First found out about Johnathan Coulton when I realized he'd written the end credit song for the game "Portal"....



Here he is doing his casual acoutsic thing. Good stuff...

Jonathan Coulton in LA -06-Baby Got Back



Jonathan Coulton in LA -12-Tom Cruise Crazy







Lifehacxker recently interviewed him.... Click

Oklahoma trooper’s lawyer says EMT escalated situation

Video on source page - click

By Carlos Miller
As the pressure mounts to fire the Oklahoma State Trooper who pulled an ambulance over, then placed a paramedic in a chokehold, the trooper’s attorney said the paramedic had it coming to him.

In a press conference today, attorney Gary James said Trooper Daniel Martin had a legal right to pull the ambulance over because it failed to yield to him as he was speeding by with sirens wailing and emergency lights flashing.

Nevermind the fact that Martin was only using his lights and sirens to pick up his wife for what appears to be nothing but a joyride.

Martin’s attorney also claims that EMT Maurice White escalated the situation by challenging the trooper’s authority, even though the trooper was committing a felony by interfering with the transport of an emergency patient.

And even though the video...

Click here

vividly proves that Martin was the only person escalating the situation.

Meanwhile, a petition to fire Martin created by a Miami librarian and introduced on Photography is Not a Crime has already surpassed 2,000 signatures, even though it’s been less than 48 hours since it was first posted.

The librarian, Theo Karantsalis, also interviewed retired South Florida police officer Glenn Rice in the above video. Rice was the first person to sign the petition. I was the second.

Martin is currently on paid administrative leave pending an internal investigation, which is probably why he feels he needs a lawyer because prosecutors have already determined they are not going to file charges against him.

Check out the original video



shot by a family member of the patient.

Porsche vs Mustang NEMESIS!!!!! (1;50)

Prison for Chicago cop who beat man in wheelchair

CHICAGO (AP) — A Chicago police officer caught on hospital security footage repeatedly striking a man who was handcuffed and shackled to a wheelchair has been sentenced to more than three years in federal prison.

William Cozzi stood expressionless as U.S. District Judge Blanche Manning imposed the sentence Thursday.

Cozzi had pleaded guilty to a civil rights violation for inflicting the beating in a hospital emergency room.

The man was the victim of a stabbing and had been brought to the hospital. Cozzi was sent to the hospital to investigate.

Cozzi had earlier pleaded guilty to a state misdemeanor charge and was sentenced to 18 months of probation. But Chicago police Superintendent Jody Weis, a former FBI official, referred the case to the federal government.

Source

Coloring book pages for you...

Serenity bar fight rehearsal(2;15)

Confessions of an eBay opium addict
Looking for drugs on the cheap, a writer found poppy pods available on the Web. He also found himself hooked.

Columbus Day almost killed me.

I woke up avalanched under a junkyard of pain, my body a trap of torn nerves and trashed organs. An oily rash of sweat had soaked through my pillow and into the mattress. I was coughing, confused and crazy with anger. A throbbing, deep-pink chemical sunburn covered my face; my bowels were spitting hot mercury. I slid out of bed and dropped to the floor, the weight of a snarling mountain gorilla bearing down on me. I saw myself in the mirror as I fell. I looked puffy.

Outside, the sun was terrifying, while the hiss from a neighbor's dancing sprinkler got in my head and pissed me off so much, it felt as though my blood had become flammable and would ignite at the next insult.

I made it to the car and somehow drove one block down to the mailbox, expecting the Priority Mail package from my eBay dealer to save me.

Nothing.

I hobbled into the car and drove back to the house, used the bathroom and looked on the computer. The U.S. Postal Service Web site tracker verified that my box of poppies had been delivered to Reno at exactly 10:32 a.m. Well, where the hell was it? I typed a threatening e-mail to my supplier but didn't send it.

Then I got back into the car, reeling and jumpy, went back and opened the mailbox.

Nothing.

I closed it. Locked it. Waited a second and then stuck the key in and opened it back up.

Still not there.

I got back in the car and decided to wait it out. My head whirled with psychic errata--miscalculations in the synapses. As though faced with gravity for the very first time, I struggled to hold the horizon line, like an infant with an iron skull. I wanted to ram my head straight into the dashboard but feared the airbag might blow and deliver the knockout punch. Or, worse, I'd miss and hit the damn horn.

Everything hurt, but the pain came in slow motion and actually seemed to stop to register with each and every nerve. My pulse rattled, and my heart seemed to sizzle.

Maybe my package had been intercepted by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Good, I thought. Maybe they'll be able to get me off this stupid homemade junk.

I sat there for less than a minute. Maybe I sat there for an hour; I don't know. But something had to be done. I stuck some Klonopin under my tongue and drove to the post office, expecting to turn myself in. Give up. Take the 15 years, if they would just give me the fix. But the door was stuck. I pushed, pulled. It wouldn't budge. No, it was locked. Closed for Columbus Day.

Columbus Day. No wonder everyone hated him. That tabard-wearing bastard had been dead for 500 years and was still causing trouble.

I took a dozen allergy pills to make me drowsy but couldn't sleep. I lay awake in bed for the next two days before the shipment finally arrived. The postman had decided to make a long weekend out of the cheap-ass holiday.

I should've stayed in bed and ridden it out. I had put a price on my head in the form of a box-a-day addiction but already had endured the worst part of the withdrawal: the first 48 hours. But then the box arrived, and I was a helpless slave. I ripped it open by its pull string and dumped a dozen poppy pods onto the bed, trying to eat one whole. I then made a quick, crude tea, drank it and started to feel a rabid glow of health return in seconds.

What had all the fuss been about?

In better days, I used to crack the dried poppy pods over the blender like eggs, little rivulets of blue-black seeds rushing out as I shattered the crowned pods. Sometimes, I'd commandeer the kitchen and make a big production out of the whole thing, as though I was hosting some kind of lowbrow cooking show, doing stupid cockney accents while explaining the preparation process to the viewers.

