Civil tribunals in Australia (an equivalent of small claim courts in other countries) do not involve lawyers in vast majority of cases and encourage self-representation instead.
In fact, the NSW Civil Administrative Tribunal explicitly requires the Tribunal’s explicit permission for a person to be represented by somebody else, including a lawyer.
But tribunal's decision is binding on the commercial entity, should it be found at fault and incurs penalties for avoidance or non-compliance with the decision.
> do not involve lawyers in vast majority of cases and encourage self-representation instead.
Sure, but if it's a corporation, who is going to represent the corporation besides a lawyer? In the US, some states explicitly do not allow a lawyer and require a different officer of the company represent them, but plenty do allow lawyers.
If Paris is taking Apple to the tribunal, there's no single human equivalent to Paris on Apple's side. This seems like the exact sort of situation where a lawyer is approved to represent somebody else.
You also get things like Stripe with mandatory arbitration. The arbitrator is chosen by Stripe. Naturally arbitrator wants to keep Stripe as a client.
Stripe terms allow them to hold the funds until 'investigation' is concluded but while held, they have the right to invest the funds and keep the profit.
> Sure, but if it's a corporation, who is going to represent the corporation besides a lawyer?
Under common law, lawyers (in the US sense) are not required on either side in the case of handling a dispute or a small claim.
Specifically in Australia, the company would have a complaint department, and the case would be dealt with by a complaint officer, not a lawyer.
If the scope of the case exceeds the tribunal's authority, the case is handled in the state's district court or in a federal court for cross-jurisdictional matters. The official title of the person representing the defendant (e.g. a company) in a courtroom is the barrister, but the case documentation and legal advice are provided by a solicitor.
Hi, I’m closely involved in xCAT cases for my Australian organisation.
We send an in-house lawyer to represent us at every mediation and hearing.
Every complaint that goes to an official body is dealt with by the lawyers at that point. Only if they complain directly to us does our “complaints department” handle it.
I can't speak for CAT's outside NSW, but in NSW, under section 45 of the «Civil and Administrative Tribunal Act 2013 (NSW)», a party (including a company that is the respondent) is not entitled to be represented by any person unless NCAT grants leave (permission) for representation[0], which is a separate step – the company must seek leave first for each case.
Only certain NCAT case types give an automatic right to representation, so a company can have a «lawyer» appear without seeking leave. NCAT’s own guidance[1] lists these as:
Administrative review and regulation
Professional discipline
Retail leases
Then there is also a separate provision in the Consumer and Commercial Division for high value claims (e.g. over AU$30k) – NCAT’s guideline indicates it will usually permit legal representation where the other party has a lawyer, where there are complex issues, or where a party would be disadvantaged without representation.
Since I do not know the nature and specifics of your Australian organisation, I have nothing else of significance to contribute on that particular topic.
To sum it up, the most common dispute scenarios involve the following sequence of events: consumer ↝ complaint department ↝ state/federal level regulator, e.g. Department of Fair Trading (NSW), ACCC (federal) or similar ↝ ombudsman or xCAT or a court. The regulatorory step can sometimes be skipped.
> You could own a microwave, but there doesn't have to be a button that makes it run with the door open. The UI of devices doesn't let just anything happen.
And where is the UI capability that prevents microwave users from putting liquids (e.g. grape juice) that generate plasma storms inside the microwave and often result in fires? Or, as a bonus, crinkled foil.
To state the matter bluntly – the entire diatribe concerning the system’s role in defining capabilities is as constructive as insisting that every computing device and appliance on the planet must implement B2-level RBAC and capability-based controls – an argument so unmoored from practical reality that one wonders whether its proponent has ever been burdened by implementation.
The UI is missing because the law doesn't require it. That's why it's possible to by tablesaws without a SawStop like safety mechanism despite it being superior to have (ignoring price). Some people will choose the cheaper and less safe option because they don't value safety as much.
To be able to fully comprehend Perl (even without having to embrace it), one needs a fiddle.
Perl and some of Perl's quirks will make more sense once you realise that it is deeply rooted in
UNIX command line utilities, UNIX conventions and some UNIX shell defaults, except when it is not, i.e.
- What is `$_`?
$_ follows the spirit of shell variables (such as $*, $@, $! etc., heavily used in Korn, Bourne flavours but not the C flavours), but was repurposed or – more likely – picked from a pool of vacant characters with the help of a dice roll. Kind of like how ancient Egyptians built the pyramids with the help of sophisticated cranes and machinery and then vapourised their tools with high-particle beams to leave future generations guessing «how on Earth did they manage to do that». This is one of the main criticisms of Perl.
- What is this BEGIN block at the start of this Perl file? Why is that necessary?
Perl started out as an improvement over «awk», and BEGIN is an awk construct where it is used frequently, e.g. awk 'BEGIN { IFS=":" } { … do something … }'
- What does chomp do when it's just on its own line, with no arguments given to it?
