Posts from: July 2009

31 Jul 2009

The Quickening of Facebook

If you’ve used Facebook in Opera and Firefox, you might have noticed that Facebook is several magnitudes faster in FF, but this has nothing to do with FF’s speed. For FF and IE users, Facebook uses a client-side architecture called “Quickening” that basically makes a few popular pages into full AJAX applications that stay loaded

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29 Jul 2009

Locked Down

Yesterday morning the police put our neighborhood on “lockdown”. A squad car drove through with a loudspeaker (he was clearly audible inside with all our windows closed) announcing we should stay in our homes and secure all doors and windows. A bit later there were helicopters (not unusual in our hood).  Later Kathleen called GPD

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26 Jul 2009

OK, Maybe markets could better control costs

I’m warming to some of the free market health care ideas. Even if we move towards more government sponsored coverage (which seems politically inevitable) it seems like some of these principles could help to increase competition and push costs down, regardless of who’s paying.

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24 Jul 2009

Extreme libertarian Challenge

Radley Balko is a thoughtful libertarian blogger who provides particularly awesome coverage of criminal justice system misconduct. You should read it. In Reason magazine he’s issued a challenge for “lefty bloggers” to define their limits “on the size, cost, and influence of the federal government.” I think this has the potential to be an interesting

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22 Jul 2009

Could drug licenses lead to saner overall policies?

For a few moments, imagine the year is 2109 and the U.S. government “grudgingly tolerates” the recreational use of psychoactive drugs, but requires users to take an education course and earn a license to buy and use (even alcohol).

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16 Jul 2009

The Kind of Press Corrupt Governments Love

While we still have a functional press, journalists have a duty to bring the truth to the public. When evidence leads us to wonder if government officials committed serious crimes, and much of the public desires the truth, there’s just no excuse for the press to look the other way. Glenn Greenwald criticized NBC News

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13 Jul 2009

CBS Classic report on Marijuana

Surprisingly, Mike Wallace’s 1968 TV report on Marijuana is probably the most reasonable, well-balanced, and well-researched report available on the drug.

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In
13 Jul 2009

On Immigration

Radley Balko provides some good evidence toward debunking the myth that immigrant communities bring violent crime, but while these communities are safe, a report on identity theft makes a convincing case that there are serious costs unfairly imposed on the citizens whose identities are stolen to employ those communities (beyond the more distributed costs of

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9 Jul 2009

Prisoners of Endless Wars

Most reasonable people can agree that Gitmo detainees not proven to be enemy combatants at all (e.g. persons pulled off the street on whom we’ve never had anything more than suspicion) should be freed. The tougher question is, what about those obviously working for the enemy, but who are acquitted of committing war crimes. Mark

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4 Jul 2009

PDF readers: Help us read.

PDF articles are notorious usability disasters, with the worst being multi-column documents that require you to constantly scroll in opposite directions as you move through the columns. PDF readers should let us draw a simple path through the document (maybe zoomed out) to outline the flow of text through the article (better, it could try

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