This is wrong on so many levels. To those of you claiming that handing out fines is acceptable, I ask you, how does one prove/disprove these fines? I can just as easily walk up to random person on the street, claim I saw them littering, give them a ticket, and be on my merry way. How can they prove they didn't litter?

The difference with an actual police force is a) selection, which the police have severe regulations on, b) monitoring, which police have an entire department aimed at their own, c) authority, which we the people gave to the police force, but which we did not choose to give to these random security guards.

The abuse that runs rampant in private security firms is becoming quite publicly visible lately. Let's not give them any more power to corrupt them.

I hate to me a stickler, but your title says "ocsillate" instead of "oscillate".

"And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up."

The problem with erosions of privacy is that, even if they aren't targeting you now, they might later. How much would it take? Speaking out against the government? A prank phone call to the police? File-sharing? Just because they don't have a reason to watch you doesn't mean they won't find one later.

The need for a warrant and the explicit description of who and why are extremely important to judicial overview. How can you tell if powers are being abused if you don't know what was happening? The fact that they submitted the paperwork means nothing if the paperwork is blank (read: without details).

I have a friend who works in CSIS, and despite the fact that they are horribly understaffed, the truth is that they have a lot of information on a lot of people. It wouldn't take much to abuse this.

The problem with using litigation to combat abuse is that it's more difficult to prove abuse. If it's illegal to wiretap without a warrant, all you have to prove is that you were wiretapped and there was no warrant. If it's legal, but there are a bunch of conditions, you need to prove those various conditions. This is even more difficult when many things, such as who is tapped and why, are left out. How do you prove you were illegally wiretapped if there isn't even a paper with your name on?

These may sound like little details, but put together, it results in a vastly-weakened system of oversight, which is much easier to abuse.

I was one of those unruly teenagers who hated English literature classes. Not that I didn't read -- I actually had a large collection of electronics and programming textbooks that I would read for fun -- but the material that we covered just wasn't interesting. It was no surprise to me that 14 year old boys would rather read light fiction about playing hockey than Shakespearean sonnets; it's easier for them to relate to playing hockey. Literature classes had forgotten the first rule of good literature -- writing for your audience.

Probably the most painful novel we had to read was The Stone Angel. Not because it was poorly done, or because it was Canadian and therefore forced upon us, but because it was about an old woman's regression back to childhood and her fight for independence. What does a teenager know or care about what it's like to be 80 years old? Even the more avid readers were loathe to read it because it just didn't interest them. Nevermind that it was actually a great story, it was just the wrong audience.

Hamlet, on the other hand, was found interesting by nearly everybody. Take a young teenager who falls in love, is betrayed by his parents, is trying to find his place in the world, and toss in a good ghost story, and now you've got something that almost any teenager could appreciate. Fighting through the Olde English wasn't easy, but our teacher was smart enough to give a summary at each section as to what was going on; enough that everybody understood the story.

Literature classes could get through to young adults a lot better if they focused on stories that would appeal to young adults. The stigma of reading being "boring" is bad enough at that age; tossing in an irrelevant story doesn't make it any better.

@Packet sniffing concerns:
If you are connecting with wireless over an open (unencrypted) connection, then the traffic is visible to anybody in the area. On the other hand, most routers provide both wired and wireless access. People on wireless won't be able to see the traffic on the wired portion and vice versa.

Another concern is that people who are on wireless or wired are both behind the firewall that the router provides. That doesn't immediately give people access to your home computers, but it allows them the opportunity to try exploiting them. With alternative firmware, like DD-WRT or OpenWRT, you can configure the wireless network to be separate from the wired network so that your home computers are still behind their own firewall.

Unfortunately, there will always be legal concerns. If our legal system were better, it wouldn't assume that whoever pays the bill committed the crime, but that's generally where it ends up. The types of protections that apply to ISPs don't apply to people who leave their wireless open.

What would help is a system whereby people could get access, but only after they proved who they were. Nobody would be denied access, but when the police come knocking on your door, you can show them the list of who was using your WiFi at that time. Unfortunately, this just isn't practicle right now -- there's no commonplace, reliable system to electronically prove your identity to a third-party who you've never met before.

Let's rewrite his quote so that we can understand it:

The government isn't always right, but (even when it isn't) we all agree that we should do what it says.

Yes, for right or wrong, follow the government like lemmings. Spoken like a true dictator.

A government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
A government of corporate members, by corporate members, and for corporate memebrs.

