14 posts tagged “law”

The first time I read about Philip Glenister getting his driver off for speeding (35 mph in a 30 mph zone) I chuckled, as he adopted his Gene Hunt persona. The cop saw the actor and said, according to Glenister, ‘I’m terribly sorry about this sir, I’ll let you off this time if you don’t mind.’
   Glenister had apparently said to him prior, ‘Yes, I’m the one on the booze, not him. Go and catch some proper criminals.’
   Then I found the earliest article on the incident in the Daily Mail tabloid which contrasted this with others in the UK:

   Earlier this week it emerged that Sydney Duffy was fined for doing 35mph in a 30mph area when he tried to leave the road quickly as his wife had an epileptic fit. The 63-year-old has appealed against the fine from Cumbria police and will appear in court.
   And Stephanie Cornwall was issued with a £60 fine after rushing to hospital when her six year-old son Alfie was mauled by a dog. The mother, 40, from Leicestershire, was travelling at 37mph in a 30mph zone.

   One law for celebrities?
   The Met should have more sense than to fine people like Mr Duffy and Ms Cornwall.
   At least here the traffic cops allow for some speedometer error and that humans cannot be expected to constantly monitor their speed when traffic safety is at issue. If you kept staring at your speedo, you might get involved in an accident!
   It is worse here in New Zealand than it was 30 years ago but by and large, 5 mph is not something for the cops to get that upset about.
   I know there are exceptions but I am talking in a general sense. As we work in metric, 5 mph is roughly 8 km/h.
   The second incident probably would have been frowned on more today, less so 30 years ago: 7 mph goes past that 10 km/h leeway that some cops have as a rule of thumb.
   I tend to drive at the legal limit but realize that due to speedometer error I can be anywhere between 5 km/h over or under.
   The ‘Your speed is’ digital signs around some parts of New Zealand are helpful as a means of calibrating my own speedometer—so why do so many of them have their displays closed?
   They tend to show that my car’s 50 km/h is actually 47 km/h so I tend to go closer to 55 km/h on my speedo.
   The problem is that speeding here is governed by legislation that brings strict liability, which basically means “no excuses”.
   But I would think a Kiwi copper would have been able to judge in both cases somewhat better than his or her British counterpart.
   I am not sure if we would distinguish between celebrities and everyday folk. Any stories? I know of one incident told to me by an eyewitness (the passenger) where a rich driver was let off because of the car he drove, and the officers wound up going into macho mode to discuss the vehicle and neglected to issue a fine for excessive speeding. I cannot reveal more since I am not permitted to, and I would hope it is exceptional rather than commonplace.
   If a flash car could get me off a fine, I would have really opened up the Astons and Porsche 911 I have driven, but I prefer my clean licence (knock on wood) and was much more careful.

Just got this in from Mike Corso at Cool Site of the Day.

A recent Brazilian YouTube sex scandal threatened to close down every WordPress blog around the world.
   Did you hear about it? It's already called “YouTube Gate”—apparently a spicy sex scene was posted on YouTube and someone discussed it on a WordPress-hosted blog.
   The problem is the Brazillian courts placed a ban on viewing the IP address of the entire WordPress website …
   … And that means potentially thousands of bloggers can't have their content shown in their country.
   Even worse, this isn't the first time a violation like this closed down an entire network of blogs.
   But the bottom line is this should be a wakeup call for those who rely on hosted blogs (like WordPress) to tweak their strategy and avoid getting their own blogs banned.
   The good news is the fix is simple … just host WordPress on your own server (rather than hosting it on the WordPress site).
   Getting WordPress installed on your own site is now a snap … just take advantage of John Saya's FREE WordPress autoinstaller.

http://www.cnotes.com/r/wordpress.html

Any questions, shoot me an e-mail.

Mike Corso
Cool Site of the Day

   This is a bit disturbing. Global Voices has more info. One of the quotations indicates a million Brazilian bloggers will be affected.
   I am not sure if a Brazilian judgement should have an effect on blogs like this, penalizing those in Brazil who are using wordpress.com. Those who didn’t feature the home-made porn on their blogs—as in the overwhelming majority of Wordpress users—should not pay the price for the handful that did. (And surely non-Wordpress blogs are affected, too?)
   Surely a simple deletion of the offending URLs would suffice?
   And this desire to post someone’s home sex video on to their own blogs—well, it ain’t my scene. Stick it on to YouPorn and let the perverts all go to the same place, and keep it off the blogosphere!

