Category Archives: Uncategorized
Dirty Necessary Money
Up at Cornell, Tom Bruce has a post about the problem of funding open access to legal materials. This brings to mind a conversation I had with a doctor friend recently about AltLaw. My friend, accustomed to the open-access requirements … Continue reading
Fragmentation and the Failure of the Web
What makes an on-line community? In the past two weeks I have received announcements of three new “communities” all interested in using open-source software to retrieve, share, and analyze data from or about governments. Most of these announcements say the … Continue reading
Lawyers and Engineers
Part of what I hope to do with the Program on Law & Technology at Columbia is bridge the communication gap between lawyers and engineers. The two groups think completely differently. To take a recent example, a new P2P file-sharing … Continue reading
Strange Referrers
The web is a strange beast. Server logs reveal just how strange. Someone’s crawling AltLaw.org, sending an HTTP Referrer of “http://www.nero.com/enu/downloads-nero8-trial.php” with a User-Agent identified as “MSIE 5.00; Windows 98″. What the heck?
Aesthetics
Finally, my blog has a new theme. I liked the old one, but it was getting a bit… old. And the serif-font-on-a-translucent-background-image was never a great idea. I didn’t have time for a complete redesign, so I settled on the … Continue reading
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Temptation
I need a new laptop. My current machine, a rebranded ASUS that I bought on the cheap a few years ago, has developed a crack in the screen hinge, so it’s only a matter of time. I have to admit, … Continue reading
New York Neanderthals
Paul Graham writes, “Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. … And what US city has a stronger claim? New York? A fair number of smart people, but diluted by a much larger number of neanderthals in … Continue reading
Privacy, Open Access, and the Law
Since we started putting court cases on the interwebs, first with Project Posner and then with AltLaw, we’ve had the occasional angry email from someone who Googles himself/herself and finds a court case from 20 years ago that reveals embarrassing … Continue reading
URI Templates for RDF
There’s a school of thought that URIs should be opaque identifiers with no inherent meaning or structure. I think this is clearly a bad idea on the human-facing web, but it is more reasonable for computer-facing web services. However, I’ve … Continue reading
When Spam Filters and AdWords Interact
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