"It is difficult to overestimate the degree to which, on the eve of the Revolution, Catholics in America were still widely discriminated against. Several members of the Continental Congress, including Congregationalist Roger Sherman, were opposed to hiring Catholics to fight in the Continental Army. Only three colonies allowed Catholics to vote. They were banned from holding public office in all New England colonies save Rhode Island. New Hampshire law called for the imprisonment of all persons who refused to repudiate the pope, the mass, and transsubstantiation. New York held the DEATH PENALTY [emphasis mine] over priests who entered the colony; Virginia boasted that it would only arrest them."
In Virginia, the birthplace of the separation of church and state, it took *seven years* for Thomas Jefferson to convince the General Assembly to pass the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and debates on the matter bear a striking resemblance to the sorts of thing one might read in YouTube comments.
By the time that the United States Bill of Rights was ratified, the freedom to practice any religion without fear of being barred from holding land, accessing the courts, or holding most professional jobs had been established by law in most of the British Empire.
This is not entirely surprising as many of the most influential people who formed the Federalist faction in what became the United States were in close cooperation with the Foxites in the British parliament from well before the Revolution until well after, and agreed on many -- or even most -- civil liberties and constitutional issues. The American Revolution weakened the common enemy (principally the Northites and Grenvilleites, who are all fairly called Tories in spite of their claim to the Whig mantle).
By comparison, the erosion of Tory (see above) dominance in the British parliament in the wake of the Seven Years' War led to a series of religious Relief Acts relaxing restrictions on Catholics. It's noteworthy that the first major such act, the Quebec Act 1774, was one of the "Intolerable Acts" protested by the Americans (in the political faction sense) that they argued justifed Independence. Additionally, in the thick of the Revolution, the British parliament passed the Relief Act 1778 and the Schools and Bishops Act 1782, in spite of vigorous domestic opposition (there were riots in Britain in the wake of each), and even more vigorous opposition in the parts of the Thirteen Colonies not already in full rebellion, and some upset in several of the others that ultimately did not join the American Revolution.
Also, by way of self-followup, the internet-draft proposes a mechanism to distinguish between https URIs over encrypted http2 connections and http URIs over encrypted http2 connections, with the goal that only the latter will be subject to manipulation by an explicitly trusted proxy, and that the client, the server, and conforming proxies all take steps to avoid unnoticed manipulation or examination of https URI related data. (The client, server and proxy all have opportunities to "opt out" of the proxy's manipulation or examination of http URI related content).
Sure, Terry, but what's worse, an MITM DOS ("you don't get to negotiate a [n https] connection") or an MITM that allows full inspection and modification of data that one (typically the server-side) or both ends think is an HTTPS connection?
The server side has lots of standardized and/or developed tools to protect the integrity and privacy of data between the server and the browser that does not rely upon perfect (or even any) HTTPS. The assumption that HTTPS is perfect -- or even close enough -- has been holding back deployments of such tools for more than a decade.
Apart from opening doors to greater network efficiency along several axes (caching and other deduplication and localization approaches, distribution away from single front ends, greater concentration of resources on single NLA addresses), deliberate trusted proxy ought to push people into reconsidering whether only-the-server-side-has-a-certificate TLS is *sufficient* for integrity and privacy. (I don't think it is, and I suspect that view is shared by at least some people behind two-factor authentication etc.)
However, the safer bet is that the proposal is likely to be strangled by people with a very narrow view of HTTPS, or by a lack of engagement on the way deliberate trusted MITM affects the security model of the whole WWW (few people will ask if it can actually *improve* overall security compared to the many people who will argue that it necessarily erodes it). It's a pity, because separating integrity (arbitrary chunks of data with some signed checksum) and privacy is likely to be a clear win on energy where integrity-but-not-privacy-required data are popular enough to warrant being highly distributed and/or highly cached.
Finally, another question that ought to be addressed is that a lot of eggs are in the HTTPS basket, and not all of them have been inherited from everything-over-HTTP. That deliberate trusted MITM exposes this question is not a bad thing, I think. However I would again bet that the consensus will be that the convenience of everything-over-HTTPS will trump that of a standard approach to making (especially) HTTP inside HTTPS amenable to caching, ad-removal, virus-removal, and whatever else a "middlebox" might do with HTTP now. After all, if someone really wants to do that, they can simply disallow (well, "break", even) HTTPS negotiation altogether...
Thus, my own answer to my question at the top: where there is agreement to enable a trusted MITM to act, then an MITM DOS is much worse; but for any other case it's the lesser of two evils. The key thing here is in how to determine agreement and trust; where that's not clear to either the client side or the server side (which is likely a harder problem), surely it's not enormously different from an MITM DOS ("can't establish a valid HTTPS connection" because of anything from TCP port blocking to pinned certificate mismatching).
They aren't riders in the U.S. sense in any meaningful way because of sec. 54 of the Constitution Act 1867, which gives the government -- even a minority government -- the exclusive right to introduce (into the House of Commons per sec. 53) money bills:
It shall not be lawful for the House of Commons to adopt or pass any Vote, Resolution, Address, or Bill for the Appropriation of any Part of the Public Revenue, or of any Tax or Impost, to any Purpose that has not been first recommended to that House by Message of the Governor General in the Session in which such Vote, Resolution, Address, or Bill is proposed
That is, *first* recommended.
The rules of both houses of Parliament impose further restrictions on their members with respect to amendments.
Omnibus bills are a problem, certainly, but it is one fully under the control of successive governments and tolerated by the House of Commons (who would force an election in rejecting or heavily amending a money bill), even during the recent series of minorities and weak majorities.
The federal government further enjoys several powers to veto legislation that one house or even all of Parliament passes anyway, even when they control only a minority of seats in the House of Commons.
Omnibus bills are far from new, and the Canadian system was sufficiently weak that the Australian constitution (which granted similar exclusive rights over the introduction of money bills and the disposition of all bills) added section 55 to their equivalent Act:
Laws imposing taxation shall deal only with the imposition of taxation, and any provision therein dealing with any other matter shall be of no effect.
Laws imposing taxation, except laws imposing duties of customs or of excise, shall deal with one subject of taxation only; but laws imposing duties of customs shall deal with duties of customs only, and laws imposing duties of excise shall deal with duties of excise only.
Similar proposals have been debated in Canada for more than a century, however since Omnibus budget bills are under the control of the federal government, there has never been much headway made, and governments have tended to consolidate and split bills according to their own needs and pushback from the Parliamentary committees and agencies who review the bills. "Omninbussing" follows trends, and somewhat reflect the strength of party discipline across the whole of Parliament -- a relatively weak government is often the source of large and complicated money bills, while a government controlling both Houses and enjoying strong party discipline tends to produce more and slimmer bills.
Riders are a wholly different matter.
The U.S. system permits riders since the Executive can only exercise a Presidential veto. The only additional checks on riders -- arbitrary amendments made by majority vote in *either* house of Congress -- are the Origination Clause, bicameralism generally, and the rules of the House of Representative, which all serve to limit the damage any subset of Congress, particularly Senators, can impose on a budget bill. In practice, however, all sides compromise and allow arbitrary changes to be added by various factions on critical bills that the Executive cannot afford to veto, so the system is more a "balance" than a "check" on legislators. Successive House majorities have over *centuries* softened their stance on the exclusivity of their control over the budget process, by weakening their own interpretation of the Origination Clause, by compromising with Senators and House factions, and by continuing to present to the President bills that are difficult to veto. On the other hand, the Executive has adapted by lobbying individual members of Congress directly and aggressively, and various processes have evolved such
L2ARC is slowly populated from the older ends of the ARC, using a separate thread. Not all blocks aging out of the ARC are guaranteed to get to the L2ARC. This is to avoid slowdowns when the ARC is under pressure, and to allow for the use of cache vdevs on media which are slow to write but fast to read.
L2ARC vdevs are circular buffers.
Each L2ARC entry consumes at least 50 bytes from the ARC, and may consume considerably more. Those bytes are released ONLY after the circular buffer overwrites the L2ARC entry. Therefore a large L2ARC competes for ARC space with ordinary blocks, and the larger the L2ARC the more likely it is that the L2ARC contains stale blocks. Those stale blocks continue to use ARC space.
The L2ARC's big use is to avoid seeks to fetch occasionally-used data. It helps so little with streaming reads that data that was streamed (via prefetch mechanisms, for example) into the ARC are skipped by the thread that populates L2ARC vdevs. Defeating that (forcing the storage of streamed data) typically worsens performance of a pool.
The ZIL is automatically managed areas in storage vdevs in each pool. One can configure one or more separated log vdevs which will be used instead of the ZIL. When synchronous write calls are made, the data is stored in the slog (if available) or ZIL, and the call returns. No other data is written to the slog or ZIL. The blocks written out remain in the ARC, marked as dirty and in need of an asynchronous flush. When the open transaction group closes, the in-ARC copies of what went to the slog or ZIL is written out with everything else in the txg, and then the slog or ZIL is cleared.
Neither the slog nor the ZIL is read except during the import process; if they are non-empty at import, the blocks are written out (synchronously) to the pool's storage vdevs and then cleared.
"With the ZIL in a different drive (SSD or otherwise), you reduce the number of writes required"
The ZIL is the ZIL; the slog is the slog. If you have a slog you don't write to the ZIL, and whether that changes the number of writes of *synchronous* data is configuration-dependent. If you have mirrored slogs, for example, you are probably writing more than you would if you just used the ZIL.
In either case the idea is to write out synchonous blocks quickly and with as little writing latency as possible; writes are linear and are to areas at the start of the vdevs.
"Because you can generally write to a ZFS pool significantly faster than to a single disk"
Actually, it's the other way around, but hinges on what you mean by "write". The more disks there are in the pool the more labels have to be updated at the finalization of each txg. That's not a large extra amount to push out to the rotating material, but it's done synchronously and will *invariably* result in seeks to the start and end of each component device in each vdev in the pool.
Additionally, you can configure a single-disk pool, and there are reasons why you might want to do so, even though that is UNSAFE.
However, system calls return quickly because all writes go into the ARC, and asynchronous write calls can return immediately; synchronous write calls return when the data is committed to the ZIL or slog(s). In the case where there's a slog, write calls practically never initiate actual activity on the device(s) forming the storage vdev(s). Instead, writes will be triggered by timers.
For many workloads, this makes writes to pools seem very fast, since delayed writing allows for smarter scheduling, as well as coalescing of writes to specific physical blocks.
The ZIL and separated log (slog, "zpool add pool log ") are slightly different.
All writes of all varities go into the ARC.
From the ARC, synchronous writes are synchronously written to the slog (if one is available) and are then marked *asynchronous* writes.
When the txg is closed, all asynchronous writes are pushed out to the storage vdevs of the pool, and the slog is cleared.
If no slog is available, from the ARC synchronous writes are synchronously written into the ZIL (yes, ZFS intents log), which is automatically maintained at the start of one or more of the pool's storage vdevs, and then the blocks in the ARC are marked as *asynchronous* writes.
When the txg is closed, all asynchronous writes are written to the storage vdevs of the pool, and the ZIL is marked empty.
If on pool import the slog or ZIL is NOT empty then the blocks are written (synchronously) to the storage vdevs before the pool is made available for access.
So, the slog and ZIL are there to make synchronous write calls return quickly and safely. They aren't permanent storage.
The slog does not really need to be a fast drive, just one in which write latency is low; all writes to the slog are linear, so there should be almost no track-to-track seeking even in a rotating drive. It is vital that that slog does not lie about having committed data to stable storage (stable in the sense of persisting across crashes, powerfailures, etc.).
The ZIL lives in the drives that make up the pool's storage vdev(s), so there's nothing special about the ZIL.
