Judge throws out Internet blocking law

Good news for the online world - a federal court threw out the COPA bill (Child Online Protection Act).  I love this quote from Senior U.S. District judge Lowell Reed Jr.:

Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.

Brilliant.  Absolutely brilliant.  It's refreshing to see this kind of thinking in a government official - kinda makes you wonder, though...

Compare this enlightened view from an appointed official to those of your elected officials.  I'm not in favor of appointing rulers, mind you, but someone who can think for themselves is a breath of fresh air in government.

Link to Judge throws out Internet blocking law - Security - MSNBC.com

del.icio.us tags: government, internet, online, libertarian

Bad day at the office, honey?

Back in the days after college, I was a sysadmin for a multi-machine Unix shop.  I remember my first week, when I was trying to free some space on the main machine.  SOP is to clear /tmp, right?  So off I go, logged in as root, and do ls -alF /tmp - filled to the gills.  So then I enter rm * to clear it - no worries right?

Of course, I had forgotten one small command - cd /tmp.  The good news was that only eight files were deleted.  The bad news was that pwd was /.  I had blown away the kernel, kernel backup, and a few other critical system files, and I got to pull them off the weekly backup before I got to go home that night.  What saved me was using rm * instead of rm -r *.  I wasn't fired, but I was chagrined.

On a bright note, at least the only thing I lost was a few hours - it could have been $38 billion dollars...

Link to Oops! Techie wipes out $38 billion fund - Tech News & Reviews - MSNBC.com

del.icio.us tags: technology, government, funny