...in response to a question about an action that was not illegal, where telling the truth would have had no consequences but embarrassment.
Moreover, more enlightened courts have deemed a crime synthesised entirely by another party in order to generate a prosecution to be entrapment. I fail to see the difference in the Clinton case; if Bill Clinton lied under oath, John DeLorean was a coke dealer.
On the one hand, you don't want anyone to discover anything about the case. On the other hand, you assert that it will be going to a court whose cases are a matter of public record by default (that's what happens in "the highest court"). And then you repeat your assertions, with exactly as much backup as you supplied before... I'm perplexed.
Incidentally, if you're trying to conceal the country in which the case might be being heard, it would help you to change your homepage. At present it's pointing at what appears to be your family site, and it took me approximately two seconds of reading to conclude that the obvious place to start would be to look at the cases recently before the NZ Court of Appeal, and whose original hearing possibly numbered a Peter Hamilton amongst the witnesses for the losing side - your comment that it's "going up the ladder... (as in the highest)" indicates that it's going to the NZ Supreme Court, which suggests that the Court of Appeal has already handed down an unfavourable decision.
As I asserted before, it would have been much better for you to hold your counsel. Not only have you essentially subtracted from the debate, you have ended up revealing enough for even a casual observer from the opposite end of the earth (ie. me) to get a good head start in tracking down the case you mention... and if the Court of Appeal have indeed supported the original verdict, your opinion of that verdict is rendered even more questionable.
This is the worst kind of anecdote. It's impossible to determine anything about your friend's situation with any certainty: you imply that you weren't personally involved in the case, which makes it hearsay; your account of it presumably comes from your friend, and so is certainly prejudiced and possibly incomplete; you don't even mention under which jurisdiction the case was heard, let alone whether the case is a matter of public record or the name of the judge; you don't provide any details of the case, not even broad ones - the only thing we can glean from your anecdote is that your friend lost, badly, a case they were expecting to win...
As far as I'm concerned, it would be better if this anecdote were stricken from the record.
Mehthinks someone is defensive about their own little project empire... keep building that cubicle fort, sweetie, you'll need it when the barbarians descend. And make them pry your stapler out of your cold dead hands.
Ah. And here the metaphor falls down. Can I, Average Joe Blow, contribute meaningfully to a coding project? Well, no.
Maybe you could - but you certainly won't. You've disenfranchised yourself. Carping about being locked out of a process when you aren't willing to follow its agreed-upon procedures is just entitlement culture, especially when if you're that averse to those procedures you have the option of maintaining your own copy of anything you're interested in and not bothering to share any of your changes.
Incidentally, the system you seem to be asking for exists, and is called Squeak. Enjoy. That is, if it's not too much effort for you.
No, they're not - at least, not according to British law. As far as I'm aware (from a year and a half of a law degree), not even the ECtHR can force the British government to change the law - they can award damages against governments, and their opinion can have the effect of rendering such a law unenforceable, but that's all. Meanwhile, because of the longstanding doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, the British courts are estopped from examining the procedures of Parliament at all, despite HRA 1998; even if they find a law to be morally wrong, the most they can do directly is issue a "declaration of incompatibility" - which the government can counter by simply having a minister stand up in the Commons and say "No it isn't". (In fact, as all bills are required to be since HRA'98, this bill will have been declared by the government to be compatible with the ECHR; the onus will be on someone whose human rights have been damaged by it to prove that no such compatibility exists.)
this is the same country that charges prisoners who have been falsely accused for bed and boarding costs
Er, even the article states that his £252k compensation was reduced, on audit, by £12.5k to cover the cost of keeping him for three years - and that in itself is a sum that works out at about what his SSP entitlement would have been over the period in which he was imprisoned, which is likely far less than the cost of actually imprisoning him (prisons being hellishly expensive to run). In short - he still walked away with £240k compensation. The implication that he somehow had to write a cheque himself is grossly misleading.
Moreover, the article is from the Daily "Hate" Mail, the newspaper that defines journalistic standards by contradiction; I'd more or less regard anything it prints as false by default, unless corroborated by a reliable source.
Probably something that comes of living here; I'm not very keen on my country of birth and residence at the moment either.