The slog (and ZIL) are mostly felt when doing bursts of synchronous writes -- some POSIX operations do this (rm -r, for instance), some database operations do it too, but the case where slogs are most worthwhile is when NFS clients are doing lots of writes to the pool.
They are not write caches in the traditional sense. Their main use is to return quickly from synchronous write calls, without compromising pool consistency.
"Files" are a concept in the ZPL; the ARC doesn't even deal with DMU objects, it deals with blocks.
You could write a shim beneath the ZPL that maintains a system like you propose, but maintaining file-based caching info is going to eat into the memory available for the L1 ARC. You probably don't want that, really. The existence of the ARC (L1 and L2) is what masks residual latency involved in fragmentation not absorbed in write coalescing and spacemap scheduling, by enabling a place for read-ahead blocks to be cached.
This was a federal criminal case, and so was handled by a U.S. attorney and would have gone before a U.S. district court.
The judges and prosecutors in the U.S. district courts are not elected.
The investigation was lead by the FBI. The FBI is a wholly unelected agency.
The federal Executive is bound by statute, internal rules, and customs with respect to exercising control over the federal law enforcement agencies, especially the FBI, and similarly is prevented from interfering in the activities of U.S. attorneys. The usual way of dealing with outright bad apples is not termination but promoting them to Alaska or Guam and hoping they refuse and resign. Firing U.S. attorneys, while often lawful, has led to wider government-crippling conflict among the various interested parties (the DoJ, the courts, the wider federal legal profession, and Congress (notably the Senate, which under the constitution must confirm the appointment of U.S. attorneys)).
tl;dr: the notwithstanding clause is hard to use - a good litigator would probably still find the courts enforcing the rights in question, and using it "for real" is (in most cases unnecessarily) politically risky.
You are referring to section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
That section [a] does not apply to the whole Charter (only to ss 2 and 7-15, although admittedly s 2(b) is the relevant freedom of expression clause, as noted in your parent article); [b] must be enacted by primary legislation; [c] that primary legislation must use specific wording ("declaration") explicitly invoking s 33; [d] the declaration expires no later than five years from its coming into force (and may expire sooner for several reasons, on the other hand further primary legislation can reset the expiration date); [e] the declaration is only valid under an appropriate Head of Power (i.e. it must conform with the ordinary Division of Powers, etc.).
The usual impediments to passing primary legislation apply, and in most of the legislatures, and in the federal Parliament, internal rules and general practice require a Royal Recommendation for legislation including a s.33 declaration -- that is, a government minister (or equivalent) must introduce the legislation with the backing of the cabinet (formally the Governor General in Council per 13 of the Consolidated Constitution Acts 1867-1982, or the provincial equivalents).
The use of the declaration does not shield the Act using it from the Canadian Bill of Rights (1960) which also has protections for freedom of expression; a remedy exists in the courts until and unless Parliament amends that Act. There may also be remedies for certain infringements under other statutes, such as the Canadian Human Rights Act (1977). Several provinces have similar "ordinary" legislation which are still in force and which offer various different protections for freedom of expression including remedies for interference by the provincial legislature or executive. Again these are not as entrenched as the Charter, but they also survive any use of s. 33 of the Charter, and most would have to be outright amended by the legislature, and brought into force *first*.
There are also much older protections for some forms of expression in force today in Canada; the Constitution as a whole has been found by the Supreme Court (and this is not surprising or controversial) to include the 19th or 20th century versions of such things as the English Bill of Rights (1689), or the Act of Settlement (1701), and the Quebec Act (1774), all of which may provide a cause of action even in the absence of the Charter protections and its modern statutory predecessors federally and provincially.
International obligations exist under treaty (and enabling or derivative statutes and regulations) that allow the courts to assess liability against the government for breaches of various rights of expression. Changing these would require primary legislation and may also require some advance notification to the other contracting parties.
Finally, there remain common law protections for freedom of expression related to concepts such as quiet enjoyment and public nuisance; people will generally resort to statutes which were written with the then state of case law in mind because they are simpler, more codified, and thus easier to deal with in litigation. However, even in the absence of statutory protections for various forms of freedom of expression, a good litigator is likely able to build a case that may persuade a Canadian judge to provide a requested remedy for some breach by the government. Indeed, this approach was very common prior to codified claims and grants of right, and did not entirely go away afterwards. There is no practical way for a government to avoid the possibility of courts finding against them for breaches of rights (even of uncodified ones) without destroying the independence of the judiciary.
The use of s 33 therefore [a] may not work with respect to shieldin
Gage was not only no fool, he was also acting in accordance with the English Bill of Rights 1689 which said (in the late 18th century; the document has been amended several times and is still in force in much of the former British Empire):
[In the Articles of Complaint, deeming actions of the former monarch and his government unlawful]:
"Whereas the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counsellors, judges and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom [...] "By raising and keeping a standing army within this kingdom in time of peace without consent of Parliament, and quartering soldiers contrary to law; [...] "By causing several good subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when papists were both armed and employed contrary to law; [...] "All which are utterly and directly contrary to the known laws and statutes and freedom of this realm;"
[The Parliament that brought about the Glorious Revolution declares]
"That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law; "That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;... "That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void;..."
[And the price for becoming the Constitutional Monarchs for William & Mary, and more importantly, the price for the Royalists in the coalition with the Parliamentarians that brought in the Glorious Revolution with its central idea that everyone should disband their private armies and argue things out in Parliament rather than fight things out in further civil war]:
"[...] the said declaration are the true, ancient and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom, and so shall be esteemed, allowed, adjudged, deemed and taken to be; and that all and every the particulars aforesaid shall be firmly and strictly holden and observed as they are expressed in the said declaration, and all officers and ministers whatsoever shall serve their Majesties and their successors according to the same in all time to come."
Gage was an officer; he took his orders from ministers in practice, and they were drawn from and had to placate various factions in Parliament, including several flavours of Whig (the Foxites, most notably) who were very friendly with "American Revolutionaries" (to the point of forcing "kid glove" rules on what Gage and his superiors could do. Parliamentary micromanagement of the military was highly fashionable at the time, and it was frequently party political (see what happened to John Byng for instance)). Lord North, head of the government at Westminster (as "First Lord of the Treasury"; we would call him Prime Minister now) was keen on suppressing social turmoil in general, in England and in New England, and was certainly hostile to the what Europeans now call "subsidiarity" and no fan of grassroots democracy (this is in part because of his conflict with Londoners' electoral support for John Wilkes, whom he opposed and detested), but even he was bound by the (then) British Constitution, including the English Bill of Rights 1689. North had seen what Junius had done to his predecessor, and North had weaker support in the House of Commons.
However, North was good at persuading subordinates to try to interpret laws restricting the powers of the executive very narrowly when suitable. In the case of the gunpowder you mentioned, this led to frictions over jointly held stockpiles, especially those that could be accessed by non-subjects (there were quite a few in the Massachusetts Bay colony, including people who had fled from regions controlled by autocratic European tyrants and who readily accepted the idea promulgated by Charles James Fox and Benjamin Franklin (among others) that
The Royal Assent with respect to Westminster bills has generally been delegated to a commission since the 16th century (this was largely motivated by efficiency issues surrounding Henry VIII becoming the constitutional monarch of Ireland and by Henry VIII being more interested in sports and architecture, and with the fractiousness of English politics which was merely hidden for a while during his father's reign). The monarch personally participated in Royal Assent ceremonies only infrequently for major bills; the last time a monarch was personally involved in a Royal Assent was in 1854.
No bill becomes law until she's signed it
is therefore at least inaccurate.
It is not clear whether the Prime Minister can Advise the Lords Commissioners to withhold the Royal Assent in the United Kingdom. It is an enumerated power of the Executive in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, however, and has been used once or twice, although proclamation and/or bringing-into-force clauses in the Constitution and covering statute are the usual tools the Executive uses to avoid implementing the entirety of Acts of Parliament until it sees fit. In Westminster, Parliament regularly delegates the decision to bring into force parts of Acts of Parliament to government ministers, directly in the Act itself.
Also, the United Kingdom is now effectively a federal state, and one of the ways this `is reflected is in how the Royal Assent works with respect to bills originating in the assemblies for Scotland and Northern Ireland. The monarch has no personal authority in the enacting of bills passed by those bodies; the remedy for apparent conflicts with the Constitution is through the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, and the power to refer bills to the Supreme Court is vested in politicians responsible to the respective assemblies.
Bills passed by the National Assembly for Wales are confirmed by an Order-in-Council (in which the Queen or a Regent participates), however this will change to a system more like that of Scotland in light of the 2011 referendum on the extension of the Assembly's legislative competence.
Since Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales effectively allow their respective governments-of-the-day to stall the implementation of Assembly bills on narrow grounds, it is likely that the government in Westminster could do the same if it wanted (for instance, if a minority government were to be unable to stop the passage of a bill through the House of Commons and the House of Lords (where necessary)).
She should really have been including Charles in these meetings for the last 10 years
He has been a Privy Counsellor since 1977, and since his age of majority has acted as Prince Regent when the Queen has been unavailable. He is almost certainly as well briefed as he would like to be. Any differences in the advisory role between President Windsor and Vice-President Windsor is most likely attributable to personality and personal interests.
A person’s extradition to a Category 1 territory is barred by reason of extraneous considerations if (and only if) it appears that: (a) the Part 1 warrant issued in respect of him (though purporting to be issued on account of the extradition offence) is in fact issued for the purpose of prosecuting or punishing him on account of his race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation or political opinions, or (b) if extradited he might be prejudiced at his trial or punished, detained or restricted in his personal liberty by reason of his race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation or political opinions. This has been hinted at, but no evidence has been provided and the bar is neither argued nor found.
That Counsel for Mr Assange did not offer an argument or evidence in support of point (b) above is astonishing. Unfortunately under the relevant rules of procedure, and given the broader workings of the adversarial system, it seems that Assange's attorneys failed to engage directly with this part of the statute while Mr Assange himself was saying in public that the prosecution was nakedly political and the punishment would be strongly influenced to his detriment because of his politics.
The Administrative Court on appeal is entitled to consider an argument on that point even if it was not made in the District Court. It may not be a terrible disadvantage if a weak argument on that point had been advanced and failed in front of the Chief Magistrate, as his reasoning on the other arguments which failed in front of him is clear and compelling.
Finally, it is disappointing that the argument focused on technical deficiencies in the procedure that, if the Chief Magistrate had taken a line opposite the "cosmopolitan" reading of the wording in the statute and Framework Decision, could be remedied simply by having Ms Ny, or a colleague, immediately reissue a new EAW that would not have these deficiencies. I would think that a judge could reasonably conclude (perhaps considering arguments from the parties) that requiring that remedy conflicts with Crim P.R. Rule 1 (the Overriding Objective) and deliberately disregard "picayune" defects in an obviously purposeful and apparently lawfully made EAW especially when the obvious remedy would quickly place Mr Assange in an effectively identical situation. In particular, I do not think that autrefois acquit would or SHOULD apply in England or in Sweden if the present EAW were overturned because it identified Ms Ny as "the" Director rather than "a" Director, or chose a negligibly broader Swedish term of art than the most exactingly precise equivalent to "prosecution". I also do not believe Sweden would hesitate to reissue a corrected EAW. Consequently, it would be a poor use of resources to require the formality, along the lines of trying to convince the Administrative Court to find for the appellant because of a macro expansion failure ("M a") or a typo ("Mr Hurtig in an unreliable witness").
I find myself wondering whether Mr Assange will continue using Mr Hurtig as his Swedish attorney (see the paragraphs starting with "10." and "15." in the ruling).
If the matter within the universe is expanding, it has to be expanding into something. What is that something?
