This is what separation of church and state means. It does not mean that private citizens or politicans are prohibited from openly expressing religious views in public or on government facilities. It means that the United States cannot establish an official state religion or for all intents and purposes do so by providing funding to one. There is nothing even stopping a government from funding all "real religions" (ie something that is not obviously a bullshit scam like Scientology).
Combine the fact that many student athletes are notorious for bad behavior like their pro-counterparts (where do you think it starts?) with the fact that many students are unabashed about posting about their bad behavior and the fact that they are affiliated with the university and you have an informal expose' on the team. Schools really do have a reason to be concerned. It's hard enough as it is to police their behavior offline to keep them out of trouble. The last thing they need is to have it all recorded for posterity online.
I'm a militant libertarian as a general rule. Much more so than your average slashdotter. Yet even I can sympathize with the school here. Until they take this over into punishing regular students, it's fine by me. If you wear the school uniform, your behavior reflects on the school the way that wearing a police uniform reflects on your department. Don't like it? Don't wear the uniform. It's not like there are a dearth of ways to pay for your way through college or jobs out there that lack these restrictions.
If it's really so important to them, they should be beyond reproach. No underage or heavy drinking. No womanizing, nothing. Be model students and athletes.
Since Big Brotheresque things are associated with arbitrary abuse by seemingly unaccountable authorities who are also unaccountable if they retaliate later, people get afraid. How many human resources departments have written a person up for saying something that got taken the wrong way by a thin-skinned person? Look at how shop-lifting by young teens is treated. Do it 25 years ago and it's a sound whack on the wrist. Today, it ruins your future no matter if you go into the army and become a decorated war hero serving on the front lines.
And the GOVERNMENT side of Big Brother has left more "little brothers" dead than all religious organizations and private corporations combined.
So yeah, it doesn't a rocket scientists to figure out why in the modern world Big Brother is considered scary. In fact, I would consider it a form of psychotic detatchment from reality to be comfortable with him.
Why would we want to contact another civilization until we are unified as a race and have advanced military and consumer technology? The ultimate in naivete is the projection done by utopian academics who equate advancement with peaceful civilization. If we as a race are any indication, and we're all we have to go by, it's safe to assume the opposite. The more advanced we've become, the less valuable human life has become and the more intrusion we tolerate from the authorities. For the love of God, the level of surveillance that the anglosphere tolerates is unfathomable by the standards of 1,000 years ago. In Britain, there's a movement to monitor every child's eating habits and American intrusion is legendary in its own right!
Let's face one little truth. Going on OUR evolutionary path, we MUST proceed with caution into space. We should avoid seeking out other races until we can approach them with confidence.
The more rabid supporters of the DMCA are the primary reason why the more moderate supporters of "liberal, but strong" IP laws (more law enforcement, less preemptive legislation) get drowned out. When they get called out on issues like the BIOS, they almost never respond. "La dee fucking da" and all that jazz. IP law sometimes doesn't work. Sometimes the market is actually expanded by the rabid competition that weak IP law can create. Necessity is the mother of all invention and there is actually a point where letting people live off their research and development becomes parasitic.
It's not a divide between socialism on the one side and hyper-protective policies on the other. There is plenty of room for common law to work its magic to create a nuanced and flexible system.
Unless these companies get the ability to sue the "SEO companies" and others that spam them, they will just get cluttered to the point that nothing short of SkyNet will be able to be useful.
Say what you will about the United States, but at least you can't say that we spend extreme percentages on our military while we have major internal problems. China wouldn't have anywhere near the problems it does today with crime and pollution if it didn't devote so many resources to its military. I get tired of the excuses for their priorities "oh they're afraid of the United States!" Bullshit. We can't even get riled up over Afghanistan, a country that aided and abetted the 9-11 terrorists and protected their ring leader. China would have to do something monstrous like conquer one of the "asian tigers" or Japan to get enough passion to actually fight them. You know what this just proves once again? Big government doesn't give a fuck about the common person unless they're revolting or about to. China's spam problems are only the tip of the iceberg. How about stopping all of those hack attacks against government and industry first? Priorities, priorities.
