While it does appear that he could be wrong legally, he is quite right from an ethical perspective.
How so? The original author (presumable one of the BSD folk) explicitly states that you can distribute the code under the GPL if you wish. What is so unethical about following the original author's wish? They wrote the code and should be allowed to set the distribution rules as they wish. Other people are free to disagree and point out why that might not be the best course of action but that is not the same as being unethical. If the author thought s/he would be swindled by distribution under the GPL license then why did they allow it?
It's not that they're morally judging you, its that they're making sure that you're not unduly susceptible to influence.
Why is it that politicians don't have to undergo the same background check before being eligible for office then? They have far more power in terms of changing laws, setting budgets etc. than the average NASA employee. Of course they also make the rules about who needs to have background checks...
Background checks make sense for people dealing with classified material but not for non-classified, scientific work which in most cases is published. You'd have to be a really stupid "intelligence" operation to try and pressure people to reveal information that you can get by subscribing to an academic journal!
Other countries, including the U.S. and Britain, have been able to stem the tide of illegal downloading by updating laws and increasing enforcement, he said, but calls from the recording industry for updated copyright laws in Canada have gone unheeded.
There is a simple reason for that: there is no illegal downloading in Canada. So we don't have a problem and we don't need to update our laws. The icing on the cake is that this is exactly what the music industry asked for when they pushed for a tax on blank media...of course that was before p2p was invented and they could make money from people who just used CDs for data storage. The justice is almost poetic.
And obviously you had no idea what the facts were when you were holding forth on "idiots" who don't look into the facts; your point would have made no sense if it were referring to a legally questionable (maybe) but obviously technically feasible order.
...and here you are holding forth about what I knew and did not know by making wild inferences from my posts. The amusing thing is you have managed to do exactly what you accuse me of doing in each of your posts so far.
The understanding I had from reading the articles was that the judge had indeed expected the information to be logged and that she did not understand that the information in RAM was not automatically logged. She issued an order that it should be logged without any clue how easy or hard that would be. Now sure it is easy to log connection IP addresses and times if the software is written in any half decent way but her contention that "RAM is primarily for storage" would be the same as saying that a table is primarily for storage: we temporarily put things there for convenience but it is not really storage. i.e. she arrived at an implementable decision by pure luck. This does not stop her being an idiot: it just makes her a lucky idiot.
If a real flu pandemic came I'd be a lot more worried about water, electricity/gas and food than how my stocks are doing. Have they already done these simulations or are we getting more like the Golgafrinchams?
So it isn't true that a US judge to ordered code to be rewritten on servers in the Netherlands to log the connections and activities of non-US citizens possibly in contravention of EU/Dutch privacy laws?
...Schrödinger is actually famous for his wave mechanical approach to quantum mechanics. The cat was just a bad, but famous, example of the wierdness of quantum mechanics.
In fact, the judge made a perfectly reasonable order which all three of you have completely misunderstood before happily charging in without a clue. So, who are the idiots?
Perhaps we just disagree about the reasonableness?
I don't think there's any other field where people have such disproportionately inflated assessments of themselves and so much misplaced contempt for others.
She's not an idiot. She's just not technical. There is a big difference between the two.
Yes but the difference is that an intelligent, non-technical person will know that they are beyond the area of their expertise and stop and ask a technical person about it whereas an idiot will happily charge in without a clue. Hence she is an idiot.
More on topic my advice to a new manager would be the above: do not be afraid to stop and ask questions from your underlings. You might be worried that it makes you look ignorant but it is far, far worse to not ask questions and do something really stupid like the aforementioned judge. Think about it: would "Judge Asks for Technical Advice from Expert" make Slashdot headlines (assuming Zonk is on holiday:-)?
A pendulum is acted upon by a constant force, gravity. The act of raising the pendulum isn't what sets it into oscillation. The releasing of it and letting gravity act on it without a counter force is what starts the oscillation.
i.e. you have to excite it from the groundstate using a non-gravitational force...and you still have not addressed the EM force in the string which is in fact what allows it to oscillate. The only example of a pure gravitational oscillator I can think of would be a globular cluster where the stars oscillate about the centre of mass of the cluster. However there the gravitational force is certainly not constant.
