Is there no such thing in the US as a vexatious litigant? I think we have that in the UK for people who continually file court cases without merit. Of course, not being a lawyer, I don't know the finer points of when someone actually becomes vexatious.
Perhaps some proportion of the cases have to finish before this type of judgement can be made.
>I'm going to get flamed for this I know, but the odds of any moderators coming from any of the Six is unlikely so I should be ok.
Wrong there. I live and work in Liverpool. It's certainly not perfect, but it's getting much better - and yes - we do have broadband. I'm not from Liverpool originally, so I wouldn't say that I'm particularly biased about the city, but in many respects I rather live in Liverpool than in many other cities in the UK.
What about the bad areas of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Newcastle and even York? They're certainly no better than Liverpool.
I will admit to having driven through some parts of Liverpool with the doors locked, though.
A fantastic film - even with an appearance by Burt Lancaster. The film has a lighthearted, understated sense of humour, combined with an evocative Mark Knoppfler soundtrack. And - all the locals are nutters......
We played with blitz for a while - blindingly fast, however the thing that surprised me was that the size of the compiled binary for adding two 6 x6 matrices together and printing the answer on the console came to over 1MB. This was a while ago, granted, but it surprised me......
The day that something like this stops academic freedom to publish, there's something wrong. Surely academic freedom of speech has to take precedence over commercial consideration; In the case of National security, maybe this type of behaviour can be justified, but not in this case.
I hope the authors publish abroad in a country where the copyright laws are more reasonable.
This is always a tricky one. I work as an admin in an engineering department of a british university. Much of the stem of these problems are due to the fact that when people have "unlimited" access to the network, they tend to use it in ways that stress the network to the limit, or go beyond the terms of acceptable use. One showcase in point occured recently within our department, when two PCs in one room were accounting for one quarter of the whole University bandwith!! Needless to say, the work was not academic - playstation CD images and MP3s. Several abuses of the kind have resulted in a set of new guidelines being introduced, which go as far as to say that machines should not be networked unless absolutely necessary, and that students are not allowed to admin machines any more.
I don't know what the case is for American Universities, but nowadays in Britain, the Unis are coming under tighter and tighter financial restraints. Many universities probably don't mind too much about people using the available bandwidth in moderation, but these kind of abuses of the priviledge (and it is a priviledge to use to the Uni network for non-academic purposes), make it impossible to justify why free access should be given when there is no (financial) need for it -especially when cash-constricted departments are having to bear the cost of non academic browsing, without having money available to pay for it - which was less of a problem in the older days, when money was flowing more freely within the universities, and general network usage was lower.....
Try to understand the awkward position that many of these universities are in in this respect. Often, it not necessarily the desire to curtail the usage of the network out of badness that is the problem, but external influences such as cost and protecting themselves from prosecution, which the Universities don't have to resources to meet.
I think that you would find that Scotland (where Bell was born) has been a predominantly Protestant country for several hundred years. The area of Scotland in which Bell was born is not even an area with strong Catholic leanings, and as to any mention about repressive catholic church; the catholic church had NO significant hold over society on the east coast of scotland. If anything, the situation is the opposite; the strong influence at that time was from the Scottish presbyterian church, NOT the Catholic. Other parts of Europe may have been subject to stronger levels of influence by the catholic church, but I can assure you that Britain, and in particular Scotland were NOT (no offence implied or meant to the Catholic church here....).
During the period in which Bell was alive, the British government tended to allow private enterprise on the same sort of level as enjoyed in the US presently. Any products that were "nationalised", as you put it, were used by the government by placing contracts with the relevant companies. The nationalising of industries in the UK only happened in the 20th centry, firstly in times of war, and then, post WW2, on a full time basis, as the country tried to recover from the war.
Most of the reasons for emmigration from Scotland were due in main to the terrible poverty that existed in the early parts of the 18/19th century, as the country made the transition from from a predominantly agrarian nation to an industrialised one. The compensation issue is complete rubbish. Often the reason for emmigration was either forced, or because the landowner in question found it was cheaper to pay for emmigration of his clients, than try and support them through times of drought, etc.....
