Category: News

My take on news from around the world…

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How drunk ARE you?

From the AP:

An Alaska man was surprised when police accused him of stealing a car from a gentleman’s club in Fairbanks. The man, 27, explained to officers that he was in his Chevy Cavalier. The only problem, police said, was that he was behind the wheel of a Ford Escort.

How drunk do you have to be to not recognize your own car… and then get into a different model??? Police said that he had a BAC of .166 – which is twice the legal limit, but frankly not all that high. Not high enough for me to take the wrong car, anyway! The poor sap was charged with auto theft, felony driving under the influence and misdemeanor drugs misconduct.

Read all about it here.

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Scottish Pubs: No Drugs For You!

Britain’s march towards INGSOC continues with news that certain Scottish pubs have started testing patrons for drugs as they walk through the door.

Scottish police will use a device called an “Itemiser” to swab the hands of patrons as they enter a pub. The machine will then give a simple, color-coded response: green (no drugs found), yellow (possible drug contamination) and red (definite drug contamination). Patrons with a green result will be welcomed into the pub. Patrons with a yellow result will be given a “drug information pack” and sent away. Patrons with a red result “may be searched by police”, and possibly arrested if drugs are found. Although the test is “completely voluntary”, people that refuse the test will not be admitted inside the pub.

The “Itemizer” has been in limited use in England thus far, and opponents have complained that the device may give false positives if people touch a surface a drug user\dealer has touched previously.

Sadly, few have complained about the attack on civil liberties that such a machine represents.

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MS Releases New Patch

Back in 2004, Microsoft made the decision to release all security updates for all of their products on the second Tuesday of each month, a day now known to us IT folk as “Patch Tuesday”.

Occasionally, Microsoft will release an “out of band” or “emergency” patch outside of the “Patch Tuesday” schedule. They do this because the security issue in question is simply too critical to wait until the next Patch Tuesday.

There is a new vulnerability out there that affects the “server” service on Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 (both x86 and x64 versions). Microsoft released a new emergency patch for it today. You can read all the technical mumbo-jumbo about it here.

The important thing is that you run Windows Update (or Microsoft Update) on all of your computers ASAP. This exploit looks pretty nasty!

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FCC Sides with NFL Net

The FCC has taken the side of the NFL Network in the network’s ongoing feud with Comcast.

In a nutshell, it goes like this: the NFL wants Comcast to include the NFL Network on its basic cable package. Normally, “contracts of carriage” between cable networks and cable providers state that each household pays a certain rate (say $1/month) for a channel, multiplied by the total number of households each provider has. So if, for example, Time Warner Cable wants E!, and E! costs $1.25 per household month, and TWC has 100 million households, then TWC must give E! $125 million a month to carry the channel on their cable systems.

Comcast thinks that the NFL wants far too much money for the NFL Network, so they want to put it on an optional “sports tier”, in which case Comcast would only pay the NFL for each household that subscribes to the tier. The NFL is opposed to this, as it effectively limits the number of people that will get NFL Network. The only problem for Comcast is this: the cable provider also owns Versus and the Golf Channel, both of which are sports channels that the company happily provides on their basic package.

Look, there’s more than enough blame to go around in this situation. The NFL is being greedy and demanding too much money for their product. But they also have a point in that the network will never get off the ground until it appears on basic cable tiers. And Comcast is being disingenuous when they whine that NFL Net costs too much money… all the while pimping two basic cable sports channels that they happen to own.

According to Ars Technica, the FCC on Friday sided with the NFL Network on at least two issues surrounding this bitter dispute. For starters, the Communications Act of 1996 “forbids a multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) from discriminating against content providers ‘on the basis of affiliation or nonaffiliation’ with the MVPD”. This means that Comcast can’t offer programming by Comcast-owned stations while at the same time discrimination against channels owned by others. The FCC also found “evidence suggesting that Comcast demanded a financial interest NFL Network programming in exchange for carriage, another violation of the agency’s rules”.

According to FCC rules, the issues will now go before an Administrative Law judge, who will send recommendations for action to the full FCC within 60 days.

Maybe… someday… NFL Network will show up on Time Warner Cable!

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Sign of the Times

Debt ClockThe National Debt has grown so large that it can no longer be displayed properly on the National Debt Clock in Times Square in New York.

