Unless they're wealthy, minorities get, or have got in the past, unjust treatment in most democratic countries around the world; this is a
problem that needs to be fixed without invoking the suppression of the democratic principles.
Being an European, I could not object to political parties that declare themselves "islamic", since most of Europe has been
governed by parties that call themselves "christian democrats" for the last 60 years. We can't deny the same thing to happen
for religions other than christianity in countries that have a different culture.
Moreover, "parliamentarizing" islam might be a good way
to avoid handing to the fundamentalists the monopoly of support for islamic values. It did work for many forms of extremism in
Europe (although sometimes it didn't - for example, with fascism).
The basic idea behind the EU is that its citizens are free to move across the countries that constitute it, so the EU must make sure
that the basic principles of freedom, tipically associated with its founding countries, are guaranteed everywhere
in the european territory. This is not compatible with having a part of the EU being "protected" by the military.
I'm not saying that Turkey is ready to join the EU (or that the EU is ready to accept such a special new member): just that that step was necessary if not sufficient. Should freedom of religion impair in Turkey, they wouldn't be accepted in the EU anyway.
Really, it's a shame that Mario teaches kids that it's OK to crush turtles (they're an endangered species). Besides, it might also encourage them to eat hallucinogen mushrooms, and they could end up stomping their heads against the ceiling in the hope of obtaining gold coins.
Perhaps the media gave me a wrong impression, but I heard that Belgium stayed for something like 500 days without a government for causes ultimately linked to mistrust between the two largest cultures making up the country. The TVs showed some people demonstrating in the streets with the Belgian flags, so at least some Belgians did feel the need to show their support for the country's unity, which means that some others called it into question. I know that the country hasn't split, that's why I put the quotes and talked about an "in-house" separation - my apologies if the expression wasn't felt as appropriate. I'm certainly not fond of borders.
You've mistakenly, or dishonestly misrepresented them,
IMHO, mutual respect is the basis for any conversation. That said, if you have better data, show them. The ones you cite coming from the British public television are from five years ago, and still show France paying more than they receive, and thus I stilll don't see how they demonstrate that France needs UK's money to go on.
I'm not sure what you mean here, most countries in the EU have a degree of euroscepticism, but the UK ratified the Lisbon treaty with far less hassle than many other countries that outright voted against it in it's original form. Do you not remember Ireland having to run the referendum on it twice because they said no the first time?
The latest official eurobarometer survey (page 47) says that 22% of the UK citizens have a positive view of the EU. That's _the lowest value_ registered in the whole area composed by the EU and the non-EU countries that are interested in joining the EU in the near future. The EU average is 40%. For comparison, Germany is at 38%. Italy is at 39%. France is at 41%.
The UK ratified the Lisbon treaty quickly because, unlike Ireland, they did not hold a referendum. Is your opinion that such a referendum would have passed, when only 22% of British people have a fully positive view of the EU?
And you think the UK is a stalling point here? really?
Not the only one. It is one of the many, and as the most euro-sceptic country inside the EU, it's a considerable one. What's the country that invariantly has some opt-out in every important treaty of the EU? Including the treaty of Lisbon?
If I've learnt anything over the years it's that alternating opinions blocking legislation is almost always a good thing. When legislation is rammed through without care for minority opinions it's rarely good legislation, and when it's passed because everyone agrees it's generally good.
You can't administer even a condominium when every house owner has a right of veto. How can we suppose to be able to govern a continent, and one with so many different and strong cultures such as the EU, under the same premises? In fact, problems of all kinds keep hitting the EU while the member states are either still quarreling or moving dispersedly.
I'd like to see decreases euro-scepticism in our country
I'd like it too, because I think that Britain is an important part of Europe's culture and history. I like being able to live and work there without hassles. And I feel that there's more that we have in common, compared to what we don't share. But I _do not_ want the people of the UK to be forced into the EU against their will, because history shows that government-enforced cohabitations end up badly sooner or later (Yugoslavia: violent breakup; Czechoslovakia: peaceful split; Belgium: "in-house divorce"). If now they aren't convinced, it's better for them to stay at the window and look at how the others do, and then join later if they do appreciate the end results.
