The legislative provisisons cited above contain the specific law that applies to the use of patented inventions by the Crown and its agencies, and can be found on ComLaw.
Oh, and to all those IANALs blabbing about sovereign immunity: go and get an education. The State and its major agencies (the legislature, courts of record, and the Crown or ministers exercising the prerogative powers of the Crown) are immune in the exercise of the particular powers that are or were traditionally exercised by the sovereign (e.g. enacting legislation, issuing judgments in legal disputes, or declaring war), but that doesn't give any government official (including the person in whom the personality of the Crown is currently vested) licence to go around killing, maiming, looting, etc, as if they were above the law.
No. I'm saying it would be better if the United Nations didn't have to ask the governments of its members whether it's okay to fart or not. To say that this takes the Nations out of the United Nations is like saying that the fact that the President or members of Congress don't have to ask the governments of the States what to do and obey them without question takes the States out of the United States.
OT: The UN didn't appoint Sudan to the HRC, the UN member states who had the right to vote appointed Sudan.
The UN gets the bad rep it has precisely because it is captive to the will of its members, most notably the five permanent members of the Security Council with their right of veto. The UN will only ever be able to accomplish its mission if it is given some measure of independence from national governments, but the current US administration (and just about any other conceivable US administration as well) will never allow that.
He can't be charged with fraud for precisely the reasons you've outlined. Fraud is essentially defined as a wilful or reckless misrepresentation made with intent to obtain some benefit, and as you pointed out it's been established that there was no misrepresentation on the evidence.
The duty of confidence is a personal duty, like a contractual duty, and does not create a proprietary interest in the information in relation to which the duty is owed. The information therefore can't be stolen in the legal sense, but still gives the entity to whom the duty is owed the right to sue for compensation.
Of course if the information can be defined as intellectual property then that's different and can now attract criminal sanction.
Out of interest, from which statute is that provision sourced? Dismissal of a claim for failure to state facts on which it could be based sounds like civil, rather than criminal, procedure.
They might have a certain kind of status as police horses which allows for a distinction to be made in relation to offences against animals generally, but it's not the same as the status an officer would have and any rank it possessed would likely be purely ceremonial. A police horse has no powers of arrest (although, of course, it could never be sued for exerting unreasonable force against a member of the public).
In any event, it's a hypothetical scenario. I was going to use pot plants for my illustration instead, except I felt that horses made a slightly more plausible scenario and I couldn't help thinking about the story of Caligula making his horse a senator.
You have to understand that conferring a rank is an executive act and does not constitute a conclusive declaration of the applicable law, which is an exercise of judicial power.
The situation is a little complicated since Starfleet, like other military organizations, runs its own courts martial. To simplify things, consider if Data were an officer in a civilian police force whose operation is subject ultimately to the control of the civilian courts. To get in, he would have to be duly sworn and appointed by an appropriate officer of the relevant agency. That officer would have the power to appoint people, but the power would not extend to appointing, say, horses. Any attempt to appoint a horse would be legally meaningless and the horse's status in law would not change, regardless of whether said horse was treated by its supposed colleagues and superiors as having all the benefits and privileges of rank and its antecedent requirement of legal personality. So too it would be with Data or any other AI: the executive does not declare the law through the exercise of its ordinary or inherent functions, even when a person tries to hold the executive to that interpretation in a later dispute.
Like I say, Starfleet runs its own courts, and I'm not an expert on military law so I can't say whether the same separation of powers exists. There's no reason why it shouldn't, and the episode certainly isn't legally senseless.
More importantly, have all services been restarted to take account of upgrades to libraries and other packages on which they depend? It's all very well having a package management system that'll restart a service when the package that provides that service is upgraded, but what about when a security hole in something important (like libc) is patched and you duly upgrade, but all your daemons and services are still using the old library image they were linked against when the service was last started?
And a lot of those genes and proteins are basically junk - stuff we needed previously, say one million years ago, or farther back, but no longer necessary now.
That's not correct. The term "gene" refers to regions that can be potentially transcribed only. Non-coding regions (so-called junk DNA) doesn't count, although if you include control sequences then that affects the genomic complexity calculations people have been making in other threads.
