From what I can tell Quebec uses a heavily-modified version of Ancien Regime Civil Law for private matters, and Common Law for public law. So Prosecutors have to follow similar rules to the ones in the UK, most of the US, and the rest of Canada, but private torts use Civil Law.
The NDA would probably be governed by a private tort, so if litigated in Quebec he's probably not gonna be able to get it invalidated. If the software company is headquartered elsewhere there are jurisdictional issues. OTOH what possible penalty in the NDA is actually worse then getting expelled from school with straight Fs?
Speaker of the House who thinks he has a mandate to thwart a President who won (by almost 5 million) despite losing the popular vote by more then a million.
The GOP lost the popular vote for US House by 1.3-1.4 million, which means Speaker Boehner lost the popular vote by more the a million. "Who thinks he has a mandate to thwart a President who won (by almost 5 million)" is it's own clause modifying "Speaker of the House," "despite" signals the start of a prepositional phrase which includes another clause ("losing the popular vote by more then a million").
I understand this is slightly above the sixth-grade-level most people reas at, but it's not that deep. Really. Especially for somebody who grammar skills are so elite he corrects other people.
Non-American Constitutions frequently have strong customary elements that greatly alter everything, but do not actually appear in the text. According to the official Canadian Constitution there is no Prime Minister, there is no such thing as a Cabinet, and the Queen does everything through a people she appoints called the "Her Majesty's Privy Council." According to the text this Council is totally her creature, serves at her will, and is generally just a fall-guy for when if the Queen fucks up.
The way that works in actual law is that the Chair of the Privy Council is the Prime Minister. The Council itself consists of all current and former Cabinet members, plus some people appointed so they can read highly classified documents, but the Cabinet is the bit of it that does all the Privy Council stuff. This is legally linked to the Constitution on the basis Preamble's sentence saying Canada wants a "Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom." There's a whole customary section of the Constitution which is unwritten, but is probably harder to change then the written bits. It should be noted that under American law a preamble has no legal relevance.
I guess you were asleep in history class when names like Urban II, Napoleon, Julius Caesar and Genghis Kahn were tossed around.
Caesar was actually Republican, not Monarchist. All the early Emperors were officially simply people who happened to have extreme influence in elections to the offices of the Roman Republic. Their official title was equivalent to US Senate President Pro Temp. Khan and Napoleon were not Monarchs in the sense that the OP meant because both rose from relatively humble origins.
Totalitarian Monarchs are typically a lot more interested in maintaining their inheritance then expanding it. Sometimes they have a fairly large view of that inheritance, as the later Russian Czars did, but it's very rare for someone to inherit a Kingdom and immediately set up an International Party dedicated to conquering all the other Kingdoms as the Commies did.
So, if the US government announced that the US is now communistic, and nothing else changed...they wouldn't be lying? That sounds pretty dumb.
That's already happened. Not with the exact word "Communism," but the US Constitutional definition of "Right" is pretty much the exact opposite of all prior English-language usage.
In 1700 a "Right" was something that small group of people held. The "Rights" of the Freeman of London were completely different then the "Rights" of the Gentry, which were completely different then the "Rights" of a Nobleman or a Villein (Serf). A "Right" was analogous to Copyright, in that it gave a small group of people an enforceable legal ability to do a certain thing, which is pretty much the exact opposite of the Bill of Rights.
What happened was the French started the Enlightenment, decided everyone has certain Rights, and Washington's generation of Americans really thought that was a great idea...
And now pretty much everyone goes along with us because we're Just That Big.
Those are americans who have seen horrors and can never forgive the communist for what they did.
That. Was. NOT. Communism.
Then what is?
If you want to take the all of means of production from their current owners/controllers said owners/controllers are not gonna be cool with that. They are going to oppose you. They'll probably shoot at you. They'll definitely politically scheme to un-seat you.
Which means you have to shoot them, and Capitalism gives enough people some share of the means of production (401ks, a house, etc.) that you're gonna be using an awful lot of bullets.
Now if you want a more peaceful, less brutal Revolution, you're basically going the Chavez route, and Chavez isn't really Communist because he hasn't passed a bill out-lawing private property. He's a Social Democrat with Authoritarian tendencies.
