Mainly this is lawyers not acting under direction from a client. Which is entirely against the rules that lawyers are supposed to operate under.
Yes, that's very close to what was happening here. Now the copyright holders were clients of the firm, and presumably instructed the lawyers at least in some vague way to protect their interests in the works under question.
However in sending these notices to specific persons the firm was implying that they were under instruction from their clients to take action against those persons. Clearly they were not and such monies as they did collect were collected by deception. A deception founded on the fact that they were lawyers.
This is why I compared it to extortion, which was the wrongful taking of money or valuables by a public officer under colour of their office. And it is also why I noted that it was wrong, especially as this was a firm of lawyers. A collection agency doing this would merely be kite flying (and their prey would likely know it).
Though lawyers are not actually public officials, I believe in the UK, as here, they are officers of the court with a primary duty to the court (ie. justice and the due administration of law) and a secondary duty to their clients. They are in any case, invested with their status by the proclamations by public bodies (including the court), charged with regulating the admission of lawyers to practice.
As far as their duty to their client is concerned...we cannot know, nor will we, what specific instructions the clients did give, however in the usual course of events the cost of sending letters &c. would only be incurred once specific instructions were received to pursue any given person.
Though I can't speak with authority on English law, the fact that 'barratry' per se was abolished doesn't mean that courts are necessary left without remedy against vexatious litigants. For example here in NSW 'rape' was similarly abolished. That doesn't mean you can get away with raping anyone, you'll simply be charged with 'sexual assault,' instead.
That being said this isn't really barratry (which is not generally as profitable). It is, especially as it is being conducted by a firm of lawyers, something much worse. Perhaps closer to 'extortion' (which they also abolished around the same time as barratry). One hopes the SRA spanks their joint and several botties!
I was about to sort them, but then realized what I was doing and stopped.;-)
Well to return the favour
Libya|22.7620 United Kingdom|21.6585 Singapore|20.8797 France|15.5392 United States|13.8154 Brazil|12.5811 Italy|10.7777 Australia|8.9012 Germany|8.1660 Spain|8.0742 Hong Kong|7.1160 Portugal|6.8629 Chile|6.7126 Belgium|6.5580 Taiwan|5.6201 Switzerland|4.4970 Israel|3.9330tt South Korea|3.4155 Argentina|3.3071 India|1.2038 Turkey|0.7029 Japan|0.4396 Austria|0.2389
So rather less than democratic countries like Libya and Singapore up there with the traditional democracies UK, US and France. And on second thought not all countries with very low rates are the pits of the earth. Norway and Sweden, the countries which regularly rank first on UN nice country lists (albeit with the inclusion of a number of criteria many readers might find too "socialistic" for their tastes, eg, access to public education and health, along with literacy and longevity rates, but apparently not mean temperature), are in the
Yes I was just looking at the map and thinking, the places that have no markers on the you wouldn't want to live. Not that all of the places marked (eg. China) you would want to either.
As far as the raw numbers you quote, how to they pan out when expresses as a meaningful metric such as take-down request per 100,000 population. Or some metric that also takes general internet access into account? I somehow doubt the biggest democracies would still emerge as the biggest culprits.
Even more interesting, would be to see the latter compared to some index of how liveable to particular country is. Not that I would want to suggest that there might be some optimum level of government censorship. That would be heresy and would no doubt see me censored, err modded, into oblivion.;)
In our little school our space-cadet next-door neighbour did not have her children vaccinated. Her daughter caught whooping cough (in the C21st!) and infected another child who had been vaccinated. Not only do people like you free-ride on the fact that most children are vaccinated, you simultaneously provide infection corridors to attack other people's children. Since vaccination cannot always confer absolute immunity, its success has been dependent on community cooperation.
.. freedom of choice
Would that we had freedom from the consequences of your choice. In making your ill-informed (despite whichever doctors you consulted) and irresponsible choices, you are making choices not only about your own kids, but about the health outcomes of children and indeed the community in general.
OP's idea, that up-to-date vaccination papers should be a pre-condition for attendance at a public school has much to recommend it, providing always that allowance is made for particular cases where a medical danger from immunisation can be demonstrated (eg. adverse family history). I do note, however, that you are only directly endangering children from families "whose values reflect [your] own."
Fortunately our constitution guarantees no forced medical treatments
Are you are no longer in Australia? Because the Australian Constitution contains no such guarantee that I am aware of. Moreover the states have plenary power, and can, as explained by Kirby P (as he then was) in the BLF De-registration case, pass a Act requiring "all blue-eyed babies to be put to death" (the classical Diceyan example), and providing there is no conflict with a valid law of the C'wealth, such an Act would be "good" law. There would seem to be no legal impediment to a regime of compulsory vaccination.
