the PSone-style PS2. i used to have a PS2 (sold it a while back), and recently got a new car and was considering throwing a PSone/screen combo in there since its only like $90...
As a sort of "onboard entertainment" for my kids on longer routes, I use a combo of an iBook 466 (used to be my workhorse, now it's our family "hand-me-down" laptop) + car charger + Virtual Gamestation (a PSX emulator for MacOS 9.x) + MacAlly iShock II (USB clone of the Sony's iShock). It's better than PSOne + screen, as it can also play DVD's. This emulator has excellent compatibility with the PSX games, and with iShock, it's actually almost like a genuine PSOne laptop that plays DVD's. A similar x86-based combo could be probably assembled much cheaper from the stuff available on eBay (I used things I already had).
And best of it all - you can have a real PowerPod for just USD 24.99. Yeah, Griffin has already taken the name for their iPod car charger. This is one of the lamest April Fool Days I can remember, they don't even try.
I was recently on the market for a new car (hoorrray!). I shortlisted three vehicles for me to consider and I asked the salespeople of the respective companies to mail me data on service plan, warranty, replacement part prices etc. on all the three vehicles. I got two replies with Excel documents and one with a printer-friendly PDF.
I am all for open standards in communication, but what shall I do? Send a reply to the salesman "you f*ing Microserf moron, I don't want your car if you force me to buy a bloody spreadsheet just to read how much do you charge for a goddamned air filter?" But is it wise to choose a car just because of the software that a salesman uses?
Finally I picked the one that was described in PDF. It was a coincidence - a decisive factor was actually that the make of that car constantly tops in the consumer surveys, while the other two are just about average. But then I started to think - maybe that's not a coincidence after all? Maybe this make tops in surveys just because it's policy is to make all stages of customer experience as convenient as possible and they ask themselves the question that other car salesmen don't ask - "what if my prospective client does not use Microsoft Excel(TM) or Microsoft Word(TM)?".
Maybe it is possible for us to vote with our wallets against proprietary, closed standards?
I don't see why RendezVous is actually needed for anything professional
By the very definition, "professional" is when you get paid for doing this. RendezVous eliminates (in some cases) the need to call for support of a paid IT consultant. If you own a small company with a small office network (3 dektops, 2 laptops, one shared printer etc.), you can set up it all using Macs + Airport + Rendezvous printer sharing without shelling out your bucks for a "professional network manager". If you are a scientist, who has Ph.D. in his field - be it biology or chemistry, but not necessarily computer science, you can use XGrid to turn ordinary desktop eMacs into a quite powerful cluster working overnight (while in daytime the same eMac will be used by clueless office workers). And once again, you won't have to pay an IT consultant to set it up for you.
In a sense, what Apple does is even worse than moving jobs to India - they eliminate the need of paying for them.
On the other hand, there was an excellent extension cartridge called Simon's Basic. Just could just fit it into the backside slot of your C-64, and you had the best BASIC in the whole 8-bit world. Dad bought me that on my birthday (?) and it was one of the best gifts I got in my entire life. I can't even imagine what would make me today as happy as I was back then with my Simon's Basic (a Porsche perhaps?).
Damn, it looks like we'll end up talking about 8-bit micros to our shrinks. "You see, doc, a friend of mine had a C-64 with a genuine 5.25" incher, and I felt so lame with my ZX Spectrum and its rubber keys...".
No, the only credible terrorist threat in my mind is an inside job - someone gets a job as a plant worker and sabotages the plant. If the plant were a fail-safe design, however (as a previous posted pointed out, current plants are designed with redundant systems, but are not fail-safe), the worst the criminal could do is shut the plant down and perhaps try and disperse the fuel with explosives (note that due to a failsafe system, he won't get any help dispersing the fuel from the plant itself). His ability to smuggle explosives into the plant without being detected will limit the effectiveness of that plan. Never mind that he'd have to be able to breach the containment building (yes, even a fail-safe reactor will likely have one).
