right of professors to refer to black students as n****rs and be free from any sanction from the university.
The content of some of these posts is reprehensible. While I believe in free speech, AutoAdmit is behaving irresponsibly. It's clear many of these comments are by students. All universities have conduct codes that prohibit this type behavior. The administration at Yale should be reminding students that slandering other students is prohibited and will be dealt with harshly. If they can find any of students responsible, expelling them would probably put an end this end kind of conduct.
Unfortunately, it will likely take a lawsuit to get AutoAdmit reveal the ip addresses of the posters. Sadly, this kind of irresponsibility of AutoAdmit will likely lead to end of liability exemption for message board operators in the long run. How long to the daughter of Senator gets this kind of treatment and the Senator makes it a personal crusade to strip the exemption?
How does withdrawing a product from the marketplace constitute monopoly abuse?
It's monopoly maintenance. Monopolists are forbidden from making decisions with non-monopoly products that have the purpose of maintaining the monopoly on another product. Pulling a product, in this case Office, from the Mac platform with the intention of helping preserve the Windows monopoly is not a lawful action under US anti-trust laws.
Skype does not want wireless (or wired carriers for that matter) blocking their VoIP calls. This request is a warning to the wireless carriers that Skype will push for very disruptive regulatory changes if their traffic is blocked. While Skype likely has low probability of successfully lobbying the FCC on the matter, the impact to the carriers is huge so they likely won't want to gamble since call revenue lost to Skype traffic is only at least at the beginning is only a minor ammount.
Maybe now some of the Google is wonderful nonsense will stop. Censoring people on religious grounds qualifies as being evil in my book. Of course, after Google sold to out to please the Chinese government, it was clear Google had decided that greed was a better motive than not being evil.
Lack of appreciation or even awareness of the mission of the organization they work for is a disease not limited to University IT departments. Corporate IT departments have same affliction. Most IT departments do not do cost analysis on the impact on the organization as a whole of the their decisions. In this case, the IT department wanted to complete undermine the entire mission of the organization, dissemination of knowledge, by telling the professor not to teach something to his students in a misguided attempt to give a negligible boost to security. In addition to disrespecting the mission of the institution, they presumed the students are too dumb to use Google.
In corporate IT departments, this disease takes the form of security measures that cost far more in lost productivity than they save through better security. Sadly, executives don't ask what the productivity and other costs are to IT decisions and thus we left to suffer a waste of the shareholders money while IT departments run amok locking everything down to the point where no one can get any work done. In a well managed organization, security proposal would be rejected on face unless they had cogent analysis of all costs involved.
Apple was not obligated to provide updates to 802.11N so there is no revenue recognition issue. Everyone who bought the machine bought it under specs that said 802.11g. If Apple had claimed at the time the machines were sold that 802.11N would be enabled at a future date, then there would be an issue. Additionally, under this interpretation of SOX, Apple would have to hold back money on every sale of every piece of hardware as deferred revenue to pay for patches. Since Apple would already be holding back revenue as deferred revenue in case it needed to patch the drivers for security hole, it simply could used that money rather than charging users more. I think this SOX excuse is a smoke screen to justify grabbing an extra $5.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
I can not find the section of the Constitution that reserves the power to determine the definition militia to the federal government.
Then why doesn't the constitution say trained? They are not synonyms. I serious doubt you could find any military office who would say "well regulated" and "well trained" are semantically equivalent. Additionally, you haven't dealt with the militia term.
WMD is arbitrary distinction not found in the Constitution. Either 2nd amendment allows the government to make distinctions about weapons reasonable for civilian to own or it does not. Washington DC deciding that distinction is that single shot long barrel rifles are the only reasonable weapon is no more or less valid than your WMD distinction. The courts get to decide what a reasonable restriction is. Anyone who is not a trained Constitutional lawyer or jurist making declarations on what reasonable restrictions are especially when the Supreme Court has not ruled on the issue in 70 years is lacks credibility and shows a lot of hubris.
Under your view, anyone could own a F-16 with 2000 pound bombs. Any weapon that can owned by the government can (outside of government regulation) be owned by a civilian. Some weapons are too expensive for most civilians to own however the Larry Ellisons Bill Gates of the world could afford just about any weapon. Armed fighter planes is not an academic argument. Ellison owns and fliess a Russian fighter. The federal government required him to modify it so it could not carry any weapons.
