A Little Civ Pro Does a Body Good

There was an interesting Supreme Court decision published Monday where Philip Morris tried (and failed) to argue that because it used the government's method of testing cigarettes, it fell under a statute that allowed removal to federal court when someone acted "under" a federal officer. The opinion talks a lot about federal officers being accused of murder during prohibition and using the statute to get their murder cases removed to federal court. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this use of the statute, although I suppose the climate was different then and states had less respect for the federal government than they do now. A federal court (and its jury) might have more sympathy for a federal agent than a state agent would.
The opinion is pretty short and worth reading in my opinion. Who knows, maybe it will be used to torture first generations of law students for generations to come.

Oh, Dickinson

It looks like Dickinson messed up with their temporary facilities, since they are waiving the fee for transfer applications. To me, that means it is a fair bet that they suffered a high attrition rate from the 1L class. Not that I blame them, I'm not sure how much I would have liked going to school amongst the truck stops.

Dell Windows Install Disks

I read on this blog that Dell -- one time only -- will give you a copy of the installation disks that came with your computer in case you lost them. I'm not sure if they charge you for the install disks (I don't see a discussion of payment on the initial page for it, and I'm not going to type in my information since I have the install disks already and I'd rather wait until I've lost them before ordering them)
Yet another reason I like Dell.

40 Years Since Anti-Miscegenation Laws Were Banned

Sometimes it's hard for me to believe that the US (in particular the South) was so different forty or fifty years ago, with segregated schools, anti-miscegenation laws, etc.  Today marks the fortieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia (which banned anti-interracial marriage laws).  

When I was in law school, I always liked Loving because it was an easy case to remember (Loving = Marriage)

Anyhow, the NPR story talked about how far we've come and how far we have to go.  They talked about an interracial couple and the challenges they face.  The white wife was probably still racist (or at least used stereotypes about African-Americans)

I've realized how far we have to go as well.  My neighbor used the n-word the other day, and that has made me even more eager to get out of Chambersburg. (I'm assuming my neighbor doesn't read this blog)

Surfing in Cupertino

I wanted to come up with a somewhat creative title for this blog entry about Apple Safari entering the Windows market.  

This blogger has much more authority than I do about Safari's market prospects, but my initial thought is that unless it offers something unique, it's going to have a hard time gaining widespread popularity among people other than techie-computer users.  The only thing Safari does is surf the web, and unless it has a "killer" feature, I'm not sure what its market prospects are.  Firefox came on the market and gained widespread popularity partially because Microsoft had so many security problems. Firefox has a reputation for being a "safe browser," and I don't think that Safari has that reputation (I don't mean to say Safari is unsafe, I just mean it doesn't have a reputation of being safe).  Unless something disastrous happens with Firefox, people who want a "safe" browser are probably going to install Firefox, not Safari.

I've installed Safari on my Mac, and am typing this blog entry using it.  I wish that Safari gave me the opportunity (Firefox does) to simultaneously have the beta and non-beta versions installed.  

I also wish that it had an option to add a new tab button to the toolbar.

I would install it on my PC, but my PC runs Windows 2000, which Apple apparently has chosen not to support.  It looks like Windows 2000 is beginning to fall by the wayside for Apple.  I don't entirely fault Apple for this.

Microsoft didn't develop IE 7 for Windows 2000 (although they'll continue to provide security updates until 2010).

Congestion Pricing in NY

In case you had not heard, Mayor Bloomberg is trying to institute congestion pricing similar to what they have in London (you'd get charged eight dollars for entering Manhattan, with a discount if you used a toll bridge to enter). I think this has potential to work well and will encourage people to take mass transit. I just hope that they are not overwhelmed with people who decide to take the subway instead of paying eight dollars. I'm surprised to see how quickly it is moving thus far, I expected it to stall out in the state legislature, but it looks like it may not.

