Re: "only six percent of MPs attending"! -- It's already illegal.
England doesn't have a Supreme Court. The equvialent is the Law Lords (Judges all) reviewing a case under the authority of the Privy Council.
For now, the High Court is the right place for this.
As for your proposal the Supreme Court, or it's equivalent, would waste an enourmous amout of time reviewing legistaltion that hasn't even passed yet This would be of particular concern under the American legislative system where poorly worded law is placed, debated and passed on a regular basis due to the fact that anyone can place a bill on the floor.
In the parliamentary system the job of ensuring the bill is properly written and constitutional is the job of the Attoreny-Genral not the courts.
Then there's the small issue that many flaws don't appear until they actually happen in a case when someone suddenly goes "whooops!" and the courts need to respond. It's called the "law of unintended consequences" though, perhaps, in this case it's more likely intended consquences that the court must now review and rule on.
The English courts of law are fiercely independent and have moved to protect that indepenence when governments of the day have moved to limit it.
As for the number of MP's present when the bill passed if it's a whipped vote then it really doesn't matter given that Labour had a majority when the vote took place. So I'm not surprised that the Opposition didn't bother to show up.
Yes, like democracy, freedom and liberty it's a rotten system UNTIL you look at the alternatives.
BTW, I keep saying England because there are sometimes/often differences in law in Scotland, Wales, Northern Island, The Isle of Mann, The Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands to take into account.
Just as there are, in civil law, important differences between Quebec and the "rest of Canada" as Quebec's civil law is based on French civil law as it existed before England and the English colonies in North America booted the French out.
For all practical purposes goods may become infinite depending on the end user interest in the stuff and how many do-it-yourselfers there are who take that interest.
(If nothing else the recession/depression has reignighted interest in DIY rather than buying the latest and greatest.)
You'd be surprised how much you can do on your own given the right tools and time.
One of the things I remember clearly from my childhood is my mother at the sewing machine making my clothes from patterns she got in the mail or from neighbours. That's probably one of the main concerns of the fashion industry but people no more recreated the horrors of the catwalk then than they're likely to now.
So in those senses goods become infinite.
As for your last question the MPAA/RIAA and their allies across the planet have answered that. They'll sue if you make your collection for yourself as much as if they will for sharing it with your partner or children.
And, as I mentioned to darryl the Law Lords will largely stay out of it except for technical details just in case it comes before them again in the Privy Council.
Before you pop off about something you seem to know nothing about, the High Court in England no more reveiws legistlation of a regular basis any more that the Supreme Court of Canada does or that the US Supreme Court does.
The legal system in all three countries assumes that the legislature has the resources to check the sorts of things you are saying the courts should do before passage, in this case the UK Parliament.
In the UK the goverment has the Attorney-General for that. A sitting MP, by the way. In the Lords there's a group called the Law Lords who make up the English version of a supreme court who often steer clear of these debates so they aren't placed in a conflict of interest should the bill, once passed, come before them.
The High Court in England gets involved in these things after passage and the bill receiving Royal assent (meaning it's now the law of the land) and something some case(s) that are troubling the High Court.
In this case BT and TalkTalk have requested the review and the Court has granted it.
Normally, in both England and Canada this isn't something a government wants to hear as it indicates the Court believes there is something very wrong with the law as it stands.
It doesn't mean that BT and TalkTalk will be able to convince the Court of their stand but it also doesn't mean that once the reveiw begins that the plantiff's objection(s) are the only ones the Court may consider.
The High Court may reject sections of the Act, it may nullify others or it may just decide the whole thing is such a mess that they'll completely over rule it and send it back to Parliament to try again.
Now, repeat after me, darryl, the courts in Canada and England are independant of the legislature, they are NOT a part of the political process and are NOT part of government so they do NOT review bills on a regular basis.
I have to admit that this guy should have seen this coming even if, as is clearly apparent he knows nothing about the workings of a computer.
