blog
Wednesday, August 08, 2001
[5:15 PM] | permanent link
Bicycling this morning, I listened to an interesting program on KQED's Forum.
Guest host Penny Nelson led a discussion of the American Bar Association's just-revised guidelines on lawyer-patient confidentiality. ABA has just changed their ethics guidelines to allows lawyers to blow the whistle on their clients more often.
One guest, representing ABA's position, pointed out that ABA's guidelines are not binding; states set the rules that lawyers must follow, and most states already allowed lawyers to blow the whistle more often.
But another guest, Sean Selegue, a member of the California State Bar Ethics Committee, argued that lawyers already have enough trouble getting their clients to trust them, and increasing client's fears that a lawyer will reveal incriminating information will only make clients less forthcoming. Selegue argued that will be bad for all of us, guilty or innocent, in the long run.
The examples given were not, for the most part, the lawyer who knows his client is guilty of murder. Rather, a primary example was the lawyer for a business who is dumping toxic substances into the cities water supply, possibly harming to the public. Another involved a lawyer for a company which has misstated its earnings on the eve of a merger, causing monetary harm to shareholders.
That was the example that crystallized the issue for me. It was argued that it's to the public good for a lawyer to blow the whistle on that client, so that millions of people aren't harmed. But the discussion also properly considered the longstanding tradition that a client must be able to obtain representation that is 100% on his side!
After all, society already has large, powerful public institutions charged with chasing down that polluter or ensuring the publicly held companies aren't shams. Those institutions can easily wield their power unfairly against innocent parties, and those parties must be able to rely on their lawyers to fend off unfair government charges. One's lawyer is a fundamental check on the power of those government bodies, and it's inappropriate now to make the lawyer a subtle ally of that body against his client.
And anyway, the new guidelines effectively encourage lawyers to make judgments about their clients' actions, whereas that's properly the job of a judge in a formal legal action with all the protections it entails. How can a lawyer decide whether to reveal information about his client's "illegal" activity without first deciding whether the client is guilty?
I'm not a right-wing, anti-government activist, but I do think the government--law enforcement, regulators, and administrators--must do their jobs on their own, using the power and the funding granted them by the people. Lawyers must not be encouraged, or even allowed, to abet that, or else how will citizens survive the inevitable unfair action by the government?
Wednesday, September 06, 2000
[8:06 AM] | permanent link
If I were an Olympic athlete, these words would disqualify me from competition. Yet another web gaffe by the IOC.
I suppose the IOC may be forgiven for just not getting it. Like the major record labels, they see their financial model challenged by the new medium, and they try to resist. These are smart people who know how to make millions of dollars in a particular way. Their shareholders prefer them to maintain growth in the usual way, in a time where rapid change is called for. Their not dinosaurs, but they're struggling in a tar pit.
Monday, August 21, 2000
[2:17 PM] | permanent link
Zeldman, in HTMHell: "... not enough designers are working in that vast middle ground between eye candy and hardcore usability where most of the Web must be built. ... Web users ... still have a tough time finding what they're looking for, and they still wonder why it's so damned unpleasant to read text on the Web ..."
Stylishness appears to be at odds with web usability. But it's not that simple. We're only starting to understand what is needed to make the web useful.
Wednesday, August 09, 2000
[5:53 PM] | permanent link
Bruce Maguire is blind. But is it reasonable for him to bring the Olympics before the Australian Human Rights Commission because their web site is missing ALT tags?
Well, yeah, actually.
See, the Olympics is one of the few truly global events that attracts popular interest. And that means the Olympics web site is a bellweather of the global internet. The site is expected to get 1.4 billion hits over its lifetime. That's one hit for every four human beings. There can be no defense for poor accessibility of the one web site that actually matters to the entire human race.
I give Maguire a lot of credit. He didn't complain that he couldn't buy garden gnomes on ebay or read the Playboy web site in braille. Instead, he insists that the Olympics belongs to us all, not just the strong and the fleet and the sighted.
The Olympics's response? They claim it'd cost AU$4 million and take 368 days to clean up the ALT tags. Instead, Maguire should use one of the web sites that already present the same information in accessible form. Um... So how did those web sites do it?
Why does this matter? Because accessible web sites are more usable for everyone and more easily integrated into other applications. The Olympics should put actually useful information in the ALT tags. Instead of just "Mandy Smith
," how about, "Smith is pictured October 14, 1999, during team practice at Dunedin, New Zealand. Her right leg is wrapped above the knee. Her face shows great intensity." That'd be useful to me, as I listen to the web site in my headset as I ride my bicycle.
