I'm shocked that Slashdot and
I'm shocked that Slashdot and others didn't pick up on some of the most surprising news of the day. Declan McCullagh
reports on a speech by Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge
Richard Posner in which Judge Posner sharply criticized the Copyright Term Extension Act and business method and software patents.
This is big. Posner is one of the country's leading conservative legal scholars. His objection to the "enormous expansion" of intellectual property law that the country has seen in recent years inspires hope that his court and others might be more willing to strike down absurd patents and favor causes like Larry Lessig's in the
Eldred case. These are viewpoints that have typically been championed on the left -- after all, the expansion of the public domain and a decrease in the scope of patent law would favor consumers while hurting businesses. If Posner's arguments can sway conservatives, perhaps U.S. intellectual property law has a chance of being restored to a more rational state than the one it's in today.
I think my Palm IIIx
I think my
Palm IIIx might finally be dying, just shy of what I think is its fourth birthday. The battery contacts on the unit are bent in interesting ways, and when I installed new batteries tonight I had a tough time getting it to turn on again. A short time later, it reset itself and deleted its memory. I'm glad I had a backup from earlier this week.
It's interesting that for the way I use my Palm, the PDA market hasn't changed much in the past four years. I use the datebook for reminders and the address book for addresses and phone numbers, and every so often I'll use the calculator or play a game, but that's all. That's not to say that I don't use it -- quite the opposite, in fact, as I carry it around with me all day, every day. It does its job, does it well, and I don't need anything more from it.
Given all of that, I'm not sure what I'll buy if I have to replace it. I don't need anything flashy -- I don't want to pay for a digital camera, random expansion slots, or Pocket Word. At the same time, I'm impressed with the direction Palm has chosen in their migration to a new processor and operating system. They're finally catching up, and I'll think about buying a
Tungsten T just to be able to take advantage of whatever applications are built for the new OS. I won't buy a Pocket PC and don't need a cell phone, so that leaves me with the Palms and Cliés to choose from. Hopefully my IIIx will last long enough for me to decide what I want and how much I want to spend....
Prompted by a question on
Prompted by a question on Apple's
java-dev mailing list today, I've finally gotten around to posting my slides from the talk I gave at
MacHack this year. Here they are:
Integrating Java and Mac OS X [PowerPoint; 652KB]