Thursday, May 08, 2008

When in Rome

I'm watching the Fox morning show in the hotel room. The host's banter is so real, they obviously really like each other.

One story is about the debate over students from some Minnesota high school traveling to Spain on a class trip.

Apparently, the law in Spain will allow 17yr old students to drink alchohol should they so choose - even though they are not of age in their home domain and so can't legally quaff Bud back home.

The teacher in the debate (who travels with the kids) made the point 'the kids travel to Spain, our laws do not travel to Spain'.

Timely. In Liberty Alliance TEG's discussion of IGF's CARML yesterday, we talked about a use case in which an application used CARML to express a need for a user's age, actually not the age itself but whether the age was above some threshold.

How the threshold is expressed will impact on the students imbibing.

If the drinking policy is expressed as 'isAgeGreaterThan19', then the students will not be drinking overseas. The policy is bound to a specific locale by hard-coding the
threshold in.

If however the policy were expressed 'isAgeLegalForDrinking' then the policy can be localized appropriately - the wine can flow (assuming parental consent etc) when in Spain but not in Minnesota.

There was also a story about a prison in Louisiana that uses black bears as prison guards. I did say I was watching Fox.

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