Start with a clean, chemical-free stock of dried poppy pods. Pulverize in a blender and scald with water. Don't boil. Don't burn. Don't vaporize. Just scald. Blend on low for about a minute, and then add a dash of lemon juice to taste. Add a cup of fine, aged brandy and then strain through an old T-shirt to remove lingering lumps.

Not only did the brandy serve to recreate that loose-laudanum effect; a swig satisfied the senses while I waited the few minutes for the infernal teapot to boil.

I had a whole list of fuel additives I'd researched on the Internet to intensify the tea experience: tyrosine, ascorbic acid, allergy medicine.

After downing a few bowls of tea, I'd lie down on the bed and watch the ceiling fan spin until my body felt etherized and free again. Ready for the imminent rapture.

But that was the first phase. And it didn't last very long.

On a field trip to Washington, D.C., Nancy Reagan promised us third-graders that there were people in the world who actually wanted nothing more than to give us drugs--for free! Free crack. Free cigarettes and beer. Free grass. Free coke. Free PCP and LSD. At the time, I remember thinking this notion carried the vague backing of Mr. T.

Back at school, they showed us a video of the circumstances and places these drugs might be obtained: playgrounds, especially while playing kickball; from ice-cream trucks; in restrooms at parties.

I played lots of kickball, but no goon in a trench coat ever trapped the ball under his foot and asked me if I wanted to fly. My friends couldn't score a Jolt cola, let alone a bump of nose candy. It was probably for the best. Had someone handed me a rock of crack, I think I would've put it in my mouth and eaten it. I couldn't even get a beer. And New Year's was coming up.

One place to get free stuff was the library. My mother dropped me off like it was day care, me and the damn bums. I looked for books with naked people. I read through investment magazines. Finally, I found the fiction section and a book called Beowulf. I liked it. The Vikings drank this stuff called "mead." It was an alcoholic drink made from honey. I looked in the card catalog and found a book on mead. It even showed how to make it. I was 12. The librarian had her hair full keeping the bums from falling asleep on the newspapers. She stamped my books and sent me away.

The recipe seemed simple enough. I rode my bike to the supermarket and bought a bear-shaped jar of honey and some Fleischmann's yeast.

I kept my mead in a pair of empty plastic Coke bottles. Every day, I'd have to twist the cap off and release the carbon dioxide, or the stuff would explode. On New Year's Eve, I poured my first glass. It was warm, almost hot. It wasn't sweet at all--it tasted like some kind of milky lard. I couldn't drink it at first, but I made myself chug the stuff. I'm not sure what happened, but all of a sudden it was dark outside, I thought I heard Dick Clark talking about his balls, and I couldn't stand up.

Because my neighborhood had failed me with its lack of blight, I began to see the supermarket and drugstore as potential drug dealers. I drank bottles of cough syrup before I knew what dextromethorphan was. I ate catnip and didn't feel anything. I ate nutmeg and felt everything. There was no Internet to guide me and nothing in the library about morning-glory seeds. My mother just happened to have some Heavenly Blues in the junk drawer. I had never seen the carpet move like that before. I tried everything in the medicine aisle and everything in the bulk food hoppers.

I got my first pain pills from my friend's dead grandmother. I liked them. I liked them so much, I started hanging out with my own grandmother, just checking in on her every now and then.

By the time I was driving, I still hadn't found out where to get anything stronger than pot on the street. But they had just opened a whole-foods store about 20 miles away. Also, there was this damn new thing called the World Wide Web. There were whole pages on "legal highs." I was an opiate man.

At the health-food store, I looked at the huge bins of sesame seeds and fennel seeds and poppy seeds. The page on legal highs had said that trying to extract opium from poppy seeds was ridiculous. You needed pounds of the stuff.

I bought pounds of the stuff. I had them back-ordered and front-ordered at 97 cents a pound.

Per instructions, I boiled some water and slurred the mix around until it poured out in a pale yellow oil. I added some lemon and forced it down. Thirty minutes later, I was a poppy plant floating in the vase of my own body. It felt like I had a headache that didn't hurt, just these pleasant vexations. Later, I remembered this feeling, this innocent password to paradise.

In college, after a few semesters of spiking needles in my arms and toes before class, my friend Lukas never came back from spring break with the heroin he had promised. The way they described it, his heart had exploded. They called it an allergic reaction. I didn't know what to think except that the greedy bastard had copped my share. I remember needing a fix but was too scared to shoot up. The shrink had me on Klonopin for anxiety attacks. I drank until drinking didn't work. I tried every drug I could find. I stole Vicodin from medicine cabinets and kept an open ear for those with upcoming dental work, but the stuff was getting harder and harder to score.

There were online pharmacies on the Internet. I ordered Tramadol from Mexico and Nurofen Plus with the legal max 12.8 milligrams of codeine per tablet from New Zealand. Then that got tougher.

Finally, I found eBay. I had been looking for old motel stationery and fake Jackson Pollock drip paintings. They sold everything--why not drugs?

I typed "poppy pods" into the search bar.

Like anyone trolling the Internet at 4 a.m., I had been looking for some kind of temporary fix. I found it on eBay under Crafts>Floral Supplies>Flowers, Foliage>Dried.

Crafting. Sure. I liked art.

A query turned up all sizes and quantities of poppies. Some, called gigantheums, were as big as tennis balls. A special of "600 XXL-sized gigantheums" was selling for $399. Fortunately, for crafting projects requiring so many poppy plants, financing was available for $17 per month. For all of us hard-core flower arrangers, of course.

The recipe was simple enough. I ordered a few dozen dried flowers from a seller with more than 3,000 positive-feedback points and a clever handle that was a clear double-entendre on horticulture and getting high.

At first, the plants came double-boxed, rubber-banded by the dozen with the stems intact. But after a few more orders, the seller seemed to cut out the pretense that I might actually be using the poppies for floral arrangements and just sent the pods themselves.