In any case, the best the House of Lords can do is defer legislation. If it's lucky, it'll be able to bounce it past a general election - unless the government wheels every sick and dying peer it can find into the Aye lobby, uses its control of the timetable to manipulate a midnight pass, or uses the Parliament Act to force it through anyway - but that seems extremely unlikely, considering that the HoL can delay legislation for no more than a year, no election has to be held for another 23 months, and the government is in no danger whatsoever of losing a vote of confidence (no Labour MP would seriously consider a spell in opposition a price worth paying to depose Gordon Brown, whatever policies they might try to defeat). samzenpus' assertion might be a little premature, but frankly that's all - only a miracle, a revolution or a constitutional upset (eg. the refusal of Royal Assent) can prevent this bill from becoming law now.
There are developers and users, and if the developers want to go open source they damn well need to accept that fact.
I have to say that I believe you are completely and utterly wrong about this. The segregation of users into developers and consumers is something that only happens when you actively prohibit the latter from being able to become the former - for example, by locking up the source code in the safe of trade secrecy. The whole point of free software is to break down the barriers between the two - to allow anyone to dip into development any time they need to, without subjecting them to restrictions or limitations. It's about empowerment. Of course, not every user will participate in development, for a whole range of reasons - but no user is prevented from doing so; every user is allowed to participate. And in that climate, the idea that there is some big glass wall between the developer and the user is simply ridiculous.
I am a huge Linux advocate, but...
Why does that comment sound so much like "I'm not a racist, but..."? Perhaps some of your best friends are penguins...?
Yes. Yes, it would. But if not even someone with the reputation and visibility of Kathy Sierra can withstand the constant onslaught of those people who believe that the only mark they can leave on the world is a crater where something useful once stood, what hope is there for anyone? And when every one of those people comes from a different country, under whose jurisdiction should prosecution be pursued?
Frankly, it's not safe to disclose too much online. That people still do demonstrates only that socially, we haven't yet evolved past clusters of huts in a clearing; we have no conception of what it means to make ourselves visible to the whole world, whilst simultaneously not quite being able to get past the feeling that if it's on a screen it's not 100% real... it's an uncomfortable combination - and what you call "cyberbullying" (in truth, the "cyber" prefix is redundant, and if anything, serves only to trivialise the epidemic) will only get much, much worse.
Think about it, if every president is officially pronounced a criminal.. what message does that send to the rest of the world about our nation?
I dunno, maybe that Americans are finally approaching political maturity? In Europe, we've known that our politicians were more or less uniformly a bunch of crooks ever since they inherited their positions...
What's the point of an SUV to drive through the city?
Likewise, what's the point of wearing a tiny fragment of compressed carbon set into a tiny wrought chunk of a highly conductive metal that doesn't oxidise easily?
Conversely, the liberal would legislate the federal right to ALL property, and impose regulations on ANYTHING.
I simply cannot understand the kind of person who would follow a complaint of misrepresentation with a sentence such as this, which they must surely know to be so much horseshit.
Slashdot Mirror
Moreover, more enlightened courts have deemed a crime synthesised entirely by another party in order to generate a prosecution to be entrapment. I fail to see the difference in the Clinton case; if Bill Clinton lied under oath, John DeLorean was a coke dealer.
And then, presumably, only to those who have been Touched by His Noodly Appendage...
On the one hand, you don't want anyone to discover anything about the case. On the other hand, you assert that it will be going to a court whose cases are a matter of public record by default (that's what happens in "the highest court"). And then you repeat your assertions, with exactly as much backup as you supplied before... I'm perplexed.
Incidentally, if you're trying to conceal the country in which the case might be being heard, it would help you to change your homepage. At present it's pointing at what appears to be your family site, and it took me approximately two seconds of reading to conclude that the obvious place to start would be to look at the cases recently before the NZ Court of Appeal, and whose original hearing possibly numbered a Peter Hamilton amongst the witnesses for the losing side - your comment that it's "going up the ladder... (as in the highest)" indicates that it's going to the NZ Supreme Court, which suggests that the Court of Appeal has already handed down an unfavourable decision.
As I asserted before, it would have been much better for you to hold your counsel. Not only have you essentially subtracted from the debate, you have ended up revealing enough for even a casual observer from the opposite end of the earth (ie. me) to get a good head start in tracking down the case you mention... and if the Court of Appeal have indeed supported the original verdict, your opinion of that verdict is rendered even more questionable.
More apposite than you might think... (Max Mathews built the original MUSIC languages from which CSound and CMusic are descended.)