I'm not entirely surprised that we have a comparable number of genes, or even a genome that's nearly identical with that of other organisms. All animal species are made up of the same basic types of cells that carry out the same basic functions, so it makes sense that a significant portion of the genome would be similar. The main differences seem to be in the distribution of the various kinds of tissue.
Neither would I, but unfortunately laws of physics matter more than your or my personal desires. Shielding is costly and quite often impractical, especially when the equipment is designed to be sensitive to the natural, low-intensity electric fields the body produces. Medical equipment is usually delicate by design, not by omission.
That's nice, but the consumer can't assume that risk on behalf of the rest of the community. I wouldn't want to see people dying due to, e.g., interference with medical equipment caused by somebody's grey MP3 player. EMI affects everybody, not just the customer.
There is a constitutional protection for speech, but only for political speech (or "political communication" as it's referred to in the cases). Whether this law adversely affects political speech is an open question.
Just because you have a power doesn't mean you have the ability to hand that power over to another person. The US Constitution is, AFAIK, silent on the issue of whether Congress can delegate its power to declare war. Public officials or bodies charged to carry out such important and solemn constitutional duties shouldn't be allowed to pass the buck so easily.
It shouldn't take an 8 year degree to understand your rights.
8 years? I got through law school in 3 years. The only reason it would take 8 is because in some places law is a graduate degree requiring admission to a non-law degree first, but if you say so...
Throwing latin and difficult wording into the mix is not conducive to self-defense.
So you never, ever use jargon in your professional life? Lawyers use obscure terms for the same reason as any other professional: economy of communication. There's no reason why the law cannot be explained in simple terms, but most lawbooks are written by professionals for other professionals. There are books and reference works available (usually through your local public library) that target the lay audience. Perhaps you should try those.
There are initiatives within the profession to try and make the law more accessible. Every time you see an interview on this site from a practitioner or academic lawyer is an example, and you can usually find a few legal education events you could attend if you look hard enough. The professional associations in your jurisdiction might be a good place to start.
And if you really want to make the law simpler, start lobbying your local politicians to stop constantly pumping out volumes of bloated, complicated legislation. Tell them to let the common law work its magic, or to at least sit down and think about what they want to do before rushing to legislate just so they can be seen to be doing something.
You could also make the claim that an operating system or programming language is arbitrarily complex. This is true, but in most cases those systems have been adapted to try and provide the best and simplest possible solutions for their respective problem domains. So it is also with law: the conficts created in modern human communities are complicated, and the law that governs those communities and tries to resolve those conflicts is also complicated.
Your claim that physics is defined by observable natural phenomenon is also only partially true. Physics is also defined by the models used to analyze and predict the behaviour of physical systems. The model has been improved over the years, e.g. with the invention of calculus or topology or other novel mathematical techniques, sometimes making physics simpler than previously thought possible.
The statement that there is no known way to make physics simpler could therefore apply equally well to law, and leads on to my own view on the matter: finding new and better ways to solve problems with formal or semi-formal systems is hard, and maybe impossible in some cases. The parent poster's assertion that law is overly complicated due to malice, incompetence, or recklessness is unjustified on the basis of the evidence he provided to support it.
Your assertion that law could be simpler is just that, an assertion, and you haven't bothered to support it with fact or logic. In respect of some areas of law I agree with it, in others I don't. Convince me.
<paraphrase>But I'm more than a little frustrated that a book like $foo For Dummies is necessary. It speaks volumes about the current state of computing. The reason computers are complex is that big corporations who have no interest in their users' needs and programmers are too lazy and inconsiderate to create simple, flexible interfaces that Aunt Tillie can pick up in five seconds flat.</paraphrase>
Seriously, exactly how does the fact that non-lawyers need a book on the application of the law to open source issues lead to the conclusion that the law is unnecessarily complex? By the same reasoning, physics is unnecessarily complex because you need an engineering degree to get a good understanding of how Newton's laws govern the behaviour of real-world systems.
Law is like mathematics: you have a set of basic principles that are fairly simple on their own, but which need to be developed into quite complex structures in order to be useful in a large number of situations. In this example, the basic principle is: the person who creates the code has the right to say how it's used. The complexity comes simply from the fact that lots of people are involved and the law gives them all a say in how their work should be used.
