Canadian Association of University Teachers and Canadian Federation of Students object to new Access Copyright Tariff.

5 sources for stock video footage. Have you ever used one of these?

I’m sending greetings from the CBA Conference in Niagara.

Here is a statement from Hon. Chris Bentley, Attorney-General of Ontario:

Statement from Hon. Rob Nicholson, Attorney-General of Canada:

The Hon. Rob Nicholson represents the riding of Niagara Falls where the conference was held.. . . . [more]

Remember the 60s?

Well, I do, and not just in flashbacks, either. It was all about — well, it was about a lot of things, most of which never did get finished. But that’s okay because some of those things are of an eternal nature: peace, love, and music come to mind. And these are brought to my mind again by the work of an outfit that I stumbled across quite a while ago now and at that time hurried past, the way one does on the internet. But as also happens on the internet, what goes around comes around . . . [more]

Standards of good behavior vary by culture. What is worthy of reprimand in one doesn’t raise an eyebrow in another. In an attempt to forestall misunderstandings, VisitBritain, a marketing group working with the UK government, has released some tips to help the citizenry play nicely with others. Personally, I appreciate that Canadians are included in the list of nations with idiosyncrasies worthy of particular mention.

I know that Brits, like Canadians, will be subject to the frivolous complaints of jealous rivals when they host the 2012 Olympics. With these tips in hand, I’m sure they’ll do a great . . . [more]

But not me. Really.

The Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense.

I figure he left law/lawyers out because it/we usually occupy a higher position in the periodic table.

[hat tip “Da Boid O”]

DC . . . [more]

As you read this, I’ll be lolling on a beach in Ontario that’s the lovely part of an island described by some as a sandbar held together by poison ivy. It’s not nearly as bad as that makes it sound. But the shrub Toxicodendron radicans is, in fact, pervasive, and I’m really, really allergic to the nasty urushiol it offers up to the unwary.

Those of us who revel in concrete surrounds and the comparative safety of traffic tend to forget that nature has green claws that can make trouble. There’s poison oak, as well, and poison sumac. Now I . . . [more]

I’ve run across a few interesting tools for making reading the web a bit easier. Depending on what you are after, one of these might suit…

Readability

a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.

Read it Later

One reading list, everywhere you are

Use the bookmarklet to add things to your reading list, then sign in to the site later when you have the time to read. Designed for the longer-form materials that actually require some time and concentration.

Flipboard (iPhone and iPad only)

World’s first social magazine

. . . [more]

R. v. Bomberry, 2010 ONCA 542

[9] At approximately 3:45 a.m., [the deceased’s] car stopped at an intersection about five blocks away from his apartment. The vehicle was half on the road and half on the curb. [The deceased] was in the driver’s seat and had suffered a single stab wound to the chest. Expert evidence indicated he would have died rapidly from the injury. Expert evidence also indicated that he was killed while sitting in the driver’s seat, likely by an assailant sitting in the front passenger seat. There was some evidence to support the conclusion that [the deceased]

. . . [more]

In Weber v. Canada (Minister of National Revenue), 2000 CanLII 14993 (F.C.), http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/fct/doc/2000/2000canlii14993/2000canlii14993.html, Hargrave, Prothonotary, described and then disposed of the respondent’s argument:

[8] Mr. Weber’s main issue is that, in his view, Revenue Canada made an offer to him, in the form of the Tax Certificate, to settle at $110,650.81: critical here, in Mr. Weber’s view, is the dollar sign with one bar through it. Mr. Weber’s submission is that a Canadian dollar sign has two vertical bars, but a peso has only one vertical bar. The offer, being in Mr. Weber’s view, in pesos, worth about seventy-five

. . . [more]

Google has released their estimate for the number of books: 129,864,880.

They also offer a full explanation of their counting methods, with some interesting quotes:

• “we can’t rely on ISBNs alone is that ever since they became an accepted standard, they have been used in non-standard ways. They have sometimes been assigned to multiple books: we’ve seen anywhere from two to 1,500 books assigned the same ISBN.”
• “We trust OCLC and LCCN number similarity slightly less, both because of the inconsistencies noted above and because these numbers do not have checksums, so catalogers have a tendency to mistype

. . . [more]

There has been a lot of press over the latest countries that don’t want Blackberries in their country unless they can get access to monitor user communications. See, for example, the Washington Post, Techdirt, Engadget.

RIM designed Blackberry communications so they would be secure, in a way that RIM itself can’t even access them. That’s a great feature that makes privacy advocates, corporate users, and individual users very happy. 

But it also makes some governments very unhappy – particularly those who believe they need to spy on communications. Some to the extent that they threaten to ban . . . [more]