Tomorrow my wife and I are going for a week to the Louisiana State Bar Convention, which naturally isn't held in Louisiana. It's in Destin, Florida. I just called the fancy schmancy Hilton hotel to see if they have high-speed access.
Nope. Not even in the "Business Center." Figures.
I have noticed that the "Business Center" at most hotels is now just basically a poorly run copy center with a fax machine and maybe a computer, attended by a very friendly lady who grimaces if you ask her anything about Internet access. If there is a God and I deseve to be punished, I'm going to wind up sitting in a hotel Business Center for a couple of eons.
But enough theology, does anyone out there in Cyberia know of a sand dune in Destin, Florida where a blawger can find a high-speed hookup? I'm not even worrying about wireless access. Just something better than dial-up. Please don't let me wind up in the Business Center.
Early in its statehood, Louisiana was at the forefront of legal jurisprudence. It adopted the Napoleonic Code, which was a body of law that was both comprehensive and general. The drafters of the Napoleonic Code would not, for example, have passed a law to prohibit the theft of crawfish if there was a law that simply prohibited theft. A law prohibiting theft of a certain class of crustacean would have been considered completely unecessary.
That was then. Now the presumption is that we need more laws to make our society function efficiently. Every year the legislature meets in Baton Rouge and has a jolly old time. And we always wind up with a few new laws that are totally unnecesary.
Time for a computer analogy. Everyone in the computer business knows that bloated code in computer programs is a recipe for disaster. At some point one piece of code is going to conflict with another piece of code and it won't be a good thing (remember why HAL went insane in the movie 2001?).
Well, law is basically code (as Lessig has pointed out). And more and more it looks like we have some out-of-control script kiddies camped out in the legislatures of this country. The result is a bunch of bloated legal code that satisfies only one need: the legislators' desire to justify their existence.
It's a good thing that we don't pay programmers based on the number of lines of code they write, or our software would be as screwed up as our legal system.
Interesting article in the Sun Herald about the grand jury probe of Mississippi's judiciary and its close ties to certain well-known plaintiffs' lawyers.
8:14:50 PM
