Via Steve: you’ve got to see this advertisement—I feel great. I don’t quite know where it came from or whether it was actually created for real use. If you like that one, check out the Pinata Ad as well.
I expect these links will be making quick rounds of the blogosphere. A Google search on turnpikefilms turns up very little at the moment (only 117 results, most of which are “meta” type content). Let’s check back again in a week.
I’m just finishing studying for my penultimate law school exam ever (my last one is on Thursday), and I realized what makes a law school class great.
A great law school class doesn’t try to cram all of the doctrine from a particular area of the law down your throat. There’s no way you’re going to remember all the rules and details anyway. For many attorneys, much of their real work is legal research. As long as you know the general contours of the rules and where to look, you should be fine.
Instead, a great law school class has a small set of themes, and it attempts to show how those themes run throughout the cases you study. Those themes should be in tension with each other, and there should be instances where a given theme is, itself, self-contradictory. The class should show you how those themes developed historically, and the general “momentum” of the law at present, so you might be able to predict how a court will decide an as-yet undecided issue.
The course should push you to explore those tensions, because that’s exactly where there is an opportunity for creative lawyering.
Karl Klare·, who teaches advanced labor law, presents precisely that kind of course. I wish all law school classes could have been this good.
You might get a little bit of a sense of the course from my class notes, which I put online along with notes from almost every other law school class I’ve taken.
Today is Grey Tuesday·, a protest against the negative impacts of copyright law on artists. Unfortunately, I’m in my last set of final exams and haven’t even had time to make my site grey or post the MP3s. Steve·, however, has a nice little piece and links explaining the whole business·. See also Larry Lessig’s· The Black and White about Grey Tuesday·.
After eight months, I finally completed the Debian New Maintainer process a few minutes ago. I am now ajkessel@debian.org, at least for Debian purposes. I once asked an employer who took 6 months to hire me whether they did hiring by attrition. I think Debian might have a similar process, but it’s probably the only way to weed out people who won’t be sufficiently committed to the project.
Brian McGroarty· (who has a very sparse web page) writes on Linux-Elitists·: Microsoft goes after Linux kernel downloaders?·.
In the wake of the recent accidental leak of the Microsoft Windows Source Code to the Internet·, McGroarty started a BitTorrent· torrent entitled “Kernel source here,” serving up the Linux Kernel·. McGroarty writes:
Imagine my surprise when my DSL stops working this morning, I call my provider, and I learn that I’ve been accused of copyright infringement.
[…]
Now, admittedly I was just asking for it by hinting at something that might offend the big giant. Still, it took them three or four days to issue this letter. In the meantime, shouldn’t they have been able to find someone capable of cracking open a .tar.bz2? Did nobody raise the question of how a leaked CD fits into a 32m file?
Microsoft must be using batch “take down” tactics, similar to the recording industry. You’d think they’d be clever enough to devise a script that could differentiate actual copies of its leaked source code from things that are totally unrelated. Crying wolf could have predictable consequences.
If people really want to make things hard for Microsoft, they would post articles and files all over the Internet entitled “kernel source here.”
DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album· is great. Get it while its available, and spread the word.
Also check out the New Yorker· story on the making of the album: The Mouse That Remixed. Also, from EMI stomps Grey Album·:
So why did EMI yesterday demand that the handful of stores that were selling the album destroy it, and send Cease and Desist letters to Danger Mouse?
…
EMI rigidly controls all Beatles sound recordings for Capitol Records. Sony Music/ATV Publishing controls the publishing side. And both are, of course, founding members of Big Music whose avowed purpose in life is to make sure all music ‘products’ are the sole property of its members.
It’s good to see such a salient conflict between copyright and creativity. The more frequently this occurs, the harder it is to ignore the fact that copyright law so frequently works against its original purpose.
The Marriott Hotel in Manhattan Beach, California provides a host of services through the television in the rooms. These include “movies on demand” at $14 a pop and Sony Playstation 2 for $8 per hour. I can’t imagine anyone paying that much for Playstation unless: (1) someone else is paying their costs (business travellers); (2) their kids are driving them crazy; or (3) money is no object. It’s incredibly frustrating to be charged an amount totally unrelated to the marginal cost of providing a service, but maybe Marriott enjoys a price-insensitive clientele.
