Interesting story on how rescue teams are struggling to keep up with advances in auto safety:

“We build more fire stations, we make faster fire trucks, we’ve got helicopters to get you to the hospital,” said Roberts, an expert who teaches extrication to colleagues around Florida. “But what’s slowing us down are these vehicles that are harder for us to get into.”

The problem has rescue workers scrambling to update their tools and explore different ways to attack cars with their cutters, spreaders and saws. Some agencies with equipment more than a few years old are arriving at accident scenes and finding out that it will no longer do the job.

The obvious answer is to design newer vehicles with rescue requirements in mind.

Automakers say they are doing more to make safety information available to rescuers and tool makers before new models come out. For instance, Ford is already offering a look at the skeleton of the 2009 F-150 pickup, built with the strongest steel construction the company has ever used.

“We want to facilitate the discussion as much as possible, because we understand the critical nature of their work,” Ford spokesman Wesley Sherwood said.

Safety information is nice, but what about a standard for vehicle safety that rescuers can be trained on and practice? For example, surely the hybrid engineers can find a way to route cables in a consistent fashion that is free and clear of a rescue saw or least give rescuers the right of explaining their preferred cutting path.

Buried amongst the long list of recent critical security patches for Apple OS X is this delightful bit of language:

The “Set access for specific services and applications” radio button of the Application Firewall preference pane was translated into German as “Zugriff auf bestimmte Dienste und Programme festlegen”, which is “Set access to specific services and applications”. This might lead a user to believe that the listed services were the only ones that would be permitted to accept incoming connections. This update addresses the issue by changing the German text to semantically match the English text.

I like how it reads “the X button was translated as X, which could be confusing, so it has been changed to Y”. Much clearer now. Anyone have the new German phrase?

An investigation of the killing of rare mountain gorillas has uncovered an inside job:

The Congolese Nature Conservation Institute (ICCN) is reported to have brought the charges against Honore Mashagiro – one of its members.

Ten gorillas were killed in 2007 in the Virunga National Park, a Unesco world heritage site.

The motive is said to have been related to creating a “distraction” while other illegal activity was conducted.

No, I’m not talking about opportunities for women (pun intended). Sometimes the security team gets an odd request to help operations or even become operations in times of need. The BBC report on the bread crisis in Egypt puts this into perspective:

Hosni Mubarak said eradicating bread queues was “imperative”.

The army and interior ministry control numerous bakeries normally used to supply bread for troops and police.

Mr Mubarak issued his order to the army at a meeting of cabinet ministers on Sunday that was called to address the growing crisis, his spokesman said.

Perhaps the next time the network teams asks you to start working for them to reduce panic among users, just remember bread price inflation in Egypt. Or maybe the 100,000% inflation in Zimbabwe is worth consideration as well. Another article I read said Zimbabwe’s issues are just foreshadowing of things to come for the rest of the world. Food for thought (pun not intended).