I'm off to Stanford to speak at tomorrow's conference, Securing Privacy in the Internet Age, where I'll talk about how ID cards can help, and hurt, privacy.
I gather there won't be WiFi at the event, so blogging may be lighter than usual until I return to Miami late on Monday.
Yes, it's really that bad. KR Washington Bureau: “The government's top expert on Medicare costs was warned that he would be fired if he told key lawmakers about a series of Bush administration cost estimates that could have torpedoed congressional passage of the White House-backed Medicare prescription-drug plan.”
I am in awe of the genius of the Framers, who correctly warned us of the dangers of “faction” — the creation of party systems to which loyalty is greater than to the commonweal.
I am rueful of the fallibility of the Framers, who designed a system that:
Of course, the Framers worked on assumptions about the nature of social relations, the economy, (small-R) republicanism, virtue, natural aristocracy and many other things that makes their world view at least different from mine if not downright archaic. Which is why stories like this one make me wonder if the 'great experiment' is going as well as it should…
I used to think that the next time I was in a silly mood I'd order a few pounds of brightly colored Dilatant compound. I certainly don't want 100 lbs of it, and even $12/lb seemed steep.
But now I'm thinking the black stuff would be nice. Except that it's $24/lb. Would just one pound really be enough? And then there are all those other neat colors….
(Other problem: the stuff seems to melt in Florida, even indoors under air conditioning. I bunch it up and two hours later it has ooozed out into a flat boring ameboid shape. Could it be the humidity? Or does it do that everywhere?)
According to the web site optimization page, this blog is too big and loads too slowly:
Connection Rate Download Time 14.4K 70.21 seconds 28.8K 36.81 seconds 33.6K 32.03 seconds 56K 20.58 seconds ISDN 128K 8.66 seconds T1 1.44Mbps 3.86 seconds
For readers on a good cable/DSL connection, this shouldn’t be an issue; but the thought that it might take 20 seconds to load this page on dialup is sobering. I currently have the blog set to show six past days of content. I could set it to fewer in order to speed things up. Should I?
This John-McCain-might-like-to-be-Kerry's-veep meme is running around the internet. (E.g. The Blogging of the President: 2004). It's a nice spring fling of a concept but would be a Really Stupid choice.
Kerry's veep needs to have all of the following characteristics.
I learn a lot from reading Ed Felton. In A Spoonful of Sugar he describes an absolutely brilliant method being used at Carnegie-Mellon to “label all the images on the web”.
Jotwell Blenderlaw