December 18, 2009
The lesson is . . . next time, don’t turn it in
Remember the report of a man who’d found a shotgun on his lawn, turned it in to the police, and was promptly charged with posession of an illegal weapon? Well, he’s been convicted and will face up toa minimum of five years in prison for his “crime”:
A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for “doing his duty”.
Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday — after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year.
The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year’s imprisonment for handing in the weapon.
In a statement read out in court, Mr Clarke said: “I didn’t think for one moment I would be arrested.
“I thought it was my duty to hand it in and get it off the streets.”
The way the law is written, the jury would have had no choice but to find him guilty. If only there were some way for a jury to find that the law was at fault. (Or, among their other limits to civil liberties, has the British government made jury nullification illegal?)
Update: Fixed the mis-statement about the length of sentence Mr. Clarke may face.
Odd . . . my phone is ticking
I just went into my office to hear an odd ticking sound. At first I thought it might have been a cooling fan on my desktop computer, but it turned out to be coming from the cordless phone sitting beside the tower. When I picked up the handset, it started ringing. I checked that it wasn’t really a call (no, normal dialtone when I turned on the line). Then, when I hung up, the phone started ringing continuously.
I finally got it to stop ringing, but it’s back to ticking. There’s no user-replaceable battery in the handset, so I’ll have to let it run down completely and recharge again to see if it’s just a battery issue or if the phone has gone bad. Irritating either way.
More on passwords
The Economist‘s Tech.view correspondent confesses to password laxity:
He admits to flouting the advice of security experts: his failings include using essentially the same logon and password for many similar sites, relying on easily remembered words—and, heaven forbid, writing them down on scraps of paper. So his new year’s resolution is to set up a proper software vault for the various passwords and ditch the dog-eared list.
Your correspondent’s one consolation is that he is not alone in using easily crackable words for most of his passwords. Indeed, the majority of online users have an understandable aversion to strong, but hard-to-remember, passwords. The most popular passwords in Britain are “123” followed by “password”. At least people in America have learned to combine letters and numbers. Their most popular ones are “password1” followed by “abc123”.
I’ve written some carefully considered advice on passwords, which is still as valid today as it was in those dark, distant days of October.
Surprising court decision doesn’t favour the artist
Having just read the brief outline of the case, I was more than a little surprised that the court (correctly, in my opinion) decided that the “art” in question was just glorified vandalism:
Glass act: student fined for smashing gallery window and calling it art
Gallery fails to see funny side after student puts metal pole through window as part of an art projectDoes breaking a window count as art? Yes, murmured the 50 or so artniks who recently crowded into a former Edinburgh ambulance garage to view a film of sculptor Kevin Harman doing just that. No, insisted Kate Gray, director of the Collective Gallery in Cockburn Street, whose window it was.
The courts are on Gray’s side. Yesterday Harman, a prize-winning graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, was fined £200 for breaching the peace on 23 November, when he smashed a metal scaffolding pole through one of the gallery’s windows. Fiscal depute Malcolm Stewart described the affair as “a rather bizarre incident” which had left Collective staff “upset.”
I’m actually quite surprised that the court decided this case properly . . . it has seemed for quite some time that an “artist” could declare just about anything to be “art” and get away with it. I’m not against all art, but if in the performance of your artistic work you happen to break a law, I think the police and the courts should not mitigate your treatment just because you’re an “artist”.
