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Generally speaking, when you go to a web site, images are downloaded to temporary storage on your computer — whether it’s a personal computer, pad, laptop or certain smartphones. This temporary storage is called “cache.” The pictures and video are temporarily stored to make it easier for your computer to display those images from the web site if you go back. It makes the processing time faster. This is an automatic process conducted by your computer’s operating system.
Yes, that means you or a client can accidentally access child pornography unknowingly. There may be pictures or videos that depict child pornography that you haven’t viewed that get automatically downloaded and stored in temporary Internet storage or cache. Yes, that means that even if you or a client accidentally access child pornography and try to delete it, if the police find out about it, they will make an arrest, push to prosecute and the resultant conviction will garner a mandatory minimum sentence of incarceration.
Our system of law doesn't acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas are regarded as property, as unique and original lots with distinct boundaries. But ideas aren't so tidy. They're layered, they’re interwoven, they're tangled. And when the system conflicts with the reality... the system starts to fail.
these cases illustrate the dilemma faced by citizen journalists and commentators who want to critique the government more forcefully than the mainstream media does. The internet can be used either as a hiding place or as a connector. Each strategy has its pros and cons.
Those who use the internet to stay clear of the authorities, like the old Temasek Review, tend to find it difficult to cultivate sources and allies – this was a key reason why TREmeritus decided to come out of the shadows, according to Wan. In contrast, the likes of Yawning Bread and The Online Citizen have strong connections with Singapore’s civil society. Operating openly and transparently tends to make sites more credible. However, working in the open also means that they are no longer immune to the same post-publication legal constraints that restrict mainstream journalists.
Many who undergo weddings, for the best of reasons, do not seem to realise the dire legal effects of their actions. For a wedding means that a marriage contract has been entered into.
Every first-year law student used to know that marriage is a form of contract. Indeed, the celebrated case of Bardell v Pickwick reminds us that a legal action could once be brought for breach of a promise to enter such a contract.
Usually with such onerous contracts, both parties should have separate legal advice. I do not mean advice for a prenuptial agreement; I mean legal advice for both parties on entering the nuptial agreement itself.
A commercial transaction of comparable value -- say a share acquisition or a disposal of assets -- would normally be accompanied by lawyerly advice: seeking contractual protections, guarantees, and amounts in escrow. Various adverse outcomes would be discussed with harsh and open realism, and the parties would allocate risks and rights of termination accordingly. And once both parties were properly advised, and had mutually agreed the legal outcomes of various unhappy scenarios, then there would be a cooling-off period of 12 months before the agreement had legal effect.
"lemon law", which will allow consumers to have a product replaced or repaired if a defect is found within six months of delivery. It would be assumed that the defect existed at the time of delivery, unless the retailer proves otherwise.
Imagine that you are self-employed. Every year, you earn $100,000, pay 35% in taxes and have $65,000 left in your pocket. Now you form a corporation. $100,000 goes into the corporation. There is a corporate tax rate of 25%, so that leaves $75,000 which you pay to yourself as a dividend which are taxed at 15% which leaves you roughly $65,000. So sure, you could say that your tax rate was 15%, but that would be nonsensical. Nothing of significance has changed. What about if you get a partner and the corporation earns $200,000 paying $65,000 to each of you? Well, what changed? Nothing.
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The problem is that once again people are confusing tax incidence with tax collection. The difference is simple: If you make a gasoline company pay $1 for every gallon of gas they sell, the tax collection is a burden of $1 per gallon of gas on the gasoline company. But the tax incidence is very different since the gas company will raise their prices by some amount. So if they raise their prices by 90 cents, the tax incidence is 90 cents on consumers and 10 cents on producers. However, most people will stop at who wrote the check to the IRS. This is a basic mistake that people make all the time and teaching people about tax incidence is a job that every economist takes on when they talk about taxes.
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Isn’t it true that the burden of the corporate tax is born by both shareholders, vendors and consumers? Well of course, but we need to choose what we’re talking about and stick to it. If we talk about the incidence of the tax, we need to remember that the income tax paid by Buffett’s secretary creates a burden for both her and her employer. It’s quite obvious that Buffett and Obama are not talking about the burden of taxation. Otherwise, Mr Buffett could not get his numbers by glancing at his tax return and his secretary’s tax return. He has to perform a complicated analysis which is unlikely to be completed in his life time. So they must be talking about tax collection at which point it doesn’t make sense to talk about the burden of the corporate tax on consumers, employees and vendors.
