CNN.com – Police don’t have to knock, justices say – Jun 15, 2006
While seemingly innocuous, today’s conservative majority vote in the Supreme Court represents the changing shift in the court and our nation. This decision will have little impact in and of itself, but it sets a dangerous precedent. It says we won’t punish government officials when they fail to follow the law to the letter. In this case, it made no difference. While I feel little sympathy for the accused, I have to wonder what effect this decision will have on future cases.
It seems like every time I turn around there’s another bluetooth enabled gadget. We’ve got bluetooth on laptops, cellphones, headsets, cars and probably household pets. The one problem with all this cool wireless technology is the short-sightedness of the vendors. Take my Motorola E815 cellphone from Verizon as an example. It’s one cool phone with bluetooth, a 1.2MP camera, a large bright screen for playing games and online video and on top of all that it’s got a mini-SD (transflash) memory slot and plays MP3s as good as any iPod. The phone is capapble of being used with all of these features via bluetooth, but the vendor (Verizon) disables all of those features with the exception of the internet access and audio (headset). While there are tons of bluetooth devices out there, many of them are hobbled to the point that they are only a replacement for older proprietary wireless devices.