Rebuilding Babel

Erik Ketzan, Rebuilding Babel: Copyright and the Future of Machine Translation, 9 Tulane J. Tech. & Intell. Prop. 205 (2007). Early draft available at SSRN. So far cited in: a University of Manchester doctoral thesis by
Federico Gaspari ("The reflections offered by Ketzan (2007) are interesting and stimulating, especially because they deal directly with a set of issues that have been discussed for years but still represent grey areas surrounding the use of MT on the Internet") and some law reviews articles. Generously supported by The Samuelson/Glushko Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

idea for a nonprofit

49 can't be wrong

A nonprofit dedicated to promoting uniformity of law throughout the 50 states. There are numerous examples where ONE state differs from the other 49 in some minor point of law (for instance, there's one state that requires 3 witnesses to a will instead of 2). 49cantbewrong.org would lobby each random state to change their idiotic ways.

Law topic ideas

Gotta post these somewhere, so:

1) Wiki version of 3L epiphany's Taxonomy of Law Blogs. The wiki could allow people to add/delete their own blogs from the list-- even students, who are not listed because there are too many and their blogs are often 20% law, 80% something else-- and even debate restructuring the taxonomy.

2) Has there been any attempt to create a free, nonprofit alternative to Westlaw and Lexis? Cornell hosts Supreme Court cases online, but without pagination, are useless for purposes of citation. Wiki Law may be trying to tackle too many things at once, although it has potential. What is needed may be a simple Wiki site that lists judicial opinions with pagination of their respective reporter. The common law wiki?

In defense of Joyce and Pynchon

A response to Dale Peck's Hatchet Jobs

Machine Translation

Since no one on Earth seems to know both English and Japanese, I ended up translating an interview with Japanese director Anno Hideaki from a French translation! Babelfish actually works pretty well with French, an easy language. It is worse than useless with Japanese.

Google's working on some brilliant new translation software-- can't WAIT until it's live: a whole world of Japanese sites would open up to me.

Thoughts on Apple switching to Intel

1) Cost. Although more fully featured, Macs are more expensive than PCs. Running on Intel will keep costs down.

2) Heat. G4s and G5 are hot as hell. I can barely keep my iBook G4 800 on my lap without worrying about sperm count.

3) Compatibility. Some people hesitate to buy a Mac because they may need that one Windows app, use Windows at work, or want to play games. Perhaps you could install Windows on the new Intel Macs?

4) But then, why buy Intel Macs when you can buy a Dell and install OSX?

5) If Apple plays too hard, Microsoft may stop selling Office for Mac. You could always boot into Windows on your Intel Mac to run Office, but then you’re back on Windows.

6) Chips are getting fast, but Windows doesn’t take all that much to run. As chips get faster, emulation may eliminate the need to dual boot.

7) Even if Apple loses Mac hardware sales, it could more than gain the difference in OSX sales, iTunes sales, and software sales.

Counterforce

I'm an avid reader of the Becker-Posner Blog, and someone has just launched an Anti-Becker-Posner Blog. "Dialectically, sooner or later, some counterforce would have had to arise" - Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 536.

MFoQL Project

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana Annotation Project is a project I started to create a set of online annotations to Umberto Eco's latest novel. Two weeks and 150 edits later, it's progressing nicely: I'm 110 pages in with hundreds of annotation entries, mostly by me, but also some by two anonymous contributors, who by their IP addresses I can tell are from Australia and Brazil. Hopefully as the project picks up and more people read Eco's novel, the contributions will snowball.