"Our legal advice is that those previously prosecuted will be unable to overturn their prosecution or receive financial recompense," she said.
So people who were previously prosecuted for breaking a non-law will be unable to overturn their prosecution.
It seems very unusual that you can argue that past convictions for violating an invalid law are valid, unless the Government will argue that it was an Act of Parliament and so was really legally binding, but now it is being rescinded non-retroactively and will be re-enacted in order to meet their treaty obligations. To me, that seems like the most reasonable position that is consistent with the Government's actions on this.
Can a British lawyer please tell me at what point notification of the European Commission became a requirement for an Act of Parliament to become legally binding? Surely such a surrender of sovereignty was exactly the sort of thing Thatcher opposed?
IANABL. In fact, I am neither British nor a lawyer. I was wondering the same thing as you - since when was it a requirement that an Act of Parliament could not become legally binding until a supranational body is notified?
A bit of Wikipediaing and then Googling turned up that: It is Directive 83/189 from the European Committee for Standardization that required this. It only applies to technical standards and regulations, not all statutes. Presumably, the requirement for notification is so that the different standards and requirements for (in this case) video recordings can be collected and available to other member countries by the European Committee for Standardization.
So reporting new Acts that affect technical standards and regulations to the ECS sounds like a very good idea, but I don't see why this would necessarily make unreported Acts non-binding.
However, although the British Government is dropping all current prosecutions under that law, they are arguing that all past convictions are still valid. It seems very unusual that you can argue that past convictions for violating an invalid law are valid, unless the Government will argue that it was an Act of Parliament and so was really legally binding, but now it is being rescinded non-retroactively and will be re-enacted in order to meet their treaty obligations. To me, that seems like the most reasonable position that is consistent with the Government's actions on this. Then again, IANABL.
As far as Facebook users should be concerned, if the government of Canada thinks there are privacy violations, there are...
The Privacy Commissioner is an officer of parliament (who reports directly to the Senate and the House of Commons), not an official of the Government of Canada.
My grandfather used to say that "One boy is a boy, two boys are half a boy, and three boys are no boy at all." Meaning that when boys get together they have less good sense than one boy by himself does.
He was adamant that in regard to IP addresses, names, cell phone numbers, and email addresses: '...that is not the kind of information about which Canadians have a legitimate expectation of privacy.' The minister denied - even when presented with an audio clip proving otherwise - that his predecessor had promised never to allow the police to wiretap the Internet without a warrant."
Getting someone's name, address, cell phone number, and email addresses is not the Internet equivalent of wiretapping. The Internet equivalent of wiretapping would be getting the content of your emails and other data that you send and receive.
I'm not a fan of this bill to give these powers to police over ISPs, but it isn't as bad as too many of it critiques make it out to be. It isn't allowing police to warrantlessly get the contents of your email or other data that you send and receive - they can already get that information with a warrent and this bill does not seek to change that requirement.
In most of Europe, periods are used as thousands-separators in the same way we Americans use commas.
Generally, not in places where they primarily speak English. If I was communicating with people using the French language, I would express my numbers with commas for decimal separators.
Elections Canada is kicking around the idea of allowing voters to register online, update registration information online, and maybe even vote online.
Being able to register online or update your registration information online, if it is well-implemented, would be great. Already, Elections Ontario lets you check if you are on their register of electors. Being able to easily correct that information or update it online would be great.
However, actually registering to vote is not something that most Canadians have to do - unless they explicitly opt out, they get registered by doing things like filing their tax forms or renewing their driver's licence. The provincial and federal electoral organizations share their list of voters with each other regularly.
But the media companies still have money, and so after the next election, when once again the contributors' favours are to be repaid, they'll be pulled back off the shelf no matter who wins. Just you wait.
Any individual who is a Canadian citizen or permanent resident of Canada may make these contributions:
up to $1,000 in total in any calendar year to a particular registered party
up to $1,000 in total in any calendar year to the registered associations, nomination contestants and candidates of a particular registered party
up to $1,000 in total to a candidate for a particular election who does not represent a registered political party
up to $1,000 in total to the contestants in a particular leadership contest
[405(1)]
The Act provides for maximum contribution limits of $1,000, subject to an inflation adjustment on April 1 of each year. On January 1, 2007, the contribution limits were adjusted by the April 1, 2006, inflation factor and therefore established at $1,100.
So if you want to "buy off" a party or candidate, you can give only $1,100 to the political party and $1,100, in total, distributed among the candidates to whom you want to donate for that party. A "leadership contest" is held, at most, every few years within a party to choose a party leader.