Surely, as things escalated he'd have paused to think of how completely unreal something like this guy having a general in the Indian Army is, as close to the square root of zero the chances are that said uncle would commandeer an official aircraft that would fly to Honduras to grab a hard disk is and then fly back again (at which point we have to be closing in on the highest cost ever for a consumer grade hard disk), and how completely insane the idea is of Opus Dei is of cooking up such a plot in Poland when there's a far better supply of ultra-conservative priests are in Spain which is where Opus Die is headquartered?
None of this raised any kind of alarm bell?
Now I realize that some people have been raised in such a sheltered way that they'll believe just about anything but Davidson might just as well have lit a neon sign at his house saying "Sucker Lives Here".
To borrow from The Bard "A fool and his money are soon parted".
Sorry interval but this guy was practically inviting this to happen.
The larger issue of whether or not the majority of companies promising to remove malware form your hard disk are scammers (IMHO, they are) seems well illustrated here.
Truth, as it's been said, is stranger than fiction.
So, as there's a personal profile page patent (another episode of truth is stranger than fiction) it's about time I got off my duff and patented my notion of a "best bathroom readling" field on personal profile pages.
That one should get a rubber stamping and I'll have my shiny patent in no time!
When we talk about "cyber" crime or espionage we aren't really talking about anything new.
In reality what's happening, if it's happening to the extent those who are whipping up a panic about it, is a direct descendant of intercepting a nation's or a company's "signals", if you like, then overcoming the coding used to hide the actual meaning and reading the stuff.
The most famous of these would be the ability of the British to crack the code used by the Germans during World War II which enabled them to read virtually every communication the German armed forces sent out or received.
In reality this is the same thing with more powerful tools, by several orders of magnitude, used to crack a cypher or inject one.
Instead of the messages being sent across the airwaves or signal flags from the masts of men-o-war sailing ships or whatever now the transmission and reception is occurring over the Internet.
Yes, it's easier to assume someones identity today but its never been impossible. Far from it. Yes, it appears easier to intercept or disrupt messaging (signals) though that's gone on for, well, millennia. Yes, it appears to be easier to crack a cypher code used by governments and industry but that's gone on virtually forever too.
Using the term "cyber" merely hides the fact that this is just an extension of government and private espionage which has also gone on for, well, forever.
It does make a nice way to stir up alarm though. It makes an even better way for different departments of government to go to bureaucratic war with one another over who will get all the money they hope will come in and then take little or no responsibility for getting it all wrong or just missing it in the millions and billions of communications (signals) send across the Internet daily.
Personally, being of a cynical bent and having studied governments throughout history, I rather suspect this has more to do with eroding civil rights of citizens while hoarding power that it does much else.
In the end, sadly, it won't make anyone "safer" in the sense of stopping another terror attack on North America. The reality is that almost all of them have been home grown from the FLQ here in Canada to the Oklahoma City bombing in the United States. The notable exception is 9/11. But this would have missed that one, too.
It's a great OS to keep me employed when I see a trouble ticket from a residence or small business that says "can't access the internet" and I smile and off I go.
As for your third point, I'd give it that long too. A year or two longer for the port of DirectX (all done in a clean room, of course!)
"For the enormous majority of these people, Ubuntu/OpenOffice/Gimp could simply fill the need as well,"
True enough but most people are absolutely convinced they need MS Office even if all they ever use Word for is simple word processing which hasn't changed significantly, except for the interface, since the Wordstar days.
Worse, the they want to use Word for desktop publishing and a worse tool for that can't be found.
I still shudder when people use Excel as a database which it's awful for after a certain number of rows, say 1000 or so and also because it doesn't enforce any discipline on the clerk who has to type it all in. Want a new field, voila! it's there, and never mind you're scrolling horizontally forever to find it.
Don't get me wrong. People misuse OpenOffice the same way. For the most part though, they won't use OO.org because it's not MS Office and for no other reason.
Most people use Photoshop for things like red-eye correction when hundreds of other apps will do it as well, or often better.
Thing is their using incredibly powerful apps for (a) things they aren't designed for and (b) for things that have less expensive alternatives simply because those apps are what they know.
As most of us can't really afford these tools (at all) for the tiny scrap of the power inside them. So people bittorrent them or buy them from doubtful vendors.
