You're absolutely right - they're called coercive contracts and are as valid as a forced confession or the assumption that silence=consent.
Precedent:
in R (G) v Nottingham City Council [2008] EWHC 400 (Admin), Munby J at:
51. But quite apart from that there seemed to me to be a much more fundamental objection to the case which the local authority was seeking to advance. The argument that K had been lawfully accommodated by the local authority with the consent of the mother was in reality founded on nothing more than the assertion that the mother knew and understood the details of the birth plan (in both its original and its amended form) and that she did not "raise objection" to it, just as it was likewise asserted that, following the birth, she had not "raised objection" to the removal of her new-born baby.
52. No authority of any kind was produced in support of these surprising propositions, that a mother could be said to have given her consent to the removal of her baby merely because, knowing of the local authority's plan, she did not object to it and because, when the moment of separation arrived, she did not actively resist. I am not surprised. They are, with respect to those propounding them, as divorced from legal substance as they are remote from the emotional – and dare a man be permitted to say it – the hormonal realities of the human condition. Our law has long recognised that women in the aftermath of birth may not be as able to act wisely as at other times. It is, after all, compassionate regard for those realities which underlies statutory provisions as disparate as section 1 of the Infanticide Act 1938 and section 52(3) of the Adoption and Children Act 2002.
53. I do not wish to be misunderstood. I am not suggesting that consent to the accommodation of a child in accordance with section 20 is required by law to be in writing – though, that said, a prudent local authority would surely always wish to ensure that an alleged parental consent in such a case is properly recorded in writing and evidenced by the parent's signature. Nor am I disputing that there may be cases where a child has in fact, and without parental objection, been accommodated by a local authority for such a period as might entitle a court to infer that the parent had in fact consented.
54. But the local authority here seemed to be going far beyond this. It seemed to be conflating absence of objection with actual consent – a doctrine which at least in this context is, in my judgment, entirely contrary to principle and which, moreover, contains within it the potential for the most pernicious consequences, not least because there are probably many mothers who believe, quite erroneously, that a local authority has power, without any court order, to do what the local authority did in this case.
55. To equate helpless acquiescence with consent when a parent is confronted in circumstances such as this with the misuse (or perhaps on another occasion the misrepresentation) of non-existent authority by an agent of the State is, in my judgment, both unprincipled and, indeed, fraught with potential danger.
56. What the local authority and the NHS Trust did to G and K was unlawful absent consent by G. Let it be assumed that G did not object (though her account of these events would, I was told, be very different). As I observed during the hearing, the fact that she did not object does not mean that she consented. Even on the local authority's own case the fact is that G did not consent.
(yes, I quoted a huge block because it's ALL relevant in context)
could this be part of the reason that mainframe contracts have clauses which prohibit publishing of benchmarks?
Not that that makes much difference to me, if I'm buying a mainframe I'm not so much buying the hardware as the support that goes with it, that five-nines uptime that I don't have to be responsible for, that *I* can swing the axe if shit goes south instead of having to duck.
the latest version I use is from about 1992 (version 18.21), the latest bugfix release (20.something) is from 2012, a patch on the major release from 2008(?)
FractINT (I use version 18, the last major update was 20) FlashGet (formerly JetCar, used to be free as in beer, now nagware - I use the old version) Satori PhotoXL 2.2 with NetObjects Fusion 2 - good tools for building rolling slideshows with photos SonicStage CP (versions prior to 4.3 are always good, 4.3 and later kind of didn't work in XP and I NEED this for my Minidisc gear!) First Page 2000 - WYSIWYG site building tool, outputs in html, php, js, vba...
Serif Movieplus 4 Games: 7th Guest, Simon the Sorcerer, USS Ticonderoga, Warbirds, GTA, Worms, Homeworld Cataclysm, Red Alert, Angel Devoid, Crimson Skies, Air Warrior III, Tomb Raider Chronicles, F22 DID, Dark Reign, Tachyon: The Fringe...
I have original CD media for all this software and most of it won't run on current platforms, so I have to run it on a virtual machine.
actually, you can. That's the whole point of the Gold Standard.