They're working on getting the International Linear Collider to be based between them and Argonne National Laboratory
Actually I understood the site was to be a green-field site somewhere between Fermi and DeKalb. However they face a very hard battle getting it based in the US. There is still considerable resentment over the cancellation of the SSC in the international community: they got foreign investment and then the US congress cancelled the project. There is also the significant problem of visas which, although it has recently eased somewhat is still a major pain. Try persuading the Chinese or Indians that they should invest money in a lab that they will have significant problems ever visiting, let alone working at.
In the past the US could just front the cost by itself but the expense of the newest accelerators now requires global cooperation. So unless the US government can learn to act as a responsible funding partner and host it will be an uphill battle to get an international science projects of this magnitude based there. Plus I bet they would have a far easier time selling the original idea of a site somewhere in Northern California! This may sound trivial but you are trying to attract the best and brightest minds in the world to this project and it is worth remembering that people like this generally have a large number of options open to them. Unless they have family there moving to northern Illinois is not likely to be something that will be attractive - although as a colleague of mine put it when we were both based at Fermilab: sometimes we have to suffer for our science!
Firstly electromagnetism is understood down to scales many orders of magnitudes lower than the nanoscale. QED is the second most accurate scientific theory ever (special relativity is the winner) and works at distances considerably less than nuclear diameters (one million times smaller than nano-scale).
Secondly a pendulum does not convert a constant force into an oscillation because it has to have an initial excitation in the form of an applied force. This force must be applied and then removed so it is non-constant. Even if we ignore that the pendulum requires a string tension to work and that is an EM force so it is wrong to think of it as pure gravity.
Conclusion: this guys physics is as heavily accented as his american.
For the sake of the world, if you have a lifelong illness and are always sick, maybe it's time to change something in your life, move, or stop passing along that genetic makeup that makes you prone to illness.
So my "changing your life" do you mean "drop dead and stop bothering me" and by "move" mean "sod off somewhere else and stop bothering me"? These will not solve the problems faced by the individual who is slightly more predisposed to illness than you! I'd also hardly call a predisposition to obesity a "lifelong illness that makes you always sick"? It might shorten your life and increase the cost of medical treatments you will need but you certainly have a very good quality of living for a long time and it can be overcome with a strong enough will. If you still think that is a good idea what about stupidity? That can not only significantly shorten your live but that of others as well. So should we stop stupid people from having health insurance? If so how are you going to identify the stupid people - exam results? IQ score?
I might accept your argument not to have kids in the case of serious genetic disabilities which need lifelong treatment, shorten life and give a low quality of life such as cystic fibrosis. However modern genetic techniques allow us to screen embryos with the defective genes and then not implant them (this is at least legal in the UK) so there is no need prevent carriers from having kids: just require them to be screened.
In short your argument is redundant: we already have the means to screen for many serious genetic disorders and the less serious ones should not be a reason to refuse someone medical treatment or kids in any civilized society.
The key is the energy density, not the total amount of energy. Sunlight can't light a match normally but focus it with a magnifying glass and it is no problem at all.
On a more serious note driving and health insurance are rather different. With driving you can always choose to not drive if you have a bad driving record and the insurance premium is too high. Do you really want to tell people with a bad health record that they should just choose not to live?
Yes...but where does it end? If your family has a history of heart disease or cancer then should you pay more? Also while 99.9+% of obesity is caused by overeating and/or lack of exercise there are rare cases where it is not. Should they be penalized? It is one thing for this type of selective criteria where there is universal public health care and insurance is there to either expand coverage, reduce wait times or improve hospital accommodation. It is different in the US where you either have health insurance, are extremely wealthy or just have to live without healthcare.
