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I have no definitive answer other than my own experiences but it is my understand that FRA regulates pretty much everything on a system that interconnects with the national system, unless the operating authority (usually a freight railroad) cedes authority to the local jurisdiction. It used to be that local jurisdictions could create "quiet zones" but that authority was yanked by Congress a few years ago. FTA or local operating authority regulate captive systems.

Some examples that back me up:

• " Speed limits are established by FRA. The City has no authority over train speeds ."
• "The Federal Railroad Administration regulates train speed based on the condition of tracks and the type of train."
• "The Federal Railroad Administration sets rules and regulates the speed of trains. The city does not have any control."
• This appellate court decision covers the issue of a state trying to regulate rail activity. The court ruled that Federal regs pre-empted the state regs.
• " [I]t is our opinion that local legislation that imposes speed restrictions on trains is preempted by the Federal Railway Safety Authorization Act of 1994"

This short post couldn't be more wrong.

(1) It's English, the language very occasionally spoken on the Internet.

Rate = x per y, where y is likely a time unit.

e.g. miles per hour
e.g. kilometres per second
e.g. dumb assertions made by /. poster per day

High rate = high x per y.

(2) Sufficiently high acceleration in an urban area will certainly attract a fine for your local equivalent of dangerous driving. It may even be in violation of a city noise ordinance.

That's nothing, last week I heard from my neighbour whose dogsitter has a cousin who's married to a policemans dog that they actually lobotomize people when they sign the contract. They don't even use any surgical equipment, just the pen the applicant signed in with and a rusty spoon. They do get the option of a sedative though, but from what I've heard from my housemates sister that has a plumber who's married to a policewoman, the sedative involves applying a hammer to someone's forehead.

Well, here is the actual case at the UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SECOND CIRCUIT:

http://www.lexisone.com/lx1/caselaw/freecaselaw?action=OCLGetCaseDetail&format=FULL&sourceID=gdig&searchTerm=ebdD.bcja.aadi.YeYZ&searchFlag=y&l1loc=FCLOW

Sometimes the neighbour whose dogsitter has a cousin who's married to a policemans dog IS ACTUALLY CORRECT!

Except if they're Republican busses, then democrats slash all the tires so they cannot bus anyone.

That's also why we don't want to have ID requirements. A great many people don't have state issued id's, since they don't drive.

That's interesting. I don't think I've ever met anybody who did not have some kind of government issued ID. I've met a lot of people, too. I think most rational people understand that if you don't have any form of ID at all, you're either a.) probably not keeping very close tabs on the political issues at hand, or b.) lying for the purposes of committing vote fraud.

Let's turn this around: Republicans, being a minority, want to see as many restrictions and hoops as possible on voting, because it helps them. That explains their support for measures that are biased against people who vote for Democrats typically. Even if some Republicans are excluded from voting because they don't have an ID, even more Democrats will be excluded for the same reason.

And you Democrats want to go scrape up all of the illiterate, deranged, homeless bridge-dwellers you can find in order to get democratic votes. Nevermind that an illiterate, deranged homeless person has no hope of issuing a knowledgable vote, or having any situational awareness regarding the issues at hand.

If you hold the moral value that the community is important, you should not rest until every American can vote as easily as you can vote.

I've voted in three states, in rural, suburban, and inner city precincts, and not one time have I ever been prevented from voting, had difficulty voting, or found the process to be overly complex. My advice to those who think themselves disenfranchised w/ regard to voting is to think, plan, and execute. Simple as that.

Here:

Five Democratic campaign staffers - including the sons of a congresswoman and a former city official - were ordered Tuesday to stand trial for allegedly vandalizing Republican get-out-the-vote vans on Election Day.

They were working on behalf of the Democratic party as campaign staffers, so it wasn't just some loon; though, I doubt Kerry (or anyone with seniority in the party) came down and commanded them to slash tires.

That being said, this isn't representative of the Democratic Party, and frankly I hate it when people cite examples such as this as proof that a party is corrupt. Individuals do stupid/bad things, but in general neither Republicans nor Democrats are particularly heinous.

--trb

I'm sorry, but you're really going to have to provide some hard figures to back up that claim.

Here are a few figures. Most of them are comments on the direct cost (costs to block and clean up), only a few discuss the indirect costs (network congestion, bandwidth waste and expenses, accidentally lost messages, cost of personal time, frustration, etc.)

US National Debt, as of today -- $6,915,186,083,875.25.

SUMMARY OF STATISTICS BELOW -- 40% of spam management [corporate costs] are over 90,000,000,000, lost business estimated at 30,000,000,000, identity theft and successful spam scams range from several hundred million dollars to tens of billions of dollars, individual spam managemnt time, effort, and resources globally is estimated at between 100 and 200 billion USD. Combined total so far, 15-40% of the national debt, each year [depending on cost of successful scams and identity theft]. Nobody dares estimate additional damages, such as slowed-down network responses for everything else. Nor do they discuss the added infrastructure that has been purchaced by everybody from telcos and cable companies to ISPs to Universities to corporations, for handling support calls, developing in-house solutions to spam problems, educating users, and other indirect costs. [Have you ever considered the costs of training seminars, in terms of paychecks for all attendees? What about building costs, phone lines, computers, networks, desks, security, cubicles, and paychecks for all the AOL, MCI, and other companies just because of all the 'what do I do with all this spam' calls?]

