What’s New with Wu

In an academic paper published in 1968, this cartoon:

“The Computer as a Communication Device” Science and
Technology, April 1968

I’ve started drafting my Network Neutrality book.

Its beginning with the inter-galatic network — the vision of networking begat by J.C.R. Licklider, the MIT professor and the first person to fund Internet research through ARPA.
Licklider was a genius of rare lucidity.   Unlike many of the great visionaires of the 20th century, most of his ideas have come true.  Part pyschologist, he dreamed of computers that could extend human capacity, and a network that might connect every computer and human on earth.   If those seem that fait accompli by now, that’s the testament to his particular genuis.
One of his visions, while it may seem simple enough now, is that computers would be used for, and would in fact revolutionize, communications.   That’s it. Simple, but look how much came from that idea.
Here’s more, from the 1960s:

we believe that we are entering a technological age in which we will be able
to interact with the richness of living information—not merely in the passive
way that we have become accustomed to using books and libraries, but as
active participants in an ongoing process, bringing something to it through
our interaction with it, and not simply receiving something from it by our
connection to it.

In our rush to describe Altlaw to bloggers and the press, I think we may have done too little to discuss some of the other, complimentary efforts, to make U.S. law and the law of other nations easier to access.

I discussed LII and Findlaw in my last post, both of which I use heavily, and have many important features we don’t. Other important efforts are found outside the United States: such as the CanLII site, from my home and native land, AsianLII, the WorldLII group, and surely others.

What we do think is distinctive about Altlaw isn’t our databases — not one bit — but rather the search engine function of altlaw.

King of Kong is pure entertainment.  Yet almost as interesting is reading the discussion of the Donkey Kong high score at the Twin Galaxies discussion board:
A sample:

The juggernaut called king of kong is so slanderous and untrue it is forcing us into action. We didn’t know where inactivity was going to head in the future much like the roy shildt (censored). For all of those who think steve weibe is naive and a victim you are clueless. He is a very clever guy and a manipulator. We didn’t know till recently the guys who made the film were his friends. We were told they were making a different movie. We were play by the filmmakers and steve weibe. Victim my ass! They set up all these crying episodes in the movie. Believe me there are evil people in this world but it isn’t us at the scoreboard. We have given this guy many chances over and over most are unaware because we respect people who can play games, but when you cross the line into the realm of lies and cheating for personal gain and lie all the way publically to try an villianize another player and the scorebaord itself.

This case, Carla Yuknis v. First Student Inc., which I picked off Project Posner recently, is vintage Richard Posner:

The plaintiff had complained, initially to the company’s regional vice-president, that “all levels of personnel” at the facility at which she worked “show blatant disrespect for their marital vows, watch pornography, use foul language, tell vulgar jokes,. .. [and] gamble openly.” She accused one of her coworkers of giving an assistant manager of the facility “red underwear made to look like an elephant’s head, with a sexually-suggestive trunk” at an office party, and accused another — the manager, no less — that among other enormities he had referred to a female bus driver (not the plaintiff) as a “fat ass,” had had an affair with another female driver, sold Avon products at work, told the plaintiff that his teenage daughter had watched him walk from the shower to his bedroom naked, and described an incident in which his male cat “raped” his female cat. There is more but this recital will give the flavor.

[...]

One is put in mind of the distinction famously drawn by John Stuart Mill, in chapter 4 of On Liberty (1859), between “self-regarding” and “other-regarding” conduct. The former term refers to acts that inflict a direct harm on one, such as an assault, or a breach of contract, or an insult, and the latter to acts that harm one only in the sense that one is offended to learn about the conduct. The example Mill gave of an other-regarding act was the distress that people in Britain felt upon learning that Mormons in Utah (this was before the Mormon Church renounced polygamy) were practicing polygamy six thousand miles away. The counterpart today would be a worker offended by the fact that a coworker was of a different race or religion. The manager’s watching pornography was likewise in the nature of an “other-regarding” act so far as the plaintiff was concerned.

…

Despite it being August, Altlaw is beginning to get a bit of attention so perhaps a few comments.

Obviously the program is beta and unfinished. We don’t think, in its present form, that Altlaw can serve as a full substitute for a commercial legal database. But the crucial word is YET. With help or on our own we’re going to do at least the following before we consider Altlaw beyond beta:

• Expand coverage; both in terms of dates and jurisdictions;
• Link citations with cases
• Create smart, advanced searches, beyond which other databases have.

We have a long wish list of things we’d like to do. And it should be fun to get there.

We’d love new ideas, suggestions, help and support of any kind!

I think its also worth acknowledging what has come before in this area, which we haven’t exceeded.  Findlaw is still a great resource, and best of all is Cornell’s incredible LII.   We have a long way to go to get anywhere near those resources.

I’m not usually inclined to post about films. But the film King of Kong (a fistfull of quarters) — on the struggle to become the world champion of Donkey Kong — is so great beyond description that I’m helpless not to praise it.

Mind you, I have Donkey Kong as my cell-phone wallpaper, so I’m hardly impartial. And I’m happy to say that my high score — not shown here — is somewhere north of 50,000.

Click on the picture for the trailer.

This is a project we’ve been keeping under wraps; and while we’re still in beta, Altlaw.org is up and running.

What’s altlaw? Altlaw is the first public domain completely free legal search engine. Right now it lets you search the last 10 years of Supreme Court and Court of Appeals cases.

This is just a beta, without the full coverage we’d like to have in time, but it will come..

Outer Mongolia was better than I had even expected - a real cowboy kind of scene.  Silly picture below.

Right now with the famous five in Sutton, Quebec.