mrclay.rg

A Bad Precedent?

While Microsoft has certainly used unlawful practices in the past to build the Windows empire, I fail to see how Opera’s EU antitrust case was anything more than a thinly veiled (and successful) attempt by Opera—and later additional competitors—to strong-arm Microsoft into directly promoting their products. Users of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system in Europe

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Reverse Glasses and Map Flopping

Years ago I had an idea for “reverse” glasses. All they would do is invert horizontally–or flop–the image your retinas receive as if you were viewing through a mirror. I suspect after a brief period of adjustment you’d be able to function fairly normally wearing them, but your common surroundings would appear oddly different, like

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Moyers Considers Similarities Between Afghanistan and Pre-War Vietnam

Bill Moyers treats us to LBJ’s telephone recordings, highlighting some of the similarities between today and the days before our escalation in Vietnam. I wish we could hear the conversations of all our presidents like this. Moyer’s concludes with this: Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we

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Latest 9/11 Victim: our Justice System

Greenwald makes a pretty convincing case that Bush/Obama’s “justice system” for accused terrorists is merely for display purposes only. If you’re accused of being a Terrorist, there’s not one set procedure used to determine your guilt; instead, the Government has a roving bazaar of various processes which it, in its sole discretion, picks for you

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Voicing Opposing to UF’s E-cigarette Ban

Update Nov. 15: My letter to the editor in Monday’s Alligator. Recently I wrote about the potential e-cigarettes hold for harm reduction, so when the University of Florida proposed a regulation that would expand its tobacco use ban to explicitly include e-cigarettes, I decided to speak up. Today I sent the following e-mail to Paula

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Stewart’s Crazy Solution to Global Warming

During Jon Stewart’s interview with Al Gore, Stewart half-jokingly proposes one solution to the problem of oil interests slowing the move towards cleaner energies: Stewart: Partner up with Exxon and say, “You own the oil and gas now; you can own the new thing.” I have to admit, granting the oil companies monopolies on the

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More Cannabis Research Around the Corner?

Today almost no credible evidence suggests that cannabis belongs on Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, alongside drugs like heroin. This position has stifled medical research of the drug and its component chemicals for 39 years, making research extremely expensive and arbitrarily difficult to secure compared to that of much more harmful drugs. A

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E-cigarette: Potentially a huge harm reduction win

I first learned about e-cigarettes from Reason’s coverage of the FDA’s rush to ban them, and of the rightful criticism of that intent from the American Association of Public Health Physicians. Without smoke (e-cigs are miniature vaporizers), nicotine use is likely to be many magnitudes less harmful to the body. The hope is that e-cig

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Get higher quality images within printed web pages

Due to web images being optimized for on-screen display (let’s say 96 DPI), images on printed pages are usually blurry, but they don’t have to be: Start with a high-resolution image. E.g. 2000 x 1000. Save a version with dimensions that fit well in your printed layout when placed in an IMG element. E.g. 300

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First Flourine Bomb Victim

Kansas resident Mike Nolan was the victim of a vicious bombing according to news agency “Fox4kc”. We’re still awaiting word from DHS about troop deployment to Overland Park.

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ToDo: War on Terror Accounting

With all the talk of whether or not to increase troops in Afghanistan, and the ethics of killing from your armchair, I think a group needs to sit down and study the full costs and benefits of these wars. As provoking as tragedies like 9/11 are, if we assign value to “innocent” human lives equally

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Call it “SecondOpinion”

The creators of StackOverflow should team up with the Dept. of Health & Human Services and launch a medical Q&A site based on the SO model. StackOverflow was designed by a few programmers to scratch an itch within the community, and the model they came up with made it the most effective question/answer site I’ve

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Top 5 Random Depressing Problems in Criminal Justice

(Written in August) Forensic science is already shaky and, if DNA can be fabricated, it’s about to get even shakier. The public defender system is poorly funded and in shambles. Poor, mentally ill youths generally end up dumped in jail Florida sends a lot of teens to prison for life Our prisons are no longer

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Reasonable People May Not Show

(Obviously started in August) In the age of Glenn Beck, the town hall meeting paradigm is just the anonymous web forum with no moderator. The people interested in genuine discussion won’t go near it, and “socialist!” is the new “yr gay”. To this extent the tea party folks have certainly been successful at churning out

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We need a distributed social networking protocol…Could Opera Unite be a key?

(Written July 2007) The digital dark ages is already a reality for a lot of people who grew up with hosted e-mail services like Compuserve and AOL. A lot of those users had no choice but to accept the loss of all their received and sent e-mail when they unsubscribed, the service went under, or

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Smallest valid HTML documents

HTML4 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN”> <title></title> <p> HTML5 <!DOCTYPE html> Smallest “useful” HTML5 document <!DOCTYPE html> <link rel=stylesheet href=site.css> <script src=site.js></script> <title>Page Title</title> <h1>Heading</h1> <p>Content… Check em if you want. To avoid problems in IE you might want an opening body tag, but you don’t need a closing one!

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Thoughts on The Wire Season One

(From January 7) Over the break Kathleen and I watched a bunch of movies, but season 1 of The Wire delivered beyond the hype it got from friends. It gives a crash course on the frustration and futility of local cops fighting drug gangs on the street level in West Baltimore. The police jump through

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Questions for Economists

(First of the series “Getting rid of all these draft posts”) Should we really go back to the Gold Standard? I gather only Austrian school (Mises, Hayek, et al.) economists really think a return to “sound” money would be possible or beneficial to the economy, and most prominent economists think it would be disastrous. Has

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Skateboarding and the (Fake) Broken Windows Theory

Nike’s latest glossy skate video “Debacle” is stitched around several highly-realistic, faked acts of vandalism and assault, but none shocking if you’ve watched a lot of skate videos; I just assumed they were real until the disclaimer appeared at the end. I’ve seen pros show off how they cut chains to break into schools; accidentally

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Kleiman on Crime and Punishment

Remind your fiscally conservative politician that all these have severe public costs: Crime Prison cells Disease spread in overcrowded prisons Reduced number of working citizens Broken families and lack of role models Public fear of victimization Evidence shows we can have a criminal justice system that actually convinces most criminals to give up crime while

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