Well, I am happy to leave it up to everyone's personal consideration whether GNU and FSF are Socialism. In the US, Socialism and Communism have a such morbid echo to them (like Terrorism has today), that people eagerly go to great lengths to deny any connection to these ideologies whatsoever. Obviously any free and open public debate on these central tenets of the 20th century political discourse is still nearly impossible in the US, which is a terrible loss for the political discussion climate when observed from the outside.
But no matter how you look at it, the copyleft/ShareAlike properties of GPL are in effect creating a insulated, parallel ecosystem ideologically opposed to the traditional profit-driven software market, that plays on its own terms and is very much akin to the core ideal of Socialism - the lack of ownership.
Also, Linus Torvalds, the head developer of the Linux kernel, is the son of a well-known Finnish hardline Stalinist and Communist party frontman Nils Torvalds. Not to say that his son Linus necessarily shares the believes of his hardline Stalinist (=Genocidist) father, but there is no question that Linus has been influenced by his father's hardline Communist enthusiasm in his childhood. Just saying;)
First, nothing restricts you from editing the source code.
Well technically yes. But that's only unless I want to make use of those modification by e.g. publishing the application that contains some GPL code – even if the GPL part of my application is just a tiny part of the larger application.
The GPL unrestricts it, as long as you comply with a few requirements.
Few? Have you ever actually tried reading the GPL? It is not on par with an MS EULA's, but doesn't come very far. If I wanted to distribute my creations to the greater public, I would choose a license that is very easy to understand in a few sentences, like the BSD license.
GPL is bullsh*t because it presents itself as a free license and makes a loud claim of freedom etc. etc., but it actually takes those freedoms away from your users and restricts their use of your source code – thus it's anti-innovative and anti-progress (unless you subscribe to GPL as well – but then again, that's rarely possible in real world end user applications.)
Hi, as a Linux user, I can tell you: we don't care about the market. At all.
Well. call me when you start caring. There's no point in dealing with people who live in a zealotry-fueled Socialist dreamworld, where money grows on trees and the government pays you a monthly citizen's salary, and nobody has to do anything to earn a living.
So you have the source code of OS X?
That's the beauty of free software: the author does not have to release the source code back to the public if they choose so. No need to force them to do something they don't want through legal traps.
The only successful and widely adopted open source OS says otherwise.
Ermm.. Nope. UNIX is the most widely-adopted open source OS. One brand of it currently has 15% market share in the North American consumer market. And key to its success? It's not GPL!
Linux is open source, but not free for commercial reuse. It has been exploited in some embedded devices (while more than not totally ignoring the copyleft/ShareAlike properties of GPL). A notable example is the unwillingness of Google to open their Linux source code, but there are thousands of smaller corporations out there who simply ignore the GPL when reusing Linux.
I write for my own benefit, not for the "IT community". I want attribution, and your improvements to my code, or your money in exchange for a different license. I have no reason to give you code with no strings attached, no matter how much that might displease you.
And how is this free software? I think most people would intuitively think that something "free" comes without strings attached. And this is where the deception of GPL lies: it is not really a free software license (except in some idealistic form as defined by the GNU foundation), but a restrictive license that actually discourages free use of the author's creation.
It's fine as long as you don't need to use that software commercially. But in the commercial world you need to be able to edit the source code of the software to make any use of it. GPL does the exact opposite of what it pretends to promise: it restricts you from editing the source code, because you become liable to all sorts of legal responsibilities if you do so. Not understanding these caveats in supposedly "free" software can be very costly, when you implement a large application that relies on a slightly modified version of a GPL source code, and after two months of development realise that you have painted yourself into a corner and made yourself into a copyright criminal – just because you naïvely thought "free software" was actually "free".
If you want to write free software for the benefit of the IT community and not a certain unemployed American self-righteous zealot, you should definitely release it into the public domain or – if you want attribution – use some easier and more relaxed license (both to understand and read) than any GNU license. GPL is anyway a dying ecosystem, because both Apple and Microsoft have banned it from their current and future distribution platforms. And no Slashdot, this is not because they are bad evil corporations that hate penguins and kittens, but because GPL is an ambiguous, incomprehensible myriad of rights and responsibilities that no sane company in the software distribution business would ever touch.
