In a speech Wednesday, Microsoft general counsel and senior vice president Brad Smith called on government and business to shore up confidence in cloud computing by tackling issues of privacy and security–two major concerns that have been voiced about the cloud.

Full article.

The Italian Supreme Court has issued a decision in a criminal proceeding against www.thepiratebay.org, a P2P website because of the breach of copyright laws through the making available to the public of copyright protected works…

Full story.

“To those prospective law students applying to law school as a fallback in a bad economy, or because you want three more years to figure out what to do with your life: please save yourself time, money, and a huge amount of stress…” Aaron Street.

“At stake in the spat over the rules is the multibillion-dollar market for tech products — including office equipment, computers, software and new energy products — procured by Chinese government agencies. The value of contracts that would be covered by the new rules isn’t clear, but according to the Ministry of Finance, purchases through public procurement, including nontech goods, totaled about $88 billion in 2008.” – Rachel Hamilton

Here’s the article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126079913899790519.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_world

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BA2DO20091214

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-laws-that-govern-us.html

http://scholar.google.com/

If citation in legal writing conforms strictly to some predefined rules (either Bluebook or ALWD), then there’s no reason why the problem can’t be solved by a FSA which describes the finite number of rules set forth in those citation manuals. The solution seems pretty straight forward, and can be implemented fairly elegantly in either python or perl, off the top of my head. On the other hand, a functional language like list or scheme can probable implement achieve the same with significantly fewer lines of code.

More to come later…

A New York Times’ story I read today reminded me of Professor Russel O’Neal’s Ethics In Engineering class as an undergraduate student at UCLA.  Although that class was dreaded most by many of us engineering students for having too much reading and writing, topics touched throughout the quarter made it one of my favorite classes at UCLA, and probably THE one that has made the most impression on me.  In professor O’Neal’s classes, we learned about engineering practices that could have serious consequences on the society, and how the lack or oversight on ethics did lead to engineering disasters.

Other bits of news, stories, and anecdotes about questionable medical practices and unethical doctors performing unecessary medical procedures had me wondering if med students take their social responsibilities seriously.

As I am about to start law school in the fall (barring major surprises in admission), I hope the legal education I am about to receive will at least provide us with some exposure to questions  about ethics like in professor O’Neal’s class.  Like Google’s supposed mantra, I wish to do no evil.  I hope not a paycheck in the world would make me change that.

This development reminds me of Amazon’s ill-conceived “One-Click” patent in the late 90′s that was subsequently criticized by many, including the EFF, who then called for a boycott against the online retailer. The fact that the USPTO awarded Apple these patents is troubling. Apple is trying to stifle competition by scaring others into NOT implementing “concepts”. I am not a patent attorney (yet), but it appears to me that the US legal system has been abused again, and is at least partially responsible for Google’s decision not to implement multi-touch in their G1.

As pointed on in this article from Gizmodo, I don’t think Apple will have a rightful and lasting hold onto those patents.