And yet the Statute of Anne, which you quote has a long title beginning with the words "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning..." which presages the purposive clause in the US Constitution ("to promote the progress of science and useful arts...").
I think originally it was supposed to help by replacing previous stronger but more ad-hoc monopoly rights.
Yes, that's kinda what I remember from IP lectures as well. The earlier Statute of Monopolies abolishing the motley collection of royal letters, perhaps not "stronger," but certainly more opaque and more expansive, in favour of a Parliamentary Act which granted 'letters patent' (ie. on the public record), for inventions, with the Statute of Anne continuing this process for printed matter. I believe there was an ideological element (as well as the obvious political Crown v Parliament one), which is borne out in the quote you cite. Namely an emerging idea that monopolies per se were undesirable and only those required by economic necessity should remain in place.
So the "purpose" of copyright (and patent) law can be seen as an economic one. That is to mitigate the free-rider market failure --where the cost to the author is writing and publishing, whereas the cost to the competitor is publishing only, leaving original creation an economically irrational activity. And that is a purpose it serves universally (if not exclusively).
I'm rather enjoying good ol' Stephen Conroy trying in vain to introduce the filter!
As I just pointed out below, this is no longer about trying to introduce the filter, it will obviously fail. It is about making Abbott vote down the Australian Christian Lobby's pet project.
The ETS and mining tax are probably also going to get blocked. They don't have the numbers to pass that sort of legislation anymore.
BZZZZT! Wrong.
Let's just examine the ETS (mining tax I wouldn't want to bet on just yet). First off both Windsor and Oakeshott support an ETS, as does Wilkie and obviously the Greens so:
House of Reps: Labor 72; + Greens 1; + Wilkie + Windsor + Oakeshott = 76. 76 votes required so it passes the house.
Senate: Labor 31 + Greens 9 = 40. 39 votes required, so it passes that house too.
This parliament will be much more productive than you believe. But yes, the filter is DOOMED! Still they will force Abbott to vote it down to weaken his standing with Christian voters especially given now we have an atheist PM (which paradoxically is godsend to the Christian lobby).
Seriously though, the fact that a very obvious, very profitable (meaning it will happen), and very serious (for the victims) misuse exists doesn't give you pause? No offence, but in weighing up the pros and cons, I don't feel you have been as diligent as you might have been.
The reason Slashdotters (and others) are skeptical of government power is that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Now I do agree with you. I would not like to see this much information so easily collated in the hands of administrative authorities and I would add that it's not only governments, but also powerful private interests which would value access to such information about individuals. However, mindlessly repeating glib cliches is a poor way of demonstrating scepticism.
Does absolute power really corrupt absolutely? I sincerely doubt it. Is there even anything approaching a (negative) correlation between some index of government power and the corruption index you cite? China which is marginally less corrupt on that index appears to have far more authoritarian control, the bottom position is shared between Myanmar where the state rules with an iron fist and Somalia which has seen a complete collapse of state power, while Germany, which for decades has required citizens to carry an identification pass bearing a unique number ID is among the least corrupt.
Maybe you ought to think a bit harder about the positive implications of this such as crime prevention, speedy resolution of land disputes, etc. etc. etc.
Not to mention how it streamlines the often difficult task of identity theft.
I could have added that the most devastating events involved crown fires, which don't respect our puny attempts at burning off.
Now it may have been true that too little hazard reduction had been undertaken in the years leading up to the first in the series of truly horrific seasons, the summer of 2000-01. But, at least where I live, that all changed pretty quickly thereafter (along with the building codes). And there was an day this winter when the Sydney CBD was choked with smoke from burning in the Blue Mountains. So even if you never left Sydney you couldn't be unaware that lost of burning off is being conducted over winter.
At least he didn't call hazard reduction "back-burning," and I have to admit it did give me a bit of a chuckle that of all mods "Flamebait" was used.
Whoever these Nazis are, they seem to have far less power than you imagine. Controlled burns are proceeding everywhere. We just had a swathe of bush backing onto our place burnt a few months ago, thank you RFS. Do you live in the city or something?
we wouldn't have the magnitude of devestation [sic.] that hits so often
Well how you explain the Victorian fires then? Taking into consideration the intensive hazard reduction campaign undertaken in the year leading up to them.
Could the frequency of extreme fire events during the last decade have had anything to do with that much of SW-Australia was in one of the -- if not the --deepest and most prolonged droughts in history? Could it have had anything to do with record breaking spells of hot weather --especially in Victoria, where Melbourne not only recorded it's single hottest temperature on record, but where the state recorded it's longest run of extreme heat?... low humidity?...
Oh gosh, how silly of me, it was the Nazis! Of course.
[I]f pretty graphs are your thing then try a this random article that took me two minutes to find via a google search.
