Legal Research

If You Think Gasoline Is Expensive, Then Consider This

Posted on November 10, 2008
On average, your printer’s black ink costs you about $4,731 per gallon. This tidbit comes from PC World, which recently ran a test using one of the models from each of the top 4 printer manufacturers to see just how much ink is left in a cartridge when the printer forces you to change it...

That’s What You Get For Buying Version 1.0 Of Anything

Posted on November 10, 2008
The iPhone 3G had its teething problems with dropped calls.  Now its Android’s turn.  ZDNet’s Ed Burnette reports that Android executed every word you typed into the T-Mobile G1 as a command: “When the phone booted it started up a command shell as root and sent every keystroke you ever typed on the keyboard from then [...

Windows: A Work-In-Progress after 25 Years

Posted on November 10, 2008
Wired reports that today is the 25th anniversary of the introduction of Microsoft Windows.  It wasn’t actually released to the public for another 2 years.  (Hmm … talk about your corporate culture.) I remember working with CP/M, MS DOS, the Apple Lisa, and the first Mac, but I managed to avoid Windows for the first decade [...

Libraries … They’re Just Financial Black Holes

Posted on November 06, 2008
Why is it every time there’s a budget crisis, the first step they take to cut costs is nuke the library system?

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Firefox At 20

Posted on November 05, 2008
After making a run at 20% of the worldwide browser market share in August, Firefox finally hit the mark in October, reports Wired’s Web Monkey blog.  IE’s at about 71%.  The market share for the other noteworthy browsers — Safari, Google Chrome, Opera — combined are under 10%...

America Votes, CNN Wins in a Landslide [UPDATED]

Posted on November 05, 2008
TechCrunch reports that yesterday CNN had 27 million unique visitors to their site and generated 276 million page views.  I haven’t seen figures for other news sites yet.  But when I consider that CNN had more than 5 times their normal traffic and dished up 8x their average page views, it hits me that it [...

Will Someone Please Rescue Yahoo Before They Drown?

Posted on November 04, 2008
In a bid to get approval for their advertising partnership, Google and Yahoo have submitted a revised proposal to the U.S. DoJ.  The deal is now for 2 years, instead of 10, and revenue is capped at 25% of Yahoo’s total search advertising revenue (which, according to this post by John Battelle, will be [...

Something(s) To Think About While You’re Standing In Line This Afternoon

Posted on November 04, 2008
UK Internet searches for the US Election Hitwise gives us an interesting chart showing the UK search activity for Obama, Biden, McCain, and Palin.  (Geeze … look at the spike for Palin.  I’ve noted this previously.)  From their analysis: “As you can see, the Democrat candidate Barack Obama has received more searches than his Republican rival every [...

The Copyright Handbook: What Every Writer Needs to Know

Posted on November 03, 2008
By Stephen FishmanCopyright law is a complex field, and it’s crucial for writers to understand what’s entailed. Stephen Fishman covers what a copyright is, how it’s created and protected, limitations and transfer of ownership, how long it lasts, and what copyright infringement is all about...

Legal Roundup

Posted on October 31, 2008
Recording Industry Association of America Judge Michael J. Davis of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota has scheduled the retrial of RIAA v. Thomas for March 9, 2009.  Davis had declared a mistrial last month after he decided that he had erred in one of his instructions to the jury — where he [...

Big Mac, Free Wifi … Does It Get Any Better Than That? [UPDATED]

Posted on October 30, 2008
AT&T is now offering free wifi for iPhone users at AT&T hotspots in places such as airpoorts, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Barnes & Noble bookstores, and more.   Access seems straightforward: once you connect to the network, you’ll have to enter your 10-digit number...

Public Service Announcement #3

Posted on October 30, 2008
If you see a pop-up from a program calling itself either Antivirus XP 2008 or Antivirus XP 2009 warning you that your PC is infected, ignore it.  Don’t click on it.  And by all means, don’t shell out $50 for the software.  It’s “scareware” — a fake program originating from Russia...

Sweetness

Posted on October 30, 2008
I am now so over 1993.

Google Syntax Squishyness

Posted on October 29, 2008
Yesterday Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped reported that Google no longer ignores punctuation characters between words.  Thus, a search for low cost will retrieve different results than low-cost. However, Google’s help still says that they ignore special characters...

A Unique Health ID Number for All

Posted on October 28, 2008
A blog on the LA Times website reports on a RAND study (summary, full report) that estimated an $11 billion cost to provide every American with their own unique health ID number with a resultant $77 billion savings in increased efficiency and reduced errors...

