the tindog coffeehouse

A very sick (to put it mildly) Austrian man was found to have kept his daughter captive in his basement for 24 years, raping her repeatedly and fathering 7 children by her… all without his wife (her mother) knowing about it, even though she lived upstairs the whole time.

When I first read this story, it made my physically sick to my stomach, as it did for many I’m sure. The first question that comes to mind is “Why?” but then comes the second question: “How?”

Well, Gizmodo has published a diagram of the basement prison along with a few photos and a description of it:

Fritzl was a retired electrical engineer who used his skills to construct a basement dungeon that measured less than six feet high in some areas with a total living space composed of three “cells” measuring around 650 square feet in total. In order to prevent his family living on the outside from gaining access to the room, Fritzl constructed a gigantic 660 lb. concrete door fitted with an electronic lock behind a shelf in his workshop. The lock could only be opened by a remote control that he carried with him at all times. It wasn’t until the 19-year-old fell gravely ill that Fritzl sought medical attention and was subsequently exposed.

Ars Technica is reporting that in today’s Pennsylvania Democratic primary “over 85 percent of PA voters will vote on paperless touchscreen machines that are hackable, failure-prone, and fundamentally unauditable.”

They go on to quote numbers from the Bradblog site showing just how widespread the problem is.  For example, “51 counties will vote on the infamous iVotronic touchscreen from ES&S. This is the same model that brought us the Florida 13 controversy that ultimately resulted in Florida scrapping touchscreens altogether.”

Worse, Ars points out that House Republicans blocked an attempt earlier in the year to address the problem, and President Bush spoke out against the bill on “fiscal grounds.”

I’ve touched on this issue before, at the time of the New Hampshire primary.  What’s really frustrating is how clearly flawed these machines are and yet how reluctant the state and federal governments are to fix the problem.  I remember the public outcries in 2000 over the voting mess in Florida, but here we are 8 years later and nothing has changed except for the medium used to cast the vote.

The Consumerist has posted a great explanation of how the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 led to the subprime mortgage disaster we see today.

The act, passed in 1933 in direct response to the factors that led to the Great Depression, provided several reforms, including establishing the FDIC and authorizing the Fed to regulate interest rates in savings accounts. The act also prohibited commercial banks from merging with investment banks. (Wikipedia article here.)

In 1999 the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was passed, which repealed the prohibition on commercial and investment bank mergers. As a result (per The Consumerist):

Now, on the one side they could sell mortgages to homeowners, and then invent fancy investment structures which they sold on Wall Street. Because they were “covered” on both ends, banks felt free to sell increasingly dicey mortgages, just so long as another sucker was picking up the garbage. This sucker was picking it up because he had a plan to repackage it and sell it to another sucker, and so on. Eventually we end up with no-doc stated income interest-only option-ARM no money down mortgages being repackaged as “sound investments” being sold as “stable assets” for city pension plans to park their money in.

Footnotes: As the comments in the Consumerist post point out, John McCain voted for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, and one of the authors of the bill, Phil Gramm, is McCain’s chief economic advisor. And another commenter (quoting Bloomberg) pointed out that Barack Obama had said that Glass-Steagall should not be restored.

A new study indicates that divorced and single parents are costing U.S. taxpayers about $112 billion a year.

Scafidi’s calculations were based on the assumption that households headed by a single female have relatively high poverty rates, leading to higher spending on welfare, health care, criminal justice and education for those raised in the disadvantaged homes. The $112 billion estimate includes the cost of federal, state and local government programs, and lost tax revenue at all levels of government.

So it really does take a village to raise a child! (Or at least the village’s taxes.)

As reported on Ars Technica, the National Motorists Association has compiled numerous reports from cities around the country (including Dallas and Lubbock) caught shortening yellow lights below the recommended time limit in cases where those intersections contain red-light cameras. It’s implied that these cities are shortening the yellow lights on purpose as a way to increase traffic violations and therefore increase revenue from tickets issued to red-light runners.

In Dallas:

The city’s second highest revenue producing camera, for example, was located at the intersection of Greenville Avenue and Mockingbird Lane. It issued 9407 tickets worth $705,525 between January 1 and August 31, 2007. At the intersections on Greenville Avenue leading up to the camera intersection, however, yellows are at least 3.5 or 4.0 seconds in duration, but the ticket-producing intersection’s yellow stands at just 3.15 seconds. That is 0.35 seconds shorter than TxDOT’s recommended bare minimum. Dallas likewise installed the cameras at locations with existing short yellow times. A total of twenty-one camera intersections in Dallas had yellow times below TxDOT’s bare minimum recommended amount.

Ironic, then, that Dallas and some other cities are scaling back or discontinuing their red-light cameras because they’re unprofitable. (Maybe they didn’t shorten the yellow lights enough!)  Lubbock canceled their right-led cameras altogether after rear-end collisions increased in those intersections. (D’oh!)

Personally, I don’t agree with them.  I’m all for public safety, but as you can see, the cameras quickly become more about money than safety.  And as the National Motorists Association site pointed out, simply increasing the yellow light duration can decrease violations and therefore decrease collisions.  But then that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?

This is cool. Or scary. But mainly cool. (As long as it doesn’t take out my DirecTV service.)

Via Gizmodo, the European Space Agency has released images of the approximately 6000 satellites and countless other man-made debris currently in orbit around the earth.

