Sorry for this late answer. I felt lazy at first, but I didn't feel like letting this discussion pending. You deserve an answer, because you make several interesting points.
Most of the text of laws I have seen are for the state, not the federal government, but they read much more like your latter example (e.g., "the text of Article 8 shall be superseded by...").
I'm not sure I understand what you are stating here. Do you mean acts are more technical on the state level than on the federal level, or do you mean my perception of how acts are generally formulated in the USA is erroneous? I'm genuinely curious.
In any event, your argument that the acts are not really increasing the size of the actual law doesn't ring true to me.
I think I've been unclear. I meant that acts do not necessarily increase the volume of laws. I aknowledge that most do, though. And it may be the case here. It's probably the case.
For example, the federal law by which I am governed consists of 18 volumes, each 1300-1500 pages in length (as of 2006). Supplements are issued until the next release in 2012. You might be able to read 23000+ pages but could you keep it all in mind every day as you live your life? Now add in the state laws for your home state. And those you visit. And any foreign countries you might care to see. However we got here, the end result is unknowable by any single person much less every average citizen.
Yeah, that's a difficult point in general philosophy of law. The average citizen is not expected to know all the specifics of laws, yet normally you just need to understand the general principles to stay within the law*. Which imposes to the lawmaker to keep a general coherence in law. Ideally, I mean. Yeah, ideally (*sigh*).
Anyway, ordinarily most people don't have to wonder in their daily activities are legal or not. Social conventions make it rather obvious. The law at hand here, however, only affects a specific activity, and people who trade in it. The risk of confusion is not in cause here, because laymen are not affected. Now, the problem is that programming is a trade that, nowadays, many people can exert. But it's still a specific activity, with its specific rules.
As for whether this particular law is needed, I would argue that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. 1030 (the "CFAA") which was passed in 1984 (Hello, Orwell!) covers most if not all of the acts the "Informed P2P" law covers.
Now that is a better argument: is this act useful? Was it necessary? Does it make law better in general? A famous French jurist, Portalis once told that "there shouldn't be useless laws", because "they weaken the necessary ones".
So yeah, the question of the utility of this law is relevant. I'm not aknowledged enough in US laws to make any meaningful statement about this, though.
* Actually, there's a point I find confusing, it's the age of consent in the USA. It varies by state, and its legal formulation is not always clear. In a webcomic I read that is set in Massachusets, the question has been raised when a twenty-something guy dates a not-quite-eighteen girl, and he asks her if she's "jailbait". My being interested in Law made me look up Massachusets' law on that matter. It's incomprehensible. I can't figure out if they could have had sex legally. Probably, but it's unclear. The notion of "chaste life" is kinda confusing. No wonder most people in the USA assume "under 18"="illegal". It's not that simple, but it keeps you out of trouble in the whole of the USA.
Disclaimer: not only IANAL, but I'm from a "civil law" country (France) while the matter at hand is about the USA, a "common law" country. As a result, the rest of this post may be misinformed or biased, despite my best attempts at avoiding it by way of prudent wording and documentation on the fly. Please don't be too harsh on my possible inaccuracies.
Laws don't actually pile up on each others, but rather modify the corpus of applicable texts at a given moment (sometimes adding to it, sometimes removing from it, sometimes replacing or rewording parts of it). Now, if I get it right, the official and ultimate reference for federal laws in the USA are the United States Statutes at Large, which indeed seems like quite an impressive mass of paper. It seems like turning all of it into a code is a sisyphesque task due to the way laws are voted in Congress.
As I understand it, acts passed in Congress are formulated as "The activity X is now prohibited" or "The activity Y is no longer prohibited" and stuff like that, with the addition of some definitions, and sometimes a time scope and other precisions. Which makes apparently for rather legible texts when voted, but leads to a lot of work for the Law Revision Counsel to handle the repercussions in order to maintain the United States Code in a coherent and accurate form. This may be what gives the USA's law an air of being bloated.
In civil law legal systems, the texts voted by parliamentaries tend to be more along the line of "In code A, book B, chapter C, paragraph D, the following alineas are modified as such [follows a list of modifications]". Not very legible, but at least it results in the Codes being maintained as they go. It's not that, at times, it doesn't need some refreshing, some rewording, in order to keep the whole coherent: a Code is more legible if it is homogeneous in terminology and phrasing. When it is felt like needed for a given part of a code, a text is voted to proceed to the modifications, normally without changing the meaning of the articles of law. Normally.
