First of all he's not real, and he died. Second of all, do you know where anyone can get a transcription of the bill? It's driving me nuts that the first things I get when I google "Sopa Transcript" is just a bunch of angry news reports talking about how it'll ruin everything, that's evil, that it's just plain wrong, but I can't seem to find anyone actually talking about what's in the bill and what's actually being changed about the government's power, it's just an incredibly useless echochamber that passes as news in a search engine that's so incredibly easy to manipulate by the Socratic "multitude" that he kept telling Crito not to listen to. And take that stupid tape off of wikia and google's doodle, it never proves anything when you tape your mouth shut as protest or to "raise awareness", it just punctuates you don't have anything worth while saying. It's a disgrace to the people who take vowels of silence while holding information about child soldiers who'd get shot for speaking.
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Also, after the Treaty of Versailles was effective, England and France still owed us alot of money themselves, they figured it would be proper of us to surrender the debts we held against them as allies. The Weimar Republic was hit with the downturn like the rest of the world, they really couldn't keep paying the reparations. When we declared that we wouldn't let our Allies off without every last penny, France invaded Germany seizing a chunk of the steel industry as collateral, the Weimar Republic continued printing Deutsche Marks to pay off the debt, got to the point that kinds could build forts out of them, if you didn't buy groceries in the morning you wouldn't be able to afford anything by the time you got paid. Then there was a German Socialist Workers Party, and eventually surfacing as it's leader, some Austrian art student who fought in the German Army in world war II. You ever heard about War Plan Red?
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Go to fark.com. The site has gone dark today, but they have links to the language of the bill, as well as a fairly clear discussion of the issues. In a nutshell, the bill gives the federal government new powers to stop copyright infringement by foreign servers, up to and including shutting down domestic ISPs. As with most such attempts, it does nothing to address the real problem, it causes a lot of collateral damage, and it is subject to all kinds of misuse.
What's the connection between the Weimar Republic and control of the Internet??
edited 18th Jan '12 7:33:48 AM by RalphCrown
Under World. It rocks!Basically its the old big money vs the new big money. Though if the oldies win a website like TV tropes would have to cut all links to all websites that are accused of breaking copyright law or be guilty by association. Tv Tropes would likely survive but all the time spent stepping over eggshells would cut into people's ability to make money online and some people don't want to be bothered with doing a background check on every website they sponsor, get sponsored by or otherwise link to.
Modified Ura-nage, Torture RackHere you go, Iphobos.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h112-3261
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s112-968
I found these links on Wikipedia during the blackout. If you have been paying attention, you'd know these pages were still up. Taking down an entire online encyclopedia to highlight two pages is making a statement. Nobody in their right mind can argue that it isn't.
@Iphobos Okay. So what are google, wikipedia and other websites supposed to do? You suggest a better way to protest. I don't care what they do as long as it's effective - it spreads a message that needs to be spread because it's actually relevant to every single user of the internet. I don't live in the US and I've never even been there, but I'm sure a lot of people don't even know what goes on in politics...I don't think they wouldn't have even known or bothered about SOPA or PIPA had it not been all over the web.
Also, you get a stale cookie for a whole paragraph of pointless i-don't-even.
edited 19th Jan '12 5:08:38 AM by itchyninja
For those who claim that it's useless and dumb for Wikipedia to shut down for the day, and other sites to put up banners - yesterday's protest managed to get 8 US members of Congress to withdraw their previous support for SOPA, including two of the Senators who co-sponsored the related Senate bill called PIPA, making the bill significantly less likely to pass (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16623831)
. So it appears to have been useful overall.
I support the action - it's an effective means of protest because almost everyone uses Wikipedia, so it brings SOPA to the attention to a lot of people who haven't heard of or really thought about the bill. It might have been even more effective if Google had genuinely joined in (shut down, not just put a black bar over the logo).
It's weird to say it's pointless when over 1 million people speak out because of it: "You shut down Congress's switchboards. You melted their servers. Millions of people have spoken in defense of a free and open Internet."
Hard to say that stunt was ineffectual.
(Also, they offered ways to access info if you really needed it - e.g., in an emergency. And the very fact that you had to take extra steps to get around the "blackout" sent a message all its own: That that's what we might have to do should these draconian laws come to pass.)
edited 19th Jan '12 8:10:52 AM by Kilyle
Google didn't do anything because they had money to lose, wikipedia is non profit so they are only doing you a service by staying up. Don't be surprised if Face Book and Google turn around and try to screw users after the music companies finish lobbying the US government and force Wikipedia to protest them too.
Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack@ 4 Ralph Crown It has nothing to do with the internet, It's just that he had a Captain America quote about Hitler and I couldn't let myself pass up the chance to talk about how we helped bring about the ruin of peace.
Inanity in 140 characters or more

This may not be about comics and such, but hearing of all the SOPA craze these days and 'freedoms being snuffed from American Internet'... I'm starting to wonder if anyone remembers this one gem from the Captain America What If?:
Well, I say America is nothing! Without its ideals — its commitment to the freedom of all men, America is a piece of trash! A nation is nothing! A flag is a piece of cloth! I fought Adolf Hitler not because America was great, but because it was fragile! I knew that liberty could be snuffed out here as in Nazi Germany! As a people, we were no different then them! When I returned, I saw that you nearly did turn American into nothing! And the only reason you're not less then nothing —— is that it's still possible for you too bring freedom back to America!
The more I hear about this SOPA things, the more I kinda imagined Cap trashing through the Congress and gives this speech...