There is a certain degree of expectation that if you are going to use their network, that you need to be a paying customer. It's not hard to go in and buy a coffee. I've done that with small coffee shops that provide wireless. I go in and buy something--in cash--so that they know I'm paying my way. If you can't afford a $1.50 cup of cheap coffee, you should be working instead of sitting there with your laptop leeching off their connection. This is a welfare baby mentality. We need the police to intervene in cases like this or a few miscreants will end up ruining it for the rest of us.
And one last thing. It's very unlikely that the same workers who noticed him using their wifi would not have noticed him coming in as a buying customer, given how long he was doing this.
It's worth nothing that the political blogosphere has already started to consolidate along "MSM lines." I predict that within five or six years that "blogging" will be just another way of maintaining an information-rich website. Now, no snickering about how valuable that information might be from the anti-bloggers. The point is that "blog software" represented a commoditization of CMS software in a way that your average user could handle and is thus a step forward. It is now much easier thanks to WordPress and Movable Type for people to maintain small websites, and WordPress can handle very big ones as well.
The problem with the blogosphere is that it is "democratic" by nature, but the future evolutions like vlogging and podcasting will not be democratic. They can't be. If you aren't making serious advertising money, the bandwidth fees from your amateur video hour would actually run into bankrupting-levels if a blogger got hit with several "instalanches" in one month on top of say, 10,000 regular viewers a month.
The interesting part is the software. WordPress has proven to be particularly powerful in terms of forming the framework for websites, as ZDNet has proved with their TechBlogs.
Microsoft shouldn't have any problems starting a second Internet Explorer project to rewrite the entire codebase in C#. They have more than enough money to maintain an internal second version that is pure managed code. The advantage is that if the SHTF, they will have a fall-back app that they can immediately distribute. Not only that, but it would allow them more leeway in coercing developers into deprecating code that relies on the current native code which has hooks deep into the OS.
It would be hard to have an organization that "represents the Linux community." That'd almost be like herding cats because it's so diverse and anarchaic. Better to stay out, leave their motives as a business clear as they do now and work with those they need to while assuaging the fears of others. Seems that they regard OSDL almost like a rat regards a ship that is starting to have trouble at sea.
Aside from the legal meddling of state social workers, there are fewer problems that parents face today than they did before. Parents actually have the ability to extend their standards to places where they would normally have no control, like the television when they're working late. The V-Chip allows a parent who actually has to work late, rather than just to buy that new beamer, to control the content that is accessible. All media today is rated down to minute details to allow the rushed parent a fine-grained survey of all possibly objectionable content within ten seconds, literally. Anyone out of high school with a literacy rate above the fifth grade should be able to grok a ESRB rating in ten seconds or less.
We actually have lawsuits brought by parents who seriously think that others should do more of their job for them!. This is a generation of parents that is so self-indulgent that it wants to legislate its personal preferences onto content providers because it cannot even be bothered to buy the content it enjoys!
The irony of it is that most the people really pushing these laws are left of center! The very people who whine, piss and moan about "puritans" on the right! Last I checked, a puritan is someone who forces their views on someone else at gun point when they're not harming anyone or anyone's property. It's nice to see that the political social conservatives have competition, albeit in a dark sort of way.
I plan to be a full-time father, including sacrificing my material possessions for my kids. Someone once commented to the effect that it's not wise to try to gain the whole world at the expense of your spiritual life. I believe he also commented before some self-righteous liberals and conservatives of his day killed him for defying them, that there would come a day when parents would see their children so throughly abandon the right path that they would curse themselves for being fertile.