Please note, that the terrorist's goal does not necessarily has to be the core meltdown. They win by just contaminating a large area. Would you bet a franklin note that the whole sysem of production, transportation and storage of the nuclear fuel and waste is as safe as the plants themselves? To create a major disaster, the terrorists don't even need to attack the plant itself - they'd just seek the weakest link in the whole system. After all, bank vaults are also designed to be safe - yet sometimes someone robs a whole van (or even train!) of money.
I persistantly wonder why it's a bad thing not to just use the design from a submarine and just put 12 of them in a row, all of the same design, and man them with ex-Navy personnel.
Good idea, but it's already done. Many US power plants actually use reactors designed for submarines.
Nuclear Power is perfectly safe when done right, and it's done right in the US. The worst that could happen in the US in an accident condition is that parts of the power plant are destroyed. nd for even that to happen, so many very closely watched things would have to go wrong that it's basically not going to happen.
The Twin Towers were also perfectly safe buildings that could never collapse. Not on their own, anyway. But we are living now in a totally different century. The one in which modern technology can be helpless against a small group of fanatics capable of orchestrating suicide bomb attacks. Nuclear power used to be perfectly safe when done right - but it was in the last century. Now any US or European nuclear plant is actually nothing but a huge "KICK ME!" for the Al Quaedda boys. If I was you, I'd me more careful with your "basically not goint to happen".
You advocate a government (or governments) dictating to a publicly held company how they should write their software?
Well, actually governments are already dictating to motor companies how they should design and manufacture their cars (by enforcing safety and emission standards). In a similar manner they also dictate to electronic companies how they should design and manufacture their appliances (once again, by enforcing standards), and the list of the things they are dictating to construction companies is endless. So... what is so strange, actually, in government-enforced standards in computing? I think it is inevitable, sooner or later. The old joke "what if Microsoft build cars" has a grain of truth in it. Unlike cars, there are no mandatory crash tests for software. And it shows.
No matter how nice it gets, you can't make the world a nice enough place to keep groups of people from wanting to kill each other, it is our nature...
True, but there is still a huge difference between "wanting to kill each other" and "wanting to make the whole Earth uninhabitable". The people in Northern Ireland, Middle East or Africa might indeed want to kill their neighbors (and sadly often do), but they still don't want to have the Armageddon. So "making the world a better place" in this case boils down to much more reasonable goal - put effective control on nuclear weapons. And actually this is what the superpowers do since 1945, and certainly can continue it for a fraction of those Martian trip megazillions.
Reading similar stories, I always have the same feeling of deja vu. First Apple introduces some new gagdet or a new user interface concept. Then it gets immediate bashing from both pro-Apple and anti-Apple camps - how ugly, dysfunctional and stupid it is! Then we see an avalanche of various clones of the new Apple gizmo for Linux or Windows. And finally we hear a common outrage when Apple sends its famous "cease & desist" letters and the avalanche indeed ceases and desists. We have had that with Aqua, Dock, iTunes etc. - now we have it with the iPod...
If we don't know who supplied the bomb/bomb material too the terrorists, there is no way we can hold a country accountable
There is no way? There is always the Donald Rumsfeld way:
1. Accuse any randomly selected country
2. Invade
3. Find no proof
4. Say "There is no proof they had weapons of mass destruction? So what? Show me a proof they HAND'NT!"
5. Profit! (note: the last point requires consultancy with Halliburton)
There is no pattern - if any, it's a pattern of your attitude towards Cruise. He had interesting parts in movies like "Rain Man" (1988) or "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999). In the former Cruise plays a disgruntled yuppie, in the latter a husband, tempted by the idea of marital infidelity. You might not like them (I actually like both), but don't pretend they don't exist.
