The Dutch Ministry of Justice recently announced that special knee locks to prevent prisoner escapes could be tested later this year if parliament gives its approval. In the Netherlands, a "furlough" system is used to gradually reintroduce prisoners that have committed serious offenses back to society: instead of letting prisoners out when their term ends, they are accompanied by a guard to visit relatives, and gradually given more freedom until it is deemed that they are ready for unsupervised parole. Unfortunately, there have been several cases where prisoners on leave committed serious offenses like rape and murder by slipping away from their guards. The purpose of this test is to see whether a knee locking system -- which prevents a prisoner from moving if they move a certain distance away from their guard -- can prevent these kind of unfortunate cases. As draconian as this system may sound, it's probably the most humane of all the solutions that were looked at: prisoners could potentially have had to wear gadgets that gave them electric shocks or injected drugs to prevent them from escaping. The best part about this whole case is what justice ministry spokesman Wim van der Weegen compared the system to: illegally parked cars. Probably not the best analogy he could have used -- badly parked car = potentially inconvenient. Escaped prisoner = potentially capable of murder -- but we'll give Wim the benefit of the doubt this time, and mark it up as lost in translation.

[Thanks, Joel]

It didn't take too long for the first Wii-related injury to surface, and it was even shorter before Wiimotes folks starting breaking things with their wild flinging antics, but when your product spurns the creation of an entire website devoted to users getting banged up when misusing the controller, now that's an accomplishment. Of course, it's probably safe to assume that at least half these Wiinjuries are nothing more than backyard boo-boos that folks translated into Wiincidents to get their 15 minutes of fame, but regardless, when Nintendo sends out emails and offers beefier Wiimote straps to those having problems, at least some of this stuff has to be legitimate. First up is a high-heel-wearing dame who apparently dislocated her knee while going for the smash in Wii Tennis, but the remedy to this happening again should really be quite apparent. Next we've got a rowdy customer service guru who actually swung the Wii-bat so hard, it purportedly snapped something within his arm. Lastly, we've got a Agassi wannabe who didn't exactly pay attention to the overhead (glass) light fixture before serving an ace, and now he's reportedly got the bloodshed (and repair bills) to show for it. The moral of the story is that the Wiimote can be a potent weapon and injury liaison if not used properly, but hey, we can't deny the humor in folks taking themselves out when going FTW.

Read - Dislocated Knee, via Joystiq
Read - Broken Arm
Read - Sliced Hand
Read - More Examples of Wiimote carelessness