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Luis Villa's Home Page

Ramblings on law school in New York, free software, and the spaces in between.
By Luis Villa

Post Frequency: 1.5/day

Last Entry: February 26, 2020 at 00:21:04

quick customer service appreciation post

Posted on December 17, 2008
Three good customer service experiences I’ve had of late: lenovo: I bought an X41 tablet not long after Lenovo bought the Thinkpad brand. I was a little worried about the impact the purchase would have on customer service, but in my first interaction with them (yesterday, 2 1/2 years after the purchase) their service was prompt, [...

vicious legal-ese

Posted on December 12, 2008
From the Vermont corporations statute: (26) ?Meeting? means any structured communications conducted by participants in person or through the use of electronic or telecommunications medium permitting simultaneous or sequentially structured communications for the purpose of reaching a collective agreement...

why I?m not a big fan of OOo, part 53240

Posted on December 10, 2008
I was asked after the Deep Fried Bytes podcast why I said on the podcast that I pretty much like Office 2007’s user experience and hate OOo. I could go on at length, but here is a short version of the most important part of it. Three full years ago Microsoft shipped a beta build of [...

things I did not expect to do Friday

Posted on December 07, 2008
things I did not expect to do Friday: buy an album because I saw a music video. I’m not sure I’ve ever done that, even when I went through an MTV-watching period in my teens. (Tangent: how come I didn’t know there was a last.fm creative commons station?)

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slight innovation followup

Posted on December 06, 2008
Dan: my goal in ranting is to increase the amount of innovation being delivered to users. So if the idea is 30 years old, but I can’t use it because I’m not part of this ‘bunch’, please carry on ;) More seriously, I do hope the process of producting a new gnome-shell provides an innovation model [...

the linux desktop?s change problem

Posted on December 05, 2008
[NB: this could easily have been titled 'the software industry's innovation problem', since the problem applies broadly to all sorts of software development, and what I'm talking about as 'change' is often referred to as 'innovation', a word that has been twisted almost beyond recognition...

what the Berkman Center got right

Posted on December 03, 2008
Of late, I’ve been reading my friend Dave’s regular Berkman Lunch transcripts with a certain wistfulness. Ironically, his last lunch post was about a Columbia law prof.1 I’ve always cited the lunches as the best part of Berkman, but the further I get from it, the more I realize that the lunches were just one [...

when news and law collide, puffery edition

Posted on December 03, 2008
Lots of the tech news sites are up in arms this morning about this Wired story, (1)(2), reporting that ‘Apple says you’re a fool to believe our ads’ (to paraphrase the title.) While not strictly incorrect, this post really deserves some context...

playing with Sugar

Posted on December 02, 2008
Following Greg’s recent posts on Sugar, I’m playing with running it a bit; might even try to use it as my dominant platform for a while. Some thoughts, all written from within Sugar: The journal is not perfect yet but is a much more useful primary interface than the stock win3...

epic airline fail

Posted on November 30, 2008
Any one of these is a bad sign for your airline: won’t offer even a cup of water for less than $2 has ads on the tray tables has discontinued all in-flight entertainment If you’re doing all three, you’re US Airways. Seriously… is there a companion to seatguru...

nycinfolaw

Posted on November 15, 2008
If you live in or around New York, and you’re interested in info/tech/’cyber’ law events, you should check out nycinfolaw.org. What was a drunken brainstorm about a year ago has turned into a calendar and mailing list- nothing fancy, but the important bits are there...

part two of Deep Fried Bytes podcast up

Posted on November 07, 2008
Part two of my Deep Fried Bytes podcast is up. I had a good time doing these; hope people have a good time listening to them.

(re)focusing

Posted on November 06, 2008
Good friends know I’m a politics junkie. So I’m struggling this morning to reprogram my brain not to type http://pollster.com/blogs/ every 3-5 minutes. (XKCD, as usual, is on point.) I usually use a hacked up greasemonkey script for this, but today someone pointed me at leechblock, which looks completely awesome- lets you say ‘for this [...

visualization FTW

Posted on November 05, 2008
The Times has a really terrific visualization of the change in voting patterns from 2004. If you want to understand what happened last night, politically, going through this data seems like a critical place to start.

on complications of elections and IP

Posted on November 03, 2008
My journal’s blog (recently relaunched, slowly building up momentum) has a good piece on the interactions between the McCain campaign and IP law. Good background for those curious about the issue- how does he fit with YouTube? Does he have to listen when they say he can’t play Barracuda anymore?

I may have to become a deletionist, and other ?me? news

Posted on October 31, 2008
This is a little ridiculous. Flattering, but ridiculous. :) (Seriously, a good example of the rationale behind the deletionist position- some articles just don’t get enough ‘eyes’ to fix their errors. I think I’m still an inclusionist, on balance, but I can see the rationale...

hello CPS 82!

Posted on October 19, 2008
(planet readers, please ignore….)

Durham, higher education, and me

Posted on October 17, 2008
I’ll be in Durham this weekend; I’m not sure how much time I have free, but drop me a note if you’d like to grab a meal or beverage of choice. The formal reason I’ll be in Durham is to give a guest appearance at CompSci 82, Technical and Social Foundations of the Internet...

freedom to tinker on hacking self-drivingcars

Posted on October 17, 2008
Not quite as Deep and Serious as my other pieces over there, this is a fun one on whether or not you should be able to legally hack the Self Driving Car Of The Future. Turns out it is a slightly more complicated question than it seems on the surface, and one we’ve got very [...

why yes

Posted on October 16, 2008
that is my little sister. Thanks for asking.

FTK: clouds, hype, and freedom

Posted on October 14, 2008
I’ve written another post (really micro-essay) at Freedom To Tinker. This one is about ‘the cloud’, partially in response to Richard’s mini-interview, but really mostly in response to my continued frustration at the terribly meaningless phrase ‘the cloud’, and how it tends to confuse and obfuscate discussion of critical issues...

quick Boston Summit report

Posted on October 13, 2008
Because of schoolwork and showing my sister around schools, I ended up not attending any sessions at the summit. But it was still great to see everyone- I got a sense of a lot of positive interest and momentum coming out of the hackfest, and of course it is always great to hang out with [...

what I have been up to

Posted on October 13, 2008
Lots of people I saw in Boston were asking ‘what have you been up to’ instead of the usual ’sounds like things are good from your blog’ :) I guess I’ve been a little quiet here about me, personally. So some updates: School is generally good; the first two years ended up being very successful (low [...

quick IP-tech-politics post (mostly candidate agnostic)

Posted on October 08, 2008
A long post on (very liberal) firedoglake about Obama’s local-level organizing techniques. Very long piece but worth reading regardless of your political orientation, as it seems likely to define how campaigning will be done in the future, and doesn’t delve (much) into the politics behind the candidates/movements themselves...

posting at Freedom To Tinker for a few weeks

Posted on October 03, 2008
I was recently invited to guest-post at Freedom to Tinker, formerly Ed Felten’s group blog and now officially hosted by Ed’s Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton. Ed’s been a hero for ages (dating back to at least his voting machine work, if not to his Microsoft work) and so the invite was very [...

saddest (truest?) conversation of the day

Posted on September 30, 2008
(me) I’m an irritating perfectionist who can’t prioritize (me) stubborn ‘pride in work product’ (friend) lose it (friend) that’s an evolutionary …whatchamacallit (friend) like the appendix (friend) a holdover that adds no value

computer usage data bleg (update: and server market share)

Posted on September 22, 2008
Hey, all. I’m in need of data about ‘typical’ computer usage- i.e., ‘in 2007, the average computer user spent X% of time on the internet, Y% of time doing word processing, Z% of time listening to music, etc.’ The ideal data set would have this information for a number of years- ideally going back at [...

what you can (and can?t) learn from Google?s EULA mistake

Posted on September 18, 2008
When people started complaining about the Google Chrome EULA, it seemed obvious to me that it was a copy and paste error- old language, copied into a new situation where it didn’t quite fit. But after Google explained that they had just reused language from other licenses, Gizmodo noted: It’s not that I don’t trust Google, [...

what these guys need is? a trademark license!

Posted on September 17, 2008
Most screaming case for a community mark license I’ve seen in a while is the utterly cool PARK(ing) Day. Basically, they’ve got a very cool idea (probably patentable, not copyrightable) and have registered a mark (PARK(ing) Day, protected but not under copyright...

that havoc, he?s such a nice young man. John McCain, not so much.

Posted on September 14, 2008
HP: very nice post. The version in my drafts folder since Friday night is… hrm. Very similar in content, but, well, less polite. One might say ‘angrier’. I had a lot of respect for John McCain (probably would have voted for him over Gore in 2000) but over the past couple of weeks that respect has [...

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