For example, marital status is irrelevant on any job I can think of off the top of my head, and any job applicant who'd be asked about that one should be free to answer "FUCK YOU". Unfortunately, it means they are ultimately free to be unemployed. Freedom is tricky.
And since most/. readers are American, I feel useful to specify that yeah, this post is 80% sarcastic.
1. The word "felony" is a technical word from US law that has a very specific meaning, and one which refers to a distinction most other countries do not (any longer) make.
Actually, even though France's penal system is very different from USA's one, it has a roughly equivalent distinction.
Two important things to know before I elaborate:
IANAL, I'm just a layman, albeit well informed about the laws of my country, France, thanks mainly to the work of various blogging legal professionals, chief among them an avocat (roughly, attorney) who blogs under the pen name Eolas.
Translating legalese, not only between two languages, but two different legal traditions, is a tricky exercise. Expect some quirks. If there's someone familiar with both systems around here, be my guest to correct me. Also, you will see that, in the matter at hand, there are several false friends between English and French. To avoid too much confusion, I will systematically put the French words in italic.
In French penal system, there's this thing called "la classification tripartite des infractions", which can be translated as "the three-parts categorization of crimes" (I'm not sure there's a formal equivalent in the English legalese for Common Law systems). Here we meet our first false friend: the French word infraction is the generic term for penal offences, like "crime" in English. By ascending order of seriousness, and liability, there are:
Contraventions: petty offences, similar to what is called, I think, "infractions" in the USA (yeah, the false friend is back). The concept of "summary offence" is also similar, it seems. In the mind of most French, the word contravention is strongly associated with traffic offences, which indeed make the bulk of it. Save for the most severe cases, the process is simplified, without debates before the courts. This is an exception to what is called in French "Principe du Contradictoire" ("Principle of Contradiction", a subset of due process which makes debating an accusation the norm - I know the concept exists in the USA, but I don't know how it's formally called, or even if it has a formal designation). The accused can still cause a debate before a court if they want to challenge the conviction. Contraventions are only punished with fines, at least as the main penalty - additional penalties can be added, like, in the case of traffic offences, loss of the driving license, for example. The standard amounts of the fines are decided through executive order, within the boundaries of existing laws. There's more to this, but I prefer not to delve into the details on a subject on which my grasp is limited.
Délits: intermediate offences, roughly equivalent to misdemeanors. Always tried before a court, but without a jury. Main penalties can take the form of inprisonment, fines, or a mix of both. The scale of penalties is set in law, but take note that the judge can always decide to reduce them: the law only defines the cap. For first offences that aren't too severe, suspended sentencing is quite frequent. In some very rare case, the accused can be convicted, but exempt of penalty (a recent case of this: a woman, who had much on her mind due, in part, to a sick child, had had a lapse when bringing her youngest daughter to the nanny before going to work. She actually went there, but forgot to drop the baby and went away. It took the nanny calling her at work in puzzlement of not having seen her, for her to shrug out the delusion that she DID brought her her daughter. Too late. It was a hot day. The baby died in the car. Convicted, but without penalty. She was visibly shattered, and I guess the judge's reasoning was that yes, the case was clear, she was guilty, but there was strictly no point to add a penalty to her suffering. What would you have done?) For a délit, the investigations are handled by a prosecutor, except in the most complex cases (financial cri
I find it pecularlly puzzling.that TFA speak of "new EU privacy laws". No such thing is involved. No new law. Nothing new about it. Privacy laws have been around, EU wise, for about twenty years. US companies are allowed to make business online in the EU/ provided they comply to the Safe Harbor Principles. The real point is that the enforcement( of the Safe Harbor Principles has been inexistant for too long. The only change, the only newsworthy thing, is that some people managed to formulate a case for the public ministry to have a look at it. Oh, and that there's such a thing as an EU public ministry.
Re:Part of a money conflict within the King family
on
A Copyright Nightmare
·
· Score: 1
If you look up the notion of moral right you may end up discovering who is to blame in this kind of shit.
I take the opportunity of answering your post to mention in passing that I love your sig.
More to the point, I think most people don't quite realize that IP rights aren't fundamental rights. They are instrumental rights based on a compromise.
