Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

No Bail for Padilla

Posted on February 17, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

Judge Martha Cooke denied bail for Jose Padilla today. She cited several facts which together, I think, make the decision unassailable:

‘Dirty bomb’ suspect Padilla to remain in jail without bail: Government lawyers maintained that Padilla, who has a lengthy criminal record — including murder as a juvenile in 1985 — and a wife and children in Egypt, is both a danger to the community and a flight risk. He also used several aliases, prosecutors said.

Cooke said she was mindful of the unusual circumstances of Padilla’s detention, but would not allow his release. She noted that Padilla had failed to show up for court appearances in connection with criminal charges brought in the late 1980s and early ’90s when Padilla was involved with a Chicago gang.

According to this sympathetic profile by ~~Susan~~Deborah Sontag, Padilla’s (second) wife lives in Egypt.

Posted in Padilla | 10 Comments

A Novel Approach to Gym Class

Posted on February 17, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

The story has a Miami dateline, but it actually happened in a rural part of Florida’s panhandle — an area that is culturally more Alabama than anything else. It seems that Ernest Ward Middle School gym teacher Terence Braxton is alleged to have let kids cut gym for $1/day,

Fla. Teacher Charged as Children Pay to Cut Gym: Braxton allowed kids to skip his class if they paid him $1 a day, according to charges filed by authorities in Escambia County, Fla. They say he may have racked up more than $1,000 over three months.

The 28-year-old teacher has been charged with six felony counts of bribery and turned himself in on Thursday at a Pensacola jail. He was released on his own recognizance.

…

“The basketball team had lost every game for five years,” Principal Nancy Gindl-Perry said. “This year, we only lost two games, and they were only by two points. He had a very good rapport with the kids.”

Suspicions about Braxton arose during a parent-teacher conference, when the teacher known as “Coach Braxton” and a student differed on attendance records.

“Coach said he’d missed four or five classes,” Gindl-Perry recalled. “Well, the look on the child’s face. Then the mother said, ‘You told your dad and I you only missed one.'”

For some reason it reminds me of the old Woody Allen line: “Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym. Those who can’t teach gym, teach here.”

Posted in Florida | 7 Comments

Taming Firefox 1.5

Posted on February 17, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

Ever since I installed Firefox 1.5 (and later 1.5.0.1) I have had nothing but grief. Freezes. CPU spikes usually in the 50s — which meant it took 20 seconds for anything to happen — but sometimes much higher, verging on 100%, which meant nothing happened however long I waited. Even if I didn’t get a CPU spike, going away from the machine with Firefox open in a window, even in the background, would make it freeze up, requiring that I use the task manager to kill it.

The problem was especially bad when I loaded a particular large and complex web page that I use several times a day (no, not this blog) — not only did it load slowly, but it would bring Firefox to its knees every time. And yet it worked fine in 1.07.

My first Google search suggested it was probably a plugin issue. I duly changed from Adblock to Adblock plus. I used less aggressive Adblock settlings. I replaced my tab manager with something that had a better reputation for playing nice with others. I removed this plugin, then that one. (See below for a list of what I’m running now — an only partly restored list from what I used to use.)

Nothing worked.

I disabled the prefetch. I turned off Bfcache — the caching of recently viewed pages — losing the lightening back and forth which was one of the best reasons to upgrade.

And of course I followed the directions at InternetWeek to play with settings in about.config to reduce the cache. And I carefully followed the directions as to what settings to use in place of the defaults for the about:config setting in browser.cache.memory.capacity.

Nothing worked.

But at last I can report that I think I have found the magic bullet: Ignore the directions in the cookbook about setting browser.cache.memory.capacity to 15000 if you have up to 1 Gig of RAM, or maybe 32768 if you have a full gig. I have a full gig of RAM, and it’s not shared with my graphics card, and my problem only went away when I shrank browser.cache.memory.capacity to the absurdly small 8192.

That worked.

Continue reading →

Posted in Software | 6 Comments

More on Cheney’s Declassification Authority

Posted on February 16, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

While attention is focused on the Veep’s decapitation authority, the real issue of his declassification authority is not getting the attention it deserves. LiberalOasis has a nice analysis. I haven’t checked the original sources personally, but this seems very plausible to me.

Update: Extended discussion of this issue at Secrecy News.

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze | 1 Comment

Quailgate

Posted on February 16, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

The Washington Note posts a transcript of the Cheney interview. Others will doubtless post on the serious stuff: the sycophantically and powder-puff nature of the questions, the failure to engage the big issues of the day like torture, the odd and unconvincing explanation for the delay in going public, the failure to engage the issue of who told what to whom when, and especially the failure to ask whether Cheney ever spoke to Bush about the shooting. (Not the mention the question of whether Texas follows the year-and-a-day rule.)

Instead, I’m going to focus on a triviality: Here’s how Cheney sets the scene,

It’s in south Texas, wide-open spaces, a lot of brush cover, fairly shallow. But it’s wild quail. It’s some of the best quail hunting anyplace in the country.

Wild quail? I thought these were pen-raised birds like in the famous 2003 hunt,

In December of 2003, he went (via Humvee) to a pheasant shooting party in Pennsylvania at the Rolling Rock Club. Gamekeepers there released some 500 pen-raised pheasants from nets, and Cheney’s party, which included former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach and U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) as well as several influential Republican fundraisers, shot 417 of them. Cheney himself got at least 70. Apparently that wasn’t enough slaughter, because after lunch the group went after pen-raised mallard ducks.

So which was it, wild or domestic?

(Incidentally, a quick hunt suggests that Texas does not mechanically follow the year-and-a-day rule, but I’m not a Texas lawyer.)

Posted in Politics: Tinfoil | 2 Comments