The matter in the universe is actually compacting because of gravitation. Most of the reason that matter has not compacted into black holes is that in the early universe the matter was much hotter, and thus components of matter had a lot of kinetic energy, which works against compaction. Ordinary matter readily collides with other ordinary matter (or photons) and the collision radiates away photons, so the matter loses kinetic energy in the process, and so tends to compact into bright dense blobs like stars. (Dark matter collides very rarely, and does not collide with or emit photons at all, so it still has lots of kinetic energy and thus spins in high orbits around massive structures like galaxies; in order to fall into the middle of the galaxy, that kinetic energy has to be lost, and whatever processes dark matter uses to get rid of kinetic energy are verrrry slow).
That is, most of the matter in the universe is in large gravitationally-bound structures. These structures are all moving away from one another, any observer looking at structures from his or her or its vantage point will see the distant structures receding faster than closer structures. The most obvious interpretation of this would be that empty space is being created between the big structures, but since the structures are not themselves expanding, empty space is not being created within the big structures.
In between all these large gravitationally-bound structures the gravitational potentials (which describe the direction things fall and how they appear to accelerate while falling, in the eyes of various observers) are very weak compared to the gravitational potentials near, or within, galaxies. Because it can be seen by certain observers to impart accelerations on objects, the gravitational field has an energy. Matter can receive energy from the gravitational field, and it can also donate energy back to it. (This is a generalized conservation rule in General Relativity), and the energy of the gravitational field is non-uniform. Whatever energy is causing empty space to appear works against gravitation. For example, if the empty space was not being created, the large structures would be closer together and so they would feel mutually steeper gravitational potential gradients -- that is, gravity would bring them ever closer together, merging them, and causing them to compact. That is, gravity would (from our viewpoint) accelerate big galactic clusters (including the one our galaxy is in) towards each other. However, we observe that clusters are accelerating away from one another instead, and that the acceleration is highly uniform with distance.
The simplest way to explain this is to posit an energy field with a small energy value at every point in space; the energy works against gravity by "unfolding" new space from something like a compact manifold. However, the energy value is small enough to be dwarfed by gravitational energy in stars, star systems, star clusters, galaxies, galactic clusters, superclusters, and possibly galactic filaments. So where there is lots of gravitational energy, like in these structures, you wouldn't notice new space appearing. In deep space far from massive structures, gravitational energy is so weak that this unknown (and "dark" as in "dark ages", which are poorly understood bits of history) energy does not suppress the "unfolding" of new space. So, lots of new space appears between galactic clusters. And that new space still has dark energy, so new space unfolds within the new (and empty) space. And so on. The result: exponential growth of the amount of empty space in the universe, all appearing far from big visible structures.
This is called the metric expansion of space because "unfolding" new space has a geometrical equivalence in increasing the number of coordinates, which in one dimension is equivalent to o
I've no direct knowledge of even the name of the British "firm" (chambers, partnership, etc.) claiming to be responsible for contributing to the creation of the U.S. constitution, though I could probably find out.
Good idea. Report back.
If you can find a partnership or company arrangement for lawyers in the British Empire (outside of Quebec) prior to 1801 or in the USA prior to 1815 that would be interesting news. Arrangements that limited the liability of the lawyers involved prior to the Reconstruction Era would be even more interesting.
That said, I would be thoroughly unsurprised if you found a list of individual English and Scottish lawyers -- most likely Foxites -- who helped in the drafting process. That would have been done gratis, which is not what I think most people would expect from a "law firm".
don't know of the Quebec Act (1765), and unfortunately cannot find a reference.
Oops, I didn't catch that mistake; the date probably crossed in my head with one of the statutes proceeding from the Treaty of Paris (1763) (which ceded control of Nouvelle France to Great Britain) or one of the acts to deal with the maintenance of the "armed truce" among the combatants of the Seven Years' War such as the Quartering Act (1765) and to protect the ongoing expansion of the western frontier of the 13 colonies.
I do not think the Quebec Act itself is clearly reflected in U.S. law in any meaningful way. It may have influenced the secularization of some oaths and it may have influenced the Louisiana Purchase Treaty and derivative legislation.
As noted in the Wikipedia article, it certainly helped inflame the feelings of being treated like "second-class" or "third-class" Englishmen in the colonies just prior to the revolution.
I brought up the Quebec Act mainly to help illustrate the argument that advocates and/or attorneys working together in a limited liability construct was a very "Continental thing" frowned upon in the 18th century British Empire. The Act allowed the French limited liability collective system to continue for law professionals, and for them to employ English (including colonial) attorneys who could continue to litigate (and possibly appear in some courts) outside Quebec.
I would welcome correction on any distinction between barristers and solicitors insofar as they are required to be sole practitioners
Barristers in some jurisdictions offering services to the general public must still be sole practitioners, although as you say they may pool some costs (rent of Common Areas, certain administration tasks, some marketing activity) with other barristers. In England and Wales these arrangements are known as "chambers" principally because they have historically literally meant a set of rooms (with a porter); different terms are in use elsewhere in the former British Empire.
The separation of advocates and attorneys is fading, and did not even exist in the first place in some courts of the British Empire established since the 19th century. In medieval England, advocates were clergymen trusted to appear before senior courts (and able to communicate in Anglo-Norman French and Latin, for example) were expected by the Church to take no pay for their advocacy. Donations were allowed, however, and barristers' court dress retains a robe or gown with a flap collar or a back pocket into which attorneys would slip an honorarium.
Attorneys could not advocate before senior courts (and mostly still can't in England and Wales) but did have the right to draft and file documents with the court. Since many controversies are resolved without the need for in person advocacy before a judge, and since attorneys were never constrained from ch
1. Yes, public roads even existed in Romano-British times (1st century AD). By the 18th century there was a substantial body of law surrounding their use, upkeep, new construction, and so forth. Public roads played as important a role in the British conquest of North America as they did in the Roman conquest of Britain.
2. I do not know what the framers think. Why don't we summon them as witnesses? Surely a party has a right to confront witnesses offering testimony prejudicial to his or her case!
(This could be recursive, summoning the framers to give their testimony about the Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause)
As a matter of interest, I understand many of the amendments (including the 4th) were crafted by British law firms. Whether that was in response to the problem (in the eyes of the law firm) of refusal constituting probable cause in England is a matter of some debate, as the British didn't have at the time a written constitution giving rights to refusal (i.e. it was in the eyes of the House of Lords what constituted the constitution, and such constitution was... ephemeral).
A: "British law firms". No such thing. Law practitioners in what is now the United Kingdom were required to be sole practitioners until the 19th century. The first law firms in the British Empire were established in the 18th century under the auspices of the Quebec Act (1765) which recognized the pre-existence of legal partnerships and corporations under the French system. Since the Quebec Act resulted in a hybridized civil code and common law system, practitioners of English and Scots law with Quebec-based businesses could do something then unique in the Empire: form limited liability partnerships. Most especially, lawyers were allowed to advocate in spite of not having completed a law education in the City of London, a practice established in 1234, which made it difficult for colonists to become lawyers (and especially advocates). This *ENRAGED* many practitioners of law in North America since (a) there were substantial economies of scale enjoyed by such partnerships and (b) there were tariff advantages within the Colonies. This is not too surprising, since the Quebec Act enraged many people in the 13 colonies (especially allowing Roman Catholics to act as lawyers, judges, and officials) and even caused some friction in the other British colonies in the region (the Law Society of Upper Canada formed in reaction, for example, to advocate for practitioners of English law further up the St Lawrence).
In the reconstruction era, several of the regulators in the various states and in the U.S. began to allow law professionals to form partnerships in similar ways. This was reasonably successful, and the practice spread throughout the USA and back to England (for solicitors only initially) and Scotland.
While several of the authors of the U.S. Constitution held law degrees, and had practised law (usually exclusively in their home colony), and could reasonably be considered "British lawyers" (although more properly English lawyers; the one or two Scots involved also practised English law) at the time of the Revolution, the only thing that could reasonably be called a "British law firm" in the 1770s-1790s were in Quebec and were generally hostile to the Revolution, since the Treaty of Paris was turning out to be a good deal for the former Nouvelle France compared to the chaos, expense, and violence in the 13 colonies to their south.
B: "many of the amendments (including the 4th) were crafted by British law firms"
If you substitute "British law firms" for "English advocates" you are part way there, because much of the Bill of Rights directly reflects the contents of the (English) Bill of Rights 1689, which outlined the rights of Englishmen which many of the Revolutionaries fought for.
The English Bill of Rights in its accusations and claims should remind people of the (U.S.) Bill of Rights -- the first, the second, the third, the fifth and the eighth in particular. However the Fourth Amendment is a novel codification of what was then a rapidly evolving area of statute and case law in England; it was the better part of 50 years before a similar set of rules with respect to warrants and evidence were sufficiently entrenched in English law that future Parliaments would not dare weaken them without at least careful primary legislation (i.e., a "constitutional amendment").
"refusal constituting probable cause" - the Roman Law principle nemo tenetur se ipsum accusare has been in legal force in a modern sense in what is now England since the Englis
Yes we should reform corporate law. We should have a Supreme Court ruling on a law that explicitly states that corporations are not "persons".
Corporate persons have their own legal personalities and can enter into contracts and appear before the courts. Those alone makes them legal persons. It is not just private companies that are corporate persons -- The People of the United States is a corporate person, with its own legal personality distinct from, for example, The People of the State of New York, or the Solicitor-General of the United States. Each of these enjoys a right to appear before a court to put its case in an action concerning it. Why not private companies?
Private companies *do* appear in courts to deal with contract disputes, torts, and so forth. They appear as themselves rather than as a particularized collection of individual directors (who are natural persons) or shareholders (who may not be natural persons).
Should private companies not appear before courts in this manner? What about other corporate persons?
And corporations do not have rights, like free speech.
Natural persons have rights that corporate persons do not. No corporate person may serve on a jury, for instance, or be elected to Congress.
When you say "like free speech" do you mean literally that the free speech clause should be read as implicitly allowing Congress to make any law regulating any communication by any private company? Where is the limit? Can Congress forbid a private company from petitioning the courts? By the incorporation clause, can a state forbid a company from petitioning all three branches of the federal government?
Do you mean instead that there appears to be an imbalance between the rights to free speech enjoyed by natural persons and those enjoyed by private companies that should be addressed, and that the best venue for addressing this imbalance is in the courts?
Wouldn't Congress be a more suitable venue for proposing and debating the reasonableness and justifiability of limits on corporate communications, at least in theory? (I would hope that they would agree that the vehicle for enacting some limits on such speech would be a constitutional amendment, or at least primary legislation unencumbered with irrelevant riders, but I would not bet on it, since procedural discipline and legislative clarity do not seem to be priorities in the legislative process in either house of Congress or in the use of the Presidential veto).
I think it's unlikely that any court would agree that a private company could face dissolution by an executive branch without being able to challenge that dissolution in a court of law. Do you think denying a company its day in court is just?
Private companies already appear before courts in matters of contract dispute, tort, taxation, and so forth, as both plaintiff and defendant. A company puts its case before the court just like any other party, or indeed The People (for instance).
Companies do not have the same rights (or duties) as natural persons. They cannot sit on juries, for instance.
However, they appear to have the right to due process, which conflicts with:
The idea that a fictional entity the government creates has 'rights' the government can't infringe is sheer nonsense.
... assuming you mean the executive and legislative branches of government. Obviously their rights can be "infringed" by the courts, since that is what courts are given the authority to do, when to do so is just, reasonable, proportionate and lawful, and only when a uniform and fair process has been followed.
This is not to say that the courts will (or should) always side with a private company when one of the other branches of government seeks to interfere with their activities, nor that the balance between the rights of the relevant corporate persons (The People of the United States is also a corporate person, for example) are in a static or even desirable balance presently.