In 1925, the Gold Standard in England was set at three Pounds twenty Shillings and change. The Bank of England was authorised to print gold certificates (later to become promissory notes) to nine times the amount of gold it held in its vaults. In 1931, the 1925 Standard was abolished, and the BoE was authorised to not only deny any requests to make good on any certificate, they were authorised to print even more certificates to the total amount of national and Government debt(!), add the words "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of..." on all its new issue promissory notes (they weren't called certificates now) and also the phrase "This note is legal tender for any debt" (or something like that). What this created was a fiat currency that had by 1932, a gold backing of something like.01%, and by the time decimalisation kicked in in 1971, the amount of gold ratio to the amount of currency in circulation was so low as to constitute a rounding error no computer of its time could calculate. What we have now since even the Silver Standard is abolished is like the United States, a currency that has zero intrinsic value (it is literally worth even less than the paper it was printed on), it's current value being based on the amount of book debt held by the banks against the amount of currency in circulation measured against similar situations of other currencies. If the Dollar takes a dive, Sterling follows. If the Euro falls off a cliff, as it has done since its inception, so does the Dollar. The only thing that keeps any of these currencies afloat is the seizure of lands and properties resulting from subpar mortgaging and artificial hiking of house prices, and the sheer audacity of private financial institutions in their recent activities in Cyprus and Ireland. At least Iceland had the balls to tell the bankers to go fuck themselves.
A few years ago (2008?), much was made of the tidal capture planned for the Bristol Channel. The study on which the argument of both sides was based had calculated that capturing enough energy in the channel would supply the entire energy needs of England, Wales, Scotland and Eire, all the outlying islands and the North Sea Oil Rigs, and still only deplete 5% of the total amount of energy passing through the channel at any time. Capturing 100% of the energy would not only supply most of Europe, it would also result in a glass-smooth Bristol Channel. The surfing fraternity won the argument, saying that even a 5% drop in tidal energy would kill the tourism industry in the area since most of the coastal tourism in the area relied on the four foot breakers*!
*Yep, that's what was said. The Bristol Channel has a 47 foot tidal range, which is pretty much the highest tidal range of any estuary on the British coastline.
something just occurred to me and hit me at the same time as the epitome of absurd:
I wonder if the people mining Bitcoins like maniacs are the same people who bleed out over the amount of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere (thereafter being absorbed by the oceans but don't tell them that, it'll only piss 'em off having been called on their stupidity) by the overworked energy grids around the world? Considering that far more carbon dioxide is pumped out by volcanic eruptions each year than the entire output of Humankind since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution... and atmospheric CO2 is *still* at a 15 million year *low*.
You use what you want, my currency is my labour. Fiat currency is a necessary evil, I'm afraid; it's a lie, but it's a lie most of us are comfortable ignoring. Gold is something we can all agree on as having consistent intrinsic value. Silver as well, though not so much. But if I can buy a sack of potatoes in exchange for an hour's unloading the truck they arrived in into the back of the shop, I'm great with that.
Screw you, at least I can eat the potatoes. Can you eat what's in your wallet?
the LHC fires about 724MJ in its two beams, with a particle energy of around 7TeV each. This pushes ions around the main torus at 3ms-1 short of the speed of light. It's down for an upgrade at the minute, which'll push the ceiling to 1GJ.
ok. Take the CPU/power ratio and the cost of that power, multiply the two together, then multiply it by three: that is still below the projected BC generation rate.
See, they already got this shit worked out, you will NEVER get a BC mining operation to pay for itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Apply STRICT policy: breaking the Law is grounds for dismissal (I'm talking Computer Misuse Act here).
It's either walk or face a criminal charge. At the least, a civil suit for any damage caused.
Question: how the holy shitting fuck can you allow a PCS unfiltered access to the Internet?? Are you suicidal?
Seriously, who the fuck screens these?
You're absolutely right - they're called coercive contracts and are as valid as a forced confession or the assumption that silence=consent.
Precedent:
in R (G) v Nottingham City Council [2008] EWHC 400 (Admin), Munby J at:
51. But quite apart from that there seemed to me to be a much more fundamental objection to the case which the local authority was seeking to advance. The argument that K had been lawfully accommodated by the local authority with the consent of the mother was in reality founded on nothing more than the assertion that the mother knew and understood the details of the birth plan (in both its original and its amended form) and that she did not "raise objection" to it, just as it was likewise asserted that, following the birth, she had not "raised objection" to the removal of her new-born baby.
