WTF!?!

‘The clown formerly known as Laloo’ has ordered Indian Railway authorities to remove the images of gods and goddesses from all the railway stations in the country.

I fail to see any rhyme or reason behind this communiqué. Can you?!

The Supreme Court of India has ruled that an error of judgement on the part of a doctor, resulting in the patient’s death could not be termed as a ‘criminal’ act. It ruled that the standard of negligence should be so high that it is ‘gross negligence’ for the act to be regarded as ‘criminal’.

Justice Dharmadhikari, writing for the bench, said it could be termed ‘criminal’ only when the medical man exhibited a gross lack of competence or inaction and wanton indifference to his patient’s safety and which is found to have arisen from gross ignorance or gross negligence.
“Where a patient’s death results merely from error of judgement or an accident, no criminal liability should be attached to it,” the Supreme Court said.

I wonder… if death is the result in both the cases,

• Carelessness or error in judgement on the part of the doctor, resulting in death of the patient
• Gross lack of competence and/or wanton indifference on the part of the doctor, resulting in the patient’s death

then would the first be termed as ‘manslaughter’ and the second be termed as ‘criminal manslaughter’??

This kind of granularity is welcome since it makes a clear distinction between an honest mistake and recklessness… and lays out different levels of sentences for them.

But I hope this is applied to other areas of the law as well. For instance, the much-debated issue of marital rape.

Bruce Springsteen’s ‘No Surrender‘ is John Kerry’s campaign song, it being Kerry’s favourite song.

So Springsteen apparently returned the favour by declaring his support [NYTimes registration required] for the Kerry-Edwards campaign.

The folks over at Micro$oft recently started an IE blog now that Bill Gates has expressed his desire to start a weblog. That is a good thing per se. It is really entertaining to read what they have to say on the blog. They talk about taking IE towards better standards support while having a blog that does not validate even HTML 4.0 transitional. But some of the content (non-technical though) comes off as refreshing given the hard-nosed image that Micro$oft has.

One of the things that is readily apparent from IEblog is that everybody seems to be trying to say that they are unable to disclose detailed information about the vulnerabilites faced by IE. The reasons given for this range from security policies at Micro$oft to not letting ‘folks who want to find security holes and hurt Windows customers’ (their words, not mine!!) know about those vulnerabilites.

Hmmm…

I think someone should point them towards mozillaZine where the folks do not think in such terms while releasing updates to their browsers to rectify/patch the various security vulnerabilities that threaten them.

But then… thats just one of the differences between the best open source browser and Micro$oft!