Of course, governments don't have to approve business licenses in the first place. So could just decide not to allow any business with political goals they don't like
Do you think that's just? Would it be OK for the agency that grants incorporation in a state to deny incorporation to a group of businesspeople because one of the proposed directors is black, or is a registered Democrat?
If it's better to be "blind" to such matters at the time of granting of limited liability status or other benefits of incorporation, why abandon that "blindness" afterwards?
Why should owners of the corporation be not liable?
They may be. "Corporations" usually mean "Limited Liability Companies" where generally the maximum liability any shareholder faces is the value of his or her share(s). Other forms of incorporation have different (or even *no*) limit on liability on the shareholders, proprietors, or whatever they may be called.
There are corporate entities wherein the shareholders really do face *no* liability - they are almost all charities.
The grant of incorporation by the relevant head of power (a state, the United States) will almost always impose conditions on the corporate entity, and will generally allow -- even encourage -- the registration of rules under which the corporation will act but cannot change without the consent of the relevant head of power. These rules are variously called a corporate charter, a corporate constitution, and a number of other expressions.
If you really want corporate behavior to change, you've got to re-link the investors (owners) with the actions (and consequences of those actions) done by the corporation
Some jurisdictions have imposed a "no politics" rule on limited liability companies; this can be done by statute or by regulation. Other jurisdictions hand out limited liability much more sparingly than, for example, Delaware. That, and the commerce and full faith and credit clauses, is a big reason most large U.S. companies incorporate there.
It's unlikely that the courts would read in a "no politics" rule, even if one of the parties made a persuasive case that (a) they could and (b) they should. Courts are also unlikely to revoke corporate charters (or grants of limited liability) in the absence of primary legislation from the relevant head of power making it clear that the courts may do so.
Additionally, there is an agency problem involved in "tying" owners to corporate action more deeply than the value of the share. In large publicly traded LLCs there will almost certainly be a large number of shares held indirectly via a mutual fund or some sort of trust. Moreover, "publicly traded" implies that shares do actually change hands with some frequency. At the time of some hypothetical final judgement against such a corporation, which natural persons should be "tied" to the judgement? What should the liability be of someone invested in a large market-tracking fund that happened to (maybe even indirectly) control some shares for a while during the period covered by a finding of civil liability or criminality?
"Fractionating" the liability is certainly possible in the broadest sense, and the cost of this could be borne by the parties ultimately "tied" to the judgement. As these costs might far exceed the money in a final judgement, many investors would think very hard about ever investing into *any* limited liability corporation, just as they now avoid structures in which there is unlimited joint and several liability for each investor.
Indeed, limits to liability were founded precisely to encourage investment, and it very clearly worked.
Undoing that might not necessarily be a bad move overall, but it would be a hugely important one with many unpredictable consequences.
Bear in mind that for codecisions (binding directives that give one standing before national courts and/or the European Court of Justice where there are questions of the supremacy or legality of the EU legislation) the Lisbon treaty still requires that all member-states' governments-of-the day (via unanimity in the European Council) agree to be bound by the codecision. Once there is a qualified majority among the member-states, the European Parliament is asked to concur. If and only if the qualified majority is also unanimity (of the member-states voting), is there a directive that, if not complied with, exposes the member-state to legal liability if national legislation, policy, or practice unreasonably conflicts.
(There are also non-codecision (or now "non-ordinary") legislative procedures which may apply, but which also involve at least a qualified majority in the Council and which allows for derogations by member-states who are not part of that qualified majority; finally there are some areas which still require unanimity among the governments of the day of the member-states in the Council).
Note that Lisbon somewhat protects the principle that one member-state's parliament may not unreasonably bind its successor. The Westminster system (most notably in Canada -- note the clever tying in of the topic! -- where it is codified in Section 56 of Part IV of the Consolidated Constitution Acts 1867-1982) generally allows the head of state, on the advice of the head of government, to refuse to implement an Act of Parliament passed in the previous six months. In practice, this would be used by a new Prime Minister having faced a fresh general election to eliminate Acts of Parliament passed under the previous government (i.e., the old Prime Minister). Of course, the new Prime Minister could face troubles within the newly elected Parliament, so a more regular approach would be to try to pass a new Act of Parliament repealing the previously-passed one. This is called "limited binding" in Constitutional law, and it is generally accepted to apply to every member-state in the European Union (by way of work done in the Council of Europe, a different organization which all EU member-states must participate in).
"Limited binding" clearly applies in the acquis communitaire so if an outgoing government of the day participated in a Council co-decision in its waning days, and it were subsequently defeated in an election, the new government of the day could revoke its assent, effectively killing the co-decision.
Moreover, democratic practice generally requires that if a populace really resents a directive, the directive is wrong; following the principle of subsidiarity, if there is real democratic opposition in a member-state to a given directive, the Commission should be expected to be very careful (i.e., avoid!) a strong prosecution. Likewise, so should the courts in the member-state in question.
A constitutional conflict between a member-state and the European Union would probably be resolved politically, and probably by the EU revisiting the issue (or the member-state performing a democratic consultation of its voters or at least its national parliament). However, national courts have also been asked to intervene, and thus far, have always declared the matter to be non-justiciable on separation of powers grounds, or have referred the matter to the ECJ. It is plausible a national court might decide on its own to declare an action of the EU to be incompatible with the national constitution, and not give leave to appeal to the ECJ (it is even possible that the ECJ could decide that the member-state should not have given consent in Council on those grounds, or that the member should not be bound by the other member-states unreasonably). It's more likely that the ECJ would consider the matter non-justiciable but offer a range of possible political solutions in its decision.
A serious conflict between a new government (or the population in general) and the actions of its p
A few corrigenda and then some tl;dr information for you.
The short version is that several nasty civil wars were fought to make sure that this sentence of yours is legally and politically false:
if a party can manage to push a bad law through Parliament (especially in a majority Gov't situation), and through the Senate (a longer-term and more "sober" house, but political nonetheless), it can be stopped by the head of state
The Parliament of Canada consists of the House of Commons, the Senate and the Queen of Canada. (This is not what you say in your sentence above; you meant "the House of Commons" rather than "Parliament" presumably).
The consolidated Constitution Acts (1867-1982) says:
IV. 17. There shall be One Parliament for Canada, consisting of the Queen, an Upper House styled the Senate, and the House of Commons.
Also:
Yes, it is true that the GG can stomp on a bill, but if it's passed both the House and the Senate and hasn't raised any serious questions, then it's mostly a formality. Likewise, she can't "abolish" a law without the approval of the other parts of government either
is only true with respect to "without the approval of the other parts of [Parliament]", and then only if you read "The Queen" as "the Prime Minister", effectively.
The Queen (as an institution, rather than as a person) has a vital Constitutional role that is quite active. IV. 54. requires that the Queen make a recommendation before any spending bill may lawfully be passed by Parliament; 55. and 57. require that the Queen give Assent to any bill before it is enacted.
Both Houses of Parliament have their own rules that further restrict their activities with respect to IV. 54. (and the Senate is further constrained by 53. which requires that all money-raising bills originate in the House of Commons). Finally, 56. allows the Queen to disallow any Act within one year of its passage. In general, very little legislation may lawfully be passed without both the Queen's *prior and subsequent* consent.
In practice the Queen of Canada is read as the government of the day, since she may not exercise her powers directly or through the Governor-General without the advice of the Prime Minister (which is often delegated to other ministers and officials).
The Recommendation requirement and the statutory and house rules allow even a minority government to control all budget legislation. A House of Commons and Senate dominated by opponents cannot increase taxes *or* spending without the approval of the government (i.e. the Prime Minister of the day); if they want to do that, they must force the government to resign. (As examples, they can do this either by refusing to pass any legislation at all, or by starving the government of Supply, or the House of Commons can indicate that it has no confidence in the government's ability to govern).
Non-budget legislation can be passed by both Houses of Parliament in spite of the government's wishes, in which case the government likely would refuse to give the bill Royal Assent, killing it dead.
A government that controls Parliament and in its last few months starts passing Acts that the immediate successor government strongly disagrees with could see the use of the Disallowance power used against those Acts by the incoming government.
The power of the Queen of Canada to act contrary to the advice of the Prime Minister was fully extinguished in the wake of the King-Byng affair (1925), the Balfour Declaration (1926), the Statute of Westminster (1931) and finally by section 12 of the consolidated Constitution Act which ultimately finalized Parliament's abolition of the Queen of Canada's ability to exercise any personally held (or delegated) constitutional powers without the advice of the Prime Minister (or the Cabinet Committee and Emergency Committes of the Privy Council of Canada where the Prime Minister is incapacitated).
I'm inclined to agree. There are systemic weaknesses in the Internet, and a few systematic ones that mostly involve being effectively unable to do useful things with perfectly-flowing IP packets. (For example, the utility of the Internet drops enormously if you disable your own DNS locally; try it and go web surfing, or emailing, or whatnot).
Mostly the weaknesses are centred around what could happen if there is a large scale increase in the proportion of bad actors to good actors in various stability-sensitive aspects of the Internet, which given the occasional emergence of host software monoculture is not the best news. A really bad situation would be if, for example, a software update from a large supplier started generating traffic much more aggressively than RFC 2001 / RFC 3465 style TCP, whether through a TCP implementation bug or a deliberate choice of a non-TCP/non-congestion-avoiding protocol for some form of bulk data transfer that becomes very popular. (An obvious approaching-worst case might be if for every packet received by each of a huge number of hosts, an uncached/non-recursive pair of DNS queries (PTR, then A or AAAA) is made on the source address.)
Consequently, the greatest practical risk now comes from insiders at large network operators, router vendors, or one or two particular host software vendors. A bad actor there, or an incompetent one, could lead to sustained widespread trouble.
There are several implementations of BGP from different vendors and at least two open source implementations. The protocol is also relatively simple. Consequently it's hard to imagine a vulnerability that is structural within BGP such that enough partitioning happens to make large the Internet unusable.
In the early 1990s there was a moment where there was a very large partition when AS Path prepending was used for the first time. Cisco routers did not mind the back-to-back duplicate AS. Proteon, Wellfleet and some other implementations discarded the NLRI (prefix/mask + routing information) as part of routing-information-loop avoidance. Gated-derived routers had different approach in its NLRI loop-avoidance code, and rather than use the NLRI or discard that one update, it dropped the TCP session figuring that there was a data corruption bug. The result: BGP sessions between "core" IOS-talking routers and "core" gated-derived routers bounced up and down for a while. This affected most of the exterior routing gateways of ANS, which operated the NSFNET Backbone Service at the time.
This sort of "reset" policy is now known to have been a serious mistake and now is very rare.
Also in the early 1990s there was a hardware interaction problem involving Cisco 7000-series routers equipped with Silicon Switching Processor cards. A "covering" prefix arriving via any routing protocol -- typically BGP -- would cause all the "covered" (longer match of the same prefix) to be deleted with demand-population bringing those routes back into the radix tree like data structure. Demand population used the same CPU that TCP ACK processing and other activities used, so a router in the "core" with a relatively full routing table and a high packet per second arrival rate of a mix of prefixes (as in "core" routers generally) would simply melt down. This would starve timer-sensitive activities like TCP ACKing and processing the BGP protocol state machine. This in turn led to BGP sessions resetting due to time-outs, which in turn reduced the traffic load substantially on the melting-down router. This would "thaw" the router enough that it would bring the BGP sessions back up long enough to receive a covering prefix, and so forth in a loop. This crippled one very large "tier 1" ISP for an hour and change.
There have been a number of minor "ouchies" related to information obtained from BGP neighbours in the years since, with the most embarassing ones having to do with specific implementations' reactions to very long data sets (e.g. extremely large AS_Set attributes, extremely long AS Paths).