52. No authority of any kind was produced in support of these surprising propositions, that a mother could be said to have given her consent to the removal of her baby merely because, knowing of the local authority's plan, she did not object to it and because, when the moment of separation arrived, she did not actively resist. I am not surprised. They are, with respect to those propounding them, as divorced from legal substance as they are remote from the emotional – and dare a man be permitted to say it – the hormonal realities of the human condition. Our law has long recognised that women in the aftermath of birth may not be as able to act wisely as at other times. It is, after all, compassionate regard for those realities which underlies statutory provisions as disparate as section 1 of the Infanticide Act 1938 and section 52(3) of the Adoption and Children Act 2002.
53. I do not wish to be misunderstood. I am not suggesting that consent to the accommodation of a child in accordance with section 20 is required by law to be in writing – though, that said, a prudent local authority would surely always wish to ensure that an alleged parental consent in such a case is properly recorded in writing and evidenced by the parent's signature. Nor am I disputing that there may be cases where a child has in fact, and without parental objection, been accommodated by a local authority for such a period as might entitle a court to infer that the parent had in fact consented.
54. But the local authority here seemed to be going far beyond this. It seemed to be conflating absence of objection with actual consent – a doctrine which at least in this context is, in my judgment, entirely contrary to principle and which, moreover, contains within it the potential for the most pernicious consequences, not least because there are probably many mothers who believe, quite erroneously, that a local authority has power, without any court order, to do what the local authority did in this case.
55. To equate helpless acquiescence with consent when a parent is confronted in circumstances such as this with the misuse (or perhaps on another occasion the misrepresentation) of non-existent authority by an agent of the State is, in my judgment, both unprincipled and, indeed, fraught with potential danger.
56. What the local authority and the NHS Trust did to G and K was unlawful absent consent by G. Let it be assumed that G did not object (though her account of these events would, I was told, be very different). As I observed during the hearing, the fact that she did not object does not mean that she consented. Even on the local authority's own case the fact is that G did not consent.
(yes, I quoted a huge block because it's ALL relevant in context)
hands up those who didn't see this coming?
omg, it's "faggot", "their"... oh fuckin' forget it. EAT A FUCKING DICTIONARY!
the implication here is that defamation involves falsehoods.
I have three Compaq terminals, no idea where they came from or how I came into possession of them, but I know they're not cheap.
No, I didn't pay for 'em. I'd've remembered that.
could this be part of the reason that mainframe contracts have clauses which prohibit publishing of benchmarks?
Not that that makes much difference to me, if I'm buying a mainframe I'm not so much buying the hardware as the support that goes with it, that five-nines uptime that I don't have to be responsible for, that *I* can swing the axe if shit goes south instead of having to duck.
wait, verbal defamation is acceptable and protected under the First Amendment? First I've heard about it...
I don't know of *any* jurisdiction where Truth isn't an absolute defence against libel. Including Britain.
However the application of the Law may vary, the Truth of that statement is absolute.
the latest version I use is from about 1992 (version 18.21), the latest bugfix release (20.something) is from 2012, a patch on the major release from 2008(?)
...who is invariably NOT THE AUTHOR.
FractINT, for one. It's a fractal engine.
name ONE other that has been shown to be not only environmentally sound, but safe and efficient.
copyright doesn't protect authors, it protects publishers.
any more destructive than contamination of groundwater with frack juice and methane?
FractINT (I use version 18, the last major update was 20)
FlashGet (formerly JetCar, used to be free as in beer, now nagware - I use the old version)
Satori PhotoXL 2.2 with NetObjects Fusion 2 - good tools for building rolling slideshows with photos
SonicStage CP (versions prior to 4.3 are always good, 4.3 and later kind of didn't work in XP and I NEED this for my Minidisc gear!)
First Page 2000 - WYSIWYG site building tool, outputs in html, php, js, vba...