According to the site of the european parliament, in the 2010 balance of the European Union, the "net contributors" to the EU are:
1) Germany (19.6 %)
2) France (18%)
3) Italy (13.9 %)
4) United Kingdom (10.4%)
5) Spain (9.6%)
Of course these numbers aren't too meaningful, because they don't track the indirect benefits that a member country enjoys for being in the EU. For example, the import fees paid by a country that is importing goods for China, appear as paid by that country in the balance, but they will actually be paid by the final customers of those goods in reality.
But you can read that the image of France being a burden for other member states because of its agriculture subsidies is wrong: they pay to the EU more than what they actually receive, and in particular they pay almost twice as much as the UK.
The problem with the UK in the EU is not economic, it's their political dissent every time that an EU treaty is to be made. Which stems from the fact that probably, most of the UK population is against the EU. I think the UK shoud solve this problem by clearly asking their citizens if they really want to be inside the EU. If the answer is negative, then the UK should withdraw from the union and leave it to the states who are actually interested in its construction.
I'd rather take an EU that is 10% poorer but that works, instead of one that never acts because every decision is shot down by the crossed vetoes of the member states.
The "two-speeds" union that is starting to delineate, with the members of the Euro zone having special government structures, might be a good step in this direction; but it's still too soon to tell.
Indeed, in America free speech is much more protected than in Europe. But you have to be careful even there. Revealing certain secrets can cost you death penalty.
the government can't expropriate your property for public interest
You mean that if a city needs to build an highway, and there's a single house standing in its way, and its owner doesn't want to sell it, then the highway will have to make a 180-degrees arc around that house? I'm surprised - if things worked this way in my country, then we couldn't build any public infrastructure.
where you can have guns
Really, you can have guns in most countries. In fact, I don't know a single country where you can't. (And I still have to be convinced that it's a good idea...)
Sure, they are slowly becoming a democracy and these rights have been eroded during the 20th century
I think they actually improved during the 20th century. Think about the concentration camps for japanese Americans in the 40s, or mccarthyims in the 50s, or the various racial-based laws they had until the 60s. I don't think any of these would be possible today.
They still have a problem understanding that rights are universal and not bound to the physical boundaries of their country. For example, in 2003 ten CIA agents kidnapped a person in Italy and flew him into Egypt where he was tortured. I don't think such behaviour would be accepted inside the USA. And by the way, many details of this story are known because of the leaked Wikileaks cables, for which an American citizen is currently risking his life.
In Italy, GEMA's equivalent asked a non-profit organization to pay them 1.094,40 € because they played the national anthem in public. They say it's required because, "even if the original author of the anthem died more than 70 years ago" (in 1849 actually), they are authorized to collect royalties over the "printed musical sheets as confirmed by European Directive 2001/29/EC article 5".
This is beyond ridiculous. These people live outside of reality (and at our expense).
That's history. In my country, we moved on to the next stage: the "private elite" dumps proposals of law into the parliament verbatim. We have come to know this in one case some time ago, when someone looked at the file properties of the PDF document containing a proposed law, as posted on the official web site of the politician who was supposedly its author. They revealed that the actual author of the document was the chairman of a RIAA-like association.
Google probably already compy with this kind of legislation, because similar laws are already present in many EU countries where Google operate. You can see your personal data in Google's Dashboard (quite an interesting experience if you've ever wondered how much of your data can be gathered by a single entity, often without you even noticing) and from there you can delete it.
In particular, there's a notice inside there telling that if a web site indexed by Google is modified, it will be automatically updated, without the need for a direct intervention by the user to also update the indexed information.
I don't think Facebook will have much trouble implementing a similar system, if they already haven't one.
