For what it's worth, you *can* run Time Machine backups over a network to NAS storage - I do it at home to a small Netgear device which I back up my laptop & my desktop to. For a very simple model of this type of backup, see the Apple Time Capsule. You can get fancier by backing up to RAID-protected NAS arrays, and it works over a network, so you can easily keep your backups in another room, or at another company site, provided you have the bandwidth to send the backup date over the network with reasonable performance.
Both of your scenarios are easily worked around with an offsite backup plan - you can do live backups with Time Machine over a network to a remote storage device, or you can simply rotate a set of backup drives regularly to some secure/safe location where it's unlikely that a fire (or an angry employee) would have access to both the live data and your backups. For a small business without the funds to purchase an automated tape jukebox and contract with Iron Mountain, this sort of an arrangement would work just fine, and can provide you with most of the benefits of the jukebox + Iron Mountain, at a fraction of the cost. If your data is so absolutely critical that you cannot stomach even the remote risk of something happening to it, then probably you'll need to invest in a more sophisticated solution... but most small businesses aren't writing software or generating gigs and gigs of primary work product which is intended for sale. Their computers are used for answering customer emails, managing inventory and sending & paying invoices - the data is not their primary product, it just helps them run their business more efficiently.
You don't think he would rather have stayed in power? You don't think he would rather have been remembered as some strong, popular, charismatic leader who the people loved?
News flash: anybody who's in national politics in ANY country is *rich*. It comes with the profession, unfortunately - you're either very rich to start, or you end up very rich because you're influential, and people want access to that.
Your statement was, "Enough to bring down the government or sway the next election? I doubt it." And in fact, Sweden doing that in a high-profile case like this might very well be "enough to bring down the government or sway the next election." A large portion of Blair's lost approval ratings stemmed from his close working relationship with the US government.
Sure, there's no special magic that prevents things from failing. But component reliability metrics (MTBF, etc.) can certainly be used to judge the relative reliability and expected longevity of a piece of hardware. One Honda is more reliable than one Kia. Two Kias may be more reliable than one Honda, but they'll still probably cost more than the single Honda. Two Hondas would almost guarantee that you'll never be without a vehicle, but it'll also cost you a pretty penny - that peace of mind comes at a cost. If you live in a location where you can easily take a taxi, bus, or train, 2 cars would be wasteful overkill. If you live in the country and have no neighbors within 20 miles, maybe guaranteed transportation is a little more important to you.
As with most things, you weigh the risks against the savings - is it better to spend $15k on a big server with "redundant everything" or $1k on a small Mini server, knowing that if it breaks down, you might have some downtime? The answer is, "it depends."
If the system being offline for repairs doesn't incur massive costs, why spend a huge amount of extra money mitigating against an outage?
You can have something reliable without having redundancy built in - redundancy is great, if you need the high availability, but it can get pretty expensive, and if the system isn't mission critical, why spend thousands of dollars on a big server that'll be overkill for your needs?
For low-intensity uses - home office / small office servers, home theaters, lightweight corporate intranet servers, development / test systems, etc., a Mini (or unix/win box with similar footprint) could be perfect for your needs as a server.
What makes you think they'd go through all this theater in the first place, then, and instead just hand him over to the US? It's perfectly legal for the UK to extradite people to the US... it's perfectly illegal for Sweden to do so without the UK's approval.
Why not just hand him over to the US directly if seeing him turned over to the US is something they're interested in?
I'm pretty sure that the EU members would take very unkindly to a member state rolling over and ignoring EU laws because the US says so. I'm also pretty sure that the general population of those countries wouldn't take it kindly, either.
Remember Tony Blair, alternately known as "Bush's Poodle," or the "US foreign minister," as Nelson Mandela put it?
Rolling over to unpopular (or downright illegal) demands from the US government is a sure way to find yourself out of office in the next election, particularly in Europe.