Each state (and Washington DC) should able to interpret "well regulated militia" itself. A well regulated militia in Texas might be any private citizen wanting own a firearm. In New York, a well regulated militia might be the national guard only with no private ownership of firearms. If you want to want to own guns, you would have to live in a gun friendly state.
I think solves the underlying problem nicely. Firearms are a problem in major urban centers but not a big problem in rural states. Each state crafts its own rules. There will be states with tight rules and loose ones.
So government can not stop you from owning nuclear weapon? A nuclear device is an arm and if you have an absolute right to bear arms, you have a right to nuclear weapons. Not mention tanks, F16s, etc. I feel safer already.
Of course if we combine your view of an absolute right with originalist interpretation of the Constitution you only have a right to a musket but not a modern rifle. I don't see how an expansive (to modern weapons) absolute interpretation could not include nukes.
The reason your argument if flawed is there are no extra words in the Constitution. It's an extremely terse document and you are interpreting "well regulated militia" to mean nothing.
I agree that Apple is trying to stop people from running their supposedly open source OS on non-Apple hardware. Since locking the OS to Apple hardware is what they are trying to acheive, they should make that condition part of the license instead of adding some weenie intent based clause. Apple is trying to implictly add this condition so their marketing department can still claim Apple supports open source. This kind of duplicity makes me feel ill. Microsoft at least has courtesy not to try to deceive the public about the openness of their operating system.
Government spending does not increase the net wealth of the private sector. It may lead to a temporary increase in output (GDP). The increase in output is NOT an increase in wealth. If taxpayers use their loan for government in the form of lower taxes or any of their share of the possible increase in output (through higher real wages), to buy stuff like plasma TVs or cars instead of saving it, there is no increase in wealth.
If you invested the loan and received the exact same return as the government's interest expense, the present value of your lifetime resources is unchanged. Your returns would have to beat the government's interest rate to get ahead. For their to be wealth generation, tax payers on average would have to invest their loans and beat the government's interest rate. If you want to borrow money to invest, feel free to get a margin loan. The governmet should be forcing loans on us.
As long as the debt is outstanding, interest is owed on it. Your taxes pay to service that debt or in the case of Bush administration, issue more bonds to pay the interest which means even more taxes later. When you talk about growth, any reasonable analyis will separate growth due to the population growth (a rise in the full employment level in the economy in economist speak) and productivity growth. The cost providing government services is presumbably proportional to the population size so that economic growth due to population increasing is not going to solve an debt problem since the imbalance between government spending and government revenues will increase. Productivity growth is typically quite a small value (1% per year) and has been know to inexplicably disappear for decades, like 1970s. It's not possible ot get out a debt binge on productivity growth.
You are also making the false assumption that federal goverment will continue to be able to borrow money a favorable interest rates. Should the interest rates rise for any reason, the government's debt burden will become progressively more expensive
Fortunately, deficits affect a net surplus in the private sector
I have no idea what you talking about since you didn't say a surplus of what. It's a certainly not a surplus of investment as government spending completes with private investment. Basic economics: Y = C + I + G + NX. where Y is output (GDP), C is consumption, I is investment and G is government spending and NX is net exports. By boosting government spending which the Bush administration has done faster than than any administration since Johnson and his Great Society, private sector investment and and consumption has suffered as result. Granted, government spending may boost output but elasticity of ouput to government spending is less the one. The rest is coming out consumption or investment.
You could make the same wrong argument about personal debt if you have rising income. However, the interest still cuts againt the present value of your lifetime resources. The government has the same problem. Interest is a real expense and lower the present value of government resources causing either lower future spending or higher future taxes. There is no free lunch.
Your taxes are not lower. The Bush administration has failed to cut spending to pay their tax cuts and in fact has dramatically increased spending. Thus the present value of taxes you will pay over your lifetime has risen under the Bush administration since the 100s of billions of dollars of debt the Bush administration has run up will have to be paid from future taxes. You are not paying these taxes this year but you will have to pay them in the future. Ask any economist and they will tell that lowering taxes without cutting spending is an increase and not a reduction in your lifetime tax payments.
Bush has essentially given you a loan which will have to be paid back (with interest) by higher taxes in the future.
The Canadians are chickens at least when it comes to lumbar dispute. Canada is entitled to tariff US goods to compensate them for the lumbar issue. They never tried to collect it.