The Casimir effect is also on extremely small scales. In fact I think I may have foud out why the condensed matter guys are interested in it: accordinging to Wikipedia it becomes the dominant force between conductors at submicron distances and can generate pressures exceeding atmospheric....although I'm not sure how much trust to put in the article since the original title was the "Kashmir effect"!
I understand how you might think I got the two confused but no, this effect is completely distinct from gravity. It has a different strength, behaves differently and its fundamental mechanism is understood at the quantum level, unlike gravity.
Also there is actually no evidence whatsoever that gravity and EM fields are interrelated. It is postulated that at around 10^16 GeV they are but there is no evidence for that yet....and just to show you how much faith you should put in theory without concrete evidence to back it up remember that at one time people thought that the Earth was flat!
The Casimir effect is very wierd indeed. If you take two metal plates and put them close together in a vacuum they will attract one another VERY weakly. The effect is caused by fluctuations in the electric charge of the vacuum. Think of it a little like sea level. On average if you measure sea level lots of times you wil get "0" for the height but if you measure it just once the height you get will depend on the tide and the size of any waves. The same is true for a vacuum. Look at a particular volume of space and measure the electric charge. On average you will get zero but for a particular moment in time it may be non-zero.
Ok so far but how do we get an attractive force? Well it turns out that charge must be conserved so if one region of space has a small positive charge at one instant a neighbouring area must have a small negative charge (in quantum terms we say that we pair produce and virtual electron-positron pair) thuse we have a dipole. Now remember the two conductors? Well the one nearest the positive charge will have the electrons in the conductor attracted to it and being a conductor they will move towards it giving the conductor a net negative charge. The opposite will happen in the conductor nearest the negative charged area of space.
So now we have, instantaneously, a conductor with a negative charge and one with a positive charge...so they attract one another. this is the Casimir effect. If you stop to think about it is is VERY strange because it means that two metal plates in vacuum, with no externally applied fields will attract...so you have to ask yourself what exactly is doing the work i.e. where is the energy coming from to move these plates?
I'm not a condensed matter guy so I must admit I don't quite understand why this effect is so important to them. I understood that in molecules it was known as Van der Waal forces and due to periodic dipoles occuring in molecules in much the same way it does ina vacuum. Only, because there is a real electric field, the effect is much larger. So if there are any condensed matter people out there perhaps they would like to explain why it is Casimir and not Van der Waals that is important? or is it just because they have the same origin the name Van Der Waals has been dropped?
"I'm not going to feel better about losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because someone puts a frown face to regretfully inform me.'"
I don't know what she is complaining about. If they are using them in the military it could be a lot worse. Imagine the text message after the next friendly fire incident:
Actually I'd argue that it is both. The company owed us money for the cash it swallowed and the lack of service (in breach of contract) while awaiting repairs due to the really cheap phone they installed in the first place.
Looking back the correct morally right response would have been to sue the company for the money it refused to return and for the lack of service i.e. to make them correct their misconduct. However in modern society that NEVER works. The time and cost to sue someone over a few tens of quid is simply impractical. So what do you do? You either seize the chance for justice at the cost of behaving irreproachably or behave completely morally but live with the injustice.
That's why I think this is a somewhat tricky situation. Do you choose justice or moral conduct? We seem to have produced a society where, because we put law above justice, having both is not usually possible. Thinking back I realize we should have chosen moral conduct although at the time we were so ticked off at the phone company that were the same situation, with the same aggravation, to arise again I'm not sure I would behave differently, although I'd hope I would.
Do you sit on the curb and at minute 31 immediately proceed to loot the shop? Do you say you tried to warn them but they didn't respond in a timely manner?
But that is not a fair comparison because the shop in question did not owe you money. A better one would be to say you had brought a computer from that shop and while still under warranty it had broken and you returned it to the shop for repair. They fixed it but then said that you could not have it back until you paid a £100 repair bill even though the repair was completely covered under warranty. Would you then be morally right in letting them know and then taking your computer back from the shop before they arrived?