And yes, on any OS, for every great app there's hundreds, if not thousands of crappy ones.
Desktop Windows has business by the short and curlies.
The server and networking area sees Linux in a very healthy state and growing, often to the detriment of Win server packages.
Medium and large business have enough in the way of Unix devs who make the transition to Linux quite easily. The up front cost isn't all that much in comparison to Win server and ongoing costs are considerably less. Hardening Linux for networks and the Internet in an order of magnitude easier than it is for Windows servers. (And no, nothing is perfect before someone weighs in with how many Linux servers they know that have been cracked.)
Universities still teach Unix/Linux skills in degree programs as well as Windows. IN that sense there's no shortage of devs available either.
Sure if you're a small dev you may decide to use MS tools to program and most do. Then again, you may for Linux as well given how many resources are out there so that, as a small dev, you're not always reinventing the wheel because someone has locked it down.
Linux's two main desktops are familiar enough to Win users to make the learning curve much shallower than it used to be, too.
Inertia is a wonderful thing which is largely, at this point, most of the reason for MS's 94% control of the desktop market. And good on 'em too.
Where MS isn't already entrenched, places like gadgets, smart phones and other devices MS isn't doing all that well by it's own standards or by many others.
Finally, like most monopolists, Microsoft will be the author of it's own downfall and, like Microsoft, we'll have no idea who will knock them off till it happens. Certainly no one on the radar now.
There's really nothing illegal about telling a cop in Canada to "go forth and reproduce thyself" (to quote Pierre Trudeau).
It's certainly not the brightest thing you can do. From the sounds of it the reaction of the police wasn't all that bright either. I'm sure there was enough mechanically and otherwise wrong with this man's vehicle to give him a ticket or three. ONCE.
The U.S. First Amendment isn't entirely at issue here.
What is questionable is that a nation like Great Britain which claims to be at the forefront of democracy and liberty would ever make insulting a police officer illegal.
Not really. If you work around high power (current) AC or DC there is a high risk of non-fatal electrocution made all the higher if you don't know what you're doing.
People lose limbs, extremities like feet and hands, serious burns and serious nerve damage due to electrocution quite frequently. Particularly those who are trying to steal copper off telephone/power poles or below the street when copper prices are high.
I've got a few scars from getting zapped by high current DC when I was younger and am probably lucky to have gotten away with just a scar or three.
One other point that should be brought up is that low level electroshock therapy is used to snap some people out of depressions.
Or you can be like me and do-it-yourself by having a grand mal seizure though I wouldn't recommend it.
To get a bit more serious, I suspect this is to appeal to the Tory "base" and to the blue-law crowd of all parties in the Metro Toronto area who are, even in this day and age, quite powerful.
As I noted it got the traction out here in BC of just another bemused look across the Rockies and wondering if the water is safe to drink in Ontario.
BC's response has been far more mature and nuanced that anything Nicolson has been saying.
"1) prohibiting the use of telecommunications to plan a sex offence
2) providing sexually-explicit material to a child to “groom” them for sexual purposes"
It strikes me this is still grandstanding as the Criminal Code already prohibits this sort of activity without being quite as specific. Point (1) in particular.
I'm still unsure as to how a prosecution can actually prove point (2) in terms of gathering evidence but how that applies to craigslist or any other adult oriented advertising is beyond me.
Of course, just about any ad urging adults to visit Thailand ought to qualify given that country's record in these things.
On the post: UK High Court Announces Judicial Review Of The Digital Economy Act
Re: "only six percent of MPs attending"! -- It's already illegal.
For now, the High Court is the right place for this.
As for your proposal the Supreme Court, or it's equivalent, would waste an enourmous amout of time reviewing legistaltion that hasn't even passed yet This would be of particular concern under the American legislative system where poorly worded law is placed, debated and passed on a regular basis due to the fact that anyone can place a bill on the floor.
In the parliamentary system the job of ensuring the bill is properly written and constitutional is the job of the Attoreny-Genral not the courts.
