Think geekiness isn't fun? This a really cool job. It's like Ask Dr. Science in a computer lab.
An Australian PC magazine tries imposing fees for accessing and leaving comments. I don't think that's going to fly. Face it, the news online is free or we go elsewhere. If forums try to charge for comments, somebody's just going to start a discussion blog.
Blawg Review #5 is up.
So are some cases from last Friday in the Iowa Supreme Court. Of special interest to my field: American Family v. Corrigan, which upholds language on the policy exclusion for “bodily injury . . . arising out of . . . violation of any criminal law for which any insured is convicted” even as against innocent co-insureds - even with regard to failure to supervise claims. The rationale: All three theories of liability asserted require as an element proof of the guilty co-insured's conduct in inflicting the injuries, and as these acts must be established to prove that the innocent co-insured's negligence was a proximate cause of the plaintiff's injuries, none of the claims of negligence alleged are independent of the wrongful conduct so as to be subject to the sole-proximate-cause requirement.
For non-legal types: There's usually no insurance coverage for intentional acts and crimes and such, because they're not unforeseeable accidents. Otherwise, you could buy a policy to cover you before deciding to, say, torch your neighbor's house, and get off without any monetary consequences. The issue in this case is whether the lawyers for the plaintiffs can get around that by saying one of the other people on the policy, a wife, parent or so on, should be liable for failing to stop the person from committing the crime, and allow the plaintiffs at the policy that way. Some states do, others don't. In this case, under these particular exclusions as written (there are a gagillion different clauses out there, so don't assume yours is the same) we don't allow it. So when the Corrigans sued the babysitter that had abused their kid and his father for failing to supervise him or warn them about him, there's no coverage for the case. They can sue the kid and his dad, but they can't make his insurance policy pay for it. Any money has to come from the kid and his dad themselves. The reason is that anything they allege against dad is inextricably tied in with the actions of the kid. The policy said it excluded "bodily injury or property damages arising out of . . . violation of any criminal law for which any insured is convicted.” The kid is "any insured" and there's no case against dad that's completely independent (therefore not "arising out of") of the act that's excluded.
I know, TMI. Wake up and read the rest now.
Okay, I'm not generally fond of Rehka, but ya gotta love a beagle.
Star porn: "SPACE.com is reporting on the first optical afterglow ever detected from a short-duration (milliseconds) Gamma-Ray Burst. The GRB signals the birth of a black hole resulting from a merger between two neutron stars. Theory had predicted the whole thing, which was all spotted this morning by NASA's Swift satellite and ground-based observatories, thanks to an automated email system that notifies astronomers worldwide."
Of course, the very first commenter stole my obvious joke: "The Gamma ray burst was determined to emitted from a very large cigarette lighter igniting a very, very large cigarette. SETI recorded the first successfully detected extraterrestrial broadcast of a message, which they believe was "Was it good for you, too?" Bachelor and bachelorette scientists around the world are extremely puzzeled and have few clues as to what it all means."
Eat fat to lose fat, huh? Sounds like my kind of diet.
Did any of you sci-fi people catch this bogus allegation of a correlation between Star Trek and pedophilia? I'm not even fond of the corrected version - that it's just sci-fi in general.
That's like saying there's a correlation between reading romance novels and wearing high-heeled shoes. The big audience for romance novels is women. Most people who wear high-heeled shoes are also women. So one somehow causes the other? You should stay out of shoe stores if you don't want to promote the sappy romance novel industry? WTF?
The rest of the article, by the way, is quite disturbing and deserves to be considered apart from the annoying sci-fi claim.
They're trying to trace a little girl: "She is perhaps 12 now, her hair still light blond, but she doesn't smile anymore. Over the last three years, she has appeared in 200 explicit photos that have become highly coveted collectibles for pedophiles trolling the Internet. They have watched her grow up online — the hair getting longer, the look in her eyes growing more distant."
They've got a place - most of the photos are in Disney World. Cleverly, they got that by erasing the girl from the pictures and posting the room interiors on a kind of wanted poster.
But the leads have stopped.
They want to release her face in a sort of wanted poster in an attempt to find and rescue her. But besides the usual privacy issues, releasing the sanitized photo could put the child in incredible danger from her abuser.
Wow.
If you do the prayer thing, you might add a special one for this anonymous little girl.
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