I would also suggest setting your browser to delete all cookies when closing. By installing Cookie Monster for Firefox you can selectively allow some sites to set permanent cookies, that persist over browser sessions (e.g. your Slashdot login).
QML is really a breeze to write, and you can get very impressive visual effects easily. It has CSS-like transitions (but easier and with added benefits), and the property-system allows you to easily build complex relations between the visual elements. Objects are laid out using anchoring, where rather than defining x,y coordinates you just define the relations between the element. This also means that everything is out of the box adaptible to a wide array of screen sizes.
QML supports JavaScript inline and also the relations between the objects can be defined as JavaScript statements. Or, you can easily define methods to your QML objects by just writing out the JavaScript function in the code.
Extending from C++ has a small learning curve, but once you get into it there's nothing to stop you from doing your own components, or even implementing the whole visual element stack from the beginning. Not that you would really need to: the JavaScript is runtime compiled to machine code and executes so well that the interface is fast and responsive even on a smartphone.
LGPL is non-issue: it is both friendly to open source applications and fully proprietary closed source commercial applications, and places no legal constrains on your application code.
You can get started with QML right now. I dare you will be able to write your first app UI after 30 minutes.
Here's actually a full Tetris with sound in 1016 characters!
Not really Tetris, Not really an implementation
on
Tetris In 140 Bytes
·
· Score: 1
If you look at the site, it is obvious that this is neither Tetris nor an implementation of Tetris. It is just a part of the game that when given the current layout in certain encoding, the current user input and some other state variables can tell you what is the next state. All of this is meaningless unless you know what should you do with this state information. Crucially, included is neither the drivers to read user input or the method to render the game board for display.
So yes, this is one part of an implementation of a Tetris. But then again, any given block of code less than 140 characters in length from any full implementation has also a claim for being a part of an implementation of "Tetris". So I therefore proclaim that I have beaten them by my even shorter "implementation", which simply consists of the letter u (a part of crucial JavaScript keywords like "function" and "return") for it has an equally valid claim for an "implementation" of "Tetris" as this function, in some perverted regard;).
Does anyone know where did they get their parameters? From which studies / white papers exactly? I for one would be thrilled to port this to some other platforms if anyone could give me some pointers to relevant studies.
Exactly, and given that The Bible is anyway readily available in both written forms of Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk)–in book and electronic forms– and combined with the fact that Norway has an excellent mobile technology adoption rate (way beyond the United States) and as the official language of Norway is not a "minority language", I would think the person who wrote the summary did not know what they were writing about and that Norsk is Norwegian, in Norwegian.
I am tempted to mod you troll, but I'll post instead. I can not at all share your bad experience with the latest GNOME. I use GNOME 3 and Ubuntu 11.10 on my work laptop, and it works like a dream. GTK, as done by people who know how to write it, is still superior to Qt, and the end product is much more stable. Okay, it does not necessarily have the latest and sleekest bells and whistles – such as GPU accelerated annoying desktop effects or an integrated browser. Instead, it is a solid and fast codebase with practical (as opposed to superfluous) UI decisions, and the best Mozilla Firefox interoperation.
GNOME 3 is very well-suited for people who use their computer to do work or browse the Internet – that is to say – a great majority of the userbase. If you want the latest eye-candy and less stability, go KDE. If you want to pretend that you have a Mac and don't care at all about stability, go Unity. Or maybe something else, if you want multimedia integration on desktop etc. But your GNOME-bashing is very hard to comprehend, as I have found it very usable on modern hardware. And yes, it is still the default window manager in most distros for a good reason.
It almost begs the question: are you sure you are not mistaking GNOME 3 to the Ubuntu's new and unstable Unity? It would fit the description better – UI does not work conceptually, and overall stability is something like alpha-level.
Oh and by the way, at home I still use WindowMaker. Kicks ass.
Actually, according to the original decision, it is not not about bottled water, but (any) water in general.
However, as far as I understand, this conclusion was not reached because water would not prevent dehydration, but because they don't think dehydration is a disease. Which kind of makes sense – dehydration could be a symptom of a disease, but it is not a disease in itself. And the applicant asked a panel that verifies claims about products reducing the risk of a disease to verify a claim about a medical condition that –the board concluded– was not disease, so the board rejected the claim (or actually concluded [direct quote]: "The Panel considers that the proposed claim does not comply with the requirements for a disease risk reduction claim...")