Because all this has its drawbacks too, as the technicity of the voted texts, and the resulting lack of legibility, cause representatives to not always fully understand what they vote. This is the cause of the recent blunder in France about Scientology: the law had been changed while it wasn't supposed to be, the text voted was meant to reword the parts of the Penal Code reguarding the sentencing of crimes commited by legal persons. The law previously stated that an organization guilty of fraud could be sentenced to dissolution. An tiny error in the rewording made this no longer possible, and due to the high volume and technicity of the text, no one noticed in the Parliament that something had been changed.
What I mean is voting a new law doesn't necessarily complexify the Law, and trying to simplify the Law can sometimes cause a mess. Yeah, right, that's what I meant to say from the beginning. I think. Can't remember, I've got a bit sidetracked by those fascinating considerations about comparative law.
As for your first question about why a law is needed for the matter at hand, well, it's because it apparently wasn't covered by any existing law, and nulla poena sine lege, like they say.
Nope. You may not want to bother reading TFA, but several people posted excerpts around here. What part of "distributed to the public" did you not understand?
If you're CEO of a German corporation and you distribute your illegal wares in the US, Germany will likely extradite you (unless Germany is like us and its politicians are easily bribed).
Germany can't extradite its own citizens except to other members of the EU or an international court (the latter requiring a specific law)*, so unless the CEO of your scenario isn't German, the trial would have to take place in Germany.
This would require that Germany also has laws against the deeds involved (note that this would be a requirement for an extradition too**), but given general European rulings about data privacy, and German law in particular (Germany pioneered in addressing the issue, back in 1971), I'd say the case could be valid.
*If you want a source for this, here is mine. Main section, sixth item in the numbered list. You may want to use Babelfish or something like that (I did, my German is quite rusty).
In theory, your case (2) could use necessity as a defence, but I guess it would be hard to pull.
One problem I have with your scenario, is that it involves the girl having absolutely no one to call for help where she is. I reckon duty to rescue is not very broad in most parts of the USA, yet I think at the very least bar owners (as property owners) have such a duty to their patrons (as their invitees), but I may be wrong on that.
Just one week ago, I was having lunch at my brother's girlfriend's, who is a teacher in history of sciences, and at a moment said how puzzled she was by a physicist she knows who does't like his cars not to have a tough hull.
A physicist, dammit! She opposed him arguments about elastic and inelastic collisions, but nope, to him a car with a deformable hull is shitty. Go figure.
People are pissed off about it because they know that once bureaucrats run health care, they run your life. What you can eat, when you can eat it, how much you can eat, when, where and what kind of exercise you will do, when you get up, when you sleep. and (if all that wasn't frightening enough) Who lives, who dies, and when they die.
I've often read this argument in the debate about health care in the USA, and it doesn't cease to fascinate me. There must be something pretty fucked up about your country if what you state is really to be expected while this isn't happening anywhere else. The Country of Freedom, really?
I'm covered by a universal health care system. I'm currently smoking a cigarette and having a glass of wine, and no one ever suggested to forbid it to me. Of course on both of these I've paid taxes, and also contributions that go directly to health care funds (distinct from government funds). The tax money serves, among other things, to fund ad campaigns to promote healthy food habits (disputable efficience, but hey, it's pretty bening), a free assistance program for people who want to quit smoking (I'm considering going for it), subsidizing AA-type organizations, etc. Not much intrusion intrusion in people's choices, now is it?
What the hell is wrong with the USA that would make them drift away from the sensible policies that are at work pretty much everywhere there is that kind of health care system? This perplexes me.
I admit my grasp of how punitive damages actually work may be superficial, but as I understand it, they end up as being an incentive for silly lawsuits.
Coming from a different country, with a different legal system, I find weird the notion that punishment can be discussed in a civil court, instead of a criminal court where it belongs.
Granted, I'm not biased enough to ignore that I'm biased, but that's how I view it:
Punishment, with fines, imprisonment and stuff like that: criminal courts.
Compensation, reasonable, can include a pretium doloris: civil courts.
And anyone who tries to abuse the system should face some due consequence, I quite agree with that.
In a civil suit, for example, the costs of the proceedings plus, in severe cases, the defender's attorney fees. It's applied in some countries, just so you know.
Nope, it isn't. For one thing, the law proposal has been modified. I still disagree with it, and I think it bears great chance of being ditched again by the Constitutional Council, but proposing a modified version of a previously ditched law is perfectly legal. Thankfully. Imagine an actually useful law is ditched for being ill conceived, should it be renounced forever, or should it be perfected?
