So the Aereo case went to the Supreme Court, and it’s official: Aereo lost, and may be killed as the result of government. Naturally I agree with the three justice minority of Antonin Scalia, Sam Alito, and Clarence Thomas. Clarence Thomas is the kind of guy that, if he rules against what I thought was right, I’ll doublecheck to see if I was wrong. And he voted with Scalia.
Turns out there’s some real gold in the dissent, too. Justice Scalia could write Tech at Night.
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So before considering the new garbage coming from Эдвард Сноуден and his accomplices the Glenns Greenwald, let’s recap how far we’ve come with this pair.
The NSA has demonstrated that Snowden never did go through official channels with his alleged evidence of problems, and we certainly know he never did attempt to use legal means to alert the President or the Congress that there were issues at the NSA that needed investigation.
Instead, he ran to China, taking sensitive information with him and putting it at risk of being taken by America’s adversary, then he went to Russia and did the same thing. Then he conspired with serial sock puppeteer and extremist blowhard the Glenns Greenwald to dribble out information, most of it totally unrelated to any allegations of Constitutional or legal violations.
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A big bill is in the air. Politicians are starting to talk about passing a new Communications Act. Lobbyists are drooling at the prospect of a new Communications act. Small government activists want a new Communications act, and they give good reasons for it.
I don’t want a new Communications Act. Here’s why.
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Conservatives often talk about how government picks winners and losers, but sometimes it’s important to discuss just how that is done. It’s easy to see in cases like Solyndra where government picks winners, but sometimes it’s harder to see when government is making one industry win at the expense of another.
Laws related to technology are full of examples like that, and tonight I’m going to illustrate two important ways government makes broadcasters winners at the expense of cable companies and content producers.
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Conservatives are often painted as the out-of-touch meddlers in culture today. We boycott, we ban, we scold, we stand athwart history. We get laughed at by the left, but we fight anyway.
Hip, moderate, urbane folks tell us this is all wrong. Instead of criticizing culture, standing apart from it, and trying to reject its influences, we’re told we need to be in it, engage with it, and stand up for what we believe in from within.
Today’s politicized action by the US Patent and Trademark Office, canceling the trademark of the Washington Redskins, shows that actually, that restraint is what is all wrong. No matter how popular something is, no matter how much the general public at large is fine with it, concerted political activism can and will work.
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Email technology has changed over the years, and some people hope you don’t understand why, and how that matters for the issues of the day. So tonight I’m going to discuss how the technologies have changed, and why that influences the debates over both the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) and the IRS missing emails scandal.
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Over at Ace of Spades HQ, a site a lot of us at RedState like, they have a project called the AOSHQ Decision Desk. The plan is to come up with better and faster election night projections than the big media networks are coming up with. And while they haven’t been perfect, since the project is new and the models are still in development, the AOSHQDD is showing a lot of promise.
But they need help, and that’s where you come in.
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Bitcoin is an electronic “currency” based on math similar to what it used by cryptography. It has little in the way of central authority, just some software developers who push through software changes on a whim, however this limited authority has no means of moving money around.
As a result, Bitcoin is dangerous, useful to criminals but lacking in the basic property rights that ordinary people need in order to operate in an economy.
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To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
That’s what the Constitution says on patents (and copyrights, but we’re not going there tonight). However today the situation involving patents is messy, and takes some effort to sort through. I’ll do my best here to give the rundown of the challenges we face today, and what we should do about them.
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So, online gambling. Right now there are two major pushes going on to get new legislation related to online gambling. Neither is a small government position, and I oppose them both. The current law as it stands isn’t bad. It could be better, but either plan out there right now would make things worse.
To summarize, the two plans out there are both masquerading as right-wing positions, however one turns out to be a classic big government picking of winners and losers, and the other is big regulatory government masquerading as libertarianism. We must pass neither.
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