The first taste gave off a steamy insult. Even after being filtered twice, the manna was as putrid as a bowl of warm pus. It seemed completely undrinkable. Its fermented, earthy taste--a little like a liquid squeezed from gym socks--had to be chased with something sweet. The dark grinds of crushed seed and sediment formed a repulsive grit in a half-ring around the bottom of the bowl.

As I poured the slosh into what would become my ceremonial chalice--a plastic child's cereal bowl with a built-in silly straw on the side--I learned how to drink it. Rather, it seemed to teach me how. Its nauseating properties demanded that it be downed fast at first, and then titrated for the rest of the session.

Fifteen minutes after downing my first bowl of poppy-pod tea, I entered "Flanders Fields," from the John McCrae poem: Where the poppies blow between the crosses, row on row.

Immediately, I felt redeemed. The raw reel of life became distant, pleasant. My head was an overstuffed pillow that could softly implode any minute, and it didn't matter. Nothing could. A pleasant pressure settled on the back of my neck. I was snacky. I wanted sweets. I felt the promise of a divine massage as the pressure spread through my shoulders and opened my ribs like wings. My thoughts slowed down until just about everything seemed to fold neatly inside everything else.

I became happily over-focused in the comfortable mud of abstraction and triumph; immortality bobbed around me like fat peaches in a hot tub.

It was far from the predictable recklessness of alcohol or the silly buzz of marijuana. I didn't have the lubricated jaws of a chatty coke fiend or the mystical misconceptions of a psychedelic spaceman.

It was quiet up there.

For a while.

Poppy tea seemed to inspire creativity, from conception to actual completion, without any of those time-consuming frat-boy impulses. It effectively killed the sex drive for the night. As such, much writing could be done. A good dose could keep me up all night without that toothless amphetamine tic.

By morning, things tended to irritate me, and the return of the sun seemed an impossibly horrifying affront. I covered the windows with blankets.

As the original confessional opium-eater, Thomas DeQuincey, put it way back in the September 1821 edition of London Magazine, "Booze is an acute pleasure while opium is a chronic one. It introduces among the faculties the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. Wine robs a man of his self-possession, opium greatly invigorates it."

Another thing opium tea slows down is the bowels. As an experienced pod-head, I learned to carry a Fleet two-pack before any major binge. (Those are the enemas in the green box.) Opium bunged things up the way eating a beach towel might. When things did finally make their exit, they felt like pine cones being forced through a tiny hole in a dry brick.

There was also the cottonmouth. It was once so bad that it was physically impossible for me to eat a sandwich.

Poppy tea was an extreme beverage for sure, but no more foul than that goofy, green yuppie-goo: wheat grass.

I swallowed the tea a few times. Then a few more. By a month, I was drinking the juice of upward of 60 crushed pods per day--swallowing gallons of liquid and pissing out about $300 a week worth of tea matter. Bowl after bowl of blissful narcotic bloat that I sucked down with a silly straw.

Often, late into a session, I'd get that uncontrollable opiate itch.

Raking my skin with a giant plastic comb seemed to help. Occasionally, I'd bleed or accidentally scrape a piece of a mole right off.

The thing is, heroin gets you addicted to heroin. But opium is 40 to 50 different alkaloids, meaning 40 to 50 different drugs I was becoming addicted to.

Some nights on the tea, I'd just lie in bed, content, even cheerful and impossibly satisfied enough to watch my wife read a copy of Lucky magazine, helping her put those little stickers on items she wanted.

Admittedly, slugging down bowl after bowl of plant slop through a silly straw lacked the romance of an opium den or the skinny-tie-and-suit jet-setting of the French Connection; it didn't have the instant appeal of the smoky red-light pleasures--the real ensemble pieces of the imagination--the ones where curly white smoke swirls in slow motion until it takes on the figure of an overly gracious geisha girl in fine red silk.

Poppy tea didn't leave me fashionably thin, either. In fact, after four months of constant use, I had never been so freaking fat in my life. I swelled from a size 30 to a 38 in jeans. I gained 65 pounds, almost exclusively in the middle, from the constipating bloat and junk-food chasers. While hard drugs collapsed on the user like a broken elevator when they wore off, poppy tea seemed to fade into the next day like a down escalator.

At first.

The chronicles of the opium trade zigzag through early civilizations from Mesopotamia to China and eventually wander to Neolithic southwestern Europe, where groups of early open-minded dump dwellers found the opium poppy plant, papaver somniferum, growing like a weed among piles of refuse. They soon discovered that not only would the plant seemingly thrive almost anywhere, but, also, when eaten or brewed into a primitive tea, it even took the edge off of living in a dump.

During the 1800s, when the strong painkilling alkaloid morphine was first isolated from the poppy and used in everything from battlefield amputations to snake oils and suspect tonics with names like "Mister Jim's Special Relief for Facial Neuralgia" or "Calmer's Baby Tonic for Calmer Babies," the poppy's use as a tea fell out of practice. Purified morphine was cheaper than liquor, and a mix of the two, called laudanum, was sold as a kind of cure-all by greedy, apple-cheeked pharmacists everywhere. Once morphine was processed into brand-name heroin, the use of poppy tea just about came to an end, at least until eBay came onto the scene.

As a modern world-bazaar or world-sized museum of bizarre junk, eBay reconnected well-worn trade routes electronically that had disappeared and grassed over centuries ago. While becoming a worldwide garage sale, global swap meet and anthropologist's curio shop, eBay also quite naturally had become the official opium gray market to at least some of the masses.

But it didn't also sell the cure.

It was sometime before sunrise, and I was sitting in a motel in Carson City, Nev. My wife didn't kick me out. She didn't even tell me to stop drinking the tea. There was no ultimatum. I just packed three huge boxes of poppies in the car with the blender and left. I didn't tell her where I was going. I didn't really know. But that seemed to be where you were likely to end up--at a cheap motel. There was some equation there.

I walked a few miles to a grocery store for some lemon juice, Coke and junk food for the binge.

I tried to get the motel tap water running to a boil, but the closest I could get was to put the hand-crushed poppies in the ice bucket and run the shower until steamy water filled it to the brim. I drank it down in hideous gulps.

