Tag: Random Funny Shit

Remember These People Make Regulations

I’m always harping on government interference in our every day lives. Lately I’ve been looking at peoples’ desire to get the government further involved in Internet regulations. Well I’ve already shown the United States government’s incompetence in selecting people to work on Internet regulations when they put Mr. Series of Tubes, Ted Stevens, in charge. Well the latest episode of No Agenda shows us that Britain isn’t any more competent at finding people to work on Internet regulations:

The Right Honourable Stephen Timms is the UK’s “Minister for Digital Britain.” He’s the guy behind the Digital Economy Bill, which makes the US DMCA look good by comparison. Seriously, this is some terrible, terrible lawmaking.

OK got that? Here’s his disqualifications:

Here’s what appears to be a letter the DigiMini sent to another MP, explaining why the Digital Economy Bill needs to go forward. It reads, in part, “Copyright owners are currently able to go on-line (sic), look for material to which they hold the copyright and identify unauthorised sources for that material. They can then seek to download a copy of that material and in so doing capture information about the source including the Intellectual Property (IP) address…”

Yup that’s right. Mr. Minister for Digital Britain himself believes IP in the term IP address stands for intelectual property not Internet protocol (which is actually is). Remember these are the kinds of people making decisions in government. Think about that for a good long time when you decide the government should get involved in regulating anything.

Who Watches The Watchmen

Some hilarity was pointed out over a Bruce Schneier’s blog. Apparently the number of Federal Air Marshals that have been arrested is greater than the number of arrests made by Federal Air Marshals (the link goes to a Tennessee congressman’s website, I don’t know who he is nor should this be taken as my promoting him):

And listen to this paragraph from a front-page story in the USA Today last November: “Since 9/11, more than three dozen Federal air marshals have been charged with crimes, and hundreds more have been accused of misconduct. Cases range from drunken driving and domestic violence to aiding a human-trafficking ring and trying to smuggle explosives from Afghanistan.”

Actually, there have been many more arrests of Federal air marshals than that story reported, quite a few for felony offenses. In fact, more air marshals have been arrested than the number of people arrested by air marshals.

We now have approximately 4,000 in the Federal Air Marshals Service, yet they have made an average of just 4.2 arrests a year since 2001. This comes out to an average of about one arrest a year per 1,000 employees.

That’s just funny. This on the other hand isn’t:

Now, let me make that clear. Their thousands of employees are not making one arrest per year each. They are averaging slightly over four arrests each year by the entire agency. In other words, we are spending approximately $200 million per arrest. Let me repeat that: we are spending approximately $200 million per arrest.

That’s your tax money at work ladies and gentlemen. The scariest part about government is the fact that there is no accountability. If they’re spending far more money than they take in that’s just too bad. If their agents who are tasked with upholding the law are corrupt that’s just too bad. We either have to wait for the government to take care of their own corrupt personnel or… never mind there is no or here.

Apparently Communism Prevailed

So I just learned something that probably everybody else already knew. There is a Unicode character for the old Soviet hammer and sickle. Note for some of you it may show up as a question mark or a box with numbers in it. That’s just poor Unicode support in action.

U+262D prints ☭ (size increased to show detail). Apparently communism prevailed.