1) Germany doesn't have case law - there's no such thing as a precedent under German Law. This court's job is to rule on the legality of laws; the court can interpret how the law should be applied, then that becomes the law: another interpretation can't arise from another court
2) This is Germany's Constitutional court - there's no higher or lower instance for this type of law.
you think the cost of putting into orbit explosives * all spy satellites + extra separate power & control system so they can be used if the battery / computer dies is less than the cost of sending a missile that you've already built against the occasional dud?
next time they build a satellite it would be a good idea to put a self destruct in it that can be activated remotely, cheaper and more reliable than shooting missiles at it...
Unless of course, the satellite stopped working because it's computer is bust. Then you'd have a big lump of explosives rolling around in space, and no control over it.
It's a spy satellite and it's so big that some of it's gonna crash. What if that's over Iran/N Korea/China? You think the US wants them picking apart the remains of classified technology? They have a reason, it's just not necessarily any better than China's logic in testing their ability to destroy satellites (protect themselves from other people's spy satellites). Unless you think that the US's reason is better because it's the US, and China's worse, because it's China.
"We consider our secrets to be worth space junk, but your security not to be".
Is this really anything else? The US is willing to protect it's secrets, China was trying to ensure they could protect theirs. Both are sovereign nations with the technology and ability to make these decisions.
The only way issues like this will ever be resolved is by allowing some intra-national body to have either approval or veto powers, but nobody wants to be told what they can/can't do.
The problem is Intel are producing better chips than AMD and are able to make them for less because of lower failure rates and smaller die sizes. The main problem with the CPU industry at the moment is AMD are just doing bad in general and not keeping pace.
If this had always been true, it might be fair to say that AMD were a poor competitor. However, from the launch of the Athlon until the launch of the Core2, for several years, AMD had a better product, yet found major difficulties in getting market share. Intel's alleged tactics are illegal, and it's right that they should be properly investigated. It's just a pity that any fine imposed will hurt Intel but not benefit AMD or consumers, who are the real injured parties.
"The internet is a place where they can't maintain control," he said. "They are trying to introduce an old-school control-orientated way of thinking into a system that rejects and repels that tradition of control."
Thank god this writer understands - the studios really donät seem to
I did read. I was merely pointing out that at least when his data comes over here, it's protected, whereas when the US government illegaly takes mine, it's not. Quite an important difference.
"Let's be honest there is no additional privacy problems with RealID."
The government wants to share data with Mexico, Europe and Canada and you don't consider that a privacy problem?
The government want to eventually get RFID into DLs and you don't consider that a privacy problem?
Let me guess, you are from North Korea or the former East Germany? Excuse me, but Europe actually has data privacy laws, unlike the USA. If your data DID get over here, at least the law prevents it being used for any purpose other than the one for which it was legitemately obtained. Whereas when MY data was given ILLEGALY to the American government because I got on a plane to the US, it had no protection at all.
I don't think it's the police's fault that black people commit more crimes than white people.
You're missing the point. Many of these people haven't committed a crime, they've only been arrested on suspicion of comitting one. This can easily be due to the interpretation of the officer at the scene, and there might not enough evidence to prosecute. Racial prejudice WILL be a factor in the disproportiante number of ethnic minorities. How large a factor is open to debate, but it would be much fairer to only retain the DNA where there was sufficient evidence to charge or prosecute, this would remove at least some of the distortion due to racial prejudice.
"We have a situation where if you happen to have been in the hands of the police then your DNA is on permanent record. If you haven't, it isn't. It means where there is ethnic profiling going on disproportionate numbers of ethnic minorities get onto the database."
I interpret this as 'because the police are arresting a disproprtionately high proportion of ethnic minorities and the contents of the DNA database reveals this, we should just profile everybody so that the apparent discrimination disappears'. Maybe they should try dealing with the apparent racism and/or social inequality rather than brushing it under the carpet?
