I like this: Contracts and Bondage, a web site run by Maximillian Dornseif, he of the interesting disLEXia 3000 blog.
No, it's not what you think. It's worse: “A collection of EULAs and other 'contracts' one comes across when using a computer.” He invites submissions.
I suppose given my location, I'm compelled to link to 2003 Florida Weird News In Review. Although if that's the authoritative list, it actually seems like we had a fairly tame year by Florida standards. Especially compared to the national list, 2003: A Dave odyssey, prepared by Miami's own Dave Barry.
I did, however, especially like this item from the Weird News in Review:
Criminal charges were dropped against a Callaway man accused of smashing his way into a neighbor's house and chasing a woman with a knife. A Panama City judge was convinced the man was temporarily insane from drinking jasmine tea.
Jasmine tea is one of my wife's favorites.
Jeremy Blachman, Are You Having Trouble Paying Attention to This Post?:
“I heard a story about someone at a fine law school that is thinking about starting to take Ritalin (or something like it). Apparently he feels like he hasn't been grasping the material as well as some of his classmates, and hopes that this will help him concentrate better and give him the competitive edge he needs. Or at least restore parity — he apparently says he knows lots of people taking it, and feels like it's not fair for them to get this drug-induced edge, and not him.”
Great. Something new that maybe I should be worrying about. I have no problem with people taking Ritalin if they have a genuine disorder — and know at least one serious person who genuinely believes he does have ADD and the drug helps him. I do worry that the disorder is over-diagnosed, and that some people will shop for doctors willing to prescribe stuff they might be better off without.
Mr. Blachman worries about the morality of it all, expressing dismay
“at the thought that we live in a world where this becomes a choice that people feel an incentive to make. That the pressure to succeed, the pressure to get the slightly higher grade, the pressure to go beyond what you can do on your own — is great enough that someone feels it's worth it to medicate themselves and try to correct for what is perhaps just a natural variation in attention span and concentration.”
Of course, from my point of view it's potentially an even more personal issue: what if I am part of the pressure-inducing problem? Am I helping create a generation of drug-dependant lawyers? I run a tough class, I push people, I demand precision. Would adopting a more touchy-feelie approach be healthier for students? And, just as important, which will be better for their eventual clients?
Perhaps comfortingly, though, as Mr. Blachman describes it, the main pressure seems to be competition with other students. So, so long as I'm even-handed in my pushiness…
disLEXia 3000 blog reports on what sounds like a major German court decision on privacy in public places.
Court: leave unobserved areas for pedestrians
Heise is reporting that a german court just ordered a shop to stop complete camera surveillance of the sidewalk/ambulatory around their premises. The court upheld that this even is the case if the sidewalk is owned by the shop but used by the general public for passage.In any cases there must exist a “tunnel” of unsurveillanced ground where people can pass through.
If this judgment is upheld major parts of our cities should see dismantling of thousands of cameras.
Oh, how I wish I read German! The Heise article gets mangled less than usual by the Babelfish (see extended entry), but it's still mangled. And there appear to be a court decision and a decision of Privacy Commissioners somewhere too…
For starters, I'd like to know the legal basis of this decision. Is it the German Constitution? A statute? A local ordinance? Something at the Euro-level (surely not the toothless data protection directive)?
A regular poster to the North American Network Operators Group (Nanog) mailing list going by the moniker of “batz” (a surname? a nickname? a comment on mental stability?) has posted some fairly dire predications about attacks on the network in 2004. All but two of them seem all-too-plausible to me. In weighing the reliability of these predications, consider the fairly good scorecard for Batz's predictions for 2003. In the extended entry, I've reformatted the original and added my comments in italics.
Of course, despite all this, the Internet will be even more bound into the fabric of daily life a year ago than it is today, and on the whole we'll be better off for it..
Nanog, incidentally, is having its 10th anniversary meeting in Miami in February!
Col. David Hackworth (ret) writes in Saddam in the Slammer, so why are we on Orange?,
Even I – and I deal with that beleaguered land seven days a week – was staggered when a Pentagon source gave me a copy of a Nov. 30 dispatch showing that since George W. Bush unleashed the dogs of war, our armed forces have taken 14,000 casualties in Iraq – about the number of warriors in a line tank division.
We have the equivalent of five combat divisions plus support for a total of about 135,000 troops deployed in the Iraqi theater of operations, which means we’ve lost the equivalent of a fighting division since March. At least 10 percent of the total number of Joes and Jills available to the theater commander to fight or support the occupation effort have been evacuated back to the USA!
This is indeed a staggering statistic. The breakdown isn't much better:
Lt. Col. Scott D. Ross of the U.S. military's Transportation Command told me that as of Dec. 23, his outfit had evacuated 3,255 battle-injured casualties and 18,717 non-battle injuries.
Of the battle casualties, 473 died and 3,255 were wounded by hostile fire.
Following are the major categories of the non-battle evacuations:
Orthopedic surgery – 3,907
General surgery – 1,995
Internal medicine – 1,291
Psychiatric – 1,167
Neurology – 1,002
Gynecological – 491
Sources say that most of the gynecological evacuations are pregnancy-related, although the exact figure can’t be confirmed – Pentagon pregnancy counts are kept closer to the vest than the number of nuke warheads in the U.S. arsenal.
Ross cautioned that his total of 21,972 evacuees could be higher than other reports because “in some cases, the same service member may be counted more than once.”
The Pentagon has never won prizes for the accuracy of its reporting, but I think it’s safe to say that so far somewhere between 14,000 and 22,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have been medically evacuated from Iraq to the USA.
Although I enjoyed Hackworth's book, About Face, I thought it seriously glossed over the reasons he got into trouble in Vietnam, and have always been suspicious about the “legend in his own mind” aspect of his writing. Despite all that, I have to admit he's been one of the most diligent reporters of the Iraq War — he actually gets facts.
Jotwell Blenderlaw