Jeremiah Hoyet

Best Buy has officially launched a couple new services, one of which is a new online trade-in center for your old PCs, Game Consoles, and more. When I first read about the service, I thought to myself “This is a great idea, maybe I won’t have to worry about reselling my old hardware on Ebay anymore!”. Boy, was I ever wrong.

Here’s what my setup includes:

• EVGA 680i Chipset motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3.6ghz
• XFX GeForce 8800GT
• 500GG+ of Hard Drive Space
• A Very Freaking Expensive Watercooling Setup
• 2GB of OCZ DDR2 800

That’s just a quick run-down of what I have in my PC, here’s what the configuration on the Best Buy Trade-In center website looked like (click for full size):

Yeah, for all that hardware, they wanted to give me $400.96. Not even enough to cover the resale value of my video card, motherboard, and memory; much less the entire PC. . . .

Today I’ve read two very interesting articles that detail a government attempting to put a leash on technology.

The first was an article I found on Propeller earlier this afternoon by Michael Santo, or more commonly known to Propeller folks as TechnologyExpert. Santo wrote on his personal blog about a bill being proposed in Kentucky that would make it illegal to post anonymously on the Internet. Furthermore, if a website were to not comply with the law (if passed) they would be subject to some pretty hefty fines.

Santo writes:

Kentucky lawmaker Tim Couch has proposed a bill that would make anonymous Internet posting illegal. House Bill 775 would require anyone who wants to post a comment or other content on a Web site to register their real name, address, and e-mail address with the Web site.

The onus is placed on the website operators, however. According to the bill, website operators (or interactive service providers as the bill calls them) could face stiff fines.

The second article was brought to my attention via my RSS reader, and is located on the popular gadget blog Engadget:

Uh-oh, Indian Blackberry users — better get ready for some major disconnection anxiety. Apparently the Indian government is demanding that RIM either allow it to snoop on its encrypted email service (or worse, drop down to 40-bit encryption), or shut down the entire Indian Blackberry network at the end of the month. That’ll cut off an estimated 400,000 subscribers, so the carriers, RIM, and government officials are due to meet and try and hammer out a solution on the 14th, but the issue probably won’t be easy to solve…

I think the idea of governments trying to take some control over the modern wild west that is the Internet is laughable at best. Sure, China filters content like Nazi-Germany in the 1940’s, but the idea behind the Internet and mobile devices is to allow for greater freedom. I’m not sure all this was invented to allow our governments to keep tabs on who dislikes Johnny Tootoos on MySpace.