In the UK, I believe you can be arrested for "failing to produce ID". I'm not sure if the police need a reason to request ID, and as far as I know, they just take you into custody until they can work out who you are, it's not a crime in itself (I may be wrong about that, though). As for the store manager - in the UK anyone is allowed to detain anyone if they have any cause to believe they've committed a crime ("citizen's arrest", although I'm not sure that's an official term). Whether refusing to show your receipt constitutes such a cause, I don't know, but I would think so - it's a pretty stupid thing to refuse to do.
I'm very, very suspicous of your claims. It is certainly true that a police officer can detain you if you are unable to identify yourself, but there is definitely not a requirement to carry ID in the UK. There's not even a requirement to carry a driving license if you're driving, but if you're stopped and given a "producer" you'll have to go to a police station within 7 days and show your driving license, insurance and MOT certificate (proof your car has been tested as road-worthy).
I think you're correct about citizen's arrests, but the police advise against people doing this, and it doesn't completely negate potential "wrongful detention" charges: I caught and detained someone trying to break into a friend's car once, the police turned up and were nice, but told me I really shouldn't have detained the guy.
I think you misunderstand the point... there is a law requiring the victim to identify himself, as TFA details, and the victim provided the information requested willingly. There is NO requirement for him to produce a driving license unless the situation involves a motor or traffic offence. There is also no requirement for the victim to carry identification, when the police officer found he couldn't charge him for refusing to provide a driving license, he charged him with "obstructing official business", even though the law in Ohio specifically states that the police officer does NOT have the right to demand a driving license
I would certainly agree that the police need to be able to do their job, but they are also subject to the law when performing their duties and they SHOULD be aware of the specific process involved in simple tasks such as identifying individuals where there is no crime involved. Its ridiculous that the officer didn't know what action the law entitled him to take and when he did find out, he resorts to what appears to be harassment by charging the victim with "obstructing offical duties" when the details of the offence do not fall within that category - since the officer had no right to ask for the driving license
Where the police are unable to perform their duties within the law, its right that there should be some penalty. However, I think the US culture of significant monetary payouts for such instances is somewhat overboard. The police department certainly should be assessing why the officer didn't know the relevant laws and compensating the victim for the time and inconvenience that the wrongful arrest has involved. As long as they fail to admit they made a mistake expense for time and inconvenience will increase, since there may well be lawyers and courts involved. But as the situation stands at the moment, an apology and a relatively small amount of money could easily redress their error.
When it comes to Circuit City, they must have been genuinely suspicious to ask to search and I can understand that, but they should have called the police if they had a problem, not undertaken vigilante actions themselves such as detaining someone without evidence of a crime. Again, this appears to be more apology and retraining territory than justification for large sums of money to change hands
they've exported their politicians to England to fuck up the English system
Thank you for proving my point: there is no English parliamentary system, if you want one, go get one, but complaining about Scots in the UK parliament just demonstrates how distorted the use of the word "English" often is
Whilst the examiners in question may be living and working in the UK, there is no such thing as a "UK" exam: Scotland has a completely different examination system, run by a different exam board. Admittedly, the Times article just talks about GCSEs (exam standard in England and Wales at age 16) and never makes any comparison to the Scottish equivalent (fair and balanced reporting? the Times? Tories don't care about Scotland!)
Most people in England seem to wonder why so many Scots want independence.... but don't know the difference between UK (England, Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland), Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), and England (a catch all, that normally means whatever combination of the above countries happens to be convienient at the time).
I know that airport security is a tough issue, and something that needs to be done right, but allowing an interpretation of a micro-expression to be used to select people for further investigation basically gives the airport staff the option of pulling over anyone, any time under this pretext.
Do they collect statistics on how powers like this are used? In the UK, the police have had to start collecting statistics on the use of stop and search powers, because of concerns about racial profiling. The statistics have verified claims that the behaviour of the subjects is not what's being used by officers when deciding to search, the race of the subject is. Of course, this has lead to claims that the police are trying to find excuses to stop and search large parties of other ethnic group, to alter their statistics, without any probable cause (eg searching all passengers coming of a train for weapons, when they had no evidence that any existed)
I'm not necessarily against this kind of selection, but I do believe that it needs to be implemented carefully to prevent abuse and unfair treatment of certain sections of the population, so that not only is the security done right, it's seen to be done right.