There is seriously no reason to buy music online IMHO. Just buy the CD at the store, and rip it onto your hard drive. You get a disk with all the music, uncompressed. Plus, you get the case and all the artwork/essays that the artists include with each album. The artists still get paid, and everyone wins.
Yeah, especially the oil companies. For many of us, "just buy the CD at the store" translates to "just drive to the store", while "just buy the song online" translates to "just double-click on that icon while slashdotting at leisure".
What if anti-virus, firewalls, and other critical software could somehow run in read-only memory space, which would have a physical barrier so that no bugs in software could be exploited to alter this space?
An anti-virus software is worthless without the ability to update its virus definitions library. So even if you manage to make the executable file read-only, you cannot do the same with the library - as it NEEDS to be updated any time a new worm is on the loose. This crucial file has to be read/writable - and if it is, there is little point of making the executable read/only.
Re:somebody explain the amiga curse?
on
Amiga Sells AmigaOS
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Another company buying the Atari name hardly counts as Atari "returning." (If you believe that, then I can arrange for you to meet with Martin Luther King, Jr. Only $500, plus whatever it costs to get my name changed.)
While the identity of a human being is quite well defined by law, corporate identity is more vague. Just by changing your name to Martin Luther King, Jr you cannot claim, say, royalties from the reproduction of his speeches. To the law, you will still be Martin Luther King Jr, formerly known as NSash (and if you got a parking ticket in your previous identity, you sill have to pay it under the new one). With companies, it's entirely different. British carmaker Jaguar is now owned by the BWM - but it's still Jaguar. Merges & acquisitions can kill or resurrect brands.
Re:somebody explain the amiga curse?
on
Amiga Sells AmigaOS
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Forgive me if wrong, wasn't Amiga cursed by the BladeRunner curse? Are these the same thing?
No. You must mistake it with Atari. In "Blade Runner", we see many advertisings of companies really existing in the early 1980's, and indeed most of them went into dire troubles in mid and late 1980's. First of all, Coca-Cola entered the whole mess of the "new Coke", that even the company itself calls now "marketing infamy. And that's an euphemism, actually. Then there was Bell (antitrusted just after the theatrical release of Blade Runner), Pan Am and Atari. However, the curse seems now to be extinct. Atari returned now in big style, Coca-Cola is no longer in trouble, and even Pan Am returned (in a way). There was also one excemption from this curse - TDK (a huge TDK advertising is a backrop to the death of Roy Batty in the BR's finale grande).
The interesting thing, however, is that those devices were too good to even be possible. How did the lapel button ever figure out that a communication "Picard to Crusher" would go to either the doctor or her son, since he dealt with both people on a daily basis...
Oh, come'on. It's very easy to imagine a sort of pseudoscientific explanation, in the mood of the "Star Trek Physics". Let's just assume that the 22st century neurophysiology allows to read subliminal nuances in the way you talk about certain persons. Just some tiny difference in the way your stress particular phonems saying "Johnson" when you refer to different "Johnsons" - can't hear them with your ears, but the General Gizmotronics Voice Analyzer 3000T catches them in real time. It's probably bullshit, but if you buy the whole dilithium crap, why won't you buy this one?
The UI of star trek (at least TNG and onwards) has been horrible.
That can be said about actually every major science fiction flick or tv series. What's funny is about the same time when ST:TOS was on the air, Douglas Engelbart was already working on the real user interface for the 21st century computers - mouse, pointer, windows etc. In 1968, you could even attend The Mother Of All Demos to see the 21st century computing. Of course, the event passed virtually unnoticed and everybody was excited by famous (yet utterly missed) vision of 2001 in the Clarke/Kubrick movie. Probably somewhere someone right now knows what the computers of 2050 will look like - and he might even right now show the demo. Virtually unnoticed, as always.
Just because the British constitution isn't contained in a single document doesn't mean there isn't one.
