Ranting and Roaring

Wasting too much time read blogs? Give Jäger a spin and tell me what you think.

Caveats: the documentation hasn’t quite caught up to the tool yet, but it’s coming along.

Sorry for quoting this entire article, but this is absolutely insane. If getting nailed by a beer bottle though a window is a predictable risk, it should be covered by the appropriate government acts: no open windows on busses. It’s not like the bus had a big target on its side with an arrow point toward a window saying “throw bottles here”. Hell, why isn’t the passenger responsible? She made the choice to open the window. Surely she should have known that teenagers were going gong her one, just like the courts think the bus company could/should have.

The province’s Supreme Court has ordered a bus company in Conception Bay South to compensate a woman who was injured on her way to a bingo game.

The case goes back to 1996, when Theresa Whalen was struck in the head by a beer bottle, that ruptured her ear drum and left the woman feeling sick ever since.

The bottle was thrown through the closed window of a bus owned by Parsons and Sons, that was taking Whelan and other passengers to a bingo game.

The bus company argued that teenagers often threw items at their vehicles and Whelan should have known about the risk.

The court says the owners of the bus should have installed mesh over the windows, or taken other steps to protect the passengers.

Whelan wants the bus company to pay damages but she’s waiting to see if the company appeals the decision.

Therefore, Instapundit is not God.

TM reports on Toyota’s new concept car which automatically rats you out to the police if you speed [further comments: here and here]. With GPS technology coupled with a GIS database, it could also report all the stop signs you rolled through, the red (and yellow) lights you ran, and by cross-correlation with other car’s databases, all the times you drove with less than a 5 second gap between you and the next car.

Now, applying the 3rd amendment seems like a bit of a stretch, but of course in Canada there is no third ammendment. My question is: if you’re for photo-radar to catch cars going 114 km/h on empty highways, what possible objection could you have to this? After all, by eliminating speeding, red light running and tailgating, far more lives will be saved than ever were by manditory speed belt laws, manditory air bag laws (and so on and so forth).

It’s worth nothing that within 10 years, it should be possible to add this type of technology to every car for only a couple of bucks.

After about 15 months of use my IBM T22 laptop battery stores about 15 minutes charge, max. My mother has a T20 (I think) and her’s has the same problem. Jeremy Zawodny has the same problem.

Conclusion: IBM batteries suck.

TA: I see the airplane.
Me: Where’s it going?
TA: It’s going to Hollyfax. Auntie Jacqui lives in Hollyfax
Me: Where does Uncle Robert live?
TA: (silence for a few seconds) Uncle Robert lives in his home

The Stratocaster turns 50 this year. I own a cream coloured 1987 “American Standard” Strat. Yummy — and the first year that they resumed making decent instruments again, I think.

Next Tuesday’s Carnival will be hosted by Vicki Fox Smith at Just in from Cowtown. Vicki’s already announced her theme — no last minute decisions for her! — so start sending her your favorite entries of the week:

The topic is “Canadians: A People of Many Passions”, so I’m hoping for posts about things folks are passionate about–politics, hockey, their home towns–their choice.

Get well soon, dude.

I’ve been without the Internet for the last 22 hours. Rogers was just by and I seem to be back in business. I’ll respond to e-mails and whatnot in the next 8 hours or so

Bush lost the last election by several hundred thousand votes on the popular count. At a guess, if there are between 20 and 30 million homosexuals in America and they skew 60/40 Democrat, Bush supporting the stupid idea of a constitutional ammendment banning gay marriage, has lost on the order of 2 to 4 million Republican votes. The only question is whther they will stay home or whether they will be angry enough to hold their noses and vote for Kerry.

Sorry Jay, but I’d find it incredibly surprising if there was more than 300,000,000 * 0.025 = 7.5 million gays in the US, as an absolute upper bound. (That said, the rest of the logic is sound).

Damian Penny writes about a particularly egregious child support case:

A man who claims he was seduced and exploited in his early teens by an older, married woman must pay child support to the state for the illegitimate son he gave her, the Michigan Court of Appeals decided in a precedent-setting Macomb County case this week.