I still don't understand why there's such a push to end porn. I understand that not everybody wants to see porn, but if that's the case, then don't go looking for it.

You will rarely, if ever, see porn while visiting "safe" websites. If you start venturing into the shadier areas, like hacking or warez, then yes, you'll see all sorts of other shady things, including drugs and porn.

They keep saying they want to "protect children and families," but what are they protecting them from? Seeing a naked person? God help them if they ever looked in the mirror while they themselves were naked. They are merely enforcing the rheotoric of certain religious groups that believe that sex is both sacred and shameful.

You don't have to sanitize the Internet to keep children from being exposed to things their parents don't want them to see: let the parents act like parents and watch their kids. Give parents the option as to what their kids (and they themselves) may see. Just becuse some people think it inappropriate doesn't mean we should all be limited from accessing it.

Some people are arguing that you're still able to use paid-for services, but I think that's missing the point. Why should people be given free access as long as they don't look at porn? Why should a company be allowed exclusive access to precious radio spectrum as long as they agree to sanitize the signal? It sets a very definite double-standard: you can view porn, but not on our network. They do so in the name of children, but it applies to adults too -- the rules don't make exclusions to the filtering policy for those who can prove that they won't be harmed.

As everybody else pointed out, what is "obscenity or pornography and, in context, as measured by contemporary community standards and existing law, any images or text that otherwise would be harmful to teens and adolescents."? Whose community standards? At what granularity -- town, county, state? What is harmful? I would quickly argue that violence is harmful: should we ban all images of war? Many people are arguing that violent video games are harmful, will those be banned as well? What about communities where it's not acceptable to talk about contraception, abortion, or homosexuality? What about drugs? What about political dissent?

Obscenity laws have seen centuries of argument with no clear agreement on what is or isn't obscene. Laws have, in general, steered clear of much of the discussion -- most laws which would seek to define and punish obscenity have been stricken or otherwise made lame by the courts. The FCC's insistence on such measures merely allows a government body to, in the public interest and outside of the existing judicial system, enforce its own laws about what is to be considered obscene. It allows some people to enforce their beliefs upon the masses in the name of "protecting the children".

“I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” -Voltaire

KurtMac: TrackMania is a racing game that lots of people play online. Unfortunately you can't crash into each other and such, but you certainly can compete with each other.

@#6: Why not? While I won't deny that The Pirate Bay is quite blatant about their willingness to aide others in infringing copyrights, it's also true that the Swedish government has gone to great (illegal) lengths to punish them for it. Do two wrongs really make a right?

George Carlin truly was a great comedian. No slapstick, no ridiculousness, just everyday situations and how much he hated them. he was a master at pointing out the stupidity of the world around us. We could have used a hundred more people like George.

As a great fan of his work and everything he stood for, he will be missed.

The very notion of giving a work-for-hire photographer rights to the photograph seems ridiculous to me. For one, they have been paid for their work up front -- royalties are not their method of payment. Not to mention, why should the photographer have rights to a photo of you, your family, your house, and everything else in that picture? Quite the opposite, I would hope that I, the person in the photograph, had all rights to how that photograph could be used -- after all, it's a photograph of me!

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, is that a reasonable person would not expect that they would not have any rights to the photograph which they commissioned and which portrays their likeness. How many parents make copies of their kids' photos to send to their family? How many make copies of their wedding photos to send to their friends? This isn't being done to spite photographers; it's being done because they have no reason to believe otherwise.

It's unfortunate that other countries have already set the precedent for such unreasonable rules. Rather than impose them on Canadians, I'd like to see other countries take a second look at their own laws. As with any law, one must always ask, "Why is this necessary?"

@#15: I think you want to look at the CANSPAM act, rather than the DMCA.

@#3: Are you kidding me? You could have the Feds bang down your door and arrest you based on a conversation they didn't hear at all. With legislation like the PATRIOT act, all they need is suspicion, and to many people, encryption looks suspicious. In fact, just knowing that the IP on the other end of your VoIP conversation was to some place in Iraq is probably enough to get you hauled off to Gitmo.

@ Zikzak:

The major reason why too much data can be a bad thing is in differentiation. As more data is added to the set, it's harder to tell one piece from another -- there are greater chances that two pieces of data will share more in common, so much so that we won't be able to reliably tell them apart.

