Vive la France (or not)

I have found the really and truly stupidest lawsuit of all time. Actually, someone from Groklaw found it and and i'm blatantly doing some cut 'n pasting.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald [sub req'd], a transit company is suing a group of ten cleaning women in France, because they are car pooling instead of continuing to use their service. The Guardian has the story too. The number comes from this French account. The transit company lawyers call that "unfair and parasitical competition." They are asking for damages, including fines and -- believe it or not -- confiscation of the women's cars.

I love this quote from the Guardian:

"Using our cars is quicker and at least twice as cheap. And on the bus we didn't have the right to eat or even to speak," said Martine Bourguignon.

Wow, you dont' have the right to speak? No wonder the women are carpooling. ;)

Wtf is going on with our society? Monopolies are using to courts to maintain their monopolies... Kinda like Microsoft using SCO to go after the GPL....

Real Life Tron...

I've seen a lot of weird game/reality crossovers ( i.e. real life monopoly in London), but this one is the coolest.

Remember the movie Tron? the first big CG movie?

Turns out some geeks managed to re-create the light-cycles game from Tron, but for real life.

That's really cool.

With some minor mods, one could do it with motorcycles....

Hmmmm

Arcola's Angels

So yesterday a couple of us from my station, along with a whole slew of 1st responders from DC and Maryland got together in downtown DC for a photoshoot.

We were part of what will be a poster campaign for the Emergency Preparedness Initiative

The Emergency Preparedness Initiative will be launching a national awareness campaign in September as part of National Preparedness Month. Part of this campaign will include a poster that will include first responders and people with disabilities photographed together, as "partners".
There will be approx 100,000 posters sent across the country. Pretty cool!

The photographer was a guy called Earl Dotter who is apparently a rather famous photographer. I’ll post some pics when I get copies from the shoot. It was pretty damned fun then.

Special thanks to Jessica and Kymber who came with me – we needed more 1st responder chicks in uniforms.

Gang 9

it seems that a bunch of us from my firestation have bikes. So our chief thought that we should pose for a picture. So we did. Unfortunately not everyone showed us with their bikes. But this is what we have - oh - click on the pic for a bigger copy.

and yes, i know there are more people than bikes, but the other guys we kind enough to help us clean the engine and such, and we're all on the same team etc etc - we took the pic together.

Notional Identity

The 4th of July just passed – a big celebration of freedom and independence. As a dual citizen of Canada and the UK, living in the US during their Independence Day is always interesting. But hey, I live here, I love it, and as they say in those tacky Louis Lamour westerns, “I ride for the brand."

From what i remember about history, the American Revolution was about freedom. So I got to thinking – what is freedom to an American?

Well in the US – there are 3 basic documents that hold the tenets of freedom:

United States Constitution
Declaration of Independence
Bill of Rights

There is a deeper question here though – Freedom to do what? Or Freedom from whom?

I personally believe that a person should be free to do as they desire, so long as their actions don't impede the freedoms of another. In other words – what I do in my own home is my business. Most Americans would agree with this philosophy I think (despite the legislation on drugs and such – but that's a topic for another time).

So if what I do in my home is my own business, this begs the question then Freedom from Whom?

The obvious answer is freedom from government intervention. The American Revolution was also based on the Great Awakening and ironically the Enlightenment. In many ways, these were mutually exclusive belief systems, but then this is the idea of freedom right?

Either way, the concept was one of freedom from Tyranny.

So what's Tyranny?

In the original Greek meaning "tyrant" carried no ethical censure, a tyrant was anyone who overturned the established government of a city-state, usually through the use of popular support, to establish himself as dictator, or the heir of such a person.

But today it seems to mean:

The term now carries connotations of a cruel despot who places their own interests or the interests of a small oligarchy over the best interests of the general population of the state over which they govern.
Upon reading that definition – it got me to thinking about some of the issues that are going on right now that deal with freedom.

For example, back in the UK, there's a lot of debate going on about the UK's National Identity Card programme. (More information is available here, and opposition information here)

Aside from the huge cost (according to the LSE it will cost approx $500USD per ID card – and each person pays for their card.

Why is a National ID Card a good idea?

ID Cards don't prevent terrorism
ID Cards don't prevent Identity Theft
ID Cards aren't cheap
ID Cards can be forged
ID Cards make us less secure

Here is some some funny flash animation that also helps explain the issues.

What does this have to do with those us of living the US? Tons actually.

A US National ID card was recently slipped into a “must pass" appropriations bill. This means that soon a US National ID card is coming to you.

So looking at the big picture...

National ID Cards
warrant-free 'sneak and peek' law enforcement investigations
road surveillance cameras being installed everywhere
clandestine biometric surveillance
Patriot Act II – who needs judicial overview anyway?
Echelon
Carnivore
RFID Tags in passports
No Fly Lists
RFID Tags in consumer goods


Hmm... There's a pattern here, but I can't seem to find it.