He doesn't "allow" it to happen, since he has no role in making or enforcing the laws. In the past, the king has spoken out against political abuse of lese-majesty laws.
Frequently he pardons the person found guilty, altho there's usually conditions attached (ie: the Swiss dude left Thailand and agreed never to come back).
It's not his fault the rest of the country freaks out when you criticize him.
And they revere the king. His picture is on every coin and bill, so if you're there do NOT step on money! Stepping on money is incredibly dangerous. Of course, being American I consider the idea of royalty itself to be absurd and wonder why my British cousins need them?
Clearly you have not been paying attention to the antics in DC. If you're British/Australian/etc. when some idiot decides to bring the entire government to a halt as a negotiating tactic you can close your eyes and pretend Grandma (aka: Her Majesty the Queen) will fix it. She may not (she didn't solve Australia's Constitutional Crisis in 1975), but she could.
Sometimes she even does. Canada's Prorogation Crises was solved largely because she realized that letting the Tories get their way for two months (ie: proroguing Parliament from December 4th to January 26th) would not actually hurt anyone, but agreeing to the Opposition's demands could force a new election a few months after the old. If the Opposition actually had the votes in Parliament to govern the country in early December they'd clearly also have those votes in late January, but it they only had the votes to dump Harper, then Harper would be dumped, nobody would run the country for a few moths while they proved they had no plan (literally nobody -- they hadn't agreed who should be Prime Minister), and then everyone would have to pay for a new election. Which Harper probably would have won because a) in october he'd won, and b) would you vote for those morons?
Granted the person who actually did this crap was the Governor-General, but it was widely reported that Governor-General Jean only did those things after consulting with the Queen; and the Canadians got a whole lot of shit for that. It never seemed to occur to anyone that she's got hundreds of years of experience being Monarch of a Westminster-system Democracy (50 years ad Queen of England, Jamaica, Barbados etc. adds up), which is quite useful when something weird happens.
But if you're going to refuse to buy from Thailans because of this, you're pretty much stuck with only buying things from your own country, because every foreign country is going to have something normal to them that is atrocious to you (and vice versa). Like kings, or censorship, or guns, or burqas, or drugs, or drug laws, or something you consider corrupt where they think not having it is corrupt.
If you want a world econiomy, you're going to have to put up with other cultures' things you hate -- like guns, or gun laws, or censorship, or pornography, or royalty, or religion...
(mcgrew here, can't seem to be able to log in on this PC)
Heck, you're stuck with not buying anything, ever,
I've never met a geek who does not have significant problems with his own government, an obscure plan to fix said problems, and extreme frustration that everyone else is not passionate about replacing first-pass-the-post with proportional representation via the Condorcet method.
Thailand has it's problems. They are definitely way too protective of their King to be a good Democracy. But they don't have a debt ceiling, or a Speaker of the House who thinks he has a mandate to thwart a President who won (by almost 5 million) despite losing the popular vote by more then a million.
My first post seems a lot more anti-test then I intended because my first is saying what I think the people who did this study are arguing.
I am not personally opposed to using them for some things.
The problem is that interpreting their results is very complex. I, for example, went to an excellent High School. 90% end up in a four year college every years. It seems like 1/3 of my graduating class has a Masters. In terms of what a High School is supposed to do it's hard to argue Detroit Renaissance is not an excellent school. But it's a Detroit Public School, which means that the 1,000 or so kids who go there are in the same test-pool as the another 65k, and according to every ranking published in every newspaper we all dropped out when we were Sophomores.
I go back and forth on using them to rate teachers. On the one hand they are incredibly imprecise. The teacher who gets three Iraqi refugees in his third grade class of 15 is probably not gonna do very well on the tests even if he manages to move them from no English to First Grade level in nine months. OTOH if he was at my elementary school, which was quite similar to Renaissance, all the kids get a lot of extra help at home and he does not have to do any actual work to get everyone to grade-level. You can get around this by testing before the school year starts, and when it ends; and only counting improvement. But the second guy still has a much easier job, because parents in his class will not be reluctant to do things like hire tutors.
Ortiz's dipshit husband says "he had a plea bargain for 6 months." Oh sweet, I get to get raped for 6 months instead of 35 years. But also face the whole not ever being able to find a job, and having to live with my parents because no one will rent me a place...
