Oh come on. The CIA has all but admitted using unspecified coercive tactics (aka "torture lite") against the inmates at Camp X-Ray and the Bush administration is an informational black hole. Need I remind you that in a criminal proceeding the burden of proof rests on the State? That burden includes proving that the evidence the State obtained through the detention of a suspect was freely given. Holding suspects incommunicado invariably creates a reasonable apprehension that their evidence was obtained under duress.
If you want another example, have a look at the behaviour of the UK's Special Branch against IRA suspects during the 1970s, who were held for a mere seven days. The police officers in those cases were not bad people, they just thought that the exigencies of the situation required a slackening of the traditional rules of criminal justice. But innocent people still went to prison as a result of the tactics used. It boggles the mind that Western law enforcement agencies, not to mention their political masters, can still make the same mistake even with the benefit of hindsight.
This is an important point to remember, and one that is well illustrated by a little history.
In 1930s Stalinist Russia, hundreds of political prisoners were convicted of treason and either executed or carted off to the gulag. What is remarkable about these cases is not the fact that they happened, but the fact that the trials and subsequent convictions appeared to be conducted in accordance with proper forms and procedures. The accused would be afforded access to legal representation, but would then proceed to get up, in open court, and swear on their mother's grave that they were guilty of the most heinous treason when all they had possibly done was express the mildest dissent, often privately, or ended up in the wrong political faction. The Soviet regime was then able to deflect criticism of the suppression of dissent by simply pointing to the apparent fairness of their trial process, often with the assistance of Western apologists such as English QC D. N. Pritt.
The trick, of course, was worked before trial, during a period of a number of weeks (usually) when the accused was held incommunicado and subjected to severe psychological pressure and physical mistreatment (such as food and sleep deprivation, interspersed on occasion with outright physical torture) designed essentially to brainwash the unfortunate suspect into confessing. If necessary, threats were made against the suspect's family to induce a confession. This process was referred to by its architect, Soviet prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, as "the conveyor", and it is the twentieth century's greatest testament to the need for access to criminal suspects at all stages of the judicial process, from arrest to conviction.
Until verifiable physical evidence of what Hawash is alleged to have done is produced, this confession convinces me of nothing other than that John Ashcroft, the man who ultimately bears responsibility for Hawash's treatment and prosecution, is just a latter-day Vyshinsky and a disgrace to his profession.
Re:Pacemaker Recharge by Induction
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Who says the batteries are near the thing? I think they string the batteries on a bit of wire far enough away so that the induction doesn't interfere with the electronics. At least, that's what I would do.
But that's not how it's actually done: the battery and electronics forrm a single unit, with the only leads being the ones connecting the pacemaker to the heart itself. I'm not medically trained, but I guess there'd be two reasons for this. Firstly, there's not a lot of room in the body for lots of components spaced out all over the place, and not many convenient sites to put things; case-modding to give yourself more room is not an option. Currently, pacemakers are installed under a local anaesthetic through a small incision in the chest; your solution would likely require a more difficult procedure
Secondly, there's always the risk that the pacemaker leads could be dislodged through even normal body movement: patients are instructed not to engage in certain activities (not lifting their arm on the pacemaker's side of the body above the chest, just to name one). Having another wire connecting a string of components just compounds that problem.
Re:Pacemaker Recharge by Induction
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I don't think so. A relative of mine has just had a pacemaker fitted, and replacement of the device is required every time the Li battery goes flat. You couldn't use induction to charge a pacemaker, because the electronics don't react well to strong magnetic fields, which is a problem if those same electronics have the job of making sure your heart beats at the correct rate (or at all).
Induction is, however, used to communicate with and program the device, since the fields are weak enough not to cause a problem.
I always thought that a pentagram, goat's blood and some dribbly candles were involved, and that 5 on your list was "Virgins"...but then I guess that would put the technicians themselves in immediate and deadly peril, so I can see why it was changed.
The original question was pretty badly flawed because the poster was trying to apply privity of contract to property issues, but there is a possible defence in the fact that SCO has known about the use of its code and has basically let people use it unawares. There's an old doctrine known as proprietary estoppel that refrains the owner of property from exercising his or her property rights if s/he has knowingly allowed another person to improve the property with an honest belief that the property was theirs. I'm not sure if it's ever been applied to IP and I don't know of any authority on point, but it would be an interesting argument to run if SCO's claims of ownership were substantiated.
Since you bought it in good faith, and in legal fashion, you get to keep it!
