Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Aortas in the News

Posted on December 11, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

Richard Holbrooke has suffered an aortic dissection. This is more or less the same thing that happened to me nine months ago. Being 69, his prognosis cannot be good. Being one of the lucky ones, partly because I was much younger, I can’t help but hope he somehow pulls through. If he does, don’t expect him on any shuttle diplomacy for a while: I’m not 100% yet myself, although I’m getting there.

Posted in Science/Medicine | 2 Comments

For Those Who Hate and Fear US ‘Socialism’

Posted on December 10, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

YouTube – REGULATION VACATION CELEBRATION!

[Original draft 5/28/2009.   In preparation for my blog redesign, I’ve been going through draft blog posts that somehow never made it to publication. This is one of them.]

2010: Still relevant, but the whole things seems a little quaint now that Obama has decided to govern as a Reagan Republican; that may be saner than a DeMint Republican, but are those the only choices?

Posted in Politics: Tinfoil, Zombie Posts | 1 Comment

Was It Good For You?

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

I’ve turned on a couple of caching programs, but with fairly tame settings for now.  Please let me know if you experience any weirdness.

In the fullness of time, I will open the blog to registration, and registered users will get the uncached, most up-to-date content.   Although, in theory, the cache should update every time I post something or someone adds a comment, so I’m not sure why that really matters.

Meanwhile, I’ve got two caching programs working, and my major fear is that they may work at cross-purposes.  I have the W3 Cache, but only partial mimifying.  And I also turned on Dreamhost’s new mod_pagespeed.  As best I can discern, it risks being somewhat duplicative of W3’s mimification, as both try to squeeze out some of the air of javascript and HTML files as well as caching them on disk (W3) and who-knows-where or whether (mod_pagespeed).  It would take rigorous testing to figure out if this a good combination, or which one is better alone, and the truth is that I don’t plan to do that testing any time soon if ever.  On this, I hope to free ride on the efforts of others.

I’ve just solved a problem that had eaten my RSS feeds, and there odds are there are more.  So please let me know if things are acting stranger than usual.  (And whether the blog now seems faster or slower than it used to.)

Thanks for your patience….

Posted in Discourse.net | Comments Off on Was It Good For You?

RFID Chips In People?

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Michael Froomkin
RFID

Image © by midnightcomm. Some rights reserved.

Slashdot reports,

CNET has reported that Japanese schoolchildren in the city of Osaka will be tagged with RFID tags. Apparently this is in addition to the trial program in Tabe that The Register reported earlier, where parents can track their children on their way to school.

See also, Politech, Mexican officials get selves chipped with implants in arms.

[Original draft 7/14/2004. In preparation for my blog redesign, I found draft blog posts that somehow never made it to publication. This is one of them.]

2010: Still weird, I hope. Of course RFID in pets and livestock is becoming commonplace, so maybe people are not far behind.

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 4 Comments

Units of Measure

Posted on December 8, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

As coined by Atrios, a “Friedman” or “Friedman unit” is famously six months — the amount of time that the columnist keeps telling us it will take before we know whether Iraq turns the corner, finds the lights at the end of the tunnel….but when the time passes, we just get the same prediction again and again.

Is it time to define a new unit of measure, “the DeLong” — as the five years he predicts the Washington Post has before it craters (unless it changes)?

Admittedly, what makes the Friedman a Friedman is that we’ve had so many of them since he first made that ill-fated prediction. And as far as I know, the first sighting of Brad’s prediction may be March 7, 2007, which is pretty recent. So it’s not quite the same thing.

But I bet the Post lasts longer than five years despite all its dreadful editorial flaws. It has a lock on the local classified ad market, and its web site is a category killer that will smother local competitors. That’s going to be monetizable some day and will help keep the print paper afloat.

[Original draft 4/18/2007.  In preparation for my blog redesign, I found draft blog posts that somehow never made it to publication. This is one of them.]

2010: As a prediction, I think it’s looking good. As a newspaper, though, the Post really is looking awful.

Posted in The Media, Zombie Posts | Comments Off on Units of Measure

Please Stand By

Posted on December 7, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

If you are reading the blog via RSS, like most people, you won’t (I hope) notice any problems, but visitors here are probably in for a rough, or at least random, week or so as I sort through technical problems….

Posted in Discourse.net | Comments Off on Please Stand By