Then there's the small issue that many flaws don't appear until they actually happen in a case when someone suddenly goes "whooops!" and the courts need to respond. It's called the "law of unintended consequences" though, perhaps, in this case it's more likely intended consquences that the court must now review and rule on.
The English courts of law are fiercely independent and have moved to protect that indepenence when governments of the day have moved to limit it.
As for the number of MP's present when the bill passed if it's a whipped vote then it really doesn't matter given that Labour had a majority when the vote took place. So I'm not surprised that the Opposition didn't bother to show up.
Yes, like democracy, freedom and liberty it's a rotten system UNTIL you look at the alternatives.
BTW, I keep saying England because there are sometimes/often differences in law in Scotland, Wales, Northern Island, The Isle of Mann, The Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands to take into account.
Just as there are, in civil law, important differences between Quebec and the "rest of Canada" as Quebec's civil law is based on French civil law as it existed before England and the English colonies in North America booted the French out.
On the post: Should Illegally Recorded Video Be Admissible In Xbox Modding Case?
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Not to mention the small fact that you're better informed!
On the post: Getting Ready For When The Industry Tries To Kill 3D Printers
Re: Infinite good?
(If nothing else the recession/depression has reignighted interest in DIY rather than buying the latest and greatest.)
You'd be surprised how much you can do on your own given the right tools and time.
One of the things I remember clearly from my childhood is my mother at the sewing machine making my clothes from patterns she got in the mail or from neighbours. That's probably one of the main concerns of the fashion industry but people no more recreated the horrors of the catwalk then than they're likely to now.
So in those senses goods become infinite.
As for your last question the MPAA/RIAA and their allies across the planet have answered that. They'll sue if you make your collection for yourself as much as if they will for sharing it with your partner or children.
On the post: UK High Court Announces Judicial Review Of The Digital Economy Act
Re: Re: Re: Nothing to see here !!! move along !
Remind me never to hire him should he ever graduate from Law School, assuming he can pass the bar.
And yes, the sky is blue! :-)
On the post: UK High Court Announces Judicial Review Of The Digital Economy Act
Re: Re: Nothing to see here !!! move along !
On the post: UK High Court Announces Judicial Review Of The Digital Economy Act
Before you pop off about something you seem to know nothing about, the High Court in England no more reveiws legistlation of a regular basis any more that the Supreme Court of Canada does or that the US Supreme Court does.
The legal system in all three countries assumes that the legislature has the resources to check the sorts of things you are saying the courts should do before passage, in this case the UK Parliament.
In the UK the goverment has the Attorney-General for that. A sitting MP, by the way. In the Lords there's a group called the Law Lords who make up the English version of a supreme court who often steer clear of these debates so they aren't placed in a conflict of interest should the bill, once passed, come before them.
The High Court in England gets involved in these things after passage and the bill receiving Royal assent (meaning it's now the law of the land) and something some case(s) that are troubling the High Court.
In this case BT and TalkTalk have requested the review and the Court has granted it.
Normally, in both England and Canada this isn't something a government wants to hear as it indicates the Court believes there is something very wrong with the law as it stands.
It doesn't mean that BT and TalkTalk will be able to convince the Court of their stand but it also doesn't mean that once the reveiw begins that the plantiff's objection(s) are the only ones the Court may consider.
The High Court may reject sections of the Act, it may nullify others or it may just decide the whole thing is such a mess that they'll completely over rule it and send it back to Parliament to try again.
Now, repeat after me, darryl, the courts in Canada and England are independant of the legislature, they are NOT a part of the political process and are NOT part of government so they do NOT review bills on a regular basis.
On the post: Computer Techs Turn Normal Virus Removal Into Multi-Million Dollar Scam
Surely, as things escalated he'd have paused to think of how completely unreal something like this guy having a general in the Indian Army is, as close to the square root of zero the chances are that said uncle would commandeer an official aircraft that would fly to Honduras to grab a hard disk is and then fly back again (at which point we have to be closing in on the highest cost ever for a consumer grade hard disk), and how completely insane the idea is of Opus Dei is of cooking up such a plot in Poland when there's a far better supply of ultra-conservative priests are in Spain which is where Opus Die is headquartered?
