Yearly Archives: 2003

Today’s Dilbert Is Too Timely

Posted on October 9, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Today's Dilbert is making the rounds of the law school, because we start the retreat tomorrow.

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Undergraduates Are Promiscuous File-Sharers

Posted on October 9, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Last night I was part of a panel that spoke to undergraduates in Hecht Residential College on “Online File Sharing”. The audience was largely divided between the defiant and the possessors of guilty consciences. My suggestion that the RIAA attempts to stamp out file sharing by suing everyone in sight was likely to be as pleasant and as successful as the War on Drugs produced surprisingly little reaction.

I enjoyed meeting fellow panelist Sam Terilli, who told me he had accepted a full-time teaching job at the School of Communications, a school which just gets better and better ever year. It will be fun to have him just across the street.

But perhaps the most interesting thing I learned was this statistic, offered by a speaker from the University's IT department. Two years ago, network traffic was 80% incoming, 20% outgoing. Last year it was 20% incoming and 80% outgoing—and the difference was due to people making files available for P2P file sharing. As a result the university closed down the ports most commonly used by Kazaa and other popular file-sharing tools, and the balance is almost back to normal.

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Brad DeLong Channels Plato, Marx, Pirandello, Stoppard, D-Squared and Leo Strauss All At Once

Posted on October 9, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

It probably helps to have a little background in microeconomics, literary theory and political philosophy to appreciate the full playfulserious subversive brilliance of Brad DeLong’s A Non-Socratic Dialogue on Social Welfare Functions, but even if you don’t have that background you will enjoy it. If you do have such a background, don’t read it while drinking coffee or there’s a serious risk to your keyboard.

What makes this entry particularly brilliant is not just the self-deprecating manner in which it clubs you over the head with its intelligence, but the hidden subversive message aimed at great philosophers of past, present, and future ages.

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Posted in Econ & Money | 1 Comment

What is ‘American Food’?

Posted on October 8, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

One of the things I'm doing at the moment is supervising a State-department-sponsored three-month visit by a Ukranian graduate student working on a Ph.D in law. She's interested in the effect of various institutions, especially NGOs, on cyberlaw. OK, that part I can handle. But as it's her first visit to the US, and this a sort of cultural as well as academic experience, I feel compelled to do more than give her things to read and talk about her writing. I want to answer her questions about America. This is not always easy.

Take this stumper: she has a small budget for our lunches. We'd like to use that to introduce her to representative “American food”. But what's that? No, besides hot dogs and hamburgers, McDonalds and Burger King. She can, after all, get those at home these days. And they are hardly the best advertisements for the place anyway (why I feel the need I feel to suggest good food is beyond the scope of this entry).

What foods are both suitably “American” and good (and not too expensive)? Most of the food I like best when I go out is 'ethnic', 'national' or 'regional'—Chinese, Italian, Indian, Nicaraguan, Mexican, Cuban, Peruvian, or Thai, for example. Now, these are, in my mind, as 'American' as, well, apple pie*, and indeed in the case of Chinese food I'm reliably informed that what we get here isn't that much like what they eat there anyway. So that's 'American food' to me. But it turns out to be a tough concept to sell.

Apparently, to the Eastern European mind Chinese food just isn't authentically American enough. So, for my first attempt I suggested bagels, as she'd never heard of them. But it turned out, unsurprisingly, that they do have something a whole lot like bagels in Kiev. So that wasn't so wonderful an idea after all.

My next choice will be BBQ ribs. But then what?

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Simon Higgs Reports From Telephone Hell

Posted on October 8, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Simon Higgs is having a surreal experience trying to move his cell phone service from Verizon to Comcast. All he wants to do is (1) keep his same telephone number (this is the much-vaunted “number portability” that we are supposed to be able to enjoy; and (2) have working reliable phone service. It's not that easy.

Here are his reports from the front:

Day 4

So far the process has been a nightmare, but the impossible has recently happened which is still really annoying but is also a little amusing. Everyone says what has happened can't be done, but since I used to work for a Telco and know what I am seeing in front of me, I don't believe them for a minute.

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French Website ‘Interview’

Posted on October 8, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Transfert.net, a neat-looking French techie website, has published my reply to some questions they e-mailed me. It's a fair translation, and I stand by what I said, although I have to admit that when they said they had questions they wanted to ask me, I thought it was for background for a story, and never imagined they would publish them verbatim. Had I known, I would certainly have given a longer answer to the last question….

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