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Wednesday, March 02, 2005
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Vin Suprynowicz at The Las Vegas Review-Journal -
An odd case of 'shaken baby syndrome' - Alan Yurko was imprisoned
in Florida when the hospital killed his baby and the medical examiner
confused him with a black baby that had been shaken to death. After
seven years in a cage, Mr. Yurko's conviction was vacated. And now
he's free, right? Wrong. Gummint doesn't work that way. [End the War on Freedom]
Another reminder that nobody should expect any justice in this country's legal system.
11:02:12 PM 
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My Linksys router has begun showing signs of old age, so I bought a new one. The old router cost under $100 and lasted for five years, so I'm fairly happy with it. The replacement is a Linksys 8-port router (the old one had four ports, which were all in use), which will hopefully last for another five years.
4:52:46 PM
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I finally finished building
Open Office under
Gentoo Linux. It was an adventure. It compiled all day on
Saturday, but had eaten over a 1.4 gigs of disk on my root volume when
I noticed that there were only 200 megs of free space left in that
partition. So I suspended the compile (^Z), moved
emerge's temporary area (/var/tmp/portage)
to the large /home partition, symbolic linked (ln
-s) the old location to the new, and resumed the compile
(fg <job>). It failed quickly trying to unlink a
file. And emerge was broken, failing with a link error
early in the process. It didn't like having a symbolic link for its
temp area. So I mounted the temp area instead (mount --bind
<new location> /var/tmp/portage). This allowed me to do
the compile over. It ran all day Sunday and part of the day yesterday
(it's really nice to be able to save the state of the virtual machine,
turn off the computer, and restore the state later). There were lots
and lots of compile warnings, tsk, tsk, but it runs. [End the War on Freedom]
And speaking of OS productivity, this post is a pretty good illustration of why I don't use Linux.
1:47:10 PM
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In Which OS Do You Feel More Productive?. HTMLChecker asks: "I found an article in which the author talks about how she is more productive using MAC OS X. What about the people of Slashdot? Where do you feel more productive, in Linux? Windows? DOS? Mac OS X? Also, what is the best way to rate productivity in an OS?" [Slashdot]
I'd rate productivity based on how much time you spend doing actual work versus time spent mucking around with the computer.
The OSes I'm most productive in aren't mentioned, but here are the top three for me, with most productive first: NewtonOS, MacOS (not OS X, Windows XP.
1:41:24 PM
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No 911 Access with VoIP. Net-based 911 fight puts lives on line: This is a pretty scary consequence of VoIP services. Yes, geeks now about it in advance, but — as this story demonstrates — the average user doesn't. We talked about this last year, but this story really pounds the point home.
Seventeen-year-old Joyce John frantically grasped the portable phone and dialed 911. Downstairs, her parents struggled with two armed robbers.
"Joyce, Joyce, call the police!" her mother, Sosamma, screamed. But when she did, she heard this message: "Stop. You must dial 911 from another telephone."
Joyce grabbed another phone downstairs but got the same recording. She finally banged on the door of a neighbor, who called an ambulance. By then, her parents had been shot. They survived, but their attackers fled.
[...] Some VoIP providers don't offer 911 at all. More typically, those such as Vonage and AT&T offer a bare-bones 911 service that doesn't show operators a caller's number or address. And it doesn't ring on the emergency phone lines in the dispatch center. As a result, some 911 centers don't accept the calls.
911 service is just one of those things you take for granted. If it wasn't there, you'd find out about it at the worst possible time. [Gadgetopia]
The notion that this is a failing of VoIP is mistaken, because 911 is useless in this kind of situation anyway. Even if Joyce had been able to call 911, the cops wouldn't have shown up until long after her parents were shot and the robbers had made good their escape.
The John family should have relied on their own firearms to defend themselves. Had they done so, Joyce certainly could have retrieved one and gone to her parents' aid instead of messing around with the phone, probably saving them from injury. Unfortunately the parents were too irresponsible to provide for their family's safety.
This is no different than someone getting severely injured in a car accident because he wasn't wearing a seat belt. It's a shame that the accident happened, but the injured party really has no one to blame but himself for his injury when he could have easily taken a simple action to minimize or prevent it.
12:59:33 PM
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It Is Only Your Money After We Get Our Cut First. Entrepreneur Charged With Tax Evasion: WASHINGTON - Telecommunications entrepreneur Walter Anderson was arrested and charged with evading $200 million in federal and local taxes in what the government said was the largest criminal tax case ever against an individual in the United States.
[...]
"He was living the high life," said the Internal Revenue Service commissioner, Mark Everson. "Because of his dishonest dealings, Mr. Anderson's lavish life style was subsidized by honest, hardworking Americans." The report does not detail how Mr. Anderson fleeced money from these "honest, hardworking Americans" - but then again, he must have if, he didn't pay his fair share.
Via Libertarian Jackass. [Mises Economics Blog]
My congratulations to Mr. Anderson for depriving the Feds of a great deal of money that they would otherwise have used to oppress me and blow up children in foreign countries. His only mistake was continuing to live in the United States after getting so rich--he would have been better off if he'd moved to Costa Rica, Panama, or some other country that has at least a trace of respect for the concept of private property and the rule of law.
12:24:54 PM
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Justice of the Living Dead. A Kentucky teenager faces a "second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge" for ... well, here's his side of the story: Winchester... [Hit and Run]
This is one of those stories that would be funny if it wasn't so disgusting. I hate to think what those morons would do if they ever caught George Romero passing through Kentucky!
What makes this story even more appaling than the usual "zero tolerance" outrage is that this poor kid was turned in by his own grandmother. I certainly hope he remembers this when his grandmother is too old to take care of herself and needs to be put into a nursing home.
12:12:06 PM
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© Copyright
2006
Ken Hagler.
Last update:
2/15/2006; 2:04:45 PM.
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