Should the US become a serial violator of WTO rules, either the US withdraws or the WTO collapses which is fine by me. I never liked the secret tribunals or the restriction that only governments can bring enforcement actions.
If the US insists on unfair trade practices against other countries, other countries can do the same to the US. There was a time where the economic might of the US could have prevented this from happening. Today US economy is being propped by foreign central banks holding large amounts of US government debt. Should these banks dump this debt or even just refuse to buy any more, the US economy goes into a tailspin as the dollar collapses and interest rates shoot up. Sadly reckless economic polices of the Bush administration, have turned the US into a paper tiger on the economic front.
The EU has data protection laws and should stick to them. The US shouldn't be able bully the rest of the world to ignoring its laws. If this shuts down transatlantic travel, so be it. EU should go a WTO tribunal and demand compensation over the any US fines or loss of revenue to its airlines. The Bush administration has given the finger to international standards and international law and will continue to do so until the other nations of world stand up for themselves
The only thing we know about the pirates is that they demand content when price = 0. Assuming there is any demand among pirates when price is greater than is zero is bogus. You would fail undergrad economics by assuming you can make up a demand curve from one data point. It's entirely likely that the vast majority of pirates would do without by switching to another form of cheaper entertainment like broadcast TV. By eliminating piracy, it's a price increase on the pirate population and when significant price increases occur, consumers substitute to other goods and there are many substitutes for any type media.
The study is really thin on facts. The methodology of computing the the losses are computed is NEVER discussed. As I posted above, these studies almost always make the assumption that if piracy were stopped, those who pirated copies would be willing to buy the content at the prevailing legal price. That assumption alone which is absurd means the study is best used for toilet paper.
The study mentions that restrictions of on the number of foreign made films (20 per year) in China drives piracy but then has the gall to claim that producers are losing billions on piracy in China even though it is NOT possible by the study's own admission to increase legal distribution in China.
Finally, the study makes the ridiculous claim that giving more money to the movie industry leads to more production of content. I see no evidence in the study that this would be case. Hollywood prefers a small number of high budget blockbusters. Addtionally, creating entertainment is not "investment" in an economic sense in the economy. It's consumption. If the pirate buys an iPod with the money saved from piracy, I fail to see to see that form of consumption is inferior in an economic sense to giving the money to the movie industry.
These studies are based on the bogus premise that those downloading would be willing to pay the retail price for content if piracy was not an option. This is such a bogus assumption I think it is fair the label those did the study and those who tout it as liars. There is ZERO evidence for such a claim.
Because there is not a good way to price discriminate in the CD & DVD markets (charge less to those willing to pay less without charging less for everyone), it's quite possible that Hollywood and the RIAA would get ZERO additional dollars if they found the magic technological or legal bullet to kill priracy (which mythological entity that does not exist in this reality, but that's a different story). Somebody who trys to get content for free is by definiation not willing to pay for very much for the content. If they were willing to pay $20 for the DVD, they would have ordered from Amazon.
Hollywood and politicians are two groups that know nothing about basic micro economics and will be happy to undermine the liberty of the citizens of this country for an illusory pot of gold at the end of the DRM rainbow.
I sent in my passport in for renewal about a month ago since it expires next year and it came back without RFID. I suspect if you send in a renewal the next 2 weeks to the National Passport Center, you'll get a new one sans-RFID. I now have 10 years before I have to worry about passport RFID and tin foil hats for my passport. Hopefully by the next time I have to renew, the State Department will have realized their stupidity and gone to contact chip rather than RFID.
Retaining records of web access is going to cost millions of dollars at the largest ISPs since these records over two years will amount to pedabytes of information. Many ISPs do not even have the records that Gonzales is looking for since gathering this kind of extensive information usually requires a transparent proxy of web traffic. I suppose that ISPs could save DNS records only but that's trivally easy to avoid by using other DNS servers and probably nowhere near enough big brother for Gonzales.
I'm appalled at the invasion of privacy. Practical side of this bad idea is very troublesome as well. Gonzales must think there is data retension fairy that will do all of this for him.
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If these students are standing on principle, why don't they use their real names? "Free speech" is the first amendment right not to be prosecuted by the government for your speech which is right I support. To be a member of any institution, you have to agree abide by their standards of conduct. Yale Law School is private institution can set any standard of conduct it deems appropriate and expell students who do not meet that standard of conduct.
