Decisions

Court proceedings are initiated when a debtor has fallen behind on his or her payments to such a point that the lender believes that there is a real risk that the individual will default on the loan thereby leaving the lender with a huge financial loss; these court proceedings, usually presided over by a judge or other court appointed officer, issue legal rulings or decisions, otherwise known as court judgments, concerning the method and amount that it to be repaid to the lender. Several factors are used to determine a court judgment and each ruling is unique to the particular situation in question. Determining factors for legal decisions include the amount initially borrowed from the lender, the amount currently still owned on the debt, the available and documented assets, both financial and physical, of the debtor, and the ability or willingness of the debtor to appear before the court.

The most important factor a judge uses to determine the legal and financial ramifications of a defaulted loan is the ability and willingness of the debtor to appear before the court. Many individuals at too embarrassed to appear for the proceedings at all which leaves the judge little option than to decide in the favor of the present lender who first initiated the proceedings. Other individuals simply feel that they do not have means or wherewithal to fight the lender or the legal or financial system. Still others feel that their financial problems will go away if the ignore them or that they can simply start over from scratch.

However, the simple fact is that most judges or other court appointed officers are more sympathetic to an individual who has fallen behind on their loan payments if they show some concern for the situation and make every effort to make the situation right. This means that the debtor can best help his or her situation by representing his or herself in court. Simply by showing up can make a huge difference in the final legal ruling. Only by showing up to the court can a debtor try and explain why he or she has fallen behind in their payments to begin with by emphasizing the personal setbacks that have led to the current financial situation.

Once a judge has taken in into account the personal situation of the debtor, he or she must them take into account the financial realities of the situation. These realities are the amount of the initial loan, the amount already paid back, and the amount still owed. The lower the amount that was initially borrowed then the less hostile the judge will be. It is also a good thing, if the debtor has already repaid some of the loan. This shows that the individual had every intention of repaying the loan. Finally, when deciding court judgments, the judge will consider how much is still owed to lender. The larger the amount owed the more severe the penalties involved with defaulting.

Another concern for the court is how the debtor will be able to repay the loan. It is the responsibility of the prosecuting lender to bring to the court’s knowledge any and all assets that the debtor make have access to. This means that all bank accounts and all owned property must be made public to the court. The court will then use this knowledge to determine how the debtor will repay the defaulted loan.

Court judgments vary in scope and veracity depending on the particular financial situation of the debtor.

About the Author:
You Can Stuff $7,000 Into Your Bank Account In Just 7 Days Thanks To A Renegade Real Estate Investor Willing To Expose Secrets Of The Greedy Gurus. Visit http://www.misuniversity.com

Keyword tags: court judgements

Many personal injury accident claims are made during stressful and often painful periods of a person’s life. For this reason, the claims management companies that facilitate access to justice for people who have been injured through no fault of their own have a duty to make the process as stress-free as possible.

The claimant must know that they can trust the people that they are dealing with – they should not feel harassed, bullied or unsure of what is happening. They should feel that they are in control, and under professional care from a fully qualified solicitor.

The area of personal injury compensation is rightly subject to strict regulation. It is important that a framework is developed in which a claimant can trust that he or she is being given appropriate and honest help and advice.

Not all claims management companies feel the same way, however. There will always be people who attempt to flout the rules in order to make a quick win from injured and stressed people.

Recently the Ministry of Justice issued a warning to the public regarding three businesses acting as claims management companies. The companies have been accused of providing regulated claims management services without authorisation.

They are making unsolicited telephone calls to consumers promoting personal injury claims. Cold calling such as this is now against the law to protect the public from companies such as these. Despite various enquiries the Ministry of Justice has been unable to contact the businesses concerned and has appealed for information to the public – as well as urging them to proceed with caution.

The businesses concerned are National Compensation Consumer Line, Compensation Consumer Survey Line and Personal Injury Hotline.

It is important that the claims management industry does not allow itself to be tarred by charlatans hovering on the fringes of the market. People need to have access to justice. They should not feel in any way stigmatised or unsure about their right to make a claim.

A compensation claim can help insure that fair and appropriate compensation is received. It is important that anyone making a claim for compensation after an accident feels comfortable with the process – they should make sure that they work with a solicitor that understands what they are doing and can help to keep the process stress free. Someone who has suffered an injury has enough on their plate!

Money will not fix everything, or put a stop to the pain or psychological damage. But it can be a useful and important tool to give an accident victim control back over their life, especially if the claimant has had to take time off work or pay large medical bills.