Yes theoretically you could sue them for the money but that would end up taking a lot more than £100 and considerable time. I should mention that we had accurate logs of exactly how much money the machine swallowed (they asked for that the first time anyone reported a fault) and they still completely ignored these detailed logs. Yes we could probably have tried to sue them for it but the cost to benefit ratio pretty much prohibits that.
The second reason that this is not a fair comparison is because the slow response of the shop owners is (a) understandable and (b) is not part of the service they provide. If a company is supposed to maintain a pay phone in a hostel and take 1+ weeks to fix it they are not providing a reasonable level of service which impacts their clients. This time delay was again in breach of their contract...but again it is not practical to sue over.
Thinking back on it I think I'd say that while not morally right (on the basis that two wrongs do not make a right) it was at least as close to justice as you can probably get in our modern society where law is placed above justice. Which makes me wonder if the real (or perceived?) lack of justice in modern society is the reason for the decline in honesty: we are so desperate to feel a little justice in our lives that we will attempt to gain it at the expense of irreproachable conduct.
In any case, the actual date is not that important for the purposes of this thread. What's important is that certain laws in parliamentary democracies can be judged ultra vires and refused royal assent, and that the government of New Zealand has apparently found a way to circumvent this.
The main point I was trying to make is that they should not be called ultra vires. There are no legal limits on powers of the government and monarch in countries like the UK where there is no written constitution (and even in Canada we have the "notwithstanding" clause in the charter). If parliament passes a law and it gets royal assent it is legal so there can be no logical argument for the queen to hold back royal assent because she lacks the power to enact the law. She does. Clearly there are political limits and so this is a reasonable argument to withhold royal assent e.g. the law is clearly against the will and best interests of the people but that is not the same as lacking the power to enact such a law which is my understanding of the term "ultra vire".
Slashdot Mirror
While it does appear that he could be wrong legally, he is quite right from an ethical perspective.
How so? The original author (presumable one of the BSD folk) explicitly states that you can distribute the code under the GPL if you wish. What is so unethical about following the original author's wish? They wrote the code and should be allowed to set the distribution rules as they wish. Other people are free to disagree and point out why that might not be the best course of action but that is not the same as being unethical. If the author thought s/he would be swindled by distribution under the GPL license then why did they allow it?
It's not that they're morally judging you, its that they're making sure that you're not unduly susceptible to influence.
Why is it that politicians don't have to undergo the same background check before being eligible for office then? They have far more power in terms of changing laws, setting budgets etc. than the average NASA employee. Of course they also make the rules about who needs to have background checks...
Background checks make sense for people dealing with classified material but not for non-classified, scientific work which in most cases is published. You'd have to be a really stupid "intelligence" operation to try and pressure people to reveal information that you can get by subscribing to an academic journal!
Other countries, including the U.S. and Britain, have been able to stem the tide of illegal downloading by updating laws and increasing enforcement, he said, but calls from the recording industry for updated copyright laws in Canada have gone unheeded.
There is a simple reason for that: there is no illegal downloading in Canada. So we don't have a problem and we don't need to update our laws. The icing on the cake is that this is exactly what the music industry asked for when they pushed for a tax on blank media...of course that was before p2p was invented and they could make money from people who just used CDs for data storage. The justice is almost poetic.
And obviously you had no idea what the facts were when you were holding forth on "idiots" who don't look into the facts; your point would have made no sense if it were referring to a legally questionable (maybe) but obviously technically feasible order.
...and here you are holding forth about what I knew and did not know by making wild inferences from my posts. The amusing thing is you have managed to do exactly what you accuse me of doing in each of your posts so far.
The understanding I had from reading the articles was that the judge had indeed expected the information to be logged and that she did not understand that the information in RAM was not automatically logged. She issued an order that it should be logged without any clue how easy or hard that would be. Now sure it is easy to log connection IP addresses and times if the software is written in any half decent way but her contention that "RAM is primarily for storage" would be the same as saying that a table is primarily for storage: we temporarily put things there for convenience but it is not really storage. i.e. she arrived at an implementable decision by pure luck. This does not stop her being an idiot: it just makes her a lucky idiot.
