[Aurora_Bell]

So, is this why everything is running so slow?

[NeedKarma]

This is all a reminder that it's the big corporations that run the US government.

[tomder55]

I would remind you that it was big entertainment business that lobbied for the bill and the fast track on the bills passage ended with Wiki going down for a single day . So where do you think the real power is ?

I would also remind you that US "big business" wanted the Keystone pipeline to bring Canadian oil to the Gulf refineries ;and that it was an out of control President ,bowing to environmental wackos ,that killed that .

[Aurora_Bell]

We just want to keep our oil and not destroy the earth in the process...

[tomder55]

That's not what I hear. You're government will just pipe it west to Vancouver instead and sell it to the Chinese .

They then will process it with no where's near the environmental controls that the US has... and the pollution will float east across the Pacific to Western Canada and the US.


At least Joe Oliver gets it.

Open letter: Radicals threaten resource development | FP Comment | Financial Post

[Fr_Chuck]

And we note that places like Yahoo or Google did not actually shut down. And the few sites that did, would it really change life if they went down forever, ( sorry I know this includes our site) but when askme went down, people just found new sites to use. So did the close down send millions to the phones. Did it really scare anyone, or did it even perhaps add fuel to the idea that the government feels it needs more control

[paraclete]

We just wanna keep our oil and not destroy the earth in the process...

What a lovely seniment. Lets face it no one is going to change any time soon, we can't go back to the horse and viable alternatives mean generation of more electricity and despite claims to the contrary we cannot generate it out of thin air and not cause greater pollution. Bring on the bicyle. Sometimes I think Pol Pot had the right solution, get rid of the academics, politicians and start again

[NeedKarma]

And we note that places like Yahoo or Google did not actually shut down.

I'm pretty sure everyone knows that - it was a blackout in protest. If the bill becomes law then who knows what will happen because it's so broad.

Get an overview here: STOP PIPA/SOPA! - YouTube

[tomder55]

Fr Chuck ;I think it had an immediate positive affect.

As I already noted ,one of the Senate bill sponsors withdrew his support. That never would've happened without the public pressure the "strike" generated .


SOPA is “shelved” for now .
Controversial online piracy bill shelved until 'consensus' is found - The Hill's Hillicon Valley

PIPA is still being kept alive by the Senate Dems .
Harry Reid Says He's Concerned PIPA Will Break The Internet, But We Must Move Forward With It, Because Of 'Jobs' | Techdirt

Like everything else ,we have to remain vigil. These clowns have been known to slip bills through in the dead of night.

Bottom line is that they want greater control over the internet. 2010 they tried to slip in an “internet kill switch” (“Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act”) which would have allowed the government the ability to shut down the internet during “emergencies.”
Internet 'Kill Switch' Would Give President Power To Shut Down The Web

And more recently they proposed that we all have a registered internet ids.
Obama Eyeing Internet ID for Americans - Tech Talk - CBS News

So I for one appreciate that AMHD took the stand they did in favor of internet freedom.

Piracy and intellectual property theft can and should be addressed .
But ,as Corey Doctorow wrote :

The important tests of whether a regulation is fit for a purpose are first whether it will work, and second whether it will, in the course of doing its work, have effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress, Parliament, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it's unlikely I'd succeed. If I turned up, pointed out that bank robbers always make their escape on wheeled vehicles, and asked, “Can't we do something about this?", the answer would be “No". This is because we don't know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications, but useless to bad guys. We can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we'd be foolish to risk changing them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies—even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies—no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.

Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing - Boing Boing

[slapshot_oi]

According to the text in the new laws they are wanting to pass they can shut down servers which in effect shuts down websites. Why do you think they couldnt turn off the pipes going into and out of youtube?

I stand corrected, you were right, they do want to actually shut down services and servers that violate copyrights. The insult to injury is they also want to remove the domain/IP mapping in DNS servers to violators. So, users would have to type in the IP versus the domain name.

Why do you think they couldnt turn off the pipes going into and out of youtube?

They can cut the cord, but keep in mind, all of YouTube's content is on a CDN, so it's on servers all across the globe. So even if all the American servers are destroyed, the content will still exist somewhere else. Which, implies, it's going to find it's way back to America.

Trying to fight the internet is a really bad idea and a huge waste of resources.