I went to deposit, as I often do, a US dollar cheque into a New Zealand dollar account.
   The nice lady, Bev, tells me that there is now a $5 fee for depositing a foreign cheque.
   ANZ is totally f***ed up if it believes it can do this.
   I already have spoken to Lynne Russell at the TSB and I’ll be opening my account there at the end of March. It seems TSB is one of the few banks left in the country that understand what banking means.
   To Sir John Anderson and the other assholes making these decisions at the ANZ: when I deposit money with you, it is not a privilege for me. It is a privilege for you. I am loaning you money.
   For that, I expect you to pay me interest.
   You do not ask me for money.
   Why do you think I left the National Bank when Sir Spencer Russell retired? Because the last of the old guard went and all I saw were hot-shot assholes putting up bank charges across the board.
   You were there, Sir John. I know you are a nice guy in the regular scheme of things but why do you have to be the man at the top of banks that make these ridiculous plays?
   Dudes, you don’t realize that despite consolidation, you still ain’t the only game in town, though there should be more competition in banking.
   Banking management is, on the whole, incompetent in this country, though I understand we are still streets ahead of the UK. We certainly are when it comes to service, though in my experience the Swedes are well ahead again.
   You can tell when the Cheques Act 1993 needed to be drafted up because the banks were too incompetent to operate within the law up till that point. We have a perfectly functioning Bills of Exchange Act 1908 that covers cheques, but no—the banks were too confused about it.
   I still operate as though the 1993 act did not exist and mark my cheques based on the earlier act, which is still on the books.
   Most banks have refrained from charging me fees but they cannot do much about these head-office rules, so I will be withdrawing my deposits at, I mean, my loan to, the ANZ Bank and placing it with a New Zealand-owned operation that seems to understand banking and finance better.
   I’d encourage fellow New Zealanders to do the same. There is nothing morally acceptable about these bank fees, especially when it comes to deposits.
   When you borrow money from the bank, you pay them interest. When you lend money to the bank—which is technically what happens when you make a deposit—they should pay you. Even if they didn’t pay you and left it at a zero-sum game, that is still fine, but only just.
   Someone at ANZ forgot what banking is all about.

[Cross-posted] I didn’t do as much witness work for my legal clients during 2005–6 and I was interested to see from a former client a letter from a large New Zealand law firm’s partner. I won’t reveal any specific information, of course, but let’s say it’s from a firm I did have some dealings against in the 1990s and I considered their statement of defence pretty amateur. I have considered their marketing to be very amateur, too—all style and no substance.
   Or perhaps their brand or marketing consultant actually did a perfect job—they expressed the firm honestly and accurately.
   The letter, with all the Our refs and jargon, lacks a salutation. There is no Dear or even an Attention: it launches straight in to the correspondence.
   This may be very nice for text messaging but it has no place in what is considered acceptable commercial correspondence.
   Perhaps once texting, or some evolution of it, becomes the dominant form of communication—which places us roughly between grunting and Morse code—then business correspondence may evolve toward the demise of the salutation.
   Until then, this merely illustrates the arrogance of the legal profession and how it has fallen even further out of step with its clientèle.
   Lawyers need to remember they represent certain parties and that those parties—the ones that pay their bills—have brands that need to be protected, not destroyed through callousness.
   The effects on culture are wide-reaching. Imagine singing the song ‘Dear John’ without the words Dear John. It kind of sucks with the lyric-free bits in the verses.
   How about answering a phone without a ‘Hello’?
   When I relayed this to one regular client, a practising attorney who is around my age, he was surprised. He has received such letters, too, but he agrees with me on this topic.
   There is what some people call a simplified letter, where there may be no salutation and the words Attention: Dispatch Department (for instance) may take its place. These are acceptable—just—when the recipient is unlikely to be known by the writer, but I have always adopted a Ladies and Gentlemen in such cases.
   I realize that the niceties of I remain or even Your loyal and humble servant have disappeared in New Zealand but this development of the missing salutation is worrisome.
   At best it is disrespectful to the recipient, which may be what the law firm wanted to convey—but disrespecting others is merely a sign of an absence of self-respect, showing that the firm itself is without merit.
   Yet the writer of this letter has not forgotten his valediction—I imagine he has retained it because that way he can put his own name down the bottom and see it in print.
   After all, with no salutation, surely there is no need for a valediction? My most casual emails, where I am firing off an internal memo or a quick response to some people, do lack both. I simply end the text with an em dash and my initials and I encourage some members of my team to do the same.
   Commerce does not function with people acting selfishly. It only works with mutual respect—and that includes people who may disagree with one another.
   So, for all those who have forgotten the components of an acceptable letter in modern business practice, here is a link. It is not geared to a general audience, nor do I agree with all of it, but following its components will certainly present a letter which hide how years of law school and legal practice have failed various members of the profession.

