51–60 of 69 posts
The data is freely available of the amount of money raised by different members of congress, right? I've got an idea for a little mashup to try to raise money against the backers of this bill.
What is going on in this country?
Can someone copy/paste this article? The mobile version is just a big ad that I can't seem to dismiss. P.S. Quick, before SOPA takes effect.
Here's an idea, might be ridiculous: Can you file court papers electronically in the US? What if say youtube, wikipedia, etc had a fully automated SOPA compliance system which automatically filed court papers to have the take down notice 'reviewed' however that works thereby overloading the system. There must be some way to reflect the work back at them and DoS a manual process somewhere in the legal machinery. 'OK w…
Someone in CBS News site's comments pointed out an interesting thing: there were already two bill like that. "Communications Decency Act" and "Child Online Protection Act", which both were tossed out by Supreme Court.
Both of those bills attempted to create new restrictions on speech. SOPA simply creates new censorship measures against forms of speech that are already illegal.
I can't quite decide which option would be better in the long run:
(a) stop SOPA, only to have similar ideas come up every single year, or
(b) let SOPA pass, then build a case and take it all the way to the Supreme Court hoping that measures such as SOPA would be ruled unconstitutional once and for all. If this succeeds, it would set a precedent to seriously discourage similar ideas from coming up again. The anti-SOPA camp definitely possesses the financial and legal resources to mount such a challenge, too. But it would take years, and there's no guarantee that the Supreme Court will be any more reasonable than Mr. Lamar Smith.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We won't have a situation like the Fall of Rome before we have accepted violence as a means of political change. What killed Rome wasn't just the corruption but the fall of the Gracie brothers. You can't have Marius and Sulla without that. No Sulla, no Cesar, no fall of Rome. And while we are at it, there are no barbarian hordes that can ever invade the US -- unless you count those in the backwater areas of the flyov…
Rome fell partly because the treasures stopped coming in from conquest. And the US is being invaded faster than any other country in history, to the best of my knowledge. It's odd that so many people are unaware of this. Had 1-2 millions entered Rome every year, as with the US currently, it wouldn't have taken centuries to fall. This is just math of course--people differ in their judgements.
You're right. It's just math. You just don't understand that math.
"But most of the major players in the technology industry, including Google and Facebook, are strongly opposed to the legislation because they say they would be forced to police their websites for possibly illegal content. Google, which owns YouTube, says the language is so broad that videos of teenagers dancing would be banned because of the copyrighted music playing in the background. And that would stifle innovation, they say."
The media is minimizing the issue to corporate laziness, and thats really not okay. I sense snarkiness, especially in the last line, and I think an outlet like CBS has an obligation to do better than that.
What else can be expected from a bunch of old people who hardly understand the internet? When the internet to you is a search engine, Facebook and typing URLs into the IE6 address bar, I'm sure SOPA seems mostly harmless. Let them plow it through committee and play their games. These are tumultuous times. People, globally, are unimpressed with leadership. This is being watched carefully by the public. Hopefully it wi…
When the internet to you is a search engine, Facebook and typing URLs into the IE6 address bar, I'm sure SOPA seems mostly harmless. The problem is that describes a large segment of the general population as well.
Good luck over there. In the UK most things are allowed until they aren't (see the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and its updates).
There must be serious money to be made - or rather already made for the representatives plowing this through - there is simply no other explanation. Money is definitely deep in pockets. Looking at the "donation" list it's to both sides of the aisle and HUGE amounts, these aren't little $10k donations but $100k and even $1M I am starting to understand the fall of Rome a little better.
You may not be far off the mark. See "The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples" by Herwig Wolfram. He points out that the Western Empire (which fell over a thousand years earlier) had a far greater disparity of income than the Eastern Empire, and that this meant they couldn't raise the taxes necessary to defend themselves. The Eastern Empire spent a third of their budget on their army, and this was more than the Western Empire collected in taxes. He also points out that this doomed Ostrogothic Italy.
However, the thing that's missing from this analysis is that the Senatorial families that Wolfram is talking about as the super-wealthy weren't just family businesses. They were the equivalent of major corporations of their day. They were huge profit-seeking enterprises, owning sometimes tens of thousands of slaves and having thousands of freed slaves attached. Some of these had annual budgets that were as much as a third of what the Western Empire would collect in taxes in the same period.
We are headed down the same road, I think.