5 hour power outage Friday. Threw my whole day off, as you might imagine. I don’t even know whose fault it was: my apartment building’s or Dominion Power’s.
Apple cut Bitcoin from the App Store.. Bitcoiners are responding like a combination of spoiled children and offended followers of a religion. Wait until they find out that Russia is banning bitcoin and Florida is going after Bitcoin money laundering.
Bitcoin and crime go hand in hand. Mt. Gox is now preparing to rip off its users once and for all, it seems. Mt. Gox is the Magic: the Gathering Online eXchange, a site originally founded to trade collectible game cards, but now trades Bitcoins. Also, organized drug dealers are looking at Bitcoin.
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How about some FCC? Some bad Net Neutrality laws are being proposed, attempting to save the terrible idea. Meanwhile Dean Heller is trying some targeted FCC process reform in the Senate. That’s great.
So, Retransmission Consent. You know what happens when you rig the system to limit competition, as the Congress and the FCC did in the early days of Cable? Broadcasters raking in the bucks. Never would I say that copyright should be attacked, but that price to license these broadcasts should be dictated by the open market. Let broadcasters compete.
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Barack Obama admitted what we’ve been saying all along: Net Neutrality was an attempt to regulate the Internet. Told you so.
More FCC: Data use continues to go up, and it probably makes sense to remove barriers to investment on expanding our wireless capacity in this country. We still need spectrum, but the build out matters after that spectrum is acquired, as well.
Of course, instead of being sensible the radicals just want to spend more money stupidly.
All this is perfectly good reason to want to gut the FCC by reforming the Communications Act, but again, I just don’t trust the current legislative process to succeed at this in one big bill. When was the last time we had one big bill that worked well? Not in many years. I’d love to be proven wrong, but I’m not optimistic.
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How do we know that the NSA stuff is being driven by anti-Americanism? So much outrage about NSA and American allies, but so little about Russia, China, and American rivals. Heck, I’m not even seeing a peep about a Chicom firm Lenovo buying Google Motorola.
Now here’s a major reform idea I could get behind: merging FCC and FTC. By removing one entity, we reduce the added burden on business when two different regulators come after them for the same stuff. Getting rid of DoJ’s antitrust division would help, too. Because now even SEC is grabbing new tech powers.
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So the FCC is meeting soon, and that’s probably going to produce some news. Some of us are hoping for the best under the new FCC Chairman, but he may yet be a radical extremist who will try yet again on Net Neutrality, after the FCC has lost twice in court when attempting that power grab.
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It’s happening: the feds have arrested Bitcoin Foundation vice-chairman Charlie Shrem for money laundering. The key point seems to be that his service BitInstant was tied to Silk Road.
Good news: Microsoft and Google won and are getting some declassifications of aggregate data on FISA demands for data. Aggregate data from large providers won’t help the bad guys, but it will inform the voters, and that’s all that matters here.
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It’s neat how the New York Times is dredging up an old NSA website as news. I guess it beats writing about Obamacare breakins or Benghazi.
And it’s interesting how Democrats don’t seem to want to dig into the Healthcare.gov or Benghazi failures but seem ready to blame Target for crimes against them.
So the Obama administration wants us to believe that taking gun databases from the states is legal, Healthcare.gov is legal, but NSA is illegal. Sure, buddy.
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Why is Amazon winning? It’s not Sales Tax. It’s because Amazon is doing everything they can to combine their great selection with getting your purchases to you as fast as possible. That patent going around for predictive shipping is being reported so terribly. People keep focusing on getting something at your house you didn’t order. That’s not the real point of the patent. Figures 4A-4C of Patent No. 8,615,473 B2 demonstrate the real goal. They want to get items that are likely to be ordered into the networks of their package carriers, down to the local hub or first three digits of ZIP code, then slap on the address of a specific person who did order it, and get the item to the person insanely fast.
I know I’ve harped on this a lot, but it really is a shame that people in favor of sales tax changes have made this all about sticking it to Amazon, because there are legitimate tax reasons to favor taxing interstate purchases. Preserving sales tax revenue that used to be there means not having to raise or implement income taxes in order to get the same revenue per capita.
By the way, Healthcare.gov is horribly, horribly insecure.
What’s better than anarchists getting arrested for spreading terrorists slogans, including threats? Anarchists getting arrested and caned for the same.
Speaking of people who need arrested, even as Kim Dotcom continues his war on copyright, he’s also going to get into politics in New Zealand. I think we can guess the sole platform element of his party: DO NOT EXTRADITE KIM DOTCOM TO AMERICA.
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Bitcoin is not really as widely used as its shills want you to think.
Ajit Pai is the man and understand what it means for the courts to be used to quash innovation. As the courts refused to crush the VCR, I want them to leave Aereo alone.
By the way, Healthcare.gov is still at risk. Good thing it’s a miserable failure, though that doesn’t help the poor souls already signed up and at risk in the vulnerable systems.
Democrats want to pass a new law mandating a private-public partnership to track where you and your phone are at all times, in the name of 911 calls. But remind me again how all the Snowden stuff is about privacy and not anti-Americanism and a rollback to 9/10/2001 thinking again. Sure, guys. Sure.
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