Has anyone used or tried Outliner?
Outliner 4.0 allows law students to custom organize all of their law school information, have it at their fingertips, and generate every type of report and outline with the click of a button that the student could ever use in law school.
Sounds like it’s promising the stars, but the idea of a smart notetaking framework that could help me generate outlines at the end of the course is kind of appealing.
Actually, has anyone tried taking serious notes in something more than a word processor? I know there have been some personal semantic wiki’s floating around. I just wonder if I could keep the markup and organization straight on the fly with a semantic wiki package.
Posted by M as Law school, Organization at 6:18 PM EDT
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The Southern Poverty Law Center has an absolutely shocking piece on the neo-nazi infiltration of the U.S. military. The problem is so bad that American neo-nazi graffiti has appeared in Baghdad.
“Special Forces soldiers who double as extremist operatives present a special danger, since they have commando skills gained at huge taxpayer expense — often including urban warfare, long-range reconnaissance, and combat demolitions.”
I’m quite sure that service members even loosely associated with radical Islamic groups would get the n-th degree. Domestic terrorist organizations, though, apparently get a free pass.
The article doesn’t talk about it, but I wonder to what extent the infiltrating supremacists of the 80’s or 90’s have risen to positions of real leadership or power. Are they covering for, or recruiting, new members?
Posted by M as Interesting Link, Politics at 12:29 PM EDT
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Joe Grantz, on his blog (via Freedom to Tinker, has posted an interesting overview of the recent CleanFlicks decision. CleanFlicks, along with others, was producing less raunchy versions of popular movies that were then distributed on DVDs to home consumers. CleanFlicks purchased a legitimate DVD copy for every edited DVD they sent out in an effort to stay legit.
Congress recently provided statutory protection to companies that manufactured machines that could do this just-in-time when provided with a skip list, but did not protect companies like CleanFlicks, something the court found significant.
I thought the ruling was interesting, if only because it seems to represent the artist’s moral rights approach to copyright law, rather than the traditional U.S. utilitarian view. Moral rights, at least in civil law systems, can apparently a lot further than U.S. style copyright law. In this case, the similarity lies in an artist’s right to protect the integrity of his or her works. I’m not sure how the willingness of the directors to allow TV edits of their movies would impact this type of analysis, but that’s certainly an interesting question.
The bigger issue may be in fair use analysis. Fair use makes sense, I think, when we think about socially valuable or important uses that copyright law would, hopefully unintentionally, suppress. I guess that could be considered a type of market failure correction in copyright law, when transaction costs or unreasonable actors need to be corrected. In the case of moral rights, however, the analysis is more rawly normative that socially utilitarian. If you truly believe that an artist has an inalienable moral right to preserve the integrity of his or her works, that may be very difficult to reconcile with socially valuable uses.
Any thoughts on scholars who’ve looked into this subject?
Posted by M as Copyright, Fair Use at 12:25 PM EDT
2 Comments »
I thought I’d talk a bit more about
Tim Schneider’s recent
post at
Public Knowledge.
Tim links to an incident where Verizon terminated an EVDO customer’s account. Verizon claimed that the “extraordinarily high usage” of the account was proof positive that the customer had violated the terms of service by streaming or downloading music or video.
But what if we had some form of net neutrality? It would seem that Verizon could still be free to terminate accounts at their discretion. It might make good business sense to do so. If bandwidth costs Verizon money, even over DSL, then excluding the tiny fraction of their customer base who consume a vast majority of their bandwidth would make sense. They might not even need to raise the bogeyman of “terms of service” and face the non-neutral net problem that Tim describes. They might simply have the right to terminate for unusually high usage, or for nothing at all. Or, less controversially, to move you from a flat-rate plan to a metered plan.
The problem with flat-fee Internet might be that less skilled, less demanding users (mom and pop checking email) may be subsidizing highly skill, high consumption users. If $29.95 has a reasonable profit margin for the 300Mb a month downloader, can it still cover the cost of the 30Gb a month downloader?
