Free Republic

“The days are now numbered for surfing an uncensored, open-access Internet, using your favorite search engine to search a bottomless cyber-sea of information in the grandest democratic forum ever conceived by humankind. Instead you can look forward to Googling about on a walled-off, carefully selected corpus of government propaganda and sanitized information "safe" for public consumption. Indoctrinated and sealed off from the outer world, you will inhabit a matrix where every ounce of creative, independent thinking that challenges government policies and values will be squelched.” - Eliot D. Cohen Ph.D. The Great Firewall of China In May of this year...

Those on Capitol Hill still call their branch of government "The Congress," but they refuse to operate the branch as directed by the Constitution. In reality, those on Capitol Hill often act more like they are a combination state legislature and city council. For instance, last week the Senate was arguing about yet another hate crime bill (S. 625). Senate Republicans blocked action on the hate crime bill and Democrats were crying like little kids about it. That bill would make it a federal crime to violently attack someone because of their sexual orientation or other physical disability. The problem...

Once again, the people who decide how the Internet is supposed to function are not getting along. The Net is alight with e-flames, and people from all over the world are in Accra, Ghana, this week, arguing with the passion of parents at a Little League game. Sometimes, what these relatively anonymous Internet gurus worry about is impossibly geeky. Things like root servers, protocol parameters and port numbers are critical to making sure we see the right Web pages and get the right e-mail, and we're grateful for these people – as long as they don't go into too much...