Does anyone except her actually believe she made that offer? Or that there wasn't some wonderful catch like "50 years of probation during which time you can't touch a computer, and you have to say yes in the next minutes."
You don't charge a guy with a 35-year felony if all you want is six months.
They're also saying that a) we test poor kids at higher rates then rich kids (proven by the fact that 40% of tested kids go to impoverished schools, whereas only 23% of the general population does), and b) if the testers designed the test differently we'd do much better.
Their example was fractions vs. Algebra. If you increased the Algebra on the test but cut down the fractions we'd improve relative to the Finns, because their kids can't do Algebra but ours can't do fractions.
There's two problems with this argument: the facts are wrong, and it's totally misinterpreting the original article.
First the facts. Some foreign countries (ie: Germany) have a system similar to the one you describe. Many others don't. Finland, for example, is the only country besides us actually mentioned in this article. They don't have a two-track education system until the age of 16, which is not that far off from when the US Community College vs. Real University distinction sets in. The tests they're talking about actually happen at age 13, so you are simply wrong.
Second the original article's point is that the students tested are poorer then the student body as a whole. They're saying that while only 23% of American students go to schools where most kids are in poverty (e: qualify for cheap school lunches), 40% of American kids tested go to such schools. Our poorest kids take the damn test at twice the rates of everyone else, which isn't good for scores.
It means poor American kids are more likely to be tested then rich American kids. OTOH poor Swedes/Finns/etc. are no more likely to be tested then their rich compatriots. Since poor kids suck at tests this means America is at a major disadvantage in these rankings.
Basically it's arguing that standardized tests are bullshit. Reducing a human being to a piece of paper is inherently ridiculous, and doesn't stop being so just because you've used the same algorithm on everyone.
In some cases tests're necessary, such as college admission. But these school-system ranking ones just don't seem to show much. If you read the article, for example, they also point out our math deficiency is caused partly by the test-writers decision to make fractions count as much as Algebra.
We're worse overall because every a) Public School student are more likely to get tested, and b) since we've got high income inequality that means that we've got more poor kids then rich kids.
If you compare poor Swedish kids to poor Americans, average Swedes to average Americans, etc. we do fine. But due to a) you aren't comparing average Swedes to average Americans, you're comparing average Swedes to lower-middle-classish Americans, and due to b) we have a much larger lower-middle-classish cohort in the first place.
Tell them you want to pay by check. Get a name and address.
That sounds somewhat plausible.
But given how easy it is for debt collectors to change their company name, and the amount of work required to get the information, I'd be very surprised to find out anyone actually managed to do it.
They won't tell you their name. They won't tell you who owns the debt. All you know is a) a phone number, and b) the name they have on file for the debtor.
Unless you subpoena the phone companies' records you don't know who to sue. Subpoenas are not cheap, so unless you're a millionaire who willing to piss money away on principle...
According to everything I've read the reason the files weren't supposed to be deleted was that the DOJ did not want to tip off their owners that the game was up. Which means that as far as Megaupload knew, they couldn't alter the files in any way.
Megaupload's problem is that they haven't proven the DOJ itself ever told them this. They have proven their hosting provider Carpathia showed them a warrant saying that Carpathia and Megaupload should not “provide an opportunity to destroy evidence [and] change patterns of behavior,” but for all Megaupload knew Carpathia forged the dang thing.
I honestly have no idea whose right legally. Anybody want to bet that the original subject of the DOJ investigation 9in 2010 was actually Megaupload?
Strictly speaking Megaupload was not ordered by the DoJ to do anything to these files. The people who were ordered to do something were Megaupload's hosting provider, which told Megaupload not to do anything that would tip off the "owners" of these files.
The exact legal implications of this are unclear, but I'd say it makes Megaupload's defense much trickier unless they can get Carpathia to document that the DoJ wanted those files kept.
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In most of Canada they aren't. But Quebec uses Civil Law, so Consideration isn't really a factor.
From what I can tell Quebec uses a heavily-modified version of Ancien Regime Civil Law for private matters, and Common Law for public law. So Prosecutors have to follow similar rules to the ones in the UK, most of the US, and the rest of Canada, but private torts use Civil Law.