Well, in my original post I have provided a link to an extensive discussion of the British situation. Lack of a written constitution leads to a situation where the prerogatives of the legislatory power are unclear. For many years the Britons acted according to an unwritten rule: an act of parliament can do no wrong. How dangerous this approach is, can be well illustrated on the example of the Ulster/Northern Ireland conflict. In 1970's the British forces committed many obvious crimes in Northern Ireland, including manslaughter of unarmed civilians. Yet until the very latest days, this crime went unpunished, and Northern Ireland was put under the direct rule from Westminster for more than twenty years. The habeas corpus was virtually suspended. Should there be any written constitution, the British government and the British parliament could not just suspend civil liberties whenever and wherever they find it convenient.
These [the Holocaust] are crimes of the past and the persons who did it are dead (...) However, the executive branch does not make the laws.
But the executive branch often initiates the laws and passes the proposed bills to the parliament. Just check the case of one Hans Globke, the guy who wrote the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 - these laws were actually the legal framework of the Holocaust. They allowed to gather Jewish citizens in ghettos and subsequently eliminate them, all according to the law (the Nuremberg Law). The very same Hans Globke was appointed Staatssekretaer (State Secretary of the Federal Republic of Germany - the highest administrative post in Germany) in 1953 and he was one of the people shaping the federal German state as we know it today. So of course you're right pointing, that he's dead but... this is the country he has shaped. Many leading public officials of the whole Adenauer era had similar skeletons in closets (technically, not exactly skeletons but rather their Nazi uniforms back from the "good old days"). Therefore there was nothing strange in the fact, that in 1963 German state police seized the office of an indepented weekly magazine - just because it was investigating a corruption case. Yes, I know that the Spiegel Scandal eventually ended in a triumph of democracy - but please observe how lightly the aspect of private property and individual freedom was treated in this case. In Germany it can't happen as well today - this is the same state with the same law. Co-written by Hans Globke and alike.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this simply the same idea as trying to force people to buy cell phones with cameras
Seems like you don't know The Real Reasons Mobile Phones Have Cameras?
the PSone-style PS2. i used to have a PS2 (sold it a while back), and recently got a new car and was considering throwing a PSone/screen combo in there since its only like $90...
As a sort of "onboard entertainment" for my kids on longer routes, I use a combo of an iBook 466 (used to be my workhorse, now it's our family "hand-me-down" laptop) + car charger + Virtual Gamestation (a PSX emulator for MacOS 9.x) + MacAlly iShock II (USB clone of the Sony's iShock). It's better than PSOne + screen, as it can also play DVD's. This emulator has excellent compatibility with the PSX games, and with iShock, it's actually almost like a genuine PSOne laptop that plays DVD's. A similar x86-based combo could be probably assembled much cheaper from the stuff available on eBay (I used things I already had).
And best of it all - you can have a real PowerPod for just USD 24.99. Yeah, Griffin has already taken the name for their iPod car charger. This is one of the lamest April Fool Days I can remember, they don't even try.
I was recently on the market for a new car (hoorrray!). I shortlisted three vehicles for me to consider and I asked the salespeople of the respective companies to mail me data on service plan, warranty, replacement part prices etc. on all the three vehicles. I got two replies with Excel documents and one with a printer-friendly PDF.
I am all for open standards in communication, but what shall I do? Send a reply to the salesman "you f*ing Microserf moron, I don't want your car if you force me to buy a bloody spreadsheet just to read how much do you charge for a goddamned air filter?" But is it wise to choose a car just because of the software that a salesman uses?
Finally I picked the one that was described in PDF. It was a coincidence - a decisive factor was actually that the make of that car constantly tops in the consumer surveys, while the other two are just about average. But then I started to think - maybe that's not a coincidence after all? Maybe this make tops in surveys just because it's policy is to make all stages of customer experience as convenient as possible and they ask themselves the question that other car salesmen don't ask - "what if my prospective client does not use Microsoft Excel(TM) or Microsoft Word(TM)?".
Maybe it is possible for us to vote with our wallets against proprietary, closed standards?
