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Comment Re: It seems to be spreading (Score 1) 50

We moved around a fair bit when our three kids were 2-9 years old, including Dublin, Tokyo and San Jose (Costa Rica). The experience for the kids was helpful for their language development (tri lingual, at an early age). It also helped make them have more of a âoeglobalâ view, to be more open minded. I enjoyed being able to share that with them ⦠and weâ(TM)re having a mini âoefamily reunionâ in Japan this summer. You canâ(TM)t put a price on memories and experiences.

Comment Including Google as a defendant makes sense (Score 1) 282

Suing Google as a cadre of defendants would be part-and-parcel to assuring a higher likelihood of success — and a source for payout of any damages. Under the jurisprudence doctrine of joint and several liability, all parties in a suit responsible for damages up to the entire amount awarded. That is, if one party is unable to pay, the others named must pay more than their share. While assigning fault to Google might be difficult, if one reviews the StreetView of the area, the sinkhole is arguable hard to make out — and likely just a difficult when driving, particularly in low visibility conditions. Other mapping services show the route as inaccessible, as well. Adding a “big name” to a legal action can add weight to the plaintiff’s case, in so far as to bring awareness to the court that the situation leading up to the error were easily remedied, if the parties had bothered to take action.

Comment Re: "Safer" (Score 1) 34

Germany (and any EU member state) are free to enact laws ⦠as long as they donâ(TM)t contravene EU ones. Remember: every action taken by the EU is founded on treaties that have been approved democratically by its members. EU laws help to achieve the objectives of the EU treaties and put EU policies into practice. Each Member State has its own law and legal system, which can comprise both law at the national level and laws which are only applicable in a certain area, region, or city. Illegally displaying Nazi symbols in Germany can be punished by three years in jail. The ban broadly exempts art, but which works are allowed to show swastikas, SS sig runes and such is often more a matter of the medium. In Germany, the law considers swastikas and SS sig runes the "symbols of anti-constitutional organizations." Displaying them publicly or selling goods that sport them is illegal. The Nazi salute and statements such as "Heil Hitler" are also banned in public. Germanyâ(TM)s constitution put basic rights first, whereas the US put them as amendments; Germany's constitution is much more in depth than than the USAâ(TM)s â" it will is called the Basic Law, and was prepared by a committee of US experts and others. Swastikas and other banned symbols can, however, be displayed in Germany if they are used for "civic education, countering anti-constitutional activities, art and science, research and education, the coverage of historic and current events, or similar purposes," according to the Criminal Code. When the USA took over Germany, they helped put in place such restrictions on free speech ⦠in an effort to enforce âoemind controlâ on the German population. Nobody wants another Nazi movement. Right? Right? Ahem, cough, tRump, cough, cough.

Comment Re: "Safer" (Score 1) 34

Limiting speech is nothing new. Our constitution is very specific in this matter: âoeYou have a right to freely express your convictions and opinions (Article 40.6. 1. i). However, that right can be limited in the interests of public order and morality.â So aligning with the confederacyâ(TM)s rules are not that much of a stretch. Its aim is to push big tech companies to better police online content and to open them up to more competitionâ"with regular oversight from regulators empowered to issue fines. So it is the companies themselves who will be enforcing their own content policies. Perhaps so much whinging about this is because, at its heart, this is the EU ancting against what our duly elected representatives define as "anti-trust" or anti-competitive behaviour â"from mainly US technology businesses.

Comment Re: "Safer" (Score 1) 34

If something is not totally 100% effectiveâ" the solution is to do nothing? All this talk of Orwellian government is laughable, concerning my government. They can barely mobilise a St Paddyâ(TM)s celebration, let along craft a multi-layered, inception-level conspiracy to manipulate the masses. In a social democracy, regulated capitalism isnâ(TM)t the bugbear that so-call âoelibertarianâ right wingers would have us all believe it is.

Comment Another example of SA authoritarian (Score 2) 258

Salma al-Shehab, 34, a mother of two young children, was initially sentenced to serve three years in prison for the âoecrimeâ of using an internet website to âoecause public unrest and destabilise civil and national securityâ. But an appeals court on Monday handed down the new sentence â" 34 years in prison followed by a 34-year travel ban â" after a public prosecutor asked the court to consider other alleged crimes. By all accounts, Shehab was not a leading or especially vocal Saudi activist, either inside the kingdom or in the UK. She described herself on Instagram â" where she had 159 followers â" as a dental hygienist, medical educator, PhD student at Leeds University and lecturer at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, and as a wife and a mother to her sons, Noah and Adam. Her Twitter profile showed she had 2,597 followers. Among tweets about Covid burnout and pictures of her young children, Shehab sometimes retweeted tweets by Saudi dissidents living in exile, which called for the release of political prisoners in the kingdom. She seemed to support the case of Loujain al-Hathloul, a prominent Saudi feminist activist who was previously imprisoned, is alleged to have been tortured for supporting driving rights for women, and is now living under a travel ban. A person who followed her case said Shehab had at times been held in solitary confinement and had sought during her trial to privately tell the judge something about how she had been handled, which she did not want to state in front of her father. She was not permitted to communicate the message to the judge, the person said. The appeals verdict was signed by three judges but the signatures were illegible. Twitter declined to comment on the case and did not respond to specific questions about what â" if any â" influence Saudi Arabia has over the company. Twitter previously did not respond to questions by the Guardian about why a senior aide to Prince Mohammed, Bader al-Asaker, has been allowed to keep a verified Twitter account with more than 2 million followers, despite US government allegations that he orchestrated an illegal infiltration of the company which led anonymous Twitter users to be identified and jailed by the Saudi government. One former Twitter employee has been convicted by a US court in connection to the case. One of Twitterâ(TM)s biggest investors is the Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who owns more than 5% of Twitter through his investment company, Kingdom Holdings. While Prince Alwaleed still serves as chairman of the company, his control over the group faced questions in the US media, including the Wall Street Journal, after it emerged that the Saudi royal â" a cousin of the crown prince â" had been held captive at the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh for 83 days. The incident was part of a broader purge led by Prince Mohammed against other members of the royal family and businessmen, and involved allegations of torture, coercion and expropriation of billions in assets into Saudi coffers.

