Unlimited Flow

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 10 Jan 2006 13:00:00 GMT
# Declan McCullagh at News.com - Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime - Bushnev signed into "law" last Thursday H.R. 3402, the "Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005" (version 6, "Enrolled as Agreed to or Passed by Both House and Senate"). Section 113 of this bill adds the following: [clairefiles claire]
`(C) in the case of subparagraph (C) of subsection (a)(1), includes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet (as such term is defined in section 1104 of the Internet Tax Freedom Act (47 U.S.C. 151 note)).'.
to section (a)(1)(C) of 47 USC 223, which creates a "crime", punishable by a fine and up to two years in prison for anyone who:
C) makes a telephone call or utilizes a telecommunications device, whether or not conversation or communication ensues, without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person at the called number or who receives the communications;
Clairefiles discussion here. Claire elucidates the likely abuses of this new "law".

# Jeffrey Tucker at The Ludwig von Mises Institute - The Bureaucrat in Your Shower - Al Deitemann, head of conservation for the Seattle Water Board, reported Showerbuddy.com (Zoe Industries) to the feds for selling a multiple-shower-head device that, apparently legally, gets around federal regulations on maximum flow rates. I hate these flow limiters. I've taken them out of shower heads and out of kitchen and bathroom faucets. There was even one in the new faucet in the scullery where I wash dishes for forty people twice a week. I removed it. A three minute mop bucket fillup was reduced to 30 seconds. And the sprayer next to the big dish washer had a weak flow. I taped some pennies to the squeeze handle so that it would push the valve button more. Presto, huge spray. These flow limiters are complete nonsense. They just make people leave the water on for longer. Bottom line: same amount of water, less human happiness. I'll take the happiness any day, even if it uses twice as much water. Letting the market determine the price will limit consumption precisely as much as it needs to be, thank you very much. [lew]

# Ron Paul at LewRockwell.com - Scandals Are a Symptom, Not a Cause - wanna stop gummint corruption? Take away their check book. [lew]

Undoubtedly the recent revelations will ignite new calls for campaign finance reform. However, we must recognize that campaign finance laws place restrictions only on individuals, not politicians. Politicians will continue to tax and spend, meaning they will continue to punish some productive Americans while rewarding others with federal largesse. The same vested special interests will not go away, and the same influence peddling will happen every day on Capitol Hill.

The reason is very simple: when the federal government redistributes trillions of dollars from some Americans to others, countless special interests inevitably will fight for the money. The rise in corruption in Washington simply mirrors the rise in federal spending. The fundamental problem is not with campaigns or politicians primarily, but rather with popular support for the steady shift from a relatively limited, constitutional federal government to the huge leviathan of today.

# I tried the SLAX Linux live CD yesterday, in a Virtual PC virtual machine. Worked like a charm. Took a little doing to get Emacs to work, since the fonts it needs are not part of the standard distribution, but instructions were available in the forum. Firefox worked well, too. I haven't yet played with the commands to save your configuration. You can save it either to writeable media or to the SLAX web site. The web site save makes it possible to carry the SLAX CD around, and get your own customized Linux on any PC with a network connection.

# Speedy Share is a service provided by the author of SLAX Linux. It allows you to upload files up to 128 megs in size, and publish their address for others to download. It deletes files that have not been downloaded for seven days. Very neat.

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