Since I'm French, I'll make a distinction between patrimonial rights and moral right. In France, and in most European countries, IP rights are divided between two distinct sets. Patrimonial rights, which set the base of the rules about how the use of works of the mind should be remunerated: thanks to Disney, these rights apply in France until 70 years after the death of the author. And then there's the moral right of an author, which is inalienable and eternal. It implies that, in their lifetime, authors may oppose the use of their works in fashions they deem inappropriate. Like, having it used in meetings of a party they despise or hate. (Tell me if I'm wrong, but from my side of the Pond, it seems that in the USA an author has no right to complain about the use of his works as long as he's got properly paid).
On top of that, there are related rights, which complicate the matter.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Which form and wording are based on the French "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" - the draft of which, put out by La Fayette, was strongly influenced by Virginia''s constitution - copying rules!) mentions intellectual property rights, in a wording aimed to protect the authors; but quite unspecific about the remuneration scheme.
I see plenty of people made jokes about this piece of news. And it's okay: I'm fond of awful puns myself.
Before going to the point, I'll just mention there's an Alsacian brewery called Meteor.
My point is about microgravity, and how it could affect brewing and winemaking. But since, despite being French, I don't know much about winemaking, I'll stick to brewing (a matter in which I've been taught by distinguished Belgian amateurs).
As any beer amateur knows, most beers basically fall into two categories, commonly called "ales" and "lagers". Ales are brewed in warm temperatures, using yeasts that tend to go from the bottom to the top of the mash-tub (Saccharomyces cervesiae). It's commonly called "high fermentation". Lagers are brewed in cool temperatures, using yeasts that tend to from the top to the bottom of the mash-tub (Saccharomyces uvarum). It's commonly called "low fermentation". Aside from those two, there are also various kinds of "spontaneous fermentations", performed by wild yeasts, the most famous of them being Brettanomyces lambicus and Brettanomyces bruxellensis, which give the Belgian lambic beers.
And my question is: how would any of this work in micro-gravity?
Another question is: how would it work in a centrifugal artificial gravity? How does Coriolis currents affect contained fluids, and how would it affect brewing?
I'm asking those questions because I've got a "hard science-fiction" setting in mind, based on solar system exploration and colonisation, with plenty of space stations, but I feel unable to just dismiss brewing questions.
Can anyone more aknowledged in fluid mechanics, biology, microgravity cinetics or space engeneering that I am share their insights on the matter?
Oh, it's not often that I read something sensible on the role of criminal justice on the Internet. Granted, I see by your sig that you're a lawyer. Myself, I'm just a layman interested in the matter. Who keeps telling himself he should finally get around to read Beccaria.
It can only be used as such as a funny intellectual exercise. It really isn't convenient for anything else than transforming XML documents into something else (including, but not limited to, other XML documents).
Or rather, to make it fulfill its purpose, you have sometimes to consider XSLT as a functional language. It rarely happens, but I had once to convert a DBDesigner file into a set of HTML entity documentations, and if I hadn't been taught in CAML and functional programming fifteen years ago, I'd likely have been stumped on that problem.
But devicing an XML syntax to be considered a full-blown programming language that isn't specifically designed to handle XML structures? Unless it's toying around with theories, it sounds like a waste of time to me.
Actually, for everyone outside USA and Canada, the relevant company is Facebook Ireland Ltd. Which means it falls under the Irish Data Protection Act, and the EU/46/95 Directive, whichever protects private persons the most.
Facebook may actually take a huge blow in this affair. Its case is pretty much impossible to exculpate.
XML is very useful as an unified markup language. I'm fond of its versatility, relative legibility, and yeah, the various applications that are made to apply to itself especially Schema and XSLT. But it's not relevant to everything, and theres a fad to use it even where it's stupid.
Some times ago, in GNU/Linux Magazine France, someone who signed "Jean-Pierre Troll" wrote an article to protest against the tendancy to put XML everywhere. He for example rightfully shot down XML as a programming language, and as a way to carry binary data. Even for the transmission of structured text data, JSON is a better solution in most cases.
Said Jean-Pierre Troll wrote that the best reason to use XML is to be able to transform the data with XSLT. I tend to agree. If this possibility is not to be considered, then XML may not be the best solution.
The above AC is talking about RequestPolicy. I specify because it took me nearly 30 seconds to figure out that the subject of the first sentence had been misplaced as the comment subject, for some reason.
Are you being deliberately obtuse, or did you just hope no one would click on your link and notice you totally misrepresented what the article is about?
