Nathan's Occasional Blog

The Hilton Technology Room:
I have an urge for a business trip…

No, for once we’re not talking about our favorite gadget goddess — we’re talking Hilton as in hotel. It may be no Abu Dhabi, but the Hilton thinks it’s got a pretty sweet suite in its Technology Room, outfitted with some of the latest and greatest in emergent tech. They’re calling it their “laboratory” for gathering customer feedback on cutting edge technology. We’re not exactly sure who would complain about being set up with any of the toys stashed away in there, including a 70-inch projection screen with Bose home theater 5-channel surround sound, sonically matched cube speaker arrays, satellite and high def programming, and a couple of wireless touchscreen remotes to control the whole works (including the LCD flat-panel above the hot tub, of course).

Florida signs law to track sex offenders via GPS for life:

There are other states that have minimum sentences, and other states that require some sort of tracking of sex offenders after their release, but Florida’s new law makes them the first to require mandatory lifetime tracking via GPS for those convicted of sex crimes against children 11 and younger. Governor Jeb Bush signed the law, which also mandates a 25 years to life sentence, in response to the killing of 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford. The Jessica Lunsford Act was drafted and pushed through quickly after lawmakers discovered that the man who had murdered Jessica was a registered sex offender. It passed both Senate and House unanimously.

Don’t get me wrong, I think these folks are, generally, skum. That being said, this does raise the something’s not right with this hairs on the back of my neck. I mean, there is something in the Constitution that says you can’t be continually and repeatedly punnished for a single offense, right? If you want them to serve a 25 year sentance that’s great, but that’s the length of the punnishment. After that’s served they’re done, free, time served. This will get overturned by the courts lickedy split.

Again, being a new dad I’d personally flip a lid if something happened to my daughter, but this is’t the right solution. Can you say Florida is a Police State?

Elecom got balls that talk:
And we have our “caption of the week” winner! Thanks Engadget!

These speakers ain’t for squares. Elecom’s new PSP-CS500 speaker set looks suspiciously like the Sternform Twin, ‘cept we wouldn’t advise eating out of them. You can’t really expect great specs on these things, and 2x2W by 8 Ohm is all you’re gonna get, but they do make a unique contribution to the typical portable speaker fare.