-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Saturday 2006-08-26 at 18:21 -0500, Stan Glasoe wrote:
And if I'm not mistaken, which I may be in this case because IANAL, faxes are a legal instrument in a court of law whereas emails or PDFs don't carry the same weight in court. I refer to US Law. The fax protocol verifies an exact duplicate of the graphic sent, date and time stamps, sender and receiver, etc and more important, has been established in case law in the US.
I think that's the case also in my country. The caveat is that an apparently hand signed document sent through a computer and a fax modem can in fact be scanned and faked. Perhaps legislators thought of fax machines and are not aware of the state of technology. I worked for a big telephone and isp company some time ago. Inter-operator complaints had be faxed in real paper, email was not accepted - even if the fax was unreadable by third time around. And I'm talking of really big (here) telecommunications companies. True, there were talks of implementing a "modern" method. On the other hand, with some government agencies here (Spain) a digitally signed email is also legally binding. But not for all of them! There are also some official agencies here that accept PDF digitally signed via Acrobat software as legally biding instead of officially stamped paper work - in fact, the software adds a semitransparent red stamp to the PDF file. It's used for official engineering projects, for instance. Windows only, I'm afraid. Electronic red tape, I think you would call it :-p Also, I know a lot of business that put up a web page and email (a hotmail one, perhaps!), totally useless and inactive: you have to use paper-mail, phone, or fax to contact them. The web pages were set up because somebody convinced them that it was the in fashion thing to do around 2000 - you know, before the bubble exploded. We are technically minded people in this list, and I suppose we think of "modern" technical means to solve current problems, but not all the world is of the same mind set even in advanced countries. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFE84QKtTMYHG2NR9URAq50AKCLfPQ5HDVNyk6fx6PjULsZqU1aegCdFwKf BioeNTQSFMOcL96ii03ILfU= =UrV2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----