Controversial Carousels

There is a controversy in my town about a proposed carousel in Oyster Bay (my town). There is a waterfront park which was donated by the Theodore Roosevelt Association to the town of Oyster Bay in 1942. As part of the deed, it was ordered that there be no carousels or other mechanical rides. The Association (which still exists) has agreed to waive that provision of the deed, but there are a number of people who are still opposed to it. I wonder if (cue scary music) there is a Rule Against Perpetuities concern here, although maybe the way New York implements the RAP will prevent a problem with that.
The park is a relatively small park, and a number of people think that the carousel would add a lot of noise to the park. I tend to agree with them, I also wonder how they are possibly going to get enough visitors to the park to cover the cost of running the carousel.
The Main Street Association also thinks it will draw visitors to the downtown. I disagree. Unfortunately for Oyster Bay, it's on the northern shore of Long Island, and that means it is far away from major east-west arteries like the Long Island Expressway. Even a less major east-west artery (Northern Boulevard/25A) is probably four or five miles from downtown. There are no major roads that go through downtown Oyster Bay, so the downtown has suffered. Two car dealerships have closed, and the downtown is not doing so well. The problem is that the park is not that close to the business district, it's two or three blocks, so I don't think people are going to go to the park and then go shopping.
We'll see what happens, it's before the town board right now.
Here is an article from Newsday.

Tilapia Recipe -- So easy, Douglas can do it

Lately I've been experimenting with cooking tilapia. To do it, I put an inch or so layer of water in a frying pan, bring it to a boil, and then put a filet of tilapia in the water. I then return the water to a simmer (not a boil), cover it, and poach it for five minutes. Then, I flip the tilapia piece over and poach it (covered) for another five minutes. It's then pretty much done, and I usually eat it with rice and some vegetable. It makes my meals more interesting. My grandmother has suggested adding lemon to the water, and I also use pepper on the fish.

Bottle Deposits

There was a posting on bottle deposits on a mailing list that I subscribe to. I think that bottle deposits are a good thing, I think that to encourage recycling it might be necessary to increase the deposit on the bottles from a nickel. It has been a nickel since I was a child, and I think longer than that. (By bottle deposit, I also mean the deposit on soda cans as well)
The problem, though, is, at least under New York State's law, if you show up at any store with a bottle of a drink that they sell, they have to give you a deposit back. You don't have to return it to the store where you bought it. This is a problem for mom and pop stores.
There was a New York grocery store that I used to go to that was on the Pennsylvania (no deposit) and New York border. Someone took bottles/cans that he got in Pennsylvania and brought them to New York, where he attempted to redeem them. The New York grocery store got tired of this and eventually stopped him, probably by noting that some of the cans he was redeeming were not stamped with a five cent refund, even though the barcode was the same as refundable cans. If they doubled it to ten cents (or even made the amount more meaningful, like a quarter) it might have a significant impact on a store's income. On the other hand, recycling has become bigger now, so maybe it is not necessary to have the deposit law at all.

Giving Apple Credit Where Credit is Due

Thomas' iPod displayed the "sad iPod" icon, and so (after I tried and failed to fix it) we took it to our local Apple Store on Long Island. Within about fifteen minutes, the Genius fixed his iPod, and it didn't cost us a penny. Apparently, the hard disk had frozen, and he forced it loose by applying extra current to force it to rotate faster. Although this does not redeem Apple from their previous fiasco (or, after Dorothy's experience, make me any more likely to purchase a Macintosh computer again), it's still nice that they were able to fix it. That's more than I would be able to say for Dell, which doesn't have Genius Bars.

A Jury of Your Peers in Newfoundland

I listen to a podcast entitled Newfoundland and Labrador This Week from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. There was a segment about how a judge declared a mistrial because the entire jury pool for St. John's, Newfoundland had not been updated for eight years. (For those not up on their Newfoundland geography, St. John's is the capital of Newfoundland and is also it's largest city.) Apparently the person responsible for updating the jury pool just didn't, and so no one born after 1980 was listed in the jury pool. The judge hearing the case held that this violated the Candian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and rescheduled the case for October. All criminal trials in St. John's will have to be put on hold while they fix this problem. Plus, even the Justice Minister has conceded that people within the appeal period might have viable appeals about this. I don't know what Canada's jurisprudence is about juries, but it seems to me that they might have some argument to make. I had tried to find the judge's opinion online at this site (useful if you need to do Canadian law research), but no dice.
The best I could find was this article from the CBC.

Another Funny Email from Flickr

Flickr sent me another unusual email the other day, although it wasn't nearly as good as the last one.
This one said:
"New photos from friends

[Rene's screenname] has uploaded 1 photo in the last 24.139444444444 hours.
..."

Funny that someone at Flickr took the time to program this email to make the number of hours a variable and also calculate it out.

Cheating or Not Cheating?

