and British University has been smacked silly by the courts during the last 12 months for giving arbitrary low marks to a student in retaliation for earlier legal action. I doubt that UCL would be so foolish.
Remember "Bomber" Harris and other Euros who actually had balls
You mean the mad nutter who frittered away thousands of aircrews lives and thousands of bombers on attacking civilian targets on the ill-concieved mission of trying to 'break' the morale of a people living under a totalitarian regime? The one who was itching to get 'his' bombers released from militarilly beneficial duties in the spring\summer of 1944 supporting the invasion so that he could continue his insane mission to bomb Germany's cities into ruins (which we had to pay to fix again). It wasn't even like he tried to obliterate somewhere worth obliterating like Essen. He just tied up valuable personnel and resources on a fools quest to do what had already been proved impossible and actively opposed any sensible use of the forces under his command. The allies won the war inspite of Arthur Harris, not because of him.
and then sue the UK government under the human rights act (\the convention if he has to go to strasbourg) for not protecting him from it in the first place.
But, in the Singh case, the BCA (afaik) will be paying for his costs too (boy, will this be expensive) and Mr Justice Eady has been roundly lambasted again.
The UK has more extensive free speech in some areas, firstly in the fact that more things count as 'speech', and secondly because the Convention places a positive burden on the government to provide for the exercise of those rights. (This is, of course, in theory, but then so is the US situation)
I don't think that it was a reverse class-action was it? (not that I've RTFA, of course). Our old friends at the RIAA got told to stop joining unrelated defendants some years ago (not that they stopped). But in any case, you shouldn't be able to show up at the courthouse one day with 5000 lawsuits naming unidentified people as defendants. Quite how such a rule would be defined would be tricky. Perhaps some sort of regulation on the template of the UK's 'vexatious litigant' rules would work, but it may need to apply to law firms as well, and include some sort of direct sanction.
then you offer to settle for what you think you might get in court (i.e the cost of a window). The equivalent here would be to offer to settle for $2500, and if you don't get it, to sue for $2500. But they'll likely sue for millions, or at least 100s of thousands. Of course, if you sued for $2500 for a $100 window, you wouldn't get $2500 either.
well, the EULA probably has the standard 'no warranty' terms. Adobe probably wanted to hide behind that to avoid the otherwise default position that you have to sell a functioning product; the plantiff showed that since it hadn't been displayed, it wasn't agreed to, and didn't count, leaving Adobe holding the bag for having sold a non-functioning product.
Someone has already called you out on saying that you have to carry your driving license (and in any case, even if you had your driving license, you'd still have to go to a police station with the paper bit and your insurance certificate anyway). I'm going to call you out on the Police's ability to find out who you are when making a stop and search. The right the search you does not normally extend to opening and searching your wallet. You also don't have to identify yourself verbally when stopped and searched.
The difference between driving licenses and compulsory ID cards is that you didn't HAVE to have a driving license. You don't have to own one, let alone carry it with you or produce it on demand. This means that there's no point in setting up any system which requires people to produce a driving license. Once you've got everyone forced to own and carry and ID card, why not make every interraction with a government service (and some private ones) dependent on it? Doctor's appointment, bank transaction, library borrowing, getting more recycling bags, happening to walk past a police cordon on the street. Once you set up that, you have enormous scope for intrusively tracking people. Hell, you could require unique RFID tags to be put into products, require people to produce their ID card at the supermarket checkout, record who bought which specific product, and then prosecute them if that particular produce wrapper is found blowing down the street. 'The computer doesn't lie, here's a large fine.' With no compulsory ID cards, none of that stuff is possible.
I agree. All you have to do is look upon the bullies with utter contempt. Once you look upon someone with contempt, there is little they can say which will hurt you. Physical pain, however, does still hurt.
I was countering the absurd assertion that anyone (i.e. including police officers) should be allowed to respond to another person in a manner consistent with assuming the presence of nonexistant weapons.
When faced with a belligerent person who did not respond to orders at the border crossing, the border guard took control of the situation in a completely non-lethal way.
Your use of the word belligerant is inflammatory and misleading, but putting that to one side; the border guard did not 'take control of the situation in a non lethal way' he pepper-sprayed an unarmed man who posed no threat to him.
