Futurelawyer

Putting Toll Booths On The Internet (Information?) SuperHighway

Time Warner drops Internet metering plan. While Time Warner's ill-timed and ill-conceived plan to meter Internet use in several cities has been shelved, the plan to charge Internet users by the byte won't be going away soon. As broad band access to streaming video and music increases, the pipe will be strained; will we pay for increased access in the same way that we drive our cars down the road? We pay tolls to get across the water in order to pay for the bridge. Who will be paying for the infrastructure that will be required by the Internet? If you said "us", you would be correct. Get ready for the new Internet Superhighway, and have your toll change ready in your pocket.

Note: A reader objected to the use of the phrase "Internet SuperHighway". The idea was to project a "new" paradigm. I failed. :-)

CES 2009 - Butterscotch Is The Place

@ - @ is on the air.  Do you want to know everything that will be going on at CES 2009? Of course you do; so do most lawyer geeks. Andy Walker and his team will be doing regular video reports from the show, Grab the feed, and watch the videos as Andy and Sean Carruthers walk the CES floor. It's the next best thing to being there, and you don't have to wipe down the hotel room.

Invisibility materials can speed up web ten fold - Telegraph

Link: Invisibility materials can speed up web ten fold - Telegraph. Any lawyer who has ever spent time in a courtroom will admit that there are times when you just want to be invisible. You are familiar with the commercials that use the tag line: "Want to get away?", after the principal character does something incredibly stupid. Yeah, you know what I mean. Well, what if I were to tell you that scientists are really working on artificial composite materials that can stop light in fiber optic networks? No, unlike Harry Potter, you won't be able to make an invisibility cloak out of them; but, an ability to control fiberoptic light traffic could smooth and increase the speed of such networks, even though we can't visualize the methods in human terms. In the future, computers will really be millions of times faster; that can be scary or good, depending on your point of view. My view is that smarter computers can't screw up the planet any more than we have already.

� HOAX: Palm Centro 2 ad -> TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog

Link: � HOAX: Palm Centro 2 ad -> TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog . Thank goodness, the keyboard-less alleged Centro2 that I posted about yesterday, looks to be a hoax, designed for a marketing class. I had a good idea that Palm's next handheld would contain the keyboard that causes many of us to use Palms, and to eschew the IPhone. The Centro is just right the way it is. Why mess with success?

Stupid Litigant Tricks - Some People Shouldn't Have Access to Email

Link: Techdirt: When Colluding With A Competitor, Perhaps Don't Send A Direct Email Suggesting You Keep Prices High. And, in today's example of a reason why every lawsuit should now include examination of electronic evidence, we have this email between executives of the two biggest graphics card manufacturers in which one executive suggests to the other that they should cooperate so that both companies' stock prices will remain high. It proves that in-house lawyers need to be more involved in training company personnel about the law; or, at least they should be permitted to review external email before it is allowed to exit the building. I know, that is impractical; however, what's a poor in-house lawyer to do?

Surprise, Surprise. Microsoft Software Was Designed to Annoy Us!

Link: Microsoft: Vista feature designed to 'annoy users' | Tech News on ZDNet. There must be something in the water. First, we had the AT&T guy who is running around saying the Internet sky is falling. Now, a Microsoft manager has admitted that one of the most annoying things about Vista, user account control (UAC), was DESIGNED to annoy users. Excuse me? Rather than design the OS to be secure, Microsoft prefers to annoy its users to death. Microsoft clearly underestimated the intelligence of computer users, as the lack of sales and conversions to Vista would seem to indicate. However, it is the arrogance of the software developer that frosts me. I thought Apple had the patent on annoying users with its proprietary closed systems. Can anyone say open source, or Ubuntu Linux?

Sir, Please Step Away From The Internet

Link: AT&T: Internet to hit full capacity by 2010 | Tech News on ZDNet. Please be advised that the Internet is full. There is no more room for diatribes, blogs, useless information, defamation, or education. It is 2010, and, according to AT&T, vast infrastructure improvements are required to avoid the whole thing grinding to a halt. If broadband entertainment continues to grow, in 3 years, according to this spokesman, 20 households will be using the same bandwidth as the entire Internet today. Of course, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Let's pray that this guy's rant is a figment of his imagination. Soon, Internet capacity will grow without borders, and we will all have chips implanted in our temporal lobes. I think I saw a sci fi movie about that once. Books were banned, and everybody forgot how to read. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

Web 2.5: Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Outside

Link: Web 2.5: The emergence of platforms-as-a-service | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com. Just when we started to understand Web 2.0 (interactive web sites that allowed user interaction with information stored on the web), or "cloud computing", (doing real work on data and programs stored elsewhere, and SaaS (Software As A Service), running programs and accessing data in web browsers, now we have to deal with the half-step to Web 3.0 (the semantic web, which I have no idea about). Web 2.5 appears to be the migration from software applications and data over the web to "platform computing" over the web. Google's App Engine enters a field in which developers can use Google's servers to create applications that will be served over the web. In the future, you won't even have to have your own servers to create stuff for users to pay you to use. This may be a way to partially control legal applications that are created for lawyers to use on the web, since the developer will control just about everything. It's a brave new world.

If You Believe This, I Have Some Swampland in Kuala Lumpur to Sell You

Link: Computerworld Malaysia - Velchip signs three major partnership deals to advance the world’s biggest broadband powerline project. Powerline networking has always been slower, and less reliable than dedicated Internet lines. The electrical current problems have not dampened enthusiasm for it, however, especially in parts of the world where development is lagging. Often, electrical power is the only way to get Internet to many people. However, the claims of this Malaysia company that they will be able to provide over 200 Mbps networking for $1.58 a month per user are either inflated, or I am moving to Indonesia. Hey, I have an idea. How about bringing the network here? Of course, with all of the other wireless and electrical stuff going on, the interference will be a real problem. In the U.S., powerline networking products that have claimed 200 Mbps throughput have actually shown real life performance of 90 Mbps. And, the access costs a lot more than a buck and a half a month per user.

Giveaway of the Day - MemOptimizer

Link: Giveaway of the Day - free licensed software daily. MemOptimizer - Free up your PC's memory locked by executed applications. My Dell D620 only has 1 Gig of RAM. I would upgrade it to 2 Gigs, but my new Dell, the ultralight D430, already has 2 Gigs. I tell you this because I got a free download of MemOptimizer this morning, and saved $20. Every day the Giveaway of the Day site highlights a free piece of software, and some of them are quite useful. Bookmark the site, check it every day, and you will see what I mean.