If you're going to use flame-bait, at least make it plausible.......
I used to work for a company that makes the pumps used by the Guiness brewery in Dublin. We make pumps for the oil industry as, well, which have to be extremely corrosion resistant - because of the environment they work in, and what they're pumping; well - we used to get a year's work out of the oil pumps - but the guiness pumps (which were built to basically the same spec) would only last 3 months! The guiness dissolves the pumps! So, your pint of guiness contains rather a lot of stainless steel particles...... Always made me a bit wary of drinking the stuff after that though........
I live in Glasgow, the UK city mentioned in the article. We have had the cameras here for several years now, and the city is in certain respects, much better for it. The city centre is now a safe place to go in the evenings; you know that if there is a problem, then within around one to three minutes, there will be a police car or van on the scene. The number of city centre stabbings has decreased drastically. 5 years ago, you would not think about walking around the city alone, late at night. In this respect, the cameras have been a great advantage, as Glasgow is now a much more enjoyable place to live in.
One of the other posters mentioned that many of the problems had moved to peripheral areas as a result of the cameras. This is also unfortunately true, but at the same time, the scale of the problem has been reduced significantly. It is much easier to reduce the crime when it acts in small pockets rather than in one centralised area. Using community policing in these areas (using methods that have been developed in the US), has been successful in reducing the crime further. I think that if you asked people in Glasgow, the majority would approve of the cameras. The city centre has been handed back to the decent people, and taken away from the gangs.
There are certainly privacy issues at stake in this sort of situation. The cameras in Glasgow would appear (thus far) to have been used responsibly. The cameras are situated in a police control room, that has access to the emergency services. If they started being used for other purposes, obviously, then that becomes a problem.
The poster who mentioned that the camera fosters a sense of responsibility is right. The reason that less crime happens in the city centre is because the gangs are afraid of being caught. In that respect, it is one of the biggest deterrents available, without resorting to Draconian laws. Whatever action you take to kerb crime, then there is always a degree of compromise between the right to personal freedom and privacy, and the right to live in a safe environment. I would rather live under the scrutiny of a camera, than live in a police state.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there no such thing in the US as a vexatious litigant? I think we have that in the UK for people who continually file court cases without merit. Of course, not being a lawyer, I don't know the finer points of when someone actually becomes vexatious.
Perhaps some proportion of the cases have to finish before this type of judgement can be made.
Can anyone say anything more about this??
Wrong there. I live and work in Liverpool. It's certainly not perfect, but it's getting much better - and yes - we do have broadband. I'm not from Liverpool originally, so I wouldn't say that I'm particularly biased about the city, but in many respects I rather live in Liverpool than in many other cities in the UK.
What about the bad areas of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Newcastle and even York? They're certainly no better than Liverpool.
I will admit to having driven through some parts of Liverpool with the doors locked, though.
Definitely Heath Robinson - his contraptions from the 20's and 30's were a very similar style, and almost equally complex in some cases...
A fantastic film - even with an appearance by Burt Lancaster. The film has a lighthearted, understated sense of humour, combined with an evocative Mark Knoppfler soundtrack. And - all the locals are nutters......
We played with blitz for a while - blindingly fast, however the thing that surprised me was that the size of the compiled binary for adding two 6 x6 matrices together and printing the answer on the console came to over 1MB. This was a while ago, granted, but it surprised me......
The day that something like this stops academic freedom to publish, there's something wrong. Surely academic freedom of speech has to take precedence over commercial consideration; In the case of National security, maybe this type of behaviour can be justified, but not in this case.
I hope the authors publish abroad in a country where the copyright laws are more reasonable.
