Tag: Politics

Now That’s Blatant

It appears our Senate is in such a hurry to push a piece of legislation they forgot to actually name the fucking thing. Take a look at H.R. 1586 [PDF}:

SECTION 1. This Act may be cited as the
‘‘______Act of____’’.

That’s a catchy name! Boy our Senate is just flat out blatant about not even reading bills anymore. According to the summary the bill is:

‘‘An Act to modernize the air traf- fic control system, improve the safety, reliability, and avail- ability of transportation by air in the United States, provide for modernization of the air traffic control system, reauthor- ize the Federal Aviation Administration, and for other pur- poses.’’

I haven’t a clue what else is in it but it must be important if they didn’t even have time to give the bill a fucking name. Cripes! You’re government at work.

Net Neutrality Redux

I’ve mentioned the looming war over net neutrality before. The more I look at this problem the more I realize it’s a no-win situation. Regardless of the solution found we lose something. Very recently Google and Verizon announced their legislative framework for net neutrality [PDF]. For those of you unwilling to read the document is boils down to this; Verizon is willing to surrender on the net neutrality battle on their wired networks in exchange for being able to ignore net neutrality on it’s wireless network.

There seems to be two options in regards to this battle; ask the government to legislate net neutrality or allow ISPs to control what goes across their wires as they see fit. No matter what solution is arrived at we the people get shafted.

Let us look at option one, government legislation. Anybody with a grasp of history knows government legislation doesn’t every work out as planned. The most dangerous outcome of legislating net neutrality is it will give the government precedence to further legislate Internet traffic. Sure this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal at first right? Wrong. With this precedence all we’ll need is one self-righteous politician wanting to “protect the children” or one politician in the pocket of Comcast to introduce additional legislation. For instance since the government now gets to state what traffic will be neutral (you can guarantee they won’t write a bill saying all traffic, they’ll set a committee in place to decide these things) they will get to change the rules. Maybe one religious zealot will decide pornographic websites must be filtered, throttled, or blocked and change net neutrality to add an exception for said traffic. Another politician might listen to Comcast and claim since BitTorrent is mostly used for illegal file sharing that ISPs have the right to outright block the traffic. It’s a deep and dark hole and we don’t want to travel down.

The other interesting problem with government regulations is their desire to hand out bailouts. How so? Well the newspaper industry has been chomping at the bit for a bailout and the government has been thinking about doing so. One proposal put forth was to charge bloggers a fee which would be sent to the newspapers. The reason? Well according to those proposing this bloggers only steal newspaper articles anyways so they should pay for them. What’s to say such a newspaper bailout isn’t included with any net neutrality legislation? You can guarantee such legislation will have hundreds of pet projects, pork, and other unrelated crap in it. What should take a paragraph will end up being 500 pages with nobody know exactly what’s in the bill.

Then we have option two, allow ISPs to control what goes over their wires. This is equally dangerous as the above because now each company will decide what sites their customers have access to. If you need an example of this just turn to AOL when they were an ISP first getting started. AOL did their best to create a walled garden providing a cleansed Internet experience for their customers. This wasn’t that surprising as when the Internet amounted to bulletin board systems you were mostly restricted to talking to people using the same ISP as you had. Alas this problem is even bigger due to the fact there are a handful of very powerful ISPs. Let’s say Comcast, America’s biggest ISP, decide they are going to block all BitTorrent traffic. Since most traffic crosses a Comcast line at some point they would effectively block BitTorrent traffic for most American users regardless of the ISP they used.

I haven’t answered one question yet, why do I feel net neutrality is a needed thing? Why do I think we have any “right” (I’m not claiming any rights here but it’s a word the better reflects my idea I’m putting forth) to uncontrolled Internet traffic? How can I believe companies can’t control what is going across their wires? Well the answer to all those questions is one simple fact, the Internet was created from public funds. I glossed over the history of the Internet in my previous net neutrality post. But the Internet evolved from ARPANET which was a government funded (in other words tax money funded) research project during the Cold War. Everything from the protocols to ICANN (who control allocation of IP addresses) was created with American tax money. Heck much of the physical infrastructure was paid for through public funds. Because of this I feel we have some say in how the system we paid for is used. We can bitch, whine, moan, and otherwise complain because we paid for it. It wasn’t created by a private company and thus is a public system. That’s why the rules here are different, plain and simple.

The ironic thing is what we have right now is the best option. Currently the government wants to legislate net neutrality but need an case to point to for justification. On the other hand ISPs want to begin charging customers more money via tiered (as in site access not connection speeds) Internet access but are know that will be exactly the case the government wants. It’s a stand off. So long as this stand off continues to exist we’re OK and everything is peachy. The second this stand off stops we’re going to start losing.

I Don’t Think the Pentagon Understands How the Internet Works

Read this headline and tell me if you think the Pentagon has a basic understanding of the Internet:

Pentagon demands Wikileaks return Afghanistan documents

Wikileaks can return whatever the Hell they want but that doesn’t stop the harsh reality that thousands of copies have already been made. Welcome to the present.

