You can tell it's Taser

With the U.K. government poised to arm police with Taser stun guns despite the fact that they killed seventy people in North America last year, I cast my mind back to a recent story from Florida, where two children were stunned.
The first was a six year old who had a piece of broken glass when he was at school and threatened to cut his leg with it, apparantly. So the policeman stunned him. The second was a twelve year old girl skipping school was picked up by a police officer, but ran off. When she ran across the road, the officer stunned her for her own safety. Given that a Taser can immobilize you from seven metres away with 50,000 volts of electricity, I wonder just how safe it is, even with police guidelines in this country that allow you to shoot someone dead for carrying a table leg and go on strike if you're suspended for your actions on full pay.
As the mother of the first child points out: "If there's three officers, it's nothing to tell a 6-year-old holding a glass, if you feel threatened, 'Hey, here's a piece of candy, hey, here's a toy. Let the glass go,'". But police may feel, as in this case, that using the gun is the only option.

Individual biologies

As I learn to live with cancer -- there are some tough lessons on this syllabus -- it becomes increasingly clear that for all I discover about tumours and treatments, this objective approach will tell me little about how my own cancer might be cured. Because when you're looking for a cure, it's not about a given percentage success rate for a particular therapy or trial (especially for so rare a form of tumour as mine); the individual biology of your cancer is what counts.
My oncologist characterizes the idea that if 70% of treatments work then you have that chance of success as a neanderthal approach, and I can see his point. For example, it's no use putting patients through the most effective radiotherapy if they have lots of small metastases: it would take years to target all these mini tumours, during which period there would be further spread. The reason why people are put through mass courses of chemotherapy is not because the oncologist knows that it will work for those patients, but because it's statistically successful. Oncologists need more time with each patient to determine the correct solution: therapy shouldn't be a mass market but a heavily tailored solution.

Behind in my blogging

My recent reticence has not been entirely on purpose, or through lack of things to pontificate over. It is due to a number of factors:

1. I've been really busy at work, preparing presentations in addition to my normal job and trying to get a contract out of the HR dude.
2. I've been really busy outside work, Christmas shopping mostly.
3. I've had a lot on my plate with hospital visits; though results have turned out to be very good, it was touch and go for the last few months.
4. My bloody PDA has broken down again. It may fix itself (has done so before) but I expect I'm going to need a new one.It will need the following:
   1. PIM (address book, calendar, memos, expenses)
   2. a decent OS, onto which I can load applications like AvantGo (or some other Plucker) and Vindigo;
   3. an application that allows me to edit Word and Excel files on the PDA itself, and ideally Powerpoint too;
   4. preferably Wi-Fi with a web browser;
   5. a flash memory card from which I can play MP3s;
   6. some kind of password manager.

Any ideas? Comment them down here...

Time for (inter)action

Some quick links today, for you to interact with:

• Geek off;
• Work off your frustrations;
• Drown your sorrows.

Patent polling

The Polish government is refusing to support an EU directive on software patents, ZD Net reports. This follows on from Microsoft, Oracle and others implementing ridiculous patents. The news comes as Microsoft chief executive, Steve Ballmer -- aka scourge of open source -- is threatening to sue anyone who uses software where you can double-click. Good to see that the latest members of the EU are standing up to those who claim everything is already their intellectual property.

Stuck for something to do tonight?

Take your iPod / mp3 player / Walkman / whatever other mobile music technology you have and get yourself down to Paddington station, where there will be some mobile clubbing tonight!
For more details, go to www.mobile-clubbing.com.

How to win friends and sack people

This is a bit of a fucked company kind of thing. If you're losing £X,000 a month because you engendered a series of mergers and acquisitions without thinking about the pragmatics of how you continue to deliver your service, the easiest way to recoup is to sack the people whose fault it isn't and then implement a restructuring exercise three months later. As part of this restructuring, make half the people who remain renegotiate their contracts.
But the dilemma really comes with who and how you sack. The favourite here seems to be, ditch anyone who has a personality (which at least leaves me safe). Not content with an office devoid of charm, we need to ensure that the staff exhibit similar characteristics. Then as morale plummets, send out an email to the office Christmas party. They led us to the edge of the abyss then took a giant step forward...
The key thing of course, is that this is evolution, not revolution; we will own the company and make it a great place to work. There will be no more corporate clichés... quality will be our buzzword. By the way, we're sacking our tester.

Arafat lacked no bottle

Now you know I'm not one to gossip...
but according to the satirical French paper Le Canard enchaîné, Yasser Arafat suffered a cirrhosis of the liver, which is why cause of death was never reported (according to Le Monde).
This was not caused by alcohol consumption, according to medical sources, but an uninformed public would certainly have drawn that connection. Since Arafat didn't drink, but suffered from lesions in the liver, there were suspicions among Palestinians that he had been poisoned. There was no evidence of this according to the paper: causes of death were multiple and complex. Yet explaining these medical nuances to a world ripe with prejudice was untenable: the Middle East is not ready for truth.

What blogs are for...

Joachim du Bellay, French Renaissance poet, was celebrated for his self-consoling verse, particularly Les Regrets:

Je me plains à mes vers, si j'ay quelque regret,
Je me ris avec eulx, je leur dy mon secret,
Comme estans de mon coeur les plus seurs secretaires.

He used his poetry as keeper of his innermost secrets, then published it to his literate public.
And so it is with blogs, as we relate what secret cause we have for joy or sorrow to anyone who would read them. Such moments particularly materialize after company meetings that refer to restructuring and diminishing roles. I wait -- with not too baited breath but a very healthy dose of cynicism -- for the outcome of this all, which I will divulge to my own keepers of secrets before long.

Robo-roach

Boffins in francophone Europe have developed a robot cockroach to rid households of such pests; is killing these bugs insecticide?