He who reads the inside of the top of the box

"To me, a lawyer is basically the person who knows the rules of the country. We're all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if there is a problem, the lawyer is the only person who has read the inside of the top of the box."
~Jerry Seinfeld

Finally, a correct version of the U.S. Military Services Language Chart!!!

MILITARY LANGUAGE

CONVERSION CHART

(You may need to click on the chart to enlarge it.)

That is why traffic is so bad around here!

Hindsight is 20/20 Once The Mind Trick Wears Off

Cause of Action of the Week

"Action in Trespass for ravishment of ward" (See Stanley v. Rasnick, 137 Va. 415, 420 (1923).)

Under the Norman-introduced Law of Primogeniture, the oldest son (or daughter if there were no sons) would inherit the entire estate, and distribute gifts to his siblings at his discretion. As he was the only heir apparent, this put a bit of pressure on his marriage choice, both because his ancestors were likely to be loath to pass on to him everything they owned if he had a rotten wife and because this made him a target for the patient golddigger. To protect against this, the above trespass could be sued upon by the ancestor of the heir. If proven that the heir apparent had been taken (without consent) and married, a writ of ravishment would be issued, and as best I can tell, this would prevent the estate from passing to the golddigger or her family. The action became disused when primogeniture was abandoned; it was abolished in Virginia in 1787.

Bear kills militants in Kashmir

By Altaf Hussain BBC News, Srinagar
A bear killed two militants after discovering them in its den in Indian-administered Kashmir, police say.

Two other militants escaped, one of them badly wounded, after the attack in Kulgam district, south of Srinagar.

The militants were armed with AK-46s but were taken by surprise - police found the remains of pudding they had made to eat when the bear attacked. It is thought to be the first such incident since Muslim separatists took up arms against Indian rule in 1989.

The militants had made their hideout in a cave which was actually the bear's den, said police officer Farooq Ahmed.

The dead have been identified as Mohammad Amin alias Qaiser, and Bashir Ahmed alias Saifullah.

News of the attack emerged when their injured comrade went to a nearby village for treatment.

"Word spread in the village that Qaiser had been killed by the bear," another police officer said.

A joint party of the police and army personnel went into the forest and collected the bodies of the two militants.

Police say they also recovered two AK-46 rifles and some ammunition from the hideout. Animal attacks

Wildlife experts say the conflict in Kashmir has actually resulted in an increase in the population of bears and leopards.

Following the outbreak of the insurgency people had to hand in their weapons to police - which put a halt to poaching.

As a result, there has been a greater incidence of man-animal conflict, say experts. There have been many reports of bears and leopards killing or mauling humans in different parts of the Kashmir valley in recent years.

Three years ago, residents of Mandora village near the southern town of Tral, beat a black bear to death which had strayed into the village.

Idea for a TV Show

Desperate Entwives: but no one needs to be hasty and worry about content, it would be slower than Middlemarch.

~This idea brought to you by The Brain~

Rise of the Fallen

(The Brain would have posted this,

but he is busy being smart somewhere else and I am free to have fun!)

Bloody-Mindedness

"It would have been better if I had called him out and shot him a year ago," said Sir James, not from bloody-mindedness, but because he needed something strong to say.

~Sir James Chettam
Middlemarch, by George Eliot

Cleaning

(Thanks to TJ for sharing the fun!!)

To the Israeli Ambassador

"Press releases aren't given under oath."
~Jim Hacker

Yes, Prime Minister, Episode Six - A Victory for Democracy

For T

Something we can belive in, finally!

DDO$ and a little culture

Today I give you two items:

1) What to do when you get hit with a $3.75m court judgment? One defendant's strategy is to pay it off pennies at a time (or in their case, Swedish Krona at a time) to drive up the processing costs. Which might just fly under legal tender laws. Since the matter appeared in an internet-related case, the defendant has dubbed the strategy "Distributed Denial of Dollars," or DDO$.

2) Though subject to much dispute, one fan with a good deal of time on their hands has created a compilation of the purportedly 100 best movie lines. Once you watch, of course, you will have absorbed ninety years of culture, and have a great excuse to avoid watching anything for the next few years.

In honor of The Heart and her Arabic studies (and for the benefit of anyone who has seen Denzel Washington's larger than life role as Malcolm X), I present this bit taken from an opinion in a case with a pro se plaintiff who essentially filed the same claims twice.

