Tonight, tonight.

Going to see the Smashing Pumpkins. Because EMI is a humorless taintclown and won’t allow Youtube embedding, here’s “1979.”

The Smashing Pumpkins – 1979

Linkwad (updated).

1. Make your own Android apps (Via Engadget).
2. Lawsuit over Apple’s AT&T lock-in, App Store moves forward.
3. Harry Reid and Sharron Angle’s fair-use fight.
4. Radley Balko interviewed about police-recording arrests.
5. Update: YouTube now supports 4096p video.

Linkwad.

1. Comic Sans Dan Gilbert hates LeBron James (who has just replaced Kobe Bryant in the public’s mind as “Biggest Figurative NBA Dick”).
2. Drowning doesn’t look like drowning (via @Maryvale).
3. Android gains market share, thanks entirely to awesome circuit board live wallpapers (probably).
4. Catholic Church vacillates on welcoming drug addicts and drug dealers, still pretty much against gay dudes. (via Andrew Sullivan)
5. Updated: Nope. A potential AIDS research breakthrough which might also work against the flu (via AS, again).

And the law won.

Johannes Mehersle, the Oakland cop who shot an unarmed, handcuffed man in the back, avoided a murder charge, and was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Mehersle’s defense, that he meant to draw his Taser instead of his gun, was questionable at best, and wasn’t good enough for a judge during a preliminary hearing.

Whether or not Mehersle actually intended to shoot Oscar Grant, the trial is a reminder of a few things:

1. Juries, especially juries where blacks are excluded, are unduly sympathetic to police.
2. Even when not confused with guns, Tasers have caused hundreds of deaths in the last decade. However, police still use them freely, even in confrontations with unarmed suspects.
3. This trial only came about because of citizen-recorded video, which will get you arrested in several states (Maryland has been particularly incoherent on the subject).

Update: Adam Serwer has a much more complete take on the trial’s import.

The almighty dollar.

Back in 2005, Dexter Ford wrote an article about motorcycle helmet safety in Motorcyclist. The article, which found that Snell-rated helmets were actually less safe than less-expensive DOT-approved ones, was very helpful back when I was first looking for a brain bucket, and prompted Snell to revise their helmet testing regimen in 2009.

However, after Ford wrote an article for the NYT pointing out that helmets tested under the old rating system were still carrying Snell approval stickers (and ultimately recommending DOT-approved helmets), Shoei and Arai (two big-name helmet makers) started pulling ads from the magazine¹, and Ford was ultimately fired. The company has since attempted to circle the wagons, but it’s pretty obvious they were bowing to pressure. There’s a whole lot of documentation, none of which looks good for Motorcyclist.

Of course, this bottom-line-driven behavior isn’t limited to motorcycle rags, and is symptomatic of the general decline of large, for-profit media companies.