A healthcare company in Atlanta ran a study in which they placed secret cameras in certain pediatric hospital rooms in order to catch mothers inducing illness in their children. This phenomenon, in actuality a disease called Munchausen by proxy, is scary; I’ve been involved in diagnosing it, and it’s never an easy thing to suspect, to accept, or to report. (Interestingly, Munchausen by proxy occurs more with mothers who work in the healthcare field, and thus have some knowledge of how to manipulate the system.)
More Dubya hypocrisy: despite his strong and frequent disparaging of casinos and gambling, tomorrow Bush will be attending a quarter-million dollar fundraiser hosted by the following people:
- Charles Mathewson, chairman of International Game Technology;
- Bob Cashell, former Nevada lieutenant governor and current casino owner;
- Greg Ferraro, senior vice president of R&R Partners, lobbyist for casinos;
- Larry Ruvo, member of the board of American Gaming Association and director of Southern Wine and Spirits of Nevada, which does huge business with the casinos of Nevada;
- Sig Rogich, Bush Pioneer, political and gaming consultant, and member of the Gaming Hall of Fame Host Committee.
My favorite part, though, is that Dubya still claims that he just won’t accept money from gaming PACs; if this isn’t the same as the supposed distinction Clinton tried to draw with the term “sex,” then I don’t know what is.
Al Franken has written a dead-on editorial pleading with ABC to not bring Rush Limbaugh onto the staff of Monday Night Football. As a man whose only football experience was playing on his high school team (and who lied about said experience when talking about why he was deferred from the draft), and as someone with the ability to let the most offensive and inexcusable statements pop out of his mouth, I just don’t think I’d be watching MNF any more.
As if Worldcom doesn’t have enough to deal with, yesterday the company agreed to pay $3.5 million in penalties resulting from slamming, or changing consumers’ long distance carriers without permission. Slamming is the lowest form of low; I’ve always thought that the ultimate penalty should be an enforced period during which a company cannot sign up new long-distance customers, period.
Say what you will about Mozilla, but their bugtracking system has given me my share of laughs. Yesterday, I was surfing through it, looking at the status of some bugs that I’ve reported, and I came across a big FTP bug. Currently, you can only have one FTP download going at any point in time; if you click on a second FTP download while the first is still going, the second won’t start until the first ends. The funny part, though, is the response that Bill Law entered into the ticket when he was asked to justify fixing this bug:
Because it sucks to request some action and get no response till some random point in time later, and, to get bogus feedback on what’s happening. People will find other software that doesn’t present such obstacles and use that instead. That sucks.
Also from Bugzilla comes a pointer to a page that describes the proper inheritance rules for when there’s an HTML definition of an object that contradicts a CSS definition of the same object. (This is a big issue in Mozilla’s handling of tables right now.)