OK, I won't go in the details of your post, but the part about France having no separation of Church and State is one of the funniest things I've read lately on the Web.
I'll have you know that most Frenches perceive the USA as having no such separation. I know better, while aknowledging where this perception comes from: your politicians always speaking of God, religious nutjobs being unreasonably influential, the existence of creationists in what looks otherwise like a sensible country, etc. Seriously, I can't blame them for doubting the existence of an actual separation. In fact, I have to regularily read your Constitution to remember that this separation theoretically exists.
Ah well, since I'm on it, I can respond to other parts of your post.
So, about what you called the "Napoleonic law", I'm not sure of what you mean by that. Napoleon ended up a dictator, that's a given, and ultimately ended up as the inventor of modern dictatorship. I'm not among the Frenches who admire his reign. But even he hadn't had the guts to overthrow completely the inheritance of the French Revolution on which he built his power. And this included the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which specifies (in its article IX) the principle of presumption of innocence. So no, even under Napoleon, you weren't "guilty until proven innocent". By the way, the Constitutional Council of France specifically refered to article IX of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which has constitutional value, to invalidate the previous version of the repressive part of the law discussed here.
As for the French Academy... well, I agree that it is laughable. Fortunately, not much care is given to their rulings. For example, they ruled that the French version of "e-mail" would be "mèl". Thankfully, this awful semantic unit has been overriden by the Quebecois version "courriel", which has the awesome property of offering the variant "pourriel" for junk mail. So, basically, the Quebecois protect French language from the French Academy.
In France, the populace has a much different relationship with the government than Americans do with theirs.
That, I aknowledge as true. And I find it very interesting to discuss. Don't you?
Having the right of the accuser to be present during proceedings taken away is one that will impact their civil liberties.
This typo is quite unfortunate. I guess you meant the accused. And I agree with you, but thats one reason why the Constitutional Council might ditch this law again.
However, the French standard for civil liberties is much lower.
Maybe. Or maybe we have a different definition of civil liberties. For example, I find the typical lack of concern about privacy that most Americans show rather startling. That's things like that that make the dialogue interesting.
There is another legitimate fear that you can't delete your data for certain and ever. That's Somebody Else's Problem, and also not covered by the analogy.
And that's just an example of why a data retention legislation can be useful.
Some historians* advance that common superstitions** of that time deeming cats as demonic creatures***, leading to many cats being hunted away or down, favored the spread of Black Death through rats' fleas.
* Sorry, no source here, I just read this statement sometimes in passing, can't remember where, feel free to challenge it.****
** And by "superstitions" I really mean superstitions. As agnostic (largely, if not fully) and anticlerical (... let's say "significantly") as I am, I won't pin this on the Church, that stuff about cats has never been part of the official dogma.****
*** A recent study of the Laboratory of Applied Confusion showed that the demonic nature of cats is most likely, but that they are too cute for it to be significant.****
**** One of the three previous footnotes is meant as a joke. Take your pick*****.
***** By the way, "pick" means "penis" in Danish, which makes me giggle here ******
****** I'm having way too much fun with this footnotes stuff, I stop right now.
You are really good at picking the examples that comfort your prejudice, aren't you?
Health care and medical infrastructures in the UK have been going downhill for many years, they only recently started recovering, slowly, from the devastation they suffered from policies dating back to Thatcher. Just a few years ago, many British patients had to cross the Channel for some operations. The UK is far from being representative of European health care systems.
Yup, and unless I'm mistaken, a CC-by license is sufficient legal protection against plagiarism. And honestly, for academic works, it's the license that makes the most sense to me (I've considered CC-by-sa, but as things currently go it would hinder the work of science journalists, who play a useful role and work in an entirely different economic setting).
A common misconception. Copyright is granted when material is created, not when it is published. At least, it's the theory. In practice, it's complicated to claim authorship when you haven't published your work, or registered it somehow. But still, ideally neither publication nor registering is required to gain copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have mod points right now, but if I had your post would have been the first I'd use a point to mod +1 Funny.
Really, you win.
Sorry for this late answer. I felt lazy at first, but I didn't feel like letting this discussion pending. You deserve an answer, because you make several interesting points.
Most of the text of laws I have seen are for the state, not the federal government, but they read much more like your latter example (e.g., "the text of Article 8 shall be superseded by...").