Though Plaintiff proceeded in the Prior Action under his given name, Tyrone Troy McRae, he concedes that Pharo Naji Akhenaten is the same person as the plaintiff in the Prior Action. (Pl.'s Local R. 56.1 Statement of Material Facts ("Pl.'s Facts") PP 1-3.) Plaintiff explains that while "his biological mother named him 'Tyrone Troy McRae,'" Pharo Naji Akhenaten "is his rightful, national, [**10] indigenous, righteous name from Father Allah, in the Hieroglyphic language preserved in Qur'aanic and Hebrew Text. Plaintiff is a Qariat-ul Qur'aan-il Kaariym fi- lisaan Sidqin-il 'Alliyaa [A reciter of the Confirmations of the Noble Qur'aan, in Classical Arabic] and a descendant of Allah by Blood; a Muslim by Nature, not by religion and he is not a mere juristic person [TYRONE TROY MCRAE] or 'straw man' based upon the Black Code but an indigenous aborigine; a natural person under the Divine Protection of Allah, the God of Horus, Isis, Osiris, Ra; Abraham, Isaac, Jacob et al., The Most Honorable W.D. Fard, The Honorable Elijah Muhammad and The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan." (Id. P 1) (emphasis in original).

Akhenaten v. Najee, LLC, 544 F.Supp.2d 320, 325 n.6 (S.D.N.Y. 2008)

Accounting Joke

Would it be funny if your outside auditing firm's vendor number in your system was 990?

Do Dogs Go to Heaven?

Two churches in Hartford, KY are finally settling the issue for us all by having it out on their signs.

Click the to see the outcome for Fido!


(While it is all fun and games, the Cumberland Presbyterian Magazine reports that is, in fact, an internet hoax, and can be reproduced here.)

Legal Humor

Stasi files emerge through software

This story is a few months old, but it is really cool, so we thought we would share it with you all.
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The contents of files of the former East German secret police, the Stasi - which were destroyed after the fall of the Berlin Wall - are slowly emerging after being pieced back together through new software developed in Berlin.

The fragments are scanned and then matched up to form a complete image. The researches stress they do not read the files, only reconstruct them.

The E-Puzzler system, developed at the capital's Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology, works by scanning the fragments of the documents into a computer image file.

Then, by treating each scrap as if part of a jigsaw, the information gathered by the notorious agency is being restored.

"It is the biggest puzzle in the world," Bertram Nicolai, head of the Security and Testing department at the Fraunhofer Institute, told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme.

"The goal of the pilot project is the automatic, virtual reconstruction of 400 bags. It is very important for German history."

Reconstruction process

Almost as soon as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 - signalling the end of Communism - Stasi agents set about trying to destroy their files, first with shredders, and then with their hands.

Within weeks, they had filled 16,000 sacks with 600 million fragments.

Two years later, following reunification, German officials started trying to recreate the files by hand - but it became clear it was going to take too long.

Then researchers came up with the E-Puzzler, and managed to get a government grant.

The system analyses shape, colour, texture and thickness of the paper, so that it is eventually possible to rebuild an electronic image of the original document.

"It will be a long job - but that's the interesting part," said the Fraunhofer's Jan Schneider.

"First we have to digitise all the pieces from the bags. This is done by a special high-speed scanning device.

"The next step is to segment the image itself from the raw scan - we need the outline of the pieces, pixel-wise, to perform the reconstruction process after that.

"Then all digitised pieces of paper are stored in the database. After that we reconstruct a lot of the descriptive features of the pieces."

However, at the former Stasi prison Hohenschonhausen, the main place political prisoners were held and subjected to torture, there are criticisms that the process has already taken too long.

"I think it comes a little bit late," said Hubertus Knabe, director of the memorial at the site, which is also a museum.

"Nearly 20 years after the fall of the Wall we start to reconstruct these Stasi files, which are really important: the most important files were the ones they destroyed.

"I am happy that now it is going forward, but it is late."

Story from BBC NEWS

Not sure if we should be scared or not....

Overall, very intimidating, but those tan lines just make me crack up everytime I see him!!

Laundry Win

The Heart actually thought this was funny. I offer, from Failblog, the man's laundry tag.

The SUV Song

I played this for The Brain the other day, and as a Durango Driver he very much appreciated the song. If you click the title of this post you can listen to the song. If it does not work then google the following: Veggie Tales SUV song.

Larry- I like your car
Girl- I like Yours too
Larry- Is It a Jeep?
Girl- A Subaru
Larry- I like your tires
Girl- You've got nice chrome
Larry- A trailer Hitch ?
Girl- Left Mine at Home
Larry- Oh your suspension it suspends me over heights I've never known
Girl- And your roll bar is to die for by the way I like your chrome
Larry-You already said that
Girl- did I ?
Larry-yeah
Girl- oh
Both: Oh you and me in our sport utility vehicles crusin to 7-11 for a bag of frito laysOh you and me in our sport Utility Vehicles we'll slam into 4 wheel and pick up a dozen eggs and if there ever was a snow
Girl- A really really deep snow
Larry: And if everyone was stuck but us
Girl- We'd be the ones not stuck
Larry: then we could be the heroes
Girl- We could be the heroes
Both- we could be the herooooooos
Girl- We would push them and pull them
Larry: push them and pull them
Both- Push them and pull them right out of the snow

