law ↘↖
Groups of bicycle-riding vigilantes have been repainting 14 blocks of Williamsburg roadways ever since the city sandblasted their bike lanes away last week at the request of the Hasidic community. The Hasids, who have long had a huge enclave in the now-artist-haven neighborhood, had complained that the Bedford Avenue bike paths posed both a safety and religious hazard. Scantily clad hipster cyclists attracted to the Brooklyn neighborhood made it difficult, the Hasids said, to obey religious laws forbidding them from staring at members of the opposite sex in various states of undress. These riders also were disobeying the traffic laws, they complained.
— Hipsters repaint bike lanes in brush off to Hasids - NYPOST.com
A designated survivor (or designated successor) is a member of the United States Cabinet who stays at a physically distant, secure, and undisclosed location when the President and the country’s other top leaders (e.g., vice president, secretary of state) are gathered at a single location, such as during State of the Union Addresses and presidential inaugurations. This maintains continuity of government with regard to presidential succession in the remote possibility of a catastrophic event which might wipe out large portions of the United States’ federal government, including the entire slate of individuals designated by law in the line of succession to the presidency. Since U.S. law does not provide for anyone to assume the office of president if everyone on this list is simultaneously killed, the practice of designating a survivor is intended to effectively eliminate the chance of that happening.
Does writing a blog constitute work? That appears to be the position of the New York State Department of Labor, which recently declared a laid-off attorney ineligible for unemployment benefits because she was bringing in $1.30 a day from blog ads.
— Lawyer’s Unemployment Benefits Yanked Over $1 A Day From Blog - Forbes.com
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“A farmer sprayed milk on policemen during a protest against falling milk prices outside the E.U.’s headquarters in Brussels.”
As Ikea opened stores across Russia, and became one of the most outspoken Western corporate critics of Russian corruption, renting generators to thwart extortion from power companies became standard practice. Ikea executives took great pride in their creative solution — renting generators “instead of putting ourselves into a squeeze,” as Christer Thordson, an Ikea board member and global director of legal affairs, put it in an interview. But Russian graft may have proved more stubborn than Ikea. The board of Ikea’s operating company, which is based in the Netherlands, has concluded that the Russian executive hired to manage the generators was taking kickbacks from the rental company to substantially inflate the price of the service. Ikea said that such a fraud could cost it about $196 million over two years. Ikea canceled the contract and sought redress in Russian civil court. But in rulings over the last two weeks, Ikea has lost another 5 million euros in damages that the judges awarded the generator rental company for breach of contract.
— Ikea Tries to Build a Case Against Russian Graft - NYTimes.com
Nerd Law is some policy that can only be enforced by a piece of code, a public standard, or terms of service. For example, under no circumstances will a police officer throw you to the ground and introduce you to his friend the Tazer if you crawl a website and disrespect the robots.txt file. The only way to adjudicate Nerd Law is to write about a transgression on your blog and hope that it gets to the front page of Digg. Nerd Law is the result of the pathological introversion software engineers carry around with them, being too afraid of confrontation after that one time in high school when you stood up to a jock and ended up getting your ass kicked.
— Firefox passive-aggressives adjudicate Nerd Law • The Register
In a move that will likely get California’s consumers in a huff, impending legislation may soon restrict the paint color options for Golden State residents looking for their next new vehicle. The specific colors that are currently on the chopping block are all dark hues, with the worst offender seemingly the most innocuous color you could think of: Black. What could California possibly have against these colors, you ask? Apparently, the California Air Resources Board figures that the climate control systems of dark colored cars need to work harder than their lighter siblings – especially after sitting in the sun for a few hours.
— California to reduce carbon emissions by… banning black cars?!
There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates.
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The Inexact Science Behind DMCA Takedown Notices
“The researchers rigged the software agents to implicate three laserjet printers, which were then accused in takedown letters by the M.P.A.A. of downloading copies of “Iron Man” and the latest Indiana Jones film.”
