Eideard

I categorized this post under crime, health and politics. The first two are obvious: illegal addiction produces crime; addiction of most kinds produces ill health. Politics – because political hacks both sides of the pond consider the first two questions only for what they mean when it comes to reelection.

Alcohol is the most dangerous drug in the UK by a considerable margin, beating heroin and crack cocaine into second and third place, according to an authoritative study published today which will reopen calls for the drugs classification system to be scrapped and a concerted campaign launched against drink.

Led by the sacked government drugs adviser David Nutt with colleagues from the breakaway Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, the study says that if drugs were classified on the basis of the harm they do, alcohol would be class A, alongside heroin and crack cocaine.

Today’s paper, published by the respected Lancet medical journal, will be seen as a challenge to the government to take on the fraught issue of the relative harms of legal and illegal drugs, which proved politically damaging to Labour…

Today’s study offers a more complex analysis that seeks to address the 2007 criticisms. It examines nine categories of harm that drugs can do to the individual “from death to damage to mental functioning and loss of relationships” and seven types of harm to others. The maximum possible harm score was 100 and the minimum zero.

Overall, alcohol scored 72 – against 55 for heroin and 54 for crack. The most dangerous drugs to their individual users were ranked as heroin, crack and then crystal meth. The most harmful to others were alcohol, heroin and crack in that order…

The authors write: “Our findings lend support to previous work in the UK and the Netherlands, confirming that the present drug classification systems have little relation to the evidence of harm. They also accord with the conclusions of previous expert reports that aggressively targeting alcohol harm is a valid and necessary public health strategy.”

Our governments – and the parliamentary hacks fiddling with the same questions – only seem to care about religious morality. Not the value of that morality. Though a far cry from systematic examinations of ethics, there is an odd bit of value in some of the outdated maundering. But, what counts about morality to our politicians is how many votes will it get at election time.

Scientists have offered yet another reasoned analysis to politicians. What’s the likelihood of anyone listening?

Julien Barreaux, 20, told police he wanted to see his rival player “wiped out” after his character in the game Counter-Strike died in a virtual knife fight.

A court in Cambrai, northern France, heard how Barreaux plotted revenge for seven months after the online “killing” last November.

He then located the victim, named only as Mikhael, several miles from his home.

When the man answered the door, he plunged a kitchen knife into his chest, missing his heart by less than an inch, a police officer told the court…

Barreaux was jailed for two years for causing grievous bodily harm, and ordered to undergo psychiatric tests and anger management therapy. Judge Alexiane Potel told him: “You are a menace to society. I am frankly terrified of the disproportionate reaction you could have if someone looked at you the wrong way in the street.”

Put him in the army. Shove him out onto a real battlefield.

Forget about him.

Martin Amis told the Guardian: “What we need to recognise is that certain lives fall into the negative, where pain hugely dwarfs those remaining pleasures that you may be left with. Geriatric science has been allowed to take over and, really, decency roars for some sort of correction.” He said his comments were meant to be “satirical”, rather than “glib”.

His stance on euthanasia had hardened since the deaths of his stepfather, Lord Kilmarnock, the former SDP peer and writer, in March aged 81, and his friend Dame Iris Murdoch, the novelist, in 1999, aged 79, two years after her husband revealed that she was suffering from Alzheimer’s.

“I increasingly feel that religion is so deep in our constitution and in our minds and that is something we should just peel off,” he said. “Of course euthanasia is open to abuse, in that the typical grey death will be that of an old relative whose family gets rid of for one reason or another, and they’ll say ‘he asked me to do it’, or ‘he wanted to die’, Amis said. “That’s what we will have to look out for. Nonetheless, it is something we have to make some progress on…”

In his interview, Amis said his step father had died “very horribly”. “He always thought he was going to get better. But he didn’t get better and I think the denial of death is a great curse.”

He said Iris Murdoch, whom he had known for a very long time , was “a friend, I loved her. She was wonderful. I remember talking to her just as it started happening, and she said, ‘I’ve entered a dark place’. That famous quote. Awareness of loss is gone, the track is gone. You don’t know the day you’ve spent watching Teletubbies; it just vanished.”