Here's the judge's findings for his extradition case. Interestingly, he addresses the whole "they told me I could leave" thing, in his summary of findings of fact, specifically items 5 through 15 on pages 9 & 10 of the PDF linked. It appears as if the prosecution made repeated attempts to contact him to arrange a time for an interview/interrogation, but that his lawyer was "unable to contact Mr. Assange" - but, cannot recall exactly what steps he took to contact Mr. Assange with any clarity. The judge concludes that a reasonable conclusion may be drawn that Mr. Assange was deliberately avoiding contact - specifically, in item 15 of his findings of fact, he states:
Mr Hurtig must have realised the significance of paragraph 13 of his proof when he submitted it. I do not accept that this was a genuine mistake. It cannot have slipped his mind. For over a week he was attempting (he says without success) to contact a very important client about a very important matter. The statement was a deliberate attempt to mislead the court. It did in fact mislead Ms Brita Sundberg-Weitman and Mr Alhem . Had they been given the true facts then that would have changed their opinion on a key fact in a material way.
"The statement was a deliberate attempt to mislead the court," well... that's just a nice way of calling someone a liar. And let's be honest - if you know you have legal allegations being leveled at you, do you seriously go off the grid for a week and ignore all attempts to contact you by your legal representation? It's a very reasonable conclusion to assume that Mr. Assange deliberately avoided contact, and left the country without any particular say-so from the Swedish authorities.
The european arrest warrant specifies that he is wanted on suspicion of: "Rape (less serious crime), unlawful coercion, and two cases of sexual molestation."
The first of those - "Rape (less serious crime)" - carries a 2-4 year penalty; Unlawful coercion carries a sentence of up to 2 years; (Source); Sexual molestation carries with it a penalty of a fine or imprisonment of up to 2 years. (Source)
Of course, the investigation may find no basis to proceed with the prosecution, and he'll be released and charges dropped. But implying that he's being made the subject of an international manhunt for a crime that, at its worst, carries a couple hundred dollars fine, is simply not the case. We know what they want him arrested on suspicion of, and it does carry fairly significant penalties, unless you consider a couple years of your life to be peanuts.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying - under EU laws, a country who takes custody of somebody under an extradition arrangement may not surrender that person to a third country without the express approval of the original country's Justice Minister/Attorney General AND the approval of that country's high court.
In other words, Sweden must provide a guarantee to the UK that they will seek the approval of the UK's Justice Minister and the UK's High Court before they agree to extradite him to the US. This prevents third parties from "jurisdiction shopping" - if Sweden makes the request for extradition in bad faith - i.e., with the express intent of turning him over to the US. It also guarantees that, even if Sweden doesn't intend to do that, should the US spring a surprise extradition request on Sweden after the UK extradites him, they still may not agree to extradite unless the UK also approves.
If the UK refuses, and he's returned to the UK after his business with Sweden is finished, the US could submit a new request for extradition from the UK, and make their case there... but they can't get him extradited to a "friendlier" country with the intent of extraditing him from that friendlier country.
An interpol arrest warrant is following the laws & rules - he allegedly committed a crime in one country, then left that country. Interpol, which exists to facilitate international police cooperation, became involved because Sweden wanted him returned to face the allegations, and so an arrest warrant was issued, and extradition proceedings were initiated.
The crimes he's being investigated for carry a penalty of up to 4 years in jail if he's found guilty, not a "maximum $700 fine." The allegations are for sexual assault & rape, not littering, or the delightfully quaint-sounding "sex by surprise".
According to the judge in the UK, it sounds like he took steps to avoid contact with the investigators. It's entirely possible that his "permission to leave" was granted like so: Mr. Assange: "Can I leave town?" Swedish Police: "Sure, you can leave town. But we will probably want you to come back for further questioning." Mr. Assange: "Okay, great, I'll be in London if you need me."
Really... you don't think violating fundamental obligations by an EU member state wouldn't be met with more than a little anger and a few consequences?
I guess I overestimated the EU's independence from the oversight of the US... I guess the entire EU is just willing to roll over when the US says so?