The NDA would probably be governed by a private tort, so if litigated in Quebec he's probably not gonna be able to get it invalidated. If the software company is headquartered elsewhere there are jurisdictional issues. OTOH what possible penalty in the NDA is actually worse then getting expelled from school with straight Fs?
His facts would be more convincing if his reading comprehension were better.
As is he's totally misinterpreting the sentence,and then trying to correct it's grammar.
To quote myself for the record:
Speaker of the House who thinks he has a mandate to thwart a President who won (by almost 5 million) despite losing the popular vote by more then a million.
The GOP lost the popular vote for US House by 1.3-1.4 million, which means Speaker Boehner lost the popular vote by more the a million. "Who thinks he has a mandate to thwart a President who won (by almost 5 million)" is it's own clause modifying "Speaker of the House," "despite" signals the start of a prepositional phrase which includes another clause ("losing the popular vote by more then a million").
I understand this is slightly above the sixth-grade-level most people reas at, but it's not that deep. Really. Especially for somebody who grammar skills are so elite he corrects other people.
You are such an American.
Non-American Constitutions frequently have strong customary elements that greatly alter everything, but do not actually appear in the text. According to the official Canadian Constitution there is no Prime Minister, there is no such thing as a Cabinet, and the Queen does everything through a people she appoints called the "Her Majesty's Privy Council." According to the text this Council is totally her creature, serves at her will, and is generally just a fall-guy for when if the Queen fucks up.
The way that works in actual law is that the Chair of the Privy Council is the Prime Minister. The Council itself consists of all current and former Cabinet members, plus some people appointed so they can read highly classified documents, but the Cabinet is the bit of it that does all the Privy Council stuff. This is legally linked to the Constitution on the basis Preamble's sentence saying Canada wants a "Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom." There's a whole customary section of the Constitution which is unwritten, but is probably harder to change then the written bits. It should be noted that under American law a preamble has no legal relevance.
He's also got some engineering chops. He'[s widely credited with developing a new method of rain-making:
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/thai-rain-making-comes-to-qld-20100808-11q5f.html
Thailand has never been Communist. They actually fought against the Commies in several of the Vietnam Wars extended theaters.
They were anti-US, and officially Axis members, during WW2, but since then they've been at least leaning towards the US in their foreign policy.
I guess you were asleep in history class when names like Urban II, Napoleon, Julius Caesar and Genghis Kahn were tossed around.
Caesar was actually Republican, not Monarchist. All the early Emperors were officially simply people who happened to have extreme influence in elections to the offices of the Roman Republic. Their official title was equivalent to US Senate President Pro Temp. Khan and Napoleon were not Monarchs in the sense that the OP meant because both rose from relatively humble origins.
Totalitarian Monarchs are typically a lot more interested in maintaining their inheritance then expanding it. Sometimes they have a fairly large view of that inheritance, as the later Russian Czars did, but it's very rare for someone to inherit a Kingdom and immediately set up an International Party dedicated to conquering all the other Kingdoms as the Commies did.
So, if the US government announced that the US is now communistic, and nothing else changed...they wouldn't be lying? That sounds pretty dumb.
That's already happened. Not with the exact word "Communism," but the US Constitutional definition of "Right" is pretty much the exact opposite of all prior English-language usage.
In 1700 a "Right" was something that small group of people held. The "Rights" of the Freeman of London were completely different then the "Rights" of the Gentry, which were completely different then the "Rights" of a Nobleman or a Villein (Serf). A "Right" was analogous to Copyright, in that it gave a small group of people an enforceable legal ability to do a certain thing, which is pretty much the exact opposite of the Bill of Rights.
What happened was the French started the Enlightenment, decided everyone has certain Rights, and Washington's generation of Americans really thought that was a great idea...
And now pretty much everyone goes along with us because we're Just That Big.
Those are americans who have seen horrors and can never forgive the communist for what they did.
That. Was. NOT. Communism.
Then what is?
If you want to take the all of means of production from their current owners/controllers said owners/controllers are not gonna be cool with that. They are going to oppose you. They'll probably shoot at you. They'll definitely politically scheme to un-seat you.
Which means you have to shoot them, and Capitalism gives enough people some share of the means of production (401ks, a house, etc.) that you're gonna be using an awful lot of bullets.
