Any serious travel is looking like it’s some time away at the moment – I’m thinking of New York (and looking through old photos) and wishing I was over there.

This is a remarkable building which still holds its own in a city full of amazing skyscrapers.

Max!

1. Fuck.  I am not really angry so much as just really, really irritated at how inconvenient this is.
2. It took me a whole day to do the soldering to get that God-damned Mitsubishi wiring (which was devised by a Japanese mad scientist in the dying days of World War II as a way of exacting revenge against America) to match up with the wiring on that CD player.
3. Actually on some sick consumerist level I am secretly enjoying the silver lining of having a totally legitimate reason to purchase new consumer electronics products… maybe something which plays MP3s and has blue lights this time, probably not another Sony due to their worldwide campaign of pure evil.  What is wrong with me?  Am I happy my car got broken into?
4. Fuck! They forced the passenger lock with a screwdriver or something.  I am not happy that my car got broken into.  20 year old Mitsubishi car locks are not a fun consumerist item which I am gagging to purchase.  How the hell do you even get something like that fixed?  I am having unpleasant visions of arguing with some authorised Mitsubishi representative about the cost of official Mitsubishi parts carved from a single piece of whale ivory using ancient and secret techniques and then shipped by carrier pigeon from Hokkaido to Adelaide.
5. I realise criminals target older (and therefore cheaper) cars because they are easier to break into, but don’t they realise that by doing this instead of breaking into BMWs they are effectively balkanising their own side in the Great Class War by attacking those who are more likely to sympathise with their plight (if any) (on the possibly flawed assumptions that poverty->crime and owning a cheap car->more sympathy for the downtrodden and poverty stricken).
6. Whoever has my stereo now probably needs it more than me.
7. Re #6, fuck that, that’s why I pay half my wages in tax, people who probably need my stereo more than me already get a sizeable chunk of my money because they probably need it more than me.
8. My stereo should at least be tax deductible if they’re going to have that too.
9. Actually they probably don’t get my tax because John Howard and Chairman Rudd have decided that middle class idiots who have too many children need my money more than the poor and needy or me.  Really, Howard and Rudd stole my stereo with their blatant vote-buying and flawed middle class welfare state policies.  Plus Howard would probably steal it anyway
10. I hope that family with a better house than me and two incomes and a four wheel drive and five snot nosed kids living in Rose Park are enjoying my tax money while I use my remaining take home pay to replace my stolen stereo.
    

    Farewell, CDX-L280, may you and the new Muse album you carry within you bring joy to a bona fide puchaser without notice somewhere.

11. I can’t believe they had the poor taste to leave some of these albums behind.  Look, they didn’t even steal London Calling, fucking idiots.  Fuck, they did take my new Muse album which was in the player.  This is just like the time all my old REM tapes were stolen from my Gemini.  I miss my Gemini.
12. Let’s check… yes, despite prising open every other container/drawer/door in the vehicle, the genius individual who did this failed to open the one drawer which actually did contain real money.  Joke’s on you, this $5.75 in loose change is testament to your life of failure and poor decision making.  You could have bought a discount packet of donuts and an iced coffee at Coles with this change instead of risking your life down at the docks hawking my CD player to the triads.
13. Who the hell actually buys a stolen 4 year old car stereo in this country anyway?  A new one is like, $100, why would you buy an old one?  If I wanted to buy one, where would I even go?  Is my stereo going to be shipped to the Ukraine and sold there?
14. Does the fact that when I visualise the person who did this (let’s call him Phil) I see Phil as either a drug-addicted, 35 year old white guy or a somali teenager wearing a Fubu shirt mean that The Advertiser has succeeded in its mission to turn me into fearful, xenophobic white trash after all, or am I just being realistic about demographics and crime?
15. Do many upper class, non-drug-addicted Scottish females break into cars in their spare time?  Probably not.  Or they just don’t get caught.
16. Does my car smell?  No (well, no more than it used to).  That’s good.
17. Actually Phil was pretty neat and tidy when I look at it.  He even moved the section of the dashboard holding the stereo to the back seat and appears to have been reasonably careful in unscrewing it to get the CD player out.  Who the hell is nice enough to not totally fuck up the interior of your car but nasty enough to break into it in the first place?  Is this some kind of weird car stereo thieves’ honour code?  Is Phil the Scarlet Pimpernel of car vandals?
18. Do I even bother to call the cops?  Will they be able to take the time out from issuing huge fines to people driving 2km/h over the speed limit and harassing innocent people in the CBD to deal with an actual crime?  Will they, instead of doing anything productive, merely lecture me about how I should have taken the faceplate off my stereo/not parked my car where it was/[some other variant where it's all my fault that someone stole my stuff]?  Yes, yes they will.
19. Is my decision not to have comprehensive insurance now looking stupid?
20. Re #19, no, not really, considering that would cost me $1000/year or something ridiculous, this is the first such incident in 5 years, and this is highly unlikely to cost me more than $5000 given that my car is probably only worth $5000 total.
21. Re #18, what does it say about my levels of cynicism and mistrust of the police (or about the police themselves) that my instinct when robbed is not to call the police?
22. Am I zen/Jesus enough to wish Phil all the best despite his crime?  After all I can afford a new stereo and Phil probably has a pretty fucked up life.
23. No, I am not.  I still hope Phil slips over on the way to Cash Converters and breaks his arm.  But cleanly, and only in one place.  If he does it again we’ll move to compound fractures.
24. I find that despite this experience I am not driven to demand “tougher sentences” or harsh new laws to deal with criminals or mandatory brain monitoring chips to weed out the potential car stereo thieves lurking in our midst.  My respect for suburban conservative windbags has dropped another notch as a result.

