Natural Law vs. Positivism

The philosophy of law is a complex and in depth study, which requires an intimate knowledge of the legal process in general as well as a philosophical mind.  For centuries, the scope and nature of law has been debated and argued from various view points, and intense intellectual discussion has arisen from the fundamental question of 'what is law'.  In response, several major schools of thought have been born, of which the natural law scholars and positivists are two of the most notable.  These two camps hold strictly contrasting views over the role and function of law in certain circumstances, and have provided in themselves platforms for criticism and debated which continue to be relevant today.

Although the classifications of natural law and positivism are frequently used, it is important to remember that they cover a very wide range of academic opinion.  Even within each camp, there are those veering towards more liberal or more conservative understandings, and there is also naturally a grey area.  Having said that, academics and philosophers can be enveloped by one of the categories on the basis of certain fundamental principles within their writings and opinions.  

Natural law has always been linked to ultra-human considerations, that is to say a spiritual or moral influence determinant of their understandings of the way law operates.  One of the founding principles is that an immoral law can be no law at all, on the basis that a government needs moral authority to be able to legislate.  For this reason, natural law theories have been used to justify anarchy and disorder at ground level.  This had lead to widespread criticism of the natural law principles, which have had to be refined and developed to fit with modern thinking.  On the flip side, natural law has been used as a definitive method of serving 'justice' to war criminals and former-dictators after their reign.  

Some of the strongest criticisms of natural law have come from the positivist camp.  Positivism holds at its centre the belief that law is not affected by morality, but in essence is the source of moral considerations.  Because morality is a subjective concept, positivism suggests that the law is the source of morality, and that no extra-legal considerations should be taken in to account.  Positivism has been criticised for allowing extremism and unjust actions through law.  It has also been suggested that positivism in its strictest sense is flawed because it ignores the depth and breadth of language in legal enactment, which means the positive law can be read in different lights based on differing meanings of the same word. Despite this, positivism has been seen as one of the fundamental legal theories in the development of modern legal philosophy over the last few decades, and is winning widespread favour through a contemporary academic revival.


Natural law and positivism have been the subject of an ongoing academic debate into the nature of law and its role within society.  Both respective legal schools have criticised and built on one and others theories and principles to create a more sophisticated philosophical understanding of the legal construct.  Although the debate is set to continue with a new generation of promising legal theorists, both natural law and positivism have gained widespread respect for their consistency and close analyses of the structure of law.

Natural Law Theory

In attempting to garner an understanding of the nature of law, early legal philosophers and academics formulated what has come to be known as the natural law theory, and has become a literal cornerstone of the development of modern legal thinking.  Although somewhat limited in modern jurisprudential thinking, natural law has had a tremendous impact on our understanding of what law means in society as a baseline from which to build more complex theories.  In this article, we will look at some of the major propositions underpinning the concept of natural law, and the corresponding strengths and weaknesses of this fundamental interpretation of the legal function.

Natural law starts with the basic premise that the law is driven by morality, and consequently is affected by it.  With a history extending back to Aristotle and other early philosophers, the natural law theory has traditionally linked the law with religion and an innate sense of justice, rather than the more pragmatic approaches of some other theories.  Although this might sound rather basic, the principals have been developed and refined through academic debate for centuries ultimately leading to a far more sophisticated theory of the nature of law.  The idea that all law is subject to an unwritten code of morality is fundamental to natural law.  This also throws up some potential problems in terms of civil regulation.  Certain natural law theorists suggest that for a law to be binding on the citizen, it must conform to this sense of natural justice.  However, there is clearly no definitive objective concept of morality, which casts doubt over this principle.  Additionally, the prospect that a law may be disregarded in favour of some higher sense of morality doesn't conform in reality, considering the potential implications of consistently disregarding law on the grounds of the subjective concept of justice.  

Furthermore on this primitive understanding of natural law, the citizen in contravention to the laws of his state, could attempt to excuse his actions through a justification of 'immoral' laws.  This would also create a state of disorder, given the natural variation of personal opinions, which would ultimately render society unworkable.  For this reason, the natural law scheme has failed to garner modern academic acceptance, of course with a few exceptions.

Natural law has been proposed as a consideration in trying war criminals, on the basis of the retrospectivity principle, i.e. no man can be tried for a crime that was not a crime when he committed it.  Many war criminals are merely cogs in the machine of a legal regime, which ultimately permits their actions, however unjustifiable morally.  Natural law theories give a basis for challenge on these grounds, whilst avoiding the awkward question of direct legal contravention, which ultimately works to serve justice.  In this sense, it is perhaps useful as a canon of interpretation and in determining just and equitable outcomes in 'difficult' cases.  However, as a wider legal concept, natural law and the proposed intersection between law and morality seems too awkward to reconcile with considered academic legal understandings.  Having said that, natural law has provided an excellent starting position for further advanced argumentation, and has provided a platform for critique that has been essential to the development of the more sophisticated ideas held in regard in this modern day.