Yeah, except Sweden would then be subject to penalties for violating its legal & treaty obligations to the EU. These things don't happen in a vacuum, and if you think that the government of Sweden will risk incurring the economic and legal wrath of the entire EU over this, you're deluding yourself.
Your point only holds water if you define criminal prosecution so narrowly that it cannot include the investigation, which they are still conducting. Criminal complaints have been filed, and the investigation into them is ongoing, and will file charges if the investigation turns up evidence of illegal behavior. This is all part of the process of criminal prosecution.
And, incidentally, it appears as if a judge in the UK with far more legal experience than you or I has ruled that it's a valid & enforceable warrant.
Because the case is still in the investigation phase. According to TFA:
In his summary Riddle accused Assange's Swedish lawyer, Björn Hurtig, of making a deliberate attempt to mislead the court. Assange had clearly attempted to avoid the Swedish justice system before he left the country, Riddle said. "It would be a reasonable assumption from the facts that Mr Assange was deliberately avoiding interrogation before he left Sweden."
They are returning him to Sweden, where they will finish their investigation; if the investigation finds that charges are warranted, then he will be formally charged. If the investigation finds that charges are not warranted, then he will be released and returned to the UK. The lack of charges at this time does not negate the validity of the European Arrest Warrant - a warrant is issued for someone on suspicion of having committed a crime. Then there is an investigation (which generally includes interviews/interrogation of the people involved), and then if it does appear a crime was committed, charges are formally filed. Since it appears that Mr. Assange skipped out before the Swedish police were finished with their investigation, he is being returned to Sweden so that they may do so.
In addition to the issue with death penalty crimes, Sweden also can't turn him over to the US without the UK's approval anyway, under European Union laws (Various extradition rules under the European Arrest Warrant acts).
If the UK wouldn't extradite him to the US directly, there's really no reason to believe that Sweden would somehow have the power to do anything, since the UK has a veto on any surrender of him to a third party (at least, a non-EU third party) by Sweden.
Again, we're talking about *authors*. Not bookbinders, typesetters, printing press operators or any other person in the *publishing* end of the business - the creative type who actually writes the book. Your argument doesn't apply to them, unless - as I noted previously - we've had some truly amazing strides in the AI field in the past few months.
Computers are great at automating repetitive & manual tasks. Not so much with writing Moby Dick or The Lord of the Rings.
Sorry, I stopped reading when you suggested that *authors* have been made obsolete by technology, just like scribes and lamplighters.
Nowhere in my post did I say that the "second assistant mail clerk to the deputy copy editor" and the rest of the middlemen in the publishing industry were entitled to anything.
These are all certainly legitimate alternatives - I wasn't asking with a predetermined answer in mind, I was asking because GGP was carrying on about how "DRM and sales of books as if they're physical objects" is a dead and outdated business model, and, if we accept that that's the case, the next question is: where do we go from here?
I frankly don't see the objection to spending money to purchase a copy of a book you want to buy, regardless of whether or not there's DRM applied. I'm getting hours of enjoyment out of the story, or useful information if it's a reference book, and I understand the months of effort that likely went into creating the book, so I don't think giving an author $10-20 for a copy is unreasonable.
I guess the thing that puzzles me the most is the notion that some (perhaps many, here?) people have that "since it costs nothing to copy the book once it's created, it should pretty much cost nothing!" Low duplication costs don't necessarily translate to low initial production costs, and when I hear people saying "It costs nothing to make a copy, why should I pay $10/$5/$0.99 for my copy?" it seems to me their argument boils down to "I want it and I want it now and I want it for free." And that strikes me as unreasonable, and destructive in the long term of any sort of creative endeavor that requires more than a couple spare hours to complete.
Not sure how popular the service will turn out to be, but Amazon supports lending of (some) Kindle books - discretion is left to the publisher, and there is now a service, lendle.me, which is geared towards building a library of lendable books from Amazon that people can share.
