Journal Journal: Because NOBODY at work is old enough to remember 7
The punchline for this week's story line arc at Userfriendly is significant to any slashdotter with less than a seven digit UID.
The punchline for this week's story line arc at Userfriendly is significant to any slashdotter with less than a seven digit UID.
Sometimes there is no "winning move" but you don't have much of a choice about "playing the game."
Ontario Court of Appeal allows duress as murder defence
SEAN FINE - JUSTICE WRITER
The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Apr. 16 2015, 10:11 PM EDT
People who find themselves in a âoekill or be killedâ situation can claim duress as a defence to murder, even though the Criminal Code explicitly rules it out, the Ontario Court of Appeal said Thursday.
Until now, claiming the right to kill an innocent person to save oneâ(TM)s own life has been seen as the greater of two evils. But the court had a different way of looking at duress, offering the hypothetical example of someone faced with killing an innocent person or having their own child be killed. âoeThe putative victims are equally innocent,â the court said.
The court cited a principle that criminal law is not designed for âoea community of saints or heroes,â but for ordinary people making voluntary moral choices. And sometimes those choices are no more free than the choice of a condemned man walking to the gallows, the court said.
âoeSociety may regret or even deplore the accusedâ(TM)s failure to ârise to the occasion,â(TM) but it cannot, in a criminal justice system predicated on individual autonomy, justly criminalize and punish conduct absent a realistic choice,â Justice David Doherty wrote in a 3-0 ruling. The court was not asked to rule on the constitutionality of the law barring duress as a defence to murder, but said that law is probably unconstitutional.
France and Germany do not bar duress as a defence to murder, and 11 U.S. states have laws declaring duress can be a defence to murder.
Toronto lawyer Daniel Santoro, who represented Mr. Aravena, said the ruling is the first by an appeal court in Canada to affirm that duress can be used as a defence to murder. âoeIt recognizes that sometimes people are put into horrible situations where they have no realistic choice, and trying to punish someone in that situation as a murderer is not fair,â
Given the choice between you and someone else being killed, or just someone else, sometimes the only realistic choice is to try to minimize the body count.
Around the first of the year all three working computers were just about stuffed full, so I thought of sticking a spare drive in the Linux box, when the Linux box died from a hardware problem. It's too old to spend time and money on, so its drive is going in the XP box (which is, of course, not on the network; except sneakernet). I decided to break down and buy an external hard drive. I found what I was looking for in the "Seagate Personal Cloud". And here I thought the definition of "the cloud" was someone else's server!
I ordered it the beginning of January, not noticing that it was a preorder; it wasn't released until late March. I got it right before April.
I was annoyed with its lack of documentation -- it had a tiny pamphlet full of pictures and icons and very few words. Whoever put that pamphlet together must beleive the old adage "a picture is worth a thousand words". Tell me, if a picture is worth a thousand words, convey that thought in pictures. I don't think it can be done.
I did find a good manual on the internet. For what I wanted, I really didn't need a manual, but since I'm a nerd I wanted to understand everything about the thing. Before looking for a manual I plugged it all up, and Windows 7 had no problem connecting with it. It takes a few minutes to boot; it isn't really simply a drive, it must have an operating system and network software, because it looks to the W7 notebook to be another file server. Its only connections are a jack for the power cord and a network jack.
The model I got has three terrabytes. I moved all the data from the two working computers (using a thumb drive to move data from XP) and the "cloud" was still empty. Streaming audio and video from it is flawless; I'm completely satisfied with it, it's a fine piece of hardware.
However, it WON'T do what is advertised to do, which is to be able to get to your data from anywhere. In order to do that, Seagate has a "software as a service" thing where you can connect to a computer from anywhere, but only the computer and its internal drives, NOT the "personal cloud". And they want ten bucks a month for it.
I downloaded the Android app, and I could see and copy files that were on my notebook to my phone, but I couldn't play music stored there on it. I uninstalled the crap. "Software as a service" is IMO evil in the first place, but to carge a monthly fee to use a piece of crap software like this is an insult. Barnum must have been right.
If you're just looking for an external hard drive, like I was, it's a good solution. If you want what they're advertising, you ain't gettin' it. The Seagate Personal Cloud's name is a lie, as is its advertising.
Slashdot used to be a safe site to visit, it never made noise when you didn't want it to, making it the go-to site for quiet, in-office news aggregation.
Not anymore. I just had to mute my laptop due to a slashdot auto-playing video advert.
Dick Cheney.
The rest are nothing but vanilla pudding.
neighbor Larry Simpson said of the family. "It's a shame this had to happen."
Apparently not. If this "had to happen" then apparently we have to have irresponsible gun owners, whose irresponsibilities lead to the deaths of innocent people.
"In many states, married women were not permitted to own property or enter into contracts and had no legal existence apart from their husbands."
Yep, I remember mom's credit cards had dad's name on them. Maiden names were verboten!
Example: "She was out promoting the paperback edition of her reserve "A Preventing Opportunity,"
Should have been ""She was out promoting the paperback edition of her biography "A Fighting Chance," Google for the phrase to see the original sources and you'll see that they can't even plagiarize properly.
You got admire the sack on this bimbo:
I'm old enough to remember a day when the fiction that government works for the people was semi-maintained.
I guess it was inevitable. The Canadian invasion continues. Just like same-sex marriage is spreading to the US. Hopefully at some point they'll get it right by copying one of the single-payer health care systems around the world as well.
"It's the best thing since professional golfers on 'ludes." -- Rick Obidiah