I’m writing this post on my new laptop, a convertible tablet PC. I killed my older Sony Vaio, but I’m really pleased with using a tablet. I’ll write (or dictate!) more about not using a keyboard later.

This week I’m sitting in law review orientation. By “orientation”, they actually mean train us while actually working very hard on the next issue. Their publication schedule is pretty aggressive. I didn’t actually expect 2 hours of “homework” a night from orientation, but what are you going to do? I’m still living out of boxes and suitcases in my apartment, but I do hope to manage to unpack by the end of the week. I also need to try and work in some more preparation for Early Interview Week.

I hope to post some photos of the trip soon.

I’ll be leaving for Yellowstone at the end of the week, so things will be quiet until I return for journal orientation.

Some of you might know that I’m a big Green Lantern fan. I’ve fallen behind over the summer, but the DC Universe is really coming to grips with the ethical issues when super powers set themselves up as supra-national police. With the Green Latern Corp, we have a group of extremely powerful agents enforcing the policy agenda of an immortal and alien race on a galactic scale. In sci-fi, galactic scale civilizations seem to be either a) totally alien and disconnected from “human” scale events, i.e. another plane of existance; b) bound by a moral code of non-interference, like the prime directive;  c) galactic super-police, or, of course, d) hegemonic empires.

In sci-fi, though, it’s usually clear whether the civilization is a C or a D. I think comic books are struggling now with the realization that reasonable people can disagree on the boundary between the two.

Technorati Tags: comics, 9-11, superhero, culture

It’s a place I think I’ll be looking at more as I try to come up with a topic for the NYU Law A paper.

The Court really lays onto Mr. McCready, and from what they describe, he might even have earned it. The court, however, treats McCready’s claims against eBay under the Fair Credit Reporting Act somewhat flippantly.

The FCRA protect consumers from agencies that “regularly engage[] in … the practice of assembling or evaluating consumer credit information or other information on consumers for the purposes of furnishing consumer reports to third parties” 15 U.S.C. 1681(a)(f). McCready claimed that the eBay Feedback Forum was a “consumer report” for the purposes of the act.

This doesn’t seem crazy to me. Mob judgemental behavior on the Internet is getting out of hand. Cellphone pictures of a subway pervert start off reasonably, hounding someone who stole your cellphone seems amusing, but flash mobs in China can attack and harass adultering men and women. As we start to place substantial value in peer generated social status quantified on the Internet, we’re going to need protections.
The court rejected Mr. McCready’s FCRA theory by ruling that the eBay feedback was not a “consumer report,” but their ruling has an odd twist. The court found that a consumer, under the FCRA “must, at minimum, be an identifiable person.” Since the eBay forum uses “users’ self-anointed ‘usernames’” the court found that the users were anonymous outside of eBay and thus not consumers under the Act.

This can’t make any sense. The identity that links a consumer report with a credit agency is an arbitrary set of strings, such as SSN and DOB. Granted, they’re globally identifying in a way that an eBay ID, in theory, is not. But simply because an identity is fractured into multiple spaces, each with a different recognition mechanism, shouldn’t imply that the same reputation values aren’t carried into each space.

Bad cases make bad law, they say. Hopefully courts will look into online rating systems somewhat more carefully when more legitimate claims arise.

Anyone seen any other cases like this?

I suppose that ought to be obvious. I used to be jealous of those people with laptops that had shock sensors because they could play games, pretend to have a lightsaber, and all sorts of gadgetry with their accelerometer equipped laptop.

Now I’m jealous of those people because their laptops probably would have faired better. The good news is that only the hard drive was damaged, and not even fatally. The bad news is that I do need replace it and my laptop isn’t really designed to have a replaceable hard drive.

I used to work as a computer support guy in my college dorm, but I always refused to take a laptop apart. I was never quite sure that I could put it back together. I’ve built desktops and servers many times, but they’re not the expensive puzzlebox of a smal laptop.

And I have nothing but good things to say about GNU ddrescue. It’s not for many mortals, but you should definitely recommend it to your friendly neighboorhood CS geek if you have serious hard drive problems.

My girlfriend and I are travelling out to see the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone for 10 days. Any advice or recommendations for us?

I now know that what to call the feeling when you’ve been literatured.