It's an article about addons that only work with Firefox 4, written back in February when it was the fresh version, to give examples of the new capabilities of the browser. What the fuck does this have to do with standard compliance and compatibility of websites? If you had an example of, say, a website that would require a specific Firefox add-on to work, that would be relevant to the discussion. The article you linked mentions nothing like that.
Then there is that pesky Chrome License which is, - wait, MORE permissive than Firefox's!!!
Come on! This BSD vs. GPL debate is getting old...
I have no problem with browsers stealing features from one another as Nightingale seems to lament.
Where the hell have you seen him lament about that? That would be completely contradictory to everything Mozilla stands for!
Their revenue is already on the rise. It's just that they want more control over all the channels, in order to maximize profit even more in the future. Plus, people trying something before buying it is not necessarily something they like.
Actually, since you couldn't know for certain that your post would be first before you had posted it, it was in a quantum state of being first and not-first until you collapsed its wave function by posting it.
(3) The requirement for governments to terminate contracts with any businesses involved in breaches more than n number of times (actually, I'd prefer no public-private partnerships on IT work whatever, but simply requiring competent contractors would go a great way toward this).
There's a specific provision in German constitution that permits that a German citizen is extradited, through very strict processes, but it's possible. It's indeed unlike just about every European country. It's a legacy of post WWII, to allow for German war criminals to be extraded and judged.
Most other European countries simply don't extradite their citizens (I'm not sure about the UK, actually: does it extradite its subjects or does it just wait for the CIA to kidnap them?) AND they don't extradite anyone to a risk of death sentence. I don't know how it's handled by other European countries, but in the case of France it means a promise has to be made by the head of the Public Ministry of the American state involved, that the accused won't be sentenced to death, for someone to be extradited by France to the USA.
Just a promise? Yeah, just a promise. Between allied countries, and maybe even stronger: a promise between lawyers. Contrary to honor among thieves, honor among lawyers does exist. It's even enforced, everywhere lawyers exist. And if that promise was broken ONCE, that would mean extraditions couldn't happen anymore without VERY VERY complicated negociations, which would probably imply, on the part of France, to require that the sentencing would be commuted to life imprisonment - which would certainly be granted. So the State's head of Public Ministry (I don't know if this position is called the same in all the states of the Union, hence my use of this purely function-descriptive wording) would just have embarrassed his governor, who could retaliate by attacking him about his lack of reliability, which would honestly be a fair criticism. An the result would just be an international crisis, an in-state clash, a fair amount of criticism from the lawyer community. And that prosecutor wouldn't even get the human sacrifice he so insisted to have pronounced. Totally not worth it. For anyone.
There's also the case of federal pursuits. Honestly, I'm not sur how it works, but I guess it's roughly the same. American lawyers are even more fond of consistency than European ones.
Why did I only mentioned the USA in what precedes? Because as far as I know, the USA is the only place in the whole world that applies death penalty that can be actually trusted to not apply it if asked politely.
Slashdot Mirror
It all amounts to how relevant the questions are.
For example, marital status is irrelevant on any job I can think of off the top of my head, and any job applicant who'd be asked about that one should be free to answer "FUCK YOU". Unfortunately, it means they are ultimately free to be unemployed. Freedom is tricky.
And since most /. readers are American, I feel useful to specify that yeah, this post is 80% sarcastic.
1. The word "felony" is a technical word from US law that has a very specific meaning, and one which refers to a distinction most other countries do not (any longer) make.
Actually, even though France's penal system is very different from USA's one, it has a roughly equivalent distinction.
Two important things to know before I elaborate:
In French penal system, there's this thing called "la classification tripartite des infractions", which can be translated as "the three-parts categorization of crimes" (I'm not sure there's a formal equivalent in the English legalese for Common Law systems). Here we meet our first false friend: the French word infraction is the generic term for penal offences, like "crime" in English. By ascending order of seriousness, and liability, there are:
I find it pecularlly puzzling.that TFA speak of "new EU privacy laws". No such thing is involved. No new law. Nothing new about it. Privacy laws have been around, EU wise, for about twenty years. US companies are allowed to make business online in the EU/ provided they comply to the Safe Harbor Principles. The real point is that the enforcement( of the Safe Harbor Principles has been inexistant for too long. The only change, the only newsworthy thing, is that some people managed to formulate a case for the public ministry to have a look at it. Oh, and that there's such a thing as an EU public ministry.