I don't see why RendezVous is actually needed for anything professional
By the very definition, "professional" is when you get paid for doing this. RendezVous eliminates (in some cases) the need to call for support of a paid IT consultant. If you own a small company with a small office network (3 dektops, 2 laptops, one shared printer etc.), you can set up it all using Macs + Airport + Rendezvous printer sharing without shelling out your bucks for a "professional network manager". If you are a scientist, who has Ph.D. in his field - be it biology or chemistry, but not necessarily computer science, you can use XGrid to turn ordinary desktop eMacs into a quite powerful cluster working overnight (while in daytime the same eMac will be used by clueless office workers). And once again, you won't have to pay an IT consultant to set it up for you.
In a sense, what Apple does is even worse than moving jobs to India - they eliminate the need of paying for them.
On the other hand, there was an excellent extension cartridge called Simon's Basic. Just could just fit it into the backside slot of your C-64, and you had the best BASIC in the whole 8-bit world. Dad bought me that on my birthday (?) and it was one of the best gifts I got in my entire life. I can't even imagine what would make me today as happy as I was back then with my Simon's Basic (a Porsche perhaps?).
Damn, it looks like we'll end up talking about 8-bit micros to our shrinks. "You see, doc, a friend of mine had a C-64 with a genuine 5.25" incher, and I felt so lame with my ZX Spectrum and its rubber keys...".
No, the only credible terrorist threat in my mind is an inside job - someone gets a job as a plant worker and sabotages the plant. If the plant were a fail-safe design, however (as a previous posted pointed out, current plants are designed with redundant systems, but are not fail-safe), the worst the criminal could do is shut the plant down and perhaps try and disperse the fuel with explosives (note that due to a failsafe system, he won't get any help dispersing the fuel from the plant itself). His ability to smuggle explosives into the plant without being detected will limit the effectiveness of that plan. Never mind that he'd have to be able to breach the containment building (yes, even a fail-safe reactor will likely have one).
Please note, that the terrorist's goal does not necessarily has to be the core meltdown. They win by just contaminating a large area. Would you bet a franklin note that the whole sysem of production, transportation and storage of the nuclear fuel and waste is as safe as the plants themselves? To create a major disaster, the terrorists don't even need to attack the plant itself - they'd just seek the weakest link in the whole system. After all, bank vaults are also designed to be safe - yet sometimes someone robs a whole van (or even train!) of money.
I persistantly wonder why it's a bad thing not to just use the design from a submarine and just put 12 of them in a row, all of the same design, and man them with ex-Navy personnel.
Good idea, but it's already done. Many US power plants actually use reactors designed for submarines.
Nuclear Power is perfectly safe when done right, and it's done right in the US. The worst that could happen in the US in an accident condition is that parts of the power plant are destroyed. nd for even that to happen, so many very closely watched things would have to go wrong that it's basically not going to happen.
The Twin Towers were also perfectly safe buildings that could never collapse. Not on their own, anyway. But we are living now in a totally different century. The one in which modern technology can be helpless against a small group of fanatics capable of orchestrating suicide bomb attacks. Nuclear power used to be perfectly safe when done right - but it was in the last century. Now any US or European nuclear plant is actually nothing but a huge "KICK ME!" for the Al Quaedda boys. If I was you, I'd me more careful with your "basically not goint to happen".
Is it worth checking out if you aren't a total Star Wars fanatic?
Certainly it will hurt you less if you aren't.
You advocate a government (or governments) dictating to a publicly held company how they should write their software?
Well, actually governments are already dictating to motor companies how they should design and manufacture their cars (by enforcing safety and emission standards). In a similar manner they also dictate to electronic companies how they should design and manufacture their appliances (once again, by enforcing standards), and the list of the things they are dictating to construction companies is endless. So... what is so strange, actually, in government-enforced standards in computing? I think it is inevitable, sooner or later. The old joke "what if Microsoft build cars" has a grain of truth in it. Unlike cars, there are no mandatory crash tests for software. And it shows.
