Save Your Friend’s Life…And Then Sue Her

I thought these sort of lawsuits only happened in America, but they’re apparently also migrating to Canada now. Canada Press reports on a lawsuit stemming from an act of heroism in 1995.

Then 11-year-old Kerry-Jo Klingbeil saved her friend Amanda Horne’s life by pushing her out of the way of an oncoming truck. Unfortunately Klingbeil herself was then struck by the vehicle, and sustained injuries that left her mentally impaired and unable to find work according to the details of her lawsuit.

Now 17, Klingbeil is suing Horne saying that she was “compelled” to rescue Horne and now wants compensation for the injuries she suffered from the truck that otherwise would have hit Horne.

Not as bad as the victim suing the rescuer, which happens often in the United States, but still not a welcome trend.

Why Not Just Play Videos That Don’t Suck?

MTV is going to get all touchy-feely this year, including a 17-hour long broadcast featuring nothing but scrolling names of victims of “hate crimes.” According the Associated Press, it’s all part of a guilt trip by MTV over their heavy play of Eminem.

While I’m not much of an Eminem fan, a much better use of their time would be to go out and look for music videos that don’t suck. Intolerance of homosexuals and misogyny existed long before Eminem, but MTV is solely responsible for giving us these annoying, talent-free boy bands.

Slashdot’s Downhill Slide

Sometimes Slashdot is extremely infuriating. On the one hand people behind the site run around slamming Microsoft for its tactics, especially on a lot of the nonsense Microsoft puts out to tout its products’ alleged superiority. On the other hand, people like Jeff “Hemos” Bates demonstrate that they are just as shallow as soon as they step outside their narrow range of Linux advocacy.

What’s annoying me at the moment is a review by Bates of John Schwartz and Michael Osterholm’s book, Living Terrors. The books is one of several out now hyping the alleged dangers of bioterrorism.

First, the threat of bioterrorism is vastly overstated. As Jonathan Tucker’s Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons concludes,

Crude delivery methods are likely to remain the most common forms of chemical and biological warfare terrorism. They are potentially capable of inflicting at most tens to hundreds of fatalities—within the destructive range of high-explosive bombs, but not the mass deaths predicted by the most alarmist scenarios. Although the devastating potential of a “catastrophic” event of chemical and biological warfare use warrants examination, history suggests that the most probable terrorist use of chemical and biological warfare agents will be tactical and relatively small-scale.

We are likely to see bioterrorism, but they will be small scale attacks much like the release of sarin gas in the a Japanese subway a few years ago rather than massive disease outbreaks that kill thousands of people.

Even more annoying, though, is that Bates makes an error in the introduction to his review which could have been fact checked with a quick web search. According to Bates,

Given the recent reports on the almost total lack of security in places like Russia’s facility for holding the smallpox virus, their Cold War manufacturing of thousands of tons of the stuff, and the FBI sting operation of someone in Las Vegas trying to buy anthrax, the book’s subject matter hits even closer to home.

The Las Vegas “FBI sting operation” almost certainly refers to the 1998 arrest of William Leavitt, Jr. and Larry Wayne Harris. The FBI accused Leavitt and Harris of buying anthrax in order to create a biological weapon, and their arrest was a high profile news story that earned the two a good deal of time on national news broadcasts for a few days.

There was only one problem: what Leavitt and Harris actually bought was a vaccine for animal anthrax. The claim that the two had anthrax and were going to make a biological weapon came solely from an FBI information who had been previously convicted of extortion and at the time was party to several lawsuits.

All charges related to bioterrorism were dropped by the government and Leavitt was released. Although charges against Harris were dropped, he also faced charges related to violation of his parole.

I found all of the above information out by simply doing a Google search for “Las Vegas anthrax”. Is it really asking too much for Bates and others at Slashdot who seem to see themselves as uber geeks to do the same? Please, do us a favor and tear yourself away from Princess Mononoke long enough to do a little fact checking.

Web sites on a Desktop?

At Scripting News, David Winer keeps saying he wants to see web sites on the desktop,

Last night talking with Brent about the scaling wall that Pyra is climbing I said what they should do is Blogger On The Desktop. Then everyone using Blogger could add their computer to the mix. Decentralization and P2P all the way. I’ve got to write an essay about this. Maybe in a few minutes. Desktop websites. It’s the cure for Dotcom Disease.

