Great to see Denver’s Tattered Cover expanding again (to the former prairie, now known as Highlands Ranch). Shirley Bryant interviews owner Joyce Meskis.
Russ Feingold & Tim Michels Wisconsin Senate Race Debate Notes
Links to last night’s US Senate Race Debate notes & commentary:
Additional coverage/background here.
Insecure Browsing
Andrew Chin on missed opportunities in US v Microsoft:
But freedom of contract is expressly limited by the antitrust laws. The courts therefore had authority to order Microsoft to license and distribute its software so as to offer a neutral choice of Web browser. Microsoft could easily have done so without undoing its programming innovations.
Instead, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals created a special antitrust immunity to license Windows and other “platform software” under contractual terms that destroy freedom of competition.
The security hazards that have resulted from Microsoft’s unredressed actions are serious, and already being felt. Equally serious, but perhaps less tangible, is the D.C. Circuit’s waste of judicial resources in issuing precedential opinions that fallaciously treat Microsoft’s flagship software product as consisting of lines of code rather than intellectual property rights. The courts have missed a golden opportunity to affirm the freedom to compete in the information age.
Chin is an associate professor at the UNC School of Law and a former legal extern to Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, the trial judge in U.S. v. Microsoft.
Related Article on Microsoft’s now dormant and flawed Internet Explorer browser. (use firefox)
Insurance Discounts for Having Trips Tracked
One car insurance company now offers discounts to drivers who allow the company to track when and how fast they drive electronically. Privacy advocates are worried that outside groups could eventually see that information.
Ed Haggar Died
Ed Haggar, who coined the term “slacks,” has died. From the Dallas Morning News obit: Mr. Haggar teamed with legendary Dallas advertising pioneer Morris Hite to coin the term “slacks,” his son said. Pants were largely known as trousers until then.
“During the war years, people tried to get more casual during the weekends, during slack time or down time,” [his son] Eddie Haggar said. “Dad and Morris Hite…came up with the name slacks.”
Shanghai American School Turns over N. Korean Refugees to the Chinese
The human rights activist website Chosun Journal has information about eight North Korean refugees who entered the Shanghai American School on Monday, Sept. 27, and were subsequently handed over to the Chinese police.
The original account is here. Full text is also continued below.
Will the U.S. media report this incident? Did the school do the right thing? Could they have done otherwise and not gotten in trouble with the Chinese authorities? Will Americans be outraged? What would you do if North Korean refugees sought asylum in your school which was clearly not on embassy grounds?
There ought to be a public discussion about what Americans living abroad who care about human rights should do in such situations, and what U.S. consulates will or won?t do to help them.
Dean on Local Politics
You need to run for office yourself,” he said. “Somebody has to take responsibility for being on the school board, on the city council ? all these offices that sometimes lead to higher things and sometimes don’t. Democracy withers unless people think ? unless people understand that they’re responsible, not their neighbor.”
X-Prize 1st Flight Today at Mojave
Kudos to Bert Rutan and company on their successful flight today. Xeni Jardin has more.
NAB Death Star
Doc Searls has been following the iPodder explosion and points to a piece in Forbes about the history of the NAB and how they are succesfully regulating satellite radio out of business. It’s going to get interesting when iPods are outlawed and assault rifles are legal.
Read more about the latest Hatch/Leahy absurdity, the Induce Act here. Will Senator Kohl also carry water for Hollywood? Kohl is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which meets to discuss the Induce Act on Thursday.
The Librarians are also against this bill…..
A Honey of a Farmer’s Market
Our Local Dane County Farmer’s Market continues to be in the news. It is now recognized as the largest in the nation by the North American Farmers’ Direct Marketing Association, and still growing, according to R.W. Apple, who visited recently:
Everything sold must be grown in Wisconsin, and the sellers must actually have participated in the production of the goods. On this glorious late-summer day, with the sky a soaring canopy of robin’s-egg blue, more than 300 farmers from 30-odd counties came to town, many of them driving through the night to get here by 6 a.m. (By comparison the Union Square Greenmarket in New York has only about 70 farmers in peak season, but it is part of a network of 47 such markets in 33 locations in the city.)
The last of summer’s bounty was mingled on the stands with fall fruits and the first tender root crops of winter. The growers said it had been a wet summer, bad for tomatoes, but you couldn’t tell from those offered by Thomas M. Eugster of Old Stage Vegetable Gardens in Brooklyn, Wis., south of Madison. The tiny yellow Sungolds and the scarlet Goliaths, big as softballs, could not possibly have been sweeter.
“Look at them,” said a shopper to his wife. “With those gigantic T’s you could make a BLT without any B or L.”
There’s more local flavor:
But the king of this particular mountain is Richard deWilde of the all-organic Harmony Valley Farms near the pretty town of Viroqua, who loads a 20-foot truck every Friday night and leaves for Madison at 2:30 Saturday morning, arriving about 5:30. On a beautiful day, he might sell $6,000 worth of vegetables or more, but cold, rainy weather cuts that in half, he said, “and the food pantry” ? a charity ? “loves us.”
A bearded, keen-eyed, third-generation farmer whose grandfather was a buddy of J. I. Rodale, the pioneer organic farmer and publisher, Mr. deWilde grew up in South Dakota. He and his partner, Linda Halley, farm 90 acres planted in more than 60 kinds of vegetables with the help of their two sons and a number of hired hands. The farmers’ market, he said, is his “show window,” which has made the operation’s name in the region and has enabled him to sell to restaurants in Madison, Chicago and Minneapolis, and also to run a Community Supported Agriculture plan, in which 450 local households pay for weekly delivery of three-quarter bushel boxes of assorted produce.
Harmony Valley Farms has even broken into big-time mainstream commerce. Mr. deWilde sells several cool-climate specialties ? burdock, celeriac, daikon and three kinds of turnips ? to Albert’s Organics, a wholesaler in Bridgeport, N.J., and a broader range of vegetables to 18 Whole Food supermarkets in the Chicago area.
“Some of my friends at the farmers’ market complain about that,” he said, “but they help to keep me going. They pay on time, and above market price.”