I am morally against bank fees, and the ANZ Bank has usually been very good at making sure that I am not charged them.
   However, since late last year, despite protests, they haven’t been able to rid me of a $5 per month charge on an account I have held with the bank since the 1990s.
   So, it’s time to leave.
   I understand that the Taranaki Savings Bank has a no-fee policy for balances over $5,000, and it may be time to go patriotic and support a non-foreign-owned place.
   The problem is: there is a single branch out on Lambton Quay here in Wellington. I have enquired before about how deposits are made but if there are Voxers in New Zealand out there banking with TSB, I’d like to learn how you’ve found the process in practice.
   I also have a US dollar-only account, which TSB told me I could have. It’s also fee-free, which beats the $20 per month charge ANZ makes. So how is TSB when it comes to crediting US dollar cheques for a US dollar account?
   ANZ needs to realize it needs to keep a promise. It said it would fix things. It said that with the demise of the old type of account I had, there would be no difference. On both occasions the bank lied.
   I can afford the $5 but it’s the principle. They are making money off my money. In essence, they are borrowing money from me.
   If I borrow from them, they charge me interest.
   If they borrow from me, I should expect at least that I am not penalized for my generosity.
   This is how banks work.
   Of course, with even banking lawyers fuzzy on their understanding of such fundamental laws as the Bills of Exchange Act 1908, I am not surprised that banks themselves operate on questionable advice.
   They have suckered New Zealanders into expecting that fees are normal. Kiwis, they are not normal. They are actually immoral.
   I don’t think you will find any banker who went through the traditional training who will agree that bank charges make sense.
   Why do you think there are seniors’ packages that are fee-free? Because the seniors remember what banking is really like. Treat them like someone not old enough to have a bus pass and a pension, then you can watch Grey Power revolt.
   TSB customers, give me a shout if you have some advice on how your bank is in real life.
   I want my bank to treat me like an OAP.

N.B.: This does not affect Lucire LLC, only Jack Yan & Associates. It will take me a few weeks to sort this out due to busy-ness, so if clients are reading this, don’t change your payment method just yet!—JY

At least the British don’t pull out feeding tubes.
   In November 2007, it was reported that a 23-year-old woman, Amy Pickard, who had gone into a coma after a drug overdose (sounds familiar?) woke up thanks to the use of a sleeping pill. The pill, Zolpidem, has various side effects for comatose patients. Ms Pickard has even managed to stand.
   This link comes from the Life for Lauren website and I hope that the courts recognize this, along with the testimony of Kate Adamson, who was once diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state. Today, Ms Adamson goes around the US as a motivational speaker.
   Ms Adamson, whom some of you may remember appearing on the news around the time of the Terri Schiavo case, was paralysed from the forehead down. She was operated on with insufficient anæsthetic and surgeons did not care, because they deemed her a vegetable and unable to feel. She felt everything they did.
   She was also starved for eight days after her feeding tube was taken out and recalls it was one of the most painful and inhumane experiences a person can have.
   It was only put back in because her husband, a lawyer who had given up his practice to care for her, threatened to sue everyone’s pants off.
   Her left side is not fully able but Ms Adamson is arguably more productive than many of us with what society deems healthy bodies.
   Lauren Richardson is in a better state than Kate Adamson was, able to respond to her father and her dog, according to a video that has since been removed from YouTube. Yet the courts are so far supporting her mother, who believes her daughter’s feeding tube should be removed.
   Edith Towers, Richardson’s mother, says her daughter told her and another relative that she would not want to live this way, after watching the Terri Schiavo case on television.
   Although this evidence is hearsay—and weak at that—the court in Delaware is giving Towers considerable authority over Richardson’s rights. Her father is fighting that judgement.
   This blog also revealed in comments, which I repeat to save readers from searching, additional facts:

You can go to Lauren’s MySpace page and look to see where she states herself that she got along better with her father then with her mother. However, the verdict was based solely on her mother and her mother’s uncle stating that she had said she did not want to live “like that”.
   Not to mention, if Lauren did say those things in 2005 as told in court, she was on drugs and drinking when [she] made them, and she was not a mother. At the same time she allegedly made these statements one of the two witnesses had just gotten out of a mental institution and one was on drugs himself. These do not seem like they should be admissible to me.
   The week that Lauren “accidentally” overdosed, she had been hiding from her mother who was trying to force her to have an abortion. She had been clean for ten months! Her stuff was packed because that weekend she was going to move in with her dad, because she had asked him to help her with the baby.
   Several doctors have requested to see Lauren and try different treatments. Her mother has refused all of them. Her doctor, who is not a neurologist, told the family that she would not wake up, she would not move her body, that she would not respond to pain, that she would not breathe on her own again, that would not respond to people, that she would not show emotion. She does all of these things. She also can swallow and doctors have said with enough therapy she could eat on her own again. If she had gotten that therapy and could feed herself would we then hold her arms down so she cannot eat?

   Towers has even prevented Richardson from seeing her own daughter, to whom she gave birth last year. What sort of mother is that?
   I would have thought news like Amy Pickard’s would be celebrated. There is so much out there that says that Lauren Richardson is less “vegetative” than these other folks—who got out of far worse states than she finds herself in now.
   The courts do listen to “experts” but they also need to look at the strength of the testimony and subject it to the same rules as they might in criminal cases. We are talking about a human life here, and we can’t kill someone based on hearsay.

I love it. Dr Jay Parkinson of Brooklyn, NY, has gone online with his practice:

http://www.inter-actions.biz/blog/2007/10/is_there_a_doctor_in_the_house.html

That means you can reach him via electronic means and he will do diagnoses accordingly, even after hours for emergencies.
   Now, I would love to see lawyers do this. Even an e-court. Parties or their attorneys feed in their evidence to a site with limited fields and a judge decides. No emotion, no BS. The decision comes swiftly. Any mitigating factors can be fed in, but lawyers would be encouraged to write everything briefly. They would be unable to hide extra charges. And if they think anything’s been missed, then the process could go to appeal before a live court.
   It would lower the price of getting justice because the system would no longer need to support a live District Court, and appeals would be at the current price of the original claim. It would also make things faster.
   Best of all, the legal profession, branded as shysters even in Shakespeare’s day, would appear more transparent. It would start going up the ladder in people’s minds.
   I would love to see a country like Singapore, or even New Zealand, give this sort of thing a shot. Singapore prides itself on e-governmental processes and this would be an ultimate test. New Zealand’s system is far too entrenched but I’d love to see a party adopt this idea.
   It’s far too radical for Labour, and certainly would be gobbledegook for National.
   Greens? United Future? The Alliance?

[Cross-posted] There have been a lot of domestic businesses emailing me of late out of fear that, if they sent me more bulk emails, they would violate the new anti-spam legislation that comes into force in New Zealand tomorrow.
   This has been good in the case of NZ Post, to whom I never gave permission to spam me. It has also allowed me to get off another list that I sent a remove request to some time ago that was not honoured.
   But the majority are from businesses that need to communicate with me as a member of the press. Why they need to verify that I wish to continue on their mailing lists seems a waste of time.
   Of course journalists need to continue receiving press releases, and the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill, in its final draft form, provides an exception for them.
   The interpretation part of any legislation is always interesting as you an infer some of Parliament’s intent there. ‘Consented to receiving’ means, inter alia:

consent that can reasonably be inferred from—
   (A) the conduct and the business and other relationships of the persons concerned; and
   (B) any other circumstances specified in the regulations;

It goes on to provide other interpretations of consent, e.g. when an email address has been ‘conspicuously published by a person in a business or official capacity; and’ there is nothing to suggest that the person does not want to be spammed; and:

   (C) the message sent to that address is relevant to the business, role, functions, or duties of the person in a business or official capacity; but
(b) does not include the circumstances specified in the regulations from which consent cannot be inferred[.]

