It's a bit of a crazy world that we live in. This may already be something that you're acutely aware of.
If not - not that long ago, you were believed to have a mental condition if you were a homosexual, or a slave that ran away.
A little further back, there was an idea that the Earth was constantly expanding, and that there were canals on the surface of Mars.
Go back a little further, and we actually believed this stuff about everything going around the Sun, and spontaneous generation.
And, of course, we had the death sentence, and we were killing each other in wars with sharp/hot/fast/explosive things, and we were all at each other's throats, and.....oh, wait, no, that's still happening. Woops.
We're pretty good at getting things wrong. Making mistakes. And of course, we just keep getting more practised at it...
Recently, there's been quite a bit of hubbub about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) being thrown around in the good ol' US of A. Basically, this brilliant idea means that if you're a copyright holder, and you think I'm infringing (or somehow aiding this) on copyright, you can shut me down. This goes for pretty much any site, I believe. So you could shut down Google. Wikipedia. eBay. If you suspected them of participating or aiding in copyright infringement. I'm pretty sure that's right. If not, someone will be looking at this shortly who understands this a heck of a lot better than me.
It seems like they're hitting the PANIC! button. "We can't do anything, we can't do anything....let's just make it so anyone can play vigilantes! Oh no, it'll be fine. I trust people to not shut down anything important..." Right.
As I said. It's a mad world.
If you want to find out a bit more about it, try here: http://sopa-blackout-template.blogspot.com/ or here: http://americancensorship.org/
Oh, and if you're wondering why I'm thinking so much about something happening over in America - it's happening to the internet. The World Wide Web. World Wide. As well as that, we may as well replace the old Union Jack with the stripes and stars, we're getting so cosy. :P
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