Waukesha County Board Repeals Law of Supply and Demand

Laws of economics are more malleable than those of physics as far as Waukesha County, Wisconsin, are concerned, and municipal government bodies can repeal them at will:

Hoping to control health care costs by slowing industry expansion, the Waukesha County Board today rejected a hard-fought plan for a new hospital in the county’s fast-growing western region.

That’s right; to keep prices down, Waukesha County wants to keep supply down.

Too bad it wasn’t a sports facility of some sort instead of a health care provider, undoubtedly the government of Waukesha County would not only have approved the building, but would have made the citizens pay for it.

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An English Treat

Concern over rise of ‘happy slapping’ craze:

In one video clip, labelled Bitch Slap, a youth approaches a woman at a bus stop and punches her in the face. In another, Knockout Punch, a group of boys wearing uniforms are shown leading another boy across an unidentified school playground before flooring him with a single blow to the head.

In a third, Bank Job, a teenager is seen assaulting a hole-in-the-wall customer while another youth grabs the money he has just withdrawn from the cash machine.

Welcome to the disturbing world of the “happy slappers” – a youth craze in which groups of teenagers armed with camera phones slap or mug unsuspecting children or passersby while capturing the attacks on 3g technology.

According to police and anti-bullying organisations, the fad, which began as a craze on the UK garage music scene before catching on in school playgrounds across the capital last autumn, is now a nationwide phenomenon.

Oddly enough, this fad probably won’t catch on here in America. Particularly the right to carry states.

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Book Review: The Official Rules at Work by Paul Dickson (1996)

I bought this book for $5.98 at Barnes and Noble because it looked interesting and because I had a gift card to blow.

It’s a collection of aphorisms and “laws” coined by columnist, commentators, and humorists covering the workplace, and to be honest, covering working for the government in a lot of cases. It’s a quick read, and a lot of the axioms and maxims provide crystallizations of core truths in a handy fashion that allow you to quip them. For example, I’m going to use It’s easier to defend consistency than correctness as soon as possible.

Also, it was a quick read while I work on the longer fiction books that I’m reading. And to let you, gentle readers, that I am still literate.

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Roeper on Tattoos

Roeper on tattoos:

You can’t call the tattoo craze a craze anymore, as it’s been going on for more than a decade and it crosses all demographics.

Still, one day it will ebb. Today’s 10-year-old will become tomorrow’s 20-year-old, who doesn’t want to have anything to do with what mom and dad think is cool. I can see a college kid in 2015 saying, “My mother has my name tattooed on her neck. I mean, is she old-fashioned or what?”

I have no tattoos and never got a piercing. I saw Larger than Life which features a retired circus painted lady. Elderly, and covered with tattoos. That was the future tattooed people have embraced, and they don’t know it.

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Inadvertent Movement Member

Apparently, there’s an insurgency of fiscal apathy in the Republican Party: the Not One Dime movement, wherein Republican contributors withhold contributions.

According to the MAWB Squad (and Captain Ed), this movement captures the frustration many feel with the Republicans in the Senate regarding judicial nominees. Sandy of the MAWB Squad says:

You don’t seem to be listening to me. We are not giving to the Republicans until they act like the majority party.

My own personal extra spending money (that won’t be sent to the GOP to earn a new gold membership card) comes from my disgust not so much with how the Republicans govern the government, but how the government governs its citizens. I’m more upset with excessive regulation in broadcast, excessive spending in most endeavors, and so on.

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Governments Muscle Out Private Swimming Pools

Sink or swim: Neighborhood pools struggle to compete with public facilities:

Chesterfield, Manchester, Ballwin, Des Peres and other West County communities have built elaborate aquatic centers in recent years.

Those facilities are among the factors swamping some neighborhood and subdivision swimming pools, once the staple of the suburbs but now finding it tough to compete with the publicly funded pools.

You know, certain people condemn Wal-Mart for this sort of behavior. Local governments want to prove that their micromunicipality is as good as the next, so they waste tax money on these wet amusement parks and “invest” in a future of rising costs of maintenance for these facilities. Meanwhile, they raise our taxes to fund pension plans for police and government employees and to take care of other ongoing expenses for which the local government is short of funds.

All this to duplicate services offered by these private groups, local gyms, and the YMCAs.

When did the equation building waterparks = governance enter our civics textbooks? Probably when the governments found that they could just write it in.

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Time to Upgrade My PDA

Friends, Romans, and gentle readers who might or might not be men, the time has come for me to buy a new Personal Data Assistant (PDA). I bought my current PDA two years ago to support a trip to Milwaukee. I was taking a number of photographs and wanted a handy mechanism to capture details about each as well as blog entries that struck me while I was on the road. I’d once bought a miniature cassette recorder for the same purpose, but I realized soon that they would require transcription, a skill I lack. So I bought this PDA to help capture those thoughts and to provide me with instant access to the phone numbers and other data I might need while away from my desk, my computer, and my address book.