The following are ineligible contributions, either monetary or non-monetary:
contributions from individuals who are not Canadian citizens or permanent residents as defined in subsection 2(1) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act
contributions from corporations
contributions from trade unions
contributions from unincorporated associations
contributions in excess of the contribution limits set out in the Act
I added the emphasis in this quotation. So I'm not sure what "favours" the media companies, with all their money, can use to get repaid. I'm sure that bribery can and does happen on occasion, but the amount that the parties spend in elections is also monitored and reported, so I'm not sure how such "favours" could swing an election enough to need to be repaid. Federal politics in Canada aren't like in the US, where some forms of bribery are legal and common.
While I was in university, a computer science professor in the faculty of mathematics told me (and the rest of the class) a cute and funny story about what happens "when the children of math professors get together". He and a colleague, who each had a young daughter at that time, were walking together in a park with their daughters. The children were old enough to have picked up some math-related words and phrases from their fathers, but young enough to have no idea what they really meant - six or seven years old, maybe? The daughters went off to play and their fathers overheard them arguing about who had seen the most flowers in the park.
My professor's daughter said, "I saw five flowers!"
"And I saw... six!", the other girl replied.
Not to be outdone, my professor's daughter said, "I saw a million flowers."
"Oh yeah? I saw infinity flowers."
This, according to my professor, caused his daughter to pause - she had never heard of "infinity" before. How could she top "infinity flowers", especially since she didn't know what it meant?
But after thinking for a few seconds, she said, "Well, I saw all the flowers."
US Courts facing peer pressure from Canadian courts? Based on how I hear our current crop of Senators arguing that Sonia Sotomayor is an enemy of the state because she reads foreign court opinions I can only imagine this Canadian decision seals the fate for business patents in perpetuity here...
Anyone complaining that U.S. judges read foreign court opinions has either never heard of the "common law" or thinks that it is an American invention.
clear and unequivocal legislation is required for business methods to be patentable
Since when has that stopped anyone?:(
The courts in Canada often defer to Parliamentary supremacy. In the Supreme Court case about the "oncomouse" (genetically-engineered mouse that Harvard College was trying to patent) the patent was rejected, but not because the court said that higher lifeforms could not be patentable, even though it seemed that that was what the court wanted to decide and that was what the government was arguing before the court (they wanted to patent rejected). Instead, the court rejected the patent on much more technical grounds, because the patent application claimed to patent the "manufacture" of the "composition of matter" of the mouse. The court did not reject the patent by saying that higher lifeforms were exempt from patents. The court explicitly said that for such a major matter, that if the government did not want such lifeforms to be patentable, then Parliament should change the patent legislation to explicitly state that such lifeforms were non-patentable.
Patent Law in Canada falls under federal jurisdiction. However, patent law can be enforced in either Federal Court or in the provincial courts. It is up to patent holders to enforce their patents by suing infringers, and nowadays they usually choose to do this in the Federal Court.
The criteria for patents under Canadian law are:
Novelty
Utility
Non-obviousness
Also, there are certain matters that cannot be patented, according to the Patent Act. These areas differ quite a bit from those things that can/cannot be patented in the US. For example, in the US software cannot be patented (although they could be copyrighted), in Canada software can be patented if it meets the usual requirements - if it has an immediate, real-world, practical and useful result. Medical treatments within the body also cannot be patented, although external diagnostic tests or devices can be.
Second, there is no presumption of innocence in our Constitution.
The words "presumption of innocence" are not in the U.S. constitution, but it does guarantee "due process" in the fifth amendment.
The U.S. constitution was not written in a legal/historical/social vacuum, although, based on my first-hand experience talking with knowledgeable Americans, many of them seem to presume that the Founding Fathers were the first to invent or recognize the rights guaranteed in the constitution. But it is basically about guaranteeing rights that Englishmen had but that the American colonists were being denied. The U.S. Founding Fathers were quite insistent that they had certain "rights as Englishmen" that they were being unfairly denied.
So "due process" is not a meaningless phrase in the constitution - it means the sorts of process and protections that were common in the English system (i.e. common law), which is the inheritance of the U.S. and other countries, like Canada.
That's ironic on so many levels. Canadians get all bent out of shape when your refer to Canada as "The Maple Leaf State" but this really just proves the point. It would seem the Canadian government is just as much in the pocket of US Corporations as the US government is.
How exactly was the Canadian government involved in this?
Everywhere in the Americas (and most of the world, I don't know where you are), American == resident of the USA.
When speaking in english. In spanish, saying "americano" instead of "yanqui" or "estadounidense" sounds kinda odd, and we usually refer to the continent when saying "america".
