Hal O'Brien

Recall Aaron Sorkin's great piece of advice from SportsNight:

"If you're dumb, surround yourself with smart people. And if you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you!"

O'Brien's Addendum to Sorkin is, "Surrounding yourself with dumb people who disagree with you is just a waste of time."

I had mentioned this to akirlu recently, but as it turns out, the NYT has a piece about the increasing ideological requirements for Supreme Court clerks.

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Justice Clarence Thomas apparently has one additional requirement. Without exception, the 84 clerks he has chosen over his two decades on the court all first trained with an appeals court judge appointed by a Republican president.

...

For his part, Justice Thomas has said that choosing clerks is like “selecting mates in a foxhole.”

“I won’t hire clerks who have profound disagreements with me,” he said at a luncheon in Dallas a decade ago. “It’s like trying to train a pig. It wastes your time, and it aggravates the pig.”"

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If we believe Sorkin was giving sound advice, we are left with one of two unhappy conclusions: Either Mr. Thomas believes himself to be dumb, or he believes his clerks to be dumb.

From China's official Xinhua news agency: On-line game player wins 1st virtual properties dispute. From the article:

BEIJING, Dec. 19 (Xinhuanet) -- An on-line video game player who lost "weapons" and "treasure" in the virtual world turned to the courts for help and won China's first virtual properties dispute case.

The Beijing Chaoyang District People's Court ruled Thursday that the on-line game company, Beijing Arctic Ice Technology Development Co. Ltd., should restore the player's lost items.

Li Hongchen, a 24-year-old company employee in north China's Hebei Province, had spent two years and over 10,000 yuan (1,205 USdollars) playing the game and purchasing virtual "bio-chemical weapons", which enabled him notch up victories in the game.

However, he found all his "weapons" had been stolen in February, and were allegedly being used by another player, with the ID, "Shuiliu0011".

Li then began a legal battle to reclaim his "properties" in the real world.

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OK, you may well be asking... Xinhua?

Well, I've been playing with Mozilla Firebird as a browser. One of the cool features it has is "tabbed browsing", where multiple child windows open in the browser.

But the way tabbed browsing becomes really powerful is: Let's say you set up a folder in your Bookmarks called "News". At the bottom of the list in the folder is an option, "Open in Tabs". Push the button, Max, (name that movie) and all the bookmarks open up as tabs.

So, with a single mouse click, I suddenly have the following tabs:

Guardian UK
New York Times
Washington Post
Financial Times
Seattle Times
BBC News
Xinhua
Moscow Times
Sydney Morning Herald
Times of India
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (English weekly edit.)
Le Monde
Dagens Nyheter

If I do a [Ctrl]-[Tab], it advances through the list. Further, I can configure all those pages to update according to a schedule.

News junkie heaven.