Buy Titled Plots from Atlantic Titles Ltd

Buy a plot of land in the Atlantic starting at only £29.99, together with title “Warlord of Atlantis”!

You may style yourself “Warlord of Atlantis”
When you buy land from Atlantic Titles, you will become the beneficial owner of the plot of land that you selected. Whilst all people are free to refer to themselves as Warlords, it is only those who own land sold by us that have a genuine reason to do so.

Style Continuing Power of Attorney

In a recent court decision ¹ the Sheriff has questioned whether a commonly used style of deed of Continuing Power of Attorney in fact complies with the requirements of s15 of the Adults With Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000². Perhaps a little embarassing for the Office of the Public Guardian, it is the style they themselves suggest on their website³

Tartan Nation

Tartan is synonymous with Scotland. Whether or not we invented it, we have appropriated it as a symbol of our nation and it is one of the elements which all foreigners recognise as “Scottish”.

Kant get service – putting it through the Mills

A gentleman on Twitter made an interesting comment: “If you’re OK with Selfridges refusing to serve the EDL, you also need to be OK with B&Bs refusing gay couples”.¹

This is a very thought provoking statement, but also in my opinion quite wrong. Unfortunately Twitter may be a great forum for quick conversations with a range of people, but it’s not so good for debating complex philosophical issues, so this post intends to explain why I believe this.

View through a Crystal Ball darkly…

Inspired by an interesting talk by SF writer Charlie Stross¹ about what society might be like in 40-50 years time, I was thinking about what the Scottish Legal Profession might be like in a similar timescale. The problem as Mr Stross points out is that it is fairly easy to extrapolate current trends over the next 10 years, but after that you know that currently unforeseeable events will occur and change things significantly.

Paying the Victim Bill

The new Victims and Witnesses (Scotland) Bill has been introduced at the Scottish Parliament¹, intended to give victims and witnesses more information on the progress of court cases, and compensate the victims of crime for their losses. All very laudable, but there are a few issues with the proposed legislation that should be addressed.

Torrents of Abuse

In recent news reports an Austrian man William Weber was charged in connection with distributing child pornography because illegal images were detected being transferred by his computer. Just another pervert getting caught? No, because this Server computer was in fact a “Tor Exit Node”, so the data going through it was nothing to do with him.

Reach out and Touchscreen

Touchscreen are now becoming ubiquitous on smart phones and other gadgets, and new computer Operating Systems are now start to include touchscreen options as standard. So how useful are they for your office computer systems?

Using a touch screen as a “user interface” has a lot going for it. It is intuitive, you literally point at what you see, and it can be more ergonomic than various other methods. The previous downsides of high price and low responsiveness have been largely removed by cheaper high quality touchscreens: decent 15 & 17 inch screens can be bought for around £150 and slightly more for 19 inch.

Age of Irresponsibility

Much has been made in recent years of the problems of the “Compensation Culture” and many politicians have expended great gusts of hot air about how they propose to end it. However, in reality this is merely a symptom of a far wider problem.

Historically in the UK, when a government department got something seriously wrong the Minister for that department would give an “honourable resignation”, leaving his position on the basis (as a US President¹ famously said) “the buck stops here”. Now we have government Ministers who when something goes wrong send a junior member of staff to face the wrath of the press and carry on regardless. But it is not just politicians, this type of behaviour is endemic across society.  Bankers mess up in catastrophic ways, even breaking the law, and walk away with large bonuses in their pockets. Security contractors accept lucrative jobs, then ask the government to bail them out when they can not do what is needed.

The Great Dictator

In an earlier blog, I made a remark about some firms still using cassettes for dictation, which attracted a couple of comments. Therefore I thought I’d go over the moderns options, pros and cons.

The first decision is to dictate or not to dictate in the first place. The advantage of not dictating is a possible reduction of costs in equipment and staffing, but this is set against having to deal with the production of text yourself. This ranges from typing everything yourself (where output depends on your typing speed), to document creation systems which let you simply pick from banks of styles (which reduce ability to make bespoke documents) This is not an either/or proposition, but a continuum, and the more work a document creation system does for you in general the dearer it costs, possibly outweighing the savings of have less staff.¹