I'm not sure I understand what you are stating here. Do you mean acts are more technical on the state level than on the federal level, or do you mean my perception of how acts are generally formulated in the USA is erroneous? I'm genuinely curious.
In any event, your argument that the acts are not really increasing the size of the actual law doesn't ring true to me.
I think I've been unclear. I meant that acts do not necessarily increase the volume of laws. I aknowledge that most do, though. And it may be the case here. It's probably the case.
For example, the federal law by which I am governed consists of 18 volumes, each 1300-1500 pages in length (as of 2006). Supplements are issued until the next release in 2012. You might be able to read 23000+ pages but could you keep it all in mind every day as you live your life? Now add in the state laws for your home state. And those you visit. And any foreign countries you might care to see. However we got here, the end result is unknowable by any single person much less every average citizen.
Yeah, that's a difficult point in general philosophy of law. The average citizen is not expected to know all the specifics of laws, yet normally you just need to understand the general principles to stay within the law*. Which imposes to the lawmaker to keep a general coherence in law. Ideally, I mean. Yeah, ideally (*sigh*).
Anyway, ordinarily most people don't have to wonder in their daily activities are legal or not. Social conventions make it rather obvious. The law at hand here, however, only affects a specific activity, and people who trade in it. The risk of confusion is not in cause here, because laymen are not affected. Now, the problem is that programming is a trade that, nowadays, many people can exert. But it's still a specific activity, with its specific rules.
As for whether this particular law is needed, I would argue that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. 1030 (the "CFAA") which was passed in 1984 (Hello, Orwell!) covers most if not all of the acts the "Informed P2P" law covers.
Now that is a better argument: is this act useful? Was it necessary? Does it make law better in general? A famous French jurist, Portalis once told that "there shouldn't be useless laws", because "they weaken the necessary ones". So yeah, the question of the utility of this law is relevant. I'm not aknowledged enough in US laws to make any meaningful statement about this, though.
* Actually, there's a point I find confusing, it's the age of consent in the USA. It varies by state, and its legal formulation is not always clear. In a webcomic I read that is set in Massachusets, the question has been raised when a twenty-something guy dates a not-quite-eighteen girl, and he asks her if she's "jailbait". My being interested in Law made me look up Massachusets' law on that matter. It's incomprehensible. I can't figure out if they could have had sex legally. Probably, but it's unclear. The notion of "chaste life" is kinda confusing. No wonder most people in the USA assume "under 18"="illegal". It's not that simple, but it keeps you out of trouble in the whole of the USA.
Disclaimer: not only IANAL, but I'm from a "civil law" country (France) while the matter at hand is about the USA, a "common law" country. As a result, the rest of this post may be misinformed or biased, despite my best attempts at avoiding it by way of prudent wording and documentation on the fly. Please don't be too harsh on my possible inaccuracies.
Laws don't actually pile up on each others, but rather modify the corpus of applicable texts at a given moment (sometimes adding to it, sometimes removing from it, sometimes replacing or rewording parts of it). Now, if I get it right, the official and ultimate reference for federal laws in the USA are the United States Statutes at Large, which indeed seems like quite an impressive mass of paper. It seems like turning all of it into a code is a sisyphesque task due to the way laws are voted in Congress.
As I understand it, acts passed in Congress are formulated as "The activity X is now prohibited" or "The activity Y is no longer prohibited" and stuff like that, with the addition of some definitions, and sometimes a time scope and other precisions. Which makes apparently for rather legible texts when voted, but leads to a lot of work for the Law Revision Counsel to handle the repercussions in order to maintain the United States Code in a coherent and accurate form. This may be what gives the USA's law an air of being bloated.
In civil law legal systems, the texts voted by parliamentaries tend to be more along the line of "In code A, book B, chapter C, paragraph D, the following alineas are modified as such [follows a list of modifications]". Not very legible, but at least it results in the Codes being maintained as they go. It's not that, at times, it doesn't need some refreshing, some rewording, in order to keep the whole coherent: a Code is more legible if it is homogeneous in terminology and phrasing. When it is felt like needed for a given part of a code, a text is voted to proceed to the modifications, normally without changing the meaning of the articles of law. Normally.
Because all this has its drawbacks too, as the technicity of the voted texts, and the resulting lack of legibility, cause representatives to not always fully understand what they vote. This is the cause of the recent blunder in France about Scientology: the law had been changed while it wasn't supposed to be, the text voted was meant to reword the parts of the Penal Code reguarding the sentencing of crimes commited by legal persons. The law previously stated that an organization guilty of fraud could be sentenced to dissolution. An tiny error in the rewording made this no longer possible, and due to the high volume and technicity of the text, no one noticed in the Parliament that something had been changed.
