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The United States Supreme Court now disseminates information about its latest activities on Twitter.com. You can look at the latest Tweets — that is what they are called — at http://twitter.com/USSupremeCourt But you should really join Twitter — no fee, of course — to follow it by sms, on your cell phone, or a variety of other ways. (h/t EJB).
I remember the excitement with Project Hermes when the Court selected 20 odd news organizations to receive opinions as they are issued. Very worried about security, a Court employee downloaded the opinion from the Court’s main computer system to a floppy — I believe it was on of those really floppy five inch disks — disk and walked the disk to a group of PCs actually connected to the Internet. Times sure have changed.
If you are bored by the Court’s tweets, you can swing over to the National Debt Clock, at http://twitter.com/NationalDebt and watch as the National Debt increases. (Yes, those are Trillions of dollars, there. I understand the large display of the same information at Times Square doesn’t have sufficient digits to display the entire thing.)
And the SEC tweets, too. http://twitter.com/SEC_News
Tweets, btw, are limited to 140 characters so you can follow your favorites, easily.
OK! I’m probably too old for this stuff, but time for an article about Twitter and Facebook. (Almost a necessity for communications with your kids.) And LinkedIn and so forth. Coming to your favorite Legal Newspaper, soon. (And if yours doesn’t have it, ask the newspaper’s editor “Why Not?”
John Wesley Hall picks this quote from the Oral Argument in Herring v US, No 70-513, Opinion issued January 14, 2008:
Chief Justice Roberts: I don’t know what the situation is like in Dale County. They probably don’t have the latest version of WordPerfect, or whatever it is. They are probably making do with whatever they can under their budget and doing the best they can. (At Page 20)
Would the case have been decided the other way if Chief Justice Roberts had known that Dale County could have downloaded the latest version of OpenOffice, at no cost to the County’s budget? If the expense of a new word processor was the reason that the County eviscerated Mr. Herring’s 4th Amendment rights, Mr. Herring should have won.
The law-related tech convention season is here, with New York’s Legal Tech Frebruary 2 through 4 and the ABA Tech Show in Chicago from April 2-4.
If you’re seriously interested in seeing the new stuff, or just getting our hands on particular technology that you’ve been looking for, old or new, these are the places to do it.
Both shows are at Hilton Hotels. Both shows include educational programs, with CLE credit available.
I’ll be at both, and reporting on the latest, here and elsewhere.
One of my favorite computer/electronics retailers these days is TigerDirect. They always have interesting deals, mostly very cost competitive, and they have a ”bricks and mortar” store only a few miles away. (This means that the collect sales tax on the purchase, but then I should be paying sales tax, anyhow.) And they send out email, which I mostly scan and delete — every few days, but often has something that is interesting. Today’s e-mail includes a 500 Gig Hard drive bundled with high end Windows Vista for $190 and a Terabyte drive with Windows Vista for $230. A great deal if you’re building a new desktop computer from one of their “kits” or from scratch. (Although it would be a better deal if the drive was bundled with the latest XP). But the most amazing deal is a full Terabyte external drive for $100. I’m not familiar with Hammer Storage, but this sounds like good deal, assuming Hammer is reliable.
I have acquired, at least temporarily, a BlackBerry Curve 8330 for play; This was a great disappointment to more technical minded members of the family who wanted me to get a Storm or a Bold, but Sprint has neither, and at the moment I’m sticking with that service. The 8330 is old stuff — 6 months? a year? — and still stuck with Rev 0 EVDO instead of the Rev A that is available on Sprint, but I haven’t really played with a modern BlackBerry, so this should be an educational experience.
I’ll be writing a column about this, of course, but in the meantime, I’ll be posting problems and questions, in the hope that some reader will have some answers.