If it is correctly implemented, that's easier said than done. It is not necessarily a key-value pair that are cryptographically verified (i.e. there exists a purely arithmetic function f(x,y) that returns true iff (x, y) is a valid pair, and client is allowed access if it supplies correct (x,y) ) This kind of system would be crackable; just find another arithmetic function f' that returns y for some x (one usually exists).
However, if Apple knew what they were doing (and they usually do), it's a GUID database stored on Apple's server. Say, they generate a 128-bit random access code for each manufactured iPhone, and the only way you can use Siri is to supply a valid GUID. Such system is virtually uncrackable, because even for a 128-bit GUID and 200 million iPhone 4S manufactured, it would take a staggering 17 million trillion trillion guesses (i.e. HTTP requests to Apple servers) to guess right ONE correct GUID. If one request took a mere 100 bytes with its TCP/IP headers, you would have to transfer 170 million yottabytes (170 million trillion terabytes) of data to find one valid access key.
I believe you are talking out of your ass. Quoting the Irish legislation in question:
1. – (1) In this Act, unless context otherwise requires –
...
‘personal data’ means data relating to a living individual who is or can be identified
either from the data or from the data in conjunction with other information that is
in, or is likely to come into, the possession of the data controller;
This pretty much means "everything we know about you." As long as you (a person) can be connected to this data, it is subject to the EU data protection directive.
AFAIK EU has much stricter data protection legislation than The Land Of The Free, which I as an EU citizen find comforting. I am not that sure about Canada though.
At least in my county's (Finland) respective EU legislation there are no such provisions, that would give Facebook the right to hold my my personal data, even if it contains "trade secrets". In contrast, the law specifically notes that all my personal data must be provided to me irrespective of secrecy provisions or Non-Disclosure Agreements (only some law enforcement databases are an exemption from this– business databases definitely are not.)
If Facebook designed their database so, that it contains trade secrets embedded in my personal data, they failed to consider the law, and have caused upon themselves whatever jeopardy this could result in.
Also, even if the "Rule of Law" – the principle that all exercise of public powers must be based on Legislation – is not explicitly stated in the US Constitution (apart from Criminal Law as you quoted), the very meaning of a "Law" the drafters of the Constitution had in mind, was that a Law is a public document. If the government can reinterpret any law, and withhold this interpretation from the public, the whole purpose of any legislation becomes redundant, and the Congress is effectively stripped of its legislative powers as established in the Article I, Section I of the Constitution:
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
The Pirate Bay has also already registered a domain specifically for those in Belgium, to work around the censorship order. http://depiraatbaai.be/ (Flemish Dutch for "The Pirate Bay")
This is not listed in the domains the court ordered to be blocked. TorrentFreak has the full story.
...allowed in the European Union? It really compromises the image of the whole entity that they have no problem with this absurd level of corruption. This is obviously another censorship/media control ploy by Berlusconi, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was specifically designed to hurt Wikipedia.
Very good question. I have been worried about the situation in Italy for long. The country is ruled by a media-controlling Prime Minister, while the parliament is paralyzed by deep corruption, reckless spending and robbing the tax money. And, I mean really, really unbelievable stuff, like the mayor of a small province earning more than the President of the United States.
I think EU is essentially in the cross-roads of three alternative paths:
Keep going on like this, from crisis to crisis, with disparity in levels of democracy and wealth between different parts of the Union.
Turn in to a Federation, subordinating national parliaments to one Federal Parliament in Brussels.
Split into two or more sub-Unions (Corrupt South, Torn East and Prosperous North).
I feel like the second path is the only feasible way to proceed. First option means ever-continuing disparity within the Union, which will stall its political and economic development forever. Third option is a solution, but not a very constructive one. It would mean a new divide in Europe, akin to the times of the Cold War, and a step back of over seven decades politically.
If EU became a Federation with a corpus of Federal Law, and national legislation became subject to repeal by Federal courts, it would truly make EU a uniform, legally homogenous area, where all EU citizens and businesses would really have equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities from the shores of Black Sea in Romania to the Atlantic cliffs in Ireland, and from the tip of Gibraltar in Iberia to the rural fells of Lapland. Doing business and living in Europe would become ever more easier, as human rights would be universally respected.