If you were asked to pick a person out of a 10-man lineup, you would have no difficulty in doing so. Assuming they were picked at random, odds are that each would be different heights, have different hair color, different facial features, etc. Now try to pick that same person out of a 10 billion-man lineup. Sure, you can rule out most people, but you'll eventually find that there is a point at which all of the remaining candidates look awfully similar -- so much so that you can't reliably tell who is who.

Introducing enough points into the data set changes it from a discrete set of points to a continuous spectrum. At some point our resolution (our ability to discern between adjacent points) it no longer sufficient. Current methods, such as fingerprints, facial recognition, signature recognition, and many others, have dismally low resolution -- especially when automated by computers.

As a numerical example, consider how reliable your detection mechanism would have to be in order to reach an acceptable level of false-positives (note that you can never eliminate false-positives). Take, as an example, a recognition process with a 0.001% false positive rate -- much better than most current recognition processes. That means that if the data set is 100,000 people, there's a 100% chance of getting a false positive (0.001% chance of a false positive at each comparison * 100,000 comparisons). Is this acceptable? What is acceptable? Studies often use 5% as the margin of error that they falsely conclude their hypothesis. If we accept that as our margin of error for proving an identity (keeping in mind that this means 1 out of every 20 tests identifies the wrong person), we could only do that for a population of 5,000 people. Just how accurate would we have to be to identity a single person out of 10 billion with less than 5% possibility of picking the wrong person? (1 / 10 billion) * 5% or 0.0000000005%. That's a very small number, far more accurate than any process we have to date, and that's assuming an abismal 5% false positive rate.

The importance of false-positives is that they mean innocent people are going to be inconvenienced. And I use the word inconvenienced lightly, because that inconvenience could run anywhere from being pulled over for 10 minutes by police, to being questioned at a police station for several hours, to being held for questioning for several days, to being held in a containment camp for several months, to fighting a court battle for over a year, to being imprisoned for 25 years or more. It all depends on just how much faith we put in automated recognition.

@ #6: Unless she wanted to live as a deaf person for the rest of her life, ear plugs most likely wouldn't be an effective solution.

The problem with drowning out background music is that it tends to be everywhere and it's often not in our control. For example, if she were to be shopping in a mall which may end up playing that song, should she wear her ear plugs everywhere? If she did, how would she buy goods while she was there or otherwise converse with those around her? It may be possible to pretend to be deaf, but any storeowner who realized she was wearing earplugs would likely be offended very quickly; it would be no different to them than a customer who can't hear because they were listening to their iPod (a common aggrevation).

Given the rather immediate effect of the song on her, any action she took to prevent it would have to be very reliable. For ear plugs, that would mean enough sound dampening that she couldn't so much as make out the beat (likely what caused her seizures) and she would have to wear them at all times, leaving her essentially deaf. Deaf or the possibility of a seizure? Hard choice to make.

Assuming that the procedure had very good odds of success (or atleast of not causing damage), I don't blame her for taking it.

Perhaps they should have left us some public space in the first place. We just finished following a tense big for new spectrum. If we need room for personal devices, why are we selling all of the remaining spectrum to big companies? Set some aside and let consumer-level devices use it.

Since the FCC does have a policy of not allowing low-class devices to interfere with higher-class devices, it makes sense to keep those different classes on different frequencies.

While it makes sense, in terms of efficiency, to use whitespaces for consumer devices, it's only becoming necessary because the FCC is too busy selling public spectrum in exclusive contracts to large corporations. If they would just leave some room aside for everybody to use, this wouldn't be an issue.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but if these documents are being made public as an accountability measure, how does censoring the majority of their content (and sometimes even the title) leave them accountable? Yes, I can see that they used many manuals, but I have no idea what they are or what they contain. Were they a good use of money? I have no idea.

Though, I must applaude them for doing this anyway. It does give some accountability -- it shows just how much they hide from the people.

@ #6, I think you're missing part of the picture. Sure, they don't know the exact contents of the page, but just know where you've been says a lot. In fact, it is worse in many ways, because without the context of why you were visiting those sites and what was on them, it's easy to misinterpret your actions.

As an analogy, consider having a private investigator follow you around. He doesn't have a big microphone or camera recording every conversation you have, he just follows you and make notes about where you've been. Say you happen to visit the unemployment office, a prison, a hospital, then spend the night at a halfway home. At first glance, I'd say you were some poor junkie on parole. However, you're actually a counselor for battered women.