The Kindle Violates Civil Rights

I must write too much about the Kindle because every possible story involving my favorite little device gets e-mailed to me en masse. No I’m not complaining, let me thank those of you who e-mail this stuff because it’s always good. But this story boarders on stupid as shit.

Apparently in lieu of having real things to do the Justice Department threatened universities with lawsuits for taking part in the trials to see if Kindles would be a good replacement for text books. Their reasoning? Because the Kindle violates the civil rights of the blind.

It seemed like a promising idea until the universities got a letter from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, now under an aggressive new chief, Thomas Perez, telling them they were under investigation for possible violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

From its introduction in 2007, the Kindle has drawn criticism from the National Federation of the Blind and other activist groups. While the Kindle’s text-to-speech feature could read a book aloud, its menu functions required sight to operate. “If you could get a sighted person to fire up the device and start reading the book to you, that’s fine,” says Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the federation. “But other than that, there was really no way to use it.”

Emphasis mine. Why do I emphasis that? Because the Kindle has a text-to-speech feature while real books fucking don’t! OK the menus are not text-to-speech but it could be added in trivially and honestly a blind person could memorize the series of clicks and movements to activate the features. Even though the feature isn’t perfect (or even close) it’s still far better than regular fucking books which the universities were looking to replace.

Instead of looking to lawsuits maybe those idiots should have contacted Amazon and offered to help improve the text-to-speech functionality. Oh and this makes sense:

The Civil Rights Division informed the schools they were under investigation. In subsequent talks, the Justice Department demanded the universities stop distributing the Kindle; if blind students couldn’t use the device, then nobody could. The Federation made the same demand in a separate lawsuit against Arizona State.

So if blind people can’t use books than nobody can? That should save students buckets of money right there! Maybe this is the Obama administration’s solution to lower the cost of education. As usual the government isn’t actually representing the people they claim to be:

It’s an approach that bothers some civil rights experts. “As a blind person, I would never want to be associated with any movement that punished sighted students, particularly for nothing they had ever done,” says Russell Redenbaugh, a California investor who lost his sight in a childhood accident and later served for 15 years on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “It’s a gross injustice to disadvantage one group, and it’s bad policy that breeds resentment, not compassion.”

That’s right actual blind people don’t want this, the government pretending to represent them does. Oh and get this:

One obvious solution to the problem, of course, was to fix the Kindle. Early on, Amazon told federation officials it would apply text-to-speech technology to the Kindle’s menu and function keys. And sure enough, last week the company announced a new generation of Kindles that are fully accessible to the blind. While the Justice Department was making demands, and Perez was making speeches, the market was working.

Wow who would have thought that would happen? Anybody? It’s good to see all of your hands are up. You don’t need to pull out a lawsuit when the company is more than happen to correct the problem for its potential customers.

One of the major advantages to e-book readers over regular books is they can be made accessible to people with disabilities. You can never made a real book read to you but you can make an electronic device read text to you.

Wait, Illegal Whats…

Illegal pools… yeah. Apparently the town of Riverhead New York is using Google Earth to track down unlicensed pools. Since when did pools need to be licensed to be legal? Oh right because it’s for the children:

Riverhead’s chief building inspector Leroy Barnes Jr. said the unpermitted pools were a safety concern. He said that without the required inspections there was no way to know whether the pools’ plumbing, electrical work and fencing met state and local regulations.

“Pool safety has always been my concern,” Barnes said.

Of course pool safety is his concern it certainly isn’t money because certainly there is no money to be made from unlicensed pools… oh wait:

Violators were told to get the permits or face hefty fines. So far about $75,000 in fees has been collected.

Yeah pool safety my ass. I think it’s time to start putting up camouflage netting over our properties to avoid satellite pictures.

Your Government is Hard at Work

One thing we have to say about our federal government is that they certainly are hard working blokes. Take for instance the FBI. In essence they are a federal police force tasked with all sorts of jobs including granting government protection to exercise your second amendment rights in the form of NICS checks, enforcing interstate crimes, and of course spending your tax money trying to get Wikipedia to remove the FBI logo from the FBI article. Apparently they are using the following law:

18 U.S.C. 701 prohibits the manufacture, sale, or possession of any badge, identification card, or other insignia, of the design prescribed by the head of any department or agency of the United States for use by any officer or employee of that agency.

Funny because, as government employees, the FBI works for me. Combined with the fact that my tax money pays for their existence I’m entitled to reproduce the logo which I own since I paid for it. What law is does that fall under? Christopher Burg Fuckin’ Said So Law. Yeah it’s really obscure, good luck finding it.

Glock Gets Approval to Bring More Jobs to Smyrna

A while back I mentioned Glock wanted to expand their facilities and bring more jobs to Smyrna, Georgia but were being blocked by people who didn’t want those jobs in their neighborhood. Well good news everybody, via The Firearms Blog I found out that Glock was granted their land request. This means they can expand their facilities which is certainly a very good thing.

Wikileaks Post Afghan War Records

Well it looks like Wikileaks is in the news again. This time they have released 91,000 reports from Afghanistan which they claim to be about lethal actions taking in that region. I’m sure it’s an interesting read and they have posted a downloadable version of the reports. I’d say get them while they’re hot in case they end up going away.