Simplicity is a fine thing, but over-simplification should be considered harmful.
The problem is that video doesn't give the jury quite the same opportunty to see the body language, mannerisms and other non-verbal cues of the witness as they get from being physically present while the witness gives testimony. Video can be used in certain circumstances, but you have to have a good reason.
My problem with e-courts generally is the same problem that people here have with electronic voting: the current court procedure is a white box where everybody in the court can see everything that happens, while in an electronic court there's no guarantee that everybody's seeing the same document on their screen. Court procedure has worked on a no-trust basis for quite some time; it would be a shame to see that go out the window for the sake of expediency.
That'll protect against most, but not all, buffer overflows. What it won't protect against are attacks that overwrite the stack and then write a return address to code that'll treat what's on the stack as arguments that make it do something nasty.
Note that these attacks are only guaranteed to succeed if the attacker has access to the same binary as you. Building your own binaries with an obscure compiler (or at least different compiler options) may be of assistance here.
IIRC Intel has always built execute protection into its IA32 processors, unless these contained a bug that caused them to ignore the state of a page's execute flag?
Ha, that reminds me of the practice my old criminal law lecturer had of running a sequence from Home Alone and getting us to spot all the offences committed as an alleged teaching exercise.
One thing I forgot: I mentioned in other posts that firms seem to have specialist or custom systems to automate common tasks. What I was getting at was that staff already have to learn all sorts of weird commands. At one firm I worked with there were all sorts of strange keyboard macros grafted onto MS Word with VBA that you had to use to, for example, create a new document from the precedents system, or even just to print a document (there was, for example, a dedicated "print letter" function that printed a copy of the document on letterhead to be sent out and another on plain green paper for the file). Oddly enough, they seemed to like it that way. If you set up your secretary's.emacs so that she only has to memorize a few special keystrokes for common tasks, there should be no problem.
LyX is good as a word processor, but I don't know how it holds up to custom LaTeX styles. I don't believe it does well at all, though I would hope to be wrong here.
It's a pain to set up new classes, LyX needs a class file of its own to go with each document class, but once it's done it's done.
And what would be wrong with teaching them Emacs. Better than teaching them vi;p. A lot of the tedious typing of TeX commands could be replaced with macros, and Emacs comes with a fairly nice graphical front-end for X nowadays. I also know of at least one graphical LaTeX editor.
At any rate, most clerical staff who work for law firms seem to have to learn at least one specialist system in addition to their general office suite skills, so we're not replacing their learning curve with a cliff here.
The real challenge is database integration (see some of my other posts in this discussion for more). If we do that, then we've got a winning solution. You might also want to check out Debian-Lex, a project to make a "legally aware" distribution of Debian, and which I first heard of in this discussion.
The reason I grouped by document and then by jurisdiction is that it would make adding a jurisdiction to a document type easier - in essence, for jurisdictions that are procedurally similar enough, I see the jurisdiction as acting like a stylesheet.
This works for general classes of documents that are similar across all jurisdictions (e.g. originating process) but when you get down to the nitty-gritty, most jurisdictions do at least something differently that requires a new class of docment or a substantial alteration to an existing class. As an example, your example of the amicus brief doesn't even exist in my jurisdiction (Queensland, Australia) despite the fact that the United States and Australia are both common law countries. Even in Australia there are differences: class actions only exist in the state of Victoria and in the Federal Court, and the process for appealing to the High Court is different from the process for appealing to the State or Federal Courts of Appeal, which is diffeent again from appealing to the District (or County) Court from decisions of the Magistrates Court. There are better examples, the intricacies of procedure are myriad and subtle, they're just the ones I could think of off the top of my head.
For example, a "memo" would have to be customized per firm in the larger firms, and for a given case, it's more likely that you'll change the jurisdiction setting for a particular document than change the document type - meaning that jurisdiction is a finer-grained control level than document type.
Internal documents don't usually care about jurisdiction, a memo is a memo regardless of what kind of matter it concerns. The only way it would matter is if it dealt with a highly specialized area (e.g. family law) with its own court, jurisdiction, and process, in which case that court usually has its own specialized processes and its own set of forms.