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A Climate Science Legal Defense Fund set up last fall has taken on a formal affiliation with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an established nonprofit group offering aid and advice to government whistleblowers and scientists working on environmental issues.
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There will be three focal points, according to the fund Web site:
Litigation: The Climate Science Defense Fund is taking an active interest in litigation. Currently several climate scientists have litigation in the courts. The Climate Science Defense Fund will play an active role in helping raise funds for their defense, serving as a resource in finding pro-bono representation, and providing support during difficult litigation proceedings.
Education: The Climate Science Defense Fund will work to educate the scientific community about their rights and their responsibilities with regard to legal issues surrounding their work.
Knowledge Bank: The Climate Science Defense Fund will serve as a clearinghouse for information related to legal actions taken against scientists. Our goal is to provide lawyers representing scientists with information about past cases and strategies.
The Roman Catholic Church reacted harshly Friday to a bill proposed by Mexico City legislators that would require all couples to sign a prenuptial agreement specifying how to handle child custody and other issues in case of divorce – and estimating how long the marriage is expected to last.
people should be aware of their responsibilities when entering into any legally binding arrangement-especially one that involves their entire financial life (or at least a large portion of it). While people are supposed to know about what they are getting into and everyone has heard the horror stories about divorces, it seems that most people do not fully understand the legal aspects of marriage and it is clearly remiss that the state grants licenses without providing such information.
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Interestingly, Mexico City law makers have proposed a bill intended to address the court clogging legal battles between divorcing couples. This bill would require couples to create a pre-nuptual agreement that would create a contract specifying what would occur if the couple divorces. This would include financial matters as well as issues regarding children. The intent is, of course, to reduce the burden on the courts and allow divorces to be settled quickly. Since the divorce rate about 40%, this certainly makes sense. It also makes sense because the couple would know what their exact obligations will be and they will not be going into a serious financial contract blindly.
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One rather controversial aspect of the proposal is that the marriages are supposed to have predicted timed of termination. Couples can, of course, use the traditional termination: “until death do us part” or they can opt for a shorter contract.
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Mississippi voters Tuesday defeated a ballot initiative that would've declared life begins at fertilization, a proposal that supporters sought in the Bible Belt state as a way to prompt a legal challenge to abortion rights nationwide.
The so-called "personhood" initiative was rejected by more than 55 percent of voters, falling far short of the threshold needed for it to be enacted. If it had passed, it was virtually assured of drawing legal challenges because it conflicts with the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established a legal right to abortion. Supporters of the initiative wanted to provoke a lawsuit to challenge the landmark ruling.
The measure divided the medical and religious communities and caused some of the most ardent abortion opponents, including Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, to waver with their support.
Opponents said the measure would have made birth control, such as the morning-after pill or the intrauterine device, illegal. More specifically, the ballot measure called for abortion to be prohibited "from the moment of fertilization" – wording that opponents suggested would have deterred physicians from performing in vitro fertilization because they would fear criminal charges if an embryo doesn't survive.
The growing use of videos, simulations, and sophisticated graphics (DNA analysis included) as a basis for legal judgments exposes the vicissitudes of justice in the digital age. Adapting to these changes with our justice systems’ credibility intact will require broad cultivation of a more refined capacity for critical visual judgment.
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Less discussed than the suspect DNA evidence is whether a graphic digital animation also contributed to Knox’s conviction. In his closing argument at trial, Perugian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini played a computer-generated simulation that showed an avatar-Amanda killing an avatar-Meredith. It ended with a gory crime-scene photo of Kercher’s body. The animation now seems to have been a mere fantasy, an animated version of the prosecution’s theory featuring Amanda Knox as a sex-crazed femme fatale, “Foxy Knoxy,” as the British tabloids called her, a “she-devil,” as many European journalists wrote, appropriating the prosecutor’s phrase.
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“In the end, it was the trial of a different culture, a clash of cultures more than a legal case,” Zucconi argued. “The same girl whom prosecutors depicted as a she-devil starved for sex and orgies was, in inverse proportion, perceived in American public opinion as a chaste diva who fell into a hornets’ nest of inept, evil men.”
But this view assumes that law and culture are two separate worlds. They aren’t. Effective prosecutors and defense lawyers mine the popular imagination for well-known characters (“she-devil,” “femme fatale”) and stock scripts (“sex game gone wrong”) to help frame their story in court. And, increasingly, their advocacy begins well before the courtroom doors open.
