Friday, August 16, 2002
Jason Cherkis' new City Paper cover story The Insider's Guide to Real Policing, strikes a chord after my apartment break-in. On a Tuesday at 2pm, it took three hours and four phone calls before an officer arrived.
The 7-Eleven Police
Yes, it's a cliché, but for good reason. At any given point, you will find a group of blue hanging out at a "Sev" somewhere in the city. Some have graduated beyond the doughnut. A few years ago, one particularly inspired cop turned his favorite 7-Eleven, at 8th Street and Maryland Avenue NE, into his own private kitchen. He kept his own secret stash of coffee grounds behind the counter so he could have a fresh batch of his home brew whenever he felt like it.
Once the coffee is brewed, Sev cops like to sip it in the store. They don't leave the home of the Big Gulp easily. Two years ago, a sergeant in the 4th District tried to keep his troops from congregating at the 7-Eleven on Mount Pleasant Street NW. His officers turned the convenience store into a trench that they would never abandon. Since the official couldn't police them at all times, their sit-in worked, and he relented. "It's just a bunch of fat old timers who think they could just wait for their pensions to kick in," was the sergeant's comment.
No need to fret: A few years ago, 7-Eleven decided to partner with the police force and turned its stores into "mini-stations" with the expectation that the officers would use the extra phone lines and desks to do paperwork and interview witnesses. That's officialspeak for catching up on the latest pictorials in Maxim and making booty calls. When asked why the 7-Eleven is such a cop magnet, one officer responded: "What? We can't have a place to chill out?"
No matter how long you hang out, rest assured that the 7-Eleven clerk will never shoo you out. After all, they have no reason to. When asked why cops spend so much time at Sev outlets, 7-Eleven spokesperson Margaret Chabris replies, "The police may be on break. They could very easily be on break."
Friday, August 16, 2002
For the first time ever, I'm sending in my ballot.
Cut billion from the Massachusetts budget and watch what happens: Doctors would make frequent and free house calls, the homeless would be sheltered by churches and private charities, and hundreds of thousands of jobs would be created.
All this according to Carla Howell, a Libertarian gubernatorial candidate, who helped lead a successful drive to put a question on the Nov. 5 ballot asking voters if they want to do away with state income taxes.
Thursday, August 15, 2002
This is scary. DARPA has a Flash "self-healing" minefield simulator here (Fark.) Some info about the program:
During the health monitoring process, each mine determines any changes in the state of the minefield. These changes include loss or disruption of communication between mines and movement or disturbance of a mine by an outside force (intentional or unintentional) even though the communication between mines is not affected. A vulnerability could range from a decrease in the local density of mines to a clear path through which enemy vehicles could pass without encountering a mine, which is called a breach.
Wednesday, August 14, 2002 The Washington Post has a great article up on the genetic mutation that enabled humans to communicate via language.
A mounting body of research suggests that the mutant gene conferred on the ancestors of modern humans a much finer degree of control over muscles of the mouth and throat, possibly giving those ancestors a rich new palette of sounds that could serve as the foundation of language.
The research suggests the genetic mutations may at least partly explain why humans can speak and animals cannot. Researchers are likely to attempt to introduce the genetic mutations into mice as part of their work, but they said many other genetic changes would likely be necessary to produce a talking animal, and several said they doubted anything of the sort would ever be possible, let alone desirable.
Wednesday, August 14, 2002
From Encarta: Bugs in Space. This column recommends that space missions to similarly temparate planets and moons must be careful not to bring along Earth's microbes, insects, or bacteria that might contaminate an extraterrestrial ecology
The thought behind planetary protection isn't just to protect the other planets," says Race. "It's also to prevent us from saying 'Hey, I found life!'--only to discover the 'life' is something that originated on our planet."
Tuesday, August 13, 2002
Get your black turtleneck pressed, the Zombies are reuniting and playing ... right down the street from me at the State Theatre, Sept. 19th.
Tuesday, August 13, 2002
My former boss and top reference, Wayne Crews has an op-ed up at Tech Central Station.
Moreover, regulations and taxes can be substitutes for one another; a new government program requires increasing spending - or imposing new rules and regulations. Thus, unless regulatory activity is better monitored, the push for a balanced budget may tend to invite Congress to adopt new off-budget private-sector regulations, thereby avoiding new spending that would chip away at the surplus.
Cost-benefit analysis of rules is the typical remedy proposed to police excess regulation; however, it's largely a form of agency self-policing. Agencies have little incentive to admit when benefits of a rule do not justify the costs.
Instead, regulations should be treated the way federal spending is treated: Along with cost disclosure, Congress should be held directly accountable for the compliance costs - as well as the benefits - that federal regulations confer. If Congress were to vote on agency rules (in an expedited fashion) before they are binding, it would fulfill citizens' right to "No regulation without representation."
Tuesday, August 13, 2002
Declan McCullagh has a new article up at C-Net called Geeks in Government: A Good Idea? He says that "geektivists" go nowhere in their rage against Congress over the DMCA, Dmitri Sklyarov, or the tech issue du jour. "Instead, technologists should be doing what comes naturally: inventing technology that outpaces the law and could even make new laws irrelevant. "
Adam Back, an encryption researcher living in Canada, says that he tries to ignore day-to-day developments in the news. "What's the point?" Back asks. "You know whatever they are working on will be pretty much exclusively damaging to Net freedoms and personal liberty. New laws are almost exclusively damaging to personal freedoms these days."
"By participating in the lobby process, you're effectively giving money to the political system," Back says. "It's effectively a favor-trading system where the politician wins and the geek loses...You're better of spending time writing code and influencing Internet protocols to work towards making the politicians irrelevant in the future."
Tuesday, August 13, 2002
I'm just playing around with the code until a tempelate feels right. What do about the links I've added?