The problem is that your google search has no way of determining the authority or credibility of the "information" sources that come up as hits. [Hint: read the text in between the pretty graphs and look at the disinformation peddled by that site in general before you recommend it]. Better that people read science than reading about it!
From the data he posted, it doesn't look like the 2000s, or even any multiyear period between 1980-2010 was exceptionally warm in the majority of the measurement sites with a reasonable amount of historical data.
Really? Just eye-balling the data the period 1980-2010 looks decidedly warmer than the period 1880-1910. True, there were a number of exceptionally warm years in the 30s and 40s, but the turn of the century still looks warmer, most notably with regard to the colder years in those periods. None of this is to say anything about the statistical significance of any trend, or lack thereof or course. Be that as it may...
it would seem to suggest that a big iceberg calving in Greenland might not be global warming related.
Now that is a strange claim. "Global warming" is about the imbalance between heat entering the atmosphere and heat leaving. Actually that imbalance (the "greenhouse effect") is a necessary pre-condition for life on earth, global warming is actually about a shift in that imbalance towards greater heat retention. Retained heat can go various places. It can heat the air, it can heat the water and melt ice. Melting ice therefore, is just as indicative of global warming as rising air temperatures are. It would seem decidedly odd to claim that increasing air temperature "might not be global warming related." So how is this claim made in regard to melting ice?
Of course this calving can occur for reasons other than the mere fact that more heat is being retained in the global atmosphere. Inter alia from the force of greater ice deposition upstream in the glacier. So the significance of this calving needs to be understood in relation to other factors, such as how much ice is being deposited on the glacier as a whole.
Look, I'm sitting on the fence on this one. It may indeed be true that this calving is not global warming related, but a number of years of unusually warm local air temperature the 30s does not seem to me an especially compelling argument. I'd be more convinced if you could show me, for example, greater recent ice deposits.
Now I have to say that polar amplification has always seemed a counter-intuitive result to me, since I would have suspected that the large polar ice masses would act locally to cool the air (ie warming would manifest as melting ice). But my scientific training was in pharmacology, not climatology, so what would I know? (As both the model predictions of polar amplification and now the observed results indicate -- not damned much!)
A bigger one calving in 1962 also supports that.
Two problems here. 1) It's an example of the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. (Ie. calving can result from various causes) 2) The atmospheric concentration of GH-forcing gases (and thus the theoretical increase in the heat retention balance) had already risen significantly (against the pre-industrial background) by 1962, so absent any other evidence, you cannot really claim that that calving was "not global warming related," (not to say that it was).
Nor does it automatically grant the same rights - but that is the intention of those who crafted the term.
Now I happen to agree that IP is a loaded term. These rights can equally be described as statutory monopolies of limited duration. Propagandistically speaking, property == good; monopoly == bad.
However, I would be interested to learn which rights, otherwise universally applicable to property, do not enure to the holder of a copyright, patent &c. I would have thought that property is simply something which can be owned and that assignability was the touchstone of ownership?
Why do so many people insist on using the roman numerals in casual conversation?
Huh? Are you seriously telling me that you talk to people who say "Civ quattuor" and "Civ quinque" instead of "Civ four" and "Civ five?" Wow, you must hang out with some educated folks!
In Python, where indentation matters, tabs are evil
Yes, and people who indent with Tabs should be shot! Or maybe they should just get a text editor.;)
Actually what is evil is mixing tabs and spaces in the same code. So evil in fact that python has a command the command line switch -t to warn of such evil, and -tt to raise. The style guide suggests only spaces, and 4 per indent. IDLE on the other hand uses only tabs.
I was being a little ironic about the text editor. I use vi (or vim actually), and it has the nasty nasty habit of mixing both under certain circumstances. For instance if you set the shiftwidth to the standard 4 it will use spaces for one indent and a tab for two. Arghh!!! %| In vim at least you can set expandtab on to nuke all tabs entered. In oldschool vi you have to rely on a more hackish solution (eg. tabstop=10000)
While I'm on the subject, I can't believe it when I see vi users hitting [Tab] to indent and [BS] to dedent. It's ^T and ^D in insert mode, and >><< in command mode guys!
So the moral is: use whichever you want, spaces or tabs, but use them consistently (ie. exclusively)!
Only if those people are donkey voting by accident.
Can a donkey vote be cast by accident? It is usually taken to reflect a "dunno don't care" attitude to the process. OTOH if your preferred candidate is first and the least preferred last, numbering straight down the ticket isn't a 'donkey vote' at all. And it's not possible to separate these two cases on the basis of any single ballot alone. Indeed beyond observing that there is a statistical tendency for candidates on the top of the ticket to do better, how useful is it to describe someone's validly cast vote as a 'donkey vote?'
I have fulfilled my public obligation to cast a vote, whilst satisfy my moral and personal obligation to lodge a protest against the system.