There was also concern some years ago (late 1990s) about the frequency of BGP updates, and that a series of actors publishing up/down/up/down transitions as fast as they could might lead to a router "meltdown" with consequences along the lines of the situation described a couple of paragraphs up. This was considered a long term possibility, and as a result a couple of different approaches evolved suppress oscillating prefixes or blocks thereof at a level much lower than that where BGP's fundamentally built in mechanisms (TCP window sizes and fundamental NLRI/RIB processing speeds) would kick in.
The modern BGP "basket" is much less systematically rickety; the systemic ricketyness is the result of BGP being fundamentally being a "push" distribution of vectors rather than a "pull" acquisition of nonlocal (but widely distributed) connectivity and policy maps (as happened when one fed desired map data from USENET's u.* hierarchy into pathalias, for example, using one or more "smarthosts" as the equivalent of IP's 0.0.0.0/0 default).
Sadly, because the "push" NLRIs are not easily cryptographically signed by the source site (unlike PGP around a UUCP/USENET map file or even around an individual entry) there is still a requirement to trust your largest neighbours, although in the early 1990s the remained ANS's Policy Routing DataBase
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a nice bit of history about religious tolerance and liberty in the colonies right in the middle of the American Revolution:
http://books.google.co.uk/book...
"It is difficult to overestimate the degree to which, on the eve of the Revolution, Catholics in America were still widely discriminated against. Several members of the Continental Congress, including Congregationalist Roger Sherman, were opposed to hiring Catholics to fight in the Continental Army. Only three colonies allowed Catholics to vote. They were banned from holding public office in all New England colonies save Rhode Island. New Hampshire law called for the imprisonment of all persons who refused to repudiate the pope, the mass, and transsubstantiation. New York held the DEATH PENALTY [emphasis mine] over priests who entered the colony; Virginia boasted that it would only arrest them."
In Virginia, the birthplace of the separation of church and state, it took *seven years* for Thomas Jefferson to convince the General Assembly to pass the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and debates on the matter bear a striking resemblance to the sorts of thing one might read in YouTube comments.
By the time that the United States Bill of Rights was ratified, the freedom to practice any religion without fear of being barred from holding land, accessing the courts, or holding most professional jobs had been established by law in most of the British Empire.
This is not entirely surprising as many of the most influential people who formed the Federalist faction in what became the United States were in close cooperation with the Foxites in the British parliament from well before the Revolution until well after, and agreed on many -- or even most -- civil liberties and constitutional issues. The American Revolution weakened the common enemy (principally the Northites and Grenvilleites, who are all fairly called Tories in spite of their claim to the Whig mantle).
By comparison, the erosion of Tory (see above) dominance in the British parliament in the wake of the Seven Years' War led to a series of religious Relief Acts relaxing restrictions on Catholics. It's noteworthy that the first major such act, the Quebec Act 1774, was one of the "Intolerable Acts" protested by the Americans (in the political faction sense) that they argued justifed Independence. Additionally, in the thick of the Revolution, the British parliament passed the Relief Act 1778 and the Schools and Bishops Act 1782, in spite of vigorous domestic opposition (there were riots in Britain in the wake of each), and even more vigorous opposition in the parts of the Thirteen Colonies not already in full rebellion, and some upset in several of the others that ultimately did not join the American Revolution.
Also, by way of self-followup, the internet-draft proposes a mechanism to distinguish between https URIs over encrypted http2 connections and http URIs over encrypted http2 connections, with the goal that only the latter will be subject to manipulation by an explicitly trusted proxy, and that the client, the server, and conforming proxies all take steps to avoid unnoticed manipulation or examination of https URI related data. (The client, server and proxy all have opportunities to "opt out" of the proxy's manipulation or examination of http URI related content).
Sure, Terry, but what's worse, an MITM DOS ("you don't get to negotiate a [n https] connection") or an MITM that allows full inspection and modification of data that one (typically the server-side) or both ends think is an HTTPS connection?
The server side has lots of standardized and/or developed tools to protect the integrity and privacy of data between the server and the browser that does not rely upon perfect (or even any) HTTPS. The assumption that HTTPS is perfect -- or even close enough -- has been holding back deployments of such tools for more than a decade.
Apart from opening doors to greater network efficiency along several axes (caching and other deduplication and localization approaches, distribution away from single front ends, greater concentration of resources on single NLA addresses), deliberate trusted proxy ought to push people into reconsidering whether only-the-server-side-has-a-certificate TLS is *sufficient* for integrity and privacy. (I don't think it is, and I suspect that view is shared by at least some people behind two-factor authentication etc.)
However, the safer bet is that the proposal is likely to be strangled by people with a very narrow view of HTTPS, or by a lack of engagement on the way deliberate trusted MITM affects the security model of the whole WWW (few people will ask if it can actually *improve* overall security compared to the many people who will argue that it necessarily erodes it). It's a pity, because separating integrity (arbitrary chunks of data with some signed checksum) and privacy is likely to be a clear win on energy where integrity-but-not-privacy-required data are popular enough to warrant being highly distributed and/or highly cached.
Finally, another question that ought to be addressed is that a lot of eggs are in the HTTPS basket, and not all of them have been inherited from everything-over-HTTP. That deliberate trusted MITM exposes this question is not a bad thing, I think. However I would again bet that the consensus will be that the convenience of everything-over-HTTPS will trump that of a standard approach to making (especially) HTTP inside HTTPS amenable to caching, ad-removal, virus-removal, and whatever else a "middlebox" might do with HTTP now. After all, if someone really wants to do that, they can simply disallow (well, "break", even) HTTPS negotiation altogether...
Thus, my own answer to my question at the top: where there is agreement to enable a trusted MITM to act, then an MITM DOS is much worse; but for any other case it's the lesser of two evils. The key thing here is in how to determine agreement and trust; where that's not clear to either the client side or the server side (which is likely a harder problem), surely it's not enormously different from an MITM DOS ("can't establish a valid HTTPS connection" because of anything from TCP port blocking to pinned certificate mismatching).
They aren't riders in the U.S. sense in any meaningful way because of sec. 54 of the Constitution Act 1867, which gives the government -- even a minority government -- the exclusive right to introduce (into the House of Commons per sec. 53) money bills:
That is, *first* recommended.
The rules of both houses of Parliament impose further restrictions on their members with respect to amendments.
Omnibus bills are a problem, certainly, but it is one fully under the control of successive governments and tolerated by the House of Commons (who would force an election in rejecting or heavily amending a money bill), even during the recent series of minorities and weak majorities.
The federal government further enjoys several powers to veto legislation that one house or even all of Parliament passes anyway, even when they control only a minority of seats in the House of Commons.
Omnibus bills are far from new, and the Canadian system was sufficiently weak that the Australian constitution (which granted similar exclusive rights over the introduction of money bills and the disposition of all bills) added section 55 to their equivalent Act:
Similar proposals have been debated in Canada for more than a century, however since Omnibus budget bills are under the control of the federal government, there has never been much headway made, and governments have tended to consolidate and split bills according to their own needs and pushback from the Parliamentary committees and agencies who review the bills. "Omninbussing" follows trends, and somewhat reflect the strength of party discipline across the whole of Parliament -- a relatively weak government is often the source of large and complicated money bills, while a government controlling both Houses and enjoying strong party discipline tends to produce more and slimmer bills.
Riders are a wholly different matter.
The U.S. system permits riders since the Executive can only exercise a Presidential veto. The only additional checks on riders -- arbitrary amendments made by majority vote in *either* house of Congress -- are the Origination Clause, bicameralism generally, and the rules of the House of Representative, which all serve to limit the damage any subset of Congress, particularly Senators, can impose on a budget bill. In practice, however, all sides compromise and allow arbitrary changes to be added by various factions on critical bills that the Executive cannot afford to veto, so the system is more a "balance" than a "check" on legislators. Successive House majorities have over *centuries* softened their stance on the exclusivity of their control over the budget process, by weakening their own interpretation of the Origination Clause, by compromising with Senators and House factions, and by continuing to present to the President bills that are difficult to veto. On the other hand, the Executive has adapted by lobbying individual members of Congress directly and aggressively, and various processes have evolved such
L2ARC is slowly populated from the older ends of the ARC, using a separate thread. Not all blocks aging out of the ARC are guaranteed to get to the L2ARC. This is to avoid slowdowns when the ARC is under pressure, and to allow for the use of cache vdevs on media which are slow to write but fast to read.
L2ARC vdevs are circular buffers.
Each L2ARC entry consumes at least 50 bytes from the ARC, and may consume considerably more. Those bytes are released ONLY after the circular buffer overwrites the L2ARC entry. Therefore a large L2ARC competes for ARC space with ordinary blocks, and the larger the L2ARC the more likely it is that the L2ARC contains stale blocks. Those stale blocks continue to use ARC space.
The L2ARC's big use is to avoid seeks to fetch occasionally-used data. It helps so little with streaming reads that data that was streamed (via prefetch mechanisms, for example) into the ARC are skipped by the thread that populates L2ARC vdevs. Defeating that (forcing the storage of streamed data) typically worsens performance of a pool.
The ZIL is automatically managed areas in storage vdevs in each pool. One can configure one or more separated log vdevs which will be used instead of the ZIL. When synchronous write calls are made, the data is stored in the slog (if available) or ZIL, and the call returns. No other data is written to the slog or ZIL. The blocks written out remain in the ARC, marked as dirty and in need of an asynchronous flush. When the open transaction group closes, the in-ARC copies of what went to the slog or ZIL is written out with everything else in the txg, and then the slog or ZIL is cleared.
Neither the slog nor the ZIL is read except during the import process; if they are non-empty at import, the blocks are written out (synchronously) to the pool's storage vdevs and then cleared.
"With the ZIL in a different drive (SSD or otherwise), you reduce the number of writes required"
The ZIL is the ZIL; the slog is the slog. If you have a slog you don't write to the ZIL, and whether that changes the number of writes of *synchronous* data is configuration-dependent. If you have mirrored slogs, for example, you are probably writing more than you would if you just used the ZIL.
In either case the idea is to write out synchonous blocks quickly and with as little writing latency as possible; writes are linear and are to areas at the start of the vdevs.
"Because you can generally write to a ZFS pool significantly faster than to a single disk"
Actually, it's the other way around, but hinges on what you mean by "write". The more disks there are in the pool the more labels have to be updated at the finalization of each txg. That's not a large extra amount to push out to the rotating material, but it's done synchronously and will *invariably* result in seeks to the start and end of each component device in each vdev in the pool.
Additionally, you can configure a single-disk pool, and there are reasons why you might want to do so, even though that is UNSAFE.
However, system calls return quickly because all writes go into the ARC, and asynchronous write calls can return immediately; synchronous write calls return when the data is committed to the ZIL or slog(s). In the case where there's a slog, write calls practically never initiate actual activity on the device(s) forming the storage vdev(s). Instead, writes will be triggered by timers.
For many workloads, this makes writes to pools seem very fast, since delayed writing allows for smarter scheduling, as well as coalescing of writes to specific physical blocks.
A bit more detail:
The ZIL and separated log (slog, "zpool add pool log ") are slightly different.
All writes of all varities go into the ARC.
From the ARC, synchronous writes are synchronously written to the slog (if one is available) and are then marked *asynchronous* writes.
When the txg is closed, all asynchronous writes are pushed out to the storage vdevs of the pool, and the slog is cleared.
If no slog is available, from the ARC synchronous writes are synchronously written into the ZIL (yes, ZFS intents log), which is automatically maintained at the start of one or more of the pool's storage vdevs, and then the blocks in the ARC are marked as *asynchronous* writes.
When the txg is closed, all asynchronous writes are written to the storage vdevs of the pool, and the ZIL is marked empty.
