J.R.McHale

I could understand maybe a few thousand electronic surveillance orders annually, but 30,000 to 50,000 or more such orders annually suggests possible abuse of the process and strikes me as a magnitude likely significantly beyond what lawmakers envisioned when the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 was passed.

The revelation of the annual volume of electronic surveillance orders was made in a recent paper by U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen W. Smith: Gagged, Sealed & Delivered: Reforming ECPA’s Secret Docket, Harvard Law & Policy Review, Vol. 6, 2012 (forthcoming).

Matthew Lasar writing in Ars Technica’s “Law + Disorder” blog on Hugo Gernsback, “the man who popularized the term science fiction,’ and in whose name the Hugo Awards are given to writers to this day.”

Ars Technica review: the best review of the iPad I’ve seen to date; long, detailed and comprehensive.

Gizmodo review.

Engadget review.

Slate’s Explainer on the legality of Apple restricting the software that runs on the iPad.

FontFeed on how the iPad is missing good typography.

I played with an iPad for half an hour in the store today. Initial impressions: Much heavier than I expected, and probably too heavy for extended holding and reading. Would be nice as an ebook reader, but for $600, wildly too expensive. Actual work – typing, editing – seems like it would be a pain in the ass. Safari browser = ok, but not great; lack of flash support annoyed me in just my ten minutes of web browsing. Plus I would miss synching my bookmarks through Xmarks on firefox (and I’d also miss the Echofon firefox add-on). Speed: I had heard the iPad was quite fast, but it suffered in comparison to my MacBook Pro. Sound: very poor. iPhoto: very nice, as was video. Think I’ll wait for a cheaper, hopefully lighter, android/chrome/windows tablet.