Elsewhere we discussed a number of suggestions for minimally satisfying your legal obligations to vote. I suspect you are correct that casting a 'donkey vote' achieves that. But is meeting your public obligation satisfied merely by meeting your legal obligation. I'm not sure. Is your public obligation not also a moral one?
On the one hand it might be argued that you (the hypothetical 'you') can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't act on a personal moral imperative inimical to the public and claim to have satisfied a public obligation. By deliberately seeking to pervert the outcome of the election you would be actively working to undermine Australia's democratic polity.
On the other, it might be argued that since you intentionally numbered to top candidate (who in our hypothetical case happens to be the Family First candidate), then you are in effect a Family First voter. After all, the factor(s) motivating any voter to select any candidate varies between different individuals. Why is voting for a candidate because you "like their face," any more valid than voting because you enjoy sequentially numbering boxes?
In any case, it seems a fairly ineffective protest against TheSystem(tm). I'm gonna sock it to the Man, I'm gonna donkey vote! Yeah! Shouldn't you be donning a Che T-shirt, some cammo and a balaclava while chucking Molotov cocktails wildly about? I dunno, kids these days...;)
A good friend of mine is a corporate lawyer who freely admits that he has nfi about criminal law...
Your friend is lying to you!:) Assuming he is an Australian lawyer, we all have to study Criminal Law in first year, and to be frank, it ain't exactly rocket science (a criminal specialist might beg to differ). Moreover there are numerous criminal provisions in corporate law. OK, he's not a specialist, but NFI, yeah right!
But why would your good friend mislead you?
... and no interest in it,
It's an occupational hazard. As soon as anyone finds out you're any kind of lawyer (including a student at law) they start talking crime.:#
Now while the criminal cases might be slightly entertaining for their salacious facts, imho, they are exceedingly dull in terms of their law (again the criminal specialist might beg to differ). Personally I respond by talking about some of the finer points of drafting contracts (the only thing I have any real experience of -- I did help with a couple of criminal matters though, nothing interesting, drink driving, a gang rape) that usually shuts them up.
[D]oes being a lawyer in one field automatically make you an expert in every field of law?
Not automatically, no.** Nor did I claim any expertise in electoral law. On the contrary, I refused to venture a definitive opinion on a matter on which I confessed I was "too lazy to do the research," (although I suspect I do know the answer). In fact I have no area of expertise since, despite the fact that I'm admitted, I actually develop software for a living. OTOH, a legal education ought to leave you with an expert understanding of how our system of law functions in general. [I'm being just a little unfair to myself (but only a little). My area of expertise --the area in which I have published --is the electronic delivery of legal materials (to be as vague as possible), which is not of course a 'field of law' per se.]
I would like to be clear on exactly how much weight we should give to said statement.
My statement was that as a lawyer, a technical discussion about the state of law requires the citation of proper authority, to wit, statutory instruments or (conj.) the decisions of (preferably appellate) courts, rather than "just making this stuff up." Or, as the case actually was, telling me I was wrong by repeating urban legal myths. You can give very great weight indeed to "said statement."
What weight should you give to my reading of the electoral law? Only as much as is justified by the authority I cited.
I quoted and cited relevant statutory provisions, and I gave you hrefs so you can go and read them for yourself. You can go further and do the hard yards of finding and reading the case law (Hint: from any of the pages I gave take the [Table] link to the Act's TOC and then use the [Noteup] link to start you off). Perhaps you will be able to come back to me and demonstrate the inadequacy of my understanding (please do), or perhaps the statues simply mean what the appear to mean.
To recapitulate, the claims I'm sought to dispel by reference to the Act were:
1) Voting is compulsory, but if you don't enrol in the first place you are alright. Compare this claim to the provision of the Act I cited, namely s101.
2) That "technically" all you need do is turn up have your name marked off, refuse to take the ballot, march out and "there's nothing they can do to you." (Cf. ss232(1), 233(1), 245(2)).
3) Deliberately to spoiling your vote, for example by doing nothing more than drawing a dick and balls on the back, satisfies your legal obligation to vote. (Cf. ss245(1),233(1)). Here I expressed a desire for some curial authority as to what 'to vote' actually means, though doubting the the extreme example given would actually constitute "mark[ing a] vote on the ballot paper".
What I did was to arm you, the reader, with a basis on which to begin to weigh the claims being made for yourself. Does that answer your question?
**That being said, your suburban solicitor does have to be something of a GP, with a working understanding of Land Law , Criminal Law, Wills and Probate, Family and the various aspects of law pertaining to small business for a start. Even accredited specialists cannot avoid some level of generality, Tax Lawyers for instance need to be expert in virtually every branch of law (at least that's what a Tax specialist will tell you:).
Slashdot Mirror
There is also 'The intentional infliction of mental harm' under tort which covers things like invasion of privacy ...