My use of the SAS example was just the first one I could grasp on to, and was to demonstrate the far more reasonable principle that you can't respond appropriately to the presence of a weapon merely on the assumption that it is present. Of course, that principle has been eroded somewhat in the UK now that a judge has allowed a police officer to sucessfully argue that they thought a carton of milk might have been a weapon, and issue a swift beating to the person who was holding it. The CPS also having declined to charge two police officers who shot dead an innocent man holding a table leg in a bag because a paniced member of the public who had seen him momentarily called them up to report that he was carrying a shotgun.
And in San Francisco the collection/enforcement departments spend more money than the meters take in! Net loss.
Is that per ticket, or the department as a whole? (i.e. if the number of tickets went up, would the department start to turn a profit?) Because any use of financial penalties should ALWAYS cost more than it brings in per use.
you are right that unfair contracts could allow Sony to be hit (though I'm not sure what for), but 'fit for purpose' and 'advertised features' wouldn't - they could be used to hit retailers though, and dependent on the clout of the retailer, that could be useful (e.g. if DSG got fed up of having to refund bricked PS3's, they could twist Sony's arm to refund them, or face DSG not selling anything else which Sony makes).
Second, it undermines their authority, giving your child the sense that any time the teacher does something they don't like, they can just come running to you to overrule the teacher's authority.
Good. A sensible parent won't overrule the teacher unless they're wrong (bad parents always take thei kid's side even when they shouldn't, but good parents won't). The other side of the coin, however, is that the teacher learns not to abuse their authority once they realise that trying to do so results in parents sweeping in with their 'I'm the actual parent' god-mode and just swiping the teacher's power out from under them. It's a far better lesson in why you shouldn't be an asshat than a lawsuit against the school which takes so long to conclude that none of the pupils who were in the class at the time are even in the school any longer.
this itended detention was during lunch. At the time the school policy was that the lunch hour was entirely ours (now the younger kids need a letter from their parents at the beginning of term, but it's otherwise the same), and the way that detention worked was that parents had to sign off on it first - a detention slip wasn't a 'for your information', it was 'will you let us...?'. The teacher had no right to keep me in for half of my lunch hour without my parents permission, and they weren't willing to give that permission, thus the whole thing just collapsed. The teacher could have tried to take it further, but they'd have been trying to fight my parents who, as the people with the last say on the matter, were pretty unassailable. I was discussing it further with my form tutor at the time and, as he explained it, there really wasn't anything that could be done by the school if the parents refused permisson for occasional detentions (especially if they had an articulable reason) - parents who tried to entirely block the school's ability to punish their children would be a problem, and the children would have to go elsewhere if that were the situation, but on a case-by-case basis the school really had no rights at all.
I presume that there's laws which can be used against schools which try to prevent their enrolled pupils from actually attending lessons.
And it's not about the kid not showing for detention - it's about the parents telling the school that they may not keep the kid in detention. Once that happens, it's a dispute between the parents and the school and the kid isn't involved any longer.
Well, perhaps, but I wasn't involved in the misbehaviour of my class; I was sitting quietly hunched in my chair with my skin crawling at how much trouble my classmates were going to get us all in.
BTW, in most places a 12 YEAR OLD can babysit, but in your state they can't take an aspirin?
I don't know about 'can't', but they shouldn't - aspirin is really nasty for kids, and it's not like they need the blood thining effects yet. Better to give them ibuprofen.
Her parents think the detention is stupid, tell the school that she won't be staying for it, and there's nothing the school can do about it. Right? In loco parentis doesn't trump erm, er, whatever the Latin for 'actual parents' is, does it? Here in the UK when my teacher tried to include me in a class detention because most of the class were misbehaving, my parents told the school that they wouldn't be allowing me to be kept in, and that was the end of it.
because, in the end, 'keeping complete control of the situation' involves doing what happened here, i.e. using force against the member of the public if they try to retain some of the control for themselves. It's not the police officer defending themselves against an attacker, it's retaining control through force in the name of their own safety, and at the expense of that of the public.
The officer has at least not been a felon. The person in the car is a complete unknown. In that case it makes sense to leave the unknown in the car and have the officer walking around.
It makes sense for the officer, in terms of their own control (& therefore safety). It does not make sense for the unknown who is also unlikely to be a felon and their control (& therefore safety). The difference is that the police officer is paid to risk their safety, and the unknown person isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
and British University has been smacked silly by the courts during the last 12 months for giving arbitrary low marks to a student in retaliation for earlier legal action. I doubt that UCL would be so foolish.