If a real flu pandemic came I'd be a lot more worried about water, electricity/gas and food than how my stocks are doing. Have they already done these simulations or are we getting more like the Golgafrinchams?
Uh, no. You have the facts completely wrong.
So it isn't true that a US judge to ordered code to be rewritten on servers in the Netherlands to log the connections and activities of non-US citizens possibly in contravention of EU/Dutch privacy laws?
...Schrödinger is actually famous for his wave mechanical approach to quantum mechanics. The cat was just a bad, but famous, example of the wierdness of quantum mechanics.
In fact, the judge made a perfectly reasonable order which all three of you have completely misunderstood before happily charging in without a clue. So, who are the idiots?
Perhaps we just disagree about the reasonableness?
I don't think there's any other field where people have such disproportionately inflated assessments of themselves and so much misplaced contempt for others.
Are you in this field by any chance?
She's not an idiot. She's just not technical. There is a big difference between the two.
:-)?
Yes but the difference is that an intelligent, non-technical person will know that they are beyond the area of their expertise and stop and ask a technical person about it whereas an idiot will happily charge in without a clue. Hence she is an idiot.
More on topic my advice to a new manager would be the above: do not be afraid to stop and ask questions from your underlings. You might be worried that it makes you look ignorant but it is far, far worse to not ask questions and do something really stupid like the aforementioned judge. Think about it: would "Judge Asks for Technical Advice from Expert" make Slashdot headlines (assuming Zonk is on holiday
A pendulum is acted upon by a constant force, gravity. The act of raising the pendulum isn't what sets it into oscillation. The releasing of it and letting gravity act on it without a counter force is what starts the oscillation.
i.e. you have to excite it from the groundstate using a non-gravitational force...and you still have not addressed the EM force in the string which is in fact what allows it to oscillate. The only example of a pure gravitational oscillator I can think of would be a globular cluster where the stars oscillate about the centre of mass of the cluster. However there the gravitational force is certainly not constant.
They're working on getting the International Linear Collider to be based between them and Argonne National Laboratory
Actually I understood the site was to be a green-field site somewhere between Fermi and DeKalb. However they face a very hard battle getting it based in the US. There is still considerable resentment over the cancellation of the SSC in the international community: they got foreign investment and then the US congress cancelled the project. There is also the significant problem of visas which, although it has recently eased somewhat is still a major pain. Try persuading the Chinese or Indians that they should invest money in a lab that they will have significant problems ever visiting, let alone working at.
In the past the US could just front the cost by itself but the expense of the newest accelerators now requires global cooperation. So unless the US government can learn to act as a responsible funding partner and host it will be an uphill battle to get an international science projects of this magnitude based there. Plus I bet they would have a far easier time selling the original idea of a site somewhere in Northern California! This may sound trivial but you are trying to attract the best and brightest minds in the world to this project and it is worth remembering that people like this generally have a large number of options open to them. Unless they have family there moving to northern Illinois is not likely to be something that will be attractive - although as a colleague of mine put it when we were both based at Fermilab: sometimes we have to suffer for our science!
Firstly electromagnetism is understood down to scales many orders of magnitudes lower than the nanoscale. QED is the second most accurate scientific theory ever (special relativity is the winner) and works at distances considerably less than nuclear diameters (one million times smaller than nano-scale). Secondly a pendulum does not convert a constant force into an oscillation because it has to have an initial excitation in the form of an applied force. This force must be applied and then removed so it is non-constant. Even if we ignore that the pendulum requires a string tension to work and that is an EM force so it is wrong to think of it as pure gravity. Conclusion: this guys physics is as heavily accented as his american.
For the sake of the world, if you have a lifelong illness and are always sick, maybe it's time to change something in your life, move, or stop passing along that genetic makeup that makes you prone to illness.
