As of tomorrow, the modern remnant of the “Long Vacation”[1] is over for us Canadian civil litigators. Some of us might be starting trials, tomorrow.

Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
I want to shoot
The whole day down

from I Don’t Like Mondays (c) The Boomtown Rats, Bob Geldof (1979)

Especially if one isn’t prepared. Preparation means facts and law. One can’t know what facts might be relevant unless one knows the relevant law. And, one owes it to one’s client, and the judge, and the jury where there is one, to go to court with the . . . [more]

done to the tune of Donovan’s Season of the Witch (Kooper – Still’s Super Session version, of course).

When I look out my window,
Many sights to see.
And when I look in my window,
So many different people to be
…
Must be the season of the switch.

OK, so I switched a word. Sue me.

Simon F’s taken heart in hand, foot in mouth, tongue in cheek, etc. and allowed me to shift from occasional to core contributor, on threat of dire consequences if I stray too far from “hailing distance of research/IT/legal-information”. 

“Sue me” is within “hailing . . . [more]

In praise of… free law

Leader – The Guardian
Monday September 3, 2007

History tends to forget that the Sheriff of Nottingham had a greater purpose than hunting down Robin Hood. Like every county sheriff, he was supposed to ensure that the burghers of Notts knew the law of the land, however recently it had been proclaimed in distant Westminster. The injustice of this myth of convenience never troubled Robin Hood, but it did worry Hobbes, Bentham and, more recently, the magisterial Lord Brooke, a former chairman of the Law Commission and appeal court judge. In the internet era, . . . [more]

Nice to know we are being read on the Monterey peninsula . . . [more]

. . . [more]

Just a month after a science fiction writer speculated on storage devices the size of a grain of sand comes news from the magazine Science of developments in magnetic anisotropy that could eventually be used to store information in individual atoms, paving the way to pack as much as 150 trillion bits of data per square inch, 1,000 times more than current data storage densities. In other words, the ability to store data in individual atoms could lead to devices capable of storing the equivalent of 30,000 movies in a device the size of an iPod.

The first paper describes . . . [more]

Today’s Guardian Blog”Guardian Blog contains an impassioned plea to keep the world’s most famous reading room as just that.

The Reading Room was Karl Marx’s office. It was used by a large number of famous figures, including notably Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Mahatma Gandhi, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, V. I. Lenin (under the name of Jacob Richter), Bram Stoker, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells. It was according to Norman Lebrecht, a “Room [which] was neither loved by users, nor conducive to creative thought”. Still…what a space.

. . . [more]

In the blogosphere, according to a piece in law.com entitled Is the Future of Legal Scholarship in the Blogosphere?

Though according to Warren Kinsella quoted in the Hill-Times, such views are so 2006, since blogs are passé and the action’s elsewhere. . . . [more]

Earlier this week on Slaw Evan Van Dyk asked about podcasts and got a number of good suggestions. Must be the Zeitgeist, because at roughly the same time Alex Iskold of Read/WriteWeb reported how podcasting is on the decline, losing steam to video, among other things — and I’d teed up a sound file as today’s fillip.

My offering this Friday is Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood read (not acted — audio, remember?) by that other son of the red dragon, Richard Burton. And in case you don’t want to close your eyes and let the sonorous sloe syrinx of the . . . [more]

This is the report that the federal government would probably prefer you didn’t find:

A Climate Change Plan for the Purposes of the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act 2007.

Under the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act 2007, the government was required to release a plan for climate change by Tuesday, August 21, 2007, according to a report from the CBC. Later that week, news sources said that the report had been released, but where? No news release on the main Canadian government website. No news release on the Environment Canada website. And surprisingly nothing on the Environment Canada climate . . . [more]

Google’s blogging platform, Blogger, is coming under increasing attack from a talented group of spammers, according to a report today on the BBC.

Gogle’s Blogger site is being used by malicious hackers who are posting fake entries to some blogs. The fake entries contain weblinks that lead to booby-trapped downloads that could infect a Windows PC.

Infected computers are being hijacked by the gang behind the attacks and either mined for saleable data or used for other attacks.

The Blogger attack is the latest in a series by a gang that has managed to hijack hundreds of thousands of PCs…

Seems that digging into Wikipedia’s online community is all the rage these days (bad pun intended). Following up on Connie’s post last week on Wikiscanner, we now have Wikirage. This time, we get a tool that tracks the entries with the largest number of edits over a certain period of time – 1 hr, 6 hrs, 3 days, past week, or past month.

And to give this a Canadian spin, one of today’s rage pages is the entry for the Vancouver Canucks, who changed their logo yesterday. We even get a fun graph on the number of . . . [more]