Remember "Bomber" Harris and other Euros who actually had balls
You mean the mad nutter who frittered away thousands of aircrews lives and thousands of bombers on attacking civilian targets on the ill-concieved mission of trying to 'break' the morale of a people living under a totalitarian regime? The one who was itching to get 'his' bombers released from militarilly beneficial duties in the spring\summer of 1944 supporting the invasion so that he could continue his insane mission to bomb Germany's cities into ruins (which we had to pay to fix again). It wasn't even like he tried to obliterate somewhere worth obliterating like Essen. He just tied up valuable personnel and resources on a fools quest to do what had already been proved impossible and actively opposed any sensible use of the forces under his command.
The allies won the war inspite of Arthur Harris, not because of him.
But even if she can find some wiggle room or some minor technicality to skate by the intent of this law,
Like acquiting herself? Having not redacted herself from the case, obviously.
and then sue the UK government under the human rights act (\the convention if he has to go to strasbourg) for not protecting him from it in the first place.
But, in the Singh case, the BCA (afaik) will be paying for his costs too (boy, will this be expensive) and Mr Justice Eady has been roundly lambasted again.
The UK has more extensive free speech in some areas, firstly in the fact that more things count as 'speech', and secondly because the Convention places a positive burden on the government to provide for the exercise of those rights.
(This is, of course, in theory, but then so is the US situation)
The Supreme Court has ruled differently time and again.
If that were true, this case wouldn't be happening. That's the beauty of a precedent-controlled legal system
I don't think that it was a reverse class-action was it? (not that I've RTFA, of course). Our old friends at the RIAA got told to stop joining unrelated defendants some years ago (not that they stopped). But in any case, you shouldn't be able to show up at the courthouse one day with 5000 lawsuits naming unidentified people as defendants. Quite how such a rule would be defined would be tricky. Perhaps some sort of regulation on the template of the UK's 'vexatious litigant' rules would work, but it may need to apply to law firms as well, and include some sort of direct sanction.
then you offer to settle for what you think you might get in court (i.e the cost of a window). The equivalent here would be to offer to settle for $2500, and if you don't get it, to sue for $2500. But they'll likely sue for millions, or at least 100s of thousands. Of course, if you sued for $2500 for a $100 window, you wouldn't get $2500 either.
well, the EULA probably has the standard 'no warranty' terms. Adobe probably wanted to hide behind that to avoid the otherwise default position that you have to sell a functioning product; the plantiff showed that since it hadn't been displayed, it wasn't agreed to, and didn't count, leaving Adobe holding the bag for having sold a non-functioning product.
Someone has already called you out on saying that you have to carry your driving license (and in any case, even if you had your driving license, you'd still have to go to a police station with the paper bit and your insurance certificate anyway).
I'm going to call you out on the Police's ability to find out who you are when making a stop and search. The right the search you does not normally extend to opening and searching your wallet. You also don't have to identify yourself verbally when stopped and searched.
The difference between driving licenses and compulsory ID cards is that you didn't HAVE to have a driving license. You don't have to own one, let alone carry it with you or produce it on demand. This means that there's no point in setting up any system which requires people to produce a driving license. Once you've got everyone forced to own and carry and ID card, why not make every interraction with a government service (and some private ones) dependent on it? Doctor's appointment, bank transaction, library borrowing, getting more recycling bags, happening to walk past a police cordon on the street. Once you set up that, you have enormous scope for intrusively tracking people.
Hell, you could require unique RFID tags to be put into products, require people to produce their ID card at the supermarket checkout, record who bought which specific product, and then prosecute them if that particular produce wrapper is found blowing down the street. 'The computer doesn't lie, here's a large fine.'
With no compulsory ID cards, none of that stuff is possible.
From HHGG
This is /. - we didn't need to be told where that was from
I agree. All you have to do is look upon the bullies with utter contempt. Once you look upon someone with contempt, there is little they can say which will hurt you. Physical pain, however, does still hurt.
How long did your career producing segments for Sesame Street last?
doesn't that mean that the individual cops no longer have priviliged immunity to hide behind?
I was countering the absurd assertion that anyone (i.e. including police officers) should be allowed to respond to another person in a manner consistent with assuming the presence of nonexistant weapons.
When faced with a belligerent person who did not respond to orders at the border crossing, the border guard took control of the situation in a completely non-lethal way.
Your use of the word belligerant is inflammatory and misleading, but putting that to one side; the border guard did not 'take control of the situation in a non lethal way' he pepper-sprayed an unarmed man who posed no threat to him.
