ABA Legal Rebels; Racing Toward Mediocrity at Simple Justice

See Simple Justice and their posting ABA Legal Rebels; Racing Toward Mediocrity

MyPaint: A Fabulous Digital Painter as an Open-Source Graphics Application

Take a look MyPaint. It is really quite fabulous.
I am going to be using the program for some of my graphics-related projects and documents.

Germany's Bifurcated Patent Litigation System Improved by Reducing Potential for Conflicting Decisions

See the Kluwer Patent Blog at Of Mice and Elephants.

Ubuntu 10.10 nearly a Perfect Ten?

See the ITworld Review by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at Ubuntu 10.10 scores close to a ten.

At Patently-O: Challenging the Clear and Convincing Standard of Proof for Invalidating Patents in Court

Dennis Crouch in Challenging the Clear and Convincing Standard of Proof for Invalidating Patents in Court discusses Microsoft Corp. v. i4i Limited Partnership (on petition for certiorari 2010)

European Union takes United Kingdom to Court for UK Failure to Adjust Privacy and Data Protection Laws to fit EU Requirements

See John Hunt at thinkbroadband in
EU take UK to court over privacy and data protection rules.

TARP Bailouts May Turn a Profit

Tobin Harshaw at the New York Times asks: Will TARP Turn a Profit?

Anytime you buy assets of any kind, if they rise in value, the profit could be there. Why not?

Nevertheless, we think there may be a countervailing inflationary component.

Geeks Delight: The Roberts Court Starts a New Term on Monday as New Justice Elena Kagan Takes Her Seat - U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS)

For a short intro, see The Roberts Court, Version 4.0 which presents a "greenhouse view" of the U.S. Supreme Court, which begins a new term on Monday, October 4, 2010.

For the technology side of upcoming cases, see David Kravets, All Rise: Supreme Court’s Geekiest Generation Begins.

Latvia: EPP hails victory of PM Dombrovskis; another centre-right victory for Europe

Latvia: EPP hails victory of PM Dombrovskis; another centre-right victory for Europe

Oh, the Brilliance! Found in Translation

If you read -- or write -- you will surely appreciate the brilliance of Found in Translation at the New York Times, by Michael Cunningham.

President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso Addresses Germans in German Language on German Unity Day - Tag der Deutschen Einheit

Today, October 3rd, is German Unity Day, in German, der Tag der Deutschen Einheit

President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso addresses all German speakers here in German language on the 20th anniversary of the reunification of Germany, 3 October 2010.

If you speak German, take a look.

Immigration Law Becomes a Central Issue in Many States of the USA

A.G. Sulzberger at the New York Times in Anti-Immigrant Focus in, of All Places, Nebraska discusses the prospect that more States of the United States will seek to pass strict immigration laws similar to the controversial new immigration law in Arizona.

Libel and Blogging: Journalism Law Online for Bloggers: Mondays 4 to 5 PM EST November 4 - December 2, 2010 via the New York Times Knowledge Network

This course on libel law looks useful for people who blog. We post this as a public service announcement.

Journalism Law for Bloggers
« New York Times Knowledge Network
November 4 - December 2, 2010, Registration Closes November 3
Live Sessions Mondays 4:00 – 5:00 PM EST
Instructor: George Freeman $175

"This course will teach you the fundamentals of media law, including special concerns that apply to online journalists and bloggers. One of the most experienced lawyers at The New York Times will guide you through the standard definition of libel law (plus specific exceptions), the standards of proof and how they are applied, as well as various libel defenses. The course will review the major cases that established our standards for libel, as well as some cases that involved The Times. Also included is a review of other legal concepts related to journalism, such as invasion of privacy, intrusion, and access to courts, documents, and other proceedings.

The course will have weekly live online sessions with the instructor as well as self-paced lessons filled with original content covering the weekly topics. All live sessions and course material can be accessed directly within the online course."

"The Adobe Flash plugin has crashed" in Mozilla Firefox - A Solution for this Vexing Problem

The best solution that we have found for getting rid of the privacy-violating and intrusive The Adobe Flash plugin has crashed alerts, which by default appear everywhere 45 seconds after termination in Mozilla Firefox, is just to disable the plug-in hang detector pursuant to this tip from the MozillaZine Knowledge Base:

"Plugin hang detector

In Firefox 3.6.4 and above, a plugin hang detector determines when an out-of-process plugin or plugin script has stopped responding, so that Firefox can terminate the plugin. The time period that must pass before the plugin is assumed to be locked up is set in the preference dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs (the default is 45 seconds in Firefox 3.6.6). [12] When Firefox terminates a plugin that is no longer responding, you will see the "plugin has crashed" error dialog shown above. To prevent Firefox from terminating plugins it considers non-responsive, set dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs to -1 in about:config. This disables the plugin hang detector but does not disable OOPP or stop "plugin-container" from running; to do that, you must set the dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.* preferences to "false" (see above)." 

It is a scandal that such a faulty program as the Adobe Flash Player can be released to the public without serious criminally fraudulent consequences for the companies involved and the people who are the actors behind the scene, who actively have initiated an often-failing program that bombards users with alerts in what amounts to free advertising for the company when the faulty program "terminates".