Universities really CAN'T lock systems down in the kind of way a workplace can. I'm doing a Master's degree in Information Technology (basically a one year conversion course Computing Science for those with different first degrees). We have to write software for our dissertations and this often involves making use of other people's software, sometimes libraries, sometimes compiled programs. We wouldn't be able to do our dissertations if we couldn't install more software. It's not practical to have to have to get permission for every peice of software every student needs. I'm sure many of the academic staff also need to do these things in order to do their own research.
University networks are not like work networks. You can't enforce a standard set of tools and be sure that no one needs to run anything else
I think this whole fuss is somehwat overblown... my finacee is a german law student... pased her first state exams, about to go and do the "on the job learning" part. She's been translating the law for me (she wants to defend her country against all this fuss). Some points she made:
This law is implementing a European Council Convention ruling from 2001 (don't just pick on Germany), to keep consistent criminal cyber law across Europe.
The law states that someone is only comitting a criminal offence if they're acting without authorisation
It's only illegal to develop software that is INTENDED to be used for computer crime - tools with genuine uses would not be subject to this by just existing, but misuse of them would be a crime
The concerns people have been expressing about "the whole security industry will be operating in a grey area" just aren't fair: security researchers shouldn't be poking about in machines without authorisation, so it's not a problem
I understand that there's a lot of concern about how the laws will be applied, but this is hardly unique to Germany, tech crime is generally difficult for law enforcement agencies to deal with, we'll see what happens with that. My fiancee thinks that part of the problem is that most of us English speakers don't have a basic understanding of the German legal system
NB IANAL, my fiancee isn't(yet) and she's not your lawyer.
I know I'm going to get modded offtopic at best here, but wasn't the point of the invasion to stop Iraq from deploying its extensive stockpiles of WMDs? Wasn't it supposed to be a pre-emptive strike to get him before he got America and its allies? Toppling Hussein was supposed to be a byproduct of that, but it was not the primary goal.
The officially given reason for the war was, as you say "to stop Iraq from deploying its extensive stockpiles of WMDs". The goal of regime change is not an acceptable reason for invasion under international law. Despite this, evidence has come to light showing that both the US and the UK had intelligence that told them Iraq did not have WMDs. Someone else mentioned "Al-Qaida" being connected with the invasion - yes, GWB did go on about claimed connections to Al-Qaida, however, Blair consistently denied any link. In the British media this claim is often thought to have been an attempt to use 9/11 as justification for the Iraq war.
In January, Odyssey won permission from the Spanish government to resume a suspended search for the wreck of the HMS Sussex, which was leading a British fleet into the Mediterranean Sea for a war against France in 1694 when it sank in a storm off Gibraltar.
But the union of the parliaments between Scotland and England didn't happen until 1707. Therefore there was no British fleet in 1694; it was an English fleet.
Please. Stop. Arguing. Seriously. Come back when you've either got irrefutable proof to shut up all the naysayers, or you have a cure-all solution. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's sick of hearing the scientific community continually bicker amongst themselves.
That's the point though, isn't it? The scientific community isn't realy bickering amongst themselves, the politicians and special interests are bickering with the scientists. The press (and many of the rest of us) are caught in the middle, divided along political lines. At the end of the day, for most people its about what they WANT to believe.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Germany doesn't have case law - there's no such thing as a precedent under German Law. This court's job is to rule on the legality of laws; the court can interpret how the law should be applied, then that becomes the law: another interpretation can't arise from another court
2) This is Germany's Constitutional court - there's no higher or lower instance for this type of law.
IANAL etc.
I'm not sure that firing a ground-based weapon into space is militarising it. Isn't it more about not leaving weapons up thre?
you think the cost of putting into orbit explosives * all spy satellites + extra separate power & control system so they can be used if the battery / computer dies is less than the cost of sending a missile that you've already built against the occasional dud?