Serif Movieplus 4
Games: 7th Guest, Simon the Sorcerer, USS Ticonderoga, Warbirds, GTA, Worms, Homeworld Cataclysm, Red Alert, Angel Devoid, Crimson Skies, Air Warrior III, Tomb Raider Chronicles, F22 DID, Dark Reign, Tachyon: The Fringe...
I have original CD media for all this software and most of it won't run on current platforms, so I have to run it on a virtual machine.
saves me a lot of time archiving old CDROMs... ...and yes, there is software around that I'm still using after nearly 20 years...
actually, you can. That's the whole point of the Gold Standard.
In 1925, the Gold Standard in England was set at three Pounds twenty Shillings and change. The Bank of England was authorised to print gold certificates (later to become promissory notes) to nine times the amount of gold it held in its vaults. In 1931, the 1925 Standard was abolished, and the BoE was authorised to not only deny any requests to make good on any certificate, they were authorised to print even more certificates to the total amount of national and Government debt(!), add the words "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of..." on all its new issue promissory notes (they weren't called certificates now) and also the phrase "This note is legal tender for any debt" (or something like that). What this created was a fiat currency that had by 1932, a gold backing of something like .01%, and by the time decimalisation kicked in in 1971, the amount of gold ratio to the amount of currency in circulation was so low as to constitute a rounding error no computer of its time could calculate. What we have now since even the Silver Standard is abolished is like the United States, a currency that has zero intrinsic value (it is literally worth even less than the paper it was printed on), it's current value being based on the amount of book debt held by the banks against the amount of currency in circulation measured against similar situations of other currencies. If the Dollar takes a dive, Sterling follows. If the Euro falls off a cliff, as it has done since its inception, so does the Dollar. The only thing that keeps any of these currencies afloat is the seizure of lands and properties resulting from subpar mortgaging and artificial hiking of house prices, and the sheer audacity of private financial institutions in their recent activities in Cyprus and Ireland. At least Iceland had the balls to tell the bankers to go fuck themselves.
A few years ago (2008?), much was made of the tidal capture planned for the Bristol Channel. The study on which the argument of both sides was based had calculated that capturing enough energy in the channel would supply the entire energy needs of England, Wales, Scotland and Eire, all the outlying islands and the North Sea Oil Rigs, and still only deplete 5% of the total amount of energy passing through the channel at any time. Capturing 100% of the energy would not only supply most of Europe, it would also result in a glass-smooth Bristol Channel. The surfing fraternity won the argument, saying that even a 5% drop in tidal energy would kill the tourism industry in the area since most of the coastal tourism in the area relied on the four foot breakers*!
*Yep, that's what was said. The Bristol Channel has a 47 foot tidal range, which is pretty much the highest tidal range of any estuary on the British coastline.
I know - bad form - but these'll be the same people who extol the virtues of electric cars ::sniggger::
something just occurred to me and hit me at the same time as the epitome of absurd:
I wonder if the people mining Bitcoins like maniacs are the same people who bleed out over the amount of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere (thereafter being absorbed by the oceans but don't tell them that, it'll only piss 'em off having been called on their stupidity) by the overworked energy grids around the world? Considering that far more carbon dioxide is pumped out by volcanic eruptions each year than the entire output of Humankind since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution... and atmospheric CO2 is *still* at a 15 million year *low*.
You use what you want, my currency is my labour.
Fiat currency is a necessary evil, I'm afraid; it's a lie, but it's a lie most of us are comfortable ignoring. Gold is something we can all agree on as having consistent intrinsic value. Silver as well, though not so much. But if I can buy a sack of potatoes in exchange for an hour's unloading the truck they arrived in into the back of the shop, I'm great with that.
Screw you, at least I can eat the potatoes. Can you eat what's in your wallet?
the LHC fires about 724MJ in its two beams, with a particle energy of around 7TeV each. This pushes ions around the main torus at 3ms-1 short of the speed of light. It's down for an upgrade at the minute, which'll push the ceiling to 1GJ.
ok. Take the CPU/power ratio and the cost of that power, multiply the two together, then multiply it by three: that is still below the projected BC generation rate.
See, they already got this shit worked out, you will NEVER get a BC mining operation to pay for itself.