Not sure how the library services you use compare, but it's an option for people who own Kindles.
I have an honest question: How is an author going to be paid for their time writing the books if we allow one person to purchase the book, and then lend it to an infinite number of people at once? Musicians can go out on tour and perform live, and make a reasonable living doing that, making their studio recordings less critical a part of their income. Authors can't (generally speaking, I suppose some poets and spoken-word types could) go on tour and perform their craft for a live audience.
Yes, they're forcing a business model down peoples' throats, and it seems dated and silly given that you can make infinte lossless copies of a book with a close-to-zero cost. The real (and earnest) question is - what's your proposal for a better solution, specifically for the publishing industry, which will allow authors to - at the very least - make a comfortable middle-class living? Most authors do not write books that sell at volumes that would allow "2 cents per electronic copy" to be a maintainable business model. Do we tell those writers, "tough shit, start waiting tables and give up the writing thing if you're not popular?" And bear in mind that if you actually would suggest that, you've just neatly gutted the bulk of the sci-fi and fantasy genres, which I believe tend to be pretty popular around this part of the intartubes.
I think the self-preservation instinct is very strong in politicians. I think anybody with 2 brain cells can see that "selectively blocking a single site that happens to be supportive of your opponents" is going to just throw gasoline on the fire.
What I said, "No politician smart enough to get elected (admittedly a low bar) is that stupid," is not exactly a resounding endorsement of the intelligence of politicians.
However, after the firestorm regarding the unions erupted, a decision was made to block the site.
This is what makes me skeptical of the entire thing: no politician smart enough to get elected (admittedly a low bar) is that stupid. "We're in the middle of a political firestorm, let's break out the gasoline." If it was an attempt to "silence critics," there are other sites that would likely be blocked as well.
Given that the site was launched last Friday, and their own tweet overnight about moving to a new server causing an overnight outage... I'm inclined to believe this is a case of a normal technical glitch being inflamed by rhetoric and paranoia on both sides.
As I said, I absolutely agree that the governor is in the wrong if he did intentionally block this, and I'm sure he'll already have to deal with a lawsuit or two as a result of it - he can defend himself against charges of violating first amendment rights there, and I'm sure he will need to. But I'm just not seeing the hand of some nefarious censorship effort in this.
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth, you *can* run Time Machine backups over a network to NAS storage - I do it at home to a small Netgear device which I back up my laptop & my desktop to. For a very simple model of this type of backup, see the Apple Time Capsule. You can get fancier by backing up to RAID-protected NAS arrays, and it works over a network, so you can easily keep your backups in another room, or at another company site, provided you have the bandwidth to send the backup date over the network with reasonable performance.
Both of your scenarios are easily worked around with an offsite backup plan - you can do live backups with Time Machine over a network to a remote storage device, or you can simply rotate a set of backup drives regularly to some secure/safe location where it's unlikely that a fire (or an angry employee) would have access to both the live data and your backups. For a small business without the funds to purchase an automated tape jukebox and contract with Iron Mountain, this sort of an arrangement would work just fine, and can provide you with most of the benefits of the jukebox + Iron Mountain, at a fraction of the cost. If your data is so absolutely critical that you cannot stomach even the remote risk of something happening to it, then probably you'll need to invest in a more sophisticated solution... but most small businesses aren't writing software or generating gigs and gigs of primary work product which is intended for sale. Their computers are used for answering customer emails, managing inventory and sending & paying invoices - the data is not their primary product, it just helps them run their business more efficiently.
You don't think he would rather have stayed in power? You don't think he would rather have been remembered as some strong, popular, charismatic leader who the people loved?
News flash: anybody who's in national politics in ANY country is *rich*. It comes with the profession, unfortunately - you're either very rich to start, or you end up very rich because you're influential, and people want access to that.
Your statement was, "Enough to bring down the government or sway the next election? I doubt it." And in fact, Sweden doing that in a high-profile case like this might very well be "enough to bring down the government or sway the next election." A large portion of Blair's lost approval ratings stemmed from his close working relationship with the US government.