Um, no, no you don't. There is a legal doctrine, nemo dat quod non habet (trans. "You can't give away what you don't have") that says otherwise. Since a vendor of stolen property does not possess title in the property, s/he can't possibly transfer it to someone else. Your only right over the property is a bare possessory right that's good against the entire world, except for the true owner.
After all, you didn't do anything wrong, why should YOU get screwed?
Yeah, life sucks sometimes. But why should the poor bastard who's had his stereo stolen have to suffer; he's just as innocent as you, after all. This is a case where the law has to come down on the side of one of two innocent parties who've both been wronged by a third, and the rule that the law has adopted in this case is caveat emptor.
Not only that, but it would seem that any clump of A-M of less than galactic size would have a hard time existing in a harsh, matter-filled region. A-M objects in an M galaxy would have to contend with the fact that interstellar space isn't empty, but has a faint hydrogen "wind" blowing thorugh it. For an inert body like an asteroid or rogue planet, this would mean gradual but inevitable erosion. For a star system, things might get interesting, since the star's own solar wind would sweep the interstellar medium out to its heliopause, which would presumably show up as a gamma-ray "halo" surrounding the system.
I wouldn't even want to speculate on the conditions necessary for the formation of such a system, since I'm simply talking out of my rear-end here (I Am Not An Astrophysicist).
The way this is worded, that they are particularly targetting Microsoft products, makes this look less like a cost-cutting measure and more like a witch hunt.
You forget that politics isn't fought on ideas or generalities, but on specifics and symbolism. A single event can have a far greater impact on the mood of the body politic than a truckload of ideology, and Microsoft is a good target because of the resentment it engenders in the general community. I don't approve, but that's the way it's done.
As far as mandating open source software across the board, that's a bad idea as well. What if there is no suitable open source project for the task at hand? Should the government fund its own open source project to create one?
Depends on the project. If we're talking about a custom application for, e.g., processing tax information, then the principles of accountability and openness in government require open source as a simple matter of FOI (IMHO). If it's defence-related, then the tech needs to be trustworthy as a matter of national security. If it's more general, then I would tend to agree that a proprietary solution will do just as well, all other things being equal.
An excellent analogy. And, just like BSD, they fork every time a couple of the lead figures have a spat. I'm a little sore about the Dems; they did, after all, support the Australian version of the DMCA, but it looks like they might redeem themselves with this sort of thing.
Actually, it is you who are wrong. Up until a customer buys the magazine from the store, it is the store's property, which means that the store has the exclusive right to determine what happens to it. The store gives you a licence to pick up the magazine, briefly examine it to assess its quality, etc and then, if you want to, take it to the counter to buy it. If you do anything else, then that's violating the store's rights in that physical property, and if you do it with "fraudulent intent" (as is probably the case here) then that is, in fact, stealing.
I think you're sort-of-right. The mere fact that a search engine gives you this facility to opt out does not create an implicit licence to use content by itself: there is an old principle of law that silence does not mean consent. If this were not the case, I could, e.g., write to you offering an opportunity to engage in a Nigerian money-laundering scam with the rider that "if you don't reply to this I will take it to mean you have accepted my offer" and then enforce that through contract law if you didn't in fact take the effort to tell me to go jump.
However, the practice of search engines archiving content is so prevalent that the social conventions and behavioural norms of the Internet would give rise to an implied licence if you did not create a robots.txt file to block archiving. There's a useful analogy in trespass: if you leave an open or unlocked gate and don't indicate otherwise through a sign or other means then there is an implied licence for friends, family, travelling salesdroids, etc to enter your property in order to call on you. This does not extend to other types of visitors though, otherwise you wouldn't have an action in trespass against a would-be burglar.
In short, exercise caution when archiving somebody else's web content. If it's not a common activity amongst web users at large, you probably don't have a right to do it.
Actually, since the original poster used a single quote instead of a double quote, the string isn't properly terminated, resulting in a missing semicolon on line 5 with an undeclared identifier 'Island', then all kinds of junk.:)
It happened because everyone has the unqualified right to approach a court and at least have it entertain the case. After it's done that it can then chuck the case out for vexatiousness, absurdity, etc, but it at least must grant the right to approach. Just think of the alternative: if the court had a discretion in whether it would let you in the door, your right to access justice would be compromised.
