Very Bad Karma:
A British court sent a mother of two to prison for six weeks for killing the family cat by boiling it in a washing machine ...
Holly Thacker, 34, decided to kill Fluffy after it scratched her, the court in Norwich in eastern England heard.
She denied cruelty.
What, she thought the cat would enjoy the experience, or perhaps learn something from it??? *aghast*
Admittedly I have on occasion thought of doing harm to a cat, but it was just one cat in particular and its behaviour was truly abominable (posing a serious health risk to my then-toddler daughter), and its owner refused to take responsibility. This was several years ago and I haven't seen that particular cat in a long time. Regardless, I did not harm said cat.
Jonathan Eales, prosecuting, told the court that Thacker's ex-husband alerted the national animal protection society, the RSPCA, following a conversation with her at her home on November 7.
"A conversation took place in which she said: 'I haven't got my cat any more'. He said: 'Why?'. She said: 'The cat scratched me so I put it in the washing machine'," Mr Eales said.
"She then laughed and said: 'I put it on a f#cking boiling wash as well'. She said: 'I am serious. Then I put it in the bin'."
I suppose we can be grateful she didn't just toss it in the gutter.
According to a veterinarian, the cat would have taken five to 10 minutes to die. Fluffy broke its claws trying to escape.
Why do they not know the gender of Fluffy? And why "Fluffy"? Icky name. Poor cat. No, seriously - poor cat.
Just because a document from a colour laser printer doesn't carry your name doesn't mean no one can trace it back to you, privacy advocates warn.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says it has cracked the tracking codes embedded in Xerox's DocuColor colour laser printers. Such codes are just one way manufacturers employ technology to help governments fight currency counterfeiting.
Researchers found patterns of yellow dots arranged in 15 by 8 grids and printed repeatedly over every colour page, said Seth Schoen, a staff technologist at the San Francisco-based civil-liberties group.
Consider two documents, one carrying the author's name and one meant to be anonymous. By comparing the codes, it could be determined whether the two documents came from the same printer, even if Xerox reveals nothing about a customer's serial number, Schoen said.
Certainly, counterfeit currency (and other official thingies) is to be actively discouraged, but to put general privacy at risk in this way is quite horrific.
British American Tobacco, the world's second-largest cigarette company, has been secretly operating a factory in North Korea for the past four years.
BAT has never mentioned the factory in its annual accounts.
The anti-smoking group ASH said: "It seems that there is no regime so awful and no country so repressive that BAT does not want to do business there."
Asked about North Korea's human rights record, the [BAT] spokeswoman said: "It is not for us to interfere with the way governments run countries." She said BAT could "lead by example" and assist the country's development by meeting internationally accepted standards of businesses practice and corporate social responsibility.
The "altruistic" angle notwithstanding, it seems to me this is a nasty piece of hypocrisy (blatant capitalism capitalising, pun intended, on the vagaries of a non-capitalist society). All the little cows are disgusted.
School officials in Lake County, Florida, have confirmed that a casual teacher pulled an insulin pump off a diabetic student's leg after mistaking it for a mobile phone, Associated Press reports.
Cliffton Hassam told school officials that his insulin pump ... began beeping in class last Friday. Before he could turn it off, the teacher, Richard Maline, ripped it from his leg. Hassam said his blood sugar levels did not return to normal until early this week.
Shoot first and ask questions later, eh? Effing criminal, is what it is.
Government regulators are trying to shut down a company they say secretly downloaded spyware onto the computers of unwitting internet users, rendering them helpless to a flood of pop-up ads, computer crashes and other annoyances.
The Federal Trade Commission accused Walter Rines of Stratham, New Hampshire, and his company, Odysseus Marketing, of luring computer users with the promise of free software that would make peer-to-peer file sharing anonymous. The claim was bogus, the agency said, and the software was bundled with spyware that was secretly downloaded onto computers.
The agency also said the spyware was nearly impossible to remove. Rines, the FTC said, offered his own "uninstall" tool, but it did not work and actually installed additional software.