Yes, but we are communicating in English here. And in English, unfortunately, in most contexts "American" refers to people or things of the USA only. Words like "americano" or "americain" or even "american", in languages other than English, are not the same word as the English word "American". Yes, they are very similar (or even identical) in spelling and pronunciation, and they have the same origin, and they have related meanings, but they are different words in different languages.
Criticizing the use of the word "American" in English because the word "americano" has different meanings in Spanish is like someone saying that the word "pain" refers to a very uncomfortable and distressing physical sensation, but I say, "That's only true in English. In French, pain means bread."
Laws against common assault are no longer being enforced by the police in my Canadian city. If you can't afford to pay the courts to charge them out of your own pocket, nothing will happen to your assailant. So, basically, the police are there to enforce your economic slavery. They are not there to protect you. Incidentally, they just hired 50 more of them here.
What are you talking about "pay the courts to charge them out of your own pocket"? A person can't fund a criminal prosecution. Or do you mean that someone with enough money could afford to sue someone for assault in civil court?
As a Canadian, my first reaction to reading this story on/. was "what is the prestigious Conference Board of Canada?" I mean, I know what the "Ontario government" is and the "US copyright lobby" and "Canadian copyright lobby" are self-explanatory terms, but I'm not familiar with the Conference Board of Canada. When I read it here, I thought maybe it was an agency of the federal government.
Anyway, I little digging turns up that the Conference Board of Canada is basically a non-profit think-tank, that is funded on a per-service basis. So private groups and governments will pay it to research a topic and publish a paper on it. It also holds conferences and does research reports on its own. According to their official website, their areas of expertise are "running conferences", "conducting, publishing, and disseminating research", "economic trends", and "public policy issues". It is affiliated, but legally separate from, the U.S./international "The Conference Board, Inc. of New York".
They state: "Objective and non-partisan. We do not lobby for specific interests."
Why would we expect comets or asteroids to carry organics? Haven't they been around much longer than life?
A) Because we know that comets, asteroids, and other interstellar objects and dust do contain organic chemicals: see astrochemistry
B) Because organic chemicals have also been around much longer than life has. You may be interested to know that vitalism has been discredited by the synthesis of urea.
The claim [that the sort of speciation characterized by the repeated splitting of one species into two has never been observed] makes me think of the trial where a man was charged with biting off another man's ear in a bar fight.... An eyewitness to the fracas took the stand. The defense attorney asked, "Did you actually see with your own eyes my client bite off the ear in question?" The witness said, "No." The attorney pounced: "So how can you be so sure that the defendant actually bit off the ear?" To which the witness replied, "I saw him spit it out."
We have the fossils, the intermediate forms, the comparative anatomy, the genomic homologies - we've seen what evolution spits out.
Let's just think for a moment about which branches of science contradict creationism:
biology
biochemistry
genetics
physics
astronomy
astrophysics
Biochemistry and genetics are large fields within biology, and likewise astronomy and astrophysics are areas within physics.
But to your list, we can add
geology
paleontology (which fits within biology and geology, I suppose)
Slashdot Mirror
FTA:
"Our legal advice is that those previously prosecuted will be unable to overturn their prosecution or receive financial recompense," she said.
So people who were previously prosecuted for breaking a non-law will be unable to overturn their prosecution.
It seems very unusual that you can argue that past convictions for violating an invalid law are valid, unless the Government will argue that it was an Act of Parliament and so was really legally binding, but now it is being rescinded non-retroactively and will be re-enacted in order to meet their treaty obligations. To me, that seems like the most reasonable position that is consistent with the Government's actions on this.
Can a British lawyer please tell me at what point notification of the European Commission became a requirement for an Act of Parliament to become legally binding? Surely such a surrender of sovereignty was exactly the sort of thing Thatcher opposed?
IANABL. In fact, I am neither British nor a lawyer. I was wondering the same thing as you - since when was it a requirement that an Act of Parliament could not become legally binding until a supranational body is notified?
A bit of Wikipediaing and then Googling turned up that: It is Directive 83/189 from the European Committee for Standardization that required this. It only applies to technical standards and regulations, not all statutes. Presumably, the requirement for notification is so that the different standards and requirements for (in this case) video recordings can be collected and available to other member countries by the European Committee for Standardization.
So reporting new Acts that affect technical standards and regulations to the ECS sounds like a very good idea, but I don't see why this would necessarily make unreported Acts non-binding.