Now if you want a more peaceful, less brutal Revolution, you're basically going the Chavez route, and Chavez isn't really Communist because he hasn't passed a bill out-lawing private property. He's a Social Democrat with Authoritarian tendencies.
steaming turd if he allows such crap to happen.
He doesn't "allow" it to happen, since he has no role in making or enforcing the laws. In the past, the king has spoken out against political abuse of lese-majesty laws.
Frequently he pardons the person found guilty, altho there's usually conditions attached (ie: the Swiss dude left Thailand and agreed never to come back).
It's not his fault the rest of the country freaks out when you criticize him.
And they revere the king. His picture is on every coin and bill, so if you're there do NOT step on money! Stepping on money is incredibly dangerous. Of course, being American I consider the idea of royalty itself to be absurd and wonder why my British cousins need them?
Clearly you have not been paying attention to the antics in DC. If you're British/Australian/etc. when some idiot decides to bring the entire government to a halt as a negotiating tactic you can close your eyes and pretend Grandma (aka: Her Majesty the Queen) will fix it. She may not (she didn't solve Australia's Constitutional Crisis in 1975), but she could.
Sometimes she even does. Canada's Prorogation Crises was solved largely because she realized that letting the Tories get their way for two months (ie: proroguing Parliament from December 4th to January 26th) would not actually hurt anyone, but agreeing to the Opposition's demands could force a new election a few months after the old. If the Opposition actually had the votes in Parliament to govern the country in early December they'd clearly also have those votes in late January, but it they only had the votes to dump Harper, then Harper would be dumped, nobody would run the country for a few moths while they proved they had no plan (literally nobody -- they hadn't agreed who should be Prime Minister), and then everyone would have to pay for a new election. Which Harper probably would have won because a) in october he'd won, and b) would you vote for those morons?
Granted the person who actually did this crap was the Governor-General, but it was widely reported that Governor-General Jean only did those things after consulting with the Queen; and the Canadians got a whole lot of shit for that. It never seemed to occur to anyone that she's got hundreds of years of experience being Monarch of a Westminster-system Democracy (50 years ad Queen of England, Jamaica, Barbados etc. adds up), which is quite useful when something weird happens.
But if you're going to refuse to buy from Thailans because of this, you're pretty much stuck with only buying things from your own country, because every foreign country is going to have something normal to them that is atrocious to you (and vice versa). Like kings, or censorship, or guns, or burqas, or drugs, or drug laws, or something you consider corrupt where they think not having it is corrupt.
If you want a world econiomy, you're going to have to put up with other cultures' things you hate -- like guns, or gun laws, or censorship, or pornography, or royalty, or religion...
(mcgrew here, can't seem to be able to log in on this PC)
Heck, you're stuck with not buying anything, ever,
I've never met a geek who does not have significant problems with his own government, an obscure plan to fix said problems, and extreme frustration that everyone else is not passionate about replacing first-pass-the-post with proportional representation via the Condorcet method.
Thailand has it's problems. They are definitely way too protective of their King to be a good Democracy. But they don't have a debt ceiling, or a Speaker of the House who thinks he has a mandate to thwart a President who won (by almost 5 million) despite losing the popular vote by more then a million.
My first post seems a lot more anti-test then I intended because my first is saying what I think the people who did this study are arguing.
I am not personally opposed to using them for some things.
The problem is that interpreting their results is very complex. I, for example, went to an excellent High School. 90% end up in a four year college every years. It seems like 1/3 of my graduating class has a Masters. In terms of what a High School is supposed to do it's hard to argue Detroit Renaissance is not an excellent school. But it's a Detroit Public School, which means that the 1,000 or so kids who go there are in the same test-pool as the another 65k, and according to every ranking published in every newspaper we all dropped out when we were Sophomores.
I go back and forth on using them to rate teachers. On the one hand they are incredibly imprecise. The teacher who gets three Iraqi refugees in his third grade class of 15 is probably not gonna do very well on the tests even if he manages to move them from no English to First Grade level in nine months. OTOH if he was at my elementary school, which was quite similar to Renaissance, all the kids get a lot of extra help at home and he does not have to do any actual work to get everyone to grade-level. You can get around this by testing before the school year starts, and when it ends; and only counting improvement. But the second guy still has a much easier job, because parents in his class will not be reluctant to do things like hire tutors.