If on pool import the slog or ZIL is NOT empty then the blocks are written (synchronously) to the storage vdevs before the pool is made available for access.
So, the slog and ZIL are there to make synchronous write calls return quickly and safely. They aren't permanent storage.
The slog does not really need to be a fast drive, just one in which write latency is low; all writes to the slog are linear, so there should be almost no track-to-track seeking even in a rotating drive. It is vital that that slog does not lie about having committed data to stable storage (stable in the sense of persisting across crashes, powerfailures, etc.).
The ZIL lives in the drives that make up the pool's storage vdev(s), so there's nothing special about the ZIL.
The slog (and ZIL) are mostly felt when doing bursts of synchronous writes -- some POSIX operations do this (rm -r, for instance), some database operations do it too, but the case where slogs are most worthwhile is when NFS clients are doing lots of writes to the pool.
They are not write caches in the traditional sense. Their main use is to return quickly from synchronous write calls, without compromising pool consistency.
"Files" are a concept in the ZPL; the ARC doesn't even deal with DMU objects, it deals with blocks.
You could write a shim beneath the ZPL that maintains a system like you propose, but maintaining file-based caching info is going to eat into the memory available for the L1 ARC. You probably don't want that, really. The existence of the ARC (L1 and L2) is what masks residual latency involved in fragmentation not absorbed in write coalescing and spacemap scheduling, by enabling a place for read-ahead blocks to be cached.
The \mu characters above were eaten. Thanks, slashdot. :-(
The various time terms should be 30 microseconds or 10 microseconds.
1 TW * 30 microsecond = 30 MJ
30 MJ / 30 microsecond = 1 TW
30 MJ / 10 microsecond = 3 TW
This was a federal criminal case, and so was handled by a U.S. attorney and would have gone before a U.S. district court.
The judges and prosecutors in the U.S. district courts are not elected.
The investigation was lead by the FBI. The FBI is a wholly unelected agency.
The federal Executive is bound by statute, internal rules, and customs with respect to exercising control over the federal law enforcement agencies, especially the FBI, and similarly is prevented from interfering in the activities of U.S. attorneys. The usual way of dealing with outright bad apples is not termination but promoting them to Alaska or Guam and hoping they refuse and resign. Firing U.S. attorneys, while often lawful, has led to wider government-crippling conflict among the various interested parties (the DoJ, the courts, the wider federal legal profession, and Congress (notably the Senate, which under the constitution must confirm the appointment of U.S. attorneys)).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_controversy
Removing a federal judge requires an impeachment process involving both houses of Congress.
tl;dr: the notwithstanding clause is hard to use - a good litigator would probably still find the courts enforcing the rights in question, and using it "for real" is (in most cases unnecessarily) politically risky.
You are referring to section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
That section [a] does not apply to the whole Charter (only to ss 2 and 7-15, although admittedly s 2(b) is the relevant freedom of expression clause, as noted in your parent article); [b] must be enacted by primary legislation; [c] that primary legislation must use specific wording ("declaration") explicitly invoking s 33; [d] the declaration expires no later than five years from its coming into force (and may expire sooner for several reasons, on the other hand further primary legislation can reset the expiration date); [e] the declaration is only valid under an appropriate Head of Power (i.e. it must conform with the ordinary Division of Powers, etc.).
The usual impediments to passing primary legislation apply, and in most of the legislatures, and in the federal Parliament, internal rules and general practice require a Royal Recommendation for legislation including a s.33 declaration -- that is, a government minister (or equivalent) must introduce the legislation with the backing of the cabinet (formally the Governor General in Council per 13 of the Consolidated Constitution Acts 1867-1982, or the provincial equivalents).
The use of the declaration does not shield the Act using it from the Canadian Bill of Rights (1960) which also has protections for freedom of expression; a remedy exists in the courts until and unless Parliament amends that Act. There may also be remedies for certain infringements under other statutes, such as the Canadian Human Rights Act (1977). Several provinces have similar "ordinary" legislation which are still in force and which offer various different protections for freedom of expression including remedies for interference by the provincial legislature or executive. Again these are not as entrenched as the Charter, but they also survive any use of s. 33 of the Charter, and most would have to be outright amended by the legislature, and brought into force *first*.
There are also much older protections for some forms of expression in force today in Canada; the Constitution as a whole has been found by the Supreme Court (and this is not surprising or controversial) to include the 19th or 20th century versions of such things as the English Bill of Rights (1689), or the Act of Settlement (1701), and the Quebec Act (1774), all of which may provide a cause of action even in the absence of the Charter protections and its modern statutory predecessors federally and provincially.
International obligations exist under treaty (and enabling or derivative statutes and regulations) that allow the courts to assess liability against the government for breaches of various rights of expression. Changing these would require primary legislation and may also require some advance notification to the other contracting parties.
Finally, there remain common law protections for freedom of expression related to concepts such as quiet enjoyment and public nuisance; people will generally resort to statutes which were written with the then state of case law in mind because they are simpler, more codified, and thus easier to deal with in litigation. However, even in the absence of statutory protections for various forms of freedom of expression, a good litigator is likely able to build a case that may persuade a Canadian judge to provide a requested remedy for some breach by the government. Indeed, this approach was very common prior to codified claims and grants of right, and did not entirely go away afterwards. There is no practical way for a government to avoid the possibility of courts finding against them for breaches of rights (even of uncodified ones) without destroying the independence of the judiciary.
The use of s 33 therefore [a] may not work with respect to shieldin
Gage was not only no fool, he was also acting in accordance with the English Bill of Rights 1689 which said (in the late 18th century; the document has been amended several times and is still in force in much of the former British Empire):
[In the Articles of Complaint, deeming actions of the former monarch and his government unlawful]:
"Whereas the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counsellors, judges and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom [...]
"By raising and keeping a standing army within this kingdom in time of peace without consent of Parliament, and quartering soldiers contrary to law; [...]
"By causing several good subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when papists were both armed and employed contrary to law; [...]
"All which are utterly and directly contrary to the known laws and statutes and freedom of this realm;"
[The Parliament that brought about the Glorious Revolution declares]
"That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law; ... ..."
"That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;
"That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void;
[And the price for becoming the Constitutional Monarchs for William & Mary, and more importantly, the price for the Royalists in the coalition with the Parliamentarians that brought in the Glorious Revolution with its central idea that everyone should disband their private armies and argue things out in Parliament rather than fight things out in further civil war]:
"[...] the said declaration are the true, ancient and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom, and so shall be esteemed, allowed, adjudged, deemed and taken to be; and that all and every the particulars aforesaid shall be firmly and strictly holden and observed as they are expressed in the said declaration, and all officers and ministers whatsoever shall serve their Majesties and their successors according to the same in all time to come."
Gage was an officer; he took his orders from ministers in practice, and they were drawn from and had to placate various factions in Parliament, including several flavours of Whig (the Foxites, most notably) who were very friendly with "American Revolutionaries" (to the point of forcing "kid glove" rules on what Gage and his superiors could do. Parliamentary micromanagement of the military was highly fashionable at the time, and it was frequently party political (see what happened to John Byng for instance)). Lord North, head of the government at Westminster (as "First Lord of the Treasury"; we would call him Prime Minister now) was keen on suppressing social turmoil in general, in England and in New England, and was certainly hostile to the what Europeans now call "subsidiarity" and no fan of grassroots democracy (this is in part because of his conflict with Londoners' electoral support for John Wilkes, whom he opposed and detested), but even he was bound by the (then) British Constitution, including the English Bill of Rights 1689. North had seen what Junius had done to his predecessor, and North had weaker support in the House of Commons.
However, North was good at persuading subordinates to try to interpret laws restricting the powers of the executive very narrowly when suitable. In the case of the gunpowder you mentioned, this led to frictions over jointly held stockpiles, especially those that could be accessed by non-subjects (there were quite a few in the Massachusetts Bay colony, including people who had fled from regions controlled by autocratic European tyrants and who readily accepted the idea promulgated by Charles James Fox and Benjamin Franklin (among others) that
Drat, that was clearly for the GP article.
The Royal Assent with respect to Westminster bills has generally been delegated to a commission since the 16th century (this was largely motivated by efficiency issues surrounding Henry VIII becoming the constitutional monarch of Ireland and by Henry VIII being more interested in sports and architecture, and with the fractiousness of English politics which was merely hidden for a while during his father's reign). The monarch personally participated in Royal Assent ceremonies only infrequently for major bills; the last time a monarch was personally involved in a Royal Assent was in 1854.
is therefore at least inaccurate.
It is not clear whether the Prime Minister can Advise the Lords Commissioners to withhold the Royal Assent in the United Kingdom. It is an enumerated power of the Executive in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, however, and has been used once or twice, although proclamation and/or bringing-into-force clauses in the Constitution and covering statute are the usual tools the Executive uses to avoid implementing the entirety of Acts of Parliament until it sees fit. In Westminster, Parliament regularly delegates the decision to bring into force parts of Acts of Parliament to government ministers, directly in the Act itself.
Also, the United Kingdom is now effectively a federal state, and one of the ways this `is reflected is in how the Royal Assent works with respect to bills originating in the assemblies for Scotland and Northern Ireland. The monarch has no personal authority in the enacting of bills passed by those bodies; the remedy for apparent conflicts with the Constitution is through the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, and the power to refer bills to the Supreme Court is vested in politicians responsible to the respective assemblies.
Bills passed by the National Assembly for Wales are confirmed by an Order-in-Council (in which the Queen or a Regent participates), however this will change to a system more like that of Scotland in light of the 2011 referendum on the extension of the Assembly's legislative competence.
Since Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales effectively allow their respective governments-of-the-day to stall the implementation of Assembly bills on narrow grounds, it is likely that the government in Westminster could do the same if it wanted (for instance, if a minority government were to be unable to stop the passage of a bill through the House of Commons and the House of Lords (where necessary)).
He has been a Privy Counsellor since 1977, and since his age of majority has acted as Prince Regent when the Queen has been unavailable. He is almost certainly as well briefed as he would like to be. Any differences in the advisory role between President Windsor and Vice-President Windsor is most likely attributable to personality and personal interests.
The most shocking part of the ruling is:
That Counsel for Mr Assange did not offer an argument or evidence in support of point (b) above is astonishing.
Unfortunately under the relevant rules of procedure, and given the broader workings of the adversarial system,
it seems that Assange's attorneys failed to engage directly with this part of the statute while Mr Assange himself
was saying in public that the prosecution was nakedly political and the punishment would be strongly influenced
to his detriment because of his politics.
The Administrative Court on appeal is entitled to consider an argument on that point even if it was not made in the District Court.
It may not be a terrible disadvantage if a weak argument on that point had been advanced and failed in front of the Chief Magistrate,
as his reasoning on the other arguments which failed in front of him is clear and compelling.
Finally, it is disappointing that the argument focused on technical deficiencies in the procedure that, if the Chief Magistrate had taken
a line opposite the "cosmopolitan" reading of the wording in the statute and Framework Decision, could be remedied simply by having
Ms Ny, or a colleague, immediately reissue a new EAW that would not have these deficiencies. I would think that a judge could
reasonably conclude (perhaps considering arguments from the parties) that requiring that remedy conflicts with
Crim P.R. Rule 1 (the Overriding Objective) and deliberately disregard "picayune" defects in an obviously purposeful and apparently lawfully made
EAW especially when the obvious remedy would quickly place Mr Assange in an effectively identical situation. In particular, I do not think
that autrefois acquit would or SHOULD apply in England or in Sweden if the present EAW were overturned because it identified Ms Ny as "the"
Director rather than "a" Director, or chose a negligibly broader Swedish term of art than the most exactingly precise equivalent to "prosecution".
