I don't think that the supporters of this bill have had enough time on the internet to even know all the consequences this bill might bring... if my site had a spammer problem that I had trouble keeping up with that posted links to infringing sites, I'd be blocked. If I had a script that got compromised and I don't know enough about it to fix it and whoever made it is no longer providing fixed (could also be the case of a heavily-modded CMS that you can't upgrade feasibly) they could just claim I didn't try hard enough, and be blocked. If I am advertising a service that I like, but did not read their 732 pages of material on how they want this to be done and they don't like it, I'd be blocked.

This bill is wrong in so many ways that its ridiculous. Also, ban China and Iran right off the bat? What kind of censorship is that? It is more or less total dictatorship of the internet by big companies. The chaos alone is enough to bring a lot of smaller companies that depend on the internet under, let us not speak of all those companies that sell products through their sites and happen to use a phrase or sentence that is trademarked by a big company... that smaller company's website WILL disappear.

But out of all of this, guess what? Only the big companies and other bigger websites will probably not be affected. Is this really the land of the free? Really? It seems like Congressmen these days are more concerned about catering to mega corporations and lobbyists than actually doing the right thing for all the Americans that elected them.

I used to think that politics and politicians are a necessary evil... now I think that they are a cancer that will end up killing the true spirit on which the Constitution of the United States of America was founded upon. Great job.

Lets give a better example: Google. All the indexes that it keeps, it is automated and with all the fail-safe mechanisms in place, it will still index pages undesired by these copyright holders. The only process that would solve this is manual approval of indexed content... but that is impossible for the amount of pages Google handles in their indexes. Hence, Google would be faced with problem after problem.

Think about it. If I get a record for some petty crime decided by a corporation and their portfolio of copyrights which they bought (and not really invented or had anybody who invented anything... that is also another annoying bit), I can't really join the armed forces now, can I? I have a criminal record. The list can go ON and ON.

Read more at americancensorship.org. Fight For The Future and Free Press are behind this website and promoting it via Twitter, Facebook and other social media websites.

The US Congress is considering America's first system for censoring the Internet. Despite public outcry, the Internet Censorship bill could pass at any time. If it does, the Internet and free speech will never be the same:

Website Blocking

If SOPA or Protect IP passes, the government can order internet providers to block any site for its users' infringing posts, using the same DNS-blocking methods as China or Iran.

Risk of Jail for Ordinary Users
It becomes a felony with a potential 5 year sentence to stream a copyrighted work that would cost more than $2,500 to license, even if you are an ordinary noncommercial user. Singing a pop song on Facebook could be a felony.

Chaos for the Internet
Thousands of sites that are legal under the DMCA would face new legal threats. People trying to keep the internet more secure wouldn't be able to rely on the integrity of the DNS system.

In light of recent unveiling of Google+ in the official Google blog, I just have to state and express my biggest wishes for Facebook or MySpace-like websites, like the Google+ project.

These two humble and simple wishes, which I bet many of us would like:

• Please do not allow applications like Facebook does, or make it an option to be excluded from all of the hell they bring.

I hate that since Facebook kept opening up in that direction, all I can seem to use Facebook for is for the random messages with my siblings and deleting application spam from my wall. Even things I find remotely interesting are a link to enable an application to my account, which I don't want in the first place. Its like some sort of viral marketing.

• Either do not allow "custom designs" or make it an option for those of us that do not want to see pretty sparkly background gifs making our eyes bleed to be free of that other annoyance.

These two might be the features that seem "hip" and the latter made MySpace popular for a while, former making Facebook the king, but they annoy a vast number of us and I am sure that if Google+ has these, I will have an account just to reserve my name.

There is two things I missed from my Vibrant so far, which is the ability to set the ring-tone per-contact, but that's really minor at this point and the battery life. My Vibrant with the Bionix-V 1.3.1 ROM could do 14 hours and have around 10%-15% of battery left, but the Nexus S with stock does around 10 hours with 10% left by then, same usage on both phones (hard to change habits)... not major issue, and I'm hoping that when CM7 hits 2.3.4 I can actually have a even better experience.

