Jason, a magistrate should never indulge in these shenanigans. Her vulgarity makes her a liability to the justice system. Or are you so ashamed of all this that now you are calling those who blew the whistle on this magistrate and her lover character assassins? You want omerta. We need to expose those ‘saints by day, sinners by night’ who make a mockery of our institutions and make themselves liable to blackmail.

They later tried to stae they they should govern because they won the majority of the districts.You state that 1981 was pre planned implying that the 1971 result was a fluke. Any honest person would admit that it was a perfect plan gone awry. The 2008 result was a 1500 majority which is wafer thin considering that we have no idea who is entitled to vote.

Representation without taxation for most of them any way. Why don’t we put our money where our mouth is and give anyone in possession of a Maltese passport the right to vote (here I am including the thousands of Maltese Australians/Americans/Canadians who emigrated in the 1960’s). That’s democracy in action. After all, what makes them so different from recent emigres who reside within the EU boundaries?

It is a great place to put so much of my life in one place to share ….but with whome I choose

Since I created my facebook space, I have all my privacy settings set to “Only Friends”.

This means that only the people I have accepted as my friends can see ANYTHING about me.

In any search (Google, Facebook or otherwise), if I have not accepted you as my friend on facebook, you will see absolutely nothing about me, not even my profile picture if I want to, which is the only image I have left “public”.

Nobody except my direct friends can see what I write, reply, or whatever.

The crux of the matter is that you have to implicity trust your friends on facebook. That is the ticket.

And it is why I have the astronomical number of 16 friends. I trust them all not to do anything with the information they have access to.

Not that anyone else would give a rat’s ass anyway lol !

I am by no means a public figure, but I still have these settings, because I feel comfortable like that.

This is the downfall of public figures. They accept any Tom Dick or Harry as friends (tigiex tghidli they implicitly trust 1,195 people !), and may also have their privacy settings on “Friends of Friends”.

They are therefore allowing all the thousands of friends, of those 1,195 friends of theirs, to access their information !

The multiple numbers of who can see “all of you”, therefore become many, many, many thousands.

That’s where control on facebook is lost.

As I said, it is however possible to only allow whoever you very specifically choose, to see whatever you specifically wish.

In fact, if I wanted to, I could completely obliterate my very existance on facebook by selecting the option there is. I would not even show up on a facebook search. And this while still existing on facebook, to only my friends.

Throught Facebook, I have found a few friends who I had been looking for sometimes for over 20 years. It is wonderful to see what they have been up to since then, the families they have etc.

Facebook is not a “bad” place. It’s gives me the feeling of being in a social gathering, whenever I wish, with the people who are very dear to me.

It becomes a nightmare only if used unwisely.

I know more or less what I’m talking about. I’m in I.T. (reading for a B.Sc (Hons) degree).

In short. Once you upload them to Facebook, they automatically belong to Facebook which is open to all (regardless of privacy settings).

Since it is open and on their server anybody can use the photo just as long as it doesn’t have a copyright.
Usually if you obtain a copyright (or want to fake a copyright) you still need to place a watermark on the photo to show it is copyrighted (or the person copying the photo will just say there was no indication that it was copyrighted and case is closed).

I have some copyright nonsense on my profile, but I know I cannot take anybody to court with it. It’s there to scare the misinformed away.

If you remove your photos, the references from your account to the Facebook database to the Facebook storage devices, will be set to null from your point of view, although the photos are still on the storage device and ultimately Zuckerburg still has access to them.

Get this, every single photo uploaded from you drinking tequila out of a hookers’ ass to you making silly faces on your webcam will never be erased from Facebook. They harvest all that and that’s one of the reasons why buying Facebook is so valuable.

A trademark is different. To be able to sue somebody for it, you must own it legally.

HSBC owns and pays for their trademarks. You are free to use the HSBC logo and open up another Bank call it Aychesbeesee.
You’d get sued, because its’ their intellectual property legally speaking.

Daphne, no doubt you know lots about the use of the Internet but you are getting something fundamentally wrong. The Web is a combination of the Internet, Extranets and Intranets. The basic distinction comes through security settings which you refer to privacy settings. These are implemented using software, firewalls, routers, switches, etc… With the right tools I can bypass your home PC privacy settings once your PC is connected to the internet – that’s illegal but technically possible. It is also technically possible (with the right tools/method) to bypass the Facebook privacy settings in a similar way that I can bypass your PC privacy settings.

