Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Good Thing Two Kids Was Enough

Posted on December 9, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

They only measured lap heat, not actual sperm production, but the results are suggestive: Laptops may damage male fertility.

I can hear the jokes already.

Posted in Science/Medicine | 2 Comments

Bad Deal: Snow Stays, Principi Leaves

Posted on December 9, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

The Cabinet lost one of its few competent members but retained one its most clueless and ineffectual (note the “and” — many are one or the other only some are both): CNN.com – Snow staying at Treasury. When does the press get to rats and sinking ships? (Although, to be fair, as political matter, pushing through an intelligence bill whatever its actual merits was good survival politics for the administration; failing to do so would have reeked of lame duckishness so hard no one could ignore it.)

Posted in Politics: US | Comments Off on Bad Deal: Snow Stays, Principi Leaves

Moving Day

Posted on December 8, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

It's moving day today: we're taking all our stuff from the front half of the house where we've been living for a year in cramped conditions, and moving to the brand new back half of the house, where we will live in cramped conditions while the front half is rehabbed. In theory this rehab process should only take a month. Or two. Or who knows. Anyway, no posting today unless I have a lot more pep than I expect to still have after dinner.

Posted in Adventures in Remodeling | Comments Off on Moving Day

Where Do They Find These Guys?

Posted on December 7, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Tom's Hardware Guide: Tom's Hard News:

The record companies' next witness in the trial, Professor Leon Sterling, Adacel chair of software innovation and engineering, University of Melbourne, has filed two affidavits on his examination of Kazaa Media Desktop (KMD) documents.

In the affidavits, filed in court Tuesday morning, Sterling claimed that whether a system was managed centrally or peer-to-peer was only a design detail, not a technically significant characteristic.

Assuming this report is accurate — never a certainty — you have to wonder what planet this guy is living on. P2P vs. central server is no mere design detail. It's an entirely different philosophy.

Posted in Law: Copyright and DMCA | 3 Comments

Wayne Madsen Is At It Again (‘Vote Switching” Software???)

Posted on December 6, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

I still think Wayne Madsen is not a nut, and that's why I have to give some credence to this well researched, and highly suggestive albeit not dispositive piece of reporting: Texas to Florida: White House-linked clandestine operation paid for “vote switching” software:

An exhaustive investigation has turned up a link between current Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney, a customized Windows-based program to suppress Democratic votes on touch screen voting machines, a Florida computer services company with whom Feeney worked as a general counsel and registered lobbyist while he was Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and top level officials of the Bush administration.

According to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, while he was employed by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc., during 2000, Feeney solicited him to write a program to “control the vote.” At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic registrations.

According to Curtis, Feeney and other top brass at Yang Enterprises, a company located in a three-story building in Oviedo, Florida, wanted the prototype written in Visual Basic 5 (VB.5) in Microsoft Windows and the end-product designed to be portable across different Unix-based vote tabulation systems and to be “undetectable” to voters and election supervisors.

I just hope he's wrong — and I worry that the same hope may cause other people to dismiss this one out of hand rather then trying to find out where the facts lead.

Posted in Politics: Tinfoil, Politics: US: 2004 Election | 13 Comments

It’s Miller Time at UM

Posted on December 6, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

UM Medical School announced a $100 million gift today, from the family of the late Leonard Miller, a longtime South Florida businessman and philanthropist.. The Medical School will be renamed the “Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine”.

Officially, anyway. That same announcement also refers to it as “The University of Miami Miller School of Medicine”.

The Med School Miller School is the biggest academic unit at UM. I bet for half that, or even less, you could name the law school almost (but not quite) anything you wanted.

Meanwhile, this enormous gift means that the university is 80% of the way towards its billion-dollar fund-raising goal, with $500+ million going to the Med School.

Posted in U.Miami | Comments Off on It’s Miller Time at UM