None of this raised any kind of alarm bell?
Now I realize that some people have been raised in such a sheltered way that they'll believe just about anything but Davidson might just as well have lit a neon sign at his house saying "Sucker Lives Here".
To borrow from The Bard "A fool and his money are soon parted".
Sorry interval but this guy was practically inviting this to happen.
The larger issue of whether or not the majority of companies promising to remove malware form your hard disk are scammers (IMHO, they are) seems well illustrated here.
Truth, as it's been said, is stranger than fiction.
On the post: Facebook Files First Patent Lawsuit; Countersuing Alt Weekly Newspaper Company Who Sued First
That one should get a rubber stamping and I'll have my shiny patent in no time!
On the post: Time To Stop Being So Fascinated With The Cyber- Part Of Cybercrime
But this ISN'T new!
In reality what's happening, if it's happening to the extent those who are whipping up a panic about it, is a direct descendant of intercepting a nation's or a company's "signals", if you like, then overcoming the coding used to hide the actual meaning and reading the stuff.
The most famous of these would be the ability of the British to crack the code used by the Germans during World War II which enabled them to read virtually every communication the German armed forces sent out or received.
In reality this is the same thing with more powerful tools, by several orders of magnitude, used to crack a cypher or inject one.
Instead of the messages being sent across the airwaves or signal flags from the masts of men-o-war sailing ships or whatever now the transmission and reception is occurring over the Internet.
Yes, it's easier to assume someones identity today but its never been impossible. Far from it. Yes, it appears easier to intercept or disrupt messaging (signals) though that's gone on for, well, millennia. Yes, it appears to be easier to crack a cypher code used by governments and industry but that's gone on virtually forever too.
Using the term "cyber" merely hides the fact that this is just an extension of government and private espionage which has also gone on for, well, forever.
It does make a nice way to stir up alarm though. It makes an even better way for different departments of government to go to bureaucratic war with one another over who will get all the money they hope will come in and then take little or no responsibility for getting it all wrong or just missing it in the millions and billions of communications (signals) send across the Internet daily.
Personally, being of a cynical bent and having studied governments throughout history, I rather suspect this has more to do with eroding civil rights of citizens while hoarding power that it does much else.
In the end, sadly, it won't make anyone "safer" in the sense of stopping another terror attack on North America. The reality is that almost all of them have been home grown from the FLQ here in Canada to the Oklahoma City bombing in the United States. The notable exception is 9/11. But this would have missed that one, too.
On the post: Free Speech Isn't Free: Court Barring Access To Brief About Free Speech
Re: or 'ALL speech isn't FREE'..
On the post: Microsoft's Anti-Piracy Efforts: Millions Spent Driving People To Open Source Software
Re:
It's a great OS to keep me employed when I see a trouble ticket from a residence or small business that says "can't access the internet" and I smile and off I go.
As for your third point, I'd give it that long too. A year or two longer for the port of DirectX (all done in a clean room, of course!)
On the post: Microsoft's Anti-Piracy Efforts: Millions Spent Driving People To Open Source Software
Re: Re: Re: Re:
No difference that I can see.
On the post: Microsoft's Anti-Piracy Efforts: Millions Spent Driving People To Open Source Software
Re: Re: Re: Same old debate
True enough but most people are absolutely convinced they need MS Office even if all they ever use Word for is simple word processing which hasn't changed significantly, except for the interface, since the Wordstar days.
Worse, the they want to use Word for desktop publishing and a worse tool for that can't be found.
I still shudder when people use Excel as a database which it's awful for after a certain number of rows, say 1000 or so and also because it doesn't enforce any discipline on the clerk who has to type it all in. Want a new field, voila! it's there, and never mind you're scrolling horizontally forever to find it.
Don't get me wrong. People misuse OpenOffice the same way. For the most part though, they won't use OO.org because it's not MS Office and for no other reason.
Most people use Photoshop for things like red-eye correction when hundreds of other apps will do it as well, or often better.
Thing is their using incredibly powerful apps for (a) things they aren't designed for and (b) for things that have less expensive alternatives simply because those apps are what they know.
