Tag: crime

tech

From the "You Can Run But You Can't Hide" Dept

Posted on

It was only a matter of time: Digital wanted signs have arrived and are already proving to be quite effective. One guy in Alabama was on the run for 10 days – the police had no leads except for his photo. So, the police posted his photo to a digital billboard which acted as a giant digi “Wanted!” poster and low and behold, the fugitive turned himself in a day later. It seems he felt that with so many people driving by his face all day long, someone was bound to recognize him and better he turn himself in than have the police break down his door.
This is just the first step – the next is when we all have RFID chips under our skin. I say convicts will start to get “chipped” in the next 5 – 10 years, ACLU be damned.

politics

In Memorium: Liviu Librescu

Posted on

The sad, tragic and horrible irony of how a Holocaust survivor, a man who then survived Communism in Romania, died in America by a hand gun is not lost on me nor has it been lost on the rest of the world. Professor Librescu died after he threw his body in front of the door to his classroom to allow his students to escape through the windows when the VT gunman approached. At the memorial service, President Bush said, “We take strength from his example” and hundreds of blogs and news outlets are writing about him. I’m just one of them.
Jason Linkins’s post on DCist titled Requiem For a Heavyweight is an especially great post which I really suggest you read in its entirety. He details Prof. Librescu’s life and how “it is an extraordinary thing, then, that a man whose life was mainly defined through escape and survival faced the unfolding terror of yesterday’s killings in an altogether different way.”
The most touching point is at the end where he notes that “within hours of yesterday’s shootings, it is reported that the inbox of Liviu Librescu’s wife began to fill with email, all from thankful students whose lives he saved. In this small way, it can be said that Liviu Librescu has survived even this.” It has been reported that all of students wound up safely escaping. Who knows how many would have died if he did not act as he did.
In summation, Paul at Powerline puts it even more simply: “More than sixty years after his liberation, the rescued became the rescuer.”
Todah (thank you) Professor. Todah.

ramblings

News of the Day

Posted on

Note to self: when driving around with tons of illegal drugs in the car – drive carefully! Check out the news article below from the good people at the AP (the reporters group, not the supermarket chain which utilizes an ampersand). In one word, it’s ridiculous!
Car with pot in trunk hits state trooper: 54-year-old caught with 43 pounds of marijuana after South Carolina crash
The Associated Press (Updated: 12:21 p.m. ET March 6, 2007)
ORANGEBURG, S.C. – It might have been one of the easiest drug busts in the history of the South Carolina Highway Patrol: A car with 43 pounds of marijuana crashed into a trooper’s cruiser, authorities said.
The easy bust happened after two patrolmen parked their cars in each lane of northbound Interstate 95 near Santee early Sunday morning following a series of wrecks that had tied up traffic, Highway Patrol Capt. Chris Williamson said. A Chevrolet Malibu going about 70 mph hit one of the cruisers, causing minor injuries to the trooper behind the wheel, Williamson said.
Officers found two large duffel bags in the trunk with 43 pounds of marijuana in plastic bags, worth more than $150,000, Orangeburg County deputy Warren Pendry said. They also found a few marijuana cigarettes and cocaine, Pendry said. The 54-year-old driver from Daytona Beach Shores, Fla., was charged with driving under the influence, possession of cocaine and trafficking marijuana, authorities said.

