Category: Uncategorized
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The future of photography
Several interesting things are happening in the wild world of digital photography as it’s colliding with digital video. Most notably, the new Canon 5D Mark II (roughly $2700) can record 1080p video and the new Nikon D90 (roughly $1000) can record 720p video. At the higher end, Red just announced some cameras that will ship…
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Total Election Awareness
Ed recently made a number of predictions about election day (“Election 2008: What Might Go Wrong”). In terms of long lines and voting machine problems, his predictions were pretty spot on. On election day, I was one of a number of volunteers for the Election Protection Coalition at one of 25 call centers around the…
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How Fragile Is the Internet?
With Barack Obama’s election, we’re likely to see a revival of the network neutrality debate. Thus far the popular debate over the issue has produced more heat than light. On one side have been people who scoff at the very idea of network neutrality, arguing either that network neutrality is a myth or that we’d…
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Innovation vs. Safety in Self-driving Technologies
Over at Ars Technica, the final installment of my series on self-driving cars is up. In this installment I focus on the policy implications of self-driving technologies, asking about regulation, liability, and civil liberties. Regulators will face a difficult trade-off between safety and innovation. One of the most important reasons for the IT industry’s impressive…
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Bandwidth Needs and Engineering Tradeoffs
Tom Lee wonders about a question that Ed has pondered in the past: how much bandwidth does one human being need? I’m suspicious of estimates of exploding per capita bandwidth consumption. Yes, our bandwidth needs will continue to increase. But the human nervous system has its own bandwidth limits, too. Maybe there’ll be one more…
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Louisiana Re-enfranchises Independent Voters
Two weeks ago I wrote that independent voters were disenfranchised in the Louisiana Congressional primaries: unclear or incorrect instructions by the Secretary of State to the pollworkers caused thousands of independent voters to be incorrectly precluded from voting in the open Democratic primary on October 4th. Today I am told that Secretary of State Jay…
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Election 2008: What Might Go Wrong
Tomorrow, as everyone knows, is Election Day in the U.S. With all the controversy over electronic voting, and the anticipated high turnout, what can we expect to see? What problems might be looming? Here are my predictions. Long lines to vote: Polling places will be strained by the number of voters. In some places the…
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Federal Circuit Reins in Business Method Patents
This has been a big year for patent law in the technology industry. A few weeks ago I wrote about the Supreme Court’s Quanta v. LG decision. Now the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has jurisdiction over all patent appeals, has handed down a landmark ruling in the case of…
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DMCA Week: Predictions Are Hard, Especially about the Future
My previous post on DVD jukeboxes has prompted an interesting discussion among our commenters. There seems to be a lively difference of opinion about how useful a DVD jukebox would be, what it would look like, and who would use it. Personally, I had envisioned a high-end video device that DVD collectors would buy to…
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Wikipedia as a Public Good
My post about Wikipedia and public goods prompted an interesting response from Judd Antin at Berkeley’s School of Information. He makes a number of sharp points, but let me focus on this response to the idea that free-riders don’t hurt Wikipedia: This completely depends on what your goal is. On the one hand, sure, once…