The reverie, the calm of my ocean, a measured but strong divine state for silent natural trances. I was back in the folds of the plant. I realized I had left because I didn't want to share this experience with anyone. I reached into the grocery bag and ripped open a three-pack of yellow Easter Peeps.

This was living.

DeQuincey noted that some nights he seemed to live for 70 to 100 years. This was going to be one of those nights. As long as I didn't die, at least.

I took a poppy pod out of the box and looked it over. It was regal, like a birch-colored rose wearing a halo; a poet could sit and be effusive for days meditating over its near-beauty.

Insulated by the opium and the sumptuousness of a secured motel room, I lay down with hopes of the state between consciousness and sleep.

Suddenly, everything got blurry. The lights stayed put while my eyes moved. It was as though they were riding on oily ball joints. Or were the lights on ball joints? My lips shrank, and I couldn't talk. My heart drummed fiercely. I needed to calm down.

I panicked. The fear was intense. My toes wiggled around and got stuck in a cigarette hole in the bottom sheet of the motel bed. Did I drink too much? This was the high-water mark. I scratched my itches. Chasing. Always chasing. But this time, I wasn't catching anything. I was caught.

I made more tea. Used more pods than ever before. I was trying to blast off somewhere.

A few hours later, I had drunk the salt of 200 pods but only felt a kind of necessary doom. I got out of bed and looked in the mirror to make sure I was still there. I looked like that mug shot of Nick Nolte, my hair up in the air, pasted in place by sweat and spilled drink. Tiny poppy seeds were stuck to my shirt. They were everywhere. In the bed. Under my feet. On the floor.

I turned on the TV. The news. Some jackass was trying to sell a body part on eBay, and it had made the headlines.

I felt like I was trapped in an aviary of evil eye-pecking birds. The threats were soaring overhead, then dive-bombing beak-first into the pores in my aching skull. I screamed. The writhing, palpitating torment; the shattering headache; and the enormous irritability and agitation of the world all fit into the grit in my teeth.

I needed something, some kind of painkiller, or I was going to die. I didn't know any old people who might have medicine cabinets stocked with Norco. I needed help. I thought about the stairwell. I thought maybe I could push myself down the stairwell and break something and go to the emergency room and get some pain meds.

I hurried down the hall and stood over the top, but I couldn't throw myself off. It was carpeted. I might just bruise, not break. I couldn't jump. My eyes fogged over with tears that didn't stream. I never knew how serious it had gotten until it had gotten serious. I had left my wife. I had blown through our savings. But I couldn't make myself take the final fall and literally hit bottom.

I went back into my room and found the Bible. I promised to God I'd quit. I tried to read some passages, but my eyes kept closing. I knew if I fell asleep, I wouldn't wake up. I found a section called "Leviticus." It was awful. Something about an "unclean creeping carcase." I had to get out of there. By "there," I meant my body.

But I was stuck.

I've been off opium tea for almost two weeks: twelve days of nonstop low-grade flu and restless thoughts of maybe sawing off my head with a bowie knife. I've also considered a homemade lobotomy with a knitting needle. I can't live on this plane of plain sobriety.

When I can sleep, I wake up after a couple of hours, shivering, as though I've been sleeping in the steerage of some Alaskan fishing boat. Everything hurts.

I've tried jogging to build up that natural high, but my brain's capacity to make natural painkillers has been so dimmed by the opium that it feels like my knee joints are ripping with every stride.

The thing about it is I realize that I'm going to order more poppies. It's not a question of "if." I know where I can get them. It's only a matter of time before I do this all over again. As long as someone sells the pods, and nobody cares to stop them, my recidivism is all but assured.

Poppies have shown me a better place. An occasional oasis of emotional stability. It's medicine for life. I doubt it will ever kill me. Perhaps make me into a 400-pound shut-in. Whatever--as long as I can get to the mailbox.

Source

'Stupid' driver blocked ambulance

A judge told a driver she displayed "moronic stupidity" by deliberately and repeatedly blocking an ambulance which was carrying a dying patient.

Annika Avery, 20, of Leicester, was given a five-month prison sentence, suspended for two years. She had already admitted dangerous driving.

The court was told that Avery overtook the ambulance at speed and slowed down, causing the vehicle to brake suddenly.

She did this even though the siren was on, Leicester Crown Court heard.

Avery, of Tatlow Road, Glenfield, was said to be under stress at the time of the incident in July 2008, although no other reason was given for her behaviour.

Obscene gestures

In the back of the ambulance a paramedic was giving heart compressions to an elderly patient.

Such was the force of the braking that the paramedic was flung the length of the vehicle, the court heard.

The driver of the ambulance said at one stage Avery pulled alongside him and she was travelling at 60mph (96km/h) in a 40mph (64km/h) area.

The paramedic said he looked across and saw Avery and a male passenger laughing and making obscene gestures.

Judge Howard Morrison called Avery's driving "disgusting and dangerous".

The patient in the ambulance died and the judge said if Avery's driving had played any part in that death, she would have been facing a very different sentence.

He added that ambulance crews did a difficult job, telling Avery: "Your moronic and anti-social behaviour is exactly what they cannot tolerate."

Speaking after Friday's sentencing hearing, Nick Arnold from East Midlands Ambulance Service said: "We are deeply disturbed at the actions this woman took.

"She purposely obstructed our ambulance which was clearly dealing with an emergency.

"People who commit this type of crime must think of the consequences - one day because of the mindless actions of someone else they, or their loved one, might not get the urgent medical care they need."

Source

Group of dancers wearing Hammer Pants flashmob a trendy store and surprise hipsters in skinny jeans.

Stupidest Awesome Car At 2009 Orphan Car Show: Out-rig Your Mom-In-Law

Imagine traveling along at speed outside the car, just aft of the drivers door and in front of the rear wheel, no seat belt, no shields, no nothin', just you on a seat perched precariously on a slide-out seat. We've never heard of or seem anything this bonkers on a production vehicle before and it sure does give you an idea how far we've come as a safety conscious society. It had to be a surreal design meeting; "Yeah, it's a two seater, but we need space for four as a selling point." (furled brows and furtive glances shoot through the cigarette smoke hanging in the room) "I've got it! We'll put a folding seat on a sliding shelf!" "Brilliant!"

