Law

Australian Curfew

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Robert Corr does not like curfews:

A youth curfew is an ineffective, racist, stigmatising policy that should never have been introduced by a government that considers itself progressive.

If this story is true the pictured police officers should be fired, their bosses fired, and whatever excuse for a goverment Rob is referring to ought to be ousted. All after a ride in that cage these girls apparently were tossed into.

Beating (one year) or Spit (life)

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Bean, over at ALAS A Blog, is rightfully disturbed by the disproportionate sentences available in Oklahoma for the crime of domestic abuse (one year maximum) and the crime of “placing bodily fluid upon a government employee” (life sentence maximum). Go read how a jury gave a domestic abuser a more appropriate sentence than the statutory maximum. Do you have answers to his questions on disporportionality:

Why are government employees so much more important than the general pubic…?
Why are the sentences so disproportional. Do they really think that the possibility of transmitting a deadly disease by spitting is significantly worse than the risk of killing someone by abusing them?

How Many Pages does it Take to Choke a Country?

This entry was posted in Capitalism Democracy Law Libertarianism Regulation on by

I’m afraid we will find out before it gets better. From the Washington Post 2002 Federal Register Is Longest Ever:

The Bush administration, philosophically wedded to the idea of smaller government, issued a record-high number of pages of new federal regulations last year, according to a study to be released today by the Cato Institute.
…Federal Register boasted 75,606 pages of federal regulations in 2002, up from a high of 74,528 pages in 2000, when President Bill Clinton was still in office.

On the other hand:

A total of 4,187 rules were in the federal pipeline in 2002, down from 4,509 rules the previous year and from a 10-year peak of 5,119 in 1994,…..

For a full analysis see the 2003 Cato Institute report: Ten Thousand Commandments, An Annual Report of the Federal Regulatory State.
Via Bespacific.

It’s still Stealing

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The Net Pirate says

I know what I am doing is illegal, but I feel it is no more illegal or threatening to the music industry, than my videotaping of programmes from TV is threatening to broadcasters.

You know, though, it is illegal and it is theft. Perhaps if you stuck with copying mix tapes onto your CD from the radio you could say that you are analogous to the timeshifting folks do with vidotaped tv programs (which is not illegal).

This person is right that the industry is changing, that the recording industry wants to maintain control, etc. And, yes, the industry needs to come up with new models to sell the product. Still, I can’t quite figure out any reason why he shouldn’t be fined or go to jail for theft.

Oh, many performers approve the recording and trading of their live performances. This is legal. What the pirate is doing is not no matter how broken the distribution model.

On a related note, the RIAA, better get busy making the changes to their business model. There are some things on the horizon that will make their lives even more interesting:

An international team set new Internet2 Land Speed Records using next generation Internet Protocols (IPv6) by achieving 983 megabits-per-second with a single IPv6 stream for more than an hour across a distance of 7,067 kilometers (more than 4,000 miles) from Geneva, Switzerland to Chicago, Ill. The record is comparative to transferring the equivalent of approximately one feature-length DVD-quality movie every 36 seconds, or more than 3,500 times faster than the typical home broadband connection.

36 seconds to download a movie!! Wahooooo!! Well, almost. It will be a while before many of us get true broadband at our homes (and I certainly don’t consider the definition used above, 280 Kilobits-per-second, to be broadband).