Maybe the current crisis will have only one possible outcome: the establishment of the Federal Government of the European Union.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I am happy to leave it up to everyone's personal consideration whether GNU and FSF are Socialism. In the US, Socialism and Communism have a such morbid echo to them (like Terrorism has today), that people eagerly go to great lengths to deny any connection to these ideologies whatsoever. Obviously any free and open public debate on these central tenets of the 20th century political discourse is still nearly impossible in the US, which is a terrible loss for the political discussion climate when observed from the outside.
But no matter how you look at it, the copyleft/ShareAlike properties of GPL are in effect creating a insulated, parallel ecosystem ideologically opposed to the traditional profit-driven software market, that plays on its own terms and is very much akin to the core ideal of Socialism - the lack of ownership.
Also, Linus Torvalds, the head developer of the Linux kernel, is the son of a well-known Finnish hardline Stalinist and Communist party frontman Nils Torvalds. Not to say that his son Linus necessarily shares the believes of his hardline Stalinist (=Genocidist) father, but there is no question that Linus has been influenced by his father's hardline Communist enthusiasm in his childhood. Just saying ;)
First, nothing restricts you from editing the source code.
Well technically yes. But that's only unless I want to make use of those modification by e.g. publishing the application that contains some GPL code – even if the GPL part of my application is just a tiny part of the larger application.
The GPL unrestricts it, as long as you comply with a few requirements.
Few? Have you ever actually tried reading the GPL? It is not on par with an MS EULA's, but doesn't come very far. If I wanted to distribute my creations to the greater public, I would choose a license that is very easy to understand in a few sentences, like the BSD license.
GPL is bullsh*t because it presents itself as a free license and makes a loud claim of freedom etc. etc., but it actually takes those freedoms away from your users and restricts their use of your source code – thus it's anti-innovative and anti-progress (unless you subscribe to GPL as well – but then again, that's rarely possible in real world end user applications.)
Hi, as a Linux user, I can tell you: we don't care about the market. At all.
Well. call me when you start caring. There's no point in dealing with people who live in a zealotry-fueled Socialist dreamworld, where money grows on trees and the government pays you a monthly citizen's salary, and nobody has to do anything to earn a living.
So you have the source code of OS X?
That's the beauty of free software: the author does not have to release the source code back to the public if they choose so. No need to force them to do something they don't want through legal traps.
The only successful and widely adopted open source OS says otherwise.
Ermm.. Nope. UNIX is the most widely-adopted open source OS. One brand of it currently has 15% market share in the North American consumer market. And key to its success? It's not GPL!
Linux is open source, but not free for commercial reuse. It has been exploited in some embedded devices (while more than not totally ignoring the copyleft/ShareAlike properties of GPL). A notable example is the unwillingness of Google to open their Linux source code, but there are thousands of smaller corporations out there who simply ignore the GPL when reusing Linux.
I write for my own benefit, not for the "IT community". I want attribution, and your improvements to my code, or your money in exchange for a different license. I have no reason to give you code with no strings attached, no matter how much that might displease you.
And how is this free software? I think most people would intuitively think that something "free" comes without strings attached. And this is where the deception of GPL lies: it is not really a free software license (except in some idealistic form as defined by the GNU foundation), but a restrictive license that actually discourages free use of the author's creation.
GPL is a horrible piece of sh*t.
It's fine as long as you don't need to use that software commercially. But in the commercial world you need to be able to edit the source code of the software to make any use of it. GPL does the exact opposite of what it pretends to promise: it restricts you from editing the source code, because you become liable to all sorts of legal responsibilities if you do so. Not understanding these caveats in supposedly "free" software can be very costly, when you implement a large application that relies on a slightly modified version of a GPL source code, and after two months of development realise that you have painted yourself into a corner and made yourself into a copyright criminal – just because you naïvely thought "free software" was actually "free".
If you want to write free software for the benefit of the IT community and not a certain unemployed American self-righteous zealot, you should definitely release it into the public domain or – if you want attribution – use some easier and more relaxed license (both to understand and read) than any GNU license. GPL is anyway a dying ecosystem, because both Apple and Microsoft have banned it from their current and future distribution platforms. And no Slashdot, this is not because they are bad evil corporations that hate penguins and kittens, but because GPL is an ambiguous, incomprehensible myriad of rights and responsibilities that no sane company in the software distribution business would ever touch.
I would also suggest setting your browser to delete all cookies when closing. By installing Cookie Monster for Firefox you can selectively allow some sites to set permanent cookies, that persist over browser sessions (e.g. your Slashdot login).