The Hight Court is slightly different because of the "special leave" filtering mechanism it uses. Essentially, you only have the right to seek leave to appeal, and the court has a discretion as to whether it wishes to hear the appeal. This guy sought leave, had his 20 minutes in front of a single justice (Gleeson CJ in this case), appealed against denial of leave, had another 20 minutes in front of two justices (Kirby and the newly-elevated Heydon JJ), and had leave denied again. The filtering mechanism worked as it should, and there wasn't a serious abuse of the court or its resources here. Good for a laugh though.
Personally, I think that this is largely wishful thinking on the FSF's part. Remember, the basis of copyright law is to give the copyright holder an exclusive right over the reproduction (and analogous activities) of a work. In order to be limited by a licence covering a copyrighted work (such as a library), the activity you are doing must fall within that classification (which is more precisely defined in the relevant legislation) of reproduction. Dynamic linking would obviously not fall within anyone's definition of reproduction, whereas static linking would constitute the creation of a derivative work. To avoid the licence, you would therefore only need to restrict yourself to releasing source or a dynamically linked binary (and leave solving the dependency problems to your users:)).
However , this is only based upon a construction of the GPL as a licence. By imposing limitations upon the way in which you dispose of your own copyright in your own works as a condition of being granted a licence to use a GPLed work, the argument could be raised that the GPL is in fact a form of contract, like an EULA. The issues surrounding software licences as contracts are much nastier so I won't get into them, except to say that the FSF thinks that EULAs are invalid and so do I.
Given the example you cite: the DNS protocol is independent of any particular implementation of a DNS server, so by writing software that acts as a DNS client as part of its functionality, you are not in any way linked to the author of any GPLed DNS server implementations. Therefore, there cannot be any possibility of the existence of legal relations (either licence or contract) between you and the authors of such software, and you are not bound by the terms under which they release their software.
IANAL (yet), and I don't have authority to back up a lot of what I said, but it sounds right, and I hope it helps.:)
Serves you right. This is a classic example of why the Prime Directive prohibits the introduction to primitive cultures (e.g. the marketing dept.) of concepts beyond their current level of development. Think about the consequences of your actions in future.
Or, since all the file-shares are presented to userland via the OS's filesystem layer (as I mentioned in my original reply), you could use your platform's equivalent of rgrep. All those handy tools you use to search your own local volumes can be easily applied to the file-share network.
What's wrong with the file-sharing capabilities built in to most OSs? I mean, yes, most organizations use MS, which means that file-sharing is most likely very weak and full of holes, but there's nothing to say that this new product is necessarily more secure on an MS platform, and when configured properly and put behind a firewall/VPN, there's no reason why traditional file-sharing shouldn't prove adequate enough to prevent looking elsewhere. It also has a number of advantages, such as integration with the filesystem, thus allowing traversal of the distributed file store with any tool that understands the OS's filesystem API.
Agreed. In addition, CUPS can be set up to only accept local connections (unlike regular BSD lpd), so even if your firewall fails, the printer daemon should still refuse an incoming remote connection.
Australian law is ahead on the U.S. on this point: numbered paragraphs! American lawyers still cite page numbers, though few ever see physical pages. Paragraph numbering allows for for more precision, though I wish they could set them off a little, so it didn't feel as though you had someone slowly counting over your shoulder.
Offtopic: Paragraph numbers have always featured in English/Australian judgments, although it is far more common to see page citations than parapoint citations. This is because it is easier to look up a page citation in a physical volume than a parapoint (for obvious reasons). However, as more and more research is done online, there is a gradual shift towards "medium neutral citation" such as parapoints so that both writers and readers don't have to haul their lazy a**es from their terminal to a bookshelf to look up a page citation. Just a bit of trivia to lighten your day:).
Amen to that. Banks' work, particularly the Culture series, is highly imaginative and funny as hell (in a wonderfully dark way). Does anyone have a link to a list of Culture Ship names?
The technology in his books allows him to place his well-developed characted in unusual situations. He doesn't let the technology run the story.
I'd add a proviso to that. Technology very much underlies the entire Culture concept, it is very difficult to imagine a completely hedonistic, anarcho-socialist society such as the Culture that wasn't essentially run by a group of "giant" AIs with hardwired altruism. Technology is very much a central theme to the Culture series, although it is somewhat understated. Against a Dark Background is much less tech-oriented, IMHO, even if it is about a super-weapon:).
In principle, IIRC Ministers do not have to be sitting Members of Parliament, but this is almost unheard-of.