Are you certain such a tort exists at English law?
Mainly this is lawyers not acting under direction from a client. Which is entirely against the rules that lawyers are supposed to operate under.
Yes, that's very close to what was happening here. Now the copyright holders were clients of the firm, and presumably instructed the lawyers at least in some vague way to protect their interests in the works under question.
However in sending these notices to specific persons the firm was implying that they were under instruction from their clients to take action against those persons. Clearly they were not and such monies as they did collect were collected by deception. A deception founded on the fact that they were lawyers.
This is why I compared it to extortion, which was the wrongful taking of money or valuables by a public officer under colour of their office. And it is also why I noted that it was wrong, especially as this was a firm of lawyers. A collection agency doing this would merely be kite flying (and their prey would likely know it).
Though lawyers are not actually public officials, I believe in the UK, as here, they are officers of the court with a primary duty to the court (ie. justice and the due administration of law) and a secondary duty to their clients. They are in any case, invested with their status by the proclamations by public bodies (including the court), charged with regulating the admission of lawyers to practice.
As far as their duty to their client is concerned ...we cannot know, nor will we, what specific instructions the clients did give, however in the usual course of events the cost of sending letters &c. would only be incurred once specific instructions were received to pursue any given person.
Though I can't speak with authority on English law, the fact that 'barratry' per se was abolished doesn't mean that courts are necessary left without remedy against vexatious litigants. For example here in NSW 'rape' was similarly abolished. That doesn't mean you can get away with raping anyone, you'll simply be charged with 'sexual assault,' instead.
That being said this isn't really barratry (which is not generally as profitable). It is, especially as it is being conducted by a firm of lawyers, something much worse. Perhaps closer to 'extortion' (which they also abolished around the same time as barratry). One hopes the SRA spanks their joint and several botties!
"Lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math."
The second ticket is for people who are bad a maths! The first one is value for money. ;)
I was about to sort them, but then realized what I was doing and stopped. ;-)
Well to return the favour
So rather less than democratic countries like Libya and Singapore up there with the traditional democracies UK, US and France. And on second thought not all countries with very low rates are the pits of the earth. Norway and Sweden, the countries which regularly rank first on UN nice country lists (albeit with the inclusion of a number of criteria many readers might find too "socialistic" for their tastes, eg, access to public education and health, along with literacy and longevity rates, but apparently not mean temperature), are in the
Come on! It doesn't take a rocket scientist to derive those values
No just someone who's gonna take the time to look up all those population figures. Now how about sorting them? ;)
Seriously though, thanks for the effort it's much more informative this way.
Biggest democracies, biggest culprits
Yes I was just looking at the map and thinking, the places that have no markers on the you wouldn't want to live. Not that all of the places marked (eg. China) you would want to either.
As far as the raw numbers you quote, how to they pan out when expresses as a meaningful metric such as take-down request per 100,000 population. Or some metric that also takes general internet access into account? I somehow doubt the biggest democracies would still emerge as the biggest culprits.
Even more interesting, would be to see the latter compared to some index of how liveable to particular country is. Not that I would want to suggest that there might be some optimum level of government censorship. That would be heresy and would no doubt see me censored, err modded, into oblivion. ;)
Letting the "new owners" keep someone's house, that might have big sentimental value is insane.
What if the "new owners" have been living there for 19 years?
"Infectious spawn"? My, what a vehement response.
In our little school our space-cadet next-door neighbour did not have her children vaccinated. Her daughter caught whooping cough (in the C21st!) and infected another child who had been vaccinated. Not only do people like you free-ride on the fact that most children are vaccinated, you simultaneously provide infection corridors to attack other people's children. Since vaccination cannot always confer absolute immunity, its success has been dependent on community cooperation.
Would that we had freedom from the consequences of your choice. In making your ill-informed (despite whichever doctors you consulted) and irresponsible choices, you are making choices not only about your own kids, but about the health outcomes of children and indeed the community in general.
OP's idea, that up-to-date vaccination papers should be a pre-condition for attendance at a public school has much to recommend it, providing always that allowance is made for particular cases where a medical danger from immunisation can be demonstrated (eg. adverse family history). I do note, however, that you are only directly endangering children from families "whose values reflect [your] own."
Fortunately our constitution guarantees no forced medical treatments
Are you are no longer in Australia? Because the Australian Constitution contains no such guarantee that I am aware of. Moreover the states have plenary power, and can, as explained by Kirby P (as he then was) in the BLF De-registration case, pass a Act requiring "all blue-eyed babies to be put to death" (the classical Diceyan example), and providing there is no conflict with a valid law of the C'wealth, such an Act would be "good" law. There would seem to be no legal impediment to a regime of compulsory vaccination.
I'm not sure that's true outside of the US.
