btw2.net

Hand-colored 1911 photograph of Machu Picchu

…Sister Dianna Ortiz said yesterday that the sights and sounds during a 24-hour vigil and protest at Lafayette Square against torture took her “back to that place” and time — Guatemala in 1989, when the American nun, then 29, taught Mayan children about human rights….

In 1996, Ortiz founded the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International, which brings together survivors and advocates for human rights issues, and she began to travel across the country to tell her story….

My Money Blog links to the Environmental Working Group’s Shopper’s Guide.

Self-perspective is one of the hardest things to understand. I mean, it seems simple enough on the surface; it’s merely what you think of yourself. But many times we don’t see that how we view ourselves can affect our successes as a professional/parent/circus clown/etc. Maxwell Maltz put it best when he said

(discussion includes several points, including)
1. You don’t have to change to fit in.
Google knew what they were: a great search engine. Yet instead of tinkering with the latest thing, the continued to improve their bread-winning product….
(some are open for discussion)

“PowerPoint is not the cause of bad business presentations, but laziness and poor writing skills may be.”

Yup, do the homework, then the outline.

New York Times reports “…“I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years,” he announced this week on his blog (lessig.org/blog) and last week in a speech at the iCommons Summit in Croatia (available via youtube.com).

His new mission, for at least the next decade, he says, is to combat the influence of money on politics, which yields bad laws — and not just the bad laws governing intellectual property….

His book “Free Culture” is available via a free download under a Creative Commons license, a concept he had a hand in developing (free-culture.org). It allows the free use of copyrighted materials outside the purview of what he believes are the creativity-stifling copyright restrictions championed by corporations and protected by compliant, cash-besotted lawmakers (creativecommons.org)….”

Don’t Let Your E-Evidence Get Trashed
By Jerold S. Solovy and Robert L. Byman
The National Law Journal
June 11, 2007

It was our first night in the suburbs, and we learned the hard way why raccoons wear masks as we surveyed the carnage they had made of our garbage. We were drilling eye hooks into the wall so that we could rope off and secure our garbage cans against further raids when a neighbor came up and asked “When you’re done with all of that, will you still be able to get into your garbage cans?” “Of course,” we said. “Then,” our wise neighbor replied, “so will the raccoons.”

Hackers are to computers what raccoons are to garbage cans. And the problem is that hackers don’t limit themselves to taking stuff out, they also put garbage in. Because we know this — because courts know this — the admissibility of computer-stored information can be a far more complex proposition than we might first think. During discovery, you assemble e-mails with all sorts of juicy facts, computer records from which you can easily compute damages, and copies of Web pages from various sites that support your theory of the case. Your work is done; you are ready for trial. But are you? Will you be able to get all of that great electronic material admitted at trial? The time to consider that question is now, while discovery is still open….

THE PROBLEM WITH ELECTRONICALLY STORED DATA

Let’s talk about electronically stored data. You plan to prove damages with your client’s electronic database that tracks the outstanding account due. You will overcome the hearsay rule because the data is a business record; the account data was entered by persons with knowledge as a regular practice in the ordinary course of business. But with electronic documents there is an extra step. In Vee Vinhnee v. American Express, 336 B.R. 437 (B.A.P. 9th Cir. 2005), the court pointed out that authenticating a paperless electronic record in principle poses the same issue as for a paper record. But because “one must demonstrate that the record that has been retrieved from the file, be it paper or electronic, is the same as the record that was originally placed into the file,” there is an important distinction. When one retrieves the paper that was put in the file, there usually is no issue that it may have been altered after its creation….