My PDA When I bought my PDA, it was top of the line, and I imagine its features are still quite enviable.
Its memory is 80 sheets/160 pages of writable memory. This particular model is compatible with most styluses on the market, including the
erasable and the non-erasable data transfer devices. Unfortunately, I prefer permanent encryption styluses in blue ink; once data is
written with these styluses, the memory is consumed and cannot be re-written. In most cases, 80 sheets should provide enough usage for any
number of lists, ideas, phone numbers, and other data.

This particular PDA, unlike others I’ve owned, does not have plugable memory cartridges that I could swap out after all memory has been
filled.

Notice, too, that I have installed an aftermarket, third-party searching application that will immediately take me to the unused memory.
Unfortunately, the original PDA didn’t include that hardware, which proves that all of those hardware guys are in cahoots.

My PDA This picture identifies the need for the update; the wear and tear of daily use, wherein I thrust the
PDA into my back pocket over and over again, has cracked the external casing. Although the external case hasn’t failed to the point where
the memory’s contents would be lost, I don’t want to risk a catastrophic memory failure, which would occur when I pulled the PDA from my
pocket and its memory devices would spill out behind me, lost to the wind or the vagaries of a mud puddle I might have crossed.
My PDA This particular entry into my PDA’s log denotes its age, as it became
this blog entry. Circa
1993. Back before the earth cooled, and when blogging was not the means of controlling the world.

This particular PDA entry comes from the very trip when I bought this PDA, when it was shining and new.

Yikes, it also refers to an incident in 1996 where I drank champagne alone at Sybaris Fantasy Suites because I’d ended a
relationship after booking the $400 a night room. I’d blush, but it’s two-thousand and something now, and blushing is SO
TWENTIETH CENTURY.

My PDA When I uploaded the information from the PDA to
an eventual blog entry,
a thought, and a reminder for a short story which I have yet to complete, the PDA entry in memory was marked as used, but unfortunately,
that didn’t free the memory for further use. This was a limitation of these old PDAs. Also, inclusion of the words “Insane Clown Posse”
mark a limitation of an obsolete piece of technology.
My PDA Do I remember drinking Mint Juleps at Sutton Place with Jewel Accents? No?

Those must have been some effective Mint Juleps. The whole thing leads to some pleasant speculation and imagination, particularly
to what someone named Jewel Accent must look like….

Aw, crikey, those are carpet styles. Jewel Accent kinda looks like the things I step on when I’m stumbling from the bed to the bathroom at
three in the morning. How exciting is that?

My PDA Yet, when I look upon the amount of memory remaining within my current PDA, I still have a lot of
annotation to perform, a lot of shopping lists to jot, a number of spontaneous ideas to collect, and one or two friends whose numbers I want
to keep handy…. I don’t want to purchase a new PDA just yet.

Because just face it: I have PDA memories, written to disks the size of legal pads or pocket notebooks, from 1990 on. Using the PDAs that I’m used to, with the scratchouts and the incomplete sentences, I have captured memories and trains of thought that I can use for future blog entries, short stories, poems, and whatnot. Were I a slave to Bluetooth or its predecessors Mauvetooth and Aquamolar or other proprietary and since-forgotten file formats, I’d be file.sol with my personal history.

I expect, then, I’ll select another similar PDA when I actually retire this one (in about 40 pages, give or take). Because although I dabble every day in the binary dits and dahs of digital communication, I still value the scratchings in the Noggle TTF that relate my current, older self to the thoughts I had last decade, last year, or only yesterday.

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A Fool and His IT Budget

Firewall to zap XML viruses:

Salt Lake City-based Forum Systems plans to announce the addition of the antivirus module to XWall on Monday. It will be available at the beginning of May, with pricing ranging from $5,000 to $40,000.

The 5-year-old company is one of several companies that make software or devices for securing applications that use XML to format data or XML-based communications protocols, called Web services.

$40,000 piece of hardware specifically to block bad XML from coming into your company? Lord, love a duck, I though XML Schema Documents (XSD) did that.

There is a need for XML-specific products, according to these companies and industry analysts, because traditional security products are designed primarily to inspect Internet protocols, rather than XML or Web services protocols.

Obfuscation is a virus, too. Those Web services protocols determine how XML messages are formatted, but they’re still sent over common Internet messages that use the same traditional Internet protocols that your native firewalls block. If someone is triggering a denial of service using SOAP against one of your public Web services, you’ll do the same thing you do when blocking a traditional DOS attack: You’ll block the IP addresses from the incoming flood or you’ll block/change the port number/URI of the Web service. No special XML-sniffing necessary.