Thomas brought this to my attention, but I wanted to throw it out there. At Columbia, there is a course that all students are required to take -- Literature Humanities -- which is taught by different professors (there are 57 sections). It is a survey course and there is a course-wide exam given at the end (basically to the entire first year class). The exam asks students -- among other questions -- to identify quotations from the various works studied. One professor came up with a study guide which listed the quotations that were to be used on the exam. Students in this section redistributed the study guide to other sections of the class, which messed up the exam (to put it mildly) because students knew which quotations were to be used. The lead professor of the course found out about this "study guide," (initially she thought someone had stolen the exam) and has now decided to discard the exam results and allow students to either take the exam again in the fall or use their other grades to determine their grade. I think it's clear that the professor should be fired.
Was it cheating for the students to use this study guide? I don't think so, the provenance of the guide was legitimate, it wasn't as if some student was distributing it improperly. On the other hand, the students reading the study guide might have realized that the professor should not have been giving out this much information. Columbia does not require students to report academic misconduct. Comments?

A "Family Tree" of Firefox

There is a pretty good diagram of Firefox on a website which is done by Mozilla Japan (Mozilla is the company that makes Firefox) It's a PDF, but if you are not familiar with Firefox and how it is related to NCSA Mosaic (and Internet Explorer) it's worth looking at.

My Law School Could Have Decided to Move to Florida

Through RichardZ (which I found through Jerry and Tammy), I learned about how Ave Maria School of Law has decided to move to Florida from Ann Arbor, Michigan. After seeing what happened with DSL, it was interesting. Here is a link to a blog entry which sets forth the faculty view. In the interest of balance, I'm also including a link to Ave Maria School of Law's own page on the topic. I'm not taking a position on this, though.

Running Again

I've been at a loss for things to blog about recently. However, I've taken up running again. I ran a lot last summer while I was studying for the bar exam, but kind of dropped it after that. I've started doing it again, and as I'm sitting in my office during the day, I kind of look forward to it. I've got a new route worked out, which goes around town, a lot of it is along quiet streets, so I don't have cars whizzing by me all the time. I'm debating joining a gym, but running is a good workout in and of itself.

Old Supermarkets

The other day I got a flyer from Weis Market in the mail saying they were celebrating their ninety-fifth anniversary. That means they're a really old supermarket, comparatively. According to this Wikipeida article, supermarkets started in 1915 with Piggly Wiggly. That makes Weis (if they started in 1912) older than Piggly Wiggly. The grocery stores in my town on Long Island have gone through several iterations. First, there was a Food Town in the downtown portion of the town. It then moved to the outskirts of town and has changed its name from Food Town to Finast to Edwards to its current name, Stop and Shop (which is part of the same gigantic corporation that owns Giant. Waldbaums and King Kullen continue to exist on Long Island, although I wonder how they are doing when they have to compete against big chains like Stop and Shop. Waldbaums in Hicksville seems to do a decent business, though. I wonder about the King Kullens though.

A Different (from usual) Single of the Week on iTunes

There is a different single on iTunes, it's called Philosophia by The Guggenheim Grotto. They remind me a little bit of Simon and Garfunkel in terms of the style of their music. It definitely sounds like something that could be older music. I don't guarantee you'll like it (it's not going to be one of my top songs), but it also isn't going to be removed from my playlist (which is what happens to a lot of other songs that I download free on iTunes) If you have iTunes, download it here. The price is right.

Astroturf in New York City Parks

On Gothamist, there was a blog entry explaining how New York City wants to put astro-turf in its parks for use as athletic fields. I don't think this is a good idea. I think that plastic grass (at least the type that I am picturing) is not really that comfortable to use, at least compared to regular grass. I think it would be easier to skin one's knee if one fell on artificial turf. This is also New York City we're talking about. What happens if someone spills something on the artificial turf. With dirt, it would soak right in (or the grass would grow out). But that won't happen with artificial turf. The gum, or whatever it is, will stay stuck in it. I wouldn't want to play on a field that looked like the bottom of a subway track.
Or, someone could spray-paint "D wuz here" on the turf. If one did that on grass, they would be pretty stupid, because it would grow right out. But on turf? It would be permanent.
I realize that grass has its own problems. If it rains, I realize that one football game can ruin the grass, but I still think that natural grass may be better.

Thomas has a Blog Too

Thomas (or Tom) co-authors a blog too -- he blogs about sports for Gothamist. The link is:
http://www.gothamist.com/sports/
There is a link to the feed too:
http://www.gothamist.com/sports/index.xml
He says that he does about half the posts. It looks like they are mostly about New York teams, so those of you reading the blog from out-of-town might not find it so interesting.
Oh, and I took the picture for his bio on the blog.