Oh yeah, the VA loss was just an accident...
on
Telecommuting Backlash
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
What are the odds that the weekend he'd take a dump of the records of 26M veterans home would be the weekend he got robbed? Someone better get the FBI on this guy's ass because he's probably got a fat Swiss bank account waiting for him after he loses his job and does a little time in the pokey. What a great coincidence that the time he takes the motherload of personal information home is the time he is the victim of a little "smash and grab..."
If they had actually kept to the original price specs, maybe it would have done better. Still, the machines are probably a much better buy than a Nokia 770 right now.
The problem with the flat pricing mechanism is that a $9.95 flat fee would work well for big movie studios whose products are known and in demand, but will be very bad for small film studios because many people won't pay that much for a movie that might suck "because it's not a big name movie." $4.95 for an independent movie would reduce the "risk" that people take when they buy it, and I think that Jobs knows that but doesn't care.
Another thing that is problematic is that flat rates are good only for movies that are middle of the road on cost to produce and popularity. High cost movies actually need to promote an economy of scale to make up their costs every bit as much as small ones do. What is the studio going to do if it actually realizes that the only way to push a big budget movie like King Kong that flopped at the theatres, is to cut the iTMS cost to say $7.95 for a promotional offer, but Apple won't let them?
Flat prices are great if all content is worth the same, but it isn't.
The key to stopping these problems would be to impose rigorous common carrier status regulations on general bandwidth providers. Allow everything from political speech to hate speech to pornography. The only thing that would get exempt would be IPTV so that IPTV providers could organize content packages according to their customers' tastes.
For the love of God, get rid of all of the bullshit regulation at every level that allows governments to meddle in the prices of bandwidth packages and the ability of property owners to negotiate with the telecoms. Take away EVERY barrier that keeps new players from entering the market, or that even increases the cost of entering.
And I ask one more time. Does anyone want this Congress, with its meth-addled ADHD-afflicted child-level attention span for details and consequences to regulate complex technical issues when most of it are MBAs and lawyers? I wouldn't, and I despise Verizon. I switched to Vonage and would stay with Vonage even if cost more than Verizon or AT&T because it's not AT&T or Verizon, but I sure as hell don't trust this bunch of coin-operated cronies to regulate the Internet.
That the key to dominating is "excellence in conformity?" The key to beating your competition is to build up a standard, then trash your competition at implementing it. Who wants to be limited to all Sony? No one who wants to do something as "lame" as borrowing a next gen DVD from a friend.
If you do not buy any merchandise AND download their albums, you just leave the bands in debt. Your "civil disobedience" doesn't help these bands at all because you're not building an alternative marketplace. You're just copying music, and leaving the bands with no money to live on or pay off their debt. Basically, from their point of view, you're not a fan, you're just an asshole who's miserly with his money.
People like you cannot accept the fact that intellectual property doesn't come out of thin air. If you do not pump in real money into A system, not necessarily THE EXISTING system, you won't allow IP creators to actually live of their works and keep making new works. If bands cannot stand to make good money when they get good and command respect among audiences, how can they justify touring and recording new works? If you're not willing to go see them live and/or buy merchandise, how can they compensate for money they didn't make on recordings?
Artists will still make art, but you won't get it nearly as easily as you do today if you go into your socialistic model that blatantly hates the idea of having to compensate them financially for their work. You may think that by "sticking it to the man," you're sticking it to the eeeeeevil corporations, but you're not. They just nimbly duck out of the way and let your sharp stick stab the artist behind them. Your way of "freeing the artists" makes as much since as saying that stealing from and firebombing the property of plantation owners is a more effective way of freeing slaves than getting them their freedom and creating an economy that can supply them with productive jobs.
He makes great stats for years doing this, ups the ante by admitting that he knows it's the key to his success (thereby getting a lot of people to show up again) and now, the question is, will people stop reading him? Of course not. For the same reason that the right can't ignore Ted Rall and the left, Ann Coulter. He's the Rall and Coulter rolled into one of the tech press.
