The employer's parking lot is his property but my car is my property

I disagree with Jed:

Any law which deprives a business of the right to control access to their private property, and the terms thereof, is a blatant violation of property rights. We cannot, and should not, defend gun rights at the expense of something so fundamental.

I'm not arguing for gun rights in this instance, but indeed property rights. My automobile is my property. The State has an interest in knowing what's in my car only so long as it is moving on a public road. They can require that my car bear identifying marks for several reasons, including the possible recovery of my property if it is stolen, as well as the enforcement of requirements to insure it for operation on public roads. The State can search it under (too) many circumstances, usually in connection with it moving on a public road.

I disagree that my property rights in my vehicle, and my rights in the other property my vehicle may contain, are conditioned by where that vehicle may be, whether moving or parked.

If I keep a piece in my car, and the car and the piece are lawfully mine, it's nobody's business whether I have a piece in it.

it's about LUUUUUURRRVE

Those rare times that I get to see HBO, it can still surprise and titillate.

And disturb. The teaser for this show suggests, at least to me, that it is aimed at religious fundies, and the kind of world the left thinks they'd like to build if they ever came to grasp the levers of political power.

Ha ha laugh oh that's funny he's got three conservatively-dressed Stepford milfs and he worries there's not enough of him to go around {it's not for every man!} ha ha isn't that just precious and the milfs fight over who's in charge and they have to work out a schedule where they pass him around like a bowl of Fritos y'know? salty greasy and corny

The live trailer included remarks from the producers, about how the show is not about polygamy, it's about LOVE. Ok sure. Sometimes a Frito is just a Frito.

How to get mugged in the sterile area of an airport

We are paying $8 plus for 24 hours of 802.11g internet access in the airport terminal. I may ultimately use about 10 of those hours, given last night's weather. But couldn't SBC sell their connectivity in realistic increments?

Who in an airport would order 24 hours of WiFi unless he's setting up a kiosk to sell fake Rolexes?

Could this law have helped Cory Maye?

From HB46, now passed out of Wyoming's House and headed to the Joint Committee on the Judiciary:

A person who uses force as permitted in W.S.
6-2-602 is justified in using such force and is immune from
criminal prosecution and civil action for the use of such
force, unless the person against whom force was used is a
peace officer, who was acting in the performance of his
official duties and the officer identified himself in
accordance with any applicable law or the person using
force knew or reasonably should have known that the person
was a peace officer.

Of course it always hinges on what a DA asserts that a person "reasonably should have known," and on how well a defense counsel can counter to a jury what that DA asserts. But would Cory Maye be on death row if this law had been in effect at that place and time?

The only loophole that I see in this bill is the 'applicable law' standard for how a peace officer must identify himself. Should shouting "police", even repeatedly and through a bullhorn, suffice?

Regardless, reforms like this one still don't address the root of the problem---the overuse of dynamic entry.

and on your right, the Bridge to Nowhere

I drove past the Clinton Library this afternoon. Wow.

It does look just like a gigantic aluminum-sided trailer.

now that's country

I just found a Jim Reeves collection. His He'll Have To Go reminds me of the satire treatment of same by Homer and Jethro. I'd kill to have that.

None of this Toby Keith sh1t. Friggin tin-foil cowboy hats.

Ooops

A chem detector rang the cherries with a false positive for nerve agent at the Russell Senate Office Building.

It could have been a cleaning lady spilling a large quantity of Simple Green. Some molecules that feature an ether linking to a glycol will trigger nerve agent detectors.

What I should have done in the first place

The scanner has been a Canon LiDE 20, bought at bargain-basement price at the BX on Golfball Prairie AFB a year ago.

The printer has been an Epson Stylus Color 740i, bought not long after we brought the G4 PowerMac home in '99.

A lot of water has passed under these bridges, in the form of emails to Canon's tech support to get their scanner to work on the Classic emulator on OS 10.2.8, then their upgraded drivers to run directly on OS X; emails to Epson to get their printer to play nice with a Linksys Ethernet print server; emails to Linksys to get their print server to play nice with the Epson.

It's been an expensive bargain and I'm not done paying for it. All I wanted was one multifunction printer/scanner/copier that runs on the home network with an IP address, and I can print to it from any of the menagerie of computers in the house.

The Linksys server has been yanked out and put in the box while I ponder tactics to return it for refund or credit. The Canon scanner is going to my workplace until we get our Sharp copier upgraded with a scanner and OCR. The Epson printer is perfectly mission capable.

But HP has found a place in our home. Their Photosmart 2575 connects directly to the home network. I installed its drivers on 3 machines---the PowerMac, a Win2k, and the Clandestine Blogging Platform's WinXP--and the only hitch I have is with printing from Mac Classic applications on the OS X emulator.

The support email is already sent to HP, with a $5 bet with any of my five devoted readers that they'll be unable to get that aspect of it to work. So I am holding on to the Epson printer, just to print from Mac Office 98.

Quote for the day

I have two replies when as a criminologist studying firearms issues I am asked would the world not benefit if there were no guns? First, 1200 years ago there were no guns. Yet, for excellent reasons, that period in Europe has been called the Dark Ages. Firearms are the only weaponry by which the weak can resist the strong. Their absence was characterized by oppression and massacre not peace.

Don Kates, quoted by David Hardy at Arms and the Law.

Kates's other reply is worth reading too.