I hope he writes his essay soon because I have no idea what he’s talking about there. After all there are already a number of website on the desktop products. Dreamweaver will let do a nice web site on your desktop and then handle uploading it to an FTP site automatically.

Too complex? A tool such as Trellix does an excellent job of simplifying the process (or even Winer’s Radio Userland, which is impressive).

If Winer means actually serving pages from the desktop as well, that opens up a whole can of worms that I don’t think the average person using Blogger or a similar service wants to deal with.

Which brings me to the problems that Blogger is having raising money. Its venture capital partners decided not to offer additional funding, so Pyra is appealing for its users to donate money to buy new servers. New servers are needed because the service is slow in general, and more resources will be needed to launch the fee-based pro version of Blogger.

If I were a Blogger user, however, I might be concerned about Pyra’s long term ability to reach profitability. The market it is entering with its fee-based system is already getting pretty crowded and Blogger has an extremely narrow focus. I’m using Conversant to manage this web site, but if I weren’t and I wanted a solution that was going to cost real money, I’d opt for using something like Trellix, a hosted Manila site or even one of hosts that offers Slashcode before I’d go with Blogger.

Print Your Own Money (And It’s Legal)

Over the past few years there has been quite a bit of speculation about whether ubiquitous computer networks coupled with strong cryptography might lead to new currencies that are beyond the reach of the state. But why wait for the future? It turns out some Americans are already using alternative currencies.

According to a Fox News story, since 1972 more than 60 localized currency systems have sprouted up around the nation. In Ithaca, New York, for example, millions of dollars worth of Hours have changed hands. The Hour is paper and rectangular in shape much like the familiar dollar bills, and available in different denominations. So long as the currency is exchangeable for dollars, the scheme is completely legal.

Ithaca’s experiment isn’t quite motivated by libertarian concerns, but rather is the result of more left wing ideas of communitarian economics. The idea is by using Hours, the money can only be spent in Ithaca. Of course there’s nothing to stop such a currency from gradually becoming regional.

Since these competing currencies by law have to be exchangeable for the state’s funny money these currency systems aren’t really an alternative to Federal Reserve notes, but anything that gets people to question the fallacy that money must be created by the state is a good thing in my book.

Funny money. Michael Y. Park, Fox News, October 16, 2000.

Comparing Apples to Intels

MacCentral is hyping a New York Times article which regurgitates what a lot of other people have noted: the Pentium IV sucks. In fact most benchmarks suggest that it is slower lower end Pentium IIIs, except with software that is specifically re-compiled for the Pentium IV. But is this time for gloating for Apple fans?

Dennis Sellers thinks so, writing,

He explains how that megahertz ratings are valuable only when making speed comparisons between chips in the same family: comparing a Pentium III with another Pentium III, for example. They’re meaningless when comparing different chips.

“That’s why, for example, a 500-megahertz Macintosh chip is much faster than a 500-megahertz Pentium III,” he says. “Getting excited about a chip just because it runs at 1.5 gigahertz is a little like pouncing on a house just because it’s $50,000; first you’d better find out whether it’s a Taj Mahal or a tool shed.”

Megahertz is definitely not the end-all, be-all of a computer system and the 500mhz Macintosh is certainly much faster than a 500mhz Pentium III. But that comparison isn’t very helpful either.

Here’s a much better comparison. I can buy a 900mhz Athlon system with nice 3d graphics card, 40 gig hard drive, 128mb memory, and 17-inch monitor, for about $1300. For anything I’m going to do, the Athlon system is going to be at least as fast and probably faster than a G4 500mhz system.

A G4 500 mhz system with similar components costs about $2,500 without a monitor. That’s simply an insanely high price given what people can buy in the Wintel-compatible market. Sure you’re stuck using Windows with all its attendant problems, but is the Mac’s usability really worth $1,200? For most people the answer is no.

Intel has made a number of missteps lately, but its mistakes will likely create further openings for AMD and other competitors rather than spur Apple’s growth until Steve Jobs and others find a way to bring Macintosh hardware costs in line with Wintel hardware costs.

Apple today is in much the same position as Dell. Dell has an exclusive arrangement with Intel whereby it only sells computers with Intel processors — as Intel has misfired, Dell’s sales and its stock price have both suffered. Aside from the fact that I have friends who work at Dell, I could care less. If I can’t get the machine I want from Dell I’ll just go buy from any number of manufacturers who sell Athlon-equipped machines. Apple, like Dell, would do well to reconsider its business model that ties its operating system to a single chip vendor prone to missteps.