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Post Gazette – June 6, 2009:
At Penn Hills High School this morning, Chief Burton said, a student was walking up and down a hallway, using a cell phone. School policy permits students to have cell phones but not to use them during school except in emergencies, Chief Burton said.
A Penn Hills police officer told him to put the phone away and go to class.
“The kid refused to listen,” Chief Burton said. “The officer took him by the arm and said, ‘You have to go to the office.’ The student resisted, pushed the officer. The officer, defending himself, took out his stun gun and did a drive stun.”
Chief Burton said a drive stun involves pushing the Taser against a portion of the body and squeezing the trigger, thus immobilizing a portion of the body, such as the leg. He said this affects about a 2- or 3-inch area.
While on the floor, the student was still resisting and was placed in handcuffs, Chief Burton said. The student complained of a headache and dizziness and was taken to Forbes Regional Hospital.
Taser International’s argument is that Tasers are a safer alternative to guns. That’s certainly true, but sidesteps the entire issue. Does anyone seriously believe the officer would have used his gun in this instance?
Tell the student he’s suspended for using his cell phone, report it to the office, and then go about your business. How hard is that?
Arguing that “Tasers are safer than guns” is about as asinine as saying “Tasers are safer than anti-aircraft artillery.” That only makes sense when guns and anti-aircraft artillery are viable alternatives.
As Amodedoma brilliantly points out in the comments, apparently Tasers are not replacements for guns, they’re replacements for common sense!
Apparently Mike Arrington (TechCrunch) was on the “B” list for review copies of the Palm Pre and decided to be huffy with Leo, who let him have it back. At some point people need to realize that Mike Arrington is indeed a douche. He once stiffed us at Cranky Geeks, never showed up and never apologized or even bothered to call. It was pretty amazing, unprofessional and inconsiderate. This BS about Leo slanting his opinion based on having a loaner is laughable.
What irks me most about this guy is his constant assertions that he gets never-ending death threats. Why? For what? I do not want to trivialize death threats as I have had them when writing Op-Eds for a daily newspaper and reporting on gun control and Middle East politics. I’ve never gotten any for writing about tech. And I didn’t hole up when I got them years ago for other commentary. So what is this all about Mike?
Based on this, is there anything that the government disapproves of that can’t be called terrorism?
The UK loaned Iceland £2.3bn last year to reimburse UK savers with Icesave, after the entire Icelandic banking system was nationalised.
The savings of 300,000 retail depositors who held accounts in Britain with Icesave were affected.
The incident sparked tensions between London and Reykjavik at the time.
Britain used anti-terrorism laws to freeze the assets of Icelandic banks, which had collapsed in the wake of financial crisis.
British savers with Icesave were refunded in full at the time by the UK Treasury.
The Curse of Video and other Agnosia
by John C. Dvorak
Video Agnosia (Ag-nose-ee-ah) will be the curse of the 21st Century. Like dyslexia, video agnosia may be genetic in its origins. Simply put, video agnosia is the inability to understand information coming from any video device. This includes both television and computer displays.
The curious thing about this handicap is that it reflects deeper brain disorders that crop up as other forms of agnosia (rock and roll agnosia, sexual agnosia, political agnosia) including the dreaded general agnosia–the inability to understand what the heck is going on around one. These are people who we say are “out of it.”
While researching this little known, but common, ailment I happened upon a secret society known as The Friends of Yuri Ivanovich. Apparently Ivanovich, a Russian emigre, was the first person fired from a job because of video agnosia. In 1956, he was working for Honeywell monitoring computer activity on an old cathode ray tube (CRT) and he kept seeing images of Czar Nicholas on the screen.
Apple may be known for its advertising prowess, but this little marketing coup is going to go down as one of the most hilarious ad placements in recent history. doubleTwist, the company co-founded by renowned software reverse engineer DVD Jon, has managed to place a banner for its product directly next to the main entrance to Apple’s flagship San Francisco store.
The ad invites passersby to try “The Cure for iPhone Envy”, which they can use to access their “iTunes Library on any device. In Seconds”. It’s clearly a message that Apple doesn’t want anything to do with. We’re hearing that Apple employees are currently scratching their heads as to how this appeared.
Apparently the window technically belongs to BART, the Bay Area’s commuter transit system. doubleTwist got in touch with an ad agency that BART deals with and leased the window, giving them the chance to plaster their ad just below the Apple logo in its full glory.
While DVD Jon has a long history of reverse engineering digital media security, doubleTwist is a perfectly legitimate software application that makes it easy to manage media files for a variety of hardware devices. It’s sort of like iTunes, except it works for nearly any device — not just your iPod and iPhone (you can find an extensive overview here, and the app now supports both Windows and Mac). Given that one of the iPod’s biggest advantages over competitors is the seamless experience it offers to users, Apple probably isn’t a big fan.
*Snicker* See a larger photo of the ad here.