Wayback Machine would probably need more work; e.g. in case somebody discovers that his cell phone number ended up on a web page in 1997, I think that he probably could request that information to be removed (the phone number, not the web page). They can probably get away with providing an email address accepting privacy-related requests.
The requirement to be able to query, amend and delete the personal information stored by any entity (public or private) is already present in the national laws of many EU member states, and has been for years. For once, european legislation won't bend to pave the way for some large company's business model. Which should be the rule and not an exception, frankly.
Facebook will have no problems complying with the law. All the service providers working in the individual EU countries which protect privacy already do.
I don't think many people will lose their jobs. Adobe will probably re-target the development tools they sell to produce HTML5 instead of flash. They wouldn't announce the plan to phase out flash without having a viable migration path for their business model.
The false information from my side was only that Apple litigated first - I was convinced of that, because I confused Motorola with Samsung.
The false information from you is that Google is Motorola Mobility. It isn't. The acquisition hasn't happened yet. Google has no control over what Motorola does, whatsoever. You're angry against the wrong people.
Dont blame microsoft.
These are the silly rules that the silly patent system and goverments have decided on.
Complaining to MS or others wont help. If nothing else they are victims too.
No they aren' t. Other companies are playing with the same rules but they don't act that way. Example given: Google.
Microsoft are just being Microsoft, as they always do and as they've always done.
Actually Windows supports UDF out of the box, too. And it works well, much better than FAT, almost in every case where FAT is used today.
Anyway, it's too late to care about that, because Microsoft managed to inject exFAT into the relevant standards for SD cards, so we'll have to keep dealing with them in the near future, whether we like it or not.
Abusing a ridiculous patent about "long file names" to extort money from people who are using that technique only to provide interoperability with their monopolist OS looks much like patent trolling to me - the difference is that they do have a product, which the market rejected, implementing that feature, unlike typical patent trolls. But the intentions and the result are the same.
Google, for example, are playing in the same game and by the same rules: they buy patents and pay licenses, but I haven't seen them using their patent portfolio for offensive purposes yet.
A USB connector beats the hell out of a pointlessly proprietary power/data port; but it doesn't have enough pins to make physically exposing host capabilities to low-cost peripherals doable. If the driver gods are merciful, you can do a lot of things over a USB link with a suitably powerful peripheral; but you lose the ability to do all sorts of fairly simple and cheap peripherals that you could implement if you could piggyback on the host to a greater degree...
I bought a cheap Bluetooth headset for € 5, and it even had a car power adapter in the package; I can't believe that an encrypted, low-power, shared-mac, wireless link can be cheaper to implement than a wired USB connection. Once a standard is widely adopted, the cheap pheripherals for it will come.
So, price does not matter to most consumers? Out here, it's the first thing a consumer watches.
Lately on slashdot this elitist opinion has spread, that sees nerds as genetically unable to understand supposedly "normal" people. This is plain wrong, because I'm a consumer well before being a nerd. Look at many of the most successful companies, there's a good chance you'll find that they're directed or were founded by "nerds".
And then, a smartphone is a "nerd's product", because "most consumers" just make calls.
So please spare me the "shut up, you're a nerd" argument.
Slashdot Mirror
Being an European, I could not object to political parties that declare themselves "islamic", since most of Europe has been governed by parties that call themselves "christian democrats" for the last 60 years. We can't deny the same thing to happen for religions other than christianity in countries that have a different culture.
Moreover, "parliamentarizing" islam might be a good way to avoid handing to the fundamentalists the monopoly of support for islamic values. It did work for many forms of extremism in Europe (although sometimes it didn't - for example, with fascism).
The basic idea behind the EU is that its citizens are free to move across the countries that constitute it, so the EU must make sure that the basic principles of freedom, tipically associated with its founding countries, are guaranteed everywhere in the european territory. This is not compatible with having a part of the EU being "protected" by the military. I'm not saying that Turkey is ready to join the EU (or that the EU is ready to accept such a special new member): just that that step was necessary if not sufficient. Should freedom of religion impair in Turkey, they wouldn't be accepted in the EU anyway.