If you look up the notion of moral right you may end up discovering who is to blame in this kind of shit.
I take the opportunity of answering your post to mention in passing that I love your sig.
More to the point, I think most people don't quite realize that IP rights aren't fundamental rights. They are instrumental rights based on a compromise.
Since I'm French, I'll make a distinction between patrimonial rights and moral right. In France, and in most European countries, IP rights are divided between two distinct sets. Patrimonial rights, which set the base of the rules about how the use of works of the mind should be remunerated: thanks to Disney, these rights apply in France until 70 years after the death of the author. And then there's the moral right of an author, which is inalienable and eternal. It implies that, in their lifetime, authors may oppose the use of their works in fashions they deem inappropriate. Like, having it used in meetings of a party they despise or hate. (Tell me if I'm wrong, but from my side of the Pond, it seems that in the USA an author has no right to complain about the use of his works as long as he's got properly paid).
On top of that, there are related rights, which complicate the matter.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Which form and wording are based on the French "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" - the draft of which, put out by La Fayette, was strongly influenced by Virginia''s constitution - copying rules!) mentions intellectual property rights, in a wording aimed to protect the authors; but quite unspecific about the remuneration scheme.
I see plenty of people made jokes about this piece of news. And it's okay: I'm fond of awful puns myself.
Before going to the point, I'll just mention there's an Alsacian brewery called Meteor.
My point is about microgravity, and how it could affect brewing and winemaking. But since, despite being French, I don't know much about winemaking, I'll stick to brewing (a matter in which I've been taught by distinguished Belgian amateurs).
As any beer amateur knows, most beers basically fall into two categories, commonly called "ales" and "lagers". Ales are brewed in warm temperatures, using yeasts that tend to go from the bottom to the top of the mash-tub (Saccharomyces cervesiae). It's commonly called "high fermentation". Lagers are brewed in cool temperatures, using yeasts that tend to from the top to the bottom of the mash-tub (Saccharomyces uvarum). It's commonly called "low fermentation". Aside from those two, there are also various kinds of "spontaneous fermentations", performed by wild yeasts, the most famous of them being Brettanomyces lambicus and Brettanomyces bruxellensis, which give the Belgian lambic beers.
And my question is: how would any of this work in micro-gravity?
Another question is: how would it work in a centrifugal artificial gravity? How does Coriolis currents affect contained fluids, and how would it affect brewing?
I'm asking those questions because I've got a "hard science-fiction" setting in mind, based on solar system exploration and colonisation, with plenty of space stations, but I feel unable to just dismiss brewing questions.
Can anyone more aknowledged in fluid mechanics, biology, microgravity cinetics or space engeneering that I am share their insights on the matter?
Sure, if you count steganography as hacking. Which is arguable, but defendable.
Oh, it's not often that I read something sensible on the role of criminal justice on the Internet. Granted, I see by your sig that you're a lawyer. Myself, I'm just a layman interested in the matter. Who keeps telling himself he should finally get around to read Beccaria.
Seriously, not only did he set the bases of modern astronomy, but he still discovers planets 381 years after his death.
Ah, yeah, how could I have forgotten dear ol' Marcus Cole and his weird philosophical streaks?
I don't remember for certain which character voiced this. Wasn't it G'Kar? It sound like his kind of stuff.
Astrology or geomancy, maybe?
And butter. How could I forget butter? I'm losing a lot of Breton creds on this one...
Galettes flipping, even. And theres no such thing as maple syrup. Honey and apples all the way!
It can only be used as such as a funny intellectual exercise. It really isn't convenient for anything else than transforming XML documents into something else (including, but not limited to, other XML documents).
Or rather, to make it fulfill its purpose, you have sometimes to consider XSLT as a functional language. It rarely happens, but I had once to convert a DBDesigner file into a set of HTML entity documentations, and if I hadn't been taught in CAML and functional programming fifteen years ago, I'd likely have been stumped on that problem.
But devicing an XML syntax to be considered a full-blown programming language that isn't specifically designed to handle XML structures? Unless it's toying around with theories, it sounds like a waste of time to me.
Actually, for everyone outside USA and Canada, the relevant company is Facebook Ireland Ltd. Which means it falls under the Irish Data Protection Act, and the EU/46/95 Directive, whichever protects private persons the most.
Facebook may actually take a huge blow in this affair. Its case is pretty much impossible to exculpate.
