Friday Links

  • Last week, we commented upon our fair city of Greenville’s attempt to woo Google to bring its fiber optic initiative to town. The search engine giant plans to choose a medium sized city in which it will offer Internet service up to 100 times faster than that currently available from traditional Internet service providers. Thus, cities across the nation are actively attempting to convince Google to select their locale to be the site of the Google’s new initiative. Above, you’ll see Greenville’s entry into the fray: an aerial photograph depicting thousands of glow stick wielding Greenvillians spelling out Google’s name in lights. For more photographs (aerial and otherwise), please see Greenville’s We Are Feeling Lucky website. We here at Abnormal Use greatly applaud this effort. If you’re on Twitter (like we are), you can follow news of Greenville’s quest with the hashtags #GoogleOnMain and #LuckyGVL. We offer our congratulations to the event’s organizers, who apparently organized the enterprise in less than two weeks time. Below, you can see a bird’s eye video of the scene:

  • Foreign manufacturers should take note of some new law in New Jersey. In a recent piece entitled “Buy Globally, Sue Locally for Products Liability,” J. Russell Jackson of The National Law Journal notes that a recent New Jersey case significantly expands the concept of personal jurisdiction in products cases. That case is February’s Nicastro v. McIntyre Machinery America, Ltd., 987 A.2d 575 (N.J. 2010), and it may ensnare a number of foreign manufacturers, even those who do not purposefully avail themselves of the benefits of the forum. Jackson, of course, is also the author of the Consumer Class Actions and Mass Torts blog, long a staple of this site’s blogroll.
  • On Wednesday, former circuit court judge John C. Few of Greenville was sworn in as the new chief judge of the South Carolina Court of Appeals. See here for the Greenville News report of the investiture.
  • Here’s another interesting post. In a piece entitled “Toyota’s Embedded Software Image Problem,” Michael Barr of Embedded Gurus opines: “It remains unclear whether Toyota’s higher-than-industry-average number of complaints regarding sudden unintended acceleration (SUA) is caused (in whole or in part) by an embedded software problem. But whether it is or it isn’t actually firmware, the company has clearly denied it and yet still developed an embedded software ‘image problem.’ They’ve brought some of this on themselves.” Check out the full story for the rest of his thoughts on that topic.

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