In view of our election just past, and the one next week of our neighbours to the south, I thought it opportune to raise the topic of election laws, and more specifically, absentee voting.

Several weeks ago, I received in the mail an absentee ballot from the Board of Elections in Lorain County, Ohio. I dutifully filled it out, put it in an envelope, and mailed it in: voilà, my franchise duly exercised. No one asked how long I’d been in Canada (sixteen years), or if I intended to return to the U. S. (unlikely, at this point). As a . . . [more]

The new federal Cabinet is just being sworn in. A few notes from CBC: the Cabinet has expanded from the previous Cabinet (11 more ministers than last time), there are a large number of female ministers, and The Honourable Leona Aglukkaq is the first minister from Nunavut.

The Right Honourable Stephen Joseph Harper
Prime Minister of Canada

The Honourable Robert Douglas Nicholson
Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada

The Honourable Jean-Pierre Blackburn
Minister of National Revenue and Minister of State (Agriculture)

The Honourable Gregory Francis Thompson
Minister of Veterans Affairs

The Honourable Marjory LeBreton
Leader of the Government . . . [more]

A U.S. company, CrimeReports.com, takes statistics given to it by various police departments and geolocates the instances on a Google map. So far as I can tell, Ottawa is the only Canadian city to enlist the company’s services. The Ottawa crime map sets out markers for various crimes — breaking and entering, theft, etc. — the nature of which can be controlled by a selection panel, so that, for instance, you could look at the location of all thefts from a vehicle. You can, as well, adjust the area, the date and the number of instances you wish to . . . [more]

A thanks to colleague Brenda Wong for letting me know of two new “social network” search engines mentioned at a recent SLA event she attended. I was not aware of either. They are: Spokeo and me.dium.

However, maybe I am getting too old. Both seem geared towards the “younger crowd”, at least based on their own descriptions of their products but the first may help with due diligence type of investigations and the second appears to be taking advantage of the “wisdom of the crowd” philosophy.

Spokeo, for example, features a picture of teenage girls whispering in each other’s . . . [more]

The text of Ontario’s Bill 118, Countering Distracted Driving and Promoting Green Transportation Act, 2008 is now available online. There’s also a PDF version.

Display screens visible to the driver are prohibited, except for dedicated GPS devices and a few others. The “money” provision reads as follows:

No person shall drive a motor vehicle on a highway while holding or using a hand-held wireless communication device or other prescribed device that is capable of receiving or transmitting telephone communications, electronic data, mail or text messages.

With the proviso:

a person may drive a motor vehicle on a highway while

As reported on the front page of today’s Ottawa Citizen, the federal government has launched its own internal version of Wikipedia to which all federal public servants will be able to contribute:

“At the annual Government in Technology (GTEC) conference, taking place at the Westin Hotel in downtown Ottawa, federal officials took the wraps off the government’s internal version of the popular online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which it calls GCpedia.”

“The service will allow federal employees to post, comment and edit articles placed on GCpedia by their peers (…) ”

“For example, information about climate change policies could be posted

Govtrack.us is a site aimed at shedding light on the often byzantine operations of Washington. And it seems remarkably useful for doing so. It’s a portal to a comprehensive database of legislation that is either in the works or recently passed.

Each legislator has his or her own page with personal info and a list of all of the bills they have recently sponsored. For instance, Sen. Ted Stevens’ page shows that he sponsored Bill S. 94, the Gasoline Consumer Anti-price-gouging Protection Act, which was introduced in January 2007, while Sen. Barack Obama was sponsoring the Oil SENSE Act . . . [more]

Schedule L of Bill 114 in Ontario, if passed, will effectively over-rule the Ontario Court of Appeal decision in Hare v Hare. The Bill will amend the Limitations Act, 2002, by tying the limitation period to the date of default under a demand loan rather than the date of the loan. The Ontario Bar Association discusses this issue in its October 28th e-newsletter. . . . [more]

I just returned from the annual conference of the Canadian IT Law Association in Halifax. Fellow Slawyer David Fraser was co-chair this year, and is now the president of the association.

I highly recomend this association, this annual conference, and its other educational activities to anyone who practices in the IT area. . . . [more]

Two law professors are offering a book for sale at: http://www.semaphorepress.com/about.html, on a pay what you want basis. It is a casebook on intellectual property law. An interesting business model — will they succeed? Time will tell for these and other entrepreneurs. A comment from their Web site: “Be a part of the solution to $130 casebooks, by fostering the creation of $30 casebooks: Please pay the suggested price. If you can’t pay it, please at least pay something to help Semaphore Press succeed.” . . . [more]

In 2009, the Christian Science Monitor will become the first nationally circulated newspaper in the United States to replace its daily print edition with its excellent website; the 100 year-old news organization will offer subscribers weekly print and daily e-mail editions.

It’s always been a thoughtful paper with excellent writing and probing journalists. The title has always been misleading. It’s a website worth putting on your bookmark list.

Agence France Presse draws the dots to Gannett job cuts – it remains to be seen who follows the CSM lead. . . . [more]

For a price-tag of $125 million ((Which must be small change for Google)) Google, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild resolved a challenge to the Google Books project.

The settlement agreement resolves a class-action suit filed on Sept. 20, 2005, by the Authors Guild and certain authors, and a suit filed three years ago, by five major publisher-members of the Association of American Publishers: McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group, John Wiley & Sons and Simon & Schuster. It is subject to approval by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

For . . . [more]