The sign was originally put up in 1989 to highlight the then-staggering $2.9 trillion US debt. The debt, which now exceeds $10 trillion, is simply too large for the clock, which has run out of digits.

Douglas Durst, son of the late Seymour Durst, the clock’s inventor, says a new version will be installed sometime next year that can hold all the necessary digits. In the meantime, the dollar sign has been removed and replaced with a “1”.

Awesome!

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The Smoot, Defined

You’ve heard of feet and meters… but have you ever heard of the Smoot?

Back in 1958, Oliver Smoot began attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was also pledging for the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. At 5′ 7″, Smoot was the shortest pledge by far, so his future frat brothers came up with a personalized initiation for him: they took him to the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge and used his body to measure the length of the bridge, with an exhausted Smoot standing up and lying down every time the frat members marked off another “Smoot”. The bridge was eventually found to be 364.4 Smoots long.

The prank became something of a local legend in the Boston area. In the years following the prank, whenever the city of Boston painted over the “Smoot Markers”, the fraternity members would surreptitiously sneak back onto the bridge and paint them back. After a few years of back and forth between the city and the fraternity, the city of Boston eventually gave up and announced that they would no longer paint over the markers. In the past few years, the city has even warmed up to the markers by providing an off-duty motorcycle officer to warn traffic as the fraternity members repaint the markers. I believe that the city even uses “Smoots” as their official measurement of the bridge!

Over the years, Smoots have taken off as something of a “geek joke”. You can even convert between feet and Smoots with Google calculator: open a Google window and type “8.5 feet in Smoots” into the search box. On the next page, Google will have your answer (1.52238806 Smoots).

Smoot eventually became chairman of the American National Standards Institute, was in the news lately because of Smoot Celebration Day at MIT, where he received a plaque which will be installed on the bridge later this year.

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How the Cutty Sark Burned

Clipper ships were the “race cars” of sailing ships. The short and narrow ships were sometimes called “Yankee clippers” due to their development on the east coast of the United States in the early part of the 19th century. Clippers were the ship of choice for low-volume, high-value cargoes. If you needed travel from Baltimore to Buenos Aires as quickly as possible, or you needed to send a cargo of spices from Bombay to London in weeks not months, clipper ships were the way to go. The very first clipper ship, the Annie McKim, was built in Baltimore in 1833, and by 1854 clipper ships were routinely breaking speed records. In that year, the clipper ship Sovereign of the Seas traveled at a sustained speed of 22 knots (25 mph), the fastest speed ever recorded for a sailing vessel.

One of the most famous of all the clipper ships was Cutty Sark. Built in 1869 at Dumbarton, Scotland, the ship lived her life in the tea trade. Her claim to fame is that she raced another ship, the Thermopylae, from Shanghai to London in 1872. Although the Cutty Sark lost the race, she nevertheless gained fame when she lost her rudder in the Sunda Strait two weeks into the race. The plucky captain decided to plow ahead with an improvised rudder, and the Cutty Sark made it to London only a week after the Thermopylae, even though she was severely disabled.

In 1895, the Cutty Sark was sold to the Portuguese firm Ferreira and was renamed Ferreira after her new owners, although the crew called her Pequena Camisola, which means “little shirt” and is a direct translation of the Scottish name. In 1922, she was sold to a Captain Wilfred Dowman, who purchased the little vessel to restore it to its former glory and to use as a training vessel. In 1954 she was moved to a dry dock at Greenwich, in south London. For years, the Cutty Sark remained a tourist attraction, being close to the National Maritime Museum, the Royal Observatory, Greenwich Hospital, and Greenwich Park.

Sadly, on May 21, 2007, the ship, which had been undergoing restoration, caught on fire. Although it was feared that the ship might be totally lost, upon further inspection, it appears that much of the ship was not permanently damaged, and much of what was damaged was not original to the 1869 ship.

I mention all this because last week, British police announced that the fire was caused by a vacuum cleaner that had accidentally been left running that weekend. Someone deserves to get fired for this, but it’s at least good news that it was an accident… rather than arson, which was initially suspected.

Currently, there are two petitions about the Cutty Sark before the British Prime Minister: one for funds to restore the ship, and the other for funds to restore the ship into commission as a sail training vessel. As someone that’s seen the Cutty Sark on multiple occasions, as well as stood on the deck of the U.S.S. Constitution (which is still on the US Navy’s roster as an active battleship), I hope that it’s the latter.