04.27.06
Posted in Copyright/Trademark/Patent Law, General at 9:05 pm by Clay
As I’m sure all of you know, gas prices are high.
So, of course, there’s a congressional inquiry into price fixing, and many Republicans are talking about passing new laws to protect consumers.
At the same time, Republicans in congress are, as far as I can tell, unified against net neutrality legislation, which would make it so that the broadband providers would not be allowed to provide an extra fast pipe to the companies that pay extra. It would also disallow broadband providers from providing preferential service to their own products, such as by offering a Voice Over IP(VOIP) solution while degrading the performance of their competitors.
So, on one hand you have many gas stations in every city in the nation, along with multiple producers, refiners, and distributors of the gasoline itself. Oh, and the investigations into price fixing have pretty much uniformly come up empty.
On the other hand you have broadband providers, of which there are generally(if you’re lucky) two providers in an area, and where switching from one to the other will cause weeks of headaches and hundreds of dollars. Oh, and both industries have a long track record of overcharging the consumer, providing poor service, and being monopolistic.
So somehow competition is failing to provide low enough gas prices, while competition will decide whether or not it’s fair to take money from 1) the consumer, 2) the taxpayer, 3) the content provider(for the T1 and other lines that Google, Yahoo, and the others pay to have their site on the web), and 4) the content provider again(for access to the consumer who already paid for access to the content provider.).
I’ll admit that many people are pro-”competition” in both cases(The Wall Street Journal editors are one example), but I’d like for the country to get to a time where legislation that encourages competition(like the net neutrality proposal) gets passed, and the anti-competitive laws(like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act or the huge ethanol requirements) get shot down quickly.
Permalink
04.21.06
Posted in General at 12:44 am by Clay
So Zacharias Moussaoui has been convicted of something, and evidently claimed that he was supposed to be on a fifth plane that would have crashed into the White House.
Okay, all fine and good.(aside from the whole extreme-evil part)
So why exactly were families of 9/11 victims testifying about whether or not they thought that this guy should get the death penalty? I fail to see how the families of victims of different planes crashing into different buildings can actually have standing when the convicted party claimed to be attempting to kill an entirely different set of people who weren’t killed.
Honestly, this isn’t a rant about the case, as I can fully understand why lawyers would bring these people in — they have a strong emotional connection to the effects of terrorism, and can be wonderful at emotionally swaying people to decide on whether or not to have this person killed.
This is a rant about the court system itself. I mean, shouldn’t someone who committed(or attempted to commit) a horrendous crime be sentenced based on, oh, what he actually did, rather than how emotionally convincing the families of the victims can be in the court room?
Permalink
04.08.06
Posted in General at 7:13 pm by Clay
I imagine most of you have heard about how Scooter Libby had testified that Cheney had said that Bush had authorized leaking of confidential information. As much as I’d like rip into Bush or Cheney for such things, I think the media is doing a fine job of it by just repeating some Bush anti-leak quotes from a few years back.
However, I haven’t seen anyone talking about the Bush administration’s penchant for secrecy. Yes, yes, I know that leaking information intentionally is basically admitting that they want to be really secretive, except when it would be really helpful to their administration to be a little less secretive.
From an AP article, picked up by the Wisconsin State Journal in the Saturday, April 8th, 2006 edition:
The White House scrambled to assert the president’s right to selectively declassify information, with McClellan insisting there’s a difference between leaks that can compromise national security and a president’s decision to declassify information “when it is in the public interest.”
What I’m aiming at is that the president’s and vice president’s idea of “when it is in the public interest” has for the most part meant “absolutely nothing, unless it’s needed to point out how good a job the president is doing.”
So we’re supposed to live in a country where it’s absolutely wrong to tell the American people that the president authorized domestic wiretaps without even a whiff of judicial oversight, but defending the president “is in the public interest”.
That’s whacked.
Permalink