Getting in touch with a professional claims company can be the first stage in moving on with your life after an injury. If you’re planning on making a personal injury claim, you need to ensure that your claims company is regulated, and you need to feel comfortable with the way the claims company treats you, before going ahead.

About the Author:
Jessica A Parker writes on behalf of the National Accident Helpline (http://www.national-accident-helpline.co.uk) and offers insightful advice on personal injury claims and the no win no fee system.

Keyword tags: national accident helpline,compensation,accident,claims,advice,personal injury,no win no fee

The present legal system in Canada has its roots mainly from the English government and its common and statutory laws. The legal system is derived from a number of European systems that were bought to the country in the late 17th century and the early 18th century by different explorers. Even though the indigenous people in the country had their own set of laws and powers, as time passed by the laws of the immigrants who gathered in large numbers came into existence. The conditions went even worse after the English victory over the French in 1759 at Quebec. After this event, the country full fell under the English law. Thus, both the civil and criminal laws of the country are solely based on the British statutory and general laws. Here is a quick brief of the different laws existing in the country and the sources of these laws.

The Constitution of Canada was formed only after the enforcement of the British North Act or the constitution act by the British central government in the year 1867. Though there is no single separate constitution in Canada, the definitions of a separate constitution were given in the Constitution Act in the year 1982. The Constitution of the country divides the government into three main levels, namely the national or federal level, the provincial level of government and the municipal level. Thus, the power and authority to make different laws is divided between the different levels of the government. A federal government or the parliament has the rights to makes laws in fields that are applicable to the entire country while the provincial and municipal governments have the right to make new laws in areas that affect the place or jurisdiction under their control. There may be cases when the jurisdiction of a particular government may overlap.

The Canadian charter of Rights and Freedoms deals with the laws governing the individual’s rights and freedoms. In Canada, the laws corresponding to the person’s rights and freedoms are subject of all the three levels of the government. The first law enacted by the federal government to set out the basic human rights to the people of Canada was in the year 1960. It was commonly known as the Canadian Bill of Rights. Another important act in this respect is the Canadian Human Rights Act or the CHRA, which came into existence in the year 1977. This act was enacted to protect human rights mainly in the area of employment. This charter form the basis of the Canadian Constitution and it applies to all the three levels of government.

While speaking of language rights, the charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada respects two main languages namely English and French as its official languages. Both these languages have equal rights and powers without any partiality for other. Everyone in the country has the right to use either of these languages to speak or write in any public forums. The statutes and the common laws are the two main sources of these laws in Canada. While statutes are codified laws, common laws are imported from British laws.

About the Author:
Ruchand writes for http://www.torontolawyers.ws/dirbrowse-4.htm Toronto Criminal Lawyers Directory and http://www.torontolawyers.ws/dirbrowse-3.htm Toronto DUI Lawyers Directory. Toronto Criminal Lawyers Directory and Toronto DUI Lawyers Directory offer all the information about the leading criminal lawyers and DUI lawyers in Toronto.

Keyword tags: Human Rights

Most of us are aware that Canada is a democratic country. However, how many of us know that it was a British colony until 1857? Yes, the country was one among the British colonies until 1857. The colony was announced as a formal legal country by the enactment of the British North American Act also known as BNA by the British Parliament. Some people even call it the Constitution Act since it led to the formation of the Canadian Constitution. The act outlines the functions of the government and explains the powers of the federal, provincial and municipal governments. Reading further will help you understand the Canadian law and the legal system in the country.

The Constitution act or BNA divided the country into main levels of governments namely the federal level, the provincial level and the municipal or local level. The act also stated separately the responsibilities of each level of government in making laws in the areas that come under their control. Each government works independent of the other in establishing their powers and controlling their jurisdiction. Each level of government has powers to make laws in field allotted to them. However, in some cases, these jurisdictions may overlap, in the sense, the central or federal government can make laws related to marriage and divorce and laws related splitting the properties after divorce are made by the provincial government. Thus, when a couple has to bid farewell to each other in Canada both provincial and federal act comes into the picture.

Now that it is clear that the different levels of Canadian government comes into the picture to deal with a single problem. One needs to understand the relationship between all these levels of government to solve any legal problem. When it comes to laws of Rights and Freedoms, every Canadian citizen is equal under the law irrespective of their race, color, sex and religion. This means that there is no partiality for any particular person in Canada when it comes to the benefits enjoyed from the laws or protection of rights by the Canadian laws.

The Canadian charter made for rights and freedoms also ensures guarantee for democratic rights. It also guarantees respect for two main languages of the country namely French and English.

