Not news

Most of this stuff is old, but some new and some new to me

I don’t put stuff here often, but most of the time it’s a quick note from the news or even sometimes I put stuff here that i’m experimenting with.

You broke the law, but we won't tell you why

Should you have to obey a law which is kept secret from you?

This is another interesting article from Papers Please. I simply cannot understand why a people who reward individuality and applaude freedom put up with this kind of treatment. The rules we obey just don’t make sense. We cannot take a bottle of water or lipstick or toothpaste on the plane. But, somehow we are allowed to take a laptop.

The law is not for sale

Supremes say the law is public domain

On 27 April 2020, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the state of Georgia can’t claim copyright over its laws. Many companies make a fortune printing legal codes, providing online access the the laws, and they don’t want to give up that gravy train.

Conference Call Bingo

How long have we been doing conference calls? ... Can you ... me ...?

So, you ever sit in a conference call and get super annoyed, because Bob can’t work the mute button or Suzy is trying to talk over the traffic in her convertible or John is presenting his second monitor, which coincidently has a photo collection that’s quite embarrassing. It happens every call. So I decided to make a game of it and you can play along. I did this silliness as an exercise to teach myself how to read and manipulate an XML file using JavaScript, then load them into a web page with formatting controlled by CSS.

Swine flu

This is just another influenza

The only weird thing is that it started (or got caught) in Mexico instead of Asia. Pigs don’t cause the flu. Most modern influenzas breed in pigs (for at least part of their evolutions). An average influenza normally infects 5-15% of the population. An average influenza outbreak normally kills 5-10% of infected individuals (or 0.25-0.1 percent of the population). In the US alone, 30,000 to 50,000 people per year die of influenza.