QML is really a breeze to write, and you can get very impressive visual effects easily. It has CSS-like transitions (but easier and with added benefits), and the property-system allows you to easily build complex relations between the visual elements. Objects are laid out using anchoring, where rather than defining x,y coordinates you just define the relations between the element. This also means that everything is out of the box adaptible to a wide array of screen sizes.
QML supports JavaScript inline and also the relations between the objects can be defined as JavaScript statements. Or, you can easily define methods to your QML objects by just writing out the JavaScript function in the code.
Extending from C++ has a small learning curve, but once you get into it there's nothing to stop you from doing your own components, or even implementing the whole visual element stack from the beginning. Not that you would really need to: the JavaScript is runtime compiled to machine code and executes so well that the interface is fast and responsive even on a smartphone.
LGPL is non-issue: it is both friendly to open source applications and fully proprietary closed source commercial applications, and places no legal constrains on your application code.
You can get started with QML right now. I dare you will be able to write your first app UI after 30 minutes.
Here's actually a full Tetris with sound in 1016 characters!
If you look at the site, it is obvious that this is neither Tetris nor an implementation of Tetris. It is just a part of the game that when given the current layout in certain encoding, the current user input and some other state variables can tell you what is the next state. All of this is meaningless unless you know what should you do with this state information. Crucially, included is neither the drivers to read user input or the method to render the game board for display.
So yes, this is one part of an implementation of a Tetris. But then again, any given block of code less than 140 characters in length from any full implementation has also a claim for being a part of an implementation of "Tetris". So I therefore proclaim that I have beaten them by my even shorter "implementation", which simply consists of the letter u (a part of crucial JavaScript keywords like "function" and "return") for it has an equally valid claim for an "implementation" of "Tetris" as this function, in some perverted regard ;).
Does anyone know where did they get their parameters? From which studies / white papers exactly? I for one would be thrilled to port this to some other platforms if anyone could give me some pointers to relevant studies.
Exactly, and given that The Bible is anyway readily available in both written forms of Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk)–in book and electronic forms– and combined with the fact that Norway has an excellent mobile technology adoption rate (way beyond the United States) and as the official language of Norway is not a "minority language", I would think the person who wrote the summary did not know what they were writing about and that Norsk is Norwegian, in Norwegian.
Patents – everyone gets hurt.
What's the point?
Reinvent the system already!
I am tempted to mod you troll, but I'll post instead. I can not at all share your bad experience with the latest GNOME. I use GNOME 3 and Ubuntu 11.10 on my work laptop, and it works like a dream. GTK, as done by people who know how to write it, is still superior to Qt, and the end product is much more stable. Okay, it does not necessarily have the latest and sleekest bells and whistles – such as GPU accelerated annoying desktop effects or an integrated browser. Instead, it is a solid and fast codebase with practical (as opposed to superfluous) UI decisions, and the best Mozilla Firefox interoperation.
GNOME 3 is very well-suited for people who use their computer to do work or browse the Internet – that is to say – a great majority of the userbase. If you want the latest eye-candy and less stability, go KDE. If you want to pretend that you have a Mac and don't care at all about stability, go Unity. Or maybe something else, if you want multimedia integration on desktop etc. But your GNOME-bashing is very hard to comprehend, as I have found it very usable on modern hardware. And yes, it is still the default window manager in most distros for a good reason.
It almost begs the question: are you sure you are not mistaking GNOME 3 to the Ubuntu's new and unstable Unity? It would fit the description better – UI does not work conceptually, and overall stability is something like alpha-level.
Oh and by the way, at home I still use WindowMaker. Kicks ass.
Actually, according to the original decision, it is not not about bottled water, but (any) water in general.
However, as far as I understand, this conclusion was not reached because water would not prevent dehydration, but because they don't think dehydration is a disease. Which kind of makes sense – dehydration could be a symptom of a disease, but it is not a disease in itself. And the applicant asked a panel that verifies claims about products reducing the risk of a disease to verify a claim about a medical condition that –the board concluded– was not disease, so the board rejected the claim (or actually concluded [direct quote]: "The Panel considers that the proposed claim does not comply with the requirements for a disease risk reduction claim ...")
Sure. But then you'd have to buy an iPhone.
