Posts by Matthew Poole
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Well, yes, but I'm sure the SST and their acolytes won't mind because they're only prisoners! People who broke the law! The scourge of right and decent folks everywhere!
You mean people like Bruce Emery? muahahahaha. Let's see how he likes double-bunking with some of the, err, less cerebral members of our prison population. As evil as that is, and I am a little ashamed for actually vocalising the thought, Bruce Emery's incarceration has come at a very apt time.
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Please excuse my ignorance, but how does a privately run prison work?
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Does the government decide that it costs, for example, $50k per year for a prisoner and then give that to the prison to house said offender, with it then becoming up to the prison how it chooses to use that money?Yes, that's pretty much it, except that it's the prison operator that decides what it will cost them to incarcerate a prisoner at a given level of security. The State continues sentencing as per normal, and ships prisoners about as under the status quo. The only real difference from the outside is that some prisoners will end up in prisons that are run on a for-profit basis at a cost-per-prisoner that's set by tender of the prison operator. I think there's also a base annual fee, to account for the fact that a prison is not a light bulb and doesn't cost nothing while it's sitting there un-utilised.
The prisons don't get a choice as to who's sent there, and in any case the likes of Dixon and Burton are high-security prisoners and it's (hopefully) not going to eventuate that Paremoremo is put under private management. The thought of a bunch of Geo Corp prisoners, graded as suitable for the infamous 'D Block', rioting on a regular basis is really not appealing. Certainly one hopes that the contracts will include a cost-recovery clause to fully indemnify the Police for all costs associated with quelling unrest. If history in the US is anything to go by, riots at a privately-operated prison will be common and highly destructive.
On the rehabilitation thing, that would depend entirely on the terms of the contract. If there is an obligation, monitoring could be a real bitch, as alluded to in other posts.
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Interesting, Tim, thanks. I hadn't realised US copyright law was quite so fucking complicated. I knew it was bad, but that's ugly beyond my worst imaginings.
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Right on cue: a fascinating story about a fansite creating derivative works from stories in the public domain in NZ, but not in the US. Quite a mess, and it doesn't seem like anyone is well-served by it.
From the CW article Russell linked: But under New Zealand copyright law, works are in the public domain 50 years after the year of the author's death, he says. Howard committed suicide in 1936, aged 30.
And by my count, 70 years after his death would've been 2006. So the works are also public domain in the US. Someone needs to whip out the lawyer-gram and tell them to C&D with the C&D notices. I can't see Conan being of sufficient import to justify another retroactive term extension, but chequebook statutory drafting seems to be fairly readily available in the US. -
I think the only way I'd be sure that each spin is an independent event is If I looked at the code or that they are required to by law. I'm assuming they get audited, I remember reading a piece comparing the controls on the development of slot machines compared to those of voting machines.
Amongst other things the Gambling Act mandates that the likes of Sky City must connect their pokie machines to an electronic monitoring system as specified by the Secretary for Internal Affairs. The monitoring system tracks a bunch of things, including income, pay-out, possible tampering, and possible violations of the Act.
Further, the Act allows appointment of Gambling Inspectors and empowers them to inspect the carrying out of gambling, including auditing the machines. So rigging the pokies at Sky City is unlikely. It's the local pub that you need to worry about. Sky City, as I understand it, has IA staff on-site at all times to ensure that things are carried out in accordance with the law. They have so much to lose if they're caught fiddling the odds even further into their favour that it's just not worth it.The misconception that casinos (and here I talk about the major ones, not the local pokie den) cheat is mostly because the true 50:50 odds of the laws of chance don't assert themselves until the iterations through a particular event have been run thousands or tens-of-thousands of times. Since most people don't have the time to play for a long enough period to reach the point of true randomness, they usually lose out. Because the house wins every time you lose, the house has many more opportunities to win than you do because the house is party to every "roll of the die".
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chased quite some distance only suburban streets
err, "chased quite some distance along suburban streets". Not sure quite where that came from.
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It's certainly massively different from the Emery tagger incident, and comparison between the two doesn't bring anything useful to the surface, to my mind.
The only comparison is that in each case a person died when it wasn't, in the glaring light of hindsight, necessary. Other than that, they have nothing in common.
In one, someone who was unarmed, didn't present or make clear threats, and had simply defaced property, was chased quite some distance only suburban streets by a man who was simply sick of his property being defaced. In the other, a person came onto private property in a very rural area, demanded money from and threatened to kill a man who'd recently been hospitalised by a serious beating, and then returned to his vehicle and reached out of sight. -
the question for me is, what is legitimate "self defence"?
Try looking here. Short version, it's whatever the defendant can convince the jury was believably reasonable at the time. Which, given the recent attacks on the farmer and the circumstances of the victim's presence at the time, went as far as lethal force. I don't think I'd have voted differently had I been on the jury. If you have to wait to see the weapon, you may already be dead before you get a chance to defend yourself.
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There is an exemption in section 62 for material communicated to the Crown - but the Crown isn't Parliament (check the definitions in the interpretation section).
My Copyright Act 1994 s2 says that Crown...Includes a Minister of the Crown, a government department, and an Office of Parliament . It doesn't specifically say that it doesn't include Parliament, and because the word is "includes" it's likely to be interpreted as indicative, not absolute. I wouldn't want to be arguing in a court that select committees aren't part of the Crown, especially when "a Minister of the Crown" is included in that section.
The reality is that there would be urgent legislation tabled to explicitly include select committees in that definition, and suddenly it would all be legal again. That's if a ruling was made that publishing submissions is indeed a breach of copyright, and I wouldn't put money on any court saying any such thing.
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There's an explicit exception for caching.
For ISPs, not for individual users or (possibly) corporations.This section says otherwise. Any user cannot be sued for infringement if the copying occurs as a transitory part of accessing that content through a computer network. Which is precisely what caching is. If you have a flat and run a caching server, you're no more infringing than an ISP that caches for all their users. Caching is caching, doesn't matter who's doing it. The step after that is downloading, and that's infringing (or not) regardless of who's doing it.