My favorite part was when I tried to use the wireless keyboard to access the menu of services. I got the following message:
A required DLL was not found: FILTERS.DLL was not found.
The wireless keyboard provided no way to cancel the error message. In fact, there was no way to make any selections on the menu in the background. All you could do was look at this clever Microsoft error message.
You would think that a simple “black box” type program like a menu of services served over a television would be pretty rock solid. But not when the television server is running Windows NT!
Whenever I discover a solution to a computer-related problem that isn’t easily found on google, I post it on my useful linux page, in the hopes of saving other people time with the same problem. I’m always trying to figure out the best way to present the problem and solution so that people will find what they’re looking for. Right now, I’ve just got a laundry list of problems and solutions on that page, which seems to work pretty well based on my traffic analysis (particularly for people searching for the cups client-error-forbidden message, which has brought thousands of visitors to my site).
In any case, here’s my most recent batch of useful stuff:
deb http://jrfonseca.dyndns.org/debian ./
As a side note, does anyone have any idea why so many webmail interfaces are hooked on unnecessary Java? I provide SquirrelMail as the webmail interface for bostoncoop.net, and it seems to do quite well without Java, Flash, streaming video, or any other silliness. Do makers of webmail software just get a kick out of making their software not work with standard browser installations?
I feel some obligation to perpetuate the Bush in 41.2 Seconds meme. Maybe I’m a little late. (Thanks to UG for the link).
I run my own little “rightwatch” organization by subscribing to the mailing lists of several right wing organizations. Although on occasion I find myself agreeing with the more economic/libertarian groups (e.g., the Cato Institute·), I always find the social right pretty funny. Here’s the latest press release from the Christian Coalition·:
Washington D.C. — Today’s decision by 4 out-of-control left-wing judges on the Massachusetts Supreme Court to force homosexual “marriage” on the citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the rest of America should be thoroughly ignored by the Massachusetts State Legislature. The American people who overwhelmingly oppose homosexual marriages (only 24% support such an abomination) — through their elected officials —- must make these important decisions, not a tiny minority of judicial tyrants.
This excerpt is striking because they admit that 24% of the population supports gay marriage. It’s astonishing that that’s the lowest number the Christian Coalition can reasonably claim. What might that number have been ten years ago? Twenty? The Christian Coalition is on pretty thin ice if one-quarter of the population supports an “abomination.” I’m not sure that can really be counted as “overwhelming.” Assuming the trend towards acceptance continues at anywhere near the current rate, it’s going to be pretty hard for them to continue to claim that these judges are way out in left field.
They also (unsurprisingly) neglect to mention that constitutional rights are almost always countermajoritarian: if the only issue were the will of the masses, then the only purpose of the constitution would be to insure proper (representative) functioning of the legislative branch. But that’s clearly not the case, and one only need to look to the school desegregation cases to see why courts must act against the will of the majority when the constitution so commands.
I’m sure the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (holding same sex marriage rights required under the Massachusetts Constitution in Goodridge·) and the United States Supreme Court (in holding sodomy prohibitions unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas·) have seen the writing on the wall: people will some day look back at this time and wonder how people could ever have harbored such homophobic views. By setting out bold precedent breaking with past practice, authors of these opinions must be hoping to establish themselves as visionaries in the eyes of future legal historians, just as we now see the Holmes and Brandeis dissents in the free speech cases of the late 1910’s·, or Holmes’ dissent in Lochner v. New York· in 1905. We realize now that Holmes and Brandeis understood what is now obvious, at a time when the rest of the court was stuck in an untenable (or unjust) conceptual framework.
I’m looking forward to the time when we can look back on all of this and laugh at the small-mindedness of the Christian Coalition. In any case, I feel better about getting married this May knowing that I live in a state where the right to marry isn’t predicated on the gender of the person one loves.