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Maturing Net Grows More Slowly
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC has an article covering the slowing growth rate of
Internet traffic." From the article: "Growth rates in some territories was staying high, said Mr. Mauldin, at 76% in Asia and 70% in Latin American but even these were down on 2004. Currently the amount of traffic flowing between nations is approximately one terabit per second. If growth rates hold up this is likely to hit three terabits per second by 2008. Much of the growth over the last few years has come about because of the rise in the popularity of file-sharing that encourages people to swap and share large media files, said Mr. Mauldin. "
Imagine opening tomorrow's newspaper and reading this: "Citing all-too-frequent child abuse and neglect, Congress has proposed the Parenting Reform Act. Under the proposed law, all parents must sign a sworn statement pledging that they have not 'caused unreasonable physical harm or danger' to their children. To verify their compliance, all parents will be required to submit their children to a monthly full-body inspection by the new Parental Oversight Board, and account for every cut, scrape, and bruise that inspectors find. If a parent cannot prove the 'reasonableness' of any injuries to the Board's satisfaction, it could result in a loss of custody and 20 years in prison.
"'If a child has a bruised leg,' one of the bill's supporters said, 'we need to know about it--and we need to know how it happened. If it happened playing soccer, we need signed accounts from the coach and the referee. Otherwise, how can we be sure his father didn't just get drunk and beat him? And if a child gets a lot of bruises playing soccer, we need an explanation of why his parents continue to expose him to such danger.'"
Our reaction to this proposed law would be outrage. It is unjust and destructive, we would say, for the government to make arbitrary accusations of abuse and neglect, to conduct baseless investigations, and then to force an innocent parent to try to disprove them.
We should say the same about an existing law that perpetrates such horrors, not on America's parents, but on its businessmen: Sarbanes-Oxley.
Sarbanes-Oxley was passed three years ago, in the anti-business frenzy following the Enron, WorldCom, and Slashdot accounting frauds--crimes that were characterized not as the work of a handful of cheats, but as a black mark on all businessmen. Instead of simply gathering evidence and prosecuting individual perpetrators accordingly, our leaders passed a law that forces all businessmen to prove to the government that they are not cooking their books.
Under Sarbanes-Oxley, the government, without any evidence of possible fraud, has free reign to scour a company's books to determine whether they "fairly" represent the company's finances and do "not contain any untrue statement of a material fact or omit to state a material fact."
What is "fairly"? What is "material"? Since these terms are undefined, they mean anything government bureaucrats want them to mean. Just as the government under the fictional Parenting Reform Act could declare a parent a child-abuser for enrolling his child in soccer, so the government under Sarbanes-Oxley can declare a CFO a defrauder for reasonably deciding to capitalize an expenditure instead of to expense it (there are many such judgment calls in accounting).
Further, how can the government hold a businessman criminally responsible for any mistake in a financial report, which is the product of hundreds of people making thousands of individual judgments and decisions? Sarbanes-Oxley says the mistake is "knowing" if the internal controls management establishes to prevent error and fraud are not "adequate." But since the government does not define "adequate," anytime a regulator decides there "should have been" still one more control to prevent even the most inconsequential of errors--management is guilty of fraud.
If parents knew that the government could throw them in jail for every judgment call and innocent error that resulted in a skinned knee, they would avoid "risky" situations like trips to the park, and spend their time tracking their and their child's every move so that they could rebut the government's arbitrary accusations. The same is true for businesses under the potential guillotine of Section 302 of Sarbanes-Oxley--behavior practically mandated by the extensive testing and documenting of internal controls required by Section 404. Whole companies avoid any action the government might frown upon, and pour endless time and energy into monitoring and cataloging anything that a government inspector might conceivably believe is relevant to
You're right. Your post should have been modded "Overrated" or (stretching) "offtopic". But most people here have already accepted that the Mod system at Slashdot is broken at least and simply a tody system.
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