The products are a response to the growing

Dell on Tuesday announced the release of its first purpose-built industrial PC products for the mainstream market: the Embedded Box PC 3000 Series and 5000 Series.

The products are a response to the growing embedded computing market and the lack of reliable devices, Dell said.

The embedded systems market was valued at more than US$11 billion in 2014 and is expected to reach $23.1 billion in 2019, growing at a compound annual rate of almost 15 percent, according to a Technavio study that Dell cited.

Falling component costs, improved power efficiencies, increasing return-on-investment needs, and demand from the Internet of Things are fueling that growth.

Known Quantity

"Customers have consistently told us that current embedded solutions do not meet the level of cost-effective sophistication, scale and support they need for these to be a critical, reliable component of their operations," said Andy Rhodes, Dell's executive director of commercial IoT solutions.

Dell provides global scale and an end-to-end IT and operations technology security portfolio, he said.

The products' rugged design can withstand extreme temperatures while using a fanless cooling system, which is beneficial in several applications, according to Dell spokesperson Sarah Luden.

"These were made to be used in a wide range of industries, from digital signage to factory automation and transportation and construction. Within factory automation, the fan is the first thing to go down," she told TechNewsWorld.

"It's also much quieter, so in a hospital setting, think of MRI machines, where patient care and comfort is important," Luden added.

The IoT is a new arena for many business owners, and investing in costly computers and programmers can be a scary proposition, she noted. "For some people, the Internet of Things is new, so they want to go with a brand they know."

Why This Box Is Different

What makes the Dell PC appealing is its out-of-the-box capabilities, said Christian Juarez, an instructor at TechShop.

Dell Embedded Box PC

The IoT is helping industries streamline their processes to make work more efficient. "The whole point of IoT is bringing everything to the cloud and then connecting to the Internet and then having a control center for it," Juarez told TechNewsWorld.

"What happens a lot of times is that you have to set up the control center yourself. If you're setting it up yourself, as opposed to what Dell's offering, you have to decide on your distro, have all kinds of software running to get everything working together, you have to code things yourself, things of that nature," he said.

"With Dell, they have software built in for you, so you don't have to do that much. Software can be a huge issue, so with something like an out-of-the-box embedded machine you're going to appeal to a lot more people," Juarez added.

Microcomputers like Raspberry Pi are used for control centers, he noted, but that kind of device requires expert-level programming skills that a Dell doesn't necessarily need, which may help companies save money in the long run.

The Embedded Box PCs will be available this summer. Pricing starts at $1,099 for the 3000 series and $1,699 for the 5000 series.


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Windows 10 Gains on 7, Inch by Inch

Windows 10 last month had more user share than Windows XP and Windows 8, according to data released by NetMarketShare.

It held 11.85 percent of the global OS market, though Windows 7 was still No. 1 with 52.47 percent.

Though adoption has slowed, the NetMarketShare numbers helped validate Microsoft's claim last month that Windows 10 was active on 200 million devices.

Hot Start

Windows 10 dashed out to a 4.8 percent gain in user share in August, after launching the previous month. For January, the OS gained about 1.9 percent of global user share.

That gain was the biggest the OS has seen since August, and a holiday bump in PC sales may have boosted January's jump.

"Windows 10 is off to the hottest start in Windows history," Microsoft said in comments provided to the E-Commerce Times by spokesperson Carmen Vasilatos. It is "already running on more than 200 million devices, with unprecedented early demand from consumers and enterprise customers."

Microsoft attributed much of that momentum to its free upgrade offer. The upgrade was available to users running legitimate installations of Windows 7 and higher.

"With 300 million new PCs expected to ship in 2016 alone, we're looking forward to a great year ahead, along with our partners," Microsoft said.

The Surface: Windows 10's Interface

Microsoft hasn't explained the jump from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, skipping over what would have been Windows 9.

Windows 8, and the Metro tiles it brought with it, turned a lot of people off, but people seem to appreciate the Windows 10 interface, according to Joe Silverman, owner of New York Computer Help.

"Windows 10 was well-reviewed by our technicians and customers in regard to its interface, especially from Windows 8," he told the E-Commerce Times.

Really Getting to Know Windows 10

Two separate tales have been playing out among Windows 10 migrants, according to Silverman.

Customers who bought new computers with Windows 10 preinstalled have been "relatively happy," but the story often is different for those upgrading to the OS, which he described as a potential memory hog after system updates slowed it down.

"At first, customers gladly upgraded to Windows 10 as it is a free upgrade," Silverman said. "Soon after, they complained about the slowness, and we have seen the aftereffects by customers requesting us to downgrade their computers to Windows 7 or 8."