Sure, there's no special magic that prevents things from failing. But component reliability metrics (MTBF, etc.) can certainly be used to judge the relative reliability and expected longevity of a piece of hardware. One Honda is more reliable than one Kia. Two Kias may be more reliable than one Honda, but they'll still probably cost more than the single Honda. Two Hondas would almost guarantee that you'll never be without a vehicle, but it'll also cost you a pretty penny - that peace of mind comes at a cost. If you live in a location where you can easily take a taxi, bus, or train, 2 cars would be wasteful overkill. If you live in the country and have no neighbors within 20 miles, maybe guaranteed transportation is a little more important to you.
As with most things, you weigh the risks against the savings - is it better to spend $15k on a big server with "redundant everything" or $1k on a small Mini server, knowing that if it breaks down, you might have some downtime? The answer is, "it depends."
If the system being offline for repairs doesn't incur massive costs, why spend a huge amount of extra money mitigating against an outage?
You can have something reliable without having redundancy built in - redundancy is great, if you need the high availability, but it can get pretty expensive, and if the system isn't mission critical, why spend thousands of dollars on a big server that'll be overkill for your needs?
For low-intensity uses - home office / small office servers, home theaters, lightweight corporate intranet servers, development / test systems, etc., a Mini (or unix/win box with similar footprint) could be perfect for your needs as a server.
High court AND justice minister must both agree, so "yes, decided by both."
What makes you think they'd go through all this theater in the first place, then, and instead just hand him over to the US? It's perfectly legal for the UK to extradite people to the US... it's perfectly illegal for Sweden to do so without the UK's approval.
Why not just hand him over to the US directly if seeing him turned over to the US is something they're interested in?
I'm pretty sure that the EU members would take very unkindly to a member state rolling over and ignoring EU laws because the US says so. I'm also pretty sure that the general population of those countries wouldn't take it kindly, either.
Remember Tony Blair, alternately known as "Bush's Poodle," or the "US foreign minister," as Nelson Mandela put it?
Rolling over to unpopular (or downright illegal) demands from the US government is a sure way to find yourself out of office in the next election, particularly in Europe.
Here's the judge's findings for his extradition case. Interestingly, he addresses the whole "they told me I could leave" thing, in his summary of findings of fact, specifically items 5 through 15 on pages 9 & 10 of the PDF linked. It appears as if the prosecution made repeated attempts to contact him to arrange a time for an interview/interrogation, but that his lawyer was "unable to contact Mr. Assange" - but, cannot recall exactly what steps he took to contact Mr. Assange with any clarity. The judge concludes that a reasonable conclusion may be drawn that Mr. Assange was deliberately avoiding contact - specifically, in item 15 of his findings of fact, he states:
"The statement was a deliberate attempt to mislead the court," well... that's just a nice way of calling someone a liar. And let's be honest - if you know you have legal allegations being leveled at you, do you seriously go off the grid for a week and ignore all attempts to contact you by your legal representation? It's a very reasonable conclusion to assume that Mr. Assange deliberately avoided contact, and left the country without any particular say-so from the Swedish authorities.
The european arrest warrant specifies that he is wanted on suspicion of: "Rape (less serious crime), unlawful coercion, and two cases of sexual molestation."
The first of those - "Rape (less serious crime)" - carries a 2-4 year penalty; Unlawful coercion carries a sentence of up to 2 years; (Source); Sexual molestation carries with it a penalty of a fine or imprisonment of up to 2 years. (Source)
Of course, the investigation may find no basis to proceed with the prosecution, and he'll be released and charges dropped. But implying that he's being made the subject of an international manhunt for a crime that, at its worst, carries a couple hundred dollars fine, is simply not the case. We know what they want him arrested on suspicion of, and it does carry fairly significant penalties, unless you consider a couple years of your life to be peanuts.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying - under EU laws, a country who takes custody of somebody under an extradition arrangement may not surrender that person to a third country without the express approval of the original country's Justice Minister/Attorney General AND the approval of that country's high court.