Slashdot – June 6, 2009:
“Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is threatening to move Microsoft employees offshore if Congress enacts President Obama’s plans to curb tax avoidance by US corporations. ‘It makes US jobs more expensive,’ complained billionaire Ballmer. ‘We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the US as opposed to keeping them inside the US.’ According to 2006 reports, Microsoft transferred $16 billion in assets to secretive Dublin subsidiaries to shave billions off its US tax bill. ‘Corporate tax is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland,’ acknowledged Ballmer in 2005. ‘It would be disingenuous to say otherwise.'”
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Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
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| Admiral Mike Mullen, Richard Holbrooke, FM Shah Mahmood Qureshi |
ISLAMABAD: The United States has said that Afghan drug trade was not a major source of funding for militancy and extremism in Pakistan. The financing came from extremists’ patrons in Gulf countries — an aspect now being scrutinised, the statement added.
‘Private individuals who support extremists bring money in through illegal means … hawala system and the area focussed is the Gulf Cooperation Council countries,’ US Special Envoy…Richard Holbrooke told a media briefing at the American Embassy.
Mr Holbrooke…said it was ‘a very big issue’ and ‘the most troubling aspect of the entire situation.’
The US, he said, had started looking into the source of financing for the extremists and would be devoting more time to investigate it. He admitted that not much work was done in the past to explore this aspect.
However, he said the much-touted drug trade was not the main financing source for extremism. ‘Even if the drug trade stops it won’t have any significant impact.’
Holbrooke is being careful, precise enough in his choice of words to confine his statement to “private individuals” being responsible for the flow of gold to the insurgency. Though, I doubt that any significant traffic through the wahala banking system goes unscrutinized by Saudi royals or UAE sheikhs..
KATU.com – Jun 3, 2009:
Although a man was shot by police and died from a bullet wound to the chest, the state medical examiner has ruled his death a suicide because he had cut his own wrists.
The shooting happened Tuesday at the Northridge Condominiums, located at 12600 S.E. Freeman Way.
According to police, when officers responded to the complex on a welfare call, they found a man bleeding and holding a knife. Police said when the officers ordered the man to freeze, he didn’t, causing them to open fire.
Some neighbors said the man never had a knife but the Milwaukie Police Department stands by their account of what happened.
Former Vice President Al Gore may be sent to North Korea to negotiate the release of two American journalists on trial, the AFP reported.
Laura Ling and Euna Lee, reporters for Gore’s California-based Current TV, were arrested March 17 near the North Korean border while on a reporting trip to China on charges they entered the country illegally and engaged in “hostile acts” — allegations that could draw a 10-year sentence in a labor camp. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly did not rule out the possibility of Gore being sent when asked if it would make sense for him to go.
“It’s a very, very sensitive issue, I’m not going to go into it,” Kelly told reporters. “This is such a sensitive issue, I’m just not going to go into those kinds of discussions that we may or may not have had,” he said about whether Gore himself had raised the matter with the State Department. “The bottom line is that these two young women should be released but I’m not going to go into any kind of details on what we will or won’t do,” Kelly said. North Korea was silent Friday about the fate of the journalists, who were supposed to go on trial a day earlier.
Their trial began in the communist country’s highest court at a time of mounting tensions on the Korean peninsula following the regime’s provocative May 25 nuclear test. As the United Nations and Washington discussed how to punish the regime for its defiance, there were fears the women could become political pawns in the standoff with Pyongyang.
Analyst Choi Eun-suk, a professor of North Korean law at Kyungnam University, said the court could convict the women, and then the government could use them as bargaining chips with the United States.
“The North is likely to release and deport them to the U.S. — if negotiations with the U.S. go well,” Choi said.
Hmmm, are you thinking what I’m thinking?
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John and Adam discuss the news of the day from an international perspective
Queue / cue / Q the closing credits — We hope you enjoy the show!
No Agenda Archive
Running time: approx. 90 mins.
NEW YORK (CBS) ― A New York City woman says her father apparently lay dead for weeks in a minivan while police repeatedly left parking tickets on the vehicle, seen here, below the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway underpass. went undiscovered for weeks because the vehicle’s windows were apparently tinted and ticketing officers don’t normally search cars, police said Friday.
George Morales, 59, died naturally from heart disease, the medical examiner’s office said Friday. The body was found in the backseat Wednesday when a city marshal tried to tow the vehicle from beneath an overpass on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, police said. He was believed to have been living out of the white Chevrolet minivan, which had North Carolina plates.
But his daughter, Jennifer Morales, 29, told the Daily News he had been living with her family in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. She said she last saw him in early May and had called police. “The window was cracked open. I don’t understand how no one noticed him. They just gave him tickets,” she told the Daily News.
She said her father was a handyman who suffered from diabetes. But police do not have a missing person’s report on record for Morales. It wasn’t clear exactly how many tickets were on the minivan’s windshield when the body was discovered. Witnesses had reported a foul odor near the vehicle.
The Morales family plans to cremate the remains. Officials used X-rays taken of him in 2007 at Elmhurst Hospital Center to positively identify him, Jennifer Morales told the newspaper.
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