Employers have the same right. These cowards making these slurs are hiding behind anonymity because they know no reputable law firm will hire people who say such things. The comments in question will get you fired if you make them at work. Educational institutions should have similar standards. To say otherwise, would mean you support the absolute right of professors to refer to black students as n****rs and be free from any sanction from the university.
The content of some of these posts is reprehensible. While I believe in free speech, AutoAdmit is behaving irresponsibly. It's clear many of these comments are by students. All universities have conduct codes that prohibit this type behavior. The administration at Yale should be reminding students that slandering other students is prohibited and will be dealt with harshly. If they can find any of students responsible, expelling them would probably put an end this end kind of conduct.
Unfortunately, it will likely take a lawsuit to get AutoAdmit reveal the ip addresses of the posters. Sadly, this kind of irresponsibility of AutoAdmit will likely lead to end of liability exemption for message board operators in the long run. How long to the daughter of Senator gets this kind of treatment and the Senator makes it a personal crusade to strip the exemption?
How does withdrawing a product from the marketplace constitute monopoly abuse?
It's monopoly maintenance. Monopolists are forbidden from making decisions with non-monopoly products that have the purpose of maintaining the monopoly on another product. Pulling a product, in this case Office, from the Mac platform with the intention of helping preserve the Windows monopoly is not a lawful action under US anti-trust laws.
Skype does not want wireless (or wired carriers for that matter) blocking their VoIP calls. This request is a warning to the wireless carriers that Skype will push for very disruptive regulatory changes if their traffic is blocked. While Skype likely has low probability of successfully lobbying the FCC on the matter, the impact to the carriers is huge so they likely won't want to gamble since call revenue lost to Skype traffic is only at least at the beginning is only a minor ammount.
Maybe now some of the Google is wonderful nonsense will stop. Censoring people on religious grounds qualifies as being evil in my book. Of course, after Google sold to out to please the Chinese government, it was clear Google had decided that greed was a better motive than not being evil.
Lack of appreciation or even awareness of the mission of the organization they work for is a disease not limited to University IT departments. Corporate IT departments have same affliction. Most IT departments do not do cost analysis on the impact on the organization as a whole of the their decisions. In this case, the IT department wanted to complete undermine the entire mission of the organization, dissemination of knowledge, by telling the professor not to teach something to his students in a misguided attempt to give a negligible boost to security. In addition to disrespecting the mission of the institution, they presumed the students are too dumb to use Google.
In corporate IT departments, this disease takes the form of security measures that cost far more in lost productivity than they save through better security. Sadly, executives don't ask what the productivity and other costs are to IT decisions and thus we left to suffer a waste of the shareholders money while IT departments run amok locking everything down to the point where no one can get any work done. In a well managed organization, security proposal would be rejected on face unless they had cogent analysis of all costs involved.
Apple was not obligated to provide updates to 802.11N so there is no revenue recognition issue. Everyone who bought the machine bought it under specs that said 802.11g. If Apple had claimed at the time the machines were sold that 802.11N would be enabled at a future date, then there would be an issue. Additionally, under this interpretation of SOX, Apple would have to hold back money on every sale of every piece of hardware as deferred revenue to pay for patches. Since Apple would already be holding back revenue as deferred revenue in case it needed to patch the drivers for security hole, it simply could used that money rather than charging users more. I think this SOX excuse is a smoke screen to justify grabbing an extra $5.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
I can not find the section of the Constitution that reserves the power to determine the definition militia to the federal government.
Then why doesn't the constitution say trained? They are not synonyms. I serious doubt you could find any military office who would say "well regulated" and "well trained" are semantically equivalent. Additionally, you haven't dealt with the militia term.
WMD is arbitrary distinction not found in the Constitution. Either 2nd amendment allows the government to make distinctions about weapons reasonable for civilian to own or it does not. Washington DC deciding that distinction is that single shot long barrel rifles are the only reasonable weapon is no more or less valid than your WMD distinction. The courts get to decide what a reasonable restriction is. Anyone who is not a trained Constitutional lawyer or jurist making declarations on what reasonable restrictions are especially when the Supreme Court has not ruled on the issue in 70 years is lacks credibility and shows a lot of hubris.