It may be time for another major marketing push: The message of frustrated Windows 10 users has spread inside the tech community, according to Silverman.

"As such, other computer users are leery of performing the upgrade and shied away from installing Windows 10," he said. "It is likely the slow adoption of upgrading Windows 10 will continue due to the negative reviews it is getting."


Source by: http://www.technewsworld.com

Wall Street Backs Off Apple

Their fears confirmed, investors were bearish on Apple Wednesday, the day after the company reported its slowest-growth quarter ever. The company's shares closed the day at US$93.44, down 6.55 percent.

In its Q1 earnings report, Apple prepared investors for what may come next: its weakest quarter for iPhone sales in 13 years. Even worse is that the company may not see a significant boost in handset sales until the launch of the iPhone 7 later this year.

Apple moved about 74.8 million iPhones during the quarter that ended in January, and the company forecast sales of between 50 and 52 million units during the three-month period that will end in March.

The news of Apple's slowing growth came on the heels of reports detailing the rise of Alphabet, Google's recently formed parent company, valued at around $500 billion.

For now, Apple is still the world's most valuable company, with a valuation of around $562 million.

Apple reported that it sold about 16 million iPads and 5.3 million Macs in Q1 -- down about 25 percent and 4 percent, respectively, from the year-ago quarter.

Keeping the Faith

Taking note of the general saturation of the smartphone market, many investors have been turning to Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon for growth. However, those companies rely on ad revenues, which could prove more volatile than Apple's handsets reliance.

Though hardware accounts for more than half of Apple's business, the company has been pivoting toward services, noted Larry Chiagouris, professor of marketing at Pace University'sLubin School of Business.

That should count for something with investors, he said.

"Its ecosystem, to include iTunes and iCloud services, are either already dominant or possibly on the way to being dominant, and so this is not the time to lose faith in the company or its stock," Chiagouris told the E-Commerce Times.

The current perceived loss of faith likely is a byproduct of the times, he suggested. In a connected world, speed rules and investors don't hesitate to look elsewhere for growth when a company stumbles.

Also, investors are more influenced by media reports today than they were a decade or two ago, Chiagouris pointed out.

"All the reporting as of late has been on iPhone sales slowing, and so investors are reacting to these reports," he said. "The more important fact is that, ultimately, hardware companies always confront shrinking margins as the products that they make begin to become less differentiated or even commoditized."

Too Big to Fail

Paradoxically, investor disappointment might be a consequence of Apple's historic rise to become the most valuable company in the world and its position at or near the top of any list of most-respected organizations, suggested Ritch Blasi, president of MediaRitch.

"By continually overachieving in offering innovative products and services, and outperforming financial targets, it has become a darling of investors," Blasi told the E-Commerce Times. "Apple's latest numbers are viewed as not quite up to snuff, and the financial markets are feeling jittery."

While investors may want to hedge some of their bets by looking elsewhere, it would be premature to count Apple out, he said. The company didn't become this powerful by chance.

"While it may never again have the impact magnitude it did when introducing the iPhone," said Blasi, "expect Apple to rebound from this financial burp and continue on its course of changing the way we work and live."


Source by: http://www.technewsworld.com

Major Security Flaw Found in Silent Circle's Blackphone

Security researchers at SentinelOne on Wednesday revealed a vulnerability they discovered in the Blackphone.

The flaw -- an obscure socket -- lets an attacker take over and control communications on the Blackphone, a highly secure Android smartphoneSilent Circle developed and marketed in reaction to news of government surveillance of people's communications.

Silent Circle began taking preorders for the device in 2014, and "despite [its] best attempts, a severe zero day remained undetected for nearly a year before we uncovered it," said Tim Strazzere, SentinelOne's director of mobile research.

No Evidence of Exploitation

The vulnerability, a socket left open and accessible on the Nvidia Icera modem used in the Blackphone, lets attackers take control of many of the modem's functions, including sending and receiving text messages, dialing or connecting calls, and changing the phone's settings.

Attackers could use a malicious application that exploits the vulnerability in the background without the device owner's knowledge, Strazzere told TechNewsWorld.

Exploit-based attacks would be used against this open socket, and "any antivirus- or antimalware-based technology wouldn't prevent it," he observed. "Even an HIPS-based solution that focused on exploits would have missed it since this is a zero-day-based vulnerability with no available signatures used for protection."

The options available to an attacker "are extensive," Strazzere remarked, but "we have seen no evidence that [it] was ever used for surveillance or malicious purposes."

The vulnerability was discovered during a reverse engineering exercise to prepare for a Red Naga training session. Red Naga is a security training group Strazzere and friends created to teach, train and grow the mobile security community at no cost.

The Icera modem is fairly obscure, used only by the Nvidia Shield tablet and "a few phones in India," Strazzere noted.

