Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. - A.J. Liebling
{ Monthly Archives }
The Economist describes a new technique to “stamp minute features on to melted silicon, just as a seal is stamped on to softened wax”. This is more fodder to dispose of the contention that Moore’s Law will soon be coming to an end.
Go out and see Minority Report. In Blame Runner David Edelstein writes that “Minority Report is a fabulous, witty totalitarian nightmare”. Jeremy Lott provocatively asserts in Reason that the movie will be to the Bush administration what Wag the Dog was to the Clinton team: both “capture a political and cultural moment”. Wag the Dog featured a war to distract the public from a presidential sex scandal, and soon afterward the bombing on Kosovo began during the peak of the Lewinsky scandal. Minority Report convicts and punishes perpetrators of future crimes before they can commit them.
Of course, in a world without “pre-cogs” to stop the future before it happens, we’re stuck back with all the inconveniences of potentially flawed justice, and therefore the due process guarantees that help protect us from inevitable mistakes. Unless, of course, John Ashcroft decides that we are an “enemy combatant”, in which case we (like American citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi) can be held without a lawyer until the war ends, i.e., until hell freezes over.
Sunbelt Software iHateSpam is a plug-in Outlook anti-spam filter.
Everyone knows how ridiculous the McDonalds lawsuit for serving coffee was. Some trial lawyers add an opposing view:
The woman, an 81-year old former department store clerk who had never before filed suit against anyone, said she wouldn’t have brought the lawsuit against McDonald’s had the Corporation not dismissed her request for compensation for medical bills.
I generally support tort reform, and especially nuisance shareholder lawsuits, but it’s hard to argue that lawsuits have not improved product quality (when they were not forcing other, potentially important products from ever coming to market).
Arnold Kling doesn’t think blogging is a fad.
Shake hard.
Signed in the fields of Runnymede in 1215, the magna carta guaranteed protection against unlawful imprisonment by instituting habeas corpus, appeal to a higher body. President Bush and John Ashcroft have decided that this right no longer applies to certain American citizens, such as Yaser Esam Hamdi. History will not look kindly on their betrayal of the freedoms that America represents. I never expected to read these words about the US government: “The government argued today that it was perfectly legal to hold an American citizen in custody without filing charges against him and without giving him access to a lawyer.”
The cynical view of Westerner’s obsession with Ebola and death by asteroid is that it gives us relatively innocuous ghouls to worry about while completely curable diseases like measles and malaria kill tens of millions every year. The counter-argument is that no event threatens the survival of our species the way an asteroid strike does, so it’s worth some extra effort to prepare. Timothy Ferris wrote the definitive “Death from Above” in the New Yorker in 1997, which has been excerpted and reviewed.
The New York Times carries an AP story today that an asteroid the size of a football field had a near miss last week. You’ve got to love NASA representatives calmly discussing asteroids that could “destroy civilization as we know it” versus the miss last week that would only be the magnitude of a large nuclear weapon. Of the nuclear-bomb size asteroids, another scientist helpfully adds: “Civilization has to get used to them on some level.”
Is there a pattern here?
MSN’s earlier efforts to expand its D.S.L. service nationwide have been star crossed. It first contracted with Northpoint Communications to provide its nationwide backbone network. When Northpoint filed for bankruptcy protection, Microsoft hired Enron, which met the same fate. Now Qwest is providing Microsoft’s backbone.
Maybe we should short QWST?