I agree with your last point about LaTeX being better, but you will be using a typist because it's generally quicker to dictate than to type, and most large firms will be set up so that you spend all your time at your desk doing productive work instead of busywork, e.g. thinking about what should be said rather than just typing it out. Either that, or you'll be farming out most of the drafting to a paralegal or clerk.
Slashdot Mirror
Above post applies to Australia only.
The legislative provisisons cited above contain the specific law that applies to the use of patented inventions by the Crown and its agencies, and can be found on ComLaw.
Oh, and to all those IANALs blabbing about sovereign immunity: go and get an education. The State and its major agencies (the legislature, courts of record, and the Crown or ministers exercising the prerogative powers of the Crown) are immune in the exercise of the particular powers that are or were traditionally exercised by the sovereign (e.g. enacting legislation, issuing judgments in legal disputes, or declaring war), but that doesn't give any government official (including the person in whom the personality of the Crown is currently vested) licence to go around killing, maiming, looting, etc, as if they were above the law.
No. I'm saying it would be better if the United Nations didn't have to ask the governments of its members whether it's okay to fart or not. To say that this takes the Nations out of the United Nations is like saying that the fact that the President or members of Congress don't have to ask the governments of the States what to do and obey them without question takes the States out of the United States.
OT: The UN didn't appoint Sudan to the HRC, the UN member states who had the right to vote appointed Sudan.
The UN gets the bad rep it has precisely because it is captive to the will of its members, most notably the five permanent members of the Security Council with their right of veto. The UN will only ever be able to accomplish its mission if it is given some measure of independence from national governments, but the current US administration (and just about any other conceivable US administration as well) will never allow that.
He can't be charged with fraud for precisely the reasons you've outlined. Fraud is essentially defined as a wilful or reckless misrepresentation made with intent to obtain some benefit, and as you pointed out it's been established that there was no misrepresentation on the evidence.
The duty of confidence is a personal duty, like a contractual duty, and does not create a proprietary interest in the information in relation to which the duty is owed. The information therefore can't be stolen in the legal sense, but still gives the entity to whom the duty is owed the right to sue for compensation.
Of course if the information can be defined as intellectual property then that's different and can now attract criminal sanction.
Out of interest, from which statute is that provision sourced? Dismissal of a claim for failure to state facts on which it could be based sounds like civil, rather than criminal, procedure.
They might have a certain kind of status as police horses which allows for a distinction to be made in relation to offences against animals generally, but it's not the same as the status an officer would have and any rank it possessed would likely be purely ceremonial. A police horse has no powers of arrest (although, of course, it could never be sued for exerting unreasonable force against a member of the public).
In any event, it's a hypothetical scenario. I was going to use pot plants for my illustration instead, except I felt that horses made a slightly more plausible scenario and I couldn't help thinking about the story of Caligula making his horse a senator.
You have to understand that conferring a rank is an executive act and does not constitute a conclusive declaration of the applicable law, which is an exercise of judicial power.
The situation is a little complicated since Starfleet, like other military organizations, runs its own courts martial. To simplify things, consider if Data were an officer in a civilian police force whose operation is subject ultimately to the control of the civilian courts. To get in, he would have to be duly sworn and appointed by an appropriate officer of the relevant agency. That officer would have the power to appoint people, but the power would not extend to appointing, say, horses. Any attempt to appoint a horse would be legally meaningless and the horse's status in law would not change, regardless of whether said horse was treated by its supposed colleagues and superiors as having all the benefits and privileges of rank and its antecedent requirement of legal personality. So too it would be with Data or any other AI: the executive does not declare the law through the exercise of its ordinary or inherent functions, even when a person tries to hold the executive to that interpretation in a later dispute.
Like I say, Starfleet runs its own courts, and I'm not an expert on military law so I can't say whether the same separation of powers exists. There's no reason why it shouldn't, and the episode certainly isn't legally senseless.
And yes, IAAL.
More importantly, have all services been restarted to take account of upgrades to libraries and other packages on which they depend? It's all very well having a package management system that'll restart a service when the package that provides that service is upgraded, but what about when a security hole in something important (like libc) is patched and you duly upgrade, but all your daemons and services are still using the old library image they were linked against when the service was last started?