The Christian Science Monitor Puts Its Faith In The Web

Posted on October 28, 2008
The Christian Science Monitor will become the first U.S. national newspaper to go Web-only, reports the NY Times today.  The changeover will occur in April 2009.  From the article: “John Yemma, The Monitor’s editor, said that moving to the Web only will mean it can keep its eight foreign bureaus open while still lowering costs...

Maybe You Think Wal-Mart’s Evil …

Posted on October 28, 2008
… But they’re selling the G1 Android phone for $148.88, more than $30 cheaper than the T-Mobile store, so they can’t be *all* bad.  Right?

GE Stands for Google Electric, Right?

Posted on October 28, 2008
Here’s an article and a blog post from the NY Times about Google’s research into energy, in particular alternative energy sources.  If you’re interested, both are worth reading.  One paragraph of the blog post caught my eye: “As to how Google would commercialize its own energy research — and the intellectual property that rises from it, [...

Google Books Library Project Settlement: $125 Million [UPDATED]

Posted on October 28, 2008
Two weeks ago I blogged about how Google’s lawyers are such busy bees.  Well, one case down and a zillion to go: the NY Times reports that Google has settled the class-action suit filed by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over the Google Books Library Project for $125 million...

The Globalized Lawyer: Secrets to Managing Outsourcing, Joint Ventures and Other Cross-Border Transactions

Posted on October 27, 2008
By David A. SteigerA practical, step-by-step guide on how to prepare for, negotiate and implement a new cross-border operation, The Globalized Lawyer examines both legal and business considerations involved. This book incorporates the advice and insights of more than two dozen leading experts, including professionals from such globally recognized organizations as Baker & McKenzie, [...

Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together

Posted on October 27, 2008
Google has released an official version of Google Earth for the iPhone.  Coverage here and here.

Netbooks

Posted on October 27, 2008
One of the reasons cited for declining Windows Vista sales is the rise of netbooks — cheap, small notebook computers perfect for people who want to check their mail, surf the Web wirelessly, stuff like that.  They normally run Windows XP (and can continue to do so until at least June 2010) or some flavor [...

Vista, We Hardly Knew Ye

Posted on October 27, 2008
Last week Microsoft released its 1Q earning figures for July-September 2008.  Fifteen billion in revenue.  Office and server software, both up 20% or more.  Woo hoo!  Take that, stupid Steve Jobs and your annoying commercials. Um … not so fast: Windows revenue was up only 2%, and income was down 4%...

And While We’re on the Topic of the iPod …

Posted on October 23, 2008
The Wall Street Journal today has a short post (subscription required) about how “fun” technologies — iPods, iPhones, DVD players, digital cameras, etc. — are adopted by people around the world about 5 years faster (on average) than “work” technologies such as microwaves, dishwashers, and washing machines...

The Day The Music (Industry) Died

Posted on October 23, 2008
Seven years ago today, the iPod was introduced to the world by Steve Jobs.  It helped save Apple, which up to that point was getting by on the five or six dozen people left in America still using Macs.  And it was the nail in the coffin for the CD and the record business as [...

bgC3 LLC

Posted on October 23, 2008
That’s the name of Bill Gates’ new think tank, according to TechFlash, a new Seattle tech blog.  “BG” obviously stands for Bill Gates, the “c” means “catalyst”, and the 3 indicates that it’s his third organization, after Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation...

… And While We’re On The Subject Of Literacy

Posted on October 22, 2008
… Let’s also discuss tech literacy. Frank Hayes at Computerworld has posted an article about how lawyers for Barclays Capital messed up (for lack of a better term) a spreadsheet of assets belonging to failed investment bank Lehman Brothers...

Search Literacy Is Not Just About Children

Posted on October 22, 2008
Yesterday John Battelle blogged about how his daughter had been assigned a project to define 10 related words.  Her teacher said she could either use a dictionary or talk to her parents about what the words mean.  Battelle asked his daughter if she had considered using Google...

Today’s Numbers

Posted on October 22, 2008
1,400 - Yahoo employees waiting for the pink slip now that Jerry Yang announced a 10% workforce reduction. 6.9 - Million iPhones sold during Apple’s 4Q (July-September). 13 - Million (again) - Total number of iPhones in the wild. ** Note to Jenkins: I coulda been one of those lucky 6...

More Next-Gen Search Engines

Posted on October 22, 2008
Last week I made a video blog post on next-generation search engines Searchme and Powerset.  This week: round two, featuring Soovle (which lets you compare and contrast the suggested search terms offered up by Google, Yahoo, and others) and Facesaerch (a “cover-flow” front-end to Google image search, limited to facial shots)...

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