The pro-euthanasia pressure group Dignity in Dying said: “Like all too many people in the UK, Martin Amis has witnessed the bad death of a loved one.” But, it added: “Dignity in Dying’s campaign for a change in the law is not about the introduction of ‘euthanasia booths’, nor is it in anticipation of a ‘silver tsunami’. Our campaign is about allowing dying adults who have mental capacity a compassionate choice to end their suffering, subject to strict legal safeguards.”

Hear, hear.

I also suggest checking out the website of the Dignity in Dying campaign if you’re in the UK. In the U.S., there is Death with Dignity. Pretty much spot on.

Virginia Hernandez Lopez admitted to knocking back two shots of tequila with Sprite chasers on an August night in Julian, Calif., a couple of years ago. But she said she was not drunk when her Ford Explorer collided with an oncoming Toyota pickup truck later that night, killing its driver.

In May, a California state appeals court affirmed Ms. Lopez’s conviction for vehicular manslaughter. Her blood-alcohol level two hours after the accident was, according to a report presented to the jury, just over the legal limit of .08 percent.

But the appeals court reconsidered the case after a decision in June from the United States Supreme Court that prohibited prosecutors from introducing crime lab reports without testimony from the analysts who prepared them.

The appeals court reversed Ms. Lopez’s conviction, saying prosecutors had violated her constitutional right to confront witnesses against her by failing to put the analyst who prepared the blood-alcohol report on the stand.

But now, in an unusual move, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on Jan. 11 in a new case that raises questions about how lower courts may carry out its six-month-old precedent. Many state attorneys general and prosecutors are hoping the court will overrule its decision in the earlier case, Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, before it can take root, saying it is a costly, disruptive and dangerous misstep.

“Already data and anecdotal evidence are demonstrating an overwhelming negative impact,” a friend-of-the-court brief submitted by 26 attorneys general last month said. The decision, they said, “is already proving unworkable.”

RTFA. Prosecutors and defense lawyers have the world of differences on the question – as you might presume.

The article doesn’t mention what Ms. Lopez had to say about the constitutional rights of Allan Wolowsky, the driver she killed.

Federal authorities are investigating the loss of a computer hard drive containing a huge quantity of personal information from Bill Clinton’s presidency in an apparent security breach at a National Archives record center.

Government officials briefed on the matter said the breach, which was confirmed in April, involved the loss of a drive containing a terabyte of computerized data, which could include millions of individual pieces of information, including personal information about one of then Vice President Al Gore’s three daughters.

The missing information included Social Security numbers and home addresses of numerous people who visited or worked at the White House, along with other material related to security procedures used by the Secret Service at the White House in the Clinton years.

The National Archives and Records Administration said Tuesday in a statement that the agency “takes very seriously the loss of an external hard drive that contained copies of electronic storage tapes from the executive office of the president of the Clinton administration…”

Other officials said it was not known whether the hard drive had been stolen or accidentally misplaced. They added that it did not appear that classified information related to national security was taken but that analysts had not yet completed their review of the vast quantity of information stored on the drive…

It was not clear how anyone could have removed presidential computer records from the highly secured archive in suburban Maryland, although officials said the hard drive was removed from a storage area to a work space that was accessible to many archive employees and visitors.

There is no patch for stupidity. Mayhap I’m too brusque; but, someone in that neck of the prairie gets paid big bucks to guarantee crap like this doesn’t happen.

UPDATE: Hey – they’ve added a $50,000 reward!

iPhone Pong

Here are seven clear signs you might have a work spouse:

1. You depend on a particular co-worker for office supplies, snacks and aspirin.

2. There are inside jokes that you and a specific co-worker share.

3. You can be bluntly honest with this person about his or her appearance, hygiene or hair (and vice versa). You’re comfortable enough to point out that the other’s hair is sticking up — or that someone’s fly is down.

4. When something eventful happens at work, this co-worker is the first person you seek out for a de-briefing.

5. At breakfast, lunch and coffee breaks, your closest co-worker knows what to order for you and how you like your coffee (and vice versa).

6. You and your co-worker can finish each other’s sentences.

7. Someone in your office knows almost as much about your personal life as your best friend or real-life spouse does.

I know people who think they have software that fills this function for them.