There’s a very excellent article (via Techdirt) by Tom Evslin, founder of AT&T Worldnet, that questions whether bandwidth usage like this actually costs the ISP at all. It certainly has questioned some of my assumptions. But for services like cable Internet, the local loop can be saturated by heavy use, and certainly EVDO and wireless will have similar issues.
Now, granted, the Snowe/Dorgan amendment might have limited this with Section 12(a)(1): “not block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade the ability of any person to use a broadband service to access, use, send, post, receive, or offer any lawful content, application, or service made available via the Internet;”
But this goes well beyond, I think, most peoples’ concept of net neutrality. Here, in an effort to block preferential and discriminatory treatment of content over the Internet, we suggest that there’s a limitation on when and how an ISP can deny service to users.
Net neutrality might be sound, but doesn’t this kind of regulation seem a bit too much?
Posted by M as Net Neutrality, Internet Policy, Interesting Link, Recommended Media at 11:10 AM EDT
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Tim Schneider at Public Knowledge has written a very excellent post on the usage restrictions that Verizon places on the their EVDO usage. Tim suggests, I think rightly, that this is a future we might see without network neutrality guarantees.
Some commentators have raised the specter of cable companies turning the Internet into cable TV, with top-down bundled content relegating individual and non-corporate content to an Internet version of the fuzzy local access channel. It seems far more plausible to me, though, that phone companies will seek to transform the Internet into the cell phone / cell network model.
If technology progresses to the point that computers can be effectively, if not completely, locked down, we might have Bells distribute free computers that could only connect to their network. Their network might have a complicated per-email free structure, with premium zones and bundled content.
Granted, the tide seems to be turning against this. AOL apparently plans to open up their walled garden. If AOL, with the content pockets of Time Warner, doesn’t see a future in this type of access/content bundling, maybe we should be less concerned and more optimistic.
Posted by M as Net Neutrality, Interesting Link, Recommended Media at 10:42 AM EDT
1 Comment »
When I first saw the title of Vernor Vinge’s new book, Rainbows End, I though it was missing an apostrophe. But no, it’s not.
The book is excellent. I enjoyed the space opera style fiction of A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, but I think I liked the topics of Rainbows End even better. Extremely mild spoiler after the break.
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Posted by M as Recommended Media, Future of books, Book, Libraries at 6:06 PM EDT
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- 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
- 42% of college graduates never read another book.
- 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
- 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
- 57% of new books are not read to completion.
These statistics come from the book industry (via kottke.org).
Sadly, I’m not terribly surprised by #1. So many people in high school don’t actually read even the books assigned during school.
I am surprised by #2, though perhaps I shouldn’t be. We hear plenty of complaints directed towards the inadequacies of high school education in this country, particularly in public schools, but I think much less concern about higher ed. Still, if slightly less than half of all college graduates never read another book in their life, how could we not say that education failed them?
I wonder if this doesn’t all suggest that rather than replacing books, as some fear, Internet content might be reclaiming an audience for print media. Sadly, I’d imagine that the Internet probably supplies magazine and news type content to these users rather than in-depth treatments books can provide.
Posted by M as Interesting Link, Recommended Media, Education, Future of books at 1:30 PM EDT
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Nicholas Carr has a good review of Jonathan Zittrain’s article, The Generative Internet. Zittrain’s article is a must read, though I feel bad suggesting that, having still not gotten to Yochai Benkler new book
.
I wonder who bears the costs of accidents or negligence at the edges of the neutral network? Even with overwhelming benefits, there’s clearly a cost to having new innovation at the edges of the network. I think distribution of that cost is a very appropriate question, though I’m not at all sure what the answer should be.
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Posted by M as Net Neutrality, Internet Policy, Interesting Link at 12:31 PM EDT
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While we wait for the motion picture, a link to a version of the 1978 Copyright Act, in verse. My favorite stanza below.
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Posted by M as Interesting Link, Funny Link, Copyright at 11:25 AM EDT
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… by the letter M.
A mixture of thoughts, commentary, interesting links, blah blah blah.
Posted by M as Rambling at 10:22 AM EDT
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