Random Brain Dump

Star Locke is a longshot candidate for the Republican nomination for the governorship in Texas. This cowboy aims to kill property tax by taxing on 3 things he find undesirable instead:

1. $10,000 per abortion tax on medical clinics
2. 10% tax on sodas with sugar
3. 50% tax on violent video games

“I take the position that the Founding Fathers took: that the power to tax is the power to destroy,” he said. “So our concept is that we need to tax things we don’t want and you want to not tax things that you want to encourage.”

Where’s the bandwagon? Sure sounds like a killer plan to me… 😉 Man… Are all Texan politicians just nuts wearing spurs & donning cowboy hats?

The government is trying to peek at what you’re searching for on the web! US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asked a San Jose federal judge to order Google to hand over search records of millions of its users and 1 million random web addresses in the search engine’s databases.

The administration claims that this is part of their anti -pornography efforts. But along with the recent wire tapping efforts, this is yet another encroachment on individual privacy. Furthermore, I am certain the government wouldn’t know what to do with such sheer amount of raw data. It’s a lot of data that for sure, but is it useful data to anybody? I doubt any insightful stats can be drawn from raw data like this without user information which wasn’t being requested. Worse, misleading or even wrong conclusions can be drawn from misinterpretation of this mountain of raw data. Perhaps, the feds will try to acquire user information next? Why not, if the feds get their way this time around.

I applaud Google for fighting the feds. It’s a shame that other search engines like Yahoo, MSN & AOL quickly caved in and handed the data to the feds. Kudos to Google….

This BBC article reports that American sugeons are choosing a disfigured patient to perform a face transplant on. This is life imitating fiction (remember Face Off the movie with Travolta & Cage?).

However, computer modeling indicates that the new face will neither look like donor nor the patient since it will be placed on a different facial skeleton. The docs pegged success rate at only 50% though.

Ethics aside, it’s fascinating as a medical advancement. It’s also gross if you imagine it!