Comment Central Bank Ops is No Walk in the Park (Score 1) 54

My first job was in public service working for Bank Operations at the Federal Reserve in D.C. Back in those heady days of the mid-1980s, the X.25 network was an amazing thing. Being involved in "information security" (as it was called back then) to support the 10 reserve banks communicating was a joy, launching my career. We were in the early stages of prototyping the ACH system, with the expectation that by 1993 there's be no more paper checks. LOL. But alas, I was never cut out for a role in the bureaucracy, so I left to start my own "thing". The central bank system of the U.S. is a model in social democracy at work, where political will works hand-in-hand with capitalism. It is a private-public partnership meant to ensure a smooth working monetary system, an innovation when conceived. And let's not forget the "secret" eleventh reserve bank, hidden away so the economy could be re-started in the aftermath of global thermonuclear war. Wow, ain't 'Murica grand?

Submission + - US and UK 'lead push against global patent pool for Covid-19 drugs' (theguardian.com)

tomtermite writes: US and UK 'lead push against global patent pool for Covid-19 drugs' — Efforts to dilute world health assembly resolution on open licensing decried as ‘appalling’. Ministers and officials from every nation will meet via video link on Monday for the annual world health assembly, which is expected to be dominated by efforts to stop rich countries monopolising drugs and future vaccines against Covid-19.

As some countries buy up drugs thought to be useful against the coronavirus, causing global shortages, and the Trump administration does deals with vaccine companies to supply America first, there is dismay among public health experts and campaigners who believe it is vital to pull together to end the pandemic.

While the US and China face off, the EU has taken the lead. The leaders of Italy, France, Germany and Norway, together with the European commission and council, called earlier this month for any innovative tools, therapeutics or vaccines to be shared equally and fairly.

“If we can develop a vaccine that is produced by the world, for the whole world, this will be a unique global public good of the 21st century,” they said in a statement.

Submission + - The Atlantic warns: 'The 2016 Election Was Just a Dry Run' (theatlantic.com)

DevNull127 writes: A staff writer at The Atlantic published a 7,800-word warning about election security considering the possibility of everything from ransomware to meddling with voter-registration databases — and of course, online disinformation. But it starts with Jack Cable, a Stanford student who discovered security holes in Chicago's Board of Elections website — then spent months trying to find an official who'd fix them. The Atlantic describes the holes as "the most basic lapses in cybersecurity — preventable with code learned in an introductory computer-science class — and they remained even though similar gaps had been identified by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, not to mention widely reported in the media." And then this "teenager in a dorm room" discovered "many other" states had similar security holes...

Fortunately, the former head of security at Facebook (who now teaches at Stanford) had gotten approval from the Department of Homeland Security to assemble a team of undergraduates to search for election-security holes. "Less than six months before Election Day, the government will attempt to identify democracy's most glaring weakness by deploying college kids on their summer break." But there's other equally disturbing anecdotes in the article. On election night in 2016, Russians had queued up a Twitter campaign alleging voting irregularities, and "Russian diplomats were ready to publicly denounce the results as illegitimate..."

But there's also this anecdote about the Internet Research Agency, "a troll farm serving the interests of the Kremlin."

Starting in 2017, it launched a sustained effort to exaggerate the specter of its interference, a tactic that social-media companies call "perception hacking." Its trolls were instructed to post about the Mueller report and fan the flames of public anger over the blatant interference it revealed... If enough Americans come to believe that Russia can do whatever it wants to our democratic processes without consequence, that, too, increases cynicism about American democracy, and thereby serves Russian ends.

Comment Isn't the Republic of Ireland part of the EU? (Score 1) 205

A federalized tax structure would reduce corporations leveraging the advantageous tax situations in select countries. But the EU seems far from that model -- no "United States of Europe." Ireland negotiated a treaty in the 1990s with the US for the express purpose of attracting employers for its well-educated and young workforce. Why shouldn't trans-nationals do what's best for their shareholders? That is what corporate democracy is all about, imho.

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