If you think that was an unreasonable example, consider what your search terms on Google look like. When AOL had that list of millions of customers' searches leaked, there were some rather bizarre correlations. One woman looked like she was either at the end of her rope or in desperate need of medical attention. In reality, she had tried to help many friends all with various ailments.

The common belief that there's nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide is false because the interpretation of one's actions can be quite negative even if they are done with good intentions.

Besides, what business do they have keeping track of where you go? Other than making them money, what are they providing you in return?

As has been pointed out, this seems like a rather open and shut case. I'm not familiar with the british laws, but in both Canada and the US, there are laws specifically against installing software on somebody's computer without their knowledge. It's not surprising to see a random website doing this, but for an ISP to do this, and for such selfish reasons, calls for swift action. Let's hope this goes to court swiftly and decisively.

The problem with this, as with so many other "preventative measures", is that we are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. It is not up to a single policeman or military officer to determine, without any evidence, our guilt.

The government has no authority to prevent us from being on public property. If they suspect us of having committed a crime, they may arrest us, but they better be able to show reasonable suspicion. Not having a good reason for being there isn't even reasonable suspicion of intent to commit a crime (which isn't a crime itself), let along reasonable suspicion of having committed a crime. It's no different than photographing a public building from public property; there is no law against it, so they have no authority to arrest you for doing it.

@ #36: While I agree that excising that portion of the quote does skew the meaning behind his quote, I don't see that the additional explanation makes his adgenda any more legitimate.

Assuming that what the telcos did (at the request of the government) was legal, then retroactive immunity isn't even an issue -- you don't need immunity from punishment if you haven't committed a crime. On the other hand, if the telcos' actions were, in fact, illegal, then how is granting immunity anything less than putting them outside of the law? Even if it is only retroactive, it absolves them of a crime that they knowingly committed. That certainly doesn't give them any incentive to follow the law in the future, knowing that the president could be convinced to give them retroactive immunity if the shit hits the fan.

He may not have promised to allow it in the future, but by not punishing it in the present, he certainly would be setting a precident for not punishing it in the future.

[N]either the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. [...]

Perhaps this was just a poor choice of words, but McCain's comment leaves a lot of interpretations possible.

First, he refers to these as "actions that most people ... understand were Constitutional..." What does "understand" mean in this context? Is he implying that they were legally constitutional and most people know that, or is he implying that most people believe that it was constitutional.

He also mentions the qualifier of September 11th. It may be that he meant something like, "...actions, in the wake of September 11th, that most people believed...", but as he said it, it reads as a qualifier, saying that those actions were constitutional and appropriate because of September 11th. If that's what he meant, then it shows a complete lack of understand of what the Constitution is, because it certainly isn't dependent on current events. The Constitution is not something that is to be applied when and where it's deemed fitting -- it applies to all Americans in all situations.

Lastly, he directs his attack at the ACLU and "the trial lawyers". While it's possible that the trial lawyers' interpretation of the Constitution will not be consistent with the trial judge's interpretation, I find it highly presumptuous of him to believe that he and "most people" have a better understanding of the Constitution and its implications in this case than the ACLU (a collection of lawyers) or the trial lawyers. Is a lawyer's entire profession not based around being an expert on laws and their applications?

@#4: Reading the original article, Hyneman does make the point that you need energy to convert the CO2 into something -- CO2 by itself can't be used to create energy (it's already one of the simplest, most stable compounds we know of). Assuming something like http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=solar&id=18582&a=
could be done efficiently, it would use solar energy to address two problems: reducing existing CO2 quantities and transforming otherwise transient solar energy into more stable chemical energy.

The second scenario in the article quote is a nonsequiter. Just because breaking down diapers won't power an entire country doesn't make it an unacceptable alternative energy source. No country gets its power from a single source.

The problem with almost every alternative energy source (and there are numerable possibilities) is that they are only useful if they produce more energy than they require for production. The dirty diaper scenario is a great example of this. Yes, you could break down dirty diapers (or any other organic product) into oil and gas, but how much oil and gas would the factories require to do this?

This is a common problem with recycling plastics. Yes, recycling plastics saves us from needing to use as much oil (as direct constituents), but how much oil is expended in the process of the recycling? It ends up being cheaper and more energy efficient to make it from scratch than to recycle it. The only reason recycling plastics has merit is that it prevents those plastics from sitting for eternity in a landfill.

A truly useful alternative energy source must be able to provide us with energy at a lower cost than what our current energy sources cost. As the cost of our current energy sources continues to rise, we may find previously costly sources to be acceptable alternatives.