However, although the British Government is dropping all current prosecutions under that law, they are arguing that all past convictions are still valid. It seems very unusual that you can argue that past convictions for violating an invalid law are valid, unless the Government will argue that it was an Act of Parliament and so was really legally binding, but now it is being rescinded non-retroactively and will be re-enacted in order to meet their treaty obligations. To me, that seems like the most reasonable position that is consistent with the Government's actions on this. Then again, IANABL.
1.3 inches isn't a pebble; it's a stone.
The Privacy Commissioner is an officer of parliament (who reports directly to the Senate and the House of Commons), not an official of the Government of Canada.
Why don't they just go to Northern Ireland?
My grandfather used to say that "One boy is a boy, two boys are half a boy, and three boys are no boy at all." Meaning that when boys get together they have less good sense than one boy by himself does.
Getting someone's name, address, cell phone number, and email addresses is not the Internet equivalent of wiretapping. The Internet equivalent of wiretapping would be getting the content of your emails and other data that you send and receive.
I'm not a fan of this bill to give these powers to police over ISPs, but it isn't as bad as too many of it critiques make it out to be. It isn't allowing police to warrantlessly get the contents of your email or other data that you send and receive - they can already get that information with a warrent and this bill does not seek to change that requirement.
In most of Europe, periods are used as thousands-separators in the same way we Americans use commas.
Generally, not in places where they primarily speak English. If I was communicating with people using the French language, I would express my numbers with commas for decimal separators.
Being able to register online or update your registration information online, if it is well-implemented, would be great. Already, Elections Ontario lets you check if you are on their register of electors. Being able to easily correct that information or update it online would be great.
However, actually registering to vote is not something that most Canadians have to do - unless they explicitly opt out, they get registered by doing things like filing their tax forms or renewing their driver's licence. The provincial and federal electoral organizations share their list of voters with each other regularly.
But the media companies still have money, and so after the next election, when once again the contributors' favours are to be repaid, they'll be pulled back off the shelf no matter who wins. Just you wait.
Do you know about the restrictions on campaign contributions in Canada at the federal level?
So if you want to "buy off" a party or candidate, you can give only $1,100 to the political party and $1,100, in total, distributed among the candidates to whom you want to donate for that party. A "leadership contest" is held, at most, every few years within a party to choose a party leader.
I added the emphasis in this quotation. So I'm not sure what "favours" the media companies, with all their money, can use to get repaid. I'm sure that bribery can and does happen on occasion, but the amount that the parties spend in elections is also monitored and reported, so I'm not sure how such "favours" could swing an election enough to need to be repaid. Federal politics in Canada aren't like in the US, where some forms of bribery are legal and common.
While I was in university, a computer science professor in the faculty of mathematics told me (and the rest of the class) a cute and funny story about what happens "when the children of math professors get together". He and a colleague, who each had a young daughter at that time, were walking together in a park with their daughters. The children were old enough to have picked up some math-related words and phrases from their fathers, but young enough to have no idea what they really meant - six or seven years old, maybe? The daughters went off to play and their fathers overheard them arguing about who had seen the most flowers in the park.
My professor's daughter said, "I saw five flowers!"
"And I saw... six!", the other girl replied.
Not to be outdone, my professor's daughter said, "I saw a million flowers."
"Oh yeah? I saw infinity flowers."
This, according to my professor, caused his daughter to pause - she had never heard of "infinity" before. How could she top "infinity flowers", especially since she didn't know what it meant?
But after thinking for a few seconds, she said, "Well, I saw all the flowers."
US Courts facing peer pressure from Canadian courts? Based on how I hear our current crop of Senators arguing that Sonia Sotomayor is an enemy of the state because she reads foreign court opinions I can only imagine this Canadian decision seals the fate for business patents in perpetuity here...
Anyone complaining that U.S. judges read foreign court opinions has either never heard of the "common law" or thinks that it is an American invention.
clear and unequivocal legislation is required for business methods to be patentable
Since when has that stopped anyone? :(
The courts in Canada often defer to Parliamentary supremacy. In the Supreme Court case about the "oncomouse" (genetically-engineered mouse that Harvard College was trying to patent) the patent was rejected, but not because the court said that higher lifeforms could not be patentable, even though it seemed that that was what the court wanted to decide and that was what the government was arguing before the court (they wanted to patent rejected). Instead, the court rejected the patent on much more technical grounds, because the patent application claimed to patent the "manufacture" of the "composition of matter" of the mouse. The court did not reject the patent by saying that higher lifeforms were exempt from patents. The court explicitly said that for such a major matter, that if the government did not want such lifeforms to be patentable, then Parliament should change the patent legislation to explicitly state that such lifeforms were non-patentable.
