Side by Side Comparison
Leon Therimin from Starke, FL
Used to work at Reliable Temps in Starke, Florida. Got called in to do clean-up at Union Cor. Inst. Turns out it was double execution. CO’s had set up two electric chairs, side by side. Wired one with Wattgate 381 Audio Grade Duplex Socket, the other with regular economy duplex outlet. Chairs were set up on parallel circuit. When the warden threw the switch, the lights dimmed, and prisoner A with the economy duplex outlet jerked against the leather straps, broke his leg strap, and died in a cloud of smoke. Inmate B, with Wattgate 381 Audio Grade Duplex Socket, got pushed back in his chair, while his eyes, teeth, one lung, and a lot of blood went in the other direction. The proof is in the pudding. Wattgate 381 Audio Grade Duplex Socket rocks!!!!!

True power fidelity
Spellman Powers from Edison, New Jersey
Excellent value for the money. I paid almost twice as much for two single channel outlets with monophonic power. Now I can get true dual channel stereo power out of ANY line cord with a full 60 Hz per channel. My only complaint is the leakage current in horizontal mode. Without a good set of power corks you can drain all the current out of your wires in a couple of hours. So mount the outlet vertically or if you absolutely need horizontal audio, get yourself a good sponge capacitor and mount between the ground plug and ALL! the speaker magnets.

#142 No Agenda For Sunday October 25th 2009

Obamaland

FLORENCE, Ariz. — It is a dangerous place to patrol, and Arizona spends $4.7 million each year to house inmates such as Hausner in a super-maximum-security prison. But in a first in the criminal-justice world, the state’s death-row inmates could become the responsibility of a private company. State officials soon will seek bids from private companies for nine of the state’s 10 prison complexes that house roughly 40,000 inmates, including the 127 on death row. It is the first attempt by a state to put its entire prison system under private control. The privatization effort, in its breadth and aggressive financial goals, demonstrates what states — broke, desperate and often overburdened with prisoners and their associated costs — are willing to do to balance the books. Arizona officials hope the effort will put a $100 million dent in the state’s roughly $2 billion budget shortfall.

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” said Andy Biggs, a Republican in the state Legislature who supports private prisons. “If we were not in this economic environment, I don’t think we’d be talking about this with the same sense of urgency.”

Private prison companies generally build facilities for a state and charge per prisoner to run them. But under the Arizona legislation, a vendor would pay $100 million upfront to operate one or more prison complexes. Assuming the company could operate the prisons more cheaply or efficiently than the state, any savings would be equally divided between the state and the firm. The privatization move has raised questions about the ability of the private sector to handle the state’s most hardened criminals. While executions would be performed by the state, officials said, the Department of Corrections would relinquish all other day-to-day operations to the private operator and pay a per-diem fee for each prisoner.

The federal government, with a surge of new immigrant inmates, also contracts with firms. The number of federal prisoners in private prisons in the U.S. has more than doubled, to 32,712 in 2008 from 15,524 in 2000. The number of state prisoners in privately run prisons has increased to 93,500 from 75,000 in that time.

We are one step closer to a Death Row Reality Show.

The New York Times

Two former Yale University law students have settled their suit brought against some 30-plus anonymous commenters who posted derogatory remarks about them on an internet forum called AutoAdmit. The comments, which ranged from standard insults to those of a more sexually explicit nature, were so vile they prompted the women to sue in order to out the identities of those doing the commenting. According to the plaintiffs, the suit was necessary because the discussion board, a site designed for law school graduates, was often monitored by firms looking to hire. Because the comments were associated with their names, the women claimed that it would hurt their chances of being offered a job.
[…]
In the end, the women’s attorneys were able to identify some eight or nine of the anonymous posters, according to the Hartford Courant and they settled with some of them.

Because the terms of the settlement were confidential, the lawyers representing the former students, Heide Iravani and Brittan Heller, would not discuss them. However, San Francisco attorney Ashok Ramani, whose firm, Keker & Van Nest took the case pro-bono said that their clients were “very pleased with how the case went.” The women had sued for monetary damages so a settlement means they were likely awarded at least some of the amount they had hoped for.

DU has more than it’s fair share of trolls.