No matter how nice it gets, you can't make the world a nice enough place to keep groups of people from wanting to kill each other, it is our nature...
True, but there is still a huge difference between "wanting to kill each other" and "wanting to make the whole Earth uninhabitable". The people in Northern Ireland, Middle East or Africa might indeed want to kill their neighbors (and sadly often do), but they still don't want to have the Armageddon. So "making the world a better place" in this case boils down to much more reasonable goal - put effective control on nuclear weapons. And actually this is what the superpowers do since 1945, and certainly can continue it for a fraction of those Martian trip megazillions.
Now I'll have to say `just browsing' on every webpage I visit and in every brick and morter store I visit.
Actually, all you have to do is enable pop-up windows blocking. Which is a good thing to do anyway.
Reading similar stories, I always have the same feeling of deja vu. First Apple introduces some new gagdet or a new user interface concept. Then it gets immediate bashing from both pro-Apple and anti-Apple camps - how ugly, dysfunctional and stupid it is! Then we see an avalanche of various clones of the new Apple gizmo for Linux or Windows. And finally we hear a common outrage when Apple sends its famous "cease & desist" letters and the avalanche indeed ceases and desists. We have had that with Aqua, Dock, iTunes etc. - now we have it with the iPod...
If we don't know who supplied the bomb/bomb material too the terrorists, there is no way we can hold a country accountable
There is no way? There is always the Donald Rumsfeld way:
1. Accuse any randomly selected country
2. Invade
3. Find no proof
4. Say "There is no proof they had weapons of mass destruction? So what? Show me a proof they HAND'NT!"
5. Profit! (note: the last point requires consultancy with Halliburton)
There is no pattern - if any, it's a pattern of your attitude towards Cruise. He had interesting parts in movies like "Rain Man" (1988) or "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999). In the former Cruise plays a disgruntled yuppie, in the latter a husband, tempted by the idea of marital infidelity. You might not like them (I actually like both), but don't pretend they don't exist.
There is seriously no reason to buy music online IMHO. Just buy the CD at the store, and rip it onto your hard drive. You get a disk with all the music, uncompressed. Plus, you get the case and all the artwork/essays that the artists include with each album. The artists still get paid, and everyone wins.
Yeah, especially the oil companies. For many of us, "just buy the CD at the store" translates to "just drive to the store", while "just buy the song online" translates to "just double-click on that icon while slashdotting at leisure".
What if anti-virus, firewalls, and other critical software could somehow run in read-only memory space, which would have a physical barrier so that no bugs in software could be exploited to alter this space?
An anti-virus software is worthless without the ability to update its virus definitions library. So even if you manage to make the executable file read-only, you cannot do the same with the library - as it NEEDS to be updated any time a new worm is on the loose. This crucial file has to be read/writable - and if it is, there is little point of making the executable read/only.
Another company buying the Atari name hardly counts as Atari "returning." (If you believe that, then I can arrange for you to meet with Martin Luther King, Jr. Only $500, plus whatever it costs to get my name changed.)
While the identity of a human being is quite well defined by law, corporate identity is more vague. Just by changing your name to Martin Luther King, Jr you cannot claim, say, royalties from the reproduction of his speeches. To the law, you will still be Martin Luther King Jr, formerly known as NSash (and if you got a parking ticket in your previous identity, you sill have to pay it under the new one). With companies, it's entirely different. British carmaker Jaguar is now owned by the BWM - but it's still Jaguar. Merges & acquisitions can kill or resurrect brands.
Forgive me if wrong, wasn't Amiga cursed by the BladeRunner curse? Are these the same thing?
