Law Students

morning link bits

By Luis

• All too short and insubstantive piece on the Amazon ‘top reviewers’. Reminds me a bit of the wikipedia cabal discussion. We will eventually demand transparency in these institutions, I think. (via the awesome furdlog- must-read if you want to keep tabs on some of the big picture tech policy issues, especially as understood by the mainstream media.)
• Interesting-looking new blog on Gibson’s dictum that ‘the street finds its own uses for things.‘ I’ve been reading Jane Jacobs the past few days (for school!), so the phrase rings particularly true.
• The Jacobs research is tied in with telecommunications history (trust me), so this quote about the ’savage fury’ of innovation… in the late 1800s… struck me as interesting.
• A brief synopsis of what I think is the most intellectually interesting question I’ve approached yet in law school- innovation and standardization. (Other topics are probably more important, but frankly, aren’t intellectually that stimulating- as Lessig has put it, things like term extension are braindead easy.)
• Mozilla’s ten year anniversary this week helps me date my own Linux anniversary- I was already running Linux by then, so I must have switched some time in fall of ‘97, not spring of ‘98. My next door neighbor (P. Teichman) tried to build the code that day; he kept me up-to-date on the build’s progress, two years later I started contributing to Mozilla, and it has been a long, strange ride since then. :)
• My journal is starting up for the semester, which means I’ll be spending quality time with this paper and wondering if there are better ways to do this…
• Ah-Ha. Nemo was the file manager that I want to bribe to turn into the GTD desktop. :)
• (warning: politics ahead) Lessig on Rove-ness of the Clinton campaign. Also a good synopsis from a newspaper endorsement of Obama (esp. the last paragraph of the quoted endorsement.) And a statement of the somehow non-obvious obvious about electability.

Full post as published by Luis Villa's Home Page on January 24, 2008 (boomark / email).