[Daphne – I know all that. But round here, we have to use simple language, because there are people about who don’t know the difference between GDP and the Central Bank’s reserves, or between a family photograph and the logo of an international conglomerate. In fact, to prove your point that everything on the internet can be tracked and traced, we’ve even managed to identify the person who is obsessively hovering over my Wikipedia entry (which I didn’t upload, by the way) and sabotaging it. He used to be in my eldest son’s class at school as it turns out. And we’ve even managed to link him to a person who repeatedly posts comments on this blog, which I don’t upload, using ‘random’ IP numbers ranging from Khazakstan to Illinois. I guess I’m going to have to ring his mother. He’s more of a danger to himself than anyone else really – your classic Lord of the Rings bearded loner.]

@dudu – I live in Italy. I agree that Italians like the best in everything. They all want to drive a Ferrari, eat and dine in the best restaurants and wear the latest designer clothes etc.

However, you missed my point – most of them (there are exceptions of course) do it for themselves. I’ll give you an example. It makes me laugh when I come to Malta and everybody is flashing their designer labels. If a pair of Armani jeans has an inside label nobody would buy it in Malta. Here in Italy, people actually look for designer clothes without labels.

The Maltese have not realised that their D&G and Armani labels are considered terribly naff elsewhere. The really classy people do not buy pret-a-porter: that’s the lower level designer wear with labels on the outside.

The real designer stuff has no labels. What’s more, anybody considered to have any taste would never ever show more than one brand name at most. If you’re wearing a Chanel bag, unless you’re a total “cafone” you don’t ever flash another six or seven brands -as I’ve seen in Malta.

Same goes for the rest. I can’t imagine anybody picking up their kids from school in a Ferrari. Ferraris are driven on the highway usually in rallies with other Ferraris.

Also, Italy is a very big country (things come into perspective when one realises that the province I live in – not the region, the province – is twice the size of Malta) so it’s difficult to generalise.

Some people in the big cities like Milan or Rome do move in certain circles and may have a certain degree of exclusivity and follow stereotyped behaviour such as holidaying in Cortina D’Ampezzo in a certain period. However, believe me – there we’re talking mega bucks rich. We’re not talking of Maltese middle class ‘rich’.

And one final comment, I must clarify that I’m only referring to a certain sector of Maltese society. Not everybody is like that, and the irony of it is that the Maltese who are really and truly rich hide it. They live very much out of the limelight and park their yachts in Porto Fino and party in their farmhouses in Tuscany. Trust me.

A week later they were plastered on a Sunday magazine. This is really quite ridiculous.

@John Tabone

If you think that it’s OK for “close friends” to see your pics on Facebook, you’re in for a surprise. It’s so often I get links from friends to have a look at other friends’ ridiculous pics (some a lot more compromising than the magistrate’s), to have a good laugh.

There is a huge difference between 1971 and 1981.

To start with “the several thousand vote majority in 1971” was just over 2800 and less than the nationalist majority of 1981 (4100).

The 1981 rip-off was the result of a deliberate plan by Labour in government. It came as no surprise to anyone but readers of l-orrizont or Dardir Malta viewers. It was repeatedly pointed out to Labour BEFORE the election that the crazy districts would produce the result they eventually did. But what did labour care? They’d planned it all along.

It was also followed by the continuation of the strategy geared at turning us into the North Korea of the Mediterranean.

Intellectual dishonesty? Your post is a textbook definition of it.

It is also an insult to all those of us who lived through those times and watched the MLP make us ashamed to be Maltese (a trait it has not yet abandoned).

But keep at it. Its the sort of reasoning which keeps labour in opposition. Sure, Labour might win the next election as things stand, but the only way is down and Labour is great at that.

Hey, there’s the Winter Olympics on, I wonder if we could persuade the IOC to create a new event combining the slalom gigante with the discesa libera. We’d send Joey, Toni and the inspector and maybe one of them would come back with Malta’s first gold medal in an olympic event…..

The’re businessmen too now, Daphne, in case you forgot.