In other words, Sweden must provide a guarantee to the UK that they will seek the approval of the UK's Justice Minister and the UK's High Court before they agree to extradite him to the US. This prevents third parties from "jurisdiction shopping" - if Sweden makes the request for extradition in bad faith - i.e., with the express intent of turning him over to the US. It also guarantees that, even if Sweden doesn't intend to do that, should the US spring a surprise extradition request on Sweden after the UK extradites him, they still may not agree to extradite unless the UK also approves.
If the UK refuses, and he's returned to the UK after his business with Sweden is finished, the US could submit a new request for extradition from the UK, and make their case there... but they can't get him extradited to a "friendlier" country with the intent of extraditing him from that friendlier country.
An interpol arrest warrant is following the laws & rules - he allegedly committed a crime in one country, then left that country. Interpol, which exists to facilitate international police cooperation, became involved because Sweden wanted him returned to face the allegations, and so an arrest warrant was issued, and extradition proceedings were initiated.
The crimes he's being investigated for carry a penalty of up to 4 years in jail if he's found guilty, not a "maximum $700 fine." The allegations are for sexual assault & rape, not littering, or the delightfully quaint-sounding "sex by surprise".
According to the judge in the UK, it sounds like he took steps to avoid contact with the investigators. It's entirely possible that his "permission to leave" was granted like so:
Mr. Assange: "Can I leave town?"
Swedish Police: "Sure, you can leave town. But we will probably want you to come back for further questioning."
Mr. Assange: "Okay, great, I'll be in London if you need me."
Really... you don't think violating fundamental obligations by an EU member state wouldn't be met with more than a little anger and a few consequences?
I guess I overestimated the EU's independence from the oversight of the US... I guess the entire EU is just willing to roll over when the US says so?
Yeah, except Sweden would then be subject to penalties for violating its legal & treaty obligations to the EU. These things don't happen in a vacuum, and if you think that the government of Sweden will risk incurring the economic and legal wrath of the entire EU over this, you're deluding yourself.
Your point only holds water if you define criminal prosecution so narrowly that it cannot include the investigation, which they are still conducting. Criminal complaints have been filed, and the investigation into them is ongoing, and will file charges if the investigation turns up evidence of illegal behavior. This is all part of the process of criminal prosecution.
And, incidentally, it appears as if a judge in the UK with far more legal experience than you or I has ruled that it's a valid & enforceable warrant.
Because the case is still in the investigation phase. According to TFA:
They are returning him to Sweden, where they will finish their investigation; if the investigation finds that charges are warranted, then he will be formally charged. If the investigation finds that charges are not warranted, then he will be released and returned to the UK. The lack of charges at this time does not negate the validity of the European Arrest Warrant - a warrant is issued for someone on suspicion of having committed a crime. Then there is an investigation (which generally includes interviews/interrogation of the people involved), and then if it does appear a crime was committed, charges are formally filed. Since it appears that Mr. Assange skipped out before the Swedish police were finished with their investigation, he is being returned to Sweden so that they may do so.
In addition to the issue with death penalty crimes, Sweden also can't turn him over to the US without the UK's approval anyway, under European Union laws (Various extradition rules under the European Arrest Warrant acts).
If the UK wouldn't extradite him to the US directly, there's really no reason to believe that Sweden would somehow have the power to do anything, since the UK has a veto on any surrender of him to a third party (at least, a non-EU third party) by Sweden.
Again, we're talking about *authors*. Not bookbinders, typesetters, printing press operators or any other person in the *publishing* end of the business - the creative type who actually writes the book. Your argument doesn't apply to them, unless - as I noted previously - we've had some truly amazing strides in the AI field in the past few months.
Computers are great at automating repetitive & manual tasks. Not so much with writing Moby Dick or The Lord of the Rings.