(thanks to Erin)

Swine flu: there is no escape.

(Source of photo unknown).

It’s actually a mobile phone – you just stick a sim card into it and you’re set.  It even supports international roaming and has 5 days battery life (I guess minimising size and weight were not issues).

“Commissar Markov has long been a loyal party member, but I fear his growing influence in state policy. Perhaps it is time to cash in a favor from my friends at the Kremlin.”

More Яolcats here. This is why the internet was invented (ok, maybe not, but it should be why the internet was invented).

Follow the link above for a demonstation of this awesome technology in action.

(thanks to Sam).

EULAs are somewhat obnoxious from a consumer perspective in that they are non-negotiable, usually highly technical and long, and leave a consumer who does not agree to the terms in a difficult position as to whether or not they can return the software for a refund (assuming they’ve paid for it) – most retailers won’t accept software which has been opened due to piracy concerns.  In the U.S. shrink/click-wrap agreements have been upheld as being valid, although some caution has been expressed as to whether such agreements are enforceable if there is no opportunity to obtain a refund by returning the software.

In Australia there has been minimal consideration of these types of agreements, although there appears to be no reason why they would not be enforceable.  It seems likely that the same reasoning that was applied in the ‘ticket cases’ would apply to click-wrap licences – if a reasonable effort is made to draw the terms to your attention (or at lesat the fact of the existence of the terms) and you proceed, you are likely to be bound by those terms – see e.g. Parker v South Eastern Railway (1877) 2 CPD 416 and Thornton v Shoe Lane Parking Ltd [1971] 2 QB 163 (the ticket cases involve terms and conditions printed on train tickets, parking tickets etc).

But what happens if you get your cat to execute a ‘click-through’ licence agreement?  One woman, Anne Loucks, decided to find out.  She has constructed an excellent cat-contract-acceptance machine whereby her cat can accept contracts by wandering onto a device placed on her keyboard.  She then arranges the device and tempts the cat into the general area with food.

Anne’s device is humorous, but it demonstrates an interesting point.  When the “meeting of the minds” (which is what a contract really is) is embodied in an action as simple as clicking a mouse, there is much greater scope for one party to argue that it did not accept the agreement.  What if an infant accepts it?  What if you are drunk when you click?  Or what if your cat accepts it for you?  If the software company wishes to enforce the agreement, it may also face difficulties in proving that you, and not some other person, clicked the magic “I Agree” box (which is, of course, one of the benefits of signatures and witnesses).  In addition, I think there are serious questions of unconscionability – if you cannot return the software no matter what, does this amount to a special disadvantage of which the software maker is taking advantage?

In this case I suspect Anne’s cat is sufficiently under her control that she would still be bound (especially as the cat will only produce one result when it walks on the keyboard, and Anne is deliberately tempting it there with food).  The ticket cases suggest that it is not strictly necessary that she read the terms, and I think that if she was aware of the fact of the existence of the terms and decided to use the software anyway, she would likely be bound by them.

Still, I’d love to see it go to court…

Somewhat NSFW, but not completely (depending on where you work).