Newsmap

January 9, 2005

Newsmap is a very clever integration of webmedia and aggregation tools.  Concept: Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that […]

Onward →

An Inventor’s Chances of Success

January 9, 2005

A fascinating post by Bob Shaver, a patent attorney in Boise, Idaho, on an inventor’s chances of success, and some observations by Russ Krajec, a patent agent in Colorado, on what that means for the inventor’s initial approach to investigating the opportunity.  Bob breaks down the odds of success by stage of patent commercialization.  I’m […]

Onward →

CBC Has Open Sourced the Code Base for zed.cbc.ca

January 7, 2005

The CBC, Canada’s state run broadcasting company, has just open-sourced (Apache License 2.0) the code base for zed.cbc.ca.

Onward →

Trial Lawyer’s Prayer

January 7, 2005

Evan Schaeffer is the funniest lawyer on the planet.  Funnier even than, oh, Alberto Gonzales.  Yes, that funny.  Evan, if you’re looking for your glasses, you left them on your newspaper.

Onward →

Half-Life 2: Test Bed for Internet Licensing Techniques

January 7, 2005

Quite apart from Valve’s virtuosity in creating Half-Life 2, the licensing scheme they have developed to underpin the online gaming environment is also testing the boundaries of existing business models.  Politech has an interesting thread on the topic.  The game is packaged with an online authentication system called "Steam", itself nothing new, but Steam also […]

Onward →

Preventing Publicity of Cease and Desist Letters

January 7, 2005

A new twist in the US over IP infringement cease and desist letters – in at least one case, lawyers representing the aggrieved party have asserted that under copyright law the letter cannot be distributed in any manner. It is difficult to understand how, at least from a policy perspective, in the absence of a […]

Onward →

More on What Happens to Your Data When You Die

January 7, 2005

The recent Yahoo case concerning access to a deceased soldier’s email has sparked a lot of discussion.  Declan McCullagh has a thread on the issue.

Onward →

Gigabit Transfer Rates Over Power Lines

January 7, 2005

Slashdot has a post about new research out of Penn State that suggests gigabit speed over powerlines.  Money quote: Penn State engineers, Pouyan Amirshahi and Mohsen Kavehrad, estimated in a research paper released Wednesday that their system could deliver data at close to one gigabit per second over medium-voltage electrical lines in ideal conditions, with […]

Onward →

The Greatest American Lawyer

January 7, 2005

is a new blog about the travails of The Greatest American Lawyer – in the current episode our hero is leaving the firm to set out in non-solo practice.

Onward →

CIBC Sues Six Former Employees

January 6, 2005

In what will almost certainly be the biggest case of its kind in Canada for a while, CIBC is suing a group of former senior employees who left the bank to establish their own brokerage firm, Genuity.  The suit alleges they took confidential information and masterminded a “secretive, well-orchestrated and calculated scheme” to recruit colleagues […]

Onward →

CNN / Carlson Episode Becoming Really Rather Strange, Actually

January 6, 2005

Carlson’s non-firing firing is descending into bafflegab.  This from the NYT: CNN has ended its relationship with the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson and will shortly cancel its long-running daily political discussion program, "Crossfire," the new president of CNN, Jonathan Klein, said last night. Mr. Carlson said he had actually quit "Crossfire" last April and had […]

Onward →

Save us From Experts

January 5, 2005

Via Eweek, this piece from Larry Seltzer with the very useful reminder that the experts were wrong on Y2K.  And why so much alarmism about Y2K in the first place?  While there were some well-meaning people who genuinely thought the sky was going to fall: Why was there no disaster? It’s really simple. Y2K simply […]

Onward →