In an excellent column in the News-Record, Ed Cone puts Rep Howard Coble to task on his support for the Berman-Coble bill, which will allow the big media companies to attack and disable any computer system that they believe has illegally-gotten copyrighted material.
He further discusses the potential of newly-found political power from folks on the internet who are contributing to defeat candidates, like Coble's opponent, Tara Grubb.
In the end is a pleas for sanity:
Copyright protection is a serious issue, but enforcement shouldn't overly empower an entertainment industry that has a history of resisting new technologies from television to the VCR. My hope is that Coble, who two years ago reversed his stance on work-for-hire rules for musicians when an industry-backed bill he supported came under fire, will live up to his reputation for fairness and emerge as a champion of individual liberty. Fixing the digital vigilante bill would be a great place to start.
Just a quick tech note that will hopefully get picked up by Google, a message in a bottle, so to speak.
I used to have problems getting spell checking to work correctly with Ximian Evolution. The problem was that Debian needs a default dictionary to perform spellchecking. Here's the packages you need: aspell