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, it is particularly ironic that the South’s voters are America’s most zealous in their efforts to protect innocent human life – as long as that life is still inside the womb, or is that of a person who, suffering from a terminal illness, seeks a doctor’s assistance in order to die when he or she wants. It is a contradiction that belies what the Republican Party, which dominates the region, promotes as a “culture of life.”
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The death penalty is not an effective deterrent. Murder rates in Europe and other Western industrialized nations are lower, often much lower, than those in the US. In the US itself, the 16 states that have abolished the death penalty generally have lower murder rates than those that retain it.
In the US, however, deterrence is not really the issue. Retribution is often seen as a more important justification for the death penalty. It is quite common for family members of the victim to watch the execution of the person convicted of killing their relative, and afterwards to pronounce themselves satisfied that justice has been done – it happened again with the execution of Troy Davis.
Thinking pedantically, we can see ways in which Romney was literally correct; for example, corporations are nothing other than the people who own, run and work for them, and they are recognized as “persons” in some technical legal sense. But it is also obvious that corporations are not people in a full moral sense: they cannot, for example, fall in love, write poetry or be depressed.
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Well before the first protester set foot in Zucotti Park, a heckler urged Mitt Romney to tax corporations rather than people. Romney’s response — “Corporations are people” — stirred a brief but intense controversy. Now thousands of demonstrators have in effect joined the heckler, denouncing corporations as ”enemies of the people.”
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Far more important than questions about what corporations are (ontological questions, as philosophers say) is the question of what attitude we should have toward them. Should we, as corporate public relations statements often suggest, think of them as friends (if we buy and are satisfied with their products) or as family (if we work for them)? Does it make sense to be loyal to a corporation as either a customer or as an employee? More generally, even granted that corporations are not fully persons in the way that individuals are, do they have some important moral standing in our society?
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First, there are plenty of practitioners and manufacturers of alternative medicine out there who market themselves to parents. There are also plenty of parents who are suspicious enough of conventional medicine that they will seek out alternatives. Too often, they seek out CAM in lieu of treatments known to work. Also too often, practitioners and parents will defend their choices insisting that they are the ones with the child’s best interest in mind, and that they have the right to make the choice anyway, evidence notwithstanding. As this is happening, children’s rights and needs are pushed aside.
Who advocates for the child when parents are bombarded by misinformation, are marketed to vigorously, and the agencies charged with protecting consumers are unable or unwilling to intervene? I don’t know, but I’d like to start the conversation. I will suggest that we all begin to pay closer attention to when the pseudoscience we’re dealing with affects children disproportionally. It’s not just about the science, it’s also, and more importantly perhaps, about the victims.
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Here’s what commenter “Anon” contributed:
“Every person on this earth has choices, and that Mom has EVERY right to choose for her child, because it is her child! Not the drug companies child, not your child! Gain some research under your belt before you start trashing a mother who chooses not to put vaccinations in her kids arms”.
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people easily conflate the ability to make a choice for their children with the nonexistent right to make whatever choice they want. Children are not chattel. The choices that are made by a parent for their children are best described as responsibilities. You have the responsibility to make choices for your children, and these choices are reasonably limited by various laws in place to protect children from the harms that result from bad parental choices, among other things.
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there are two quite distinct ideas that fly under the banner of "religious freedom." The first is that people have the right to practice a faith, consistent with the rights of everyone else. We think this is vital and unassailable. However, as we will contend, it is misleading to label this idea "religious freedom." The second idea is that religions deserve some special accommodations under the law that are not available to comparable secular institutions or commitments.
Traditionally cherished and unquestioned though it may be, this latter notion of religious freedom is philosophically unsound, legally incoherent, and morally indefensible. To make real progress in the conversation about church and state, we must give it up.
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there are two quite distinct ideas that fly under the banner of "religious freedom." The first is that people have the right to practice a faith, consistent with the rights of everyone else. We think this is vital and unassailable. However, as we will contend, it is misleading to label this idea "religious freedom." The second idea is that religions deserve some special accommodations under the law that are not available to comparable secular institutions or commitments.
Traditionally cherished and unquestioned though it may be, this latter notion of religious freedom is philosophically unsound, legally incoherent, and morally indefensible. To make real progress in the conversation about church and state, we must give it up. -
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The religion clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution were perhaps the boldest and most novel assertions of the American experiment. Their formulators, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, hoped "to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries," as Madison put it. Neither man foresaw that the Free Exercise clause would come to mean what it does today: the "accommodation" of religion by granting practitioners a presumptive right to violate otherwise valid laws.
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