Girl- I like your car
Larry- I like yours too
Girl- Periwinkle?
Larry- its baby blue
Girl- hows it handle?
Larry- Like a dream
Girl- How 'bout coffee
Larry- and then Ice cream!
Both- o you and me in out sport utility vehicles crusin to Dunkin Donuts for a cup of steaming Joe oh you and me in our sport utility vehicles we'll slam into 4-wheel drive for a scoop of rocky road
Girl- and if we ever go campin,.. you know
Larry- haven't been but one day.. I'll go
Girl- And we find a ranger stuck in a ditch
Both- a nice ranger in a deep ditch
Larry- we could be the heroes
Girl- we could be the heroes
Both- we could be the heroes
Girl- we would push him and pull him
Larry- push him and pull him
Both- Push him and pull him right out of that ditch

Larry- I like your car
Girl- I like yours too
Larry- Is it a Jeep?
Both- Its my sport Utility Vehicle

Quote of the Week

"Action movies have car chases, and explosions, and budgets, and, um, what's the word I'm looking for here, ... yeah, FANS."

--Will Smith, on the category that gets ripped off every year (this year included) at the Oscars.

Stimulus plan?

Our new president has been circulating a plan to offer $850 billion dollars as a stimulus for the economy. How much money is that? Well, after a friend offered one version of what could be done with that much money, I decided to check on whether it was accurate. Following please find my rough calculations:

23 karat gold leaf is approximately $35 per square foot.

An interstate highway lane is 12 feet wide, with a ten foot shoulder on the right and four feet on the left, or 38 feet per direction. Averaging in cities where there are more lanes, we'll call it 40 feet per direction, or 80 feet of pavement.

A mile is 5280 feet, so 5280 * 80 = 422,400 square feet per highway mile. At $35 / square foot, this is $14,784,000 to gild a mile of highway in both directions. In order to preserve the number of significant digits we have at the beginning, we need to round this to $15 million.

According to wikipedia, there are 46,837 miles of interstate highways in the United States. At the unrounded rate, this is $692,438,208,000, at an even $15M/mi it comes out to $702.555 billion, but again, because of the significant digits, we need to call it $700 billion. Out of a stimulus package of $850 billion, this leaves $150 billion for labor to gild the entire U.S. Interstate Highway System, shoulder to shoulder on both sides.*

So should we go forward with the stimulus plan? For my two cents worth, a shiny gold highway system would look way cooler from space, making this choice easy. Heck, it would probably create more jobs than the stimulus plan, anyway.


*This equation, of course, leaves out the effect trying to buy up that much gold leaf would have on the market price of said leaf, and accordingly, the increases in price for this project before it can be completed. And probably lots of other stuff that is important to coming up with a realistic scenario. But I'm not putting out a bid on this...

Never bring a bow to a gun fight

At least, under normal circumstances.

Running into two CCW permit holders should be considered normal circumstances. Not much else about the situation was normal, though.

Woman wounded by civilians, police officer after shooting father's coworker with an arrow.

'Carbon cost' of Google revealed -BBC

2 google searches = 1 kettle of boiling water

I think I may need to cut down my tea intake so that I can keep my research up...

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Two search requests on the internet website Google produce "as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle", according to a Harvard University academic. US physicist Alex Wissner-Gross claims that a typical Google search on a desktop computer produces about 7g CO2.

However, these figures were disputed by Google, who say a typical search produced only 0.2g of carbon dioxide.

A recent study by American research firm Gartner suggested that IT now causes two percent of global emissions.

Dr Wissner-Gross's study claims that two Google searches on a desktop computer produces 14g of CO2, which is the roughly the equivalent of boiling an electric kettle.

Carbon emissions

The Harvard academic argues that these carbon emissions stem from the electricity used by the computer terminal and by the power consumed by the large data centres operated by Google around the world.

Although the American search engine is renowned for returning fast results, Dr Wissner-Gross says it can only do so because it uses several data banks at the same time.

Speaking to the BBC, he said a combination of clients, networks, servers and people's home computers all added up to a lot of energy usage.

"Google isn't any worse than any other data centre operator. If you want to supply really great and fast result, then that's going to take extra energy to do so," he said.

Dr Wissner-Gross said he was working on a website called co2stats.com which helps companies identify "energy inefficient" aspects of their websites.

In a statement on its official blog, Google said that Dr Wissner-Gross' figures were "many times too high."

The firm said that a typical search returned a result in less than 0.2 seconds and that the search itself only used its servers for a few thousandths of a second. This, said Google, amounted to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search - equivalent to 0.2g of CO2.

"We've made great strides to reduce the energy used by our data centres, but we still want clean and affordable sources of electricity for the power that we do use," said Google in its statement.

"In 2007, we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. This non-profit consortium is committed to cutting the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 and so reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year. That's a lot of kettles."

On Strange Case Names, Part II

This just seen:

Knights of the Ku Klux Klan v. East Baton Rouge Parish School Board, 735 F.2d 895 (5th Cir.1984).

(Part I here)