My use of the SAS example was just the first one I could grasp on to, and was to demonstrate the far more reasonable principle that you can't respond appropriately to the presence of a weapon merely on the assumption that it is present. Of course, that principle has been eroded somewhat in the UK now that a judge has allowed a police officer to sucessfully argue that they thought a carton of milk might have been a weapon, and issue a swift beating to the person who was holding it. The CPS also having declined to charge two police officers who shot dead an innocent man holding a table leg in a bag because a paniced member of the public who had seen him momentarily called them up to report that he was carrying a shotgun.
And in San Francisco the collection/enforcement departments spend more money than the meters take in! Net loss.
Is that per ticket, or the department as a whole? (i.e. if the number of tickets went up, would the department start to turn a profit?) Because any use of financial penalties should ALWAYS cost more than it brings in per use.
They paid $5000 for it. Certainly not the act of a legitimate "news organization".
Paying $5000 for it (to stop it being touted around to someone more unscrupulous), and handing it straight over to Apple would have been.
Not that they did that, of course.
you are right that unfair contracts could allow Sony to be hit (though I'm not sure what for), but 'fit for purpose' and 'advertised features' wouldn't - they could be used to hit retailers though, and dependent on the clout of the retailer, that could be useful (e.g. if DSG got fed up of having to refund bricked PS3's, they could twist Sony's arm to refund them, or face DSG not selling anything else which Sony makes).
Second, it undermines their authority, giving your child the sense that any time the teacher does something they don't like, they can just come running to you to overrule the teacher's authority.
Good. A sensible parent won't overrule the teacher unless they're wrong (bad parents always take thei kid's side even when they shouldn't, but good parents won't). The other side of the coin, however, is that the teacher learns not to abuse their authority once they realise that trying to do so results in parents sweeping in with their 'I'm the actual parent' god-mode and just swiping the teacher's power out from under them. It's a far better lesson in why you shouldn't be an asshat than a lawsuit against the school which takes so long to conclude that none of the pupils who were in the class at the time are even in the school any longer.
this itended detention was during lunch. At the time the school policy was that the lunch hour was entirely ours (now the younger kids need a letter from their parents at the beginning of term, but it's otherwise the same), and the way that detention worked was that parents had to sign off on it first - a detention slip wasn't a 'for your information', it was 'will you let us...?'. The teacher had no right to keep me in for half of my lunch hour without my parents permission, and they weren't willing to give that permission, thus the whole thing just collapsed. The teacher could have tried to take it further, but they'd have been trying to fight my parents who, as the people with the last say on the matter, were pretty unassailable.
I was discussing it further with my form tutor at the time and, as he explained it, there really wasn't anything that could be done by the school if the parents refused permisson for occasional detentions (especially if they had an articulable reason) - parents who tried to entirely block the school's ability to punish their children would be a problem, and the children would have to go elsewhere if that were the situation, but on a case-by-case basis the school really had no rights at all.
I presume that there's laws which can be used against schools which try to prevent their enrolled pupils from actually attending lessons.
And it's not about the kid not showing for detention - it's about the parents telling the school that they may not keep the kid in detention. Once that happens, it's a dispute between the parents and the school and the kid isn't involved any longer.
Well, perhaps, but I wasn't involved in the misbehaviour of my class; I was sitting quietly hunched in my chair with my skin crawling at how much trouble my classmates were going to get us all in.
BTW, in most places a 12 YEAR OLD can babysit, but in your state they can't take an aspirin?
I don't know about 'can't', but they shouldn't - aspirin is really nasty for kids, and it's not like they need the blood thining effects yet. Better to give them ibuprofen.
Her parents think the detention is stupid, tell the school that she won't be staying for it, and there's nothing the school can do about it. Right?
In loco parentis doesn't trump erm, er, whatever the Latin for 'actual parents' is, does it?
Here in the UK when my teacher tried to include me in a class detention because most of the class were misbehaving, my parents told the school that they wouldn't be allowing me to be kept in, and that was the end of it.
because, in the end, 'keeping complete control of the situation' involves doing what happened here, i.e. using force against the member of the public if they try to retain some of the control for themselves. It's not the police officer defending themselves against an attacker, it's retaining control through force in the name of their own safety, and at the expense of that of the public.
The officer has at least not been a felon. The person in the car is a complete unknown. In that case it makes sense to leave the unknown in the car and have the officer walking around.
It makes sense for the officer, in terms of their own control (& therefore safety). It does not make sense for the unknown who is also unlikely to be a felon and their control (& therefore safety). The difference is that the police officer is paid to risk their safety, and the unknown person isn't.