California's greenhouse gases suit

It's all over the news that California has sued several auto makers over greenhouse gas emissions. Corporate Crime Reporter's article has a link to a PDF of the complaint itself, which you can read here. (Bless 'em for giving the link, especially since the big databases don't seem to have picked it up yet, but I can't help wondering why an organization called Corporate Crime Reporter is covering a civil suit. I guess they define "crime" broadly.) Here's a quick overview:

California v. General Motors Corp., Toyota Motor North America, Inc., Ford Motor Co., Honda North America, Inc., Chrysler Motors Corp., and Nissan North America, Inc. Case # C06-05755. Filed by Bill Lockyer Sep. 20, 2006 in federal district court, Northern District of California.

The complaint alleges claims of both federal common law public nuisance and California state law public nuisance (Cal. Civ. Code §§ 3479 and 3480.) It asks for monetary damages but does not appear to seek injunctive relief. Paragraphs 2 and 61 give the flavor of it:

Defendants have for many years produced millions of automobiles that collectively emit massive quantities of carbon dioxide in the United States and have thus contributed to an elevated level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

. . .

Defendants knew or should have known, and know or should know, that their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases contribute to global warming and to the resulting injuries and threatened injuries to California, its citizens and residents, environment, and economy.

The complaint alleges specific harm to California. Paragraph 4 alleges the costs of planning, monitoring, and infrastructure changes to deal with "a large spectrum of current and anticipated impacts":

• reduced snow pack leading to future water shortages and flooding
  
• coastal and beach erosion
• increased ozone pollution
• sea water intrusion into Sacramento Bay-Delta drinking water supplies
• impacts to wildlife including endangered species and fish
• wildfire risks
• long-term monitoring needs

This case will probably be in the courts quite a while. It'll be interesting to read the parties' briefs.

hurricanes in Europe?

An article in the Insurance Journal (no, I don't normally read it; Google News turned it up) suggests that Hurricane Gordon might hit Europe on Thursday. It's based on the National Hurricane Center's three-day prediction showing the hurricane heading for Spain.

the Pope's speech

I'm not going to give an opinion on the Pope's speech and the furor that came after it, at least not now, except to say this: you can find a copy of the address itself here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/15_09_06_pope.pdf

You can--and should--read it and decide for yourself what you think. Please notice that the preceding sentence recommended two actions: read it first, then decide. Most of the "discussion" I've seen so far could benefit greatly from a better grounding in the facts.

time warner and routers

A friend asked me to set up a router to work with his Time Warner cable modem. The symptoms were confusing: if you plugged his PC into the cable modem directly, the cable modem would give it an IP address and everything was happy. If you plugged the router into the cable modem, there was a link light but nothing else.

After a couple unhelpful tech support calls, during which T-W's techs repeatedly told me I'd have to call the router manufacturer, despite my patient explanations that the router manufacturer wouldn't know diddly-squat about how T-W set up its network, a Google search got to the bottom of it: Time Warner is filtering by MAC address.

You see, every Ethernet device in the world has a unique serial number, called a MAC address. When the Time Warner tech set up my friend's cable connection, he must've configured the cable modem so it would answer to the Ethernet jack on the back of my friend's laptop--and only to that Ethernet jack. Because of the way T-W set up their cable modem, if my friend had to replace the laptop, or decided to plug in a desktop machine instead, or bought a PC-Card Ethernet card and plugged that in, or plugged in a router, the cable modem wouldn't deign to talk to it because it would have a different MAC address. Of course, none of the techs mentioned anything about this limitation when we talked to them, even after the Google search when my friend was pressing them about whether there was any sort of filter in the modem.

Anyway, the work-around is easy: newer routers, like the Linksys WRT54G, have a feature called "MAC address cloning." The router can change its Ethernet's MAC address to match whatever one your PC uses. Clone the MAC address and suddenly the cable modem is friends with your router.

Of course, it's up to you whether you want to do business with a company that goes to such lengths to make it hard to use the service it's purportedly selling you. Personally, I have DSL with one of T-W's competitors.

semi-carless

My car's in the shop. As cars get older, more things break down, and I drive a pretty old car. The shop had some wildly obscure parts in stock, like a valve for the bug washers and a plate that goes behind a handle that's used only on pre-1993 convertibles, but they had to overnight, of all things, a power steering hose. Hopefully it'll be done today.

Now, I have a loaner car, so I'm not without wheels, but it's not my car, and it's amazing how disorienting that fact can be. And sad, in a way: a 2000+ pound piece of machinery has become so central to my life that I'm distracted and confused when it's not around, even when a perfectly functional substitute is available.

aquasaurs (triops launcauditus)

Our niece is getting aquasaurs, scientifically known as triops launcauditus, for her birthday. I did a bit of investigating to find out more about such odd-looking three-eyed creatures. Here are the highlights of digging through the web. You can find more details at the Netfysh Triops FAQ, MyTriops.com, the ever-popular Wikipedia, and the DiscoverThis.com FAQ.

Triops are living fossils. As a species, they've been around 250-350 million years. For comparison, dinosaurs began around 230 million years ago.

Triops have a most amazing adaptation to a niche environment: they do well in ponds that dry up. When the rains come, their eggs hatch. They grow rapidly, lay eggs, and live up to about 90 days. The eggs can survive being dry for 10-20 years until the next time the rain fills the pond. That means if you want more triops, siphon most of the water out of your aquarium (without sucking up the eggs at the bottom), let the rest dry and remain dry for two weeks, then add back distilled water to get the eggs to hatch.

Triops are also predators, though apparently when available they'd rather hunt slow moving vegetables than fast-moving animals. They are predators nonetheless, so mixing them with small fish is not recommended.

tiddlywiki

Tiddlywiki is shiny, in the same sense a blue LED on a cell phone is shiny: it's one of those things that might or might not be especially useful, but it's really neat to play with.

Tiddlywiki is a single, self-contained web page that contains its own built-in editor that you can use to add little bits of information and link them to other little bits of information, all living inside the one web page. There's a fair bit of javascript in it to keep it all working smoothly, so from a technical standpoint it's a nifty trick.

From a practical standpoint, well, I have this shiny new hammer and I'm in search of a nail. Right now, I'm trying it out as a place to put those little bits of information that I might've put in my PDA before, things like birthday/Christmas gift lists and names of good restaurants. I've downloaded a copy of Tiddlywiki to my hard drive and have a bookmark to it in my web browser. We'll see how well this works, but I have great faith that such an interesting tool must have a useful application somewhere.