What I mean is voting a new law doesn't necessarily complexify the Law, and trying to simplify the Law can sometimes cause a mess. Yeah, right, that's what I meant to say from the beginning. I think. Can't remember, I've got a bit sidetracked by those fascinating considerations about comparative law.
As for your first question about why a law is needed for the matter at hand, well, it's because it apparently wasn't covered by any existing law, and nulla poena sine lege, like they say.
Nope. You may not want to bother reading TFA, but several people posted excerpts around here. What part of "distributed to the public" did you not understand?
If you're CEO of a German corporation and you distribute your illegal wares in the US, Germany will likely extradite you (unless Germany is like us and its politicians are easily bribed).
Germany can't extradite its own citizens except to other members of the EU or an international court (the latter requiring a specific law)*, so unless the CEO of your scenario isn't German, the trial would have to take place in Germany.
This would require that Germany also has laws against the deeds involved (note that this would be a requirement for an extradition too**), but given general European rulings about data privacy, and German law in particular (Germany pioneered in addressing the issue, back in 1971), I'd say the case could be valid.
*If you want a source for this, here is mine. Main section, sixth item in the numbered list. You may want to use Babelfish or something like that (I did, my German is quite rusty).
**Ibid. First item in the numbered list.
In theory, your case (2) could use necessity as a defence, but I guess it would be hard to pull.
One problem I have with your scenario, is that it involves the girl having absolutely no one to call for help where she is. I reckon duty to rescue is not very broad in most parts of the USA, yet I think at the very least bar owners (as property owners) have such a duty to their patrons (as their invitees), but I may be wrong on that.
Just one week ago, I was having lunch at my brother's girlfriend's, who is a teacher in history of sciences, and at a moment said how puzzled she was by a physicist she knows who does't like his cars not to have a tough hull.
A physicist, dammit! She opposed him arguments about elastic and inelastic collisions, but nope, to him a car with a deformable hull is shitty. Go figure.
What part of "74,000 milse on the odometer, which was broken" did you overlook?
People are pissed off about it because they know that once bureaucrats run health care, they run your life. What you can eat, when you can eat it, how much you can eat, when, where and what kind of exercise you will do, when you get up, when you sleep. and (if all that wasn't frightening enough) Who lives, who dies, and when they die.
I've often read this argument in the debate about health care in the USA, and it doesn't cease to fascinate me. There must be something pretty fucked up about your country if what you state is really to be expected while this isn't happening anywhere else. The Country of Freedom, really?
I'm covered by a universal health care system. I'm currently smoking a cigarette and having a glass of wine, and no one ever suggested to forbid it to me. Of course on both of these I've paid taxes, and also contributions that go directly to health care funds (distinct from government funds). The tax money serves, among other things, to fund ad campaigns to promote healthy food habits (disputable efficience, but hey, it's pretty bening), a free assistance program for people who want to quit smoking (I'm considering going for it), subsidizing AA-type organizations, etc. Not much intrusion intrusion in people's choices, now is it?
What the hell is wrong with the USA that would make them drift away from the sensible policies that are at work pretty much everywhere there is that kind of health care system? This perplexes me.
IMHO, there should have been a punitive award of some sort, but I'm no lawyer.
For your information, and that of anyone interested, this is simply not permitted by French law. No punitive damages, only compensatory ones.
To state roughly the philosophy behind it: punishment is a job for criminal courts, not civil courts.
I admit my grasp of how punitive damages actually work may be superficial, but as I understand it, they end up as being an incentive for silly lawsuits.
Coming from a different country, with a different legal system, I find weird the notion that punishment can be discussed in a civil court, instead of a criminal court where it belongs.
Granted, I'm not biased enough to ignore that I'm biased, but that's how I view it:
And anyone who tries to abuse the system should face some due consequence, I quite agree with that.
In a civil suit, for example, the costs of the proceedings plus, in severe cases, the defender's attorney fees. It's applied in some countries, just so you know.
Then again, in most sensible countries, punitive damages don't exist.
This has to do with the GGP stating "It's the American way."
In France, as in most European counties, this affair could even be a case for a criminal proceeding.
Nope, it isn't. For one thing, the law proposal has been modified. I still disagree with it, and I think it bears great chance of being ditched again by the Constitutional Council, but proposing a modified version of a previously ditched law is perfectly legal. Thankfully. Imagine an actually useful law is ditched for being ill conceived, should it be renounced forever, or should it be perfected?