No. You must mistake it with Atari. In "Blade Runner", we see many advertisings of companies really existing in the early 1980's, and indeed most of them went into dire troubles in mid and late 1980's. First of all, Coca-Cola entered the whole mess of the "new Coke", that even the company itself calls now "marketing infamy. And that's an euphemism, actually. Then there was Bell (antitrusted just after the theatrical release of Blade Runner), Pan Am and Atari. However, the curse seems now to be extinct. Atari returned now in big style, Coca-Cola is no longer in trouble, and even Pan Am returned (in a way). There was also one excemption from this curse - TDK (a huge TDK advertising is a backrop to the death of Roy Batty in the BR's finale grande).
The interesting thing, however, is that those devices were too good to even be possible. How did the lapel button ever figure out that a communication "Picard to Crusher" would go to either the doctor or her son, since he dealt with both people on a daily basis...
Oh, come'on. It's very easy to imagine a sort of pseudoscientific explanation, in the mood of the "Star Trek Physics". Let's just assume that the 22st century neurophysiology allows to read subliminal nuances in the way you talk about certain persons. Just some tiny difference in the way your stress particular phonems saying "Johnson" when you refer to different "Johnsons" - can't hear them with your ears, but the General Gizmotronics Voice Analyzer 3000T catches them in real time. It's probably bullshit, but if you buy the whole dilithium crap, why won't you buy this one?
The UI of star trek (at least TNG and onwards) has been horrible.
That can be said about actually every major science fiction flick or tv series. What's funny is about the same time when ST:TOS was on the air, Douglas Engelbart was already working on the real user interface for the 21st century computers - mouse, pointer, windows etc. In 1968, you could even attend The Mother Of All Demos to see the 21st century computing. Of course, the event passed virtually unnoticed and everybody was excited by famous (yet utterly missed) vision of 2001 in the Clarke/Kubrick movie. Probably somewhere someone right now knows what the computers of 2050 will look like - and he might even right now show the demo. Virtually unnoticed, as always.
You missed them! They were available for vintage systems - ebay is your last resort now, sleeper!
Just because the British constitution isn't contained in a single document doesn't mean there isn't one.
Well, in my original post I have provided a link to an extensive discussion of the British situation. Lack of a written constitution leads to a situation where the prerogatives of the legislatory power are unclear. For many years the Britons acted according to an unwritten rule: an act of parliament can do no wrong. How dangerous this approach is, can be well illustrated on the example of the Ulster/Northern Ireland conflict. In 1970's the British forces committed many obvious crimes in Northern Ireland, including manslaughter of unarmed civilians. Yet until the very latest days, this crime went unpunished, and Northern Ireland was put under the direct rule from Westminster for more than twenty years. The habeas corpus was virtually suspended. Should there be any written constitution, the British government and the British parliament could not just suspend civil liberties whenever and wherever they find it convenient.
These [the Holocaust] are crimes of the past and the persons who did it are dead (...) However, the executive branch does not make the laws.
But the executive branch often initiates the laws and passes the proposed bills to the parliament. Just check the case of one Hans Globke, the guy who wrote the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 - these laws were actually the legal framework of the Holocaust. They allowed to gather Jewish citizens in ghettos and subsequently eliminate them, all according to the law (the Nuremberg Law). The very same Hans Globke was appointed Staatssekretaer (State Secretary of the Federal Republic of Germany - the highest administrative post in Germany) in 1953 and he was one of the people shaping the federal German state as we know it today. So of course you're right pointing, that he's dead but... this is the country he has shaped. Many leading public officials of the whole Adenauer era had similar skeletons in closets (technically, not exactly skeletons but rather their Nazi uniforms back from the "good old days"). Therefore there was nothing strange in the fact, that in 1963 German state police seized the office of an indepented weekly magazine - just because it was investigating a corruption case. Yes, I know that the Spiegel Scandal eventually ended in a triumph of democracy - but please observe how lightly the aspect of private property and individual freedom was treated in this case. In Germany it can't happen as well today - this is the same state with the same law. Co-written by Hans Globke and alike.