According to Microsoft’s Silverlight 4 Privacy Statement,
Disabling Silverlight Unique Client Identification
A registry key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Silverlight can be created with the Value Name EnableClientInformation with a Value Type of REG_DWORD and given a value of 0x00000000. This sets the machine to never provide the unique identifier associated with the Unique Client Identification feature to any Web site regardless of the DRM setting.
Any downside to this?
Peter Shane has a great question for GOP House members written as they prepared to read the Constitution aloud at the opening session of the new Congress (a stunt I’m entirely for, by the way — the Constitution should be read aloud much more often, I say).
Peter argues, I think correctly, that the Incompatibility Clause of the Constitution (Section 6, Paragraph 2, of Article I: “no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office.”) means that Congresspersons cannot be serving officers or members of the Reserves. He applies this to Rep. Allen West, who is a retired Lt. Colonel. If Rep. West in the Retired Reserves, then I guess Peter is right; but if he’s not, then the fact that by statute Rep. West might theoretically be recalled to active duty due to his former service cannot be held against him.
Incidentally, as regards the Incompatibility Clause and the Reserves, I think the policy issues are quite mixed at best. On the one hand, there is a real possibility for exactly the sort of manipulation that the Clause is designed to prevent — sweetheart assignments, promotions (and thus pay increases) to Congresspersons by an administration seeking to curry favor with them. On the other hand, there’s surely a benefit to having Members of Congress subject to the same obligations as the Reservists whose lives their decisions effect in so many ways, plus the value of rubbing shoulders with an important constituency. Whatever my policy preferences, however, the Constitutional text looks absolute to me.
Note, incidentally, that I think there wouldn’t be a problem with a Member of Congress being an NCO in the Reserve as I do not think that NCOs are “Officers” in the Constitutional sense, and in any case the level of cushiness is in most cases not going to be as great as for commissioned officers.
This is pretty cool: my colleague Robert Rosen has just had his Ph.D dissertation — written many years ago and apparently something of a cult classic — published.
Here’s the publisher’s blurb:
The recognized study of the disparate roles that corporate attorneys play in representing and advising their institutional clients. Long passed around and cited by scholars and lawyers as an unpublished manuscript, the book is also accessible to a wide audience and includes inside interviews. Professor Robert Rosen insightfully explores the choices that lawyers, managers and executives make about how lawyers are involved in corporate processes.
In the companies studied, Rosen showed that corporate lawyers were repeatedly intertwined in decisions—beyond those regarding mere legal compliance—ranging from finance to production to sales to returns to litigation. But the how, when and consequences of their involvements varied. The book analyzes these variations. It examines relations between inside and outside counsel and the management of the corporate legal function. It locates them in a taut framework of organization theory and institutional behavior, a frame and application since referenced for its cogency and explanatory power.
The author, now a senior professor at the University of Miami Law School, repeatedly calls on attorneys to understand the organizational context of their work. His book repeatedly calls out attorneys who ill serve their clients because they failed as organizational analysts. It has since been recognized by legal, ethical, and sociological theorists as a rich resource of corporate analysis and the divergent roles that lawyers play.
The groundbreaking research was conducted at six major manufacturing companies as Rosen interviewed a triad of inside counsel, outside counsel and managers who worked on particular problems. This novel method allowed self-serving statements (especially by the lawyers involved) to be checked and placed in realistic context. More important, because it triangulated how the legal problem was understood, the method brought out how the legal task had been structured. The frames that the lawyers, managers and organization imposed on the legal problems varied widely—and the sources and consequences of these variations are detailed and explained.
The book’s latest edition is now available from Quid Pro Books, but the manuscript has already had scholarly impact and praise. For example, the Yale Law Journal noted in 1996 that “Rosen’s important manuscript is widely cited in recent literature on legal professionalism.”
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A Florida professor was arrested and removed from a plane Monday after his fellow passengers alerted crew members they thought he had a suspicious package in the overhead compartment.
That “suspicious package” turned out to be keys, a bagel with cream cheese and a hat.
Ognjen Milatovic, 35, was flying from Boston to Washington D.C.on US Airways when he was escorted off the plane for disorderly conduct following the incident.
…
When confronted by the US Airways crew about his “suspicious package,” Milatovic got on his cell phone. The crew asked him to hang it up and sit down. When he refused, he was cuffed.
Milatovic was also charged with interfering with the operation of an aircraft.
According to the Australian newspaper article where I got this picture, it is a “Right Brain vs Left Brain test,”
do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?
If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.
Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction
I’m a little dubious, because it doesn’t explain the mechanism, and I think most people who know me would say I’m very thoroughly left-brained. But I saw the figure turning clockwise.
Focusing didn’t change that. Shaking my head up and down like a raving loony got me to a point where the dancer seemed to be flipping back and forth and then briefly counter-clockwise, before reverting to clockwise.
[Original draft 1/19/2009. In preparation for my blog redesign, I found draft blog posts that somehow never made it to publication. This is one of them.]
2011: Still see it going clockwise.
Orin Kerr points us to an article at law.com:
In a pact brokered by the New York County Lawyers’ Association, more than 60 law firms have agreed to tell their corporate clients the composition of assigned legal teams by race, gender, ethnicity and sexual preference.
For several years, clients have asked law firms to sign statements in support of diversifying the legal profession. But with the formal agreement, firms have volunteered to put hard numbers behind their noble aspirations. According to the pact, “law firms should not object to requests by their corporate clients [to] report the number of hours devoted to the clients’ matters by minority lawyers.”
It’s nice that clients don’t want to employ either bigots or those who, even by lack of effort, have failed to overcome a legacy of discrimination.
But immediate consequences are clear, said Robert L. Haig, a partner at Kelley, Drye & Warren, one of the first large Manhattan firms to sign the agreement.
“When that number is put on the table and it’s a small number, then the great enthusiasm for diversity is a little suspect. The client might say, ‘We can’t hire you for the following year,’” Haig said in an interview. “Right then, that law firm is going to change. They’re going to do what they have to do in order to be retained again and again.”
He added, “This is economically driven, and that’s what makes it powerful.”
Haig, a former president of County Lawyers, the nation’s first bar association to admit minority attorneys, was one of about 30 attorneys who formed a County Lawyers task force on diversity. The effort was launched in 2000 and headed by Juanita Bing Newton, administrative judge of New York City Criminal Court and deputy chief administrative judge for Justice Initiatives at the Office of Court Administration.
But suppose the shoe were on the other foot? What if the clients wanted low numbers of minorities? Then we’d all be revolted. The parallel is far from perfect: excluding minorities is illegal and immoral; demanding their inclusion is legal and praiseworthy. But is the mechanism appropriate? In general I’m in favor of people voting with their buying dollar to support suppliers whose values they share, and to avoid sellers with bad values even when they have good things to sell.
But I’m also instinctively uncomfortable with anything that smacks of racial quotas. Yet it is undeniable that law firms, especially big corporate firms, have not done everything they could to diversify. Some of the older troglodytes even seem to believe that the clients may harbor suspicions of minority lawyers. So it’s nice to see pushback from the clients.
And yet.
[Original draft 5/13/2005. As part of my blog redesign, I’ve been going through draft blog posts that somehow never made it to publication. This is one of them.]
2011: Subsequent research by one of my colleagues suggests strongly that big clients, at least, really couldn’t care less about diversity among their lawyers; big firm clients may talk a great deal in public about demanding it, but it doesn’t even show up on their general counsels’ list of important factors determining law firm choice when speaking in private.
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