“… a device with absolutely no onboard storage is just plain stupid. id never buy it, and neither would any tech savvy person i know..”

Agreed. USAToday says the $249 model includes: “SSD storage of 16GB”

“… the idea of having multiple, tiny devices that specialize in only a few things …”

That was true, but I think the trend is towards integration. A smart phone (or tablet) can be a phone, mp3 player, video player, web browser, GPS, camera, radio, translator … perhaps not as good as dedicated ones but it’s there in your pocket when you have a bit of downtime. Apparently just sitting and daydreaming or people watching is no longer an option. If you believe the commercials, some people are that mobile – work, errands, kids to practice, yada, yada.

Free Speech – aka the death of my liberal street cred.

If someone can get a NVIATWAS image taken down, then the same should be true for some poor kid’s beach party photos that end up on ‘Bikini Jailbait.’ Maybe FaceBook et al should watermark every image posted and encourage users to grant them copyright for the sole purpose of combatting image theft. They have the money and the technology to do it if anyone does. If the government can shut down MegaUpload for hosting masses of illegal files then it should be possible to do it to sites that egregiously rip off images. Every frontier needs a modicum of order in order to thrive. Without it, the participants may be limited to vandals, victims and vigilantes.

It’s not about banning the raunchy porn sites or the StormFront Nazis or even the Taliban – better to introduce them to Stuxnet. It’s not even about guys privately fap-excuse me, admiring nymphets in bikinis; Lord knows we’d have to ban post-pubescent males from beaches everywhere. It’s about people (especially minors), at least having a right not to be crudely exploited for some company’s financial gain, or a sociopath’s ego trip. There’s enough consensual exploitation going on.

It is a seemingly unsolvable problem, but I think we need to start thinking about it now, while the internet is still in its relative infancy. I’m pretty sure that the founders didn’t have publishing pictures of dead girls in mind when they crafted the First Amendment. They were probably most concerned with protecting political and religious speech. Somehow, we’ve made almost a fetish of everyone having the right to say anything, anywhere at any time – and that is indeed wonderful, at least in principle. The federal constitution has no privacy amendment. We may need one to protect private citizens against malign and unreasonable harassment and exploitation.

The devil will always be in the details and I know the dangers of the proverbial slippery slope but I’m not sure that this unprecedented technology and a decent society are compatible without some adjustment. Set the bar as high as is reasonable, but, without accessible legal recourse. I think we will see people taking the law into their own hands. We put people in prison for images of consenting adults having sex. If we have to tell a parent who just buried their child that we can’t do anything about their daughter’s corpse displayed on some Dead Jailbait venue, but oh; be grateful you live in a country that cherishes free speech – hire a lawyer and hope. I’m sorry, but IMO, something’s wrong with that picture. As a society, we owe them more than the hope that some digital sleuth will out the perpetrator, and maybe it’ll get taken down. And frankly, we owe him more than a system where someone may feel that the only justice they can get is carrying out one of the death threats he’s getting. Gather the most wise and thoughtful people we can find, get public input and have a discussion. Leave the pols out until we at least have an idea of where we want to go. If people want the status quo, fine. I hope I’m wrong about the perils of doing nothing.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken