Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

What He Said, What I Did, What They Said

Posted on January 26, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

This is right: Hullabaloo: Gentleman’s Agreement. That’s the “what he said” part of this post.

Isn’t it odd that major corporations foster so much hatred on the air? It’s clear that Limbaugh and the Fox types are not joking. They are not even “joking”.

So it’s nice to see someone doing something to strike back. I suspect that Chris Matthews would not have been my top choice, or probably even one of my top three, for an advertiser boycott, but you start where you are. And where we are right now is An Open Letter to Chris Matthews.

So here’s what I did. I wrote emails to Intuit and to Toyota because I’m a long-time buyer of their products. And I also used the comment form on their web site. And I said that, much as I like their products, I wouldn’t buy again until they disassociate themselves from this filth. For Toyota it’s a car. For Intuit it was TurboTax: I said I would switch to Tax Cut (I didn’t say I would drop Quicken, because the truth is I probably wouldn’t).

That was last night. This morning I got a phone call from a very concerned marketing VP at Intuit. That’s the company that doesn’t do tech support and never answers my email about bugs in Quicken. She just saw my email and she want me to know that Intuit is very concerned about my opinion, that this is the first she’s heard of this and of course they are concerned. She’s put in a call to the marketing people, but of course Intuit has no control over what shows its ads run on.

I suggested to her that in fact networks make accommodations all the time if a sponsor doesn’t want to be on a show, and if her people were telling her different, maybe she should ask some questions.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking there were over 100,000 visits to the Open Letter site before I got there. I can’t really be the first person to actually write to Intuit, can I? (Although I used the web comment form as well as email, so who knows?). But never mind. I take her to mediamatters.org and to the An Open Letter to Chris Matthews site, and she professes amazement. I say that while Matthews has a First Amendment right to say what he likes, I am a Democrat, and I find it very offensive to have Democrats compared to terrorists. And if Intuit is paying for that with their ads, I think they are responsible for it and they’re associated with it, and I don’t want their product any more.

And so Ms. VP says she’ll call me back if the ad policy changes. I say I’d love it if they change the ad policy,and I look forward to hearing from her soon, and we part best of friends. Or something. And I’m not holding my breath, but who knows.

Posted in The Media | 6 Comments

Still Waiting for the Right Phone

Posted on January 26, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

If only this Duo-mode GSM WIFI Phone — quad band no less! — was a flip phone form factor, I’d buy one just for the coolness of it all.

As it is, even though my old phone is gradually getting electronic Alzheimer’s, I can’t find a flip phone that does what it did when it worked right. Certainly, neither of these seems like the ticket.

Posted in Shopping | Comments Off on Still Waiting for the Right Phone

A Strange Kurdish Parable

Posted on January 26, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

I love this story. Although I’m not utterly sure I know what it means, I can certainly think of times that it would have been appropriate. Jonathan Dworkin guest blogging at Political Animal tells a Kurdish parable:

A man is crazy. He believes he is a flower and birds are trying to eat him. A doctor takes him to the hospital. After months of treatment he improves. “I am not a flower,” he tells himself. As he is walking home from the hospital he looks up at the sky. “I know I am not a flower,” he thinks. “But those birds still want to eat me. How do I convince them that I am not a flower?”

Posted in Etc | 3 Comments

Are Non-Refundable Air Tickets Actually Refundable?

Posted on January 25, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

In the course of a very interesting and serious rumination about proposed air travel regulations ostensibly designed to allow the Center for Disease Control to react to epidemics — but which conveniently enact the surveillance regime on air travelers that this administration has been seeking for some time, Ed Hasbrouck throws out this great aside,

If you are ever denied transportation by an airline, ask them for a copy of their conditions of carriage, which they are required to have available at every check-in counter. Ask them to tell you under which specific clause of the conditions of carriage you are being denied transportation. Try to get them to put that in writing, preferably either on airline letterhead over the signature and legibly printed name of the station manager for the airline at that airport, or as part of a complete printout of your passenger name record , in which the reason you were denied transportation, citing the specific clause of the conditions of carriage, has been entered. (If you made your reservations from Canada, the European Union, or certain other countries, you are entitles to see what’s in your PNR. But not, unfortunately, if you made your reservations in the USA.) If the airline balks at giving you reasons, point out that your eligibility (or not) for a refund of your ticket is dependent on the reasons and the clause of the conditions of carriage under which you were denied transportation. So you need documentation of the reasons for their denial, in order to establish your refund claim. (If the airline refuses to transport you because you refuse to consent to being searched, you are entitled to a full and unconditional refund, even if your ticket would otherwise have been an entirely nonrefundable. Presenting yourself at the airport, and refusing to consent to search, is perhaps the most foolproof way to obtain a refund of an otherwise nonrefundable ticket.) The airline cannot refuse to transport you, except as provided by specific terms of their published conditions of carriage, without grave liability under the common carrier clause of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978.

I’m sure it would be one @#%@$ of a hassle, but it’s an interesting idea nonetheless.

Posted in Shopping | 3 Comments

It Worked for Harry Truman

Posted on January 25, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

It’s good to think that someone in the Senate remembers a little history. Truman became Vice President because he got famous for chairing an investigatory committee, the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program (aka “the Truman committee”).

Harry Truman remembered the ‘war profiteering’ from WW I and determined to try to root it out from the war effort in WW II. The effort made him a popular hero, even as the Washington elites turned up their noses.

Comes now Senator Byron Dorgan, taking aim at “waste, fraud and mismanagement” in the GOP crony capitalist management of the government. Unlike Truman, he hasn’t got a committee to chair, which makes running an investigation much more difficult. The Blogging of the President suggests Dorgan will use a media strategy instead.

I’d like to believe that can work. But it’s very hard to break through. (I expect some white women will go missing in the event this sort of thing gets any traction.)

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze | Comments Off on It Worked for Harry Truman

Robot Uprisings. It’s Only a Matter of Time.

Posted on January 24, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

It’s good to have Bruce Schneier worrying about the big questions for us. The world is undoubtedly a safer place thanks to his work on crypto and security. And he’s funny too. In Schneier on Security: How to Survive a Robot Uprising he points us to this “good start” on the problem:

i’m reading about how to survive a robot uprising. i’m not gonna give away all the secrets, but i’ll share a few…

  • choose a complex environment. waterfalls, street traffic, and places with lots of ambient noise confuse the robots.
  • lose your heat signature. smear yourself with mud and leaves and sit real still.
  • use uncommon words to suss out robots on the phone. robots do not know how pronounce supercalifragilisticexpealidocious.
  • find a blunt weapon. serrated edges won’t work on robo exo-skeletons. nope.
  • alter your stride. robots can judge gait and injury, even height and intention, by stride, so put some rocks in your shoes and mix things up a bit. doing some ministry of silly walks stuff goes even further towards confusing them.
  • pretend that everything is normal. to forstall a mechanized killing spree, you must pretend that nothing is amiss.

If they are Daleks, I thought you just find something with a lot of stairs and no elevator. But the Wikipedia entry on Daleks suggests I’m behind the times,

Due to their gliding motion Daleks were notoriously unable to tackle stairs, which made them easy to overcome under the right circumstances. An oft-copied cartoon from Punch pictured a group of Daleks at the foot of a flight of stairs with the caption, “This certainly buggers our plan to conquer the Universe”. In a scene from the serial Destiny of the Daleks, the Doctor and companions escape from Dalek pursuers by climbing into a ceiling duct. The Doctor (Tom Baker) calls down, “If you’re supposed to be the superior race of the universe, why don’t you try climbing after us? Bye bye!” The Daleks generally make up for their lack of mobility with overwhelming firepower. A joke around science fiction conventions went, “Real Daleks don’t climb stairs; they level the building.”

In The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) a Dalek emerges from the waters of the River Thames, indicating that they are amphibious to a degree. Remembrance of the Daleks (1988) showed that they can hover using a sort of limited antigravity — first implied in earlier serials such as The Chase (1965) and Revelation of the Daleks (1985) — but their awkward forms still limit their mobility in tight quarters. Despite this, the Daleks’ supposed inability to climb stairs is still frequently referred to for humorous effect by journalists covering the series.

The 2005 series episodes Dalek and The Parting of the Ways featured Daleks hovering and flying, the latter also showing them flying through the vacuum of space. In the Dalek episode, the Dalek said “Elevate” before hovering, in the same way it would say “Exterminate” before exterminating.

And is this a good time to link to Charles Stross’s free e-book, Accelerando? Could there be a bad time?

Posted in Completely Different | 1 Comment