I don't know what the case is for American Universities, but nowadays in Britain, the Unis are coming under tighter and tighter financial restraints. Many universities probably don't mind too much about people using the available bandwidth in moderation, but these kind of abuses of the priviledge (and it is a priviledge to use to the Uni network for non-academic purposes), make it impossible to justify why free access should be given when there is no (financial) need for it -especially when cash-constricted departments are having to bear the cost of non academic browsing, without having money available to pay for it - which was less of a problem in the older days, when money was flowing more freely within the universities, and general network usage was lower.....
Try to understand the awkward position that many of these universities are in in this respect. Often, it not necessarily the desire to curtail the usage of the network out of badness that is the problem, but external influences such as cost and protecting themselves from prosecution, which the Universities don't have to resources to meet.
The specifications pages says that it supports any LPD enabled printer. Does this not count as linux support??
I think that you would find that Scotland (where Bell was born) has been a predominantly Protestant country for several hundred years. The area of Scotland in which Bell was born is not even an area with strong Catholic leanings, and as to any mention about repressive catholic church; the catholic church had NO significant hold over society on the east coast of scotland. If anything, the situation is the opposite; the strong influence at that time was from the Scottish presbyterian church, NOT the Catholic. Other parts of Europe may have been subject to stronger levels of influence by the catholic church, but I can assure you that Britain, and in particular Scotland were NOT (no offence implied or meant to the Catholic church here....).
During the period in which Bell was alive, the British government tended to allow private enterprise on the same sort of level as enjoyed in the US presently. Any products that were "nationalised", as you put it, were used by the government by placing contracts with the relevant companies. The nationalising of industries in the UK only happened in the 20th centry, firstly in times of war, and then, post WW2, on a full time basis, as the country tried to recover from the war.
Most of the reasons for emmigration from Scotland were due in main to the terrible poverty that existed in the early parts of the 18/19th century, as the country made the transition from from a predominantly agrarian nation to an industrialised one. The compensation issue is complete rubbish. Often the reason for emmigration was either forced, or because the landowner in question found it was cheaper to pay for emmigration of his clients, than try and support them through times of drought, etc.....
If you're going to use flame-bait, at least make it plausible.......
I used to work for a company that makes the pumps used by the Guiness brewery in Dublin. We make pumps for the oil industry as, well, which have to be extremely corrosion resistant - because of the environment they work in, and what they're pumping; well - we used to get a year's work out of the oil pumps - but the guiness pumps (which were built to basically the same spec) would only last 3 months! The guiness dissolves the pumps! So, your pint of guiness contains rather a lot of stainless steel particles...... Always made me a bit wary of drinking the stuff after that though........
I live in Glasgow, the UK city mentioned in the article. We have had the cameras here for several years now, and the city is in certain respects, much better for it. The city centre is now a safe place to go in the evenings; you know that if there is a problem, then within around one to three minutes, there will be a police car or van on the scene. The number of city centre stabbings has decreased drastically. 5 years ago, you would not think about walking around the city alone, late at night. In this respect, the cameras have been a great advantage, as Glasgow is now a much more enjoyable place to live in.
One of the other posters mentioned that many of the problems had moved to peripheral areas as a result of the cameras. This is also unfortunately true, but at the same time, the scale of the problem has been reduced significantly. It is much easier to reduce the crime when it acts in small pockets rather than in one centralised area. Using community policing in these areas (using methods that have been developed in the US), has been successful in reducing the crime further. I think that if you asked people in Glasgow, the majority would approve of the cameras. The city centre has been handed back to the decent people, and taken away from the gangs.
There are certainly privacy issues at stake in this sort of situation. The cameras in Glasgow would appear (thus far) to have been used responsibly. The cameras are situated in a police control room, that has access to the emergency services. If they started being used for other purposes, obviously, then that becomes a problem.
The poster who mentioned that the camera fosters a sense of responsibility is right. The reason that less crime happens in the city centre is because the gangs are afraid of being caught. In that respect, it is one of the biggest deterrents available, without resorting to Draconian laws. Whatever action you take to kerb crime, then there is always a degree of compromise between the right to personal freedom and privacy, and the right to live in a safe environment. I would rather live under the scrutiny of a camera, than live in a police state.
Bawheid