But now they’ve expanded the service to include software that scans for XML Viruses, which are pretty common, hey?

Although they have not seen viruses written specifically for XML, these applications are still not adequately protected, executives from Forum Systems and CA said.

The only adequate prevention is heat; that is, just burning money on an XML-virus-sniffing and firewall product is the only thing that can protect you from XML! And SOAP! And all the potentially-malevolent buzzwords you don’t understand!

After all, gentle reader, your organization is at risk!

Forum Systems CEO Wes Swenson predicted that XML viruses will become common as people store Office documents in XML format and as developers use the Simple Object Access Protocol, which is written in XML, in tools for company-to-company communication.

The difference between XML files and Office document file types is that XML doesn’t execute code in and of itself. Wrapped in SOAP, an XML document can trigger the execution of a Web service, but that’s not an XML virus. Viruses need to run their contents to propogate, and if you’ve got an XML document that can propogate itself using SOAP, you’ve got a problem with your Web service.

But never mind that; spend the $40,000 and feel good about yourself.

“When you do have an XML-based virus attack, it will affect mission-critical servers as opposed to e-mail server and Web servers,” Swenson said.

The very words mission-critical indicate that CNET has passed on a press release as a news story. XML viruses don’t exist, and cannot exist unless you’ve got an XML-consuming application that’s poorly written and vulnerable to buffer overflow errors or, heaven forfend, runs code contained in XML messages. A DOS attack on a Web service will affect the servers hosting the “mission-critical” Web services, but you don’t need this guy’s product to deal with it.

But, hey, if corporations want it, let them have it.

Meanwhile, I am hard at work here in the lab to protect corporations from insidious ASCII text file viruses. Did you know that your company uses hundreds or thousands of these potentially hazardous files every day and that they can be transmitted through e-mail attachments or automatically copied from the Internet or across networks. And unlike XML files, ASCII flat files, particularly those with file extensions of .java, .cpp, or .vb, can contain malicious code that can take control of your desktop when executed.

Watch soon for the money-sucking Jeracor ASCII Virus Firewall, coming soon.

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Unpopular Canaries

Ladies and gentlemen, watch what the authorities do to child molestors, because they will eventually take those same measures with other offenders.

Because the crimes are so repellent, citizens will accept these measures and parents will clamor for them. But as the first item shows, once these rights are abrogated to protect the children, law makers and law enforcement officials will use those mechanisms to persecute other criminals who might commit the same crime in the future.

Sure, Westchester County only wants sex offenders to wear a bracelet; but sex offenders can take those off. Countdown to mandatory microchipping has begun.

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The Other Creationism vs. Evolution

O’Connor Dismisses Ado Over Int’l Law:

O’Connor, a Reagan appointee, participated in a lively one-hour discussion at the National Archives with Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen G. Breyer. She said if there is no controlling U.S. precedent or the viewpoint of states is unsettled, “of course we look at foreign law.”

“This is much ado about nothing,” she said in response to a question by moderator Tim Russert of NBC. “Our Constitution is one that evolves. What’s the best way to know? State legislatures — but it doesn’t hurt to know what other countries are doing.”

Our constitution has a mechanism in it for evolution. It’s the amendment process.

Any other evolution, a la reading the penumbras, emanations, and secret codes inherent in interpreting the rights derived from reading the third letter after every punctuation mark isn’t constitutional evolution. It’s judicial creationism.

(Link seen on Althouse.)

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Safer T&A Through Security Cameras

More women’s bodies protected by security cameras:

A San Francisco police officer is facing possible disciplinary action for allegedly using surveillance cameras at San Francisco International Airport to ogle women as they walked through the terminal, according to San Francisco Police Commission documents.

Oddly enough, he’s in the most trouble because apparently it wasn’t his turn at the cameras:

Police share the surveillance system with several agencies. When the Police Department traffic substation is controlling a camera, none of the other agencies is able to use that camera, the charging documents note.

Rossi allegedly spent a total of three hours manipulating six of the cameras.

He ignored coworkers’ warnings that he should not be using the cameras, saying “he did not care since he was not assigned to the substation he would not get in trouble,” according to the charging documents.

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Relativism

Ben Affleck demonstrates the relative worth of Jennifer Garner vs Jennifer Lopez:

Affleck bought Garner a $500,000, 4.5-carat Harry Winston engagement ring — as compared to the 6.1-carat pink diamond ring from Winston which Affleck got for his former fiancée Jennifer Lopez.

Nothing says “I love you” like giving the second Jennifer a ring that’s 73% of the one given to Jennifer I.

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