From InstaPundit: "TED BARLOW is dissing the Supreme Court for its state sovereign immunity decisions. He's right to dis them -- but wrong to blame the Rehnquist Court in particular, which is just following a long line of stupid decisions in this area. This utterly screwed-up line of cases started with Hans v. Louisiana in 1890, and it's been continued by every Court since, regardless of political position. I don't know why, and I've asked a lot of law professors, most of whom seem mystified at the Court's near-religious enthusiasm for extending state sovereign immunity way beyond the letter of the Eleventh Amendment.
It's true, of course, that the Eleventh Amendment cases are a substantial degree of departure from the text for a Court with many justices who say they're strict constructionists. (It's so true, in fact, that I wrote a law review article saying that in 1992, called "Penumbral Reasoning on the Right," in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review). But in a way this illustrates the meaninglessness of the term "judicial activism." On the one hand, the Court is way outside the text of the Constitution, which can certainly be characterized as activist. On the other hand, its recent decisions are entirely consistent with a line of cases that's over a hundred years old, which could be considered respectful of precedent and hence not activist at all."
For you non-lawyers, it may surprise you to learn that States can't be sued for things that ordinary companies can be sued for, except under certain circumstances. The reason for this? The Eleventh Amendment gives the states immunity from suit. Hard to believe, isn't it?
5:06:34 PM
Here comes the Dancing Queen....
From Andrew Sullivan's blog: Click Here. Remember, she may be the Queen, but you are in control so work it baby.
4:33:59 PM
Ask a Librarian an answer and you usually get a good answer...
I read Jenny's story, Let's Hope the Glass Is Half-full, and I sympathize. Let's just all do our jobs and hope the the reinforcements (i.e. the Net-Geners') arrive soon.
1:57:43 PM
NIH announces change in research guidelines...
The National Institute of Health (NIH) announced last week that they were going to start using lawyers instead of rats in their experiments. Among the beneficial reasons that the NIH gave for the change were the following:
1. Lab assistants don't mind hurting the lawyers.
2. There's a better supply of lawyers, and
3. There are some things even a rat won't do.
1:24:17 PM
Well, I like spam....sometimes
From Rick: Weird spam. "Hands down, the wierdest piece of spam ever. "
Well Rick, you know what Hunter Thompson says about when it gets "wierd"...
12:51:43 PM
More on the "new economy" from John Robb
Fortune reports: CEOs are glum about profit growth. John Robb's Radio Weblog: "Note that all three company CEOs interviewed (DuPont, Best Buy, and UPS) aren't reducing IT spending. Why? They need to continue to improve productivity in order to compete."
I'm sure that Wal-Mart isn't reducing its spending on IT either. But it's still hard to convince a lot of corporate types (i.e. those not familiar with technology from a hands-on standpoint) of the benefits. I think that corporations are still somewhat stuck in the mainframe era. There are lots of PC's now and many call this the era of "peer-to-peer computing" or "the desktop era" or whatever. I call it the "booting up" era. We're just getting through the POST stage, and getting ready to load the societal operating system. By the time it gets loaded the Net-geners will be old enough to run things. They understand technology, or at least it will be an entrenched part of their lives.
11:01:35 AM
Activewords - And The Problem of User-Interface
Activewords is a cool program that I have blogged about before, and even created a whole story post (see my link over on the right). I've been running it for 263 days now (the program keeps track of this) and it has saved me 40 hours of time since then (it keeps track of that too). Buzz and I talk constantly about why more people don't use ActiveWords, given its tremendous power. He thinks about this a lot more than I do since he is one of the principals of the company, but I think about it a lot because I have tried to get people to use it and, while some of them take to it quickly and like it, there are many who don't.
Trying to figure out why more people don't use this product is useful to me not just to understand ActiveWords' marketing challenge, but to understand something greater. I think that there is a lesson in here for all software developers and marketers. I don't pretend to know what the lesson is, at least not completely. But here are my preliminary thoughts.
First, the program is too powerful. The average person gets a program and says, "okay what does this program do?" ActiveWords does too many things and does them all very well. It replaces text in any context (Windows dialogue box, your eail program, wherever you need to type text). It will pull up programs for you with whatever shortcut you decide. It will pull up folders (no matter how nested they are) in a few quick keystrokes. And, most amazingly, ActiveWords will instantly take you to any website no matter whether you have launched your browser or not.
These are amazing things, so what's the problem? Well, it's that when you show people the program they are so overwhelmed that they can't remember which of those things it does. Or they remember, but then they somehow can't make the committment to use the program because perhaps they are overwhelmed. And that leads to what I think is the greatest challenge for ActiveWords. It changes the user interface too much.
But that's the point of ActiveWords, Buzz would say. I know. Changing the user-interface is a good thing. It has made my life easier. Rick Talcott, a lawyer in Oakland uses ActiveWords and has done a great job of describing how ActiveWords' user interface makes his life easier, and he compares it to a waitress named Alice. The thing is that while it is good to have Alice bring you your coke (which is, analogously, what ActiveWords does). I say that Alice doesn't represent ActiveWords. She is Windows. And she isn't a very responsive waitress. But people all know her and know what her quirks are.
Activewords is the new waitress. The one that can work a lot faster and do more, but you have to get used to her and develop a relationship with her. Many people don't like it when Alice, whom they know and love, gets replaced with a new waitress, even if the new waitress is efficient. Look at the QWERTY keyboard, for God's sake. It was designed to be inefficient (so that the mechanical typewritters wouldn't jam if people typed too fast). We know the DVORAK keyboard is faster and better (it's been proven in tests), but we don't want to use it. Why? New user interface. And we don't want to have to learn a whole new way of typing.
All of that said, I don't mean to imply that ActiveWords is too hard to adapt to. It's not, and if you are reading this then you are certainly the sort of person who would be able to handle the minor adjustment to a new program. Like all programs, it requires a little commitment. But the dividends are huge, and worth the small effort. It's ironic to me that, despite all of the hostile feelings toward Microsoft and it's supposed lack of responsiveness to customer's demands, here is a program that basically gives people a lot more control over their Windows operating system, and yet they don't want to make the committment to use it. Maybe, Microsoft knows more about what they want than they think. Maybe they just want Alice, even with all of her flaws....
9:12:53 AM