Unless of course, the satellite stopped working because it's computer is bust. Then you'd have a big lump of explosives rolling around in space, and no control over it.
It's a spy satellite and it's so big that some of it's gonna crash. What if that's over Iran/N Korea/China? You think the US wants them picking apart the remains of classified technology? They have a reason, it's just not necessarily any better than China's logic in testing their ability to destroy satellites (protect themselves from other people's spy satellites). Unless you think that the US's reason is better because it's the US, and China's worse, because it's China.
Is this really anything else? The US is willing to protect it's secrets, China was trying to ensure they could protect theirs. Both are sovereign nations with the technology and ability to make these decisions.
The only way issues like this will ever be resolved is by allowing some intra-national body to have either approval or veto powers, but nobody wants to be told what they can/can't do.
If this had always been true, it might be fair to say that AMD were a poor competitor. However, from the launch of the Athlon until the launch of the Core2, for several years, AMD had a better product, yet found major difficulties in getting market share. Intel's alleged tactics are illegal, and it's right that they should be properly investigated. It's just a pity that any fine imposed will hurt Intel but not benefit AMD or consumers, who are the real injured parties.
story from slashdot in August?
Thank god this writer understands - the studios really donät seem to
I did read. I was merely pointing out that at least when his data comes over here, it's protected, whereas when the US government illegaly takes mine, it's not. Quite an important difference.
You're missing the point. Many of these people haven't committed a crime, they've only been arrested on suspicion of comitting one. This can easily be due to the interpretation of the officer at the scene, and there might not enough evidence to prosecute. Racial prejudice WILL be a factor in the disproportiante number of ethnic minorities. How large a factor is open to debate, but it would be much fairer to only retain the DNA where there was sufficient evidence to charge or prosecute, this would remove at least some of the distortion due to racial prejudice.
I interpret this as 'because the police are arresting a disproprtionately high proportion of ethnic minorities and the contents of the DNA database reveals this, we should just profile everybody so that the apparent discrimination disappears'. Maybe they should try dealing with the apparent racism and/or social inequality rather than brushing it under the carpet?
I'm very, very suspicous of your claims. It is certainly true that a police officer can detain you if you are unable to identify yourself, but there is definitely not a requirement to carry ID in the UK. There's not even a requirement to carry a driving license if you're driving, but if you're stopped and given a "producer" you'll have to go to a police station within 7 days and show your driving license, insurance and MOT certificate (proof your car has been tested as road-worthy).
I think you're correct about citizen's arrests, but the police advise against people doing this, and it doesn't completely negate potential "wrongful detention" charges: I caught and detained someone trying to break into a friend's car once, the police turned up and were nice, but told me I really shouldn't have detained the guy.
IANAL
I think you misunderstand the point... there is a law requiring the victim to identify himself, as TFA details, and the victim provided the information requested willingly. There is NO requirement for him to produce a driving license unless the situation involves a motor or traffic offence. There is also no requirement for the victim to carry identification, when the police officer found he couldn't charge him for refusing to provide a driving license, he charged him with "obstructing official business", even though the law in Ohio specifically states that the police officer does NOT have the right to demand a driving license
I would certainly agree that the police need to be able to do their job, but they are also subject to the law when performing their duties and they SHOULD be aware of the specific process involved in simple tasks such as identifying individuals where there is no crime involved. Its ridiculous that the officer didn't know what action the law entitled him to take and when he did find out, he resorts to what appears to be harassment by charging the victim with "obstructing offical duties" when the details of the offence do not fall within that category - since the officer had no right to ask for the driving license
Where the police are unable to perform their duties within the law, its right that there should be some penalty. However, I think the US culture of significant monetary payouts for such instances is somewhat overboard. The police department certainly should be assessing why the officer didn't know the relevant laws and compensating the victim for the time and inconvenience that the wrongful arrest has involved. As long as they fail to admit they made a mistake expense for time and inconvenience will increase, since there may well be lawyers and courts involved. But as the situation stands at the moment, an apology and a relatively small amount of money could easily redress their error.