That's wrong, there is a constitutional provision (s 64) that requires ministers to be members of Parliament, at least at Commonwealth level. Non-members may hold a ministerial position for a period of up to three months without being an elected MP, but this is to allow continuity of government during election periods, during which Parliament (or, at least, the House of Representatives) is dissolved and doesn't technically exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come on. The CIA has all but admitted using unspecified coercive tactics (aka "torture lite") against the inmates at Camp X-Ray and the Bush administration is an informational black hole. Need I remind you that in a criminal proceeding the burden of proof rests on the State? That burden includes proving that the evidence the State obtained through the detention of a suspect was freely given. Holding suspects incommunicado invariably creates a reasonable apprehension that their evidence was obtained under duress.
If you want another example, have a look at the behaviour of the UK's Special Branch against IRA suspects during the 1970s, who were held for a mere seven days. The police officers in those cases were not bad people, they just thought that the exigencies of the situation required a slackening of the traditional rules of criminal justice. But innocent people still went to prison as a result of the tactics used. It boggles the mind that Western law enforcement agencies, not to mention their political masters, can still make the same mistake even with the benefit of hindsight.
This is an important point to remember, and one that is well illustrated by a little history.
In 1930s Stalinist Russia, hundreds of political prisoners were convicted of treason and either executed or carted off to the gulag. What is remarkable about these cases is not the fact that they happened, but the fact that the trials and subsequent convictions appeared to be conducted in accordance with proper forms and procedures. The accused would be afforded access to legal representation, but would then proceed to get up, in open court, and swear on their mother's grave that they were guilty of the most heinous treason when all they had possibly done was express the mildest dissent, often privately, or ended up in the wrong political faction. The Soviet regime was then able to deflect criticism of the suppression of dissent by simply pointing to the apparent fairness of their trial process, often with the assistance of Western apologists such as English QC D. N. Pritt.
The trick, of course, was worked before trial, during a period of a number of weeks (usually) when the accused was held incommunicado and subjected to severe psychological pressure and physical mistreatment (such as food and sleep deprivation, interspersed on occasion with outright physical torture) designed essentially to brainwash the unfortunate suspect into confessing. If necessary, threats were made against the suspect's family to induce a confession. This process was referred to by its architect, Soviet prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, as "the conveyor", and it is the twentieth century's greatest testament to the need for access to criminal suspects at all stages of the judicial process, from arrest to conviction.
Until verifiable physical evidence of what Hawash is alleged to have done is produced, this confession convinces me of nothing other than that John Ashcroft, the man who ultimately bears responsibility for Hawash's treatment and prosecution, is just a latter-day Vyshinsky and a disgrace to his profession.
But that's not how it's actually done: the battery and electronics forrm a single unit, with the only leads being the ones connecting the pacemaker to the heart itself. I'm not medically trained, but I guess there'd be two reasons for this. Firstly, there's not a lot of room in the body for lots of components spaced out all over the place, and not many convenient sites to put things; case-modding to give yourself more room is not an option. Currently, pacemakers are installed under a local anaesthetic through a small incision in the chest; your solution would likely require a more difficult procedure
Secondly, there's always the risk that the pacemaker leads could be dislodged through even normal body movement: patients are instructed not to engage in certain activities (not lifting their arm on the pacemaker's side of the body above the chest, just to name one). Having another wire connecting a string of components just compounds that problem.
I don't think so. A relative of mine has just had a pacemaker fitted, and replacement of the device is required every time the Li battery goes flat. You couldn't use induction to charge a pacemaker, because the electronics don't react well to strong magnetic fields, which is a problem if those same electronics have the job of making sure your heart beats at the correct rate (or at all).
Induction is, however, used to communicate with and program the device, since the fields are weak enough not to cause a problem.
I always thought that a pentagram, goat's blood and some dribbly candles were involved, and that 5 on your list was "Virgins"...but then I guess that would put the technicians themselves in immediate and deadly peril, so I can see why it was changed.
The original question was pretty badly flawed because the poster was trying to apply privity of contract to property issues, but there is a possible defence in the fact that SCO has known about the use of its code and has basically let people use it unawares. There's an old doctrine known as proprietary estoppel that refrains the owner of property from exercising his or her property rights if s/he has knowingly allowed another person to improve the property with an honest belief that the property was theirs. I'm not sure if it's ever been applied to IP and I don't know of any authority on point, but it would be an interesting argument to run if SCO's claims of ownership were substantiated.
Since you bought it in good faith, and in legal fashion, you get to keep it!
