We were talking about England of course, where we don't have the distinction between "misdemeanors" and "felonies" that exists in some places.

You would not have to report any arrests when applying for a job in the UK. An employer would not have any mechanism for discovering this (unless a google search turns up a newspaper report of your arrest or something).

There are certain provisions for jobs involving children where a more thorough background check can be requested from the authorities. But this is aimed essentially at protecting children from paedophiles and only things that are relevant to that are at issue.

There might be a record of your arrest, but that's not what is normally understood by a criminal record, which is a list of the offences of which you've been convicted or accepted a caution in respect of.

This is a clear reference to Bill Roger's joke about people moving from Oklahoma to California increasing the average IQ of both states.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Rogers_phenomenon

Odds definitely in favour? How do you even go about assigning odds to something like life on Europa?

Plumes don't "confirm" the existence of life. It could be that water makes life more likely - if we're assuming that other life has somewhat similar processes to life on Earth - but we knew there was water on Europa anyway.

I'm not sure that the Advocate General's opinion is properly described as an interim ruling - that suggest a court ruling which has some legal force pending a full trial. The AG's opinion is there to help the court make its decision, but doesn't have any legal force of itself.

As the summary says, its usual for the court to follow the opinion of the AG, but it doesn't always happen.

Before maps people got around by dead reckoning, trial and error or talking to the locals. That doesn't mean that maps are not useful.

By the same token the existence of maps doesn't mean that gps navigation aids are not useful.

... so you don't actually have to do any coding at all?

Hey, just what you see pal.

Surely the suggestion is not that authors compose and tag raw html... the suggestion is that they use editors/word processors that have html as the underlying document format?

There's a problem watching videos on linux? Can't say I've ever noticed a problem...

I'm no expert on space travel, but surely we have invented engines capable of going more than 1/10th of light speed? An engine will continue to accelerate a spacecraft so long as it still has fuel... all it takes is time to get above any given speed below the speed of light.

It's a pretty good rule of thumb that anything in the Mail is wrong. So I guess that's consistent...

The law, especially in common law jurisdictions like the US, England and a lot of the Commonwealth, does not work just by knowing the statutory rules. There are rules that exist independently of any statute. For example in England (I don't know about the US), murder is not a statutory offence - you won't find any act of Parliament that creates such an offence. It is a creation of the common law.

You therefore need to know all the relevant judgments to get a read on the way things are likely to go in a particular case. These are not necessarily expressed in clear, declarative terms. Judgments meander around mixing up the facts of the particular case with the legal principles involved, surveys of relevant authorities and bits of whimsy (read, for example, Denning's judgment in Miller v Jackson). In England at least it often happens in the higher courts that each judge will write a judgment. They will not all agree - sometimes there will be dissenting judgments. Sometimes judgments will agree about the outcome but for different reasons. Hence it can be hard to understand the legal principles on which the decision was reached.

Now, whilst in some areas it's probably possible to make an expert system that helps in some cases, you'd be crazy to rely on such a thing if you've been charged with a serious offence or have some significant civil dispute. And it's not just a question of trying to figure out which way it's likely to go - the way it's argued in court can make a big difference. You need to muster all the different arguments, based on legal authority, that support your position.

I've written quite a bit of bespoke code being used by clients. Is that released? Dunno...

Indeed and there's more to it than that. Serious policy changes cannot happen without the consent of the Council of Ministers. This is a body made up of government ministers from member states. You don't get to be a government minister without some kind of democratic legitimacy. Of course the exact process by which people get appointed as ministers varies by member state.

Of course policy is also made by the courts. We like to maintain the fiction that courts just apply the law. But there's much more to it than that. This is not exclusively a European issue tho'. Nobody can sensibly say that the decision in Row v Wade, for example, isn't really a policy decision. Every knows this which is why appointment of Supreme Court Justices is so political.