It follows the standard convention of UNIX utilities that expect the input to come from the standard input stream (file descriptor 0 or <file-in in the shell) when no input file name has been specified. So, when no <FILE1> given to chomp, it chomps on the standard input.
> I don't see any evidence Ofcom is currently asking anyone else to enforce their laws. As far as I can they're currently simply taking the steps they can themselves to enforce their laws - i.e. as far as people in the US go sending letters.
It is even more nuanced than that: whilst Ofcom absolutely has legal enforcement powers under UK law – but they are regulatory / civil powers, not criminal powers like the police.
Therefore, it probably can even be argued (by deduction as I do not have a degree in law) that particularly in the cross-jurisdictional scenario, Ofcom’s whining about the non-compliance of a website with UK law is null and void.
> Therefore, it probably can even be argued (by deduction as I do not have a degree in law) that particularly in the cross-jurisdictional scenario, Ofcom’s whining about the non-compliance of a website with UK law is null and void.
I see absolutely no argument for this. The UKs regulations here that Ofcom is the enforcement agency for are explicitly extra-territorial in nature. That doesn't mean that Ofcom can successfully get other countries to help them enforce their laws (or can invade other countries to enforce them themselves) but they clearly have the power to act within the UK to enforce their laws against people in other jurisdictions. For instance to levy fines that will be on the books should those people come to the UK in the future.
I wonder whether the regulatory / civil vs criminal distinction plays a role here.
It is plausible to assume that, at any given time, a random person from the juridisction A is in breach of compliance of jurisdiction B – knowingly or unknowingly to them. Jurisdiction B granting itself extra-territorial regulatory / civil (not criminal) enforcement powers puts the nationals of the entire jurisdiction A into non-compliance and subject to fines or arrests at the cross-border point. It is, of course, perfectly legally possible, yet surreal.
Curiously, what the UK is attempting in this instance closely mirrors the approach adopted by the CCP with the National Security Law in Hong Kong, wherein they asserted their own authority to indict any individual, of any nationality, residing in any jurisdiction, for alleged breaches of the Hong Kong NSL.
Whilst it is abundantly clear that the primary focus is Hong Kong pro-democracy activists holding multiple citizenships, they have also stated – with calculated lack of emphasis – that non-Hong Kong persons may likewise be targeted.
> So no, there are plenty of easy ways to fool the optimizer by obfuscation.
If you mean fooling the compiler by the source code obfuscation, it won't – by the time the first optimisation pass arrives, the source had already been transformed into an abstract syntax tree and the source code obfuscation becomes irrelevant.
Multiple optimiser passes do take place, but they are bounded in time – it is not an accepted expectation that the optimiser will spend a – theoretically – indefinite amount of time trying to arrive at the most perfect instruction sequence.
There was a GNU project a long time ago, «superoptimiser», which, given a sequence of instructions, would spend a very long time trying to optimise it into oblivion. The project was more of an academic exercise, and it has been long abandoned since.
It is, of course, well known – or at the very least frequently and enthusiastically repeated – that a suitably drunk Odersky devised Scala whilst watching a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup ad[0].
Laminated glass does not prevent routine stone chip events – if a tiny fragment of the stone becomes wedged in the outer ply or at the laminate interface at a tension point and, coupled with the temperature difference (inside the cabin vs ambient), cabin pressure and body flex that often place higher tensile stress lower on the windscreen, the crack can start propagating very quickly.
That was my experience earlier in the year: I was driving alongside a large fuel tanker on a city road when a tiny stone chip, probably thrown up from under the tanker’s tyres, struck the front windscreen. It took about an 1 ½ hour for the initially invisible crack to spread into an irreparable 30 cm one – effectively right in front of my eyes – and the windscreen had to be replaced. Lesson learned: do not drive anywhere near large trucks or fuel tankers or maintain a larger distance.
But the laminated glass will prevent the structural collapse of the windshield and will also prevent the occupants from being showered with glass shards. It is also more likely that the windshield will withstand an impact from a large stone, leaving a localised and static crack that can be repaired with resin.
> ...and will also prevent the occupants from being showered with glass shards.
Hasn't it been the case for a long time now that glass in automobiles is coated so that it breaks into small, generally-square fragments, rather than shards?
I've never smashed a window myself, but every couple of months, I see the remains of a window smashing on the sidewalk... it's always a pile of small, generally-square fragments.
My memory tells me that this design was mandated long ago because folks would get shards embedded in them effectively forever. One of my parents related a story that one of the parents up the tree would irregularly have to extract migrating glass shards breaking through the skin of his face that had been embedded during an automobile accident many years prior. But, perhaps that story is bullshit and completely fabricated, IDK.
That's tempered glass which breaks into the safer fragments. Still not completely safe obviously, especially if stuff is getting thrown around violently in an accident. The bigger safety case for laminated glass though is since it sticks together your body or limbs can't fly out through it in a rollover accident (even if belted can happen on the sides). There's also some fringe benefits: noise isolation, UV protection, and supposedly more annoying for thieves.
Apple Pty Ltd, PO Box A2629, Sydney South NSW 1235
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