Ok, fess up, how many of you have downloaded gigs of MP3s before with no intention of going out to see the band live or buy the merchandise? DRM exists primarily because many college students today enjoy a quasi-middle class lifestyle on campus and still rape and pillage the file sharing networks. I'd be a lot less cynical if I didn't see a lot of the guys I knew flat out not give two shits about supporting small bands because they'd rather buy a case of beer than actually pay for the music they listened to at the party or in their apartment/dorm. And I'm not talking about bands like Metallica, but Lacuna Coil, Nightwish, theStart and others like them.
What we need is less DRM and more basic law enforcement action. It'd be a lot more effective for them to monitor bandwidth usage on campus and then start "wiretapping" students who are heavy users to see just what the hell they're doing. Chances are, it ain't home movies, porn or Linux ISOs they're sending.Then send them a bill for $5-$10/file traded illegally. Treat it like a minor property crime like stealing a candy bar and maybe juries will actually go for it.
A lot of policy wonks are for and against it. That's what policy wonks do, they research issues and take sides.
You know what would be news? Is if a libertarian think tank like Cato came out in favor of network neutrality. Why? Because that would be a major policy group going against what is normally expected of them.
When not abused by a fascist ass like Bush. However, let's not kid ourselves here. VoIP is the future of telecom. The court knows this too and said that it's within the spirit of the law. The great thing about the Internet is that VoIP might actually balkanize to the point that it'll be harder for the government to keep track of all of the different protocols, but as long as they are theoretically wiretappable, it should be fine legally.
If you have been struggling to make money at it, despite having experience, you will be vulnerable if the economy starts to really struggle. Do it on the side, and find a job that is more or less to your liking, but that is more stable and lucrative. The last thing you want is to make it to 40 and have only a few times more money saved up for retirement than a typical mid 20s code monkey. Given the ageism present in IT, you will be foolish to not make your money while you're young. This coming from a guy who's not quite 23:)
Slashdot Mirror
This is what separation of church and state means. It does not mean that private citizens or politicans are prohibited from openly expressing religious views in public or on government facilities. It means that the United States cannot establish an official state religion or for all intents and purposes do so by providing funding to one. There is nothing even stopping a government from funding all "real religions" (ie something that is not obviously a bullshit scam like Scientology).
Combine the fact that many student athletes are notorious for bad behavior like their pro-counterparts (where do you think it starts?) with the fact that many students are unabashed about posting about their bad behavior and the fact that they are affiliated with the university and you have an informal expose' on the team. Schools really do have a reason to be concerned. It's hard enough as it is to police their behavior offline to keep them out of trouble. The last thing they need is to have it all recorded for posterity online.
I'm a militant libertarian as a general rule. Much more so than your average slashdotter. Yet even I can sympathize with the school here. Until they take this over into punishing regular students, it's fine by me. If you wear the school uniform, your behavior reflects on the school the way that wearing a police uniform reflects on your department. Don't like it? Don't wear the uniform. It's not like there are a dearth of ways to pay for your way through college or jobs out there that lack these restrictions.
If it's really so important to them, they should be beyond reproach. No underage or heavy drinking. No womanizing, nothing. Be model students and athletes.
Since Big Brotheresque things are associated with arbitrary abuse by seemingly unaccountable authorities who are also unaccountable if they retaliate later, people get afraid. How many human resources departments have written a person up for saying something that got taken the wrong way by a thin-skinned person? Look at how shop-lifting by young teens is treated. Do it 25 years ago and it's a sound whack on the wrist. Today, it ruins your future no matter if you go into the army and become a decorated war hero serving on the front lines.
And the GOVERNMENT side of Big Brother has left more "little brothers" dead than all religious organizations and private corporations combined.
So yeah, it doesn't a rocket scientists to figure out why in the modern world Big Brother is considered scary. In fact, I would consider it a form of psychotic detatchment from reality to be comfortable with him.
Why would we want to contact another civilization until we are unified as a race and have advanced military and consumer technology? The ultimate in naivete is the projection done by utopian academics who equate advancement with peaceful civilization. If we as a race are any indication, and we're all we have to go by, it's safe to assume the opposite. The more advanced we've become, the less valuable human life has become and the more intrusion we tolerate from the authorities. For the love of God, the level of surveillance that the anglosphere tolerates is unfathomable by the standards of 1,000 years ago. In Britain, there's a movement to monitor every child's eating habits and American intrusion is legendary in its own right!
Let's face one little truth. Going on OUR evolutionary path, we MUST proceed with caution into space. We should avoid seeking out other races until we can approach them with confidence.
The more rabid supporters of the DMCA are the primary reason why the more moderate supporters of "liberal, but strong" IP laws (more law enforcement, less preemptive legislation) get drowned out. When they get called out on issues like the BIOS, they almost never respond. "La dee fucking da" and all that jazz. IP law sometimes doesn't work. Sometimes the market is actually expanded by the rabid competition that weak IP law can create. Necessity is the mother of all invention and there is actually a point where letting people live off their research and development becomes parasitic.
It's not a divide between socialism on the one side and hyper-protective policies on the other. There is plenty of room for common law to work its magic to create a nuanced and flexible system.
Unless these companies get the ability to sue the "SEO companies" and others that spam them, they will just get cluttered to the point that nothing short of SkyNet will be able to be useful.
Say what you will about the United States, but at least you can't say that we spend extreme percentages on our military while we have major internal problems. China wouldn't have anywhere near the problems it does today with crime and pollution if it didn't devote so many resources to its military. I get tired of the excuses for their priorities "oh they're afraid of the United States!" Bullshit. We can't even get riled up over Afghanistan, a country that aided and abetted the 9-11 terrorists and protected their ring leader. China would have to do something monstrous like conquer one of the "asian tigers" or Japan to get enough passion to actually fight them. You know what this just proves once again? Big government doesn't give a fuck about the common person unless they're revolting or about to. China's spam problems are only the tip of the iceberg. How about stopping all of those hack attacks against government and industry first? Priorities, priorities.
There is a certain degree of expectation that if you are going to use their network, that you need to be a paying customer. It's not hard to go in and buy a coffee. I've done that with small coffee shops that provide wireless. I go in and buy something--in cash--so that they know I'm paying my way. If you can't afford a $1.50 cup of cheap coffee, you should be working instead of sitting there with your laptop leeching off their connection. This is a welfare baby mentality. We need the police to intervene in cases like this or a few miscreants will end up ruining it for the rest of us.
And one last thing. It's very unlikely that the same workers who noticed him using their wifi would not have noticed him coming in as a buying customer, given how long he was doing this.
Who wants to take bets on how long before someone writes an office suite plugin?
It's worth nothing that the political blogosphere has already started to consolidate along "MSM lines." I predict that within five or six years that "blogging" will be just another way of maintaining an information-rich website. Now, no snickering about how valuable that information might be from the anti-bloggers. The point is that "blog software" represented a commoditization of CMS software in a way that your average user could handle and is thus a step forward. It is now much easier thanks to WordPress and Movable Type for people to maintain small websites, and WordPress can handle very big ones as well.
The problem with the blogosphere is that it is "democratic" by nature, but the future evolutions like vlogging and podcasting will not be democratic. They can't be. If you aren't making serious advertising money, the bandwidth fees from your amateur video hour would actually run into bankrupting-levels if a blogger got hit with several "instalanches" in one month on top of say, 10,000 regular viewers a month.
The interesting part is the software. WordPress has proven to be particularly powerful in terms of forming the framework for websites, as ZDNet has proved with their TechBlogs.
