Monitor Election Problems Nationwide with OurVoteLive.org
Search by State or County for Real-Time Voter Reports on Election Day - Reporters, bloggers, and voters across the country can monitor problems at the polls on Election Day on OurVoteLive.org, a project built and hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of Election Protection, the nation's largest nonpartisan voter protection coalition, and its toll-free voter-assistance hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE.

Your do-not-call registration will not expire. Telephone numbers placed on the National Do Not Call Registry will remain on it permanently due to the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007, which became law in February 2008. Read more about it at http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2008/04/dncfyi.shtm. https://www.donotcall.gov/

Authors, Publishers, and Google Reach Landmark Settlement
News release: The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google announced a groundbreaking settlement agreement on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search. Under the agreement, Google will make payments totaling $125 million. The money will be used to establish the Book Rights Registry, to resolve existing claims by authors and publishers and to cover legal fees. The settlement agreement resolves Authors Guild v. Google, a class-action suit filed on September 20, 2005 by the Authors Guild and certain authors, and a suit filed on October 19, 2005 by five major publisher-members of the Association of American Publishers: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.; Pearson Education, Inc. and Penguin Group (USA) Inc., both part of Pearson; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; and Simon & Schuster, Inc. part of CBS Corporation. These lawsuits challenged Google’s plan to digitize, search and show snippets of in-copyright books and to share digital copies with libraries without the explicit permission of the copyright owner.
The Future of Google Book Search - Our groundbreaking agreement with authors and publishers.
Related postings on Google Book Search

What does Google book scan settlement mean to Viacom? We’ll say at the outset that the answer, at least according to Google’s Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, is zippo. “I would not read anything into the structure,” Drummond told the WSJ. The settlement must be approved by a federal court. As the NYT points out, the settlement leaves unanswered the issue of whether Google’s unauthorized scanning constitute fair use for copyright purposes.
Now back to Viacom, which is suing Google for $1 billion, alleging that Google-owned YouTube has been illegally hosting its proprietary content. (We wrote about the spat, which awaits trial in the Southern District of New York, back in July when the judge in the case caused a firestorm by ruling that Google must hand over info about which users watched which videos on YouTube.) Does the Google settlement mean a similar settlement could be in the offing with Viacom? WSJ Law Blog October 29, 2008

Quote: I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Residents of Lancaster, California had a road with grooves in a quarter-mile strip that, when a car drove over them, played a recognizable excerpt of The William Tell Overture. It was created for a car commercial, but neighbors complained about the noise. So, it was torn up and will be built at a different spot. Comments and demonstrations are available on YouTube.

October 30 is the birthday of the second president of the United States, John Adams, born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1735. He was a lawyer, a writer, and a philosopher, famous for the articles he wrote in opposition to the British Stamp Act. Even though John Adams supported the American patriot cause, he agreed to defend the British soldiers who killed civilians during the Boston Massacre, and he managed to get most of them acquitted.
On October 30, 1938 a radio broadcast based on a science fiction novel caused mass hysteria across New England: Orson Welles's adaptation of War of the Worlds. The first part of the broadcast imitated news bulletins and announced that Martians had invaded New Jersey. There was a disclaimer at the beginning of the program explaining that it was fictional, but many people tuned in late and missed the explanation. So they panicked; some people fled their homes and many were terrified. War of the Worlds (1898) was a novel by H.G. Wells set in 19th-century England. Orson Welles kept the same plot but updated it and set it in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. The Writer’s Almanac