Passing on an announce for other tech-interested proto-lawyers:
The Software Freedom Law Center is currently seeking legal interns to join the staff this summer. Applicants should have a demonstrated interest in software freedom and should be conversant in legal and technical concepts related to free and open source software, but no specific prior course of study or technical proficiency is required. First- and second-year applicants will be considered. Internships are unpaid.
To apply, please send a resume and cover letter, in a free and open format, to
SFLC’s Executive Secretary, Ian Sullivan (sullivan@softwarefreedom.org).
(HT: Aaron Williamson)
… food poisoning, or something a lot like it. And today was supposed to be a fun-ish friday… blah.
… is a class that drowns you in both history and state of the art for an hour and a half, and then spends half an hour challenging you to think about what comes next. And all of it (implicitly and explicitly) screaming at you that This Really, Really Matters. I left exhausted, and if every class were like this, I don’t think I would make it through law school in one piece, but… man, I’m really glad at least one of my classes is this way.
(Beyond ‘Computers, Privacy and the Constitution’, I’ve really got a great schedule this semester- Telecoms is interesting and not too heavy on the case law, which makes for a nice break; E-commerce is almost certainly the most applied course I’ve taken yet; and Corporations looks like it’ll be fairly interesting for a class that is really more ‘learning fundamentals’ than anything else.))
Objectivist phenomenology? (Seen on a mail drop box in lower manhattan.)
I’ve told people that I support Obama in part because I’d rather gamble on someone who wants to lead 60% of the country than to be certain of another four years of someone who can at best lead 51% of the country. Cass Sunstein has some similar thoughts that may be worth reading if you’re a Hillary or Edwards person trying to understand the Obama appeal.
Philippe Aigrain on categories of services
Danny O’Brien on self-hosting
Too much data to process right now- am going through old blog posts of interest… and there are so many of them. Argh!
Two of my classes this semester have class wikis:
That would be two more than I’ve ever had before.
There are a few different spins you could put on this development. Along the student-faculty axis, it is putting more control in the hands of students. This is probably consistent with the institutional mission of actual student development, but we’ll see whether or not most students are actually willing to participate. (One of these professors will include wiki participation in the grade, the other has not indicate any such weighting.) In the institutional-’enterprise’ sense, it is taking some control out of the hands of university IT (who run our mostly competent but not exactly interactive current course website) and putting it in the hands of technically skilled professors (or at least those who have technically skilled support staff), which is consistent with larger trends in the software industry. And in the open source-proprietary sense, both of these are based on open source software, despite neither admin is exactly thrilled with the available options- contrast with the closed system used for the current course management tools elsewhere in the school.
Not completely a tangent: is there any good term for ‘a wiki user who is grumpy when other users don’t wikify things?’ Because I’m going to be that guy. :)
… when it uses sans-serif fonts in the chapter headings. (In this case, ‘Electronic Commerce’, Mann and Winn.)
Wesabe’s Marc Hedlund is speaking at the Princeton Cloud Computing seminar I’m at. Their ‘data bill of rights’:
This Data Bill of Rights is our promise to you.
- You can export and/or delete your data from Wesabe whenever you want.
- Your data is your data, not ours. Our job is to help you understand and act on your data.
- We’ll keep all of your data online and accessible for as long as you have an account. No “archive access” charges.
- Any data you want us to keep private, we will.
- If a question comes up not covered by these rights, we will answer it remembering that your data belongs to you.
Interesting. My intuition is that this is a really good start in the right direction for web apps; he himself notes, though, that it isn’t legally binding. They are considering doing that- will be very interesting to see that if/when it happens.