When it comes to Circuit City, they must have been genuinely suspicious to ask to search and I can understand that, but they should have called the police if they had a problem, not undertaken vigilante actions themselves such as detaining someone without evidence of a crime. Again, this appears to be more apology and retraining territory than justification for large sums of money to change hands
Just my 2p.
they've exported their politicians to England to fuck up the English system
Thank you for proving my point: there is no English parliamentary system, if you want one, go get one, but complaining about Scots in the UK parliament just demonstrates how distorted the use of the word "English" often is
Whilst the examiners in question may be living and working in the UK, there is no such thing as a "UK" exam: Scotland has a completely different examination system, run by a different exam board. Admittedly, the Times article just talks about GCSEs (exam standard in England and Wales at age 16) and never makes any comparison to the Scottish equivalent (fair and balanced reporting? the Times? Tories don't care about Scotland!)
Most people in England seem to wonder why so many Scots want independence.... but don't know the difference between UK (England, Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland), Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), and England (a catch all, that normally means whatever combination of the above countries happens to be convienient at the time).
I know that airport security is a tough issue, and something that needs to be done right, but allowing an interpretation of a micro-expression to be used to select people for further investigation basically gives the airport staff the option of pulling over anyone, any time under this pretext.
Do they collect statistics on how powers like this are used? In the UK, the police have had to start collecting statistics on the use of stop and search powers, because of concerns about racial profiling. The statistics have verified claims that the behaviour of the subjects is not what's being used by officers when deciding to search, the race of the subject is. Of course, this has lead to claims that the police are trying to find excuses to stop and search large parties of other ethnic group, to alter their statistics, without any probable cause (eg searching all passengers coming of a train for weapons, when they had no evidence that any existed)
I'm not necessarily against this kind of selection, but I do believe that it needs to be implemented carefully to prevent abuse and unfair treatment of certain sections of the population, so that not only is the security done right, it's seen to be done right.
Universities really CAN'T lock systems down in the kind of way a workplace can. I'm doing a Master's degree in Information Technology (basically a one year conversion course Computing Science for those with different first degrees). We have to write software for our dissertations and this often involves making use of other people's software, sometimes libraries, sometimes compiled programs. We wouldn't be able to do our dissertations if we couldn't install more software. It's not practical to have to have to get permission for every peice of software every student needs. I'm sure many of the academic staff also need to do these things in order to do their own research.
University networks are not like work networks. You can't enforce a standard set of tools and be sure that no one needs to run anything else
I think this whole fuss is somehwat overblown... my finacee is a german law student... pased her first state exams, about to go and do the "on the job learning" part. She's been translating the law for me (she wants to defend her country against all this fuss). Some points she made:
I understand that there's a lot of concern about how the laws will be applied, but this is hardly unique to Germany, tech crime is generally difficult for law enforcement agencies to deal with, we'll see what happens with that. My fiancee thinks that part of the problem is that most of us English speakers don't have a basic understanding of the German legal system
NB IANAL, my fiancee isn't(yet) and she's not your lawyer.I heard this was implemented in 1984!
Yes, it's called options.
The officially given reason for the war was, as you say "to stop Iraq from deploying its extensive stockpiles of WMDs". The goal of regime change is not an acceptable reason for invasion under international law. Despite this, evidence has come to light showing that both the US and the UK had intelligence that told them Iraq did not have WMDs. Someone else mentioned "Al-Qaida" being connected with the invasion - yes, GWB did go on about claimed connections to Al-Qaida, however, Blair consistently denied any link. In the British media this claim is often thought to have been an attempt to use 9/11 as justification for the Iraq war.
If you want references, try "The diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning", the president told Mr Blair, In the memo, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is quoted as saying Mr Bush had made up his mind to take military action even if the timing had not yet been decided., and
The article states:
But the union of the parliaments between Scotland and England didn't happen until 1707. Therefore there was no British fleet in 1694; it was an English fleet.