Out of Cheese

Shouts out to Brian Palmer,

Shouts out to Brian Palmer, who just joined the lengthy list of people -- now three, I believe -- who link to this page.

I randomly came across the

I randomly came across the GNOME Usability Project's list of references just now and noticed a link to a Windows User Experience page at Microsoft. That was a pleasant surprise -- Microsoft generally isn't known for user experience work.

Curious, I followed the link and came to an overview page with only one interesting link, to the Microsoft Inductive User Interface Guidelines. I followed that and got a page not found error. Naturally.

Larry Lessig returns to his

Larry Lessig returns to his blog with his thoughts on the arguments that he presented in Eldred v. Ashcroft earlier this week. He's optimistic, but worried that after four years of work, he might not win the case. His summary of the oral arguments is terrific -- it's rare to get a well-written in-depth description of the arguments before the Court from someone who really understands the nuances of oral arguments.

The New York Times Sunday

The New York Times Sunday magazine has a story on the confused state of sexual harassment law. Apparently there's been a steady increase in male-on-male sexual harassment cases in the past few years, including many involving two heterosexual men. Theses cases are raising issues that those who wrote the sexual harassment laws didn't really consider, and it's caused a lot of division between federal appellate courts. The division was supposed to be settled by a 1998 Supreme Court case, but the Court's decision in that case leaves a lot of questions unanswered and opens up some interesting holes in the law. For example, harassers apparently can get off scot-free as long as they're equal-opportunity boors -- if they harass members of both genders, they're not harassing on the basis of sex even if their actions may be sexual in nature.

I suspect this and other problems with the law will cause the Supreme Court to hear another sexual harassment case before long. Read the Times piece for a number of interesting examples of the kinds of cases the Justices may have to resolve.

The ad from the Montana

The ad from the Montana Senate campaign that caused Republican Mike Taylor to drop out this week is online. As far as political ads go, I really don't think it's all that bad. It's really just a standard attack ad without much backing for the allegations (at least, not much presented in the ad; I don't know the facts of the scandal it mentions). Perhaps it's the Californian in me, but I can't see how his clothes or the fact that he's giving a man a facial implies anything about his sexual preferences. I also can't see why a politician's sexual orientation should matter, but that's a separate issue.

Taylor's campaign has said that he dropped out due to the ad and because he had no money. If I were running his campaign, I would've been much more concerned about not having any money a month before the election than about any attack ad. You simply have to have money at the end of the race, or else you can't respond to your opponent's attacks. And time has shown that in competitive races, candidates who can't (or don't) respond to their opponent's attacks don't win. If Taylor's campaign staff didn't understand that, he wouldn't have won anyway, ad or no ad.