Having explained about the different levels of government and their powers, one will have the question of who makes all these laws. As mentioned before, Canada is a democratic country and the democracy, in simple terms, is defined as a government of the people, for the people and by the people. Therefore, people are responsible and play a key role in forming up the government. In all the three levels of government, the people who represent the public in making any decisions elect the representatives. Thus the Canadian people act as the key sources in making the laws in Canada. Thus, everyone who is 18 years or more have the responsibility of voting and electing the representative in their jurisdiction.

About the Author:
Ruchand writes for http://www.torontolawyers.ws/dirbrowse-5.htm Toronto Family Lawyers Directory and http://www.torontolawyers.ws/dirbrowse-8.htm Toronto Employment Lawyers Directory. Toronto Family Lawyers Directory and Toronto Employment Lawyers Directory offer all information’s about the leading family lawyers and employment lawyers in Toronto.

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When discussing inappropriate image detection, the most common question posed is “What about false positives?”. In this article, an Irish company explains the issue of false positives in simple terms.

What is a false positive?

One definition of a False Positive is: “A positive test result in a subject that does not possess the attribute for which the test is being conducted.”

Relating this definition to inappropriate images, typically digital pornography, a false positive refers to a benign image, which is incorrectly reported as containing inappropriate content.

Conversely a ‘False Negative’ refers to an image containing inappropriate content, which is not identified as inappropriate and therefore is not reported.

When using software to scan file systems for inappropriate images, auditors are usually more concerned with false positives than false negatives for one simple reason – they can see and measure the false positives because they have been detected. False negatives on the other hand are images which have been missed by the scanning software and therefore do not get presented to the auditor.

The false positive / false negative balance

When creating software applications to find inappropriate images on computer systems, the application developer has to deal with the False Positive versus False Negative balance, such that the software only presents a human auditor with images that are likely to contain inappropriate content yet at the same time does not ignore images containing inappropriate content.

At one extreme, an application could return every image encountered for the auditor to review. While this would definitely capture all inappropriate images, this is clearly unmanageable since the auditor would have to review every image on a computer system.

At the other extreme, an application might only return images which are definitely inappropriate. While this would greatly reduce the number of images viewed by the auditor, a large number of inappropriate images would not be reported by the application if there is any uncertainty at all. Therefore most applications try for a ‘happy medium’ whereby they expect return a manageable number of false positives but will also capture almost all the inappropriate images.

The realities of image analysis.

When setting out to determine whether or not a network contains inappropriate images, it is important to recognize that:

• no software algorithm is 100 percent accurate;
• images are stored in hundreds of files types;
• a high proportion of files residing on the network will be capable of containing images; • a human auditor will have to view and classify the suspect images.

In most cases, there will be a large number of suspect images which need to be reviewed by an auditor many of which will be false positives.

Therefore it is essential to be able to:

• Identify false positives quickly;
• Clear false positives en masse;
• Ensure the same false positives never appear in future scans.

Irish company Approach

That irish company’s image algorithms are tuned to look for multiple facets of an image and make a decision based upon statistical likelihood values that an image contains inappropriate content.

In the case of digital pornography, the Irish company’s image algorithms look for key elements in seven facets of an image:

Such comprehensive analyses result in a published accuracy rate of around 95%

About the Author:
This article was written by Colm Doherty of Pixalert – http://www.pixalert.com – Data Loss Prevention, Email Monitoring Solution, Porn at Work. PixAlert is the market leader in products and services that provide detection of critical data for corporations.

Keyword tags: data loss prevention, block porn, email monitoring solution, data leakage prevention, porn at work

Recent statistics collated during 60 corporate audits undertaken by an Irish company between June and September 2006, found that 31.2% of the 5,000 PCs scanned contained digital pornography or other inappropriate images, 8% of the 5,000 email server accounts and 4.5% of 10,000 file server shares scanned were similarly affected. These figures support the recent Audit Commission’s findings that 47% of reported IT incidents is for accessing inappropriate material.

This may be no surprise to the seasoned IT security professional; who understands the most difficult IT security threat to prevent is that of an ‘insider attack’. Those downloading and distributing inappropriate content will happily ignore corporate policies and will go to extraordinary lengths to bypass corporate protection systems in order to obtain material which, while maybe titillating or amusing for some, more often than not causes offence and distress to those who receive it inadvertently and leaves a latent threat to the corporation inside their defences.

Corporate officers, who have a clear understanding of reputational risk but little experience of IT security, wrongly assume that boundary protection systems will prevent any digital pornography from entering the network.