   For those businesses (like ours) that have mailing lists that only includes people that have specifically and expressly requested to be on it, then this Act presents no problems. The only ones where we have compiled addresses are press mailings, covered by the definition of consent.
   It shows that by respecting laws over a decade before they are drafted, we are sitting pretty.
   In fact, I am not sure how this law might apply to us, with the only problem being false addresses that are fed in to our request forms. It does mean that we need to keep more records, which is a burden on honest businesses.
   We, and the many emailing us, may actually have a final out, with the following not qualifying as unsolicited commercial email (UCE):

provides notification of factual information about a subscription, membership, account, loan, or similar relationship involving the ongoing purchase or use by the recipient of goods or services offered by the person who authorised the sending of the message, or the recipient’s ongoing subscription, membership, account, loan, or similar relationship;

which largely covers notices that we send out.
   I wanted an anti-spam law here in New Zealand because I was getting unsolicited junk email from the ACT Party over the course of maybe one year. But when one considers the bigger picture, the majority of spam in New Zealand is not from New Zealanders. The majority is from American, Russian and eastern European countries, often routing through Far East servers. And this act does nothing to prevent them.
   In that frustration, I foresee a rush to judgement by regular people now panicked by all these extra-cautious requests from companies. What if they had signed up to a list and forgot about it? Does this Act now arm them, making them into amateur Perry Masons who believe that they have one up on legitimate, honest companies? Honest people will be pursued.
   In such a case, is it fair to shift the onus of proof on to the sender, when the sender might not have kept records prior to the Act coming in to force of the original subscribe request?
   I believe honest companies can discharge the onus of proof by providing evidence of how their emailing lists are compiled. In our case, we send an initial email, outlining that someone had signed up with that address. We ask the recipient to notify us immediately in case of fraud. Since 2006, we send out two emails to confirm the fact (one acknowledgement, one confirmation) with clear removal and feedback links.
   Sorry, Kiwis, tomorrow will not be a spam-free day. We will receive as many spams about penis enlargements, drugs and porn as we did today. The same SOBs will email us about wins in lotteries we never entered, or ask if we can transfer funds for some ousted African dictator. It targets the wrong people, but then, Parliament cannot exactly enact laws that go outside our borders—and that is where spam mostly comes from.

Disclaimer: don’t rely just on me. Seek legal advice.

I walked inside and asked if they did circumcisions, as I had recently converted to the Jewish faith. The guy there looked at me puzzled and said, ‘But this is an electronics’ store. How could you possibly get the idea that we would do circumcisions?’
   ‘But it’s on the front of your shop,’ I replied.
   ‘Show me,’ he demanded.
   So I did. Emblazoned on the front of his shop were the words, in Avant Garde Gothic Bold, uppercase, ‘Dick Smith’.

I am joking about the above, and no, I am not Jewish. But I did go to Dick Smith Electronics today and bought a Logitech QuickCam Go webcam after having been asked to appear on al-Jazeera. From there, the problems began. After all, it is the tail end of Mercury retrograde.

• Got home to find that the sealed box was missing the stand.
• Went to a nearer Dick Smith store to be told that they had sold out, but a customer return of the same product had a stand, and that was given to me.
• Began installing software. The box claims it’s very easy: install software; plug in camera; video instantly. The instruction menu warned me to not plug in the camera till prompted.
• Installation froze about three-quarters of the way through. Had to crash out of the program.
• Restarted installation. Program took four minutes to start from the time the CD-ROM was reinserted.
• Installation was slow and took nearly half an hour. At no point was I prompted to ever plug in the camera into the USB port.
• Installation program alerted me, despite the status bar having reached five-sixths of the way, that I should reboot my computer. I clicked ‘OK’. As I did so, the remainder of the installation continued while other programs were crashing around me.
• The installation completed as everything else was shutting down, in the nick of time. A second prompt about rebooting appeared. Still no prompt to plug in the camera.
• Computer rebooted. Started Logitech’s program. It complains that I have not plugged in the camera. I plug it in.
• It asks for a sound check. Lo and behold, it turns out that this device has no microphone built in. Not that there was any warning about this other than a line in the instruction manual. In other words, a regular Joe would not know that he had to buy an optional accessory to be heard. And I am not appearing on telly with my regular headphones on.
• The camera supposedly stands on top of the monitor. I’d like to see it done. Yes, I do have a flat screen. I just assumed the stand would be designed to accommodate both. It isn’t: you need a CRT for it to work. Otherwise, it’s out with the Scotch tape.

   This comedy took around an hour to see its way through, from the time the stand was supplied by Dick Smith (whose service, I should note, was excellent).
   Let’s see how they are when I take this piece of crap back.
   As with most software and hardware I have bought of late, remember the golden rule: do the opposite of what the manual tells you and all will be fine.

So, do you reckon Dick Smith sells Viagra?