Case study: Company of roughly 500 employees, roughly a half-million dollars each year, and climbing.

NYT article "the economic cost is $874 a year for every office worker with an e-mail account, which multiplied by 100 million such workers amounts to about $87 billion for the United States." ... "In total, corporations will spend $120 million this year on antispam systems, Ferris Research said. (Or $635 million, if one would rather listen to Radicati.)" [Corporate cost, almost $90 BILLION USD this year.] ... "Yet for one of the largest Internet backbone carriers, MCI, the spam explosion has more indirect costs. MCI receives a half-million complaints a month that its network is being used to transmit spam" ... " Indeed, the biggest single cost to the company is unpaid bills from the spammers it evicts. 'Spammers know they are going to be kicked off, so they won't pay their first few months' bill,' said Craig Silliman, the legal director for MCI's network and facilities operation. 'By the time you catch them, they turn into a significant net loss.'" ... "America Online now simply discards nearly 80 percent of the 2.5 billion e-mail messages sent a day to addresses at AOL.com" ... "A cost that is hard to measure is the losses from e-mail users defrauded by spammers. One rapidly growing category of e-mail fraud is what is known as phishing, in which e-mail messages purporting to be from a big company ask for credit card and bank information. When credit card numbers are stolen, account holders face the time and bother of putting things right, though most banks do not hold them responsible for losses. But if the spammer buys computer equipment from a Web site with a stolen number, the seller suffers a loss, perhaps never knowing it was an indirect victim of spam." ... "False positives have become so extensive that the research firms, which have spent so much time assessing the cost of spam and the need for spam filters, now have a new research topic. "We have a report coming out in the next two weeks," said David Ferris, who runs the research company bearing his name. "We think companie

I think it's interesting that California chose Lexis, but perhaps not as ominous as it would seem. As part of their obligation to provide true public access to the law, many (or maybe most) courts have law libraries.

Yes, it's on paper, yes, it's not searchable from the comfort of your home... but I think that's what you pay for when you get the access through Lexis or Westlaw's online service.

Many law libraries even have searchable case law on archived CDs, or cheap/free alternatives (like Loislaw and Lexis One.

Remember, lots of legal treatises (and perhaps some other states' "official publications") are published by LexisNexis, as are any books that used to be published under the Matthew Bender name...

In my biased opinion, this article has one major flaw, which is that it seems to totally ignore the role of law libraries - particularly academic law libraries and court libraries. I can only speak for the academic law library where I work. Although we mainly exist to serve our students, faculty and alumni, we never turn anyone from the public away who needs help with legal research. We are trained to help people find what they want or need without crossing over into the area of unauthorized practice of law. At the risk of blowing the profession's own horn too much, I say that the the assistance of a good law librarian - who is armed with a standard collection of printed materials and the resources available on the "free web", including the Legal Information Institute, West's FindLaw and LexisOne - will usually do a much better job for the pro se patron than free access to LexisNexis or Westlaw. The printed sources aren't all bad. They are very strong with the older materials, which Ms. Barr uses as an example, and they make it more difficult to full into the full-text infoglut trap - where the few pearls are hidden in a tonne of garbage.

Law libraries should do a better job of communicating all this to public libraries. I know that some of the professional associations, including the Minnesota Association of Law Libraries are already doing some work in this area.

None of this is to say that I don't have my issues with LexisNexis or Westlaw - or think that they're perfect, altruistic companies. But now there are more free electronic alternatives (or cheap ones, like VersusLaw) available for legal research. They don't have the all the fancy bells & whistles of Westlaw or Lexis, but they still offer the public access to primary legal materials that would have seemed unthinkable 15 years ago.

If you exchange your Visa for a MasterCard, you won't really be boycotting Visa:

Visa and Mastercard are really two names for the same economic enterprise, i.e. a group of 6000 banks. Of these, the same 50 or so big banks own, govern and make all of the competitive decisions for the brands called Visa and Mastercard.
From PBS

Visa and MasterCard are being sued by American Express and the DOJ for antitrust and by a a group of retailers for antitrust related to debit cards.

You should be aware though that the US Supreme Court appears to be taking the issue of high tech's effects on privacy very seriously. In Kyllo v. United States, 121 S. Ct. 2038 (2001) (available on LexisOne - free registration required) the USSC held that the police's use of a thermal imaging unit to detect the use of heat lamps to grow marijuana inside the defendant's home violated the 4th Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.

I predict that the USSC will continue to take privacy matters very seriously as technology progresses.