Best Buy apparently has a policy that they will match a price from their internet site in their stores. Unless, of course, they can show the customer on an in house website that the price isn’t better.
That is the allegation and if true Best Buy is committing fraud. We will have to wait for Best Buy to admit guilt or for a court, civil, criminal or both, to declare guilt before we know for sure.
Whichever the case, this thought from Chaos Digest holds no water:

Conservatives who continuously spout ‘less government oversight’ please note: This is the type of thing that would happen much more often if an industry is left to ‘self-regulate’.

First, see above. Until the alleged perp admits guilt or is convicted in a court of law they are, well, presumed innocent.
Second, this has nothing to do regulation and everything to do with a possible criminal act. It is the responsibility of the police, prosecuting attorneys or citizens acting in civil courts to bring this type of activity to an end.

We do not need regulatory agencies to determine whether someone or some thing corporation has committed fraud.

Inpired by Stella Liebeck here are the:

The 2006 True Stella Awards

Issued 31 January 2007

(Click here to
confirm these are legitimate.)

#5: Marcy Meckler. While shopping at
a mall, Meckler stepped outside and was “attacked” by a squirrel that
lived among the trees and bushes. And “while frantically attempting
to escape from the squirrel and detach it from her leg, [Meckler]
fell and suffered severe injuries,” her resulting lawsuit says.
That’s the mall’s fault, the lawsuit claims, demanding in excess of
$50,000, based on the mall’s “failure to warn” her that squirrels
live outside.

#4: Ron and Kristie Simmons. The
couple’s 4-year-old son, Justin, was killed in a tragic lawnmower
accident in a licensed daycare facility, and the death was clearly
the result of negligence by the daycare providers. The providers were
clearly deserving of being sued, yet when the Simmons’s discovered
the daycare only had $100,000 in insurance, they dropped the case
against them and instead sued the manufacturer of the 16-year-old
lawn mower because the mower didn’t have a safety device that 1) had
not been invented at the time of the mower’s manufacture, and 2) no
safety agency had even suggested needed to be invented. A sympathetic
jury still awarded the family $2 million.

#3: Robert Clymer. An FBI agent
working a high-profile case in Las Vegas, Clymer allegedly created a
disturbance, lost the magazine from his pistol, then crashed his
pickup truck in a drunken stupor — his blood-alcohol level was 0.306
percent, more than three times the legal limit for driving in Nevada.
He pled guilty to drunk driving because, his lawyer explained, “With
public officials, we expect them to own up to their mistakes and
correct them.” Yet Clymer had the gall to sue the manufacturer of his
pickup truck, and the dealer he bought it from, because he “somehow
lost consciousness” and the truck “somehow produced a heavy smoke
that filled the passenger cab.” Yep: the drunk-driving accident
wasn’t his fault, but the truck’s fault. Just the kind of guy you
want carrying a gun in the name of the law.

#2: #2: KinderStart.com. The
specialty search engine says Google should be forced to include the
KinderStart site in its listings, reveal how its “Page Rank” system
works, and pay them lots of money because they’re a competitor. They
claim by not being ranked higher in Google, Google is somehow
infringing KinderStart’s Constitutional right to free speech. Even if
by some stretch they were a competitor of Google, why in the world
would they think it’s Google’s responsibility to help them succeed?
And if Google’s “review” of their site is negative, wouldn’t a
government court order forcing them to change it infringe on Google’s
Constitutional right to free speech?

And the winner of the 2006 True Stella
Award: Allen Ray Heckard. Even though Heckard is 3 inches
shorter, 25 pounds lighter, and 8 years older than former basketball
star Michael Jordan, the Portland, Oregon, man says he looks a lot
like Jordan, and is often confused for him — and thus he deserves
$52 million “for defamation and permanent injury” — plus $364
million in “punitive damage for emotional pain and suffering”, plus
the SAME amount from Nike co-founder Phil Knight, for a grand total
of $832 million. He dropped the suit after Nike’s lawyers chatted
with him, where they presumably explained how they’d counter-sue if
he pressed on.

©2007 by Randy Cassingham,
StellaAwards.com. Reprinted with permission.

Perhaps Apple should have thought about trademark issues before they named it iPod:

Even if the product you make doesn’t look, smell, feel, or do anything remotely close to what an iPod does, and even if consumers can’t buy it on the shelves in a store, that apparently doesn’t mean Apple won’t release its legal dogs on you if the name of your product includes the letters P-O-D.

I wonder what they are going to do about this:

At last I said, “UnkaTom? Tell me the Poddy story– ”
“At your age?”
“Please,” I crawled up on his knees. “I want to sit in your lap once more and hear it. I need to.”
“All right,” he said, and put his arm around me. “Once upon a time, long, long ago when the world was young, in a specially favored city there lived a little girl named Poddy.

The drift from here is that Apple can trademark iPod until hell freezes over but that is where it ends.

If they persist in this foolishness then perhaps we should all consider mailing them pea pods. Either full or empty will be fine.

We can call it the Cupertino Pod Party.

Five states now have laws that allow the death penalty for perpetrators of multiple sex crimes agains children. The age limit of the children varies from 11 to 14. The death penalty has been determined to be unconstitutional in the case of mutlple rapes of adult women.
According to this NYT article there does not appear to be a strong consensus on the potential value of the death penalty in these cases. Here are some examples:

Mark Sanford, a Republican, said in a statement that the law would “be an incredibly powerful deterrent to offenders that have already been released.”

But Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a research group that opposes capital punishment, said the new laws were largely symbolic, would impose disproportionate punishment and were probably unconstitutional.

There are more arguments both ways in the article.
As heinous as these crimes are the disproportionality argument seems correct. But what to do? We do not want repeat offendors and I’m not partial to paying to keep them locked up forever though this may be required if there is not something that will help assure a significantly reduced recidivism.
Which there is. A straight forward part of the solution should be castration. I do not mean chemical castration I mean snip off their testicals! This seems reasonably proportional and given the nature of the crimes there is nothing cruel about it and if done regularly it won’t be unusual. Oh yea, no reason to allow these perps to store sperm.

It isn’t 100% perfect and some effects can be overcome with testosterone treatments but as part of a comprehensive program for dealing with repeat sex offenders it seems like a reasonable part of the minimum package.