I also do not believe Sweden would hesitate to reissue a corrected EAW. Consequently, it would be a poor use of resources to require the formality,
along the lines of trying to convince the Administrative Court to find for the appellant because of a macro expansion failure ("M a") or a typo ("Mr Hurtig in an unreliable witness").
I find myself wondering whether Mr Assange will continue using Mr Hurtig as his Swedish attorney (see the paragraphs starting with "10." and "15." in the ruling).
The matter in the universe is actually compacting because of gravitation. Most of the reason that matter has not compacted into black holes is that in the early universe the matter was much hotter, and thus components of matter had a lot of kinetic energy, which works against compaction. Ordinary matter readily collides with other ordinary matter (or photons) and the collision radiates away photons, so the matter loses kinetic energy in the process, and so tends to compact into bright dense blobs like stars. (Dark matter collides very rarely, and does not collide with or emit photons at all, so it still has lots of kinetic energy and thus spins in high orbits around massive structures like galaxies; in order to fall into the middle of the galaxy, that kinetic energy has to be lost, and whatever processes dark matter uses to get rid of kinetic energy are verrrry slow).
That is, most of the matter in the universe is in large gravitationally-bound structures. These structures are all moving away from one another, any observer looking at structures from his or her or its vantage point will see the distant structures receding faster than closer structures. The most obvious interpretation of this would be that empty space is being created between the big structures, but since the structures are not themselves expanding, empty space is not being created within the big structures.
In between all these large gravitationally-bound structures the gravitational potentials (which describe the direction things fall and how they appear to accelerate while falling, in the eyes of various observers) are very weak compared to the gravitational potentials near, or within, galaxies. Because it can be seen by certain observers to impart accelerations on objects, the gravitational field has an energy. Matter can receive energy from the gravitational field, and it can also donate energy back to it. (This is a generalized conservation rule in General Relativity), and the energy of the gravitational field is non-uniform. Whatever energy is causing empty space to appear works against gravitation. For example, if the empty space was not being created, the large structures would be closer together and so they would feel mutually steeper gravitational potential gradients -- that is, gravity would bring them ever closer together, merging them, and causing them to compact. That is, gravity would (from our viewpoint) accelerate big galactic clusters (including the one our galaxy is in) towards each other. However, we observe that clusters are accelerating away from one another instead, and that the acceleration is highly uniform with distance.
The simplest way to explain this is to posit an energy field with a small energy value at every point in space; the energy works against gravity by "unfolding" new space from something like a compact manifold. However, the energy value is small enough to be dwarfed by gravitational energy in stars, star systems, star clusters, galaxies, galactic clusters, superclusters, and possibly galactic filaments. So where there is lots of gravitational energy, like in these structures, you wouldn't notice new space appearing. In deep space far from massive structures, gravitational energy is so weak that this unknown (and "dark" as in "dark ages", which are poorly understood bits of history) energy does not suppress the "unfolding" of new space. So, lots of new space appears between galactic clusters. And that new space still has dark energy, so new space unfolds within the new (and empty) space. And so on. The result: exponential growth of the amount of empty space in the universe, all appearing far from big visible structures.
This is called the metric expansion of space because "unfolding" new space has a geometrical equivalence in increasing the number of coordinates, which in one dimension is equivalent to o
Good idea. Report back.
If you can find a partnership or company arrangement for lawyers in the British Empire (outside of Quebec) prior to 1801 or in the USA prior to 1815 that would be interesting news. Arrangements that limited the liability of the lawyers involved prior to the Reconstruction Era would be even more interesting.
That said, I would be thoroughly unsurprised if you found a list of individual English and Scottish lawyers -- most likely Foxites -- who helped in the drafting process. That would have been done gratis, which is not what I think most people would expect from a "law firm".
Oops, I didn't catch that mistake; the date probably crossed in my head with one of the statutes proceeding from the Treaty of Paris (1763) (which ceded control of Nouvelle France to Great Britain) or one of the acts to deal with the maintenance of the "armed truce" among the combatants of the Seven Years' War such as the Quartering Act (1765) and to protect the ongoing expansion of the western frontier of the 13 colonies.
The correct short title is the Quebec Act (1774).
Wikipedia has a decent overview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Act
I do not think the Quebec Act itself is clearly reflected in U.S. law in any meaningful way. It may have influenced the secularization of some oaths and it may have influenced the Louisiana Purchase Treaty and derivative legislation.
As noted in the Wikipedia article, it certainly helped inflame the feelings of being treated like "second-class" or "third-class" Englishmen in the colonies just prior to the revolution.
I brought up the Quebec Act mainly to help illustrate the argument that advocates and/or attorneys working together in a limited liability construct was a very "Continental thing" frowned upon in the 18th century British Empire. The Act allowed the French limited liability collective system to continue for law professionals, and for them to employ English (including colonial) attorneys who could continue to litigate (and possibly appear in some courts) outside Quebec.
Barristers in some jurisdictions offering services to the general public must still be sole practitioners, although as you say they may pool some costs (rent of Common Areas, certain administration tasks, some marketing activity) with other barristers. In England and Wales these arrangements are known as "chambers" principally because they have historically literally meant a set of rooms (with a porter); different terms are in use elsewhere in the former British Empire.
The separation of advocates and attorneys is fading, and did not even exist in the first place in some courts of the British Empire established since the 19th century. In medieval England, advocates were clergymen trusted to appear before senior courts (and able to communicate in Anglo-Norman French and Latin, for example) were expected by the Church to take no pay for their advocacy. Donations were allowed, however, and barristers' court dress retains a robe or gown with a flap collar or a back pocket into which attorneys would slip an honorarium.
Attorneys could not advocate before senior courts (and mostly still can't in England and Wales) but did have the right to draft and file documents with the court. Since many controversies are resolved without the need for in person advocacy before a judge, and since attorneys were never constrained from ch
Two answers for your two questions:
1. Yes, public roads even existed in Romano-British times (1st century AD). By the 18th century there was a substantial body of law surrounding their use, upkeep, new construction, and so forth. Public roads played as important a role in the British conquest of North America as they did in the Roman conquest of Britain.
2. I do not know what the framers think. Why don't we summon them as witnesses? Surely a party has a right to confront witnesses offering testimony prejudicial to his or her case!
(This could be recursive, summoning the framers to give their testimony about the Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause)
A: "British law firms". No such thing. Law practitioners in what is now the United Kingdom were required to be sole practitioners until the 19th century. The first law firms in the British Empire were established in the 18th century under the auspices of the Quebec Act (1765) which recognized the pre-existence of legal partnerships and corporations under the French system. Since the Quebec Act resulted in a hybridized civil code and common law system, practitioners of English and Scots law with Quebec-based businesses could do something then unique in the Empire: form limited liability partnerships. Most especially, lawyers were allowed to advocate in spite of not having completed a law education in the City of London, a practice established in 1234, which made it difficult for colonists to become lawyers (and especially advocates). This *ENRAGED* many practitioners of law in North America since (a) there were substantial economies of scale enjoyed by such partnerships and (b) there were tariff advantages within the Colonies. This is not too surprising, since the Quebec Act enraged many people in the 13 colonies (especially allowing Roman Catholics to act as lawyers, judges, and officials) and even caused some friction in the other British colonies in the region (the Law Society of Upper Canada formed in reaction, for example, to advocate for practitioners of English law further up the St Lawrence).
In the reconstruction era, several of the regulators in the various states and in the U.S. began to allow law professionals to form partnerships in similar ways. This was reasonably successful, and the practice spread throughout the USA and back to England (for solicitors only initially) and Scotland.
While several of the authors of the U.S. Constitution held law degrees, and had practised law (usually exclusively in their home colony), and could reasonably be considered "British lawyers" (although more properly English lawyers; the one or two Scots involved also practised English law) at the time of the Revolution, the only thing that could reasonably be called a "British law firm" in the 1770s-1790s were in Quebec and were generally hostile to the Revolution, since the Treaty of Paris was turning out to be a good deal for the former Nouvelle France compared to the chaos, expense, and violence in the 13 colonies to their south.
B: "many of the amendments (including the 4th) were crafted by British law firms"
If you substitute "British law firms" for "English advocates" you are part way there, because much of the Bill of Rights directly reflects the contents of the (English) Bill of Rights 1689, which outlined the rights of Englishmen which many of the Revolutionaries fought for.
The English Bill of Rights in its accusations and claims should remind people of the (U.S.) Bill of Rights -- the first, the second, the third, the fifth and the eighth in particular. However the Fourth Amendment is a novel codification of what was then a rapidly evolving area of statute and case law in England; it was the better part of 50 years before a similar set of rules with respect to warrants and evidence were sufficiently entrenched in English law that future Parliaments would not dare weaken them without at least careful primary legislation (i.e., a "constitutional amendment").
"refusal constituting probable cause" - the Roman Law principle nemo tenetur se ipsum accusare has been in legal force in a modern sense in what is now England since the Englis
Corporate persons have their own legal personalities and can enter into contracts and appear before the courts. Those alone makes them legal persons. It is not just private companies that are corporate persons -- The People of the United States is a corporate person, with its own legal personality distinct from, for example, The People of the State of New York, or the Solicitor-General of the United States. Each of these enjoys a right to appear before a court to put its case in an action concerning it. Why not private companies?
Private companies *do* appear in courts to deal with contract disputes, torts, and so forth. They appear as themselves rather than as a particularized collection of individual directors (who are natural persons) or shareholders (who may not be natural persons).
Should private companies not appear before courts in this manner? What about other corporate persons?
Natural persons have rights that corporate persons do not. No corporate person may serve on a jury, for instance, or be elected to Congress.
When you say "like free speech" do you mean literally that the free speech clause should be read as implicitly allowing Congress to make any law regulating any communication by any private company? Where is the limit? Can Congress forbid a private company from petitioning the courts? By the incorporation clause, can a state forbid a company from petitioning all three branches of the federal government?
Do you mean instead that there appears to be an imbalance between the rights to free speech enjoyed by natural persons and those enjoyed by private companies that should be addressed, and that the best venue for addressing this imbalance is in the courts?
Wouldn't Congress be a more suitable venue for proposing and debating the reasonableness and justifiability of limits on corporate communications, at least in theory? (I would hope that they would agree that the vehicle for enacting some limits on such speech would be a constitutional amendment, or at least primary legislation unencumbered with irrelevant riders, but I would not bet on it, since procedural discipline and legislative clarity do not seem to be priorities in the legislative process in either house of Congress or in the use of the Presidential veto).
I think it's unlikely that any court would agree that a private company could face dissolution by an executive branch without being able to challenge that dissolution in a court of law. Do you think denying a company its day in court is just?
Private companies already appear before courts in matters of contract dispute, tort, taxation, and so forth, as both plaintiff and defendant. A company puts its case before the court just like any other party, or indeed The People (for instance).
Companies do not have the same rights (or duties) as natural persons. They cannot sit on juries, for instance.
However, they appear to have the right to due process, which conflicts with:
This is not to say that the courts will (or should) always side with a private company when one of the other branches of government seeks to interfere with their activities, nor that the balance between the rights of the relevant corporate persons (The People of the United States is also a corporate person, for example) are in a static or even desirable balance presently.
Do you think that's just? Would it be OK for the agency that grants incorporation in a state to deny incorporation to a group of businesspeople because one of the proposed directors is black, or is a registered Democrat?
If it's better to be "blind" to such matters at the time of granting of limited liability status or other benefits of incorporation, why abandon that "blindness" afterwards?
They may be. "Corporations" usually mean "Limited Liability Companies" where generally the maximum liability any shareholder faces is the value of his or her share(s). Other forms of incorporation have different (or even *no*) limit on liability on the shareholders, proprietors, or whatever they may be called.