… The Court of Appeals reversed the lower court ruling, however, and said child support must be decided by the interests of the child and not the parents.

Whenever you hear anyone speak of the “interests of the child” in the context of the modern state, read it to mean “whatever supports the mother”, as that’s how it has become intrepreted. If you care to do some digging, read about poor Jordan Heikamp. Or Blatch from today’s Globe and Mail:

[Elizabeth Cao] was given a conditional sentence of two years less a day, plus three years of probation, meaning no jail time.

Judge David Fairgrieve waved off the “usual house arrest and community service provisions,” deciding Ms. Cao had been punished enough by the 22 days she cruelly had been forced to serve between her arrest and release on bail.

How did Judge Fairgrieve put it, as he read aloud selected passages from his reasons for sentence?

“Given the nature of her loss, it hardly seems necessary to provide explicit or further acknowledgment of the harm she caused.”

[...]The nature of Ms. Cao’s loss is that in the fall of 2001, fed up with her five-week-old daughter Sara’s crying, Ms. Cao shook her to death.

Grimly I note that this is the murdering your parents and asking for mercy because you are an orphan defense.

The Register reports:

UltraWideBand’s prospects for becoming the dominant wireless technology for the home improved significantly this week, with Motorola poised to support a coexistence protocol that bridges the two rival would-be standards, and Intel demonstrating integration with wired USB.

There’s been a ton of action in the UWB world in the last week, which unfortunately I haven’t blogged very much about. Here’s a few more links, all of which are good reading:

• Ultra Wideband — the Next-Generation Wireless Connection. This is a whitepaper on UWB applications.
• UWB group dumps IEEE to speed wireless USB, 1394. I.e. the time to productize this is now, and the standards process wasn’t going quickly enough.
• USB could go wireless in 2005. This is how they’re going to brand UWB: as “wireless USB”.

Early next decade, the only cables we’ll be using inside the house will be power cords and speaker-cable runs.

Synopsis: we sure as hell don’t want ‘em.

I’ve recently come to the rather depressing conclusion that the reason the elites in our society support, say, Fidel Castro or Arafat’s possee of clowns is that at some fundemental level they’d prefer our society to be more structured like Cuba than Israel. My suspicion though is that they see themselves in the Daschas rather than the crumbling concrete apartment blocks, as befits their particular importance to society.

Started playing music at 4:30am, battery gave out at 11:30am. I had the machine paused for about 15 minutes that whole time and I had the backlighting set at 5 seconds. So, awesome. Also, since it charges across the Firewire cable from the computer (how cool is that), I can bring the wall plug adapter to work to power it up here.

What a jackass. Aren’t we fighting a war or something?

President Bush on Tuesday will endorse a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage, the White House said.

“The president will announce his support for a constitutional amendment to protect the sanctity of marriage,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

— “He’s going to kill somebody, we swear”
— “I’m sorry, we can’t go looking for him: I have to buff my nails this year. And maybe the next year too.”

— “I swear, I’m going to kill somebody”
— “Right then, off you go. And don’t show your face around here until you do kill someone”

Palestinians say: “Israel’s wall will kill peace hopes“. As opposed to the apparently preferable no-wall option which will “hopefully kill Jews”. There’s a lot more nonsense in there which I could blog about, but my dentist told me to stop grinding my teeth.

Via Inkless Wells, Toro magazine has reminiscences from ex-Post reporters (dare I say: disgruntled Posties?)

Check out CotC #11 at Kim’s blog The G Spot. Thanks Kim, great job: love those license plates!

Next week’s Carnival will be hosted by Vicki Fox Smith at Just in from Cowtown themed:

The topic is “Canadians: A People of Many Passions”, so I’m hoping for posts about things folks are passionate about–politics, hockey, their home towns–their choice.

So start thinking about that one and start getting your entries over there this week.

New on Switching to Glide: The Lost Fall Sessions. Turn it up! or down, depending on your taste…

Get your entries to Kim at The G Spot tomorrow’s Carnival of the Canucks. Now!

LOL at this post I came across while doing some random searching. You don’t need to be a computer geek to read it and it’s just plain good advice. .