Whipped Cream Difficulties

Look, I don’t like drunk drivers. I don’t like drunk drivers who kill people while driving drunk. If I had my way, they’d be charged with murder.

That said, there’s something wrong with this WP editorial arguing that a bar should bear responsibility for the death of a ten-year-old girl “who liked dogs, horses and dancing”. (Would it have been less tragic if she hated horses?)

They also knew something was wrong when Michael D. Eaton downed 17 bottles of the Mexican brew, plus a shot of vodka, in about five hours. It was too much.

So that’s 18 drinks in five hours, or 3.6 drinks an hour on average. The WP doesn’t tell us how much Mr. Eaton weighed, or whether his drinks were evenly distributed over the five hours (as opposed to him being there for 4:30, and then slamming down 17 Coronas and a shot in the last half hour). But assuming he weighed 200 pounds, and the drinks were evenly distributed…according to this chart, he’d be right on the borderline between 0.06 and 0.08. I’m not convinced that’s the sort of visibly drunk that would make the bar responsible for letting him leave.

(It is interesting that none of the articles on this case specify Mr. Eaton’s BAC, but perhaps that has something to do with the fact that he fled the scene and turned himself in 12 hours later. It is also interesting that the WP editorial blaming the bar doesn’t mention Mr. Eaton’s “previous convictions for drunk driving, reckless driving, selling marijuana and speeding “.)

In other news, the Austin PD fired another officer. The twist here is that the fired officer was already on probation and had been suspended for “temporarily ignoring a dispatch and disengaging the tracking system in his patrol car for just over twenty minutes”: even after being placed on probation and suspended, he still turned off the tracking system (and apparently the cameras) in his patrol car another 60 times.

Obit watch: Noted Texas writer John Graves. At some point, I need to read Goodbye to a River.

Speaking of Las Vegas, people are coming back. But they aren’t gambling as much, or spending as much money on other things.

And speaking of DEFCON/Black Hat: WP coverage of the NSA director’s speech.

I’m hoping for some good coverage of Black Hat/DEFCON from Brian Krebs, who, by the way, has an interesting tale to tell:

Earlier this month, the administrator of an exclusive cybercrime forum hatched and executed a plan to purchase heroin, have it mailed to my home, and then spoof a phone call from one of my neighbors alerting the local police.

(Also, credit card and PIN skimmers just keep getting better and better.)