Patent Law in Canada falls under federal jurisdiction. However, patent law can be enforced in either Federal Court or in the provincial courts. It is up to patent holders to enforce their patents by suing infringers, and nowadays they usually choose to do this in the Federal Court.
The criteria for patents under Canadian law are:
Also, there are certain matters that cannot be patented, according to the Patent Act. These areas differ quite a bit from those things that can/cannot be patented in the US. For example, in the US software cannot be patented (although they could be copyrighted), in Canada software can be patented if it meets the usual requirements - if it has an immediate, real-world, practical and useful result. Medical treatments within the body also cannot be patented, although external diagnostic tests or devices can be.
Second, there is no presumption of innocence in our Constitution.
The words "presumption of innocence" are not in the U.S. constitution, but it does guarantee "due process" in the fifth amendment.
The U.S. constitution was not written in a legal/historical/social vacuum, although, based on my first-hand experience talking with knowledgeable Americans, many of them seem to presume that the Founding Fathers were the first to invent or recognize the rights guaranteed in the constitution. But it is basically about guaranteeing rights that Englishmen had but that the American colonists were being denied. The U.S. Founding Fathers were quite insistent that they had certain "rights as Englishmen" that they were being unfairly denied.
So "due process" is not a meaningless phrase in the constitution - it means the sorts of process and protections that were common in the English system (i.e. common law), which is the inheritance of the U.S. and other countries, like Canada.
Nobody says "a-boot", except the guys on South Park.
That's ironic on so many levels. Canadians get all bent out of shape when your refer to Canada as "The Maple Leaf State" but this really just proves the point. It would seem the Canadian government is just as much in the pocket of US Corporations as the US government is.
How exactly was the Canadian government involved in this?
...while the Ontario government admits spending thousands of dollars...
That's some serious cash... I mean, almost twelve US dollars!
From XE.com:
Live rates at 2009.05.26 18:26:38 UTC
15,000.00 CAD = 13,429.53 USD
Everything but "objective" certainly sounds correct. On your description it sounds like they'll lobby for whatever you pay them to lobby for.
Yup. That's my interpretation, too.
Everywhere in the Americas (and most of the world, I don't know where you are), American == resident of the USA.
When speaking in english. In spanish, saying "americano" instead of "yanqui" or "estadounidense" sounds kinda odd, and we usually refer to the continent when saying "america".
Yes, but we are communicating in English here. And in English, unfortunately, in most contexts "American" refers to people or things of the USA only. Words like "americano" or "americain" or even "american", in languages other than English, are not the same word as the English word "American". Yes, they are very similar (or even identical) in spelling and pronunciation, and they have the same origin, and they have related meanings, but they are different words in different languages.
Criticizing the use of the word "American" in English because the word "americano" has different meanings in Spanish is like someone saying that the word "pain" refers to a very uncomfortable and distressing physical sensation, but I say, "That's only true in English. In French, pain means bread."
Laws against common assault are no longer being enforced by the police in my Canadian city. If you can't afford to pay the courts to charge them out of your own pocket, nothing will happen to your assailant. So, basically, the police are there to enforce your economic slavery. They are not there to protect you. Incidentally, they just hired 50 more of them here.
What are you talking about "pay the courts to charge them out of your own pocket"? A person can't fund a criminal prosecution. Or do you mean that someone with enough money could afford to sue someone for assault in civil court?
As a Canadian, my first reaction to reading this story on /. was "what is the prestigious Conference Board of Canada?" I mean, I know what the "Ontario government" is and the "US copyright lobby" and "Canadian copyright lobby" are self-explanatory terms, but I'm not familiar with the Conference Board of Canada. When I read it here, I thought maybe it was an agency of the federal government.
Anyway, I little digging turns up that the Conference Board of Canada is basically a non-profit think-tank, that is funded on a per-service basis. So private groups and governments will pay it to research a topic and publish a paper on it. It also holds conferences and does research reports on its own. According to their official website, their areas of expertise are "running conferences", "conducting, publishing, and disseminating research", "economic trends", and "public policy issues". It is affiliated, but legally separate from, the U.S./international "The Conference Board, Inc. of New York".
They state: "Objective and non-partisan. We do not lobby for specific interests."
Why would we expect comets or asteroids to carry organics? Haven't they been around much longer than life?
I think that's a great analogy.
Let's just think for a moment about which branches of science contradict creationism: biology biochemistry genetics physics astronomy astrophysics
Biochemistry and genetics are large fields within biology, and likewise astronomy and astrophysics are areas within physics. But to your list, we can add