Turkey is one.
If by "Muslim country" you mean a country whose citizens are mostly Muslim.
Really, it's a shame that Mario teaches kids that it's OK to crush turtles (they're an endangered species). Besides, it might also encourage them to eat hallucinogen mushrooms, and they could end up stomping their heads against the ceiling in the hope of obtaining gold coins.
Perhaps the media gave me a wrong impression, but I heard that Belgium stayed for something like 500 days without a government for causes ultimately linked to mistrust between the two largest cultures making up the country. The TVs showed some people demonstrating in the streets with the Belgian flags, so at least some Belgians did feel the need to show their support for the country's unity, which means that some others called it into question. I know that the country hasn't split, that's why I put the quotes and talked about an "in-house" separation - my apologies if the expression wasn't felt as appropriate. I'm certainly not fond of borders.
IMHO, mutual respect is the basis for any conversation. That said, if you have better data, show them. The ones you cite coming from the British public television are from five years ago, and still show France paying more than they receive, and thus I stilll don't see how they demonstrate that France needs UK's money to go on.
The latest official eurobarometer survey (page 47) says that 22% of the UK citizens have a positive view of the EU. That's _the lowest value_ registered in the whole area composed by the EU and the non-EU countries that are interested in joining the EU in the near future. The EU average is 40%. For comparison, Germany is at 38%. Italy is at 39%. France is at 41%.
The UK ratified the Lisbon treaty quickly because, unlike Ireland, they did not hold a referendum. Is your opinion that such a referendum would have passed, when only 22% of British people have a fully positive view of the EU?
Not the only one. It is one of the many, and as the most euro-sceptic country inside the EU, it's a considerable one. What's the country that invariantly has some opt-out in every important treaty of the EU? Including the treaty of Lisbon?
You can't administer even a condominium when every house owner has a right of veto. How can we suppose to be able to govern a continent, and one with so many different and strong cultures such as the EU, under the same premises? In fact, problems of all kinds keep hitting the EU while the member states are either still quarreling or moving dispersedly.
I'd like it too, because I think that Britain is an important part of Europe's culture and history. I like being able to live and work there without hassles. And I feel that there's more that we have in common, compared to what we don't share. But I _do not_ want the people of the UK to be forced into the EU against their will, because history shows that government-enforced cohabitations end up badly sooner or later (Yugoslavia: violent breakup; Czechoslovakia: peaceful split; Belgium: "in-house divorce"). If now they aren't convinced, it's better for them to stay at the window and look at how the others do, and then join later if they do appreciate the end results.
1) Germany (19.6 %)
2) France (18%)
3) Italy (13.9 %)
4) United Kingdom (10.4%)
5) Spain (9.6%)
Of course these numbers aren't too meaningful, because they don't track the indirect benefits that a member country enjoys for being in the EU. For example, the import fees paid by a country that is importing goods for China, appear as paid by that country in the balance, but they will actually be paid by the final customers of those goods in reality.
But you can read that the image of France being a burden for other member states because of its agriculture subsidies is wrong: they pay to the EU more than what they actually receive, and in particular they pay almost twice as much as the UK.
The problem with the UK in the EU is not economic, it's their political dissent every time that an EU treaty is to be made. Which stems from the fact that probably, most of the UK population is against the EU. I think the UK shoud solve this problem by clearly asking their citizens if they really want to be inside the EU. If the answer is negative, then the UK should withdraw from the union and leave it to the states who are actually interested in its construction.
I'd rather take an EU that is 10% poorer but that works, instead of one that never acts because every decision is shot down by the crossed vetoes of the member states.
The "two-speeds" union that is starting to delineate, with the members of the Euro zone having special government structures, might be a good step in this direction; but it's still too soon to tell.
Indeed, in America free speech is much more protected than in Europe. But you have to be careful even there. Revealing certain secrets can cost you death penalty.