Another thing I found annoying, is that my music or music streaming apps would pause every so often, with nothing else running and other applications weren't apparently running, giving me the impression it was at random... however, I wasn't entirely convinced. Searching Google found no particular results until I went pretty much bare with the search string: "nexus s" random music pausing — that found this little jewel from Google Mobile help which says that Google Listen is causing this every so often (when it wakes up to do tasks) — so I decided to give it a go and uninstalled Google Listen. So far, no more random pauses.

Another thing that T-Mobile didn't partner with Google for the launch of Google Wallet, but Sprint — a smaller carrier — did. And while on the Google Wallet launch topic, the fact that for launch they only partnered with Citi, and to actually take advantage you need to use a special card from them really turns me off. This better change for the better or I don't really see much future on Google Wallet.

Now, on the NFC topic, I would like to see it be able to share more types of data like maps, bits of text from applications and other stuff I can share from other applications, or maybe it'd be better to say that I want it to do the same things we do with QR Codes?

Signal strength... well, this is a fun topic. Where I live in Gainesville, FL there is some 3G coverage outside my apartment, but inside, there's barely any. Also, where I work at, inside the building, there is barely any data signal at all. Given these specific situations on the places I spend 90% of my time in, I opted to make the phone only use 2G data networks not only because it saves battery but it also saves me the mental frustration.

I miss the expansion microSD slot in my Vibrant, but the Nexus S has enough storage to hold what I need and I have not had an issue with that area so far.

GPS locks have been great, and even more so with the 2.3.4 update. I have not hit any particular bugs relating to 2.3.4 people keep complaining about on the internet, or maybe its because I don't use my device in many of the ways they do?

All-in-all, I am happy with my Nexus S and I hope this device follows me around for a good two years. Google, get crackin' on a new vanilla device!

So my Samsung Vibrant decided to throw the towel... two weeks ago I was restoring the OS at work and had finished configuring the account and had it syncing the address book and other things so I decided to leave it at work when we headed out for lunch like we do every Friday.

Two hours later, we come back and I see the phone with the screen off as usual when it goes idle and get back to work. A while later I pick it up to send a SMS to a friend, so I hit the lock/unlock button and the device does nothing. I leave the button pressed (since its also the power button) and the device does nothing. I pull the USB cable, pull the battery, let it sit and re-try powering it on with just the battery, it does nothing. I was close to leaving work for the day so I waited until I got home and I tried with just the charger (leaving the battery out) and it does nothing. So I try with both the battery in and the charger plugged in and again, nothing. Reaching the end of my wits after two hours of trying to revive it, I gave up and listed it on eBay for parts, which got it sold 3 days after posting for $125.

Fast forward a week, it is now Friday the 13th and after lots of spooky things failing at work, I got home late and turned on my computer to look at new phones for T-Mobile who I have a contract with and the only choices I liked were the Nexus S and the Vibrant 4G (aka — Galaxy S 4G) which I weighed them for their pros and cons.

The Nexus S while being nicer, has no 4G on T-Mobile (while the Sprint version does), has no expansion slot for a microSD card, is not sold directly by T-Mobile and costs $529 if I want it without a contract. On the up side, the design is more comfortable to me (I tried a friend's phone), the OS is directly from Google and is going to have plenty of nice custom Android versions in a while... not to mention that because of this, there is no bloatware installed and the base Android is pretty much up to me how to configure it. Oh, and it has Gingerbread pre-installed.

The Vibrant 4G (aka — Galaxy S 4G) is visually the same thing as my old Vibrant, except that it has a front-facing camera and the data modem is 4G-capable. However, if you were a Vibrant owner like me and got to wait for Samsung to release their buggy Froyo update, you'll be aware of a few things like the fact that Samsung does not do OTA updates, rather you have to use their mini Kies software to upgrade your phone's OS, but that is only after they decide to release Android 2.3 for it. Also, it has TouchWiz, which I don't like and only adds delays on releases. Lastly, it has all the bloatware you cannot remove from the phone unless you root it, which I don't plan to do for a while.