And yet the Statute of Anne, which you quote has a long title beginning with the words "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning ..." which presages the purposive clause in the US Constitution ("to promote the progress of science and useful arts ...").
I think originally it was supposed to help by replacing previous stronger but more ad-hoc monopoly rights.
Yes, that's kinda what I remember from IP lectures as well. The earlier Statute of Monopolies abolishing the motley collection of royal letters, perhaps not "stronger," but certainly more opaque and more expansive, in favour of a Parliamentary Act which granted 'letters patent' (ie. on the public record), for inventions, with the Statute of Anne continuing this process for printed matter. I believe there was an ideological element (as well as the obvious political Crown v Parliament one), which is borne out in the quote you cite. Namely an emerging idea that monopolies per se were undesirable and only those required by economic necessity should remain in place.
So the "purpose" of copyright (and patent) law can be seen as an economic one. That is to mitigate the free-rider market failure --where the cost to the author is writing and publishing, whereas the cost to the competitor is publishing only, leaving original creation an economically irrational activity. And that is a purpose it serves universally (if not exclusively).
I'm rather enjoying good ol' Stephen Conroy trying in vain to introduce the filter!
As I just pointed out below, this is no longer about trying to introduce the filter, it will obviously fail. It is about making Abbott vote down the Australian Christian Lobby's pet project.
The ETS and mining tax are probably also going to get blocked. They don't have the numbers to pass that sort of legislation anymore.
BZZZZT! Wrong.
Let's just examine the ETS (mining tax I wouldn't want to bet on just yet). First off both Windsor and Oakeshott support an ETS, as does Wilkie and obviously the Greens so:
House of Reps: Labor 72; + Greens 1; + Wilkie + Windsor + Oakeshott = 76. 76 votes required so it passes the house.
Senate: Labor 31 + Greens 9 = 40. 39 votes required, so it passes that house too.
This parliament will be much more productive than you believe. But yes, the filter is DOOMED! Still they will force Abbott to vote it down to weaken his standing with Christian voters especially given now we have an atheist PM (which paradoxically is godsend to the Christian lobby).
I'm glad I've been able to persuade you. ;)
Seriously though, the fact that a very obvious, very profitable (meaning it will happen), and very serious (for the victims) misuse exists doesn't give you pause? No offence, but in weighing up the pros and cons, I don't feel you have been as diligent as you might have been.
The reason Slashdotters (and others) are skeptical of government power is that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Now I do agree with you. I would not like to see this much information so easily collated in the hands of administrative authorities and I would add that it's not only governments, but also powerful private interests which would value access to such information about individuals. However, mindlessly repeating glib cliches is a poor way of demonstrating scepticism.
Does absolute power really corrupt absolutely? I sincerely doubt it. Is there even anything approaching a (negative) correlation between some index of government power and the corruption index you cite? China which is marginally less corrupt on that index appears to have far more authoritarian control, the bottom position is shared between Myanmar where the state rules with an iron fist and Somalia which has seen a complete collapse of state power, while Germany, which for decades has required citizens to carry an identification pass bearing a unique number ID is among the least corrupt.
Maybe you ought to think a bit harder about the positive implications of this such as crime prevention, speedy resolution of land disputes, etc. etc. etc.
Not to mention how it streamlines the often difficult task of identity theft.
I could have added that the most devastating events involved crown fires, which don't respect our puny attempts at burning off.
Now it may have been true that too little hazard reduction had been undertaken in the years leading up to the first in the series of truly horrific seasons, the summer of 2000-01. But, at least where I live, that all changed pretty quickly thereafter (along with the building codes). And there was an day this winter when the Sydney CBD was choked with smoke from burning in the Blue Mountains. So even if you never left Sydney you couldn't be unaware that lost of burning off is being conducted over winter.
At least he didn't call hazard reduction "back-burning," and I have to admit it did give me a bit of a chuckle that of all mods "Flamebait" was used.
Actually, if the enviromental nazis ...
Who are these Nazis?
just let controlled burns continue
Whoever these Nazis are, they seem to have far less power than you imagine. Controlled burns are proceeding everywhere. We just had a swathe of bush backing onto our place burnt a few months ago, thank you RFS. Do you live in the city or something?
we wouldn't have the magnitude of devestation [sic.] that hits so often
Well how you explain the Victorian fires then? Taking into consideration the intensive hazard reduction campaign undertaken in the year leading up to them.
Could the frequency of extreme fire events during the last decade have had anything to do with that much of SW-Australia was in one of the -- if not the --deepest and most prolonged droughts in history? Could it have had anything to do with record breaking spells of hot weather --especially in Victoria, where Melbourne not only recorded it's single hottest temperature on record, but where the state recorded it's longest run of extreme heat? ... low humidity? ...
Oh gosh, how silly of me, it was the Nazis! Of course.
[I]f pretty graphs are your thing then try a this random article that took me two minutes to find via a google search.