Even with the seats stowed away, the Kissel is actually an extremely handsome car for the era, everything about it is elegantly styled and beautifully finished, hearkening back to a very different kind of luxury in a very different time.

Full gallery viewable at the Source

Random oddness to make you smile...(2;06)

Software Problems with a Breath Alcohol Detector

This is an excellent lesson in the security problems inherent in trusting proprietary software:

After two years of attempting to get the computer based source code for the Alcotest 7110 MKIII-C, defense counsel in State v. Chun were successful in obtaining the code, and had it analyzed by Base One Technologies, Inc.

Draeger, the manufacturer maintained that the system was perfect, and that revealing the source code would be damaging to its business. They were right about the second part, of course, because it turned out that the code was terrible.

2. Readings are Not Averaged Correctly: When the software takes a series of readings, it first averages the first two readings. Then, it averages the third reading with the average just computed. Then the fourth reading is averaged with the new average, and so on. There is no comment or note detailing a reason for this calculation, which would cause the first reading to have more weight than successive readings. Nonetheless, the comments say that the values should be averaged, and they are not.

3. Results Limited to Small, Discrete Values: The A/D converters measuring the IR readings and the fuel cell readings can produce values between 0 and 4095. However, the software divides the final average(s) by 256, meaning the final result can only have 16 values to represent the five-volt range (or less), or, represent the range of alcohol readings possible. This is a loss of precision in the data; of a possible twelve bits of information, only four bits are used. Further, because of an attribute in the IR calculations, the result value is further divided in half. This means that only 8 values are possible for the IR detection, and this is compared against the 16 values of the fuel cell.

4. Catastrophic Error Detection Is Disabled: An interrupt that detects that the microprocessor is trying to execute an illegal instruction is disabled, meaning that the Alcotest software could appear to run correctly while executing wild branches or invalid code for a period of time. Other interrupts ignored are the Computer Operating Property (a watchdog timer), and the Software Interrupt.

Basically, the system was designed to return some sort of result regardless.

This is important. As we become more and more dependent on software for evidentiary and other legal applications, we need to be able to carefully examine that software for accuracy, reliability, etc. Every government contract for breath alcohol detectors needs to include the requirement for public source code. "You can't look at our code because we don't want you to" simply isn't good enough.

Source

Emergency services see red over traffic tickets

OTTAWA — Police officers, firefighters and paramedics on emergency calls in Ottawa are racking up thousands of dollars in red-light camera fines and the tickets are exasperating rank-and-file rescue workers.

Ontario’s Highway Traffic Act exempts emergency vehicles with lights and sirens activated from having to wait at red lights provided they come to a full stop first and proceed only when it is safe to do so.

But more than 60 times since last year, police cars, fire trucks and ambulances speeding to calls have been dinged for not coming to full stops at the 10 red-light cameras rotated around 19 city intersections. The resulting $11,000 in traffic tickets was recouped from the three services’ operating budgets.

One of those $180 tickets, to the Ottawa Paramedic Service, was based on a photo showing a police escort blocking the intersection and waving the 5,500-kilogram ambulance through the red light. The service contested the fine with city hall traffic officials and won a rare victory.

The issue is especially contentious with police. The department was hit with 30 tickets last year and a dozen so far this year. Offending officers face discipline, from verbal warnings and loss of pay to formal charges of discreditable conduct.

And that has Ottawa Police Association seeing red.

“If it was you who had just suffered the heart attack, or your child who was in need in of assistance, or if it was an officer who needed assistance because of a call going terribly bad, would you really care whether they came to a full stop, or slowed down enough to ensure that it was safe to do so,” says Gary Babstock, a labour relations officer with the association.

Babstock is on secondment from his job as a police constable.

Sensors embedded in the road at red-light camera intersections trigger the cameras when a vehicle fails to stop at the white stop line and enters the intersection above a certain speed, believed to be 20 to 25 km/h.

Babstock says as long as officers or other emergency workers are not reckless or imprudent, “like going through Carling and Bronson at 70 km/h at four in the afternoon,” authorities should trust their judgment and dismiss any camera fines and disciplinary actions.

“You can’t invest the amount of time and authorities and decision-making abilities that you do in police officers and other emergency workers and then turn around and take that away from them when an actual emergency presents itself,” he says.

“For an officer to have used their judgment, which you’ve given them to use, and then say that their judgment is discredible because they went through a red light is really hypocritical.”

If, however, a cruiser is involved in an accident while running a red, he notes the province’s Special Investigations Unit provides investigative oversight and can lay criminal charges against an officer when warranted.

Over the years, more than a dozen area accidents have been blamed on emergency vehicles failing to travel safely through red lights. The most tragic was in 1982 when a fire department aerial ladder truck ran a red, collided with a van and smashed into the front of a Somerset Street tailor shop, killing two men in the doorway. (The Ottawa Fire Department received five red light tickets last year and four so far this year, according to City Hall records.)

Emergency services management, meanwhile, says the issue is an open and shutter case.

“The law is there,” says Staff Sgt. Denis Cleroux, of the Ottawa police professional standards service.

“It gives you authority to go through safely with your lights and siren activated,” only after a full stop.

Every instance in which a red-light camera is triggered by a police car, “is a concern as it raises the possibility of having an accident. There’s always one time that you get sidelined. We can’t take a chance on that.”

The Ottawa Paramedic Service was hit with seven red-light camera tickets last year, including one or two that were waived. With the service on track earlier this year for an estimated 20 red-light camera tickets, a memo recently issued to paramedics warned all vehicles must come to a complete stop before proceeding through a red.

“It’s a dangerous thing for us to do and we know that and we instil that in our paramedics,” says J.P. Trottier, the service’s spokesman. “If you want to cause an accident and not get to the patient in a timely fashion, boy, this is a good way of doing it by not stopping.”