#5, I think that was the author's point. He was there when Clinton imposed the DMCA; he saw first-hand its devastating effects. The fact that he was chairman of the NEA during Clinton's administration doesn't imply that he was a supporter of Clinton or that he agreed with the DMCA.

#7, I think the problem is that culture doesn't tend to be created out of nowhere, it is slowly morphed over time as each person adds something to the already prevelant culture. We see this in literature, music, visual arts, and especially fashion. Anything which limits our ability to create something new from something old imposes a barrier to that change. It leaves us stuck with either making no changes or making drastic changes, and drastic changes are very difficult to make. In essence, it encourages things to stay the same, limiting the ability of others to add their creativity into the mix.

This was a great presentation; both well explored and well stated. I have been an avid gamer since I was young and now that I'm an adult, I see no reason why some games shouldn't include adult themes and adult relationships.

I agree entirely that sex is just a part of human life, but that it's not just sex, it's sexual relationships. Video games should go beyond gratuitous nudity (exclusively female, as Iscah pointed out) and focus on the development of relationships. I think this would be good for games, not only as a way to break the "sex in games is bad" stigma, but also to bring depth to the plots of video games. Could you imagine if movies never showed the lead male and female characters forming relationships? That's constantly the way it is in video games and it definitely limits the story line, as well as giving an impression that real people don't develop deep relationships, which isn't the impression that I would want to leave child gamers.

Where I don't entirely agree with Daniel is on the belief that sexuality in film is accepted. I don't agree with this because I don't find sexuality in any part of Western society to be accepted, though it is certainly tolerated more on film and television than in video games. For whatever reason, the West is quite willing to accept violence -- something that is socially unacceptable for people to emulate -- and yet they crucify sexuality in all of its froms, despite it being a regular part of a healthy human life.

I definitely agree that the reason video games are decried for sexual content is because it is an immature media that is not well understood. The vast majority of parents allow their children to see films that contain explicit sex and violence -- even when those movies are given PG-13 and R ratings -- and yet they are vocal about much less in video games. I believe this is due to ignorance and media attention. The vast majority of parents speaking out about these video games have never played them themselves; they are only going on what they have heard in the media. Since the media will jump on even the smallest hot-button, parents get a heavily-biased view of just how much sex is present in video games. Descriptions like "porn simulator" are sensationalist and certinaly don't give an accurate representation of what is involved in those games.

The strangest part of the controversy is that the standards for decency are being applied to everyone equally. While I agree that some things are too much for a 12 year old, and many others just wouldn't make sense to an 8 year old, there are plenty of teenagers and adults who would not only understand but be able to handle with maturity the type of content being surpressed. Yet both the lobbyists and industry are happy to restrict adults to only viewing G rated material. This doesn't happen with film -- there are a large number of R rated movies and an entire industry of X rated movies -- nor does it happen with music (where a Parental Advisory label is present on nearly every album without effect), so why are video games treated differently?

The only reason I can see for the differential treatment is that video games are still a young medium, and like film and music both experienced, people fear that the content in video games will both shape and drive players to emulate them. While there are still many who believe that film and music can also have this effect (perhaps not without some merit), it seems to be accepted now that explicit movies and music aren't forming a generation of murders. However, video games aren't out of the water yet because the critical mass of a majority of a generation playing video games hasn't yet been reached. Like music and movies, it will just be a matter of time before we grow comfortable with and accept video games as just another art and entertainment media.

Interesting, but you might want to avoid it if you are epileptic or sensitive to motion -- it flips back and forth between images very quickly and at different angles. I couldn't actually finish watching it.

These censors often remove words that in-and-of-themselves have no "dirty" meaning. For example, I once played DDO and you were given the option to write a bio for your character. Being that my character was a ranger, I tried to describe him as a "master of the shadows". Much to my dismay the word "master" was censored. While I can imagine how it was used in such a way as to triggered a ban on the word, I assure you that people found other words to describe that act of self-gratification.

I can see where Zoink's linguistic theory is going and I would like to pose my own: a language will always contain words to describe every idea, even if the words normally used to describe that idea are removed from the language.

Though they speak of banning words, what they are trying to ban are the expressions of ideas. So long as people wish to express these ideas, they will find words to express them, even if it means creating new ones. If a word that expresses this idea is banned, the person will create a new one to take its place. Ergo, there will always be a word which has not been banned that can be used to express that idea. QED