The problem is that your google search has no way of determining the authority or credibility of the "information" sources that come up as hits. [Hint: read the text in between the pretty graphs and look at the disinformation peddled by that site in general before you recommend it]. Better that people read science than reading about it!
From the data he posted, it doesn't look like the 2000s, or even any multiyear period between 1980-2010 was exceptionally warm in the majority of the measurement sites with a reasonable amount of historical data.
Really? Just eye-balling the data the period 1980-2010 looks decidedly warmer than the period 1880-1910. True, there were a number of exceptionally warm years in the 30s and 40s, but the turn of the century still looks warmer, most notably with regard to the colder years in those periods. None of this is to say anything about the statistical significance of any trend, or lack thereof or course. Be that as it may ...
it would seem to suggest that a big iceberg calving in Greenland might not be global warming related.
Now that is a strange claim. "Global warming" is about the imbalance between heat entering the atmosphere and heat leaving. Actually that imbalance (the "greenhouse effect") is a necessary pre-condition for life on earth, global warming is actually about a shift in that imbalance towards greater heat retention. Retained heat can go various places. It can heat the air, it can heat the water and melt ice. Melting ice therefore, is just as indicative of global warming as rising air temperatures are. It would seem decidedly odd to claim that increasing air temperature "might not be global warming related." So how is this claim made in regard to melting ice?
Of course this calving can occur for reasons other than the mere fact that more heat is being retained in the global atmosphere. Inter alia from the force of greater ice deposition upstream in the glacier. So the significance of this calving needs to be understood in relation to other factors, such as how much ice is being deposited on the glacier as a whole.
Look, I'm sitting on the fence on this one. It may indeed be true that this calving is not global warming related, but a number of years of unusually warm local air temperature the 30s does not seem to me an especially compelling argument. I'd be more convinced if you could show me, for example, greater recent ice deposits.
Now I have to say that polar amplification has always seemed a counter-intuitive result to me, since I would have suspected that the large polar ice masses would act locally to cool the air (ie warming would manifest as melting ice). But my scientific training was in pharmacology, not climatology, so what would I know? (As both the model predictions of polar amplification and now the observed results indicate -- not damned much!)
A bigger one calving in 1962 also supports that.
Two problems here. 1) It's an example of the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. (Ie. calving can result from various causes) 2) The atmospheric concentration of GH-forcing gases (and thus the theoretical increase in the heat retention balance) had already risen significantly (against the pre-industrial background) by 1962, so absent any other evidence, you cannot really claim that that calving was "not global warming related," (not to say that it was).
Nor does it automatically grant the same rights - but that is the intention of those who crafted the term.
Now I happen to agree that IP is a loaded term. These rights can equally be described as statutory monopolies of limited duration. Propagandistically speaking, property == good; monopoly == bad.
However, I would be interested to learn which rights, otherwise universally applicable to property, do not enure to the holder of a copyright, patent &c. I would have thought that property is simply something which can be owned and that assignability was the touchstone of ownership?
Why do so many people insist on using the roman numerals in casual conversation?
Huh? Are you seriously telling me that you talk to people who say "Civ quattuor" and "Civ quinque" instead of "Civ four" and "Civ five?" Wow, you must hang out with some educated folks!
In Python, where indentation matters, tabs are evil
Yes, and people who indent with Tabs should be shot! Or maybe they should just get a text editor. ;)
Actually what is evil is mixing tabs and spaces in the same code. So evil in fact that python has a command the command line switch -t to warn of such evil, and -tt to raise. The style guide suggests only spaces, and 4 per indent. IDLE on the other hand uses only tabs.
I was being a little ironic about the text editor. I use vi (or vim actually), and it has the nasty nasty habit of mixing both under certain circumstances. For instance if you set the shiftwidth to the standard 4 it will use spaces for one indent and a tab for two. Arghh!!! %| In vim at least you can set expandtab on to nuke all tabs entered. In oldschool vi you have to rely on a more hackish solution (eg. tabstop=10000)
While I'm on the subject, I can't believe it when I see vi users hitting [Tab] to indent and [BS] to dedent. It's ^T and ^D in insert mode, and >> << in command mode guys!
So the moral is: use whichever you want, spaces or tabs, but use them consistently (ie. exclusively)!
Only if those people are donkey voting by accident.
Can a donkey vote be cast by accident? It is usually taken to reflect a "dunno don't care" attitude to the process. OTOH if your preferred candidate is first and the least preferred last, numbering straight down the ticket isn't a 'donkey vote' at all. And it's not possible to separate these two cases on the basis of any single ballot alone. Indeed beyond observing that there is a statistical tendency for candidates on the top of the ticket to do better, how useful is it to describe someone's validly cast vote as a 'donkey vote?'
