Monthly Archives: January 2004

Lego Goes Back to Its Roots (And About Time, Too)

Posted on January 12, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Driven by huge losses, Lego is going back to the basic product (spotted at Slashdot). The market gets a lot of criticism, but in this parent's view anyway on this one the market has spoken and it's right.

Lego toys that are designed to let you make a particular structure, like say a Star Wars craft, are basically horrible. They sound like a great idea, and the kids clamor for them, but they are expensive and have limited play value. First, although there's a great dog-on-its-hind-legs quality about the finished product, the assembly is usually too complicated for younger kids. Second, the result is fragile and anyone who tries to play with it finds it falls apart in their hand. Third, you can't take it apart and mix it with anything — you'll never be able to put it back together again without that one critical weird piece you can no longer find. Fourth, there aren't as many other things you can make with the set as you'd expect given the high (licence-fee-driven?) price.

Despite all this, at least in our area it's been remarkably difficult over the last six years to find large collections of just generic lego to make, say houses and garages even though there's much much more play in those. It would be really nice if that changes… Although there will still be stiff competiton in our household from the number one toy: Playmobil. (Well, number one non-electronic toy anyway.)

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 1 Comment

Dan Froomkin’s White House Briefing

Posted on January 12, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

My brother inaugurates his new online column today at washingtonpost.com, White House Briefing. Go visit! (As though he'll need the traffic….)

Update: In a case of a mechanistic metaphor running amok, Brad DeLong says that, “It is truly a wonderful world we live in, in which someone as smart and energetic as Dan Froomkin is functioning as my personal pre-processor for White House-related news…”

Posted in Dan Froomkin, Politics: US | 2 Comments

34th Suicide Attempt at Guantanamo

Posted on January 11, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Guantanamo Detainee Attempts Suicide. It's been a long time since suicide attempt number 33, so this slowdown in the pace of attempts is a sign that maybe the conditions are less awful?

Well, maybe. Or maybe not. It could be that the military has just redefined what constitutes a suicide attempt in an effort to mitigate the awful publicity worldwide caused by the detainees' apparent beliefs that they were better off dead. Consider this UK report that appeared on Newsnight, a leading news show, while I was in the UK.

MARSHALL:
But this is not a holiday camp. There are currently 660 prisoners. None has any idea if they will ever be freed. In the 13 months up to August this year, there have been 32 suicide attempts. Since then, there has only been one further attempted suicide recorded. They have, however, introduced a separate category – manipulative self injurious behaviour – SIB. It is applied to individuals deemed to have merely feigned suicide attempts. There have been over 40 SIBs since the summer. This new classification troubles Britain's leading forensic psychiatrist.

DR JAMES MACKEITH
(Maudsley Royal Hospital):
It is impossible to authoritatively assess attempts at self harm in such a way as to justify confidence that a particular self-destructive act is designed to have a manipulative purpose, rather than a self-destructive purpose.

MARSHALL:
It is not a valuable clinical definition, as far as you are concerned.

MACKEITH:
It is a new one on me.

Bottom line: we have no idea what's going on there. (Cf. TalkLeft, noting that while it talks of releasing some unspecified number of detainees sooner or later, the US is also expanding the carrying capacity at Gitmo to almost double what it is now…)

Posted in Guantanamo | Comments Off on 34th Suicide Attempt at Guantanamo

Nader Demonstrates An Inability to Learn from History

Posted on January 10, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Back in the last campaign, Ralph Nader called me up one day and asked me to represent him in a trademark case. He was being sued — frivolously — by MasterCard for his parody of their “priceless” commercial. I sent him to a big law firm that had the resources to handle a case of that scope on an emergency basis (I sure don't); but while he was on the phone, I suggested that his candidacy was doing Bush a favor.

Nader disagreed — 'I'll hammer Bush so bad it will help the Democrats' was the gist of his reply.

I disagreed politely.

Now Ralph Nader says he wants to run again as a third party Presidential candidate. The Independent: Nader Says a Run Would Benefit Democrats:

Mr. Nader would run this year as an independent. (The Green Party will not pick its nominee until June, too late, he says, to mount an effective campaign.) And here is how he says his running could work to the Democrats' advantage:

By hammering away at populist themes like a higher minimum wage, union rights and occupational health regulations, all of which he says have been neglected, he would force the leading Democratic contenders to move left. That, he says, would expand the party's base, drawing out more liberal voters, some angry enough at him about 2000 that they would vote for the Democratic nominee instead, and many who would vote Democratic in close House and Senate races.

One common definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

The time for polite disagreement is now long past.

Posted in Politics: US | Comments Off on Nader Demonstrates An Inability to Learn from History

Really Good News on the Cert Front (Hamdi)

Posted on January 10, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

High Court to Hear U.S.-Born Detainee's Case.

Of course the Hamdi case is important…but not as important as the Padilla case. Although I think the government's position in Hamdi is wrong, the threat posed by the possibility that the government might grab people abroad and falsely claim they were in the field of battle, or even hold those truly in the field of battle for a long time are problems that are survivable. Letting the government disappear citizens domestically (Padilla) is not.

Update: I should explain that I don't mean by the above to suggest anything about the facts of the Hamdi case. Rather, I mean that if one were to accept the government's contentions in the Hamdi case, then cases where the person detained was abroad, but not on the field of battle, would be unreviewable in the future, which strikes me as pretty darn bad — but not as bad as making the whole US a zone where any citizen can be picked up and locked away for ever by the (un)secret police.

Posted in Civil Liberties | 1 Comment

The Answer to MT-Blacklist Update Woes Is Out There

Posted on January 9, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

RTFM, and what do you find? MTBlacklist Updater 1.0 and MT-Blacklist Updater, both add-ins to an add-in! The Internet is wonderful. The first one looks like a moderately complex install; the second sounds easier. (Although there's a security issue noted, unless you either put it above the webroot or create a dummy user with no privileges; I'll but it up out of reach, thank you..)

Posted in Discourse.net | 1 Comment