Judge Judy Let me start off by revealing a dark secret: Not too long ago, I actually didn't like Judge Judy. My impression was that she was too harsh on the people in front of her. That verdict was far too hasty. Taking a close look at the characters that appear before her, and it's plainly obvious they've got everything that's coming to them.

Without fail, everyday a group of people appear before Judge Judy to present their case. In every case there's at least one person clearly in the wrong, and sometimes both people are in guilty to a degree. In spite of that, every person attempts to guile Judge Judy with their supposed innocence.

Judge Judy relentlessly applies common sense to cut through the layers of poorly strung exaggerations and lies. It's really an awesome sight.

So the big idea for the day is to make Judge Judy part of Congressional oversight committees. Not only would CSPAN's ratings shoot up wildly, but she'd cut through all the partisan crap. Imagine George Tenet going before Judge Judy having to explain the intelligence failures. My prediction is that he'd crumble like a cookie.

The same goes for the upcoming presidential debates. It's going to be an hour long political slogan contest. No thanks, what we need instead is for George Bush and John Kerry to appear in Judge Judy's court room and present their case to Judge Judy. Of course, she doesn't have to render a verdict but just ask all the tough questions. That's the only way we're going to get some real answers.

US Broadband Sucks Saw Fixing American Broadband on SlashDot and it just made me foam at the mouth again. Most Americans are unaware of the plentiful broadband in places like Japan, South Korea, and else where. I was lucky enough to enjoy stable 8Mbit DSL in Japan not too long ago, but now I'm Cox land where our service cuts out at least once a day. Our connection has been inspected several times, so I attribute the outages to incompetence at headquarters.

Here's a shining example of how poor the state of broadband is in Rhode Island, and I expect elsewhere. My dad connects to his work using a VPN. While at home, he gets disconnected every couple of hours so it eventually became just another fact of life. Recently he traveled to a refinery in the far western part of China. He showed up in a small town where his cellphone had no coverage and his long distance calling cards didn't work. But lo and be hold, this tiny town at least had a broadband connection. So he connected to his VPN, and found out the connection to his office network in Massachusetts was more stable half way around than in Rhode Island.

To sum it up: even a remote region in a communist country half way around the world has better connectivity to a Massachusetts office than one of America's leading free enterprise cable corporations only 50 miles away.

So I've been eager to sign-up for Vonage or a similar service, but there is no way in hell I'm going to reduce my phone service to the same level quality as my broadband connection.