Microsoft shouldn't have any problems starting a second Internet Explorer project to rewrite the entire codebase in C#. They have more than enough money to maintain an internal second version that is pure managed code. The advantage is that if the SHTF, they will have a fall-back app that they can immediately distribute. Not only that, but it would allow them more leeway in coercing developers into deprecating code that relies on the current native code which has hooks deep into the OS.
It would be hard to have an organization that "represents the Linux community." That'd almost be like herding cats because it's so diverse and anarchaic. Better to stay out, leave their motives as a business clear as they do now and work with those they need to while assuaging the fears of others. Seems that they regard OSDL almost like a rat regards a ship that is starting to have trouble at sea.
Aside from the legal meddling of state social workers, there are fewer problems that parents face today than they did before. Parents actually have the ability to extend their standards to places where they would normally have no control, like the television when they're working late. The V-Chip allows a parent who actually has to work late, rather than just to buy that new beamer, to control the content that is accessible. All media today is rated down to minute details to allow the rushed parent a fine-grained survey of all possibly objectionable content within ten seconds, literally. Anyone out of high school with a literacy rate above the fifth grade should be able to grok a ESRB rating in ten seconds or less.
We actually have lawsuits brought by parents who seriously think that others should do more of their job for them!. This is a generation of parents that is so self-indulgent that it wants to legislate its personal preferences onto content providers because it cannot even be bothered to buy the content it enjoys!
The irony of it is that most the people really pushing these laws are left of center! The very people who whine, piss and moan about "puritans" on the right! Last I checked, a puritan is someone who forces their views on someone else at gun point when they're not harming anyone or anyone's property. It's nice to see that the political social conservatives have competition, albeit in a dark sort of way.
I plan to be a full-time father, including sacrificing my material possessions for my kids. Someone once commented to the effect that it's not wise to try to gain the whole world at the expense of your spiritual life. I believe he also commented before some self-righteous liberals and conservatives of his day killed him for defying them, that there would come a day when parents would see their children so throughly abandon the right path that they would curse themselves for being fertile.
What are the odds that the weekend he'd take a dump of the records of 26M veterans home would be the weekend he got robbed? Someone better get the FBI on this guy's ass because he's probably got a fat Swiss bank account waiting for him after he loses his job and does a little time in the pokey. What a great coincidence that the time he takes the motherload of personal information home is the time he is the victim of a little "smash and grab..."
The alternative is even worse, and it ain't bloggers.
If they had actually kept to the original price specs, maybe it would have done better. Still, the machines are probably a much better buy than a Nokia 770 right now.
The problem with the flat pricing mechanism is that a $9.95 flat fee would work well for big movie studios whose products are known and in demand, but will be very bad for small film studios because many people won't pay that much for a movie that might suck "because it's not a big name movie." $4.95 for an independent movie would reduce the "risk" that people take when they buy it, and I think that Jobs knows that but doesn't care.
Another thing that is problematic is that flat rates are good only for movies that are middle of the road on cost to produce and popularity. High cost movies actually need to promote an economy of scale to make up their costs every bit as much as small ones do. What is the studio going to do if it actually realizes that the only way to push a big budget movie like King Kong that flopped at the theatres, is to cut the iTMS cost to say $7.95 for a promotional offer, but Apple won't let them?
Flat prices are great if all content is worth the same, but it isn't.
The key to stopping these problems would be to impose rigorous common carrier status regulations on general bandwidth providers. Allow everything from political speech to hate speech to pornography. The only thing that would get exempt would be IPTV so that IPTV providers could organize content packages according to their customers' tastes.
For the love of God, get rid of all of the bullshit regulation at every level that allows governments to meddle in the prices of bandwidth packages and the ability of property owners to negotiate with the telecoms. Take away EVERY barrier that keeps new players from entering the market, or that even increases the cost of entering.
And I ask one more time. Does anyone want this Congress, with its meth-addled ADHD-afflicted child-level attention span for details and consequences to regulate complex technical issues when most of it are MBAs and lawyers? I wouldn't, and I despise Verizon. I switched to Vonage and would stay with Vonage even if cost more than Verizon or AT&T because it's not AT&T or Verizon, but I sure as hell don't trust this bunch of coin-operated cronies to regulate the Internet.