So my "changing your life" do you mean "drop dead and stop bothering me" and by "move" mean "sod off somewhere else and stop bothering me"? These will not solve the problems faced by the individual who is slightly more predisposed to illness than you! I'd also hardly call a predisposition to obesity a "lifelong illness that makes you always sick"? It might shorten your life and increase the cost of medical treatments you will need but you certainly have a very good quality of living for a long time and it can be overcome with a strong enough will. If you still think that is a good idea what about stupidity? That can not only significantly shorten your live but that of others as well. So should we stop stupid people from having health insurance? If so how are you going to identify the stupid people - exam results? IQ score?
I might accept your argument not to have kids in the case of serious genetic disabilities which need lifelong treatment, shorten life and give a low quality of life such as cystic fibrosis. However modern genetic techniques allow us to screen embryos with the defective genes and then not implant them (this is at least legal in the UK) so there is no need prevent carriers from having kids: just require them to be screened.
In short your argument is redundant: we already have the means to screen for many serious genetic disorders and the less serious ones should not be a reason to refuse someone medical treatment or kids in any civilized society.
...lots of Universities also have a Law Faculty as well, and these are the guys who taught those lawyers.
The key is the energy density, not the total amount of energy. Sunlight can't light a match normally but focus it with a magnifying glass and it is no problem at all.
On a more serious note driving and health insurance are rather different. With driving you can always choose to not drive if you have a bad driving record and the insurance premium is too high. Do you really want to tell people with a bad health record that they should just choose not to live?
Yes...but where does it end? If your family has a history of heart disease or cancer then should you pay more? Also while 99.9+% of obesity is caused by overeating and/or lack of exercise there are rare cases where it is not. Should they be penalized?
It is one thing for this type of selective criteria where there is universal public health care and insurance is there to either expand coverage, reduce wait times or improve hospital accommodation. It is different in the US where you either have health insurance, are extremely wealthy or just have to live without healthcare.
The Casimir effect is also on extremely small scales. In fact I think I may have foud out why the condensed matter guys are interested in it: accordinging to Wikipedia it becomes the dominant force between conductors at submicron distances and can generate pressures exceeding atmospheric....although I'm not sure how much trust to put in the article since the original title was the "Kashmir effect"!
I understand how you might think I got the two confused but no, this effect is completely distinct from gravity. It has a different strength, behaves differently and its fundamental mechanism is understood at the quantum level, unlike gravity.
Also there is actually no evidence whatsoever that gravity and EM fields are interrelated. It is postulated that at around 10^16 GeV they are but there is no evidence for that yet....and just to show you how much faith you should put in theory without concrete evidence to back it up remember that at one time people thought that the Earth was flat!
The Casimir effect is very wierd indeed. If you take two metal plates and put them close together in a vacuum they will attract one another VERY weakly. The effect is caused by fluctuations in the electric charge of the vacuum. Think of it a little like sea level. On average if you measure sea level lots of times you wil get "0" for the height but if you measure it just once the height you get will depend on the tide and the size of any waves. The same is true for a vacuum. Look at a particular volume of space and measure the electric charge. On average you will get zero but for a particular moment in time it may be non-zero.
Ok so far but how do we get an attractive force? Well it turns out that charge must be conserved so if one region of space has a small positive charge at one instant a neighbouring area must have a small negative charge (in quantum terms we say that we pair produce and virtual electron-positron pair) thuse we have a dipole. Now remember the two conductors? Well the one nearest the positive charge will have the electrons in the conductor attracted to it and being a conductor they will move towards it giving the conductor a net negative charge. The opposite will happen in the conductor nearest the negative charged area of space.
So now we have, instantaneously, a conductor with a negative charge and one with a positive charge...so they attract one another. this is the Casimir effect. If you stop to think about it is is VERY strange because it means that two metal plates in vacuum, with no externally applied fields will attract...so you have to ask yourself what exactly is doing the work i.e. where is the energy coming from to move these plates?