OK, I won't go in the details of your post, but the part about France having no separation of Church and State is one of the funniest things I've read lately on the Web.
I'll have you know that most Frenches perceive the USA as having no such separation. I know better, while aknowledging where this perception comes from: your politicians always speaking of God, religious nutjobs being unreasonably influential, the existence of creationists in what looks otherwise like a sensible country, etc. Seriously, I can't blame them for doubting the existence of an actual separation. In fact, I have to regularily read your Constitution to remember that this separation theoretically exists.
Ah well, since I'm on it, I can respond to other parts of your post.
So, about what you called the "Napoleonic law", I'm not sure of what you mean by that. Napoleon ended up a dictator, that's a given, and ultimately ended up as the inventor of modern dictatorship. I'm not among the Frenches who admire his reign. But even he hadn't had the guts to overthrow completely the inheritance of the French Revolution on which he built his power. And this included the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which specifies (in its article IX) the principle of presumption of innocence. So no, even under Napoleon, you weren't "guilty until proven innocent". By the way, the Constitutional Council of France specifically refered to article IX of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which has constitutional value, to invalidate the previous version of the repressive part of the law discussed here.
As for the French Academy... well, I agree that it is laughable. Fortunately, not much care is given to their rulings. For example, they ruled that the French version of "e-mail" would be "mèl". Thankfully, this awful semantic unit has been overriden by the Quebecois version "courriel", which has the awesome property of offering the variant "pourriel" for junk mail. So, basically, the Quebecois protect French language from the French Academy.
In France, the populace has a much different relationship with the government than Americans do with theirs.
That, I aknowledge as true. And I find it very interesting to discuss. Don't you?
Having the right of the accuser to be present during proceedings taken away is one that will impact their civil liberties.
This typo is quite unfortunate. I guess you meant the accused. And I agree with you, but thats one reason why the Constitutional Council might ditch this law again.
However, the French standard for civil liberties is much lower.
Maybe. Or maybe we have a different definition of civil liberties. For example, I find the typical lack of concern about privacy that most Americans show rather startling. That's things like that that make the dialogue interesting.
There is another legitimate fear that you can't delete your data for certain and ever. That's Somebody Else's Problem, and also not covered by the analogy.
And that's just an example of why a data retention legislation can be useful.
Or 'turn off your computer', if this fails.
eBay is in a dominant position, and benefits from a strong network effect.
Some historians* advance that common superstitions** of that time deeming cats as demonic creatures***, leading to many cats being hunted away or down, favored the spread of Black Death through rats' fleas.
* Sorry, no source here, I just read this statement sometimes in passing, can't remember where, feel free to challenge it.****
** And by "superstitions" I really mean superstitions. As agnostic (largely, if not fully) and anticlerical (... let's say "significantly") as I am, I won't pin this on the Church, that stuff about cats has never been part of the official dogma.****
*** A recent study of the Laboratory of Applied Confusion showed that the demonic nature of cats is most likely, but that they are too cute for it to be significant.****
**** One of the three previous footnotes is meant as a joke. Take your pick*****.
***** By the way, "pick" means "penis" in Danish, which makes me giggle here ******
****** I'm having way too much fun with this footnotes stuff, I stop right now.
without being clean what kind of slob are you?
A standard, regular, ordinary slob?
You are really good at picking the examples that comfort your prejudice, aren't you?
Health care and medical infrastructures in the UK have been going downhill for many years, they only recently started recovering, slowly, from the devastation they suffered from policies dating back to Thatcher. Just a few years ago, many British patients had to cross the Channel for some operations. The UK is far from being representative of European health care systems.
Despite its many flaws, bugs and shortcomings, Arcanum holds enough goodness that I still play it from time to time. I'd be happy to see it retooled.
Yup, and unless I'm mistaken, a CC-by license is sufficient legal protection against plagiarism. And honestly, for academic works, it's the license that makes the most sense to me (I've considered CC-by-sa, but as things currently go it would hinder the work of science journalists, who play a useful role and work in an entirely different economic setting).
A common misconception. Copyright is granted when material is created, not when it is published. At least, it's the theory. In practice, it's complicated to claim authorship when you haven't published your work, or registered it somehow. But still, ideally neither publication nor registering is required to gain copyright.
I'd suggest you talk about this to a physician, what you describe seems a lot like tinnitus, which can have a variety of causes.