Back in August, my car was damaged in a hit-and-run. I got the guy’s license plate before he escaped, and filed a police report that included a statement from a witness. I paid my deductible and my insurance company paid the rest.

Last week, I received a letter from my insurance company announcing that they’d lost in arbitration, and since the other insurance company hadn’t paid up, I wasn’t going to be getting my deductible back. I have, in theory, really good insurance, such that if I hadn’t gotten the plate number or the other driver hadn’t been insured at all, they’d have paid. I called my agent and asked “WTF?”.

Today, they explained why the arbitration failed: because my insurance company didn’t submit a recorded witness statement. This was less interesting to me than why I wasn’t getting my money back, so of course they made sure to deliver it through a neutral third party who couldn’t give me anyone higher up to contact.

So I’ve gone back to my agent, and suggested he find someone to give me a damn good explanation, before I find a new company to insure my house, car, and motorcycle. Farmers is no longer my friend.

Just to be clear, I think the “One Laptop Per Child” project is doomed to failure. That is, if the goal is “educating children”, I don’t think it’s going to produce a statistically significant improvement that justifies the expense. Perhaps that’s because all of the press accounts I’ve seen have allowed the sponsors to handwave away the quite serious issues of how they’ll be used.

To date, I have seen only one piece of software that provided significant educational value for children: Rocky’s Boots. I’m sure there have been a few others, but educational software is a tough market to succeed in commercially, and it has characteristics that make it “less than attractive” for the typical open-source developer.

Given the target demographic for OBPC, there simply won’t be a software market; they’ll get whatever open-source stuff is ported, plus whatever is commissioned by the local government educrats.

And that local government will have the power to brick each and every one of those laptops at any time (section 8.19):

We provide such a service for interested countries to enable on the laptops. It works by running, as a privileged process that cannot be disabled or terminated even by the root user, an anti-theft daemon which detects Internet access, and performs a call-home request -- no more than once a day -- to the country's anti-theft servers. In so doing, it is able to securely use NTP to set the machine RTC to the current time, and then obtain a cryptographic lease to keep running for some amount of time, e.g. 21 days. The lease duration is controlled by each country.

...

To address the case where a stolen machine is used as a personal computer but not connected to the Internet, the anti-theft daemon will shut down and lock the machine if its cryptographic lease ever expires. In other words, if the country operates with 21-day leases, a normal, non-stolen laptop will get the lease extended by 21 days each day it connects to the Internet. But if the machine does not connect to the Internet for 21 days, it will shut down and lock.

[Update: I just spent half an hour browsing the OLPC web site and wiki, and all I could find about the actual educational toolsmithing for the project was words to the effect of “we’re Papert-izing the world!”, which tells me precisely dick.]

Via Marginal Revolution, The Wall Street Journal discusses a recent survey of multi-millionaires:

Fully 63% of rich men said wealth gave them “better sex,” which they defined as having more-frequent sex with more partners. That compares to 88% of women who said more money gave them better sex, which they defined as “higher quality” sex.

I particularly like the way the WSJ article uses quotation marks in this paragraph…

About six months ago, The Former Employer With Whom I Signed A Non-Disparagement Agreement decided to close their field offices and consolidate everything at the main office in Kirkland. Some folks were asked to relocate, some were laid off immediately, and a Lucky Few were asked to stay around for a while to manage the transition.

I fell into the third group, with the promise of a reasonable quantity of extra cash should I complete my tasks to their satisfaction. This cash was in fact received on schedule, so I have no immediate plans to test their tolerance for disparagement.

We said our goodbyes at the end of 2006, and I spent the first week of 2007 in Las Vegas, courtesy of a “three-free-nights” offer at the Luxor. While I was out there, Ooma, the company many former co-workers had already fled to, called me up to arrange interviews. I went in on the 10th, went back to meet the CEO on the 15th, accepted their offer on the 16th, flew home to Ohio to quickly see my family on the 19th, and started work today.

What do we do at Ooma? Can’t tell you. Ask again in (can’t tell you).

The often amusing, usually gullible technophiles at BoingBoing have struck again, with Cory Doctorow’s stunned discovery that an organization that’s been attacking PETA for years receives funding from frequent PETA targets.

Never mind the factual truth of their claims about PETA and other lifestyle lobbies, or that PETA itself is about as “grassroots” as a concrete driveway; Cory Doctorow has done a “little digging”, and determined that The Center for Consumer Freedom has (gasp!) industry ties (oh noes!), and therefore must be a tool of The Man, spouting nothing but lies.

Welcome to 1997, Mr. Doctorow. Here, have a 30,000-calorie sandwich and a clue.

Following this fairly typical “why are you so backward” post on Slashdot, I propose a simple solution that would wean consumers off of imperial units in less than ten years:

Get Wal-Mart to require it from their suppliers

I think the Iranian president’s got JC’s number here. He’d totally go jihadi on the UN leadership and rulers of most Middle-East states, as well as their loyal followers:

If Jesus Christ (peace be upon Him) was present today, he would order an encounter against those who would propagate corruption, obscenity and perversion, and try to nullify and exterminate the merits and the rights of women and diminish their position – a position that virgin Mary (peace be upon Her) – is their role model and sample.

Oh, wait; perhaps he’s using different definitions of “corruption”, “obscenity”, “perversion”, and “rights of women”. My mistake.

…John Kerry and Arnold J. Rimmer?

Based on the frantic spin surrounding today’s juicy soundbite, I’d say Rimmer was the likeable one. He also honestly admired the military, despite his failure to achieve the rank he felt he deserved.

"Well, if you'll just bear with me, I think I've devised a fair and equitable system of choosing who should survive. It's based on age, rank, seniority, usefulness... to cut a long story short it's me. I was as stunned as you are, which is why I demanded a recount. But blow me! It didn't come out of me again!"

[Update: I like the way the Leftie horde has descended on the major sites discussing this, insisting that no one could honestly interpret his comment “that way”, and that’s it’s all just a VRWC smear-job. In fact, it’s all too easy to believe that a Democrat would feel that way.]