XML is very useful as an unified markup language. I'm fond of its versatility, relative legibility, and yeah, the various applications that are made to apply to itself especially Schema and XSLT. But it's not relevant to everything, and theres a fad to use it even where it's stupid.
Some times ago, in GNU/Linux Magazine France, someone who signed "Jean-Pierre Troll" wrote an article to protest against the tendancy to put XML everywhere. He for example rightfully shot down XML as a programming language, and as a way to carry binary data. Even for the transmission of structured text data, JSON is a better solution in most cases.
Said Jean-Pierre Troll wrote that the best reason to use XML is to be able to transform the data with XSLT. I tend to agree. If this possibility is not to be considered, then XML may not be the best solution.
Nope, same here. Even though I had heard about the guy.
The above AC is talking about RequestPolicy. I specify because it took me nearly 30 seconds to figure out that the subject of the first sentence had been misplaced as the comment subject, for some reason.
Yeah, seriously, finding it was annoying as hell. I really really hope the job of whoever wrote this summary has nothing to do with user interfaces.
What about all the Firefox specific pages out there?
That's a pretty bold accusation. First time I ever heard of something like that. Do you have any example?
Or the addons that ONLY work with Firefox?
Are you being deliberately obtuse, or did you just hope no one would click on your link and notice you totally misrepresented what the article is about? It's an article about addons that only work with Firefox 4, written back in February when it was the fresh version, to give examples of the new capabilities of the browser. What the fuck does this have to do with standard compliance and compatibility of websites? If you had an example of, say, a website that would require a specific Firefox add-on to work, that would be relevant to the discussion. The article you linked mentions nothing like that.
Then there is that pesky Chrome License which is, - wait, MORE permissive than Firefox's!!!
Come on! This BSD vs. GPL debate is getting old...
I have no problem with browsers stealing features from one another as Nightingale seems to lament.
Where the hell have you seen him lament about that? That would be completely contradictory to everything Mozilla stands for!
Their revenue is already on the rise. It's just that they want more control over all the channels, in order to maximize profit even more in the future. Plus, people trying something before buying it is not necessarily something they like.
Actually, since you couldn't know for certain that your post would be first before you had posted it, it was in a quantum state of being first and not-first until you collapsed its wave function by posting it.
Or something like that...
(3) The requirement for governments to terminate contracts with any businesses involved in breaches more than n number of times (actually, I'd prefer no public-private partnerships on IT work whatever, but simply requiring competent contractors would go a great way toward this).
Just make it n=0 and I agree with you.
There's a specific provision in German constitution that permits that a German citizen is extradited, through very strict processes, but it's possible. It's indeed unlike just about every European country. It's a legacy of post WWII, to allow for German war criminals to be extraded and judged.
Most other European countries simply don't extradite their citizens (I'm not sure about the UK, actually: does it extradite its subjects or does it just wait for the CIA to kidnap them?) AND they don't extradite anyone to a risk of death sentence. I don't know how it's handled by other European countries, but in the case of France it means a promise has to be made by the head of the Public Ministry of the American state involved, that the accused won't be sentenced to death, for someone to be extradited by France to the USA.
Just a promise? Yeah, just a promise. Between allied countries, and maybe even stronger: a promise between lawyers. Contrary to honor among thieves, honor among lawyers does exist. It's even enforced, everywhere lawyers exist. And if that promise was broken ONCE, that would mean extraditions couldn't happen anymore without VERY VERY complicated negociations, which would probably imply, on the part of France, to require that the sentencing would be commuted to life imprisonment - which would certainly be granted. So the State's head of Public Ministry (I don't know if this position is called the same in all the states of the Union, hence my use of this purely function-descriptive wording) would just have embarrassed his governor, who could retaliate by attacking him about his lack of reliability, which would honestly be a fair criticism. An the result would just be an international crisis, an in-state clash, a fair amount of criticism from the lawyer community. And that prosecutor wouldn't even get the human sacrifice he so insisted to have pronounced. Totally not worth it. For anyone.
There's also the case of federal pursuits. Honestly, I'm not sur how it works, but I guess it's roughly the same. American lawyers are even more fond of consistency than European ones.
Why did I only mentioned the USA in what precedes? Because as far as I know, the USA is the only place in the whole world that applies death penalty that can be actually trusted to not apply it if asked politely.