“I fart in your general direction!”

OK, that’s a quote from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and not from Jose Cruz, the star of this particular story, but that’s pretty much what happened.

According to a local news article, Mr. Cruz was stopped by police in West Virginia for driving at night without headlights, and then subsequently arrested for driving while intoxicated. While being processed in the police station, Cruz became argumentative and passed gas directly onto one of the patrolmen, fanning the odorous mixture directly at him (if you read the actual complaint). That’s apparently when they added the battery charge.

Personally, I want to hear the other side of the story, because I think the police version stinks

But seriously…he’s very lucky he didn’t just get beaten to within an inch of his life.

This may be one of the most disgusting and egregious misuses of police force I’ve ever heard of.

According to this story in the Detroit News, police repeatedly beat Ernest Griglen, 59, so hard that he required emergency brain surgery and is still in a coma and on a ventilator more than three months later.

Even though his car had state-issued handicap plates, police admit to striking Griglen repeatedly in the upper chest after pulling him over, apparently after seeing his car weaving in the lane while Griglen was going into insulin shock and mistaking that for intoxication. And the reason they struck him in the chest? To get him to drop his hands, apparently. And their story as to why they took such harsh measures? Because they saw him fiddling with “a black object on his waistband” and they thought it was a weapon.

Unfortunately, it was his insulin pump, which it sounds like he was frantically trying to get to work before he passed out entirely.

But this story from the police doesn’t quite make sense. Who “strikes” (presumably with a police baton) anyone in the chest deliberately, especially an older person, unless they are attempting to cause severe injury, possibly even a heart attack? And if they had struck him in the chest as they say, how did he suffer brain damage? And is this standard police procedure, even for intoxicated subjects?

Perhaps it is in this case, because as it happens, Griglen is black.

Well, it seems that the folks at Google have been working really hard this Labor Day weekend, because Techcrunch spilled the beans this morning that Google will be releasing its new Chrome browser beta tomorrow for Windows.

While everyone on Digg has been following the Democratic convention, followed by the McCain/Palin excitement, Google has been putting the finishing touches on Chrome totally under the radar. The important facts are these:

• Chrome’s tabs all run as totally separate processes / threads with their own data and memory, so if one of them crashes, or hangs, it leaves the rest of the browser running.
• This means that Chrome does virtually all its own memory management, and since as a browser it has access to your files and file system, for all intents and purposes it can be thought of as a separate operating system.
• Running with Gears will allow Chrome to do quite a bit of operating even when the host computer is offline.

Which all means that Google has suddenly raised the “operating system in the cloud” question again…with the added twist of bandwidth caps coming into the mix.

Whoops, I almost forgot the official comic book.

Tags: bandwidth caps, Chrome browser, cloud, comic book, Digg, gears, google, labor day weekend, memory management, stealth browser, Techcrunch