Most motorists and pedestrians are simply not expecting an emergency vehicle to suddenly cut them off, he says. They “have the green light and away they go. With the windows up and the air conditioning on and the music full blast and they’re on the cellphone, chances are they’re not going to be listening to the siren.”

In 2002, a Guelph paramedic rushing a very ill newborn to Hamilton General Hospital was suspended for a day without pay after refusing to pay a $190 fine for running a red light on the way.

As a neonatal team worked on the infant being transferred from Guelph, the driver drove through a downtown Hamilton traffic light and triggered a red-light camera.

“Rather than standing on the brake, I kept going through. There was nobody around,” he said later. Slamming on the brakes, he said, would have been risky for the neonatal team.

“There’s absolutely no way they wouldn’t have been thrown forward.”

Source

With all the recent talk of decriminalizing marijuana, Here's a look at a country that did even more....

Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?

Portugal in 2001 became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.

At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal's drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead? Under Portugal's new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.

The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to "drug tourists" and exacerbate Portugal's drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

Portugal's case study is of some interest to lawmakers in the U.S., confronted now with the violent overflow of escalating drug gang wars in Mexico. The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing on its citizens some of the world's harshest penalties for drug possession and sales. Yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the E.U. (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the U.S., it also has less drug use.

"I think we can learn that we should stop being reflexively opposed when someone else does [decriminalize] and should take seriously the possibility that anti-user enforcement isn't having much influence on our drug consumption," says Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment and director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA. Kleiman does not consider Portugal a realistic model for the U.S., however, because of differences in size and culture between the two countries.


But there is a movement afoot in the U.S., in the legislatures of New York State, California and Massachusetts, to reconsider our overly punitive drug laws. Recently, Senators Jim Webb and Arlen Specter proposed that Congress create a national commission, not unlike Portugal's, to deal with prison reform and overhaul drug-sentencing policy. As Webb noted, the U.S. is home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners.

At the Cato Institute in early April, Greenwald contended that a major problem with most American drug policy debate is that it's based on "speculation and fear mongering," rather than empirical evidence on the effects of more lenient drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to neutralize what had become the country's number one public health problem, he says.

"The impact in the life of families and our society is much lower than it was before decriminalization," says Joao Castel-Branco Goulao, Portugual's "drug czar" and president of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction, adding that police are now able to re-focus on tracking much higher level dealers and larger quantities of drugs.

Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Maryland, like Kleiman, is skeptical. He conceded in a presentation at the Cato Institute that "it's fair to say that decriminalization in Portugal has met its central goal. Drug use did not rise." However, he notes that Portugal is a small country and that the cyclical nature of drug epidemics — which tends to occur no matter what policies are in place — may account for the declines in heroin use and deaths.

The Cato report's author, Greenwald, hews to the first point: that the data shows that decriminalization does not result in increased drug use. Since that is what concerns the public and policymakers most about decriminalization, he says, "that is the central concession that will transform the debate."

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AFM Tree Stripper (2;25) impressively destructive...



Reminds me of "The Leveller" in the 1992 animated movie "Ferngully"...




IMDB's plot summary

X-Files Actress on Vaccines: Ignore the Stars

Amanda Peet Joins the Fray in Public Debate Over Childhood Vaccination

Actress Amanda Peet is not the first celebrity to speak out on childhood vaccination. But her message is clearly different from that of many other stars on the subject.

And on Tuesday morning, she shared this advice with the public on ABC's "Good Morning America": the public might be better off to turn a deaf ear to celebrities when it comes to vaccines.

"It seems that the media is often giving celebrities and actors more authority on this issue than they are giving the experts," Peet said. "I know it's a paradox, but that's part of why I wanted to become a spokesperson, to say to people, 'Please don't listen to me. Don't listen to actors. Go to the experts.'"

Peet also apologized again during her appearance for comments she made in the July issue of the parenting magazine Cookie in which she stated, "Frankly, I feel that parents who don't vaccinate their children are parasites."

"I didn't mean to show disdain, and I did and do apologize for the use of the word 'parasites,'" she said. "But I do in no way, shape or form retract my position or the meaning behind the use of the word, which is that if there are vast reductions in herd immunity, our children will be at risk."

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Johnny Pag Motorcycles....

Custom choppers have been the love of my life since I was just a young boy. My first job I was 13, I worked for a company called Bikers Dream out of Orange County, California. There I watched my father build custom chopper after custom chopper. Most of his clients were very wealthy and a large majority was professional athletes or musicians. I thought nothing of it at the time. Who the hell is Billy Gibbons anyway??

My job wasn't exactly a high profile one like my dads. I had the thrilling job of stocking parts in what felt like a hundred degree warehouse. When I was lucky, I would be able to clean the mechanics tools. Everyone has to pay their dues somehow. I am extremely grateful for starting at the bottom sweeping floors; it taught me that you have to work hard for everything in life.

Over the years, I was able to get more involved in the bike building aspect of the business. I had the privilege of working under my father and learning from him. Together, we did a lot of one-off projects and a few limited edition production bikes. Working under him for so long, I believe, gave me the eye for detail that I have today.

I believe that the bikes we build today are a reflection of all the past work my father and I have done. We know what it takes to build a strong, reliable motorcycle. Not only do we build the coolest 300cc motorcycles on the planet, but we also now what it is that our customers expect from us. A reliable motorcycle, customer support, parts, and a great attitude is what you will find with Johnny Pag Motorcycles.

Our line of 300cc motorcycles are designed to look good and be affordable and all of our bikes are full sized. We have been building this line of bikes since early 2006 and have had a great response all over the world. We are constantly growing and introducing new bikes and accessories. Today, our corporate headquarters is operated out of Orange County, California and we have 5 satellite locations located around the world.

JR PAG

Q: Are these motorcycles full size?
A: YES! All of our motorcycles are full sized choppers. They are not "mini" or "Pocket" bikes. You can check the spec. sheets for the overall length of all of our motorcycles. Our Spyder is over 8 feet long!

Q: I'm 250 pounds, will this bike move me?
A: YES! Max recommended weight is 300lbs for all of our models.

Q: How can I get parts for the bike?
A: Our warehouse in Orange County, CA is fully stocked with every nut and bolt for you bike. Most of the time, your parts will ship out that day, and you will have them in a matter of days. You can always call us direct if you are unable, or are having problems getting parts from your dealer.

Q: What is the cost of the bike out-the-door?
A: Most dealers sell the bike out-the-door for around $5,000.00. It can be a little higher or lower depending on what accessories are installed.

Q: What is the top speed?
A: All of our 300cc bikes will cruise between 70-75 depending on your weight.

Q: Are they street legal?
A: YES!!!

Q: Can I go on the freeway with this?
A: Absolutely!!!

Q: Is there a warranty on the bikes?
A: YES! All our 2009 models come with a 1 year manufacturer warranty.

Q: What brand of engine do you use?
A: It is a JPM 300 we use on all of our bikes.


Site

This is the "autoswitch"...garage door opener that uses your high beam switch. Useful little thing...


However, I like this on much better, works off the horn switch and accomplishes the same thing. Higher maintenance costs, though...

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of his contract with Lunar. He has been a faithful employee for three long years. His home has been Selene, a moon base where he has spent his days alone, mining Helium-3. The precious gas holds the key to reversing the Earth's energy crisis.

Isolated, determined, and steadfast, Sam has followed the rulebook obediently, and his time on the moon has been enlightening, but uneventful. The solitude has given him time to reflect on the mistakes of his past and to work on his raging temper. He does his job mechanically and spends most of his available time dreaming of his imminent return to Earth, to his wife, young daughter and an early retirement.

But two weeks shy of his departure from Selene, Sam starts seeing things, hearing things, and feeling strange. When a routine extraction goes horribly wrong, he discovers that Lunar have their own plans for replacing him and that the new recruit is eerily familiar.

Before he can return to Earth, Sam has to confront himself and the discovery that the life he has created may not be his own. It's more than his contract that is set to expire.

Watch the trailer here

Time Warner's Antics in Wilson, N.C. Give Another Reason to Snip the Cable

Ah, Time Warner Cable--friendly supplier of your choice of cable TV and broadband internet. Or, as residents in Wilson, North Carolina are finding out, not friendly at all: TWC is trying to close their community-based, cheap, and efficient cable/ISP service. Why? Because it can't compete.

A few thousand residents in Wilson were fed up with paying a high price for low-speed broadband and limited cable service, so they founded a community-owned ISP based on optical-fiber networks running to the front door called Greenlight. Compared with the limited channels, slow data rates and expensive fees charged by the cable company, Greenlight is a fantastic bargain. The basic package includes 81 channels, 10 mbps down and upload speeds, and unlimited long distance phone calls to the U.S and Canada for $99. A similar package from Time Warner Cable offers fewer channels, slower upload speeds and costs 40% more--and that's the "introductory offer" price. Greenlight even has a top-end broadband service that rips along at an obscene 100mbps, ten times faster than TWC's best.

So what is TWC doing about this--improving its service, dropping prices and offering great incentives to tempt customers back into the fold? Nope, the company is lobbying the North Carolina senate to outlaw community ISPs on the grounds that it can't compete.

Yes, you read that correctly. And no, your assumptions about what "free and fair competition" mean aren't all wrong. It's difficult to see this as anything other than TWC's sour grape attempt to cover up its own inefficiencies. What the cable company is doing is apparently trying to enforce lower-spec, more expensive services on Wilson's residents just because it wants to, and because it's got the financial heft to press the legal case.

Along with news that the company seems to be withdrawing its super-fast next-gen broadband trials (DOCSIS 3.0) from cities that won't accept its tiered billing plan, this is another indication that it may finally be time to rid yourself of cable company ties. It's a technologically rich world, and there are other solutions available for both broadband and TV--as Wilson's residents have shown. There's Hulu, Boxee, TV-over ISP, ADSL, movie downloads from Amazon and Apple, Netflix, fixed wireless ISPs, and an armload of other options. The tech is out there--assuming that the cable companies will let you get your hands on it.

Source

Creationism with Ricky Gervais (9;58)

EagleTec USB Nano Flash Drive

The EagleTec USB Nano Flash Drive is Extremely Tiny, Light and Compact Flash Drive. You can leave it at your Laptops or Computers USB Port. Features Below.

Features:
Nano Size USB Design
Compact & trendy
Dimension: 19 x 15 x 6mm (approx.)
Weight: 3g
Up to 15Mb/s Read; Up to 6Mb/s write
USB 2.0 High speed data transfer
Compatible with USB1.1 & 2.0
Password protection (Optional download by user)
Support Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Mac OSX (10.2 or above)

This fashionable and stylish mass storage device priced at 4GB $22; 8GB $33.

Random....

Impressive HD slo-mo...

Based on a photron SA-2 camera, system is providing realtime HD-SDI output. Sensor is a 12bit CMOS of 2048 pixels wide, and speed can vary up to 2500fps.

Here is the first SprintCam v3 showreel, made for NAB 2009 exhibition.
Mostly 1000FPS shots, made during a recent rugby competition in the Stade de France, Paris.

I-Movix SprintCam v3 NAB 2009 showreel from David Coiffier on Vimeo.

A Welcome Sign of Vodka's Decline

The documentation comes in the new edition of Food & Wine magazine's annual drinks book, "Cocktails '09," which hits shelves in a couple of weeks. Each year since the series began in 2005, Food & Wine has collected signature concoctions of prominent (or at least well-publicized) bartenders nationwide. The books have given us a running guide to recent fashion in drinks and are every bit as valuable to the curious and thirsty looking for up-to-the-moment quaffs as they will someday be to cocktail historians. And the early 21st-century trend that stands out more than any other is the steep decline in drinks using vodka.

