Does anyone have a record of how individual Reps voted on this? I'd like to know whether I owe my Rep a disgruntled phone call.

Also, CALL YOUR SENATORS! Make some noise, folks!

If you buy an HP laptop, you're just asking for trouble. My data points are rather skewed since I did IT work for several years, but every person I've known with an HP laptop has had catastrophic hardware issues.
Really though, HP doesn't need good tech support - warranties on their computers only last for about 30 days anyway.

One problem I have with candybar phones with joysticks (or trackballs, or any other protrusive directional device) is that the joystick inevitably breaks or loses responsiveness after just a few months of being in my pocket. It's gotten to the point where I refuse to buy a candybar phone unless it has a good, old-fashioned d-pad with a button in the middle.

PSPs are great fun, but last I checked, they ran SSH like they were powered by sedated hamsters. Hopefully this thing can do caffeinated sloth or better.

I think rather than worrying about piracy's role in the vanishing of artists' "small margins", perhaps it would be more productive to figure out a system in which artists don't get screwed over with those "small margins" in the first place. Just because the record labels have a good deal of money and power now doesn't mean that that should continue to be the case.

@#27: It's called the 4th Amendment. The government just seems to be a bit illiterate right now.

Seriously folks, if your senators voted "Nay," put the screws to them. Make it clear that your right to privacy is not a negotiable issue. It is an election year, after all.

@#29
I see what you did there.

Seriously though, despite the fact that people are technically not in the US when they're being hassled by customs, they still retain their constitutional right to privacy, don't they? Like Jeff said, "no warrant, no look."

I've heard that the warranty on these things sucks.

@Jeff:
I would argue that tackling fear-inspiring problems dispassionately and with a level head is usually the best approach.
Solving most serious problems - developing a vaccine for avian flu, for instance - is something that takes time and intelligent deliberation. Scientists don't go running around like chickens with their heads cut off and expect to cure cancer. However, that's exactly the type of thing that happened to the US government post-9/11. Look at hastily-crafted legislation like the PATRIOT Act, and asinine policies like the banning of liquids on flights.
Moreover, throwing technology at a problem usually just makes the problem more complicated, especially when a large bureaucratic body is involved.

Getting back on topic, it troubles me more than a bit when a secret government document discusses tactics for the coercion of citizens into providing information for this sort of comprehensive, centralized database. Doesn't do much to foster trust, does it?

http://pieps.org/NIS_Options_Analysis_Outcome.pdf

w3top.org does a similar thing but uses information available on Twitter. The really weird part is that during their quest for a profile image for "my" account (probably a Google image search), they got my cousin's twitter profile picture instead.

@DCER
Piggybacking on #45 (apologies if I'm straying from your point here):
Moreover, you shouldn't blame individual users for stealing your bandwidth - if Comcast enters into a contract promising a certain amount of bandwidth all the time, it should be able to provide that bandwidth to all of its customers all the time. If you're troubled by the downloading habits of the kids down the street slowing down your connection, put the screws to Comcast for breach of contract.

Despite the fact that P2P may be "extremely controversial legally," it is not inherently illegal. (Technically, peer-to-peer connections are how the internet works. If you go to a web site, you're engaging in a peer-to-peer connection with a web server somewhere, so questioning the legality of P2P is questioning the legality of the internet itself.) P2P networks don't infringe on others' intellectual property rights. People choose to use those networks to infringe on others' IP rights. Saying P2P is legally controversial is like saying that hammers are legally controversial.

P2P and distributed filesharing are relatively new ideas, and I expect that the more they prove themselves as efficient, useful technologies, the more "legitimate" uses we'll see. This reminds me of how pornography drives technology (do a Google search for pornography and new technology for more on this); people seem to love using new ideas and technologies for less-than-saintly purposes.

Lastly, what's your problem with kids? Does it bother you that they're more technologically savvy than you, or is your plastic hip acting up again? Seriously though, why don't you take your ad-hominem attacks somewhere else?</flame>

Obviously the correct course of action here is to create a cryptographic hashing algorithm that yields a 6.643856...-bit number.

@3,4: The major problem with any proprietary/locked-down platform allowing for homebrew isn't necessarily IP-related - it's that by opening up a platform, you're allowing homebrew creators to run arbitrary code on your hardware. So, for example, it would be possible for a person to write a program to expose encryption keys, which Nintendo can't legally condone. A malicious homebrewer could write code to brick someone's Wii, or steal the credit card info saved to someone’s Xbox Live account.

I'm personally all for homebrew and open platforms (possibly with some sort of distinction between trusted and untrusted code implemented by the hardware manufacturer), but it's understandable that the manufacturers don't necessarily want to open up that can of worms. The current system allows for system manufacturers to hold game developers accountable for the products that they create; if Activision, for instance, were to ship a game with easter eggs that allowed a user to install Linux on an Xbox360, Microsoft could (among other things) refuse to digitally sign future Activision games. But by allowing anybody to push code onto a system, companies effectively would be giving up the ability to prevent people from uploading malicious or otherwise "bad" content. I think they understand that allowing for user-created content and homebrew is the future of these platforms – there’s a lot of potential there, and the first company to provide some sort of support for this stands to make a not-insignificant amount of money. Also, looking at the success of things like Wikipedia, it’s easy to see that the vast majority of content is not malicious. But this is the type of “feature” that companies like Nintendo or Microsoft are going to take their time implementing since there are so many ways that they can shoot themselves in the foot with it.

In the meantime, long live unsupported homebrew. It’s vitally important that we have hackers to lead innovation and show folks they’re missing out on.

My favorite was this summer, when the "if you see something, say something" PSA was going over the 1970's-era loudspeakers at El stops. The abysmal sound quality added to the Big Brother-esque feel of it all.

Too bad they're not playing anymore, I'd really like to have recorded that business.

Virtual-machine-interpreted virii? Sounds like a bad idea to me.
Seems like a fun read though.

@JL:
While it'd be nice to have the kind of "seat belt" that you propose, there are problems inherent in any kind of centralized database of "things that are ok to do".
At face value, this seems fine - companies can register content that is ok to download with this database, and your downloading program, OS, or legal system can poll the database whenever you want to access content.
Implementation issues aside, problems arise when you try to determine who gets to change the database. If you allow everybody to provide access to content that they claim is theirs, there's no difference from the current system where anyone can share any file they want, just with the added overhead of everybody polling a centralized database. If you decide to disallow access to individuals, not only are you robbing people of their freedom of speech, you're stifling creativity. Think of the effect it would have on independent artists who are unable to notify people that their IP is ok to access. Innovation as we know it would end.

Whether you like it or not, there's no way to keep people from stealing content without also neutering our ability to create content. The ability to produce and distribute perfect digital copies of works makes this problem more apparent, and arguably more serious, than ever before, but by the same token, it allows people to innovate more, faster, and in ways never previously thought of.
Personally, I think it's worth it.

Interestingly, IP is telescoping in much the same way as technology and history on the whole; all of this has the effect that IP is being created faster and in greater volume than ever before, but it also becomes obsolete faster as well. So maybe it's not bad that huge copyright magnets are finding that they can't squeeze money out of their IP for as long - since we're able to create more content faster than ever before, maybe we should take a look at how effective our current copyright system really is.

Is Comcast just sending RST packets both ways? If so, it shouldn't be that hard to get software to ignore them.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this one of the tactics China uses to censor internet traffic?

If you name your daughter cat, then she can change her middle name to whatever she finds appropriate - like /usr/share/dict/american-english, or /etc/shadow.