Several weeks back a Polish man was tasered at the Vancouver International Airport by RCMP. The man died from this incident and has caused a lot of questions to be brought up in regards to the use of tasers. A video of the incident is posted if your not sure what happen.

From the news the man did not speak English very well and was in the baggage claim area for approximately 6 hours waiting for his mother to pick him up. The man became somewhat erratic and the RCMP subdued him with a taser which killed him.

How do you think this issue could have been prevented?

I think this could have been prevented in several ways. I do not understand how the man was able to spend 6 hours in the baggage area without anyone noticing him and doing anything about it. The airport should hire someone to just watch for people that look confused in the baggage area and offer assistance. If they do not speak English they could be directed to a phone where an interpreter can communicate with them.

 I also think the RCMP should evaluate this video on how not to handle this type of situation. If you watch the video you will see the RCMP officers who finally tasered the man came from some off site location, surrounded him and then aggravated him to the point of which they required to taser him. If anything this situation would have been handled better by someone who could have looked at the situation and understood it from the other persons perspective.

How do you think this will affect international visitors from attending 2010?

I am very concerned that we could have 1000′s of people similar in the Vancouver International Airport come the 2010 Olympics.

A cartoon created by artist Rob Cottingham.

If you have an idea for a future comic or would like to submit your own BlueFur cartoon let us know in a comment.

On rainy days like these, I’m glad that I work from home. I don’t have to commute through that miserable weather. Instead, I get treated to the never-ending sunshine of the blogosphere and all the illumination that is offered from my computer monitor. From random personal entries to news in the world of blog monetization, everyone is writing about everything. We’ve got a lot to read, but here are five posts to keep you captivated over the weekend. Enjoy!

Cameron from Career Ramblings flips a common saying on its head. When life gives you lemons, optimists say that you should make lemonade. Not Cameron, though. What he recommends is that you squish the lemons instead of making an over-rated summer drink. The example he gives is of the PlayStation 3 and how Sony has flipped the poor sales of the gaming console, remarketing the machine as a home entertainment hub.

Darren Rowse of Problogger is probably one of the most knowledgeable bloggers on the planet. He stays on top of just about everything, so it comes as little surprise that he was the first one to report on the major change in Adsense ad units. The whole ad unit is no longer clickable; instead, it’s just the actual text itself that is clickable and Google says that this will reduce accidental ad clicks, protecting their advertisers from unnecessary costs. Will this hurt publishers? Time will tell.

Derek Semmler has been put up some gems at DadBalance and his great work continues this week hen he lists 5 technologies that hurt your work-life balance. I’ve obsessed repeatedly over finding a healthy life-work balance and I always thought that technology could help improve that balance. Derek thinks otherwise. Goodbye iPhone!

Misti Sandefur is a work-at-home mom, but like Derek, she’s having trouble finding an appropriate work-life balance. That’s why she is so excited about the prospects of having her own home office that is actually separate from the rest of her home. I should get one of those too.

John Bardinelli is a huge video game fan. Although his freelance writing work leads him to play a lot of casual computer games, he’s also a retro fanatic. Surfing through the web, he discovered a great history of Super Mario Bros. Do you remember the first time you jumped on a goomba? Do you remember when Mario entered the third dimension in Super Mario 64? Are you psyched about Super Mario Galaxy?

You may remember back in May when I talked about the four Ps of marketing. Well, when those guidelines were developed, they were designed to address a conventional marketing perspective. They were meant to address a marketing situation where you had a physical good or some sort of service, and you were attempting to market it in a conventional kind of way. For example, your product could be a bar of soap, accident attorney services, or a hot new music player.

However, some people have said that these four Ps — Product, Pricing, Promotion, and Placement — are not adequate to account for all the factors that take place with Web 2.0. Blogs, social media, and other websites exist under an entirely different framework than a brick-and-mortar store. For example, a competition between blogs can very easily be mutually advantageous. Both blogs can gain RSS readers without taking away any subscribers from one another.

The Web 2.0 Four Ps are:

Personalization: Web 2.0 users are less interested in products that are just “off the shelf.” They want solutions that are fully catered to their specific needs. A great example of this are built-to-order computers, like those offered by Dell. Instead of walking into a store and being offered a pre-selected configuration, a user can pick and choose the individual components. The iGoogle personalized homepage works much the same way.

Participation: No longer restricted to passive consumption, Web 2.0 allows consumers to fully participate in the development of a brand, what it offers, and what it stands for. The BlueFur blog, for example, provides an open forum where users can make specific requests for what BlueFur should offer and how the web hosting service should be run.

Peer-to-Peer: Also known as Social Computing, the P2P phenomenon pushes customer participation even further. There is definitely a push toward collaboration with the consumer. Group programming projects are a good example of this.

Predictive Modeling: Wikipedia defines this as referring to “predictive algorithms, such as neural network, that are being successfully applied in marketing problems (both a regression as well as a classification problem).”

Since launching our development servers last week they have been selling extremely well. I took some time to get some feedback from these customers as to why they picked a development server and how they are intending to use it. Here is what a few of them had to say…

Brian a web developer told me, “I have been bouncing from shared host to shared host trying to get the most up to date software so that I can develop sites for my customers. I have finally found an affordable server.”

Olivia a student shared that, “I am currently taking classes that require me to use Oracle. I have been looking for a solution where I can install and have full control of my own database. The server fits right into my budget…”

Olaf a software developer commented, “I have several successful online scripts I sell on my sites. I have not had a chance to test them using PHP 5 and MySQL 5. Finding a host that has a server that fits my needs to test my scripts is extremely valuable for the future of my online business.”

We also have sold our first Xcluster server and you can read John Chow’s review on his blog.

What’s holding you back from getting your own development server?

As many of you may have already noticed, spam bots have a tendency to target older posts in hopes of flying under the radar. Whether these spam comments are left by a bot or by a human being doesn’t really make all that much of a difference: they’re still a hassle. Sure, Akismet picks up on most of the spam comments on most blogs, but there are still a few that manage to squeeze through the cracks. As your blog gain in popularity, you’re probably going to get bombarded with an exponentially increasing number of spam comments.

Thankfully, there are at least two plug-ins that can address this issue directly. Comment Timeout by James McKay is designed for WordPress 2.x blogs and it comes with all sorts of cool features. At its core, it gives you the ability the automatically lock comments on posts that are older than a certain number of days. You can set this number in the options. You can also designate posts on which you want to leave comments open indefinitely.

Some people may be concerned that they are ending discussions too quickly with a plug-in like this. Thankfully, Comment Timeout addresses this issue too. If there is a post that meets a pre-determined number of comments, it is automatically considered “popular” and the comment form will be left open for an extended period of time. Other features include the ability to send comments on older posts to moderation (instead of closing comments altogether) and the ability to warn users when a discussion will be closed.

If you’re looking for something a little simpler, there is also the Auto Shutoff Comments plug-in available at WordPress.org. It’s nowhere near as fancy as Comment Timeout, but it still gets the job done.