On the other hand, what else is there?
Ortiz's dipshit husband says "he had a plea bargain for 6 months." Oh sweet, I get to get raped for 6 months instead of 35 years. But also face the whole not ever being able to find a job, and having to live with my parents because no one will rent me a place...
Does anyone except her actually believe she made that offer? Or that there wasn't some wonderful catch like "50 years of probation during which time you can't touch a computer, and you have to say yes in the next minutes."
You don't charge a guy with a 35-year felony if all you want is six months.
You didn't read the article very carefully.
They're also saying that a) we test poor kids at higher rates then rich kids (proven by the fact that 40% of tested kids go to impoverished schools, whereas only 23% of the general population does), and b) if the testers designed the test differently we'd do much better.
Their example was fractions vs. Algebra. If you increased the Algebra on the test but cut down the fractions we'd improve relative to the Finns, because their kids can't do Algebra but ours can't do fractions.
There's two problems with this argument: the facts are wrong, and it's totally misinterpreting the original article.
First the facts. Some foreign countries (ie: Germany) have a system similar to the one you describe. Many others don't. Finland, for example, is the only country besides us actually mentioned in this article. They don't have a two-track education system until the age of 16, which is not that far off from when the US Community College vs. Real University distinction sets in. The tests they're talking about actually happen at age 13, so you are simply wrong.
Second the original article's point is that the students tested are poorer then the student body as a whole. They're saying that while only 23% of American students go to schools where most kids are in poverty (e: qualify for cheap school lunches), 40% of American kids tested go to such schools. Our poorest kids take the damn test at twice the rates of everyone else, which isn't good for scores.
It means poor American kids are more likely to be tested then rich American kids. OTOH poor Swedes/Finns/etc. are no more likely to be tested then their rich compatriots. Since poor kids suck at tests this means America is at a major disadvantage in these rankings.
Basically it's arguing that standardized tests are bullshit. Reducing a human being to a piece of paper is inherently ridiculous, and doesn't stop being so just because you've used the same algorithm on everyone.
In some cases tests're necessary, such as college admission. But these school-system ranking ones just don't seem to show much. If you read the article, for example, they also point out our math deficiency is caused partly by the test-writers decision to make fractions count as much as Algebra.
We're worse overall because every a) Public School student are more likely to get tested, and b) since we've got high income inequality that means that we've got more poor kids then rich kids.
If you compare poor Swedish kids to poor Americans, average Swedes to average Americans, etc. we do fine. But due to a) you aren't comparing average Swedes to average Americans, you're comparing average Swedes to lower-middle-classish Americans, and due to b) we have a much larger lower-middle-classish cohort in the first place.
Tell them you want to pay by check. Get a name and address.
That sounds somewhat plausible.
But given how easy it is for debt collectors to change their company name, and the amount of work required to get the information, I'd be very surprised to find out anyone actually managed to do it.
The trick is figuring out who to have fined...
How do you know an address yo send it to?
How?
They won't tell you their name. They won't tell you who owns the debt. All you know is a) a phone number, and b) the name they have on file for the debtor.
Unless you subpoena the phone companies' records you don't know who to sue. Subpoenas are not cheap, so unless you're a millionaire who willing to piss money away on principle...
According to everything I've read the reason the files weren't supposed to be deleted was that the DOJ did not want to tip off their owners that the game was up. Which means that as far as Megaupload knew, they couldn't alter the files in any way.
Megaupload's problem is that they haven't proven the DOJ itself ever told them this. They have proven their hosting provider Carpathia showed them a warrant saying that Carpathia and Megaupload should not “provide an opportunity to destroy evidence [and] change patterns of behavior,” but for all Megaupload knew Carpathia forged the dang thing.
I honestly have no idea whose right legally. Anybody want to bet that the original subject of the DOJ investigation 9in 2010 was actually Megaupload?
Strictly speaking Megaupload was not ordered by the DoJ to do anything to these files. The people who were ordered to do something were Megaupload's hosting provider, which told Megaupload not to do anything that would tip off the "owners" of these files.
The exact legal implications of this are unclear, but I'd say it makes Megaupload's defense much trickier unless they can get Carpathia to document that the DoJ wanted those files kept.