Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Frit

Posted on September 24, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

I have no idea if this story that Lt. GW Bush was grounded for cowardice is true. I have no idea how you would tell.

The story, unlike the one by Swift Boat Vets for Lies, has the merit of being consistent with much of the documentary evidence. (I would have expected to see something about this in the medical section of his file? Is this why he didn't report for they physical, because they planned psychological tests?) It may also explain why GW Bush has never produced his separation codes.

But there's no way to tell now, I'd wager.

One thing is for sure: even though it is more plausible than the Swift Vets' tall tale, this story will never get one one-hundreth of the media play.

Posted in Politics: US: GW Bush Scandals | 1 Comment

Perfect Summary of the Allawi Visit

Posted on September 24, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Josh Marshall has the perfect summary of Iyad Allawi's “state” visit to the US.

Talking Points Memo: Here we have a US-installed foreign head of state, whose travel schedule is determined by the US State Department, visiting the US to buoy the president's election campaign and spouting demonstrable lies in order to support a retrospective rationale for war that the White House wants Americans to believe but lacks the gall to state explicitly.

(As someone said, Bush has a 100% approval rating among foreign leaders he appointed.)

Posted in Iraq | 6 Comments

GasPriceWatch: Great Idea — If It Worked

Posted on September 24, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

GasPriceWatch is a great idea: harness the power of crowds to identify the cheapest gas station in an area. Help markets be more efficient! Strike back against temporary locational monopoly and impulse purchases! Make the oiloligopolists fight for your dollar!

GasPriceWatch claims 105,690 “Volunteer Price Spotters” who turn in 43,762 prices per weekly, covering 126,860 US Gas Stations.

But none, it seems, near where I live.

Posted in Internet | 2 Comments

How to Keep Customers Sweet

Posted on September 23, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

When things go wrong with university computing, we don't exactly get full disclosure. More often than not, it's hide the fact, pass the buck, issue turgid self-exonerations later.

Here's how my commercial host deals with issues:

We experienced a brief period of downtime around 4:30pm this afternoon. The problem was caused by a misconfiguration on one of our routers that subsequently required us to reload our main switch as well, and caused some other sporadic outages for approximately the last half hour. While there was intermittent downtime with our private network, access to your websites was largely unaffected with some people seeing more of an effect than others. We're currently in the process of kicking the responsible parties in the butt and working on preventing such problems in the future.

Happy DreamHost NetNotWorking Team!

It's a bit flippant but I'll take it over denial and obfuscation any day.

Posted in Internet | Comments Off on How to Keep Customers Sweet

Great anti-DRM Screed

Posted on September 23, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Cory Doctrow has a marvelous explanation of why 'digital rights management' (building things that don't let you play digital content the way you want to) is bad business for everyone in the digital food chain. (Spotted via Joho the Blog)

I wish I knew how to make a .pdf file that looked this good and had all these cool clickable features. Wow.

UPDATE: After digesting Cory's somewhat gentle persuasiveness, have a look at Joho's own much more pessimistic take on what the pro-DRM people are thinking and doing. Hint:

they're going to win. They own Congress and neither Congress nor the entertainment cartel sees any reason to compromise. Their Lakoffian frame tells them that they're stopping theft, end of story. So they are going to kill the Internet and they don't even know it.

Posted in Law: Copyright and DMCA | 2 Comments

.209448819 Brooksies

Posted on September 23, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

By this metric, I rate .209448819 brooksies. That will do.

[If I google “Michael Froomkin” then I get “about 26,600” hits (“Froomkin” gets much more, but much of that's due to my famous brother). But the MTGoogleRank plugin in the right margin 'only' sees 18,800 hits for the same search. I have no idea why. Perhaps the smaller number excludes multiple pages on the same site?]

Update: Kevin Drum wants “one brooksie” to be a fixed metric of 127,000 google hits, like the meter. But why shouldn't this flucturate like a currency given the rise and inevitable fall of the increasingly lame columnist?

Posted in Internet | 4 Comments