Syncing Events and Contacts from the Q to the Curve were of first consideraton. I had a backup program working on the Q, but, of course, that is not compatible with the Curve. GooSync here has a free service that syncs events with the Google Calendar to and from a variety of mobile devices. It works well. Just download an application to the Q, give GooSync your Gmail account name and password, and click the “sync” buton on the Q. (I recognize that this is a potential security problem. You might wish to invent a special password that you change to just before you sync, reverting to the old one immediately thereafter. This should alleviate most of your security concerns, if you are sufficiently paranoid to think that this English software company is just a front collecting Google Passwords.)
GooSync has two types of contact syncing: one to Google Mail, itself, and a second to a contact list on GooSync. If you wish to sync contacts, you have to pay — 19 British Pounds for a year. I gave them my credit card, and sure enough I was able to sync my Q’s contacts with a contact list on the Web site. (When I tried to sync to the Google web site, the program wanted to sync thousands of contacts, which is much more than I wanted or needed for a telephone list on the Curve.)
When I went to authorize the Curve on the GooSync site — GooSync can handle four different mobile devices — I discovered that the program wouldn’t work on the Curve, without an additional program, a SyncML — for Synchronize Markup Language — application. The company suggested a $40 download from a third party, but I was not about to pay that. It turns out there are free, Open Source equivalents from something called Funambol.Com, but there might or might not be problems with it and the BlackBerrys.
On the other hand, Google has a just released program to do just what I wanted to do:Synchronize Google Mail Calendar and Contact listings with BlackBerrys. SyncML is apparently built in. The only problem: those thousands of contacts on the my Gmail account.
There was an answer:
1. Create a new Gmail Account
2. Use GooSync to synchronize the Q contacts and eventswith the new account.
3. Call Sprint to change my line from the Q to the Curve;
4. Download and install the Google application to the Curve.
5. Synchronize Events and Contacts from the new Gmail account to the Curve
And there we were. No wires. No SyncML, and no additional cost other than that of GooSync, who I probably won’t need anymore. (Hmmm….they do have a 30 day “trial” with moneyback guarantee. Would it be ethical to take advantage of it? I really won’t need it anymore. Unless I switch back to the Q, of course.) And all my Q contacts on the Curve.
Next project: Accessing Google Mail from the Curve.
The best part of a laptop is that you can easily move it around to use wherever you like, without worrying about an electrical outlet power source. The worst part of a laptop is that the bloody batteries stop taking a charge after a year or less of constant charging / recharging. Replacement batteries from the laptop manufacturer are expensive.
I’ve always thought that a battery was a battery, but do you want to trust your laptop to something that might destroy it? Computer World looks at the aftermarket and suggest you may wish to, also.
Well…Vista isn’t exactly dead yet, but the first bits of the next in the series — not Vista Plus or some such, but Windows 7 — has been released to the developers. Slimmer, faster, presumably what Vista should have been.
I’ve never recommended an upgrade to Vista, and have suggested that folks buying a new PC, these days should try to get a “downgrade” to XP. And I Guess I’m not the only one. This sort of thing happens to Microsoft from time to time. (Anyone remember Windows Millenium Edition, aka Windows ME?) But it shouldn’t. All that wasted time and money learning how to use and optimize Vista, and of course the money wasted in Redmond. Isn’t Private Industry always wonderful!
According to the New York Lawyer (free subscription required)
The number of legal jobs is steadily declining, according to new employment figures from the U.S. Department of Labor.
The law sector saw jobs shrink by 2,000 in September — the fifth consecutive month of losses.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the legal workforce of 1,165,100 is down by 1.15 percent from one year ago, when the industry employed 1,178,600 people.The drop-off is even steeper since May 2007, when legal employment peaked at 1,180,700.
Of course, all of this was prior to the passage of the “bailout” plan which, all by itself, may solve any transient lawyer employment problem for quite a while. I assume from the wording that the 1,178,600 figure includes a lot of non-lawyer support staff. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the number of secretaries dropping, although I’ll bet that Vista, alone, required substantial increases in computer support personnel.