I'm not a condensed matter guy so I must admit I don't quite understand why this effect is so important to them. I understood that in molecules it was known as Van der Waal forces and due to periodic dipoles occuring in molecules in much the same way it does ina vacuum. Only, because there is a real electric field, the effect is much larger. So if there are any condensed matter people out there perhaps they would like to explain why it is Casimir and not Van der Waals that is important? or is it just because they have the same origin the name Van Der Waals has been dropped?
"Riotous" demand? Do you really think that's going to happen?
Yes, once you remember that it is the UK we are talking about. Riotous demand does not mean quite the same as it does in the US.
"I'm not going to feel better about losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because someone puts a frown face to regretfully inform me.'"
;-)"
I don't know what she is complaining about. If they are using them in the military it could be a lot worse. Imagine the text message after the next friendly fire incident:
"Sorry we didn't mean to blow you up
Actually I'd argue that it is both. The company owed us money for the cash it swallowed and the lack of service (in breach of contract) while awaiting repairs due to the really cheap phone they installed in the first place.
Looking back the correct morally right response would have been to sue the company for the money it refused to return and for the lack of service i.e. to make them correct their misconduct. However in modern society that NEVER works. The time and cost to sue someone over a few tens of quid is simply impractical. So what do you do? You either seize the chance for justice at the cost of behaving irreproachably or behave completely morally but live with the injustice.
That's why I think this is a somewhat tricky situation. Do you choose justice or moral conduct? We seem to have produced a society where, because we put law above justice, having both is not usually possible. Thinking back I realize we should have chosen moral conduct although at the time we were so ticked off at the phone company that were the same situation, with the same aggravation, to arise again I'm not sure I would behave differently, although I'd hope I would.
Do you sit on the curb and at minute 31 immediately proceed to loot the shop? Do you say you tried to warn them but they didn't respond in a timely manner?
But that is not a fair comparison because the shop in question did not owe you money. A better one would be to say you had brought a computer from that shop and while still under warranty it had broken and you returned it to the shop for repair. They fixed it but then said that you could not have it back until you paid a £100 repair bill even though the repair was completely covered under warranty. Would you then be morally right in letting them know and then taking your computer back from the shop before they arrived?
Yes theoretically you could sue them for the money but that would end up taking a lot more than £100 and considerable time. I should mention that we had accurate logs of exactly how much money the machine swallowed (they asked for that the first time anyone reported a fault) and they still completely ignored these detailed logs. Yes we could probably have tried to sue them for it but the cost to benefit ratio pretty much prohibits that.
The second reason that this is not a fair comparison is because the slow response of the shop owners is (a) understandable and (b) is not part of the service they provide. If a company is supposed to maintain a pay phone in a hostel and take 1+ weeks to fix it they are not providing a reasonable level of service which impacts their clients. This time delay was again in breach of their contract...but again it is not practical to sue over.
Thinking back on it I think I'd say that while not morally right (on the basis that two wrongs do not make a right) it was at least as close to justice as you can probably get in our modern society where law is placed above justice. Which makes me wonder if the real (or perceived?) lack of justice in modern society is the reason for the decline in honesty: we are so desperate to feel a little justice in our lives that we will attempt to gain it at the expense of irreproachable conduct.
In any case, the actual date is not that important for the purposes of this thread. What's important is that certain laws in parliamentary democracies can be judged ultra vires and refused royal assent, and that the government of New Zealand has apparently found a way to circumvent this.
The main point I was trying to make is that they should not be called ultra vires. There are no legal limits on powers of the government and monarch in countries like the UK where there is no written constitution (and even in Canada we have the "notwithstanding" clause in the charter). If parliament passes a law and it gets royal assent it is legal so there can be no logical argument for the queen to hold back royal assent because she lacks the power to enact the law. She does. Clearly there are political limits and so this is a reasonable argument to withhold royal assent e.g. the law is clearly against the will and best interests of the people but that is not the same as lacking the power to enact such a law which is my understanding of the term "ultra vire".