Um, no, no you don't. There is a legal doctrine, nemo dat quod non habet (trans. "You can't give away what you don't have") that says otherwise. Since a vendor of stolen property does not possess title in the property, s/he can't possibly transfer it to someone else. Your only right over the property is a bare possessory right that's good against the entire world, except for the true owner.
After all, you didn't do anything wrong, why should YOU get screwed?
Yeah, life sucks sometimes. But why should the poor bastard who's had his stereo stolen have to suffer; he's just as innocent as you, after all. This is a case where the law has to come down on the side of one of two innocent parties who've both been wronged by a third, and the rule that the law has adopted in this case is caveat emptor.
Not only that, but it would seem that any clump of A-M of less than galactic size would have a hard time existing in a harsh, matter-filled region. A-M objects in an M galaxy would have to contend with the fact that interstellar space isn't empty, but has a faint hydrogen "wind" blowing thorugh it. For an inert body like an asteroid or rogue planet, this would mean gradual but inevitable erosion. For a star system, things might get interesting, since the star's own solar wind would sweep the interstellar medium out to its heliopause, which would presumably show up as a gamma-ray "halo" surrounding the system.
I wouldn't even want to speculate on the conditions necessary for the formation of such a system, since I'm simply talking out of my rear-end here (I Am Not An Astrophysicist).
The way this is worded, that they are particularly targetting Microsoft products, makes this look less like a cost-cutting measure and more like a witch hunt.
You forget that politics isn't fought on ideas or generalities, but on specifics and symbolism. A single event can have a far greater impact on the mood of the body politic than a truckload of ideology, and Microsoft is a good target because of the resentment it engenders in the general community. I don't approve, but that's the way it's done.
Depends on the project. If we're talking about a custom application for, e.g., processing tax information, then the principles of accountability and openness in government require open source as a simple matter of FOI (IMHO). If it's defence-related, then the tech needs to be trustworthy as a matter of national security. If it's more general, then I would tend to agree that a proprietary solution will do just as well, all other things being equal.
An excellent analogy. And, just like BSD, they fork every time a couple of the lead figures have a spat. I'm a little sore about the Dems; they did, after all, support the Australian version of the DMCA, but it looks like they might redeem themselves with this sort of thing.
If they manage to survive long enough, that is.
Actually, it is you who are wrong. Up until a customer buys the magazine from the store, it is the store's property, which means that the store has the exclusive right to determine what happens to it. The store gives you a licence to pick up the magazine, briefly examine it to assess its quality, etc and then, if you want to, take it to the counter to buy it. If you do anything else, then that's violating the store's rights in that physical property, and if you do it with "fraudulent intent" (as is probably the case here) then that is, in fact, stealing.
I think you're sort-of-right. The mere fact that a search engine gives you this facility to opt out does not create an implicit licence to use content by itself: there is an old principle of law that silence does not mean consent. If this were not the case, I could, e.g., write to you offering an opportunity to engage in a Nigerian money-laundering scam with the rider that "if you don't reply to this I will take it to mean you have accepted my offer" and then enforce that through contract law if you didn't in fact take the effort to tell me to go jump.
However, the practice of search engines archiving content is so prevalent that the social conventions and behavioural norms of the Internet would give rise to an implied licence if you did not create a robots.txt file to block archiving. There's a useful analogy in trespass: if you leave an open or unlocked gate and don't indicate otherwise through a sign or other means then there is an implied licence for friends, family, travelling salesdroids, etc to enter your property in order to call on you. This does not extend to other types of visitors though, otherwise you wouldn't have an action in trespass against a would-be burglar.
In short, exercise caution when archiving somebody else's web content. If it's not a common activity amongst web users at large, you probably don't have a right to do it.
Actually, since the original poster used a single quote instead of a double quote, the string isn't properly terminated, resulting in a missing semicolon on line 5 with an undeclared identifier 'Island', then all kinds of junk. :)
It happened because everyone has the unqualified right to approach a court and at least have it entertain the case. After it's done that it can then chuck the case out for vexatiousness, absurdity, etc, but it at least must grant the right to approach. Just think of the alternative: if the court had a discretion in whether it would let you in the door, your right to access justice would be compromised.
The Hight Court is slightly different because of the "special leave" filtering mechanism it uses. Essentially, you only have the right to seek leave to appeal, and the court has a discretion as to whether it wishes to hear the appeal. This guy sought leave, had his 20 minutes in front of a single justice (Gleeson CJ in this case), appealed against denial of leave, had another 20 minutes in front of two justices (Kirby and the newly-elevated Heydon JJ), and had leave denied again. The filtering mechanism worked as it should, and there wasn't a serious abuse of the court or its resources here. Good for a laugh though.