This is the worst kind of anecdote. It's impossible to determine anything about your friend's situation with any certainty: you imply that you weren't personally involved in the case, which makes it hearsay; your account of it presumably comes from your friend, and so is certainly prejudiced and possibly incomplete; you don't even mention under which jurisdiction the case was heard, let alone whether the case is a matter of public record or the name of the judge; you don't provide any details of the case, not even broad ones - the only thing we can glean from your anecdote is that your friend lost, badly, a case they were expecting to win...
As far as I'm concerned, it would be better if this anecdote were stricken from the record.
Mehthinks someone is defensive about their own little project empire... keep building that cubicle fort, sweetie, you'll need it when the barbarians descend. And make them pry your stapler out of your cold dead hands.
Your reply demonstrates my point precisely.
Where's the "net.kook" option in the moderate pull-down when you need it?
Incidentally, the system you seem to be asking for exists, and is called Squeak. Enjoy. That is, if it's not too much effort for you.
You mean like the descendants of those people who were abducted from Africa and sold as slaves already are...?
No, they're not - at least, not according to British law. As far as I'm aware (from a year and a half of a law degree), not even the ECtHR can force the British government to change the law - they can award damages against governments, and their opinion can have the effect of rendering such a law unenforceable, but that's all. Meanwhile, because of the longstanding doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, the British courts are estopped from examining the procedures of Parliament at all, despite HRA 1998; even if they find a law to be morally wrong, the most they can do directly is issue a "declaration of incompatibility" - which the government can counter by simply having a minister stand up in the Commons and say "No it isn't". (In fact, as all bills are required to be since HRA'98, this bill will have been declared by the government to be compatible with the ECHR; the onus will be on someone whose human rights have been damaged by it to prove that no such compatibility exists.)
Er, even the article states that his £252k compensation was reduced, on audit, by £12.5k to cover the cost of keeping him for three years - and that in itself is a sum that works out at about what his SSP entitlement would have been over the period in which he was imprisoned, which is likely far less than the cost of actually imprisoning him (prisons being hellishly expensive to run). In short - he still walked away with £240k compensation. The implication that he somehow had to write a cheque himself is grossly misleading.
Moreover, the article is from the Daily "Hate" Mail, the newspaper that defines journalistic standards by contradiction; I'd more or less regard anything it prints as false by default, unless corroborated by a reliable source.
Probably something that comes of living here; I'm not very keen on my country of birth and residence at the moment either.
In any case, the best the House of Lords can do is defer legislation. If it's lucky, it'll be able to bounce it past a general election - unless the government wheels every sick and dying peer it can find into the Aye lobby, uses its control of the timetable to manipulate a midnight pass, or uses the Parliament Act to force it through anyway - but that seems extremely unlikely, considering that the HoL can delay legislation for no more than a year, no election has to be held for another 23 months, and the government is in no danger whatsoever of losing a vote of confidence (no Labour MP would seriously consider a spell in opposition a price worth paying to depose Gordon Brown, whatever policies they might try to defeat). samzenpus' assertion might be a little premature, but frankly that's all - only a miracle, a revolution or a constitutional upset (eg. the refusal of Royal Assent) can prevent this bill from becoming law now.
[citation needed]
...er, ducking? Are we witnessing the birth of a euphemism here? Do you think it's applicable to all bestiality, or only acts of avian depravity?
Nah, they'll just stop paying it and let the problem work itself out naturally.
From my cold, dead hands! As far as I'm concerned, that "network transparency cruft" is the only compelling thing about X!
*scouts around for a naive doctor to make an appointment with*
Yes. Yes, it would. But if not even someone with the reputation and visibility of Kathy Sierra can withstand the constant onslaught of those people who believe that the only mark they can leave on the world is a crater where something useful once stood, what hope is there for anyone? And when every one of those people comes from a different country, under whose jurisdiction should prosecution be pursued?
Frankly, it's not safe to disclose too much online. That people still do demonstrates only that socially, we haven't yet evolved past clusters of huts in a clearing; we have no conception of what it means to make ourselves visible to the whole world, whilst simultaneously not quite being able to get past the feeling that if it's on a screen it's not 100% real... it's an uncomfortable combination - and what you call "cyberbullying" (in truth, the "cyber" prefix is redundant, and if anything, serves only to trivialise the epidemic) will only get much, much worse.
Wouldn't that make "Freedom Fries" another name for the posthumous residents of Death Row?