Add a Google Alerts type thing to that so I can be notified any time a bill is up for a vote by my representative and any time anyone proposes a bill on copyright law and I think we instantly make government a LOT more transparent and accessible.

In my thirty-plus years in the industry, I have seen a disk drive which could support transactional storage. The notion that you're going to write data in a manner which is more reliable than the underlying store is laughable. Even if you check the integrity of the underlying record, how do you know that your integrity check actually tested against the data you'll return next time? You don't; all you know is that the odds that you get back something else are negligibly small -- not zero, but low enough that you can neglect them, just like the word says.

ACID and transactional reliability are useful features of a system, but they are not magic pixie dust which prevents data loss or corruption, and they are not the only way to minimize data loss and corruption. It may be, for instance, that you'll get better reliability out of your system through simple replication -- which has the automatic advantage of making your data easy to geo-replicate.

You must not work in the storage world... We have plenty of switches with a backplane that can handle 500 Gb/s... What you speak of is nothin' for a director class switch.

I didn't see that comparison being made in the article submission. There's no need to get defensive about piracy. This is a victory against phishing scams that we should be happy about. Piracy is another issue for another day.

Actually, the analogies are important.

You're right in theory, but it depends which industry you (the government) are trying to promote.

If you are trying to promote an indigenous steel or tomato or widget industry, and you (the government) want those companies to have access to "cheap" software to run their business (we all know Linux and other GPL software are NOT free), then fine -- promoting GPL software is the way to go. Everyone can use it.

However, many countries are using "mandatory GPL" to promote a homegrown SOFTWARE industry, which doesn't work. Without intellectual property that someone can own and make money with, chances are no one is going to be chomping at the bit to make that software based on the government's code.