Under your view, anyone could own a F-16 with 2000 pound bombs. Any weapon that can owned by the government can (outside of government regulation) be owned by a civilian. Some weapons are too expensive for most civilians to own however the Larry Ellisons Bill Gates of the world could afford just about any weapon. Armed fighter planes is not an academic argument. Ellison owns and fliess a Russian fighter. The federal government required him to modify it so it could not carry any weapons.
Each state (and Washington DC) should able to interpret "well regulated militia" itself. A well regulated militia in Texas might be any private citizen wanting own a firearm. In New York, a well regulated militia might be the national guard only with no private ownership of firearms. If you want to want to own guns, you would have to live in a gun friendly state.
I think solves the underlying problem nicely. Firearms are a problem in major urban centers but not a big problem in rural states. Each state crafts its own rules. There will be states with tight rules and loose ones.
So government can not stop you from owning nuclear weapon? A nuclear device is an arm and if you have an absolute right to bear arms, you have a right to nuclear weapons. Not mention tanks, F16s, etc. I feel safer already.
Of course if we combine your view of an absolute right with originalist interpretation of the Constitution you only have a right to a musket but not a modern rifle. I don't see how an expansive (to modern weapons) absolute interpretation could not include nukes.
The reason your argument if flawed is there are no extra words in the Constitution. It's an extremely terse document and you are interpreting "well regulated militia" to mean nothing.
Do we really need to search for stupdity in high-tech marketing? I can't seem to escape those Microsoft Office dionsaur ads.
I agree that Apple is trying to stop people from running their supposedly open source OS on non-Apple hardware. Since locking the OS to Apple hardware is what they are trying to acheive, they should make that condition part of the license instead of adding some weenie intent based clause. Apple is trying to implictly add this condition so their marketing department can still claim Apple supports open source. This kind of duplicity makes me feel ill. Microsoft at least has courtesy not to try to deceive the public about the openness of their operating system.
Government spending does not increase the net wealth of the private sector. It may lead to a temporary increase in output (GDP). The increase in output is NOT an increase in wealth. If taxpayers use their loan for government in the form of lower taxes or any of their share of the possible increase in output (through higher real wages), to buy stuff like plasma TVs or cars instead of saving it, there is no increase in wealth.
If you invested the loan and received the exact same return as the government's interest expense, the present value of your lifetime resources is unchanged. Your returns would have to beat the government's interest rate to get ahead. For their to be wealth generation, tax payers on average would have to invest their loans and beat the government's interest rate. If you want to borrow money to invest, feel free to get a margin loan. The governmet should be forcing loans on us.
As long as the debt is outstanding, interest is owed on it. Your taxes pay to service that debt or in the case of Bush administration, issue more bonds to pay the interest which means even more taxes later. When you talk about growth, any reasonable analyis will separate growth due to the population growth (a rise in the full employment level in the economy in economist speak) and productivity growth. The cost providing government services is presumbably proportional to the population size so that economic growth due to population increasing is not going to solve an debt problem since the imbalance between government spending and government revenues will increase. Productivity growth is typically quite a small value (1% per year) and has been know to inexplicably disappear for decades, like 1970s. It's not possible ot get out a debt binge on productivity growth.
You are also making the false assumption that federal goverment will continue to be able to borrow money a favorable interest rates. Should the interest rates rise for any reason, the government's debt burden will become progressively more expensive
Fortunately, deficits affect a net surplus in the private sector
I have no idea what you talking about since you didn't say a surplus of what. It's a certainly not a surplus of investment as government spending completes with private investment. Basic economics: Y = C + I + G + NX. where Y is output (GDP), C is consumption, I is investment and G is government spending and NX is net exports. By boosting government spending which the Bush administration has done faster than than any administration since Johnson and his Great Society, private sector investment and and consumption has suffered as result. Granted, government spending may boost output but elasticity of ouput to government spending is less the one. The rest is coming out consumption or investment.
You could make the same wrong argument about personal debt if you have rising income. However, the interest still cuts againt the present value of your lifetime resources. The government has the same problem. Interest is a real expense and lower the present value of government resources causing either lower future spending or higher future taxes. There is no free lunch.
Your taxes are not lower. The Bush administration has failed to cut spending to pay their tax cuts and in fact has dramatically increased spending. Thus the present value of taxes you will pay over your lifetime has risen under the Bush administration since the 100s of billions of dollars of debt the Bush administration has run up will have to be paid from future taxes. You are not paying these taxes this year but you will have to pay them in the future. Ask any economist and they will tell that lowering taxes without cutting spending is an increase and not a reduction in your lifetime tax payments.