art

From the Stolen and Found Department

Posted on

“The Scream” can scream publically again in Oslo and every Nowegian can breath a sigh of relief. Not to slight the country but they don’t have that many famous people and Munch is at the top of the list. I read about the heist in the New Yorker and let me tell you, those guards were some incompetant bastards. It was a blackeye on the whole country but all’s well that ends well. After jump, read all about it.
OSLO, Norway (AP) — Police recovered two paintings they believe are the Edvard Munch masterpieces ”The Scream” and ”Madonna,” two years after masked gunmen seized the priceless artworks from an Oslo museum in a bold, daylight raid, authorities announced Thursday.
Both paintings, stolen from the Munch Museum in August 2004, were in better-than-expected condition, police said at a news conference.
”The pictures came into our hands this afternoon after a successful police action,” said Iver Stensrud, head of the police investigation. ”All that remains is an expert examination to confirm with 100 percent certainty, that these are the original paintings. We believe these are the originals,” Stensrud said.
“I saw the paintings myself today, and there was far from the damage that could have been feared,” he said.
They were recovered following the conviction of three suspects in the case in May, an international police hunt and the offer of a nearly $300,000 reward by the City of Oslo, which owns the artworks.
During the hunt for the paintings, Norwegian news media reported that they might have been burned to get rid of evidence.
Stensrud said it was not possible for the news media, or the public, to see the paintings yet. He also refused to discuss the methods or details of the search that led to the stolen artworks.
Munch’s emotionally charged painting style became a major influence in the birth of the 20th-century expressionist movement.
The two paintings recovered Thursday were part of his ”Frieze of Life” series, focusing on sickness, death, anxiety and love. ”The Scream,” which shows a waif-like figure apparently screaming or hearing a scream, has become a modern icon of human anxiety. There are three other versions of the painting.
Munch died in 1944 at the age of 80.

ramblings

I've Got Nothing I Tell You – Nothing!

Posted on

David Copperfield was robbed at gunpoint on Sunday night but “despite being possessed of a large amount of cash, the illusionist showed nothing but empty pockets to armed gunmen who targeted him and two female companions Sunday night in West Palm Beach, Florida, police said.”
What would have been even better is if he made the robbers disappear a la the Statue of Liberty. You can’t make this stuff up. You just can’t…

ramblings

Getcha Scorecard Here!

Posted on

Can’t tell Conspiracy to commit child abduction from attempted lewd act on child under 14 without your scorecard! With less than 30 minutes to go before the Jackson verdict, here is what ever-so-classy CNN has on its website:

sports

Lipso Nava is kicking up Winter Heat

Posted on

I can’t believe that someone has the name Lipso Nava. Not only is there a guy with the name Lipso, but this career minor leaguer is one of the leading batters in Venezuela’s Winter League. If his email address was his first name, first initial of his last name it would be lipson@weird.com. As it is, his name sounds like a family festival I would go to each December or a genetic condition that may be passed from one generation to the next in my family. He is now also my new favorite baseball player on name alone, supplanting JJ Putz, a relief pitcher in the Mariner’s organization.

I first heard of him in an ESPN article about how dangerous Venezuela is for baseball players. “Career minor leaguer Lipso Nava gave himself up for dead when a gun was pressed against his temple by a thief who demanded Nava’s new Hyundai Elantra.” I feel for him and his family, not just because he is my namesake. I’m hoping to meet him one day – hopefully he’ll back in the US soon playing nearby so that I can get a picture, his autograph and who knows, maybe grab a beer with him.

politics

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked

Posted on

Reading this article has further infuriated me – I was pissed off that Kerry threw in the towel and went down without a fight the day after Election Day but now I’m really pissed off. I keep reading more and more info about how the election would have been rigged and while at first I thought it was one or two isolated incidents, now I’m starting to believe a bit in a conspiracy here. Yes, I know its easier to think that “we were hacked” instead of “we lost” but the facts are the facts. After the jump, read an article I grabbed from CNN.com on 11/05/2004 about one such “interesting anomaly.”

Thanks Chris for making my blood boil…

Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County’s unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry’s 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.

State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.

Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result. (Full Ohio results)

The Secretary of State’s Office said Friday it could not revise Bush’s total until the county reported the error.

The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday’s elections. (Touchscreen voting troubles reported)

In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.

In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.

Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board’s Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said.

The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.

Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city’s new “ranked-choice voting,” in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters’ second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren’t eliminated in the first round. (E-vote goes smoothly, but experts skeptical)

When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn’t get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.

“All the information is there,” Arntz said. “It’s just not arriving the way it was supposed to.”

A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem.