Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Worldchanging is not always in the direction you expect What's New in the Legal World? A Growing Campaign to Undo the New Deal. States' rights conservatives are making progress in their drive to restore the narrow view of federal power that predated the New Deal. By By ADAM COHEN. [NYT > Opinion] In pre-1937 America, workers were exploited, factories were free to pollute, and old people were generally poor when they retired. This is not an agenda the public would be likely to sign onto today if it were debated in an election. But conservatives, who like to complain about activist liberal judges, could achieve their anti-New Deal agenda through judicial activism on the right. Judges could use the so-called Constitution-in-Exile to declare laws on workplace safety, environmental protection and civil rights unconstitutional. Another step in a deep and extensive campaign to fundamentally deligitimize government, and the very notion that people can join together collectively -- which is what government is -- to protect their interests. ('We the people of the United States... in order to protect the general welfare...' - remember?) The odd thing about this story: the progressive side of the medical marijuana dispute could be feeding the states' rights conservatives a useful legal precedent. 9:38:51 PM    comment []  trackback []

Radio redux Reinstalled the app, and it's upstreaming again. Yay. But my main template (with recent postings, blogroll, etc) is gone - at least for now. 8:15:44 PM    comment []  trackback []

The real Google story of the week... ...isn't the 'type ahead' beta noted yesterday. It's the library story! As the Financial Times reports, Google, the leading service for finding information on the internet, yesterday set out ambitious plans to become a catalogue and digital library for world literature. It said it had struck a deal with four leading university libraries and the New York Public Library to scan digitally tens of millions of books from their collections so that users worldwide could search through them using the Google service. While company officials presented the move as a philanthropic gesture, they also admitted there would be revenue opportunities and that the increased quality of their search results would maintain Google's advantage over its rivals I remember the awe of sitting in the main reading room of the NY Public Library as a kid; the serendipitous joy of wandering the stacks in university libraries, looking for one thing and finding quite another out of the corner of my eye (but influenced by the intended search), and the thrill of finding myself virtually in the stacks at the University of Singapore the first time I used 'gopher' (was that in the early 80s?) And now Google moves us closed to the dream of the universal library. Someone on NPR today observed that when Google's IPO threatened something like this, people thought it was just a combination of geek fantasy and dotcom posture. Instead, it could turn out to be a major cultural milestone. As Dave Winer would say, 'Kuwuhl!' 7:54:02 PM    comment []  trackback []