That's not correct. The term "gene" refers to regions that can be potentially transcribed only. Non-coding regions (so-called junk DNA) doesn't count, although if you include control sequences then that affects the genomic complexity calculations people have been making in other threads.
I'm not entirely surprised that we have a comparable number of genes, or even a genome that's nearly identical with that of other organisms. All animal species are made up of the same basic types of cells that carry out the same basic functions, so it makes sense that a significant portion of the genome would be similar. The main differences seem to be in the distribution of the various kinds of tissue.
Neither would I, but unfortunately laws of physics matter more than your or my personal desires. Shielding is costly and quite often impractical, especially when the equipment is designed to be sensitive to the natural, low-intensity electric fields the body produces. Medical equipment is usually delicate by design, not by omission.
That's nice, but the consumer can't assume that risk on behalf of the rest of the community. I wouldn't want to see people dying due to, e.g., interference with medical equipment caused by somebody's grey MP3 player. EMI affects everybody, not just the customer.
There is a constitutional protection for speech, but only for political speech (or "political communication" as it's referred to in the cases). Whether this law adversely affects political speech is an open question.
Just because you have a power doesn't mean you have the ability to hand that power over to another person. The US Constitution is, AFAIK, silent on the issue of whether Congress can delegate its power to declare war. Public officials or bodies charged to carry out such important and solemn constitutional duties shouldn't be allowed to pass the buck so easily.
It shouldn't take an 8 year degree to understand your rights.
8 years? I got through law school in 3 years. The only reason it would take 8 is because in some places law is a graduate degree requiring admission to a non-law degree first, but if you say so...
Throwing latin and difficult wording into the mix is not conducive to self-defense.
So you never, ever use jargon in your professional life? Lawyers use obscure terms for the same reason as any other professional: economy of communication. There's no reason why the law cannot be explained in simple terms, but most lawbooks are written by professionals for other professionals. There are books and reference works available (usually through your local public library) that target the lay audience. Perhaps you should try those.
There are initiatives within the profession to try and make the law more accessible. Every time you see an interview on this site from a practitioner or academic lawyer is an example, and you can usually find a few legal education events you could attend if you look hard enough. The professional associations in your jurisdiction might be a good place to start.
And if you really want to make the law simpler, start lobbying your local politicians to stop constantly pumping out volumes of bloated, complicated legislation. Tell them to let the common law work its magic, or to at least sit down and think about what they want to do before rushing to legislate just so they can be seen to be doing something.
You could also make the claim that an operating system or programming language is arbitrarily complex. This is true, but in most cases those systems have been adapted to try and provide the best and simplest possible solutions for their respective problem domains. So it is also with law: the conficts created in modern human communities are complicated, and the law that governs those communities and tries to resolve those conflicts is also complicated.
Your claim that physics is defined by observable natural phenomenon is also only partially true. Physics is also defined by the models used to analyze and predict the behaviour of physical systems. The model has been improved over the years, e.g. with the invention of calculus or topology or other novel mathematical techniques, sometimes making physics simpler than previously thought possible.
The statement that there is no known way to make physics simpler could therefore apply equally well to law, and leads on to my own view on the matter: finding new and better ways to solve problems with formal or semi-formal systems is hard, and maybe impossible in some cases. The parent poster's assertion that law is overly complicated due to malice, incompetence, or recklessness is unjustified on the basis of the evidence he provided to support it.
Your assertion that law could be simpler is just that, an assertion, and you haven't bothered to support it with fact or logic. In respect of some areas of law I agree with it, in others I don't. Convince me.
<paraphrase>But I'm more than a little frustrated that a book like $foo For Dummies is necessary. It speaks volumes about the current state of computing. The reason computers are complex is that big corporations who have no interest in their users' needs and programmers are too lazy and inconsiderate to create simple, flexible interfaces that Aunt Tillie can pick up in five seconds flat.</paraphrase>
Seriously, exactly how does the fact that non-lawyers need a book on the application of the law to open source issues lead to the conclusion that the law is unnecessarily complex? By the same reasoning, physics is unnecessarily complex because you need an engineering degree to get a good understanding of how Newton's laws govern the behaviour of real-world systems.
