January 31, 2007
Fake iPod Nano ::
tech — tagged fake, flickr, iPod, photos and tech
12:47 pm
Fake iPod Nano
Originally uploaded by Small Dog Electronics.
Did you know these existed? I didn’t.
Noted by Small Dog Electronics.
October 9, 2006
Project Posner ::
legal — tagged judges, legal, public domain and tech
10:00 am
Reading Boing Boing this morning, I came across a post about Project Posner, a searchable database of all of Judge Posner’s opinions dating back to when he first started his job at the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals back in 1981. According to the site’s About page:
While Posner’s books and popular writings are easily available to the public, his opinions are difficult or expensive for the public to access, let alone search. This site, for the first time, collects almost all of his opinions in a single searchable and easily readable database.
So it has just as much to do with freely accessible information as it does with legal geekery. My kind of site!
But in all seriousness, Judge Posner is one of the few icons out there whose ideas I find off the wall and crazy (remember that time he tried to apply his Law and Economics theory to criminal law?) but whose opinions I deeply respect. Plus he exudes a confidence in his legal writing that I can only hope to one day begin to approach.
September 19, 2006
Added tags, moving on ::
meta — tagged hosting, meta, tags and tech
2:27 pm
Well, thanks to the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, this site now has tags. I found that I was having a bit of category creep, which you might have noticed from the ever-expanding list of categories on the left. I have plans to consolidate many of those categories under single general headings (e.g., the legal category will take over for all the other law-oriented categories) and then use tags to categories some of the more specific like crime, con law or—oh, man—tort reform).
In other site-related news, I’ll be switching hosting providers in the next week or so, so regular readers should plan on some of the sketchy web presence that comes with the attendant DNS transition. Unfortunately, this site was inaccessible all Sunday—who knows why—and my log files seem to disappear from time to time without any explanation. That, combined some extra free time I’ve had lately, suggests that the time is ripe to try another hosting provider. Oh, what fun!
September 15, 2006
Google + TOR = fun new searches! ::
tech — tagged anonymous, google, tech, TOR, totally stumped and weird
10:19 am
Google when using TOR
Originally uploaded by gjs.
Yes, fun new searches that don’t make any sense, unless you understand German, Italian or French. There are work-arounds, of course, but the whole world of Web anonymization does take some getting used to. Here’s my favorite passage from the Wiki FAQ:
If you really want to see Google in English you can click the link [on the search results page] that provides that. But we consider this a feature with Tor, not a bug—the Internet is not flat, and it in fact does look different depending on where you are. This feature reminds people of this fact.
So there.
February 1, 2006
What’s protected? Cory Doctorow and Star Force ::
legal — tagged conlaw, legal and tech
2:56 pm
It could be that others got to this before I did. But a couple of days ago, Cory Doctorow posted to Boing Boing about a rather nasty letter he received from the people over at Star Force, threatening to sue him over a previous post in which he describes (rather accurately) one of Star Force’s product’s “anti-copying malware.” In his reply to Star Force, Cory noted that he had forwarded the message to the people over at Chilling Effects.
Well, today in my news reader I found this excellent annotated version of Star Force’s letter, complete with links to explanations about what constitutes a defamation suit, what sorts of statements are protected by the first amendment, what defenses are available to someone charged with defamation, and the definition of a SLAPP suit. It’s definitely a worthwhile read—go check it out.
July 14, 2005
Dashboard widgets broken in OS X 10.4.2 ::
tech — tagged dashboard, os x, tech, totally stumped and widgets
10:18 am
Hey, has anyone out there upgraded to OS X 10.4.2 and found their dashboard widgets are broken after the upgrade? Symptoms are: when I go into the Dashboard, the screen is empty, and when I try to drag a widget to the dashboard the widget disappears immediately. Clicking on the “manage widgets” button gets no response.
Send email to gregATpageswithin.com with your suggestions. Thanks.
Update: based on the comments in this discussion thread, I moved all the widgets in the /Library/Widgets/ directory to my ~/Library/Widgets/ directory. This solved the problem—now all the widgets appear to be working properly. However, the solution is not ideal, since my account is now the only one with access to the default widgets included with Tiger. If I come up with a more comprehensive solution to the problem, I will certainly post it here.
May 26, 2005
Janice Rogers Brown, Moon Resident ::
legal — tagged judges, legal and tech
11:42 am
So, now that the Priscilla Owen appointment is over with, I suppose it’s time for the Senate to move on to the other activist judge nominees. I have little familiarity with the judicial philosophy of Judge Pryor; however, I did get the opportunity to read a dissent by Justice Brown while researching a paper last semseter. In Intel v. Hamidi, a majority of the California Supreme Court justices found that Intel could not sue a former employee for sending email disparaging the company to current employees. In its opinion, the Court declined to extend the law of trespass—universally limited to physical trespass and physical harm—to the cyberspace realm. Justice Brown, however, disagreed. In her dissent is this tasty morsel of up-is-downism:
Those who have contempt for grubby commerce and reverence for the rarified heights of intellectual discourse may applaud today’s decision, but even the flow of ideas will be curtailed if the right to exclude is denied. As the Napster controversy revealed, creative individuals will be less inclined to develop intellectual property if they cannot limit the terms of its transmission. Similarly, if online newspapers cannot charge for access, they will be unable to pay the journalists and editorialists who generate ideas for public consumption.
Such a thinly veiled ideological stance masquerading as a clear statement of fact is quite disturbing. But then, I can understand why Justice Brown would be so appealing to the Bush administration.
For those hungering for legal citations, the above quote can be found at Intel v. Hamidi, 71 P.3d 296, 325 (2003). FindLaw has a PDF of the opinion as well.