Bush has essentially given you a loan which will have to be paid back (with interest) by higher taxes in the future.
The Canadians are chickens at least when it comes to lumbar dispute. Canada is entitled to tariff US goods to compensate them for the lumbar issue. They never tried to collect it.
Should the US become a serial violator of WTO rules, either the US withdraws or the WTO collapses which is fine by me. I never liked the secret tribunals or the restriction that only governments can bring enforcement actions.
If the US insists on unfair trade practices against other countries, other countries can do the same to the US. There was a time where the economic might of the US could have prevented this from happening. Today US economy is being propped by foreign central banks holding large amounts of US government debt. Should these banks dump this debt or even just refuse to buy any more, the US economy goes into a tailspin as the dollar collapses and interest rates shoot up. Sadly reckless economic polices of the Bush administration, have turned the US into a paper tiger on the economic front.
The EU has data protection laws and should stick to them. The US shouldn't be able bully the rest of the world to ignoring its laws. If this shuts down transatlantic travel, so be it. EU should go a WTO tribunal and demand compensation over the any US fines or loss of revenue to its airlines. The Bush administration has given the finger to international standards and international law and will continue to do so until the other nations of world stand up for themselves
The only thing we know about the pirates is that they demand content when price = 0. Assuming there is any demand among pirates when price is greater than is zero is bogus. You would fail undergrad economics by assuming you can make up a demand curve from one data point. It's entirely likely that the vast majority of pirates would do without by switching to another form of cheaper entertainment like broadcast TV. By eliminating piracy, it's a price increase on the pirate population and when significant price increases occur, consumers substitute to other goods and there are many substitutes for any type media.
The study is really thin on facts. The methodology of computing the the losses are computed is NEVER discussed. As I posted above, these studies almost always make the assumption that if piracy were stopped, those who pirated copies would be willing to buy the content at the prevailing legal price. That assumption alone which is absurd means the study is best used for toilet paper.
The study mentions that restrictions of on the number of foreign made films (20 per year) in China drives piracy but then has the gall to claim that producers are losing billions on piracy in China even though it is NOT possible by the study's own admission to increase legal distribution in China.
Finally, the study makes the ridiculous claim that giving more money to the movie industry leads to more production of content. I see no evidence in the study that this would be case. Hollywood prefers a small number of high budget blockbusters. Addtionally, creating entertainment is not "investment" in an economic sense in the economy. It's consumption. If the pirate buys an iPod with the money saved from piracy, I fail to see to see that form of consumption is inferior in an economic sense to giving the money to the movie industry.
These studies are based on the bogus premise that those downloading would be willing to pay the retail price for content if piracy was not an option. This is such a bogus assumption I think it is fair the label those did the study and those who tout it as liars. There is ZERO evidence for such a claim.
Because there is not a good way to price discriminate in the CD & DVD markets (charge less to those willing to pay less without charging less for everyone), it's quite possible that Hollywood and the RIAA would get ZERO additional dollars if they found the magic technological or legal bullet to kill priracy (which mythological entity that does not exist in this reality, but that's a different story). Somebody who trys to get content for free is by definiation not willing to pay for very much for the content. If they were willing to pay $20 for the DVD, they would have ordered from Amazon.
Hollywood and politicians are two groups that know nothing about basic micro economics and will be happy to undermine the liberty of the citizens of this country for an illusory pot of gold at the end of the DRM rainbow.
I sent in my passport in for renewal about a month ago since it expires next year and it came back without RFID. I suspect if you send in a renewal the next 2 weeks to the National Passport Center, you'll get a new one sans-RFID. I now have 10 years before I have to worry about passport RFID and tin foil hats for my passport. Hopefully by the next time I have to renew, the State Department will have realized their stupidity and gone to contact chip rather than RFID.
Retaining records of web access is going to cost millions of dollars at the largest ISPs since these records over two years will amount to pedabytes of information. Many ISPs do not even have the records that Gonzales is looking for since gathering this kind of extensive information usually requires a transparent proxy of web traffic. I suppose that ISPs could save DNS records only but that's trivally easy to avoid by using other DNS servers and probably nowhere near enough big brother for Gonzales.
I'm appalled at the invasion of privacy. Practical side of this bad idea is very troublesome as well. Gonzales must think there is data retension fairy that will do all of this for him.