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KD: "Based on what I've read and heard, my favorite among the shortlist candidates to replace John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court has been Diane Wood of the 7th Circuit Court. But I'm not a lawyer and my knowledge of her actual jurisprudence is necessarily limited. Glenn Greenwald, however, is a lawyer, and he's spent the past week reviewing her record and talking to Wood's former clerks to get a better sense of where she stands. His conclusion: she's not a truly left wing candidate (none of those are even on the shortlist), but she does have a "long, clear, inspiring record" on issues of both civil liberties and economics. Glenn goes into some detail about her defense of the rule of law shortly after 9/11 — which you should read — but the thing about Wood that has most impressed me is that she's not just someone with a solid progressive view of the law, but someone with the intellectual heft to make a difference on the court."
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SRW: "If Bank Y had plainly represented itself as an agent of Trader X... no problem. Bank Y acted very effectively in Trader X’s interest, but in a manner that can fairly be described as adversarial with respect to the Investors.... So was it okay for Bank Y to be a secret agent of Trader X while engaging in its conventional business of marketing a new investment fund? In the story as I’ve told it, the undisclosed information was clearly material — the Investors would have received the Premium or would have preferred not to do the deal had the circumstances of the trade been plainly presented. When an investment bank is acting as an agent, to what degree can it withhold material information from other parties in order to benefit its client? And what is the relationship of an investment bank to those to whom it is marketing a new investment product?... I think I’ll just let these questions dangle. What do you think?"
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McKinney: "Late in 2009 year we witnessed the largest explosion ever recorded: a super giant star two hundred times bigger than the sun utterly obliterated by... gamma ray-driven antimatter production.... The super-supernova SN2007bi is an example of a "pair-instability" breakdown.... At sizes of around four megayottagrams... giant stars are supported against gravitational collapse by gamma ray pressure... if they get too energetic, these gamma rays... [make] an electron-positron matter-antimatter pair out of pure energy as they pass an atom.... The antimatter annihilates with its opposite, as antimatter is wont to do, but the problem is that the speed of antimatter explosion... is still a critical delay in the gamma-pressure.... The outer layers sag in, compressing the core more, raising the temperature, making more energetic gamma rays even more likely to make antimatter and suddenly the whole star is a runaway nuclear reactor..."
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Miller: "On October 18, 1991, against long odds and in front of an incredulous press corps, U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Boris Pankin announced that Arabs and Israelis were being invited to attend a peace conference in Madrid.... I marveled at what America had accomplished. In 18 months, roughly the time it took Henry Kissinger to negotiate three Arab-Israeli disengagement agreements and Jimmy Carter to broker an Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the United States had fought a short, successful war -- the best kind -- and pushed Iraq's Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. And America was now well-positioned to bring Arabs and Israelis across the diplomatic finish line. Baker... was... cautious. "Boys... if you want to get off the train, now might be a good time because it could all be downhill from here." But I wasn't listening. America... could use... power to make peace. I'd become a believer. I'm not anymore."
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Adobe: "As developers for the iPhone have learned, if you want to develop for the iPhone you have to be prepared for Apple to reject or restrict your development at any time, and for seemingly any reason. The primary goal of Flash has always been to enable cross browser, platform and device development. The cool Web game that you build can easily be targeted and deployed to multiple platforms and devices. However, this is the exact opposite of what Apple wants. They want to tie developers down to their platform, and restrict their options to make it difficult for developers to target other platforms."
Apple: "Someone has it backwards--it is HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and H.264 (all supported by the iPhone and iPad) that are open and standard, while Adobe's Flash is closed and proprietary."