That's a good story, no? Yeah. So Best Buy sells it in the US for T-Mobile? cool. I had to mess with the checkout a bit because the owner of the account is not me and there was something I wasn't entering right so the process was not going through, I gave up for the day and decided to try again on Saturday 14th which went through and everything was fine like wine... UNTIL I remember we have a few deadlines coming up this week at work and its more than likely that long days will rule the week... I submitted a support message right after i placed the order to which went unanswered.

I called UPS to see if they'd change the delivery address to my workplace, but they said two things: We can't do that unless there is a delivery attempt, or the shipper modifies it. So I called Best Buy, apparently the policy is they don't change that after its shipped/in process unless it is a mistake in their part. Sunday the 15th, Monday the 16th and Tuesday the 17th came and I gave up and let the UPS delivery person find an empty residence for the day. I got home at 7PM today and did the change of address, paid the $4 fee (really? I have to give you more money for a fuck-up that neither wants to work with?) and submitted it (with the page saying the delivery was for 5/18/2011), in which it was accepted a while after, but with a surprise: The receiver requested the package be delivered to an alternate address; Driver will make a same day redelivery attempt.

Say what? Didn't the change of address form tell me that it was going to be attempted on 5/18? WHAT? There's nobody at my workplace! HELLO?! I called UPS yet again and after their (seemingly annoyed that I wanted to talk to a person) machine got me to an agent, they tell me the same thing and that there's nothing they can do at this point, I politely said goodbye and hung up... and just then I think I nearly popped an artery and a few hundred veins on how I've been harassing Best Buy to change before they ship (apparently, once it changes to "In Process" status they wont't touch it unless they f-up) and UPS for the past five days now, paying for Next Day service which I won't get, but its not the fault of either of them, according to them even if I have been onto them before it actually got out of the warehouse...

So here I am, angry as can be and cursing up the wazoo waiting for tomorrow so I can finally put this all behind me and forget about it as soon as possible. That damn phone better not be a DOA or else it'll become victim to I-75's traffic.

In this case, I was late according to policies, Best Buy was pig-headed and UPS was retarded. Neither of them was at fault and I paid for Next Day service for nothing and neither Best Buy nor UPS will refund me a penny. I might have to stick with UPS for deliveries, since FedEx delivers at times I am not here and UPS comes in half-hour before I leave for work in the mornings (even earlier than standard for UPS), but Best Buy saw the first and last of me... no complaints about their agents, they all informed me of my options and said it straight.

Thanks a lot, jerks!

Their prices are cheap, and I mean that! I have yet to find another provider that gives me the same storage and bandwith for the same (or close) price. Their VPS offering is based on OpenVZ with a custom control panel which they named "Hypanel". Recently, they even added more advanced graphs and stats for each of your VPS containers; something I've been wanting to see. They also offer a DNS service for clients with distributed DNS servers (Europe and US).

I have been a customer since December 2009, and since then only two problems: the RAID array on the physical machine where my VPS resides was having issues, thus increasing the I/O wait times and slowing things down, but the service was NOT interrupted in the time this was ongoing. This was around January.

Also, recently, there was a unexpected power problem on the data center in Atlanta, GA where they have their US nodes, and all machines in the data center went down, that has been the only real downtime with them, and wasn't even a problem caused by their hardware or software.

Their support gets five stars out of five. They respond promptly and straight to the point.

For being a cheap VPS, their support and service are great; I never thought that these would be the best US$10 a month I'd be spending.

What do I have there? I have a "VPS Start" in Atlanta, GA with two extra IP addresses. The VPS manages this domain's mail, DNS and some other miscellaneous tasks.

I make no promises and post whenever I feel like it, which should be at least once every so often nowadays.