Chad's News

Canadian officials were understandably upset when a US judge ordered a convicted sex offender to spend 3 years “exiled” in Canada.

http://today.reuters.com/…

The state of Ohio is trying to implement a special sex offender registry. It’s for people who have never been convicted of (or even charged with) a sex crime. Instead, certain people will be declared as sex offenders by a judge, and then be added to the registry. This “civil registry” is intended to handle Catholic clergy who are sex offenders but have never been charged criminally and haven’t lost a civil lawsuit. I guarantee, however, that the registry will be (mis)used for purposes far from the original intent. This is a bad idea.

http://www.toledoblade.com/…
(via slashdot)

According to this federal appeals court ruling, carrying large amounts of cash is sufficient cause for the cash to be confiscated and not returned. What planet are these judges from?

http://www.thenewspaper.com/…

The addition of a single comma will cost this company an estimated $2 million (Canadian).

Link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/…
(via digg)

If you’ve been keeping up with the news lately, you may have heard about net neutrality. As it was first explained to me, telecom companies didn’t think it was fair that bandwidth-hogging, content-providing web sites (think Google) didn’t have to pay for their traffic that travels over the telco infrastructure. So I pay Qwest, for example, to access Google. Google serves up the content through their connection to the internet, whatever that is, and the data travels through the internet, eventually arriving at Qwest’s network and then my PC. This is net neutrality. Some of the more vocal telecom companies, however, want to also charge Google for sending the content over their network. In essence, double-charging and wringing every bit of money possible out of their network infrastructure. It’s no wonder, then, that companies such as Google and Amazon are firmly opposed to this and have been pressuring Congress to pass a net neutrality bill that outlaws it.

Since this original explanation, however, net neutrality has undergone a transformation. Without a net neutrality law in place, the internet would become a two-tier network, where content providers have to pay for preferential treatment. Thus Google, paying for this privilege, would find its content served up in much the same way it is today. While Chad’s News, which cannot afford such extravagant services, would be relegated to a “slower” internet. The best explanation of this is in the linked video of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. From the video, “The point is that with net neutrality all internet packets – whether they come from a big company or a single citizen – are treated in the exact same way.” (Note that there is some off-color humor in the clip, and the real meat of the issue starts about halfway through.)

So the push is on in Congress. The current efforts to get net neutrality passed as law have failed, but we can expect to see it come up again later this year.

http://www.youtube.com/…
(via The Consumerist)

This article critiques welfare reform, which was signed into law nearly 10 years ago. The conclusion is that it’s working better than expected but not as well as it could be.

http://www.usatoday.com/…
(via digg)

The US government has created a comprehensive, online repository of all federal forms. Appropriately enough, they’re located at forms.gov.

http://www.forms.gov/
(via lifehacker)

Apparently our highways have actually become safer since the federal 55 MPH speed limit was repealed. This is in stark contrast to the doomsayers back in 1995 who predicted a massive increase in injuries. Personally, I believe the repeal of the 55 MPH speed limit to be the single most useful thing that the Republican majority has managed to do in the last 12 years.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/…

Remember this post, made only 10 days ago, where I predicted that Washington state’s online gambling law would be misused in ways the legislature didn’t intend? Well the first person charged under the law was not actually caught gambling; rather, he runs a web site that has information about online gambling. This constitutes transmitting “gambling information,” which is illegal under the new law. It will be interesting to see if he gets convicted.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/…

The state of Washington has made it a felony to gamble online. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks this way, but doesn’t this seem like a massive case of overkill? I mean, a felony? They say this law won’t be applied to individual gamblers, but I’ve found that the police have a knack of using laws in ways for which they were not intended.

http://yro.slashdot.org/…

Is it just me, or do the anti-DNA-database arguments presented in this article fall flat? I agree it would be necessary to include proper controls, such as re-testing to verify the match, but I just don’t see much difference between taking DNA samples and taking fingerprints. And nobody complains when a suspect is fingerprinted. Leave some comments and let me know your take on the subject.

On a side note, any database would have to include some method of dealing with human chimeras.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…
(via slashdot)

A true indicator of how difficult it is to end a tax, even one that was supposed to be temporary. Save those phone bills—I’m betting that the standard refund won’t cover the actual tax paid.

http://www.usatoday.com/…