Yes, we knew that there was a lot of crap out there, but not to this extent. According to the ESA, this is really bad news and urgent measures are needed. Explosions in space are not disastrous on their own, but because of the aftermath. One example: a geostationary satellite travels at 6,213 miles per hour. If it explodes, all the debris stays near the orbit, forming a cloud around the Earth within a few days….

As one commenter pointed out, the objects in the images aren’t to scale, so they are a little misleading. But that still doesn’t detract from the danger all this space trash poses to operational satellites or astronauts. (Dangerous or not, though, it is still kinda cool. Right?)

It’s been a very draining week in more ways than one.

At work, we’ve had two UPS units fail in our server room. One of them, deployed before I took over support for that group, backs up a file and print server. During the storms that crashed through the area the other night, the building temporarily lost power and the server went down, and it was down for about 5 hours before I could get to work and bring it back online. As a result, I have to go in on Sunday morning and replace that unit and another similar one with units that have a higher capacity.

The other failed UPS was a telco-owned unit that backs up an IMUX. I opened the door to the server room earlier to the horrific smell of ozone (smells like sulfur). At first I didn’t know what it was, and my initial thought was, “Oh, crap! What did I do?” A tech was eventually able to get out to replace the batteries but not before they stunk up the whole office and a rumor had spread that the server room had caught on fire. (Hopefully that rumor doesn’t make it on to my performance review.) Even though everything is fine now, I’m still feeling nauseous from inhaling all the fumes.

Also related to the recent storms, our home Internet service has been out for two days. Very frustrating, but at least we didn’t get the kind of property damage so many others did. I guess I would rather trade losing my roof for the relative minor inconvenience of being without Internet service.

But I’ve also just been really wiped out this week personally. For the past few days, I’ve had no energy and admittedly have been quite irritable. It’s also been a difficult week at work, and the storms the other night certainly didn’t help things.

I’m looking forward to getting some well-needed sleep and hopefully next week won’t be quite so turbulent.

Researchers in Geneva, Switzerland, will soon be operating a new particle accelerator in hopes of finding evidence of the Higgs boson (also referred to as the “God particle”), a subatomic element which may explain how atoms have mass.

Nobel laureate Leon Lederman has dubbed the theoretical boson “the God particle” because its discovery could unify understanding of particle physics and help humans “know the mind of God.”

So, what does it mean if they find evidence of the “God particle”? What if they don’t?

I’m reminded of an old song by Christian band The Choir, “Children of Time”:

Columbus sailed across the sea
To trouble our theology
What goes up still comes down
But where is Heaven when the world is round?
The cosmonauts were first in space
To look for God and find no trace
With a killer cloud of reason for rhyme
The devil enlightens the children of time

UT Austin has unveiled it’s new petawatt laser, “the highest powered laser in the world”, telling the previous record holder, the University of Michigan’s wimpy 300 terawatt version, “Don’t mess with Texas… or we’ll nuke your ass.” (To paraphrase.)

So what do you do with a laser that massive? Use it to justify hiking tuition rates of course!

Left: A UT spokesman shows off a model of the “laser” at a press conference.

Well, I’ve been using my company-issued CrackBerry for a few days now, and if I thought it would allow me to finally retire my beloved Sony Clie PDA, I was wrong.

Traditionally, I’ve used the PDA to sync Outlook data (contacts, calendar, etc.) between my home and work computers. The problem with the BlackBerry is, I can’t really sync it with Outlook on my home computer. Oh, I tried. And… it didn’t go so well. Screwed up my Outlook contacts and part of my calendar on my home computer and really screwed up the Blackberry. I had to wipe the Blackberry and have my corporate Blackberry server account reset, then redo all the settings. What a pain!

Now, I know what you’re saying. Yes, I’m sure there is a way to sync the BlackBerry with a corporate Exchange mailbox and a personal PST file. Well, phooey! I don’t care. It’s too much trouble. My handy-dandy PDA works just fine for that function, albeit with less-than-stellar battery life.

And yes, I know I have other choices. For example, I could forgo Outlook altogether in favor of web-based email services such those from Google or Yahoo. I could use the portable version of Thunderbird (at least for the contacts part). I could even use a web-based service such as AirSet to sync Outlook over the Internet. So, yes, I do have other alternatives. I just don’t like any of them. None of them do what I need to do as easily as my old PDA. The closest choice would be AirSet, but I can automatically rule that one out because of the bandwidth requirements, which wouldn’t fly with my Big Brother employer.

So at least for now, I’ll keep my Clie on hand to sync between my home and work computers. It’s not a perfect solution, but as long as the battery is charged, it’s a reliable one.

– “Mommy, can I please ride the subway all by myself?”
– “Sure, my little explorer, anything you want.”

Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.

No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. And no, I didn’t trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn’t do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, “Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I’ll abduct this adorable child instead.”

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

OK, it’s one thing to want to teach your kid to be independent, but it’s quite another to drop him off in the middle of friggin’ New York City with 20 bucks and a map. (Notice how the mom seemed more worried about losing her phone than losing her child.)

Megan is about to turn 7, and she’s been begging for a real cell phone for at least a year. And our answer? “No!” Why is that so hard for parents to say? Are we stunting her personal growth by setting reasonable age-appropriate limits? I guess in this lady’s opinion we are.

The grass is green (well, our grass is green; the neighbors’ not so much) and our little oak tree made it through its first blustery winter. All is right with the world.