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“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.

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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.

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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.

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What Your ISP Doesn’t Want You to Know

As no doubt everyone knows by now (except maybe Barack Obama, who had better things to do tonight), Comcast has announced an upcoming 250 GB/month bandwidth cap on its residential broadband cable Internet customers, all of whom have signed up for unlimited service based on Comcast’s own advertising.

Before I get to reaming them out, I’d like to state for the record that (a) I’m a Comcast customer, (b) I’m more or less a satisfied Comcast customer, (c) I’m also a captive Comcast customer, since our county commissioners saw fit to make a monopoly deal with Comcast, no doubt in exchange for lots of money promises of excellent service. So if they should happen to cut me off for what they call “excessive use” or even for writing this article, I will have nowhere to go but dialup or satellite, which is to say: hell.

First of all, let us not look at Comcast or any particular broadband ISP, but all of them. Because as American taxpayers, we’ve already paid $200 billion to upgrade our country’s Internet infrastructure to a 45 Mbps fiber optic network. And we paid this money more or less directly to the telecoms: the giant companies that run everyone’s landline telephone service. And we don’t have this system yet, in spite of the fact that we were supposed to have it running years ago.

Continue reading →

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Here I was, taking lots of great pictures and presumably uploading them automatically, when I suddenly find out that hours ago, Flickr had stopped accepting pictures because I had uploaded too many in one day or something. I’ve used lots of photo services and I was starting to like Flickr because of their geotagging support, but this is ridiculous. Don’t they exist to let you put pictures on the web, or something?

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in my live coverage of Wordcamp 2008, please check out my Wordcamp 2008 album on Photobucket. No limits!