That the key to dominating is "excellence in conformity?" The key to beating your competition is to build up a standard, then trash your competition at implementing it. Who wants to be limited to all Sony? No one who wants to do something as "lame" as borrowing a next gen DVD from a friend.
If you do not buy any merchandise AND download their albums, you just leave the bands in debt. Your "civil disobedience" doesn't help these bands at all because you're not building an alternative marketplace. You're just copying music, and leaving the bands with no money to live on or pay off their debt. Basically, from their point of view, you're not a fan, you're just an asshole who's miserly with his money.
People like you cannot accept the fact that intellectual property doesn't come out of thin air. If you do not pump in real money into A system, not necessarily THE EXISTING system, you won't allow IP creators to actually live of their works and keep making new works. If bands cannot stand to make good money when they get good and command respect among audiences, how can they justify touring and recording new works? If you're not willing to go see them live and/or buy merchandise, how can they compensate for money they didn't make on recordings?
Artists will still make art, but you won't get it nearly as easily as you do today if you go into your socialistic model that blatantly hates the idea of having to compensate them financially for their work. You may think that by "sticking it to the man," you're sticking it to the eeeeeevil corporations, but you're not. They just nimbly duck out of the way and let your sharp stick stab the artist behind them. Your way of "freeing the artists" makes as much since as saying that stealing from and firebombing the property of plantation owners is a more effective way of freeing slaves than getting them their freedom and creating an economy that can supply them with productive jobs.
He makes great stats for years doing this, ups the ante by admitting that he knows it's the key to his success (thereby getting a lot of people to show up again) and now, the question is, will people stop reading him? Of course not. For the same reason that the right can't ignore Ted Rall and the left, Ann Coulter. He's the Rall and Coulter rolled into one of the tech press.
Ok, fess up, how many of you have downloaded gigs of MP3s before with no intention of going out to see the band live or buy the merchandise? DRM exists primarily because many college students today enjoy a quasi-middle class lifestyle on campus and still rape and pillage the file sharing networks. I'd be a lot less cynical if I didn't see a lot of the guys I knew flat out not give two shits about supporting small bands because they'd rather buy a case of beer than actually pay for the music they listened to at the party or in their apartment/dorm. And I'm not talking about bands like Metallica, but Lacuna Coil, Nightwish, theStart and others like them.
What we need is less DRM and more basic law enforcement action. It'd be a lot more effective for them to monitor bandwidth usage on campus and then start "wiretapping" students who are heavy users to see just what the hell they're doing. Chances are, it ain't home movies, porn or Linux ISOs they're sending.Then send them a bill for $5-$10/file traded illegally. Treat it like a minor property crime like stealing a candy bar and maybe juries will actually go for it.
A lot of policy wonks are for and against it. That's what policy wonks do, they research issues and take sides.
You know what would be news? Is if a libertarian think tank like Cato came out in favor of network neutrality. Why? Because that would be a major policy group going against what is normally expected of them.
When not abused by a fascist ass like Bush. However, let's not kid ourselves here. VoIP is the future of telecom. The court knows this too and said that it's within the spirit of the law. The great thing about the Internet is that VoIP might actually balkanize to the point that it'll be harder for the government to keep track of all of the different protocols, but as long as they are theoretically wiretappable, it should be fine legally.
If you have been struggling to make money at it, despite having experience, you will be vulnerable if the economy starts to really struggle. Do it on the side, and find a job that is more or less to your liking, but that is more stable and lucrative. The last thing you want is to make it to 40 and have only a few times more money saved up for retirement than a typical mid 20s code monkey. Given the ageism present in IT, you will be foolish to not make your money while you're young. This coming from a guy who's not quite 23 :)