In the inaugural edition, "Cocktails 2005," vodka was king. Faux-Martini embarrassments littered its pages, a testament to the tenacity of a fad that wouldn't fade. There was the obligatory Pomegranate Martini made of vanilla vodka, peach schnapps, lemon juice, sugar syrup, pomegranate juice and Sprite. Orange vodka, blue curaçao, lime juice and sugar syrup produced the Indigo Martini. Vodka and rose syrup made for a Rose Martini. The cocktail template of the day was to add some sweet and brightly colored juice, syrup, or liqueur to a slug of vodka to create a candy concoction that could be labeled a -Martini.

One can understand the widespread if deluded craze for vodka in the years straddling the millennium: As a way to inject unobtrusive alcoholic content into sugary drinks, the spirit is unsurpassed. And what a windfall it was to the liquor industry to take one of the cheapest and most easily made alcohols and sell it as a luxury good. You'd have to patent water to get much higher returns.

But the popularity of vodka among foodies was always perplexing. Vodka's neutrality and uniformity would seem to be at odds with the slow-food crowd's embrace of robust flavors reflecting specific locales. Back in 2005, among the best bartenders, the revolt against vodka had begun, even if it was still too underground to be seen in Food & Wine's cocktail compilation. But now, at long last, as a revolutionary theorist might put it, the contradictions inherent in the vodka paradigm have become apparent. It's as though there were finally the realization that making cocktails with vodka is like making paella with instant rice -- it can be done, of course, but it doesn't exactly burnish one's culinary bona fides.

How far has vodka fallen in the world of serious drinks-making? Out of about 200 recipes found in the original Food & Wine cocktail book, nearly 60 used vodka, making it the dominant spirit of the day. "Cocktails '09," by contrast, has only 10 recipes that call for vodka. And even those are mostly rather apologetic about it, with vodka used in a tertiary role.

If vodka has been deposed, what is now wearing the crown? Well, gin is in, but it isn't the only white spirit that mixers are turning to. Where a late-20th-century bartender might have reflexively used vodka in a new drink, the best now look for quirky and interesting alternatives that bring subtle flavor and distinctive provenance to the mix -- spirits such as the Italian white brandy, grappa, and its South American cousin, pisco. Rums are newly popular as bartenders have come to recognize the variety available, with many -- such as Brazil's cachaça and Martinique's rhum agricole -- representing particular places.

A decade ago, sweet dominated the world of drinks. Now, as the new Food & Wine cocktail guide documents, bitter is thought to be better. The Italian bitter liqueurs called amari are widely used to add complex flavors, and three drinks in the book even call for that most difficult of Italy's bitter digestivos, Fernet-Branca. The best of these is a cocktail contrived by Boston's Jackson Cannon. The Heather in Queue cocktail is 1½ ounces of gin, three-quarters of an ounce of bianco (that is, nondry white) vermouth, half an ounce of Grand Marnier, and a quarter ounce of Fernet-Branca, served straight up. It is delightful and original, though the Fernet-Branca so wants to dominate any drink that I would recommend reducing its presence here to a mere dash or two.

Of course, even with bitter elements, sweeteners are still standard. Many of the new drinks rely on exotically flavored syrups. But the go-to cordial of the day is St-Germain elderflower liqueur, used in as many of the new Food & Wine book drinks as vodka is.

Many of the drinks of the moment are variations on classic motifs. The essential brandy cocktail, the Sidecar, provided the inspiration for a Blackberry-Pineapple Sidecar (ugh), a Cider Car (made with Calvados and apple cider), and a Solera Sidecar (made with Spanish brandy). The Daiquiri is subjected to such permutations as the Masala Daiquiri, the Strawberry-Basil-Balsamic Daiquiri, the Autumn Daiquiri (with spiced rum and cinnamon syrup), the New England Daiquiri (sweetened with maple syrup) and the La Bomba Daiquiri (which features pomegranate molasses and muddled raspberries). Among the Margarita mutations is a cross with the Bloody Mary called a Bloody Margarita.

This sort of approach is not always successful. But handled deftly, the results can be excellent, as with the Gin Fizz variant contributed by Todd Thrasher of Alexandria, Va.'s P/X bar. His Boris Karloff cocktail is made with gin, lime juice, sugar, egg white and soda water (your basic Gin Fizz), tweaked with elderflower liqueur and a pinch of freshly ground black pepper. Very nice indeed.

But my favorite drink in "Cocktails '09" is a full-blown original. Misty Kalkofen of Boston's Drink bar created the Maximilian Affair, using mezcal, elderflower liqueur, sweet vermouth and fresh lemon juice. An instant classic, it is simple, interesting and unique.




But to achieve the widespread currency it deserves, it needs a simpler name. I suggest shortening it to Maximilian. (I doubt there will be any confusion with an obscure old drink of gin and Galliano that shared the moniker.) I also took the liberty of adjusting the proportions ever so slightly. Making the drink is also a good excuse to buy a bottle of decent mezcal -- look for a smoky, single-village mezcal from a company called Del Maguey.

Best of all, Ms. Kalkofen's cocktail is 100% vodka-free.

By ERIC FELTEN

Mr. Felten is the author of "How's Your Drink?: Cocktails, Culture and the Art of Drinking Well" (Agate Surrey). Email him at eric.felten@wsj.com.

Delta, Everybody Else, Officially Fed Up With Foreign Call Centers

Delta Air Lines is the latest company to "repatriate" call center jobs previously outsourced to India. It's not just that the economy is down and fewer people are flying, but more specifically that absolutely everybody hates dealing with foreign call centers.

As Delta chief Richard Anderson succinctly put it: "Customer acceptance of call-center representatives in other countries was low, and our customers are not shy about letting us have that feedback."

United, AT&T, and Sallie Mae all reduced or canceled foreign call centers jobs earlier this year. And as Time reported a while back, even Indians are over their call centers. It's sooo not cool to work there any more — "If you work at a call center today people will think you don't have anything else to do or were a bad student," says one Indian teen.

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