marco f dot net

Two videos showing a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer fatally shooting an unarmed, cooperating 22-year-old man have surfaced, thanks to a vigilant teen and an anonymous cameraman.

According to officials, five officers arrived at a subway station around 2 a.m. in response to reports of fighting on a train. Officers handcuffed a group of suspects, and detained the soon-to-be victim, Oscar Grant III.

Source

What the hell is wrong with the cops nowadays? How about "the police is your friend"?

A person close to the investigation told the San Francisco Chronicle that BART officials are looking into the possibility that the officer thought he was firing a Taser and pulled out his gun by mistake.

Okay, if it was a mistake, what kind of moron would make this mistake? And doesn't this also say something about the dangers of these Tasers? Not only directly (people were killed already by this), but also indirectly (supposedly being too similar to a real gun?)

And anyway.. why would you need to either tase or shoot a person that is lying on the ground completely immobilized? By looking at the movie I can only say that those cops were all fat pigs (even the female one) who should lose some weight and grow a brain. Better yet, just shoot them "by accident".

Cold outside! Was -14C last night. Some places report -18!

-- Sent from my iPhone

It's another new year. Happy 2009 to all my Posterous friends and other readers.
Today is also the last day of the (too short) holiday period. Let's try to make the best of the first monday in the new year. Shaking hands, wishing happy newyear.. sigh.

 I'm looking forward to the Macworld Expo which starts tomorrow. The keynote (by Phil Schiller, not Jobs, as you already know) will be tuesday 19.00 CET. Predictions abound. Mostly a new iMac (new CPUs, same look) and possibly a Mac Mini refresh (about time). And an iPhone nano/mini is rumored to be announced to.. available Q2 or Q3 2009. I'm sceptical.
It's time to upgrade my old-ish iMac Core Duo to a new version, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for new iMacs.
Software wise, iLife and iWork need an update as well. I haven't bought iWork08 (I do have 07 though), and am hoping for a new version of either package.

 Will 2009 be a bad year because of the recession going own even further? Will the Obama administration change anything? Or was it all fluff? We'll see, I guess.

 It'll be an interesting year... 2009.

The NY Times has an interesting article about the biggest cashcow for the mobile carriers: SMS messaging, or as it is called in the US: Text messaging.  

I'm surprised the US government hasn't called a stop to the price increase for texting. 20 cents? Rip-off.

In the netherlands, we're "lucky" to have the "OPTA" watchdog. And EU wide there's the Information Society. They act to prevent rip-offs regarding roaming costs.

The big excuse for roaming cost always was that carriers were cross-charging net use to the originating carrier. And the customer has to pay for that of course. The really fun part is that even if the company is the same (e.g. Vodafone), the regional carrier (e.g. VF germany) will charge the other carrier (e.g. VF Netherlands) for net use. Of course this is complete bullshit in the view of "one company".

So the EU commission came up with the following rules, which have to be implemented by July 1st, 2009:

• an SMS message across networks will cost the customer no more than 11 cents. Receiving is free as always.
• More transparency - by July 2010 operators must provide customers with the opportunity to determine in advance how much they want to spend.
• wholesale caps for data roaming. This is your regular web browsing and email traffic over the mobile networks. Thet should not be more as 1 euro per megabyte. Look out: this is the wholesale price, not the end-user price.  

Regular (local) SMS message costs vary per carrier and subscription package. The more you pay for your subscription the "cheaper" the SMS will be. Of course, that's all in the big scheme of rip-offs. There is hardly any cost (and bandwith) involved sending an SMS message, so any cent that is charged for a message is profit. And of course your "unlimited" subscription plan.   

According to the WSJ, it is!

The sales have gone down, and most experts blame it on the price of the console. Which may indeed be the case. Dave Rosenberg at CNet has some more viewpoints to share. Not just price, but also lack of exclusive games (I agree), not enough community stuff (yup!) and just being out-marketed.

I add a personal one: it is an absolutely horrendous design that no-one wants to have sit on their A/V rack. Big fat ugly bastard console.

HEHE,

 The bounce rate (= people getting to the site and leaving from the first
page, not looking further) of my posterous is 81% at the first day of
measuring. Quite high, but since it's a blog, I was actually expecting
it to be much closer to 100% (since who reads the old pages anyway,
except if you're looking for something specific). But I guess my posts
should start to make more sense in the future, to "capture" viewers :-)

 Or I should just put the analytics on the main (www.marcof.net) page,
which -for now- redirects users to this posterous.