Law is like mathematics: you have a set of basic principles that are fairly simple on their own, but which need to be developed into quite complex structures in order to be useful in a large number of situations. In this example, the basic principle is: the person who creates the code has the right to say how it's used. The complexity comes simply from the fact that lots of people are involved and the law gives them all a say in how their work should be used.
Simplicity is a fine thing, but over-simplification should be considered harmful.
The problem is that video doesn't give the jury quite the same opportunty to see the body language, mannerisms and other non-verbal cues of the witness as they get from being physically present while the witness gives testimony. Video can be used in certain circumstances, but you have to have a good reason.
My problem with e-courts generally is the same problem that people here have with electronic voting: the current court procedure is a white box where everybody in the court can see everything that happens, while in an electronic court there's no guarantee that everybody's seeing the same document on their screen. Court procedure has worked on a no-trust basis for quite some time; it would be a shame to see that go out the window for the sake of expediency.
That'll protect against most, but not all, buffer overflows. What it won't protect against are attacks that overwrite the stack and then write a return address to code that'll treat what's on the stack as arguments that make it do something nasty.
Note that these attacks are only guaranteed to succeed if the attacker has access to the same binary as you. Building your own binaries with an obscure compiler (or at least different compiler options) may be of assistance here.
IIRC Intel has always built execute protection into its IA32 processors, unless these contained a bug that caused them to ignore the state of a page's execute flag?
Ha, that reminds me of the practice my old criminal law lecturer had of running a sequence from Home Alone and getting us to spot all the offences committed as an alleged teaching exercise.
One thing I forgot: I mentioned in other posts that firms seem to have specialist or custom systems to automate common tasks. What I was getting at was that staff already have to learn all sorts of weird commands. At one firm I worked with there were all sorts of strange keyboard macros grafted onto MS Word with VBA that you had to use to, for example, create a new document from the precedents system, or even just to print a document (there was, for example, a dedicated "print letter" function that printed a copy of the document on letterhead to be sent out and another on plain green paper for the file). Oddly enough, they seemed to like it that way. If you set up your secretary's .emacs so that she only has to memorize a few special keystrokes for common tasks, there should be no problem.
It's a pain to set up new classes, LyX needs a class file of its own to go with each document class, but once it's done it's done.
And what would be wrong with teaching them Emacs. Better than teaching them vi ;p. A lot of the tedious typing of TeX commands could be replaced with macros, and Emacs comes with a fairly nice graphical front-end for X nowadays. I also know of at least one graphical LaTeX editor.
At any rate, most clerical staff who work for law firms seem to have to learn at least one specialist system in addition to their general office suite skills, so we're not replacing their learning curve with a cliff here.
The real challenge is database integration (see some of my other posts in this discussion for more). If we do that, then we've got a winning solution. You might also want to check out Debian-Lex, a project to make a "legally aware" distribution of Debian, and which I first heard of in this discussion.
This works for general classes of documents that are similar across all jurisdictions (e.g. originating process) but when you get down to the nitty-gritty, most jurisdictions do at least something differently that requires a new class of docment or a substantial alteration to an existing class. As an example, your example of the amicus brief doesn't even exist in my jurisdiction (Queensland, Australia) despite the fact that the United States and Australia are both common law countries. Even in Australia there are differences: class actions only exist in the state of Victoria and in the Federal Court, and the process for appealing to the High Court is different from the process for appealing to the State or Federal Courts of Appeal, which is diffeent again from appealing to the District (or County) Court from decisions of the Magistrates Court. There are better examples, the intricacies of procedure are myriad and subtle, they're just the ones I could think of off the top of my head.
Internal documents don't usually care about jurisdiction, a memo is a memo regardless of what kind of matter it concerns. The only way it would matter is if it dealt with a highly specialized area (e.g. family law) with its own court, jurisdiction, and process, in which case that court usually has its own specialized processes and its own set of forms.
I agree with your last point about LaTeX being better, but you will be using a typist because it's generally quicker to dictate than to type, and most large firms will be set up so that you spend all your time at your desk doing productive work instead of busywork, e.g. thinking about what should be said rather than just typing it out. Either that, or you'll be farming out most of the drafting to a paralegal or clerk.