I have fulfilled my public obligation to cast a vote, whilst satisfy my moral and personal obligation to lodge a protest against the system.
Elsewhere we discussed a number of suggestions for minimally satisfying your legal obligations to vote. I suspect you are correct that casting a 'donkey vote' achieves that. But is meeting your public obligation satisfied merely by meeting your legal obligation. I'm not sure. Is your public obligation not also a moral one?
On the one hand it might be argued that you (the hypothetical 'you') can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't act on a personal moral imperative inimical to the public and claim to have satisfied a public obligation. By deliberately seeking to pervert the outcome of the election you would be actively working to undermine Australia's democratic polity.
On the other, it might be argued that since you intentionally numbered to top candidate (who in our hypothetical case happens to be the Family First candidate), then you are in effect a Family First voter. After all, the factor(s) motivating any voter to select any candidate varies between different individuals. Why is voting for a candidate because you "like their face," any more valid than voting because you enjoy sequentially numbering boxes?
In any case, it seems a fairly ineffective protest against TheSystem(tm). I'm gonna sock it to the Man, I'm gonna donkey vote! Yeah! Shouldn't you be donning a Che T-shirt, some cammo and a balaclava while chucking Molotov cocktails wildly about? I dunno, kids these days ... ;)
A good friend of mine is a corporate lawyer who freely admits that he has nfi about criminal law ...
Your friend is lying to you! :) Assuming he is an Australian lawyer, we all have to study Criminal Law in first year, and to be frank, it ain't exactly rocket science (a criminal specialist might beg to differ). Moreover there are numerous criminal provisions in corporate law. OK, he's not a specialist, but NFI, yeah right!
But why would your good friend mislead you?
It's an occupational hazard. As soon as anyone finds out you're any kind of lawyer (including a student at law) they start talking crime. :#
Now while the criminal cases might be slightly entertaining for their salacious facts, imho, they are exceedingly dull in terms of their law (again the criminal specialist might beg to differ). Personally I respond by talking about some of the finer points of drafting contracts (the only thing I have any real experience of -- I did help with a couple of criminal matters though, nothing interesting, drink driving, a gang rape) that usually shuts them up.
[D]oes being a lawyer in one field automatically make you an expert in every field of law?
Not automatically, no.** Nor did I claim any expertise in electoral law. On the contrary, I refused to venture a definitive opinion on a matter on which I confessed I was "too lazy to do the research," (although I suspect I do know the answer). In fact I have no area of expertise since, despite the fact that I'm admitted, I actually develop software for a living. OTOH, a legal education ought to leave you with an expert understanding of how our system of law functions in general. [I'm being just a little unfair to myself (but only a little). My area of expertise --the area in which I have published --is the electronic delivery of legal materials (to be as vague as possible), which is not of course a 'field of law' per se.]
I would like to be clear on exactly how much weight we should give to said statement.
My statement was that as a lawyer, a technical discussion about the state of law requires the citation of proper authority, to wit, statutory instruments or (conj.) the decisions of (preferably appellate) courts, rather than "just making this stuff up." Or, as the case actually was, telling me I was wrong by repeating urban legal myths. You can give very great weight indeed to "said statement."
What weight should you give to my reading of the electoral law? Only as much as is justified by the authority I cited.
I quoted and cited relevant statutory provisions, and I gave you hrefs so you can go and read them for yourself. You can go further and do the hard yards of finding and reading the case law (Hint: from any of the pages I gave take the [Table] link to the Act's TOC and then use the [Noteup] link to start you off). Perhaps you will be able to come back to me and demonstrate the inadequacy of my understanding (please do), or perhaps the statues simply mean what the appear to mean.
To recapitulate, the claims I'm sought to dispel by reference to the Act were:
1) Voting is compulsory, but if you don't enrol in the first place you are alright. Compare this claim to the provision of the Act I cited, namely s101.
2) That "technically" all you need do is turn up have your name marked off, refuse to take the ballot, march out and "there's nothing they can do to you." (Cf. ss232(1), 233(1), 245(2)).
3) Deliberately to spoiling your vote, for example by doing nothing more than drawing a dick and balls on the back, satisfies your legal obligation to vote. (Cf. ss245(1),233(1)). Here I expressed a desire for some curial authority as to what 'to vote' actually means, though doubting the the extreme example given would actually constitute "mark[ing a] vote on the ballot paper".
What I did was to arm you, the reader, with a basis on which to begin to weigh the claims being made for yourself. Does that answer your question?
**That being said, your suburban solicitor does have to be something of a GP, with a working understanding of Land Law , Criminal Law, Wills and Probate, Family and the various aspects of law pertaining to small business for a start. Even accredited specialists cannot avoid some level of generality, Tax Lawyers for instance need to be expert in virtually every branch of law (at least that's what a Tax specialist will tell you :).