I’m something of a pack rat. Not the worst of accumulators, mind, because I do bag and bid bye-bye to bunches of stuff when some implicit limit is reached. And part of me, contrariwise, is a minimalist, who wouldn’t mind if all the world were by Bauhaus out of ItalInteriors. So I’m fascinated by Jay Walker’s library, because it might be me, so to speak, if I’d saved my pennies and invested in better stocks than was in fact the case.

Who’s Jay Walker, I hear you ask. He’s a geek entrepreneur who founded Priceline.com and Walker Digital, and . . . [more]

I spent some time in September at the local landfill depositing the post modern garage sale furniture that used to furnish my world. This post from The Court caught my eye due to it’s engaging title.

An important issue in the case is the way that the privacy interest over Patrick’s garbage is characterized. The trial judge characterized the interest as informational in nature: the contents of one’s garbage may tend to reveal intimate details of one’s personal life choices. On appeal, however, the interest was characterized as territorial:
Patrick has a privacy interest in objects left in opaque plastic

That was the message delivered last night by Steve Spencer of Digital Fortress Corporation at the monthly Internetwork meeting.

He makes a good point. Many people think about disaster recovery when dealing with business continuity plans. That is the wrong focus, as recovering from a disaster has a huge cost in terms of lost customer service, idle staff time, and and hits to productivity and customer relations.

When it comes to IT infrastructure – ie the servers and systems that run a business – the better approach is to think about disaster prevention. In other words, consider the possible things . . . [more]

Readers will have already noticed that Slaw now counts Gary P. Rodrigues among its regular contributors; but we are proud to announce it, even if we’re a little late in doing so.

Gary was the senior publishing executive at both Carswell and Lexis Nexis during the periods of their greatest expansion and development and was, in effect, the architect of their current print and online publishing programs. As well, he is a former President of the Canadian Publishers Council and a former CoChair of Access Copyright when it was known as Cancopy. From time to time, he has served as . . . [more]

It’s nowhere near Friday, but that mustn’t matter. Even so there’s a tenuous connection with our regular programming, having to do with copyright law and Dolores Claman’s problems with the CBC (or vice versa). So… today’s the day you get to vote for the new hockey theme for Hockey Night in Canada. On CBC’s Anthem Challenge webpage you’ll find links to the five finalists’ music. Have a listen, and then vote. It’ll be good practice, anyway, for October 14. . . . [more]

Just a short post to raise a question that’s discussed on Law.com today, which is why American legal blogs seem to be populated by boys and abandoned by women.

That doesn’t seem to be the case here at Slaw. Is that something about Slaw? Or Canadian law? Or simply that our focus on legal information, technology and research isn’t the same as those blogs that Law.com was looking at?

It offers three theories (none of which is particularly compelling:

Theory #1: Women law bloggers are out there, you just don’t see them. ((Women bloggers aren’t as relentlessly self-promoting))

Theory

The chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, warned law students in a speech last Thursday about relying too unthinkingly on internet sources for legal research. Delivering Drake University‘s Dwight D. Opperman Lecture, he pointed to what he described as the growing practice of using simple word searches to uncover precedents, when the cases recovered in this manner may have little doctrinal connection to the issues at hand. Thinking “outside the box” is fine, he said, but “…You cannot think effectively outside the box if you don’t know where the box is.” And that requires the . . . [more]

Speaking with an accent is what other people do, right? Perhaps we Canadians, especially, think that our standard speech is the “norm” against which other ways of saying things stand out. But of course that’s bunkum. Every speaker has an accent and none is “right” or “correct,” Professor Higgins notwithstanding.

Thanks to the marvels of the internet and diligent scholarship, we can have some fun listening to how other folks say it.

The Speech Accent Archive is a wonderful site where you can hear the same paragraph of English text spoken by people for whom English is a second language . . . [more]

I have to apologize for falling down on the job in my contributing to Slaw since my inclusion among the exalted Slawyers a few weeks ago. I have to confess I’ve been distracted by a combination of being busy at work and rediscovering a passion for photography. (You can check out some of my recent work on my site or on Flickr.)

I find it interesting that regularly taking photos changes the way you look at things. Colours, shadows, textures and perspectives stand out a lot more than they used to. Everyone walks around with particular filters affecting their . . . [more]

Our colleague here at Slaw, Dominic Jaar, after working for years as a house counsel for Bell, has struck out on his own with a practice — Ledjit — aimed at helping businesses, including law firms, manage information flows. An expert in IT law and particularly e-discovery, Jaar is based in Montreal. His website explains more fully. (You will have better luck with the French version, ledjit.ca; the English version — ledjit.com — still needs some work on the links.)

Giving his enterprise a healthy boost, La Press today has a long piece in the business section on Jaar . . . [more]

My husband and I received our voting cards for the upcoming Federal Election. Much to our surprise we were in different constituencies. It seemed a bit incongruous that we would potentially have different MPs and yet live in the same house.

I decided to check out the Elections Canada website for a remedy. I am happy to report that there is a great deal of information on the site, with the ability to lookup voter information through the voter information service. Unfortunatley, I now live on the ambiguously described line between two electoral districts. A down side to the . . . [more]

Language Log has a good post on the recent Harper-plagiarism brouhaha, which you can read about on Canadian Press or BBC News. The BBC piece republishes the Liberal Party ad that graphically shows the parallels between Harper’s speech and that of the Australian Prime Minister at the time. But Language Log takes the audio feeds and overlaps them so that you can hear the similarity more or less simultaneously. More important, Mark Liberman explores the issue of copying in the political arena and compares it to that in the academic world, finding useful differences. . . . [more]