"If Pacman had affected us kids, we'd be running around in dark rooms munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music..."
Personally, I think that this is largely wishful thinking on the FSF's part. Remember, the basis of copyright law is to give the copyright holder an exclusive right over the reproduction (and analogous activities) of a work. In order to be limited by a licence covering a copyrighted work (such as a library), the activity you are doing must fall within that classification (which is more precisely defined in the relevant legislation) of reproduction. Dynamic linking would obviously not fall within anyone's definition of reproduction, whereas static linking would constitute the creation of a derivative work. To avoid the licence, you would therefore only need to restrict yourself to releasing source or a dynamically linked binary (and leave solving the dependency problems to your users :)).
However , this is only based upon a construction of the GPL as a licence. By imposing limitations upon the way in which you dispose of your own copyright in your own works as a condition of being granted a licence to use a GPLed work, the argument could be raised that the GPL is in fact a form of contract, like an EULA. The issues surrounding software licences as contracts are much nastier so I won't get into them, except to say that the FSF thinks that EULAs are invalid and so do I.
Given the example you cite: the DNS protocol is independent of any particular implementation of a DNS server, so by writing software that acts as a DNS client as part of its functionality, you are not in any way linked to the author of any GPLed DNS server implementations. Therefore, there cannot be any possibility of the existence of legal relations (either licence or contract) between you and the authors of such software, and you are not bound by the terms under which they release their software.
IANAL (yet), and I don't have authority to back up a lot of what I said, but it sounds right, and I hope it helps. :)
Guaranteed unbreakable encryption!
Not entirely. There is a slight chance that the output from /dev/random will be identical to the original message. :)
Serves you right. This is a classic example of why the Prime Directive prohibits the introduction to primitive cultures (e.g. the marketing dept.) of concepts beyond their current level of development. Think about the consequences of your actions in future.
Or, since all the file-shares are presented to userland via the OS's filesystem layer (as I mentioned in my original reply), you could use your platform's equivalent of rgrep. All those handy tools you use to search your own local volumes can be easily applied to the file-share network.
What's wrong with the file-sharing capabilities built in to most OSs? I mean, yes, most organizations use MS, which means that file-sharing is most likely very weak and full of holes, but there's nothing to say that this new product is necessarily more secure on an MS platform, and when configured properly and put behind a firewall/VPN, there's no reason why traditional file-sharing shouldn't prove adequate enough to prevent looking elsewhere. It also has a number of advantages, such as integration with the filesystem, thus allowing traversal of the distributed file store with any tool that understands the OS's filesystem API.
When was this, just out of curiosity? I did CS at UQ from 1998-2000, and I never heard anything about it. Did this happen before or after that period?
Agreed. In addition, CUPS can be set up to only accept local connections (unlike regular BSD lpd), so even if your firewall fails, the printer daemon should still refuse an incoming remote connection.
Offtopic: Paragraph numbers have always featured in English/Australian judgments, although it is far more common to see page citations than parapoint citations. This is because it is easier to look up a page citation in a physical volume than a parapoint (for obvious reasons). However, as more and more research is done online, there is a gradual shift towards "medium neutral citation" such as parapoints so that both writers and readers don't have to haul their lazy a**es from their terminal to a bookshelf to look up a page citation. Just a bit of trivia to lighten your day :).
Amen to that. Banks' work, particularly the Culture series, is highly imaginative and funny as hell (in a wonderfully dark way). Does anyone have a link to a list of Culture Ship names?
The technology in his books allows him to place his well-developed characted in unusual situations. He doesn't let the technology run the story.
I'd add a proviso to that. Technology very much underlies the entire Culture concept, it is very difficult to imagine a completely hedonistic, anarcho-socialist society such as the Culture that wasn't essentially run by a group of "giant" AIs with hardwired altruism. Technology is very much a central theme to the Culture series, although it is somewhat understated. Against a Dark Background is much less tech-oriented, IMHO, even if it is about a super-weapon :).
In principle, IIRC Ministers do not have to be sitting Members of Parliament, but this is almost unheard-of.
That's wrong, there is a constitutional provision (s 64) that requires ministers to be members of Parliament, at least at Commonwealth level. Non-members may hold a ministerial position for a period of up to three months without being an elected MP, but this is to allow continuity of government during election periods, during which Parliament (or, at least, the House of Representatives) is dissolved and doesn't technically exist.