Just received a long email that started as follows:
Please be advised that Miami-Dade Water & Sewer Department (WASD) will be performing water valve maintenance on the Coral Gables campus beginning May 18th through June 30th 2009.
During this maintenance period, the facilities could experience short-term interruptions of water.
It is signed by
James E. Sprinkle, Jr.
Sr. Manager,
Facilities & Operations
University of Miami
Honest.
I commend to you Ethan Zuckerman's The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech.
I recommend the Better Privacy Firefox Add-On
I thought I worked hard to block unwanted cookies. bit this thing found between 140 and 160 flash-based cookies on the various machines I use. Scanning the list, I told it not to delete the Pandora cookies, and eat the rest. It's possible that I deleted something I'll miss, but I rather doubt it.
I really wish there were a best practices norm that people who use cookies have to make them human-readable, so you know what they say about you. Failing that, they should at least be expected to deploy a tool on their homepages that would explain to you what their cookies say about you.
Not so very long ago we were all told that a black man would be President when pigs fly.
And, who knew?!
On the 100th day of Barack Obama’s Presidency… swine flu!
(via Gene Spafford’s mailing list)
Continuing on today's theme of asking dumb questions about areas of law I don't know enough about, here's a question about anti-trust law, spurred by the news that Administration Plans to Strengthen Antitrust Rules.
Why isn't this, which no one even attempts to hide, an anti-trust violation???
Basically, Microsoft will only allow netbook makers to load XP on machines that are a touch on the slow side, and don't have quite enough RAM — and have been crippled to prevent users from increasing it.
PC makers must limit screen size to 14.1 in. and hard-drive capacity to 160GB. Ultralow-cost PCs with touch screens will also be eligible. Earlier terms set in April did not allow touch screens at all and limited screen sizes to 10.2 in. and hard-drive capacity to 80GB. The processors are still limited to a single-core chip running at no more than 1 GHz, with memory limited to 1GB of RAM.
Why isn't this illegal? Don't the anti-trust laws prevent a software maker with a dominant position from dictating hardware to pc makers in order to protect the market share of a different product?
Then again, it may be wrong to blame Microsoft for what may actually be a case of collusion with the hardware people:
The goal of the program is apparently to limit the hardware capabilities of such PCs so that they don't eat into the market for mainstream PCs running Windows Vista, something both Microsoft and PC vendors would want to avoid.
That sure sounds like the sort of collusion I thought the anti-trust laws prevented. Everyone is being so open about this, I have to assume that there's a reason why it's legal. I'm just wondering what it could be.
I don't do criminal law, never have. But stuff like this makes me feel like an innocent, a babe in the woods.
Vanessa Blum's article in the Sun-Sentinel, Liberty City Six: No verdict yet in the Liberty City Six terror trial, and the government has spent millions, reports that the government has just spent a fortune on three trials of what from here seem to be a relatively harmless bunch of garden-variety hoodlums whom an agent provocateur raised up into mock terrorist wannabes. But that's not the shocking part, no, that is the sort of ordinary outrage one gradually builds up calluses for.
What's amazing, at least to this innocent, is this:
Among the payments by federal prosecutors is $95,755.79 to Varinsky Associates, a California-based jury consulting firm.
Jury consultants are people who advise lawyers on what sort of jurors to pick in order to increase their chances of a favorable verdict; they may also give advice, based on focus groups or polling, on what sort of arguments are likely to work or to fail.
Jury consultant services utilize sociological and psychological research. [FN250] These services include both qualitative and quantitative jury research. [FN251] Qualitative jury research uses a limited number of surrogate jurors (typically, up to fifty) drawn from the relevant community. The research identifies these jurors' reactions to evidence and arguments that can be presented in the future trial. After hearing the evidence and the arguments, the surrogate jurors will be divided into subgroups that will separately deliberate the verdict. This methodology singles out the most effective arguments and evidence along with the jurors' profiling trends. [FN252] The jurors' profiling trends are the sets of attitudes, experiences and beliefs that are favorable or, inversely, inimical to the client's case. [FN253] Quantitative research focuses on a large pool of surrogate jurors (about 400), who respond to carefully designed questionnaires (“community attitude surveys”). [FN254] These responses identify attitudes, experiences and beliefs favorable and unfavorable to the client's case. [FN255] This research strategy aims at developing dependable juror profiles. [FN256] It also identifies the “hot questions” that facilitate the jurors' selection and de-selection during voir dire. [FN257]
— Uzi Segal & Alex Stein, Ambiguity Aversion And The Criminal Process, 81 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1495, 1548 (2006)
I repeat that this isn't the sort of law I work on, and I look forward to correction by readers who live in the criminal justice trenches. But from over here on the civil side, I still think that jurors, and especially criminal juries, are ideally supposed to represent the community. (And yes, I'm aware that the reality departs from the ideal in multiple dimensions.) If the US Attorney's office uses jury consultants to tell them how to select a prosecution-friendly jury, that would seem to me to be not just unsavory, but to raise some due process and right to jury trial issues.
But, I have to say that based on a cursory survey of the literature, it seems my instincts here may be misplaced: I've found half a dozen academic articles that just report on this phenomenon as if there is nothing odd or unsavory about it; if anything the drift is that the poor under-resourced prosecutors (the ones who just spent $5-10 million on the Liberty Six trials) need consultants to level the playing field.
I suppose if all the consultants are doing is helping the prosecution spin better then that doesn't raise a constitutional question, although I still think that it is not a good use of public money. But if they are helping prosecutors identify pro-prosecution jurors, even by attitudinal rather then demographic factors, that seems to to me to take us yet another step away from the jury system we would wish for.
Some surely would say that the government is only responding to an arms race started by wealthy criminal defendants and, who knows, there may be something to that in some cases. But in this case the defendants are not wealthy. Has the public defender's office got jury consultants too? If they do, couldn't they make a non-aggression pact on the jury consultants and save us all some money?
(I'm reminded of the old joke about the judge who calls the plaintiff's lawyer in a civil case into his chambers and says, “Fred, I wanted you to know that defense counsel have offered me $5,000 to rule in their favor. So how about you give me $5,000 too and we try this one on the merits?”)
Jotwell Blenderlaw