As most of us can't really afford these tools (at all) for the tiny scrap of the power inside them. So people bittorrent them or buy them from doubtful vendors.
And yes, on any OS, for every great app there's hundreds, if not thousands of crappy ones.
On the post: Microsoft's Anti-Piracy Efforts: Millions Spent Driving People To Open Source Software
Re: Re:
The server and networking area sees Linux in a very healthy state and growing, often to the detriment of Win server packages.
Medium and large business have enough in the way of Unix devs who make the transition to Linux quite easily. The up front cost isn't all that much in comparison to Win server and ongoing costs are considerably less. Hardening Linux for networks and the Internet in an order of magnitude easier than it is for Windows servers. (And no, nothing is perfect before someone weighs in with how many Linux servers they know that have been cracked.)
Universities still teach Unix/Linux skills in degree programs as well as Windows. IN that sense there's no shortage of devs available either.
Sure if you're a small dev you may decide to use MS tools to program and most do. Then again, you may for Linux as well given how many resources are out there so that, as a small dev, you're not always reinventing the wheel because someone has locked it down.
Linux's two main desktops are familiar enough to Win users to make the learning curve much shallower than it used to be, too.
Inertia is a wonderful thing which is largely, at this point, most of the reason for MS's 94% control of the desktop market. And good on 'em too.
Where MS isn't already entrenched, places like gadgets, smart phones and other devices MS isn't doing all that well by it's own standards or by many others.
Finally, like most monopolists, Microsoft will be the author of it's own downfall and, like Microsoft, we'll have no idea who will knock them off till it happens. Certainly no one on the radar now.
On the post: Police End Up Paying $4k To Guy They Gave Bogus Traffic Tickets To After He Flipped Them Off
Re: Re: Re:
It's certainly not the brightest thing you can do. From the sounds of it the reaction of the police wasn't all that bright either. I'm sure there was enough mechanically and otherwise wrong with this man's vehicle to give him a ticket or three. ONCE.
The U.S. First Amendment isn't entirely at issue here.
What is questionable is that a nation like Great Britain which claims to be at the forefront of democracy and liberty would ever make insulting a police officer illegal.
Now THAT's absolute bullocks!
On the post: Electrical Shocks To Your Head Can Improve Your Math Skills?
Re: Re: Haha
Not really. If you work around high power (current) AC or DC there is a high risk of non-fatal electrocution made all the higher if you don't know what you're doing.
People lose limbs, extremities like feet and hands, serious burns and serious nerve damage due to electrocution quite frequently. Particularly those who are trying to steal copper off telephone/power poles or below the street when copper prices are high.
I've got a few scars from getting zapped by high current DC when I was younger and am probably lucky to have gotten away with just a scar or three.
One other point that should be brought up is that low level electroshock therapy is used to snap some people out of depressions.
Or you can be like me and do-it-yourself by having a grand mal seizure though I wouldn't recommend it.
On the post: Canada Continues To Grandstand Over Craigslist Adult Services
Re: It's Just Cheap Posturing
As I noted it got the traction out here in BC of just another bemused look across the Rockies and wondering if the water is safe to drink in Ontario.
BC's response has been far more mature and nuanced that anything Nicolson has been saying.
On the post: Canada Continues To Grandstand Over Craigslist Adult Services
Re: I'm thinking of renewing my Conservative Party Membership
On the post: Canada Continues To Grandstand Over Craigslist Adult Services
Re: I am suing...
Of course, I don't think Nicolson realizes that either.
On the post: Canada Continues To Grandstand Over Craigslist Adult Services
Re: New laws
2) providing sexually-explicit material to a child to “groom” them for sexual purposes"
It strikes me this is still grandstanding as the Criminal Code already prohibits this sort of activity without being quite as specific. Point (1) in particular.
I'm still unsure as to how a prosecution can actually prove point (2) in terms of gathering evidence but how that applies to craigslist or any other adult oriented advertising is beyond me.
Of course, just about any ad urging adults to visit Thailand ought to qualify given that country's record in these things.
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