Fraudsters took money from French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s personal account after managing to get hold of his bank details, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Sarkozy complained to police in September after “small amounts” were stolen from his account, the Journal du Dimanche newspaper said, quoting sources close to the investigation.

Sarkozy’s office confirmed the details, the paper said. Criminal and financial fraud squads and a prosecutor in the Paris suburb of Nanterre were investigating the case.

Wonder what Sarkozy considers to be a “small amount”?

AT&T cell tower truck

Verizon and AT&T have both located temporary cell sites near presidential-candidate John McCain’s Arizona ranch, to better connect the good Senator, his supporters and security staff.

The news comes from the Washington Post, which established that Cindy McCain, the senator’s wife, offered some land on the ranch to Verizon early last year in the hope that it would put a cell there. Verizon got pretty far with that request, but ended up deciding the planning requirements were too onerous, and the return on investment too nebulous.

But come June the operator was wheeling in a temporary base station to provide coverage, apparently responding to a request from the security services.

In July AT&T noticed, and figured it’d better get in there too, so brought in its own temporary base station. So both networks now provide superb coverage to the McCain ranch…

None of this would matter if McCain wasn’t so closely involved with both Verizon, AT&T, and US regulator the FCC. Five of his campaign officials have worked as lobbyists for Verizon, and Verizon employees have stumped up $155K to help fund the campaign as well as $1.3m raised by the chief executive and company lobbyists. AT&T is even more McCain-centric, with the executive vice president raising $2.3m with the help of AT&T lobbyists, and staff chucking $325K of their own money into the pot.

McCain himself is member of the Senate commerce committee, which oversees the FCC.

But, then – since John McCain is a “maverick” I guess we can trust that he’s not influenced in the least by the butt-kissing treatment he’s getting from AT&T and Verizon. Eh?

Just like flat-screen televisions, cell phones and computers, global positioning system (GPS) technology is becoming something people can’t imagine living without. So if such a ubiquitous system were to come under attack, would we be ready?

It’s an uncomfortable question, but one that a group of Cornell researchers have considered with their research into “spoofing” GPS receivers.

GPS is a U.S. navigation system of more than 30 satellites circling Earth twice a day in specific orbits, transmitting signals to receivers on land, sea and in air to calculate their exact locations. “Spoofing,” a not-quite-technical term first coined in the radar community, is the transmission of fake GPS signals that receivers accept as authentic ones…

To demonstrate how a navigation device can be fooled, the researchers, led by Cornell professors Paul Kintner and Mark Psiaki, programmed a briefcase-size GPS receiver, used in ionospheric research, to send out fake signals.

They…described how the “phony” receiver could be placed in the proximity of a navigation device, where it would track, modify, and retransmit the signals being transmitted from the GPS satellite constellation. Gradually, the “victim” navigation device would take the counterfeit navigation signals for the real thing.

By demonstrating the vulnerability of receivers to spoofing, the researchers believe they can help devise methods to guard against such attacks.

They took the time to address their concerns in a scientific manner, responsible enough to demonstrate techniques in a close-to-real-world environment. Noting, btw, that they can overcome the several countermeasures already suggested by the Pentagon.

The Fox Business Network and The Wall Street Journal, two siblings in the News Corp. family, are contractually restricted in what resources they can share. But they have taken another step toward family unity by announcing that the personal technology columnist Walt Mossberg will be a regular contributor to the upstart cable channel.

The announcement makes Mossberg, who writes two columns for The Wall Street Journal, the most prominent person from the newspaper to contribute to the cable channel, created by News Corp. last October, about the same time that it was buying Dow Jones.

A 15-year contract that extends until 2012 between CNBC, the dominant business channel, and The Journal prevents many Journal reporters from appearing on Fox Business programs…

“As long as we stay away from branded, regularly scheduled segments of business news, we’re safe,” Kevin Magee, an executive vice president at Fox News, said in an interview. “Breaking news is fine and nonbusiness news is fine.”

It’s beginning to look as if Murdoch realize the “fair and balanced” crap act needs to be abandoned to grow to an all-encompassing market. You can’t count on selling sophisticated biz news to NASCAR reality junkies. And as business TV goes, FBN is a mediocrity.