There are corporate entities wherein the shareholders really do face *no* liability - they are almost all charities.
The grant of incorporation by the relevant head of power (a state, the United States) will almost always impose conditions on the corporate entity, and will generally allow -- even encourage -- the registration of rules under which the corporation will act but cannot change without the consent of the relevant head of power. These rules are variously called a corporate charter, a corporate constitution, and a number of other expressions.
Some jurisdictions have imposed a "no politics" rule on limited liability companies; this can be done by statute or by regulation. Other jurisdictions hand out limited liability much more sparingly than, for example, Delaware. That, and the commerce and full faith and credit clauses, is a big reason most large U.S. companies incorporate there.
It's unlikely that the courts would read in a "no politics" rule, even if one of the parties made a persuasive case that (a) they could and (b) they should. Courts are also unlikely to revoke corporate charters (or grants of limited liability) in the absence of primary legislation from the relevant head of power making it clear that the courts may do so.
Additionally, there is an agency problem involved in "tying" owners to corporate action more deeply than the value of the share. In large publicly traded LLCs there will almost certainly be a large number of shares held indirectly via a mutual fund or some sort of trust. Moreover, "publicly traded" implies that shares do actually change hands with some frequency. At the time of some hypothetical final judgement against such a corporation, which natural persons should be "tied" to the judgement? What should the liability be of someone invested in a large market-tracking fund that happened to (maybe even indirectly) control some shares for a while during the period covered by a finding of civil liability or criminality?
"Fractionating" the liability is certainly possible in the broadest sense, and the cost of this could be borne by the parties ultimately "tied" to the judgement. As these costs might far exceed the money in a final judgement, many investors would think very hard about ever investing into *any* limited liability corporation, just as they now avoid structures in which there is unlimited joint and several liability for each investor.
Indeed, limits to liability were founded precisely to encourage investment, and it very clearly worked.
Undoing that might not necessarily be a bad move overall, but it would be a hugely important one with many unpredictable consequences.
Bear in mind that for codecisions (binding directives that give one standing before national courts and/or the European Court of Justice where there are questions of the supremacy or legality of the EU legislation) the Lisbon treaty still requires that all member-states' governments-of-the day (via unanimity in the European Council) agree to be bound by the codecision. Once there is a qualified majority among the member-states, the European Parliament is asked to concur. If and only if the qualified majority is also unanimity (of the member-states voting), is there a directive that, if not complied with, exposes the member-state to legal liability if national legislation, policy, or practice unreasonably conflicts.
(There are also non-codecision (or now "non-ordinary") legislative procedures which may apply, but which also involve at least a qualified majority in the Council and which allows for derogations by member-states who are not part of that qualified majority; finally there are some areas which still require unanimity among the governments of the day of the member-states in the Council).
Note that Lisbon somewhat protects the principle that one member-state's parliament may not unreasonably bind its successor. The Westminster system (most notably in Canada -- note the clever tying in of the topic! -- where it is codified in Section 56 of Part IV of the Consolidated Constitution Acts 1867-1982) generally allows the head of state, on the advice of the head of government, to refuse to implement an Act of Parliament passed in the previous six months. In practice, this would be used by a new Prime Minister having faced a fresh general election to eliminate Acts of Parliament passed under the previous government (i.e., the old Prime Minister). Of course, the new Prime Minister could face troubles within the newly elected Parliament, so a more regular approach would be to try to pass a new Act of Parliament repealing the previously-passed one. This is called "limited binding" in Constitutional law, and it is generally accepted to apply to every member-state in the European Union (by way of work done in the Council of Europe, a different organization which all EU member-states must participate in).
"Limited binding" clearly applies in the acquis communitaire so if an outgoing government of the day participated in a Council co-decision in its waning days, and it were subsequently defeated in an election, the new government of the day could revoke its assent, effectively killing the co-decision.
Moreover, democratic practice generally requires that if a populace really resents a directive, the directive is wrong; following the principle of subsidiarity, if there is real democratic opposition in a member-state to a given directive, the Commission should be expected to be very careful (i.e., avoid!) a strong prosecution. Likewise, so should the courts in the member-state in question.
A constitutional conflict between a member-state and the European Union would probably be resolved politically, and probably by the EU revisiting the issue (or the member-state performing a democratic consultation of its voters or at least its national parliament). However, national courts have also been asked to intervene, and thus far, have always declared the matter to be non-justiciable on separation of powers grounds, or have referred the matter to the ECJ. It is plausible a national court might decide on its own to declare an action of the EU to be incompatible with the national constitution, and not give leave to appeal to the ECJ (it is even possible that the ECJ could decide that the member-state should not have given consent in Council on those grounds, or that the member should not be bound by the other member-states unreasonably). It's more likely that the ECJ would consider the matter non-justiciable but offer a range of possible political solutions in its decision.
A serious conflict between a new government (or the population in general) and the actions of its p
A few corrigenda and then some tl;dr information for you.
The short version is that several nasty civil wars were fought to make sure that this sentence of yours is legally and politically false:
The Parliament of Canada consists of the House of Commons, the Senate and the Queen of Canada. (This is not what you say in your sentence above; you meant "the House of Commons" rather than "Parliament" presumably).
The consolidated Constitution Acts (1867-1982) says:
IV. 17. There shall be One Parliament for Canada, consisting of the Queen, an Upper House styled the Senate, and the House of Commons.
Also:
is only true with respect to "without the approval of the other parts of [Parliament]", and then only if you read "The Queen" as "the Prime Minister", effectively.
The Queen (as an institution, rather than as a person) has a vital Constitutional role that is quite active. IV. 54. requires that the Queen make a recommendation before any spending bill may lawfully be passed by Parliament; 55. and 57. require that the Queen give Assent to any bill before it is enacted.
Both Houses of Parliament have their own rules that further restrict their activities with respect to IV. 54. (and the Senate is further constrained by 53. which requires that all money-raising bills originate in the House of Commons). Finally, 56. allows the Queen to disallow any Act within one year of its passage. In general, very little legislation may lawfully be passed without both the Queen's *prior and subsequent* consent.
In practice the Queen of Canada is read as the government of the day, since she may not exercise her powers directly or through the Governor-General without the advice of the Prime Minister (which is often delegated to other ministers and officials).
The Recommendation requirement and the statutory and house rules allow even a minority government to control all budget legislation. A House of Commons and Senate dominated by opponents cannot increase taxes *or* spending without the approval of the government (i.e. the Prime Minister of the day); if they want to do that, they must force the government to resign. (As examples, they can do this either by refusing to pass any legislation at all, or by starving the government of Supply, or the House of Commons can indicate that it has no confidence in the government's ability to govern).
Non-budget legislation can be passed by both Houses of Parliament in spite of the government's wishes, in which case the government likely would refuse to give the bill Royal Assent, killing it dead.
A government that controls Parliament and in its last few months starts passing Acts that the immediate successor government strongly disagrees with could see the use of the Disallowance power used against those Acts by the incoming government.
The power of the Queen of Canada to act contrary to the advice of the Prime Minister was fully extinguished in the wake of the King-Byng affair (1925), the Balfour Declaration (1926), the Statute of Westminster (1931) and finally by section 12 of the consolidated Constitution Act which ultimately finalized Parliament's abolition of the Queen of Canada's ability to exercise any personally held (or delegated) constitutional powers without the advice of the Prime Minister (or the Cabinet Committee and Emergency Committes of the Privy Council of Canada where the Prime Minister is incapacitated).
Moreove
I'm inclined to agree. There are systemic weaknesses in the Internet, and a few systematic ones that mostly involve being effectively unable to do useful things with perfectly-flowing IP packets. (For example, the utility of the Internet drops enormously if you disable your own DNS locally; try it and go web surfing, or emailing, or whatnot).
Mostly the weaknesses are centred around what could happen if there is a large scale increase in the proportion of bad actors to good actors in various stability-sensitive aspects of the Internet, which given the occasional emergence of host software monoculture is not the best news. A really bad situation would be if, for example, a software update from a large supplier started generating traffic much more aggressively than RFC 2001 / RFC 3465 style TCP, whether through a TCP implementation bug or a deliberate choice of a non-TCP/non-congestion-avoiding protocol for some form of bulk data transfer that becomes very popular. (An obvious approaching-worst case might be if for every packet received by each of a huge number of hosts, an uncached/non-recursive pair of DNS queries (PTR, then A or AAAA) is made on the source address.)
Consequently, the greatest practical risk now comes from insiders at large network operators, router vendors, or one or two particular host software vendors. A bad actor there, or an incompetent one, could lead to sustained widespread trouble.
That really depends on what the vulnerability is.
There are several implementations of BGP from different vendors and at least two open source implementations. The protocol is also relatively simple. Consequently it's hard to imagine a vulnerability that is structural within BGP such that enough partitioning happens to make large the Internet unusable.
In the early 1990s there was a moment where there was a very large partition when AS Path prepending was used for the first time. Cisco routers did not mind the back-to-back duplicate AS. Proteon, Wellfleet and some other implementations discarded the NLRI (prefix/mask + routing information) as part of routing-information-loop avoidance. Gated-derived routers had different approach in its NLRI loop-avoidance code, and rather than use the NLRI or discard that one update, it dropped the TCP session figuring that there was a data corruption bug. The result: BGP sessions between "core" IOS-talking routers and "core" gated-derived routers bounced up and down for a while. This affected most of the exterior routing gateways of ANS, which operated the NSFNET Backbone Service at the time.
This sort of "reset" policy is now known to have been a serious mistake and now is very rare.
Also in the early 1990s there was a hardware interaction problem involving Cisco 7000-series routers equipped with Silicon Switching Processor cards. A "covering" prefix arriving via any routing protocol -- typically BGP -- would cause all the "covered" (longer match of the same prefix) to be deleted with demand-population bringing those routes back into the radix tree like data structure. Demand population used the same CPU that TCP ACK processing and other activities used, so a router in the "core" with a relatively full routing table and a high packet per second arrival rate of a mix of prefixes (as in "core" routers generally) would simply melt down. This would starve timer-sensitive activities like TCP ACKing and processing the BGP protocol state machine. This in turn led to BGP sessions resetting due to time-outs, which in turn reduced the traffic load substantially on the melting-down router. This would "thaw" the router enough that it would bring the BGP sessions back up long enough to receive a covering prefix, and so forth in a loop. This crippled one very large "tier 1" ISP for an hour and change.
There have been a number of minor "ouchies" related to information obtained from BGP neighbours in the years since, with the most embarassing ones having to do with specific implementations' reactions to very long data sets (e.g. extremely large AS_Set attributes, extremely long AS Paths).
There was also concern some years ago (late 1990s) about the frequency of BGP updates, and that a series of actors publishing up/down/up/down transitions as fast as they could might lead to a router "meltdown" with consequences along the lines of the situation described a couple of paragraphs up. This was considered a long term possibility, and as a result a couple of different approaches evolved suppress oscillating prefixes or blocks thereof at a level much lower than that where BGP's fundamentally built in mechanisms (TCP window sizes and fundamental NLRI/RIB processing speeds) would kick in.
The modern BGP "basket" is much less systematically rickety; the systemic ricketyness is the result of BGP being fundamentally being a "push" distribution of vectors rather than a "pull" acquisition of nonlocal (but widely distributed) connectivity and policy maps (as happened when one fed desired map data from USENET's u.* hierarchy into pathalias, for example, using one or more "smarthosts" as the equivalent of IP's 0.0.0.0/0 default).
Sadly, because the "push" NLRIs are not easily cryptographically signed by the source site (unlike PGP around a UUCP/USENET map file or even around an individual entry) there is still a requirement to trust your largest neighbours, although in the early 1990s the remained ANS's Policy Routing DataBase