Really, so you're also suggesting that AUTHORS have been made obsolete somehow by technology?
I know that AI systems have improved in the past few years, but I don't think we've managed to reduce Shakespeare to a few thousand lines of code yet.
Sorry, I stopped reading when you suggested that *authors* have been made obsolete by technology, just like scribes and lamplighters.
Nowhere in my post did I say that the "second assistant mail clerk to the deputy copy editor" and the rest of the middlemen in the publishing industry were entitled to anything.
These are all certainly legitimate alternatives - I wasn't asking with a predetermined answer in mind, I was asking because GGP was carrying on about how "DRM and sales of books as if they're physical objects" is a dead and outdated business model, and, if we accept that that's the case, the next question is: where do we go from here?
I frankly don't see the objection to spending money to purchase a copy of a book you want to buy, regardless of whether or not there's DRM applied. I'm getting hours of enjoyment out of the story, or useful information if it's a reference book, and I understand the months of effort that likely went into creating the book, so I don't think giving an author $10-20 for a copy is unreasonable.
I guess the thing that puzzles me the most is the notion that some (perhaps many, here?) people have that "since it costs nothing to copy the book once it's created, it should pretty much cost nothing!" Low duplication costs don't necessarily translate to low initial production costs, and when I hear people saying "It costs nothing to make a copy, why should I pay $10/$5/$0.99 for my copy?" it seems to me their argument boils down to "I want it and I want it now and I want it for free." And that strikes me as unreasonable, and destructive in the long term of any sort of creative endeavor that requires more than a couple spare hours to complete.
Not sure how popular the service will turn out to be, but Amazon supports lending of (some) Kindle books - discretion is left to the publisher, and there is now a service, lendle.me, which is geared towards building a library of lendable books from Amazon that people can share.
Not sure how the library services you use compare, but it's an option for people who own Kindles.
I have an honest question: How is an author going to be paid for their time writing the books if we allow one person to purchase the book, and then lend it to an infinite number of people at once? Musicians can go out on tour and perform live, and make a reasonable living doing that, making their studio recordings less critical a part of their income. Authors can't (generally speaking, I suppose some poets and spoken-word types could) go on tour and perform their craft for a live audience.
Yes, they're forcing a business model down peoples' throats, and it seems dated and silly given that you can make infinte lossless copies of a book with a close-to-zero cost. The real (and earnest) question is - what's your proposal for a better solution, specifically for the publishing industry, which will allow authors to - at the very least - make a comfortable middle-class living? Most authors do not write books that sell at volumes that would allow "2 cents per electronic copy" to be a maintainable business model. Do we tell those writers, "tough shit, start waiting tables and give up the writing thing if you're not popular?" And bear in mind that if you actually would suggest that, you've just neatly gutted the bulk of the sci-fi and fantasy genres, which I believe tend to be pretty popular around this part of the intartubes.
I think the self-preservation instinct is very strong in politicians. I think anybody with 2 brain cells can see that "selectively blocking a single site that happens to be supportive of your opponents" is going to just throw gasoline on the fire.
What I said, "No politician smart enough to get elected (admittedly a low bar) is that stupid," is not exactly a resounding endorsement of the intelligence of politicians.
This is what makes me skeptical of the entire thing: no politician smart enough to get elected (admittedly a low bar) is that stupid. "We're in the middle of a political firestorm, let's break out the gasoline." If it was an attempt to "silence critics," there are other sites that would likely be blocked as well.
Given that the site was launched last Friday, and their own tweet overnight about moving to a new server causing an overnight outage... I'm inclined to believe this is a case of a normal technical glitch being inflamed by rhetoric and paranoia on both sides.
As I said, I absolutely agree that the governor is in the wrong if he did intentionally block this, and I'm sure he'll already have to deal with a lawsuit or two as a result of it - he can defend himself against charges of violating first amendment rights there, and I'm sure he will need to. But I'm just not seeing the hand of some nefarious censorship effort in this.