Most of us put up with bad practice on the web. Maguire doesn't have that luxury, and he has chosen an appropriate event to make his point.
Sunday, August 06, 2000
[6:29 AM] | permanent link
Heat waves continue to make the news. Now we hear that PG&E is scrapping the desperate measures it had proposed to deal with the problem.
Here on the penninsula we're largely exempt from heat waves. We commonly see 20F cooler temperatures than Livermore, 20 miles away. But we're on the same power grid with the rest of the state, so we get blacked out even when it's not hot. There are planned, rolling blackouts, and companies are asked to turn off non-essential equipment. Our solution: Turn the lights off and the thermostats up, but keep the computers and the Starbuckses running. Thousands of sweaty, wired geeks illuminated by the sickly glow of their CRTs.
It is astonishing that this place, of all places, doesn't have a deeper reserve of electrons. But never fear. When things shut down, the web doesn't notice right away. A few Flash animations are late. Some credit card numbers go unhacked. A few more investors' millions are thrown on the pyre of hype.
Axolotl's servers, for example, are in Maryland. Epinions's creative people are one mile from me, but their servers are in Washington state, as is Amazon.com, Microsoft, MSN, and WebTV. AOL is in Virginia. More.com is in Colorado. Metricom's home page is in Los Gatos, but all of their wireless traffic flows through their NOC in Texas.
Sun, Cisco, and SGI's servers are in Silicon Valley. But while their customers run a lot of the internet, their own web sites are incidental to its operation.
In short, the ISPs and ASPs know that there are more stable, less expensive physical locations for their equipment. Having said that, both Earthlink and Hostpro (where aeideas.com, ganymuse.com, and pinkhousemovie.com live) are in Los Angeles. Hostpro has had a couple of outages in the past week. And poor Pacific Bell has been up and down as usual.
Thursday, July 27, 2000
[7:40 AM] | permanent link
I originally registered this domain name in August, 1997, when Network Solutions (ptui!) was the only game in town.
Since Network Solutions's forms were indecipherable (and remain so to this day), I hired Mark David Chapman to provide DNS services and deal with Network Solutions. He has always provided great service for almost no money.
Mark is moving on to other services, and I've recently had good success registering grumman.org with register.com, who have done the obvious thing: Easy-to-understand on-line tools for managing domains, DNS, and so on. So, with Mark's blessing, I've filed the form (by fax?!) to change the registrar of sbw.org to register.com.
So long, Network Solutions. You failed to do the obvious for far too long.
Wednesday, July 26, 2000
[10:55 AM] | permanent link
According to Yahoo!, "Deputy public prosecutor Elisabeth Senot, who is leading a judicial investigation into the crash, said, 'The pilot reported a failure on the number two motor and it seems that he was no longer able to brake given that the thrust was too great.'"
That sounds like a curious translation that may, in fact, be a reference to the issue of Rejected Takeoff (RTO). RTOs are a common topic in discussions among pilots and occasionally a factor in accidents.
Pilots of transport category aircraft sometimes debate whether it is safer to perform a RTO -- simply put, to stop on the runway -- rather than continuing the takeoff when a problem occurs. Since no conceivable problem can possibly prevent a transport category aircraft from flying away, and since the runway is not of infinite length, it's often argued that it's better to get in the air, even with a problem, and return to land right away. Remember, the alternative is to stop on the runway. The runway is guaranteed to be long enough to stop (or the takeoff isn't attempted in the first place), but one thing has gone wrong already. Since we know the plane will fly, why introduce the additional complexity of reducing power, maximum braking, maintaining control during deceleration, and so on.
The runway calculations also determine the maximum speed at which the runway is long enough to stop. Above that speed, there's no choice: the pilots must continue the takeoff or run off the end of the runway. Since we know the plane will fly, and there are no guarantees what's beyond the end of the runway, it's always safer to fly away and return soon.
So, "the thrust was too great"? No, more likely the plane was beyond the maximum speed for an RTO. Continuing the takeoff was the only choice. And the safe choice.
So why didn't they fly to Le Bourget and land safely despite the problem? Because the problem that occurred was not one of the conceivable problems I mentioned earlier. Rather, it was an inconceivable problem. Or, even more likely, a confluence of more than one problem in an inconceivable manner.
If the problem could have been anticipated, the accident would not have occurred.