Because it's obscure, few security researches have looked into it, and devices in the field "might not be getting updates or the attention that more popular modems would receive," he said.

Following notification from SentinelOne, Silent Circle patched the vulnerability, which was found on the Blackphone 1.

It's not clear whether it exists in the Blackphone 2, which Silent Circle released in September.

The Third-Party Risk Factor

It's possible the socket was left open for debugging purposes in preproduction and was mistakenly left that way in production devices, Strazzere speculated.

Most mobile makers use third-party technology.

Third parties for both hardware and software components "are part of the supply chain for mobile device manufacturers and represent a significant risk," said Tim Erlin, director of IT security and risk strategy for Tripwire.

However, providing assurance for both hardware and software "has really been limited to high-level government equipment, so there are few assurance operations [for] the consumer goods market," he told TechNewsWorld.

Third-party providers typically are granted access to critical elements of the internal infrastructure and to sensitive data, said István Szabó, product manager at BalaBit. One remedy would be to monitor and record all activities when third parties access internal systems.

Such monitoring "gives the mobile device producer the ability to detect and immediately terminate sessions if something suspicious occurs ... and provides important evidence to help investigations should an incident occur," he told TechNewsWorld.

Another option is to use a behavioral-based technology such as the one SentinelOne offers to detect, prevent and remediate against attacks.

Silent Circle did not respond to our request to comment for this story.


Source by: http://www.technewsworld.com

iPhone Sales Could Be Slowing

In the runup to the release of Apple's Q1 2016 earnings report Tuesday, one of the big unanswered questions was whether the iPhone could maintain its sales momentum.

Q1 2015 iPhone sales hit a record 74.5 million units, and it's possible the latest quarter's shipments may not equal -- let alone exceed -- that mark.

IDC has forecast of slowing sales industrywide for 2016. The smartphone market will see the first single-digit growth year ever.

The slowdown in China's economy, weak demand for the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, and sluggish Apple Watch sales are also of concern.

However, "we think sales are actually going to be up in volume this year compared to a year ago," said Jeff Orr, a senior practice director at ABI Research.

First, China is still a great opportunity despite the slowing down of its economy, and second, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus were launched "a little later than iPhones used to be launched previously, so we aren't sure whether or not they'll hinder Apple's quarter," he told the E-Commerce Times.

Great Expectations

Apple historically has exceeded analysts' expectations while playing down its performance prior to releasing its earnings reports.

FactSet StreetAccount estimated Apple sold 75.5 million iPhones in the quarter -- surpassing the previous year's record by about 1 million units, according to news reports.

FBR, which slashed its estimates for iPhone 6s sales in December, earlier this month predicted a huge uptick for the upcoming iPhone 7 and dismissed investors' fears about slowing growth at Apple as being overblown, while acknowledging the company has been through a rough patch.

The market agrees -- Apple shares were up by US$1.28 to $100.72 at the time of writing.

"Should we expect any company to keep setting records year over year? The answer is no," Orr said. "The problem Apple has is that investors always expect it to show a meteoric performance. The question is, at what point do you become disgruntled because you don't get meteoric performance out of the company?"

Leveraging Preowned Phones

Sales of refurbished smartphones are taking off, and Apple has ventured into this area.

Refurbished iPhones "can be sold in price-sensitive but growing markets without any brand dilution," pointed out Andreas Scherer, managing partner at Salto Partners.

"It could be tempting to develop a cheaper product that's being sold utilizing a different brand name in order to win in Africa, India and Indonesia, but the better strategy is to sell refurbished iPhones," he told the E-Commerce Times.

Grabbing Market Share

In the future, the replacement business will outpace the new phone business, ABI's Orr suggested.

"For Apple the issue no longer will be offering items good enough for first-time buyers to purchase an Apple product; it will be about getting Android or Microsoft phone users to switch," he explained.

It's "getting increasingly difficult to get that kind of differentiation, but that's not just an Apple problem. It's the same thing Samsung has been facing over the past two years and being hammered by investors over," Orr said.

Where Apple Might Go

Apple "needs to continue to win in its core markets," Scherer observed. That means "relentlessly focusing on replacing existing iPhones with newer versions" in markets such as the United States, and introducing upgrade incentive programs and incentives to buy additional phones as part of family plans through carriers.

Perhaps Apple could move away from its image as the largest manufacturer of smartphones, Orr said.

"We're hearing talk about moving the audio jack and creating a new accessories market that's exclusive and led by Apple -- Beat headphones and other products using the Lightning connector or wireless interfaces," he elaborated.

Other possibilities for Apple are wireless charging, improving battery life, wraparound screens, incorporating OLED technologies, and making iPhones "more user-proof and water-resistant," Orr suggested.


Source by: http://www.technewsworld.com