If it is correctly implemented, that's easier said than done. It is not necessarily a key-value pair that are cryptographically verified (i.e. there exists a purely arithmetic function f(x,y) that returns true iff (x, y) is a valid pair, and client is allowed access if it supplies correct (x,y) ) This kind of system would be crackable; just find another arithmetic function f' that returns y for some x (one usually exists).
However, if Apple knew what they were doing (and they usually do), it's a GUID database stored on Apple's server. Say, they generate a 128-bit random access code for each manufactured iPhone, and the only way you can use Siri is to supply a valid GUID. Such system is virtually uncrackable, because even for a 128-bit GUID and 200 million iPhone 4S manufactured, it would take a staggering 17 million trillion trillion guesses (i.e. HTTP requests to Apple servers) to guess right ONE correct GUID. If one request took a mere 100 bytes with its TCP/IP headers, you would have to transfer 170 million yottabytes (170 million trillion terabytes) of data to find one valid access key.
Good luck explaining this to your ISP! :)
Countries have no genders as far as I know. In Russian too, otecestvo means "fatherland", and it is based on otec, "father".
Psychopathy is not a "mental disorder." Most psychopaths don't consider themselves sick.
I believe you are talking out of your ass. Quoting the Irish legislation in question:
1. – (1) In this Act, unless context otherwise requires –
‘personal data’ means data relating to a living individual who is or can be identified either from the data or from the data in conjunction with other information that is in, or is likely to come into, the possession of the data controller;
This pretty much means "everything we know about you." As long as you (a person) can be connected to this data, it is subject to the EU data protection directive.
AFAIK EU has much stricter data protection legislation than The Land Of The Free, which I as an EU citizen find comforting. I am not that sure about Canada though.
At least in my county's (Finland) respective EU legislation there are no such provisions, that would give Facebook the right to hold my my personal data, even if it contains "trade secrets". In contrast, the law specifically notes that all my personal data must be provided to me irrespective of secrecy provisions or Non-Disclosure Agreements (only some law enforcement databases are an exemption from this– business databases definitely are not.)
If Facebook designed their database so, that it contains trade secrets embedded in my personal data, they failed to consider the law, and have caused upon themselves whatever jeopardy this could result in.
What kind of server-side support does this require? I bet I can not just run it from a static HTML file.
Also, even if the "Rule of Law" – the principle that all exercise of public powers must be based on Legislation – is not explicitly stated in the US Constitution (apart from Criminal Law as you quoted), the very meaning of a "Law" the drafters of the Constitution had in mind, was that a Law is a public document. If the government can reinterpret any law, and withhold this interpretation from the public, the whole purpose of any legislation becomes redundant, and the Congress is effectively stripped of its legislative powers as established in the Article I, Section I of the Constitution:
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
The Pirate Bay has also already registered a domain specifically for those in Belgium, to work around the censorship order. http://depiraatbaai.be/ (Flemish Dutch for "The Pirate Bay")
This is not listed in the domains the court ordered to be blocked. TorrentFreak has the full story.
...allowed in the European Union? It really compromises the image of the whole entity that they have no problem with this absurd level of corruption. This is obviously another censorship/media control ploy by Berlusconi, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was specifically designed to hurt Wikipedia.
Very good question. I have been worried about the situation in Italy for long. The country is ruled by a media-controlling Prime Minister, while the parliament is paralyzed by deep corruption, reckless spending and robbing the tax money. And, I mean really, really unbelievable stuff, like the mayor of a small province earning more than the President of the United States.
I think EU is essentially in the cross-roads of three alternative paths:
I feel like the second path is the only feasible way to proceed. First option means ever-continuing disparity within the Union, which will stall its political and economic development forever. Third option is a solution, but not a very constructive one. It would mean a new divide in Europe, akin to the times of the Cold War, and a step back of over seven decades politically.
If EU became a Federation with a corpus of Federal Law, and national legislation became subject to repeal by Federal courts, it would truly make EU a uniform, legally homogenous area, where all EU citizens and businesses would really have equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities from the shores of Black Sea in Romania to the Atlantic cliffs in Ireland, and from the tip of Gibraltar in Iberia to the rural fells of Lapland. Doing business and living in Europe would become ever more easier, as human rights would be universally respected.
Maybe the current crisis will have only one possible outcome: the establishment of the Federal Government of the European Union.