You mean that if a city needs to build an highway, and there's a single house standing in its way, and its owner doesn't want to sell it, then the highway will have to make a 180-degrees arc around that house? I'm surprised - if things worked this way in my country, then we couldn't build any public infrastructure.
Really, you can have guns in most countries. In fact, I don't know a single country where you can't. (And I still have to be convinced that it's a good idea...)
I think they actually improved during the 20th century. Think about the concentration camps for japanese Americans in the 40s, or mccarthyims in the 50s, or the various racial-based laws they had until the 60s. I don't think any of these would be possible today.
They still have a problem understanding that rights are universal and not bound to the physical boundaries of their country. For example, in 2003 ten CIA agents kidnapped a person in Italy and flew him into Egypt where he was tortured. I don't think such behaviour would be accepted inside the USA. And by the way, many details of this story are known because of the leaked Wikileaks cables, for which an American citizen is currently risking his life.
This is beyond ridiculous. These people live outside of reality (and at our expense).
That's history. In my country, we moved on to the next stage: the "private elite" dumps proposals of law into the parliament verbatim. We have come to know this in one case some time ago, when someone looked at the file properties of the PDF document containing a proposed law, as posted on the official web site of the politician who was supposedly its author. They revealed that the actual author of the document was the chairman of a RIAA-like association.
In particular, there's a notice inside there telling that if a web site indexed by Google is modified, it will be automatically updated, without the need for a direct intervention by the user to also update the indexed information.
I don't think Facebook will have much trouble implementing a similar system, if they already haven't one.
Wayback Machine would probably need more work; e.g. in case somebody discovers that his cell phone number ended up on a web page in 1997, I think that he probably could request that information to be removed (the phone number, not the web page). They can probably get away with providing an email address accepting privacy-related requests.
Facebook will have no problems complying with the law. All the service providers working in the individual EU countries which protect privacy already do.
Then I strongly agree with the AC I was responding to. Quite an asshole wording they chose.
OK they will. I failed to read TFA.
I don't think many people will lose their jobs. Adobe will probably re-target the development tools they sell to produce HTML5 instead of flash. They wouldn't announce the plan to phase out flash without having a viable migration path for their business model.
The false information from you is that Google is Motorola Mobility. It isn't. The acquisition hasn't happened yet. Google has no control over what Motorola does, whatsoever. You're angry against the wrong people.
Until november 17 Motorola hadn't even voted yet on whether to accept Google's offer.
Google didn't buy Motorola until August 2011.
They were sued by Apple first. Notice the difference.
No they aren' t. Other companies are playing with the same rules but they don't act that way. Example given: Google.
Microsoft are just being Microsoft, as they always do and as they've always done.
Anyway, it's too late to care about that, because Microsoft managed to inject exFAT into the relevant standards for SD cards, so we'll have to keep dealing with them in the near future, whether we like it or not.
Google, for example, are playing in the same game and by the same rules: they buy patents and pay licenses, but I haven't seen them using their patent portfolio for offensive purposes yet.
Especially for "multimedia" hardware such as GPUs? Linux is already a bit behind in this field, but FreeBSD is even worse.
I think OSX is a very elaborate NeXTSTEP, not FreeBSD, installation.
I bought a cheap Bluetooth headset for € 5, and it even had a car power adapter in the package; I can't believe that an encrypted, low-power, shared-mac, wireless link can be cheaper to implement than a wired USB connection. Once a standard is widely adopted, the cheap pheripherals for it will come.
Lately on slashdot this elitist opinion has spread, that sees nerds as genetically unable to understand supposedly "normal" people. This is plain wrong, because I'm a consumer well before being a nerd. Look at many of the most successful companies, there's a good chance you'll find that they're directed or were founded by "nerds".
And then, a smartphone is a "nerd's product", because "most consumers" just make calls.
So please spare me the "shut up, you're a nerd" argument.