Unfortunately, there are a myriad of ways that illegal or inappropriate images can get on to the desktop and corporate network other than via the Internet. Typically, a computer will have conventional points of entry such as CD/DVD, Ethernet card, serial and parallel ports; modern connectivity protocols such as USB have opened computers up to multiple new hardware devices with very high data transfer rates. The ability to plug and play using USB has meant an extremely rapid introduction of storage devices such as portable hard drives, PDAs, USB Keys, mobile phones and media players that are very hard for corporations to control.

Unmonitored web activity on computers and PDAs at home is now widespread. This is a situation that will only get worse with the rise in easy instant connectivity to WiFi hotspots and broadband at home. In addition, peer to peer communications, encryption of transmitted data and secure internet connections will all bypass or compromise any corporation’s gateway filtering solutions.

The majority of corporations currently rely solely on image protection at the internet gateway that works by blocking traffic from a banned list of sites or filters out spam emails. But the mere fact that 20,000 new pornographic web pages are launched per day means that it is impossible to keep an up to date list of harmful sites. Such systems, while an essential part of any IT defence solution, can do nothing to counteract increased threats from new technologies such as PDAs, memory sticks, DVDs CDs, digital cameras and camera phones.

Legislation.

Worryingly, in many jurisdictions, corporate officers are largely unaware that they and their companies could be held criminally and civilly liable if illegal images are found on corporate computers. Put simply, there can be huge legal, financial and reputational implications for the corporation and its officers if they do not take appropriate measures to ensure illegal and inappropriate images are not stored on corporate computer systems. Irrespective of any legal penalties, adverse publicity can have a detrimental effect on a corporation’s reputation which can affect trading performance.

How to ‘cover-up’ without a ‘cover-up’.

The shear quantity of images found during audits emphasises the fact that policies and gateway security technologies alone are not sufficient to prevent inappropriate and illegal images in the workplace. Corporations are turning to Auditing and Monitoring corporate IT assets in order to help manage this growing issue.

Image auditing is the preferred route of many corporations and software solutions exist which will scan IT systems for illicit image content held in static files on corporate IT resources. One advantage of image auditing is that no software needs to be deployed on target machines; one disadvantage is that encrypted or password protected files cannot be analysed.

Screen monitoring is often restricted to ‘high risk’ IT assets such as laptops which are rarely connected to the corporate network. Screen monitoring detects illicit images while they are being viewed on the computer screen. One advantage of screen monitoring is that it is ‘always on’ monitoring 24 x 7; one disadvantage is that a company must manage a software deployment to all target PCs. Whichever method is used, three phases are usually employed:

•Discovery;
•Categorisation;
•Reporting.

Discovery: Software solutions use advanced algorithms to provide a statistical likelihood that an image contains illicit material. If an image transgresses a threshold level then it is returned to the auditing or monitoring application for review.

Categorisation: automatic classification of known illicit images, an auditor will review the remaining suspect images for illicit content.

Reporting: automatically generated reports which provide sufficient information for a disciplinary decision to be taken without displaying the image (to prevent potential distress to those viewing the image) or identifying the target (to prevent any prejudice during or after the disciplinary process).

A change in culture is needed Almost all corporates will say they actively discourage access to inappropriate images. They back this up by pointing to the corporate acceptable usage policy and the implementation of boundary protection systems. However, the reality is that almost all establishments, whether they are public limited companies, privately owned companies, central government departments or local government authorities, educational establishments, hospitals, not for profit organisations or religious groups, will have digital pornography residing on their corporate IT assets.

Many companies act by sending out warnings that this sort of behaviour will not be tolerated. An Irish company’s experience is that this achieves little or nothing.

The only way to eradicate illicit image abuse in the workplace is to change the corporate culture; no amount of corporate policies and vocalisation will change it without strong policy enforcement. Nowadays, companies cannot afford to just ‘talk-thetalk’ they must ‘walk-the-walk’. Acceptable levels of behaviour should be clearly defined; penalties for breach of corporate policy should be well understood and staff should know that the organisation is actively auditing or monitoring corporate IT assets and such penalties will be brought to bear on anyone caught breaching policy.

At the same time staff should be fully aware of what actions to take if they accidentally receive, view or uncover inappropriate image material.

About the Author:
This article was written by Colm Doherty of Pixalert – http://www.pixalert.com – Data Loss Prevention, Email Monitoring Solution, Porn at Work. PixAlert is the market leader in products and services that provide detection of critical data for corporations.

Keyword tags: data loss prevention, block porn, email monitoring solution, data leakage prevention, porn at work