I got a kid. I'm paranoid that if he goes to a gun-owning house he'll blow his own brains out. Therefore if you're on the map everybody's coming to my house, or we're all going to Chuck E Cheese. This is a legitimate use of the map.
Maybe I don't want to live next door to a guy who thinks Gun Safety is a Liberal conspiracy AND owns six weapons. This is a legitimate use of the map.
Frankly the least likely use of this map is for criminals to find targets. A criminal doesn't usually plan things out that way. He learns a neighborhood, and goes for targets of opportunity, figuring something sellable will be in every house. I actually lived on a block where a guy got out of prison, within six months every house but his had been broken into, and he hired one of his victims as his lawyer because he had no cash. These are not people who spend hours and hours on the internet trying to figure out whether to break into 1750 Drury Lane or 1745 Drury Lane.
Gun guys really do not understand people who are not gun guys.
As a non-gun-guy I don't give a shit whether you know that I have no gun. That's the entire point of not being a gun guy. I do not believe that personal weapons increase safety, therefore I do not believe not having one decreases my personal safety, therefore I do not care whether people know I don't have one. It's like putting out a list of people who do not have dowsing rods.
Feel free to message me for my address so I can be included on your list. Don't bother until you have a working app. I'm not here to reward laziness.
Us Liberal Socialists take that phrase "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" pretty seriously.
Now if you guys started actually showing up at our houses we'd freak a bit, but simply giving you the ability to find out where our houses are does not scare us.
BTW, political terms are fascinating. When they were first created Liberals and Socialists hated each-other. Liberals were laissez-faire to the point that they let most of Ireland starve to death because clearly those idiots should have planned their agriculture better. If only they'd diversified their crops their kids would not be starving, and if their kids didn't starve they'd have no incentive to plan better next time. At the time conservatives were anti-Socialist in that they were Monarchist, and in favor of hereditary government, but they would not have let thousands of people starve to death on principle. Noblesse oblige.
State-side everybody was liberal, so nobody really used the term. It kinda went without saying.
It can't be libel if the person saying it thinks it's true. That's the First Amendment. More importantly he's not responsible for the vast majority of taggings on his map because he's not the one doing the tagging. Under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA he's only responsible for the ones he does himself.
He could be in trouble if burglaries start being linked to his app, but even then what would you charge him with? The newspaper which just printed the name and address of every gun-owner in multiple counties of New York didn't start a rash of burglaries. It was accused of numerous and sundry crimes by gun enthusiasts no actual law enforcement personal bothered charging it with a crime.
As for victims if said burglaries ever happen, you've got issues tracing weapons. Sometimes you can trace weapons to a specific robbery, but most of the time that's impossible. The government knows that a weapon was sold to a specific dealer, the dealer has a record of who he sold it to, but after that there are no records. It's not common for the government to have any record of the unique barrel characteristics of a weapon until they get their hands on it. So in a surprisingly large number of cases the government has no idea when a weapon left the control of it's last official owner and entered the underworld. Which makes it very tricky to link this app to any given murder.
Even if you pull off the linkage, you have to keep in mind that there is virtually no liability for anybody in the gun industry for having weapons appear in the hands of criminals. The Bush administration passed a law about this, which was extremely broadly written, and I would not be surprised if they hadn't included a provision exempting groups that let criminals know a gun is in a house. Otherwise everyone with a sign saying "gun-owner lives here" sign on their house could be sued if their weapons were stolen.
You do realize that in the US "Invasion of Privacy" is perfectly legal as long as the invaders aren't the government? The first amendment says that if I find something out about you legally you have no right to stop me from telling everyone else about it.
Libel could conceivably be an issue, but a) the safe harbor provision should protect him, and b) if the person saying it believes it to be true it's not libel. Since many, many Americans define unsafe gun ownership to mean any gun ownership it's gonna be mighty tricky to prove that they should have known that keeping the damn things unloaded in a gun safe is safe.
That last bit is also why the list won't be terribly useful. If people start using it it will basically be a map of suspected gun-owners, because most people who post to something like that don't know/care whether you've got the damn things locked up in a case or not.
You may not understand what a "sub-post-master" does.
A sub-post-master runs a tiny little post office. The kind that doesn't have employees, or only has a couple employees. He's basically a mailman who can also sell stamps. Oh, and he's a private contractor so he can't get help from anyone in the government except the help desk. A subpostmaster simply does not have the money to hire an accounting guy full-time to go through the books every day.
The one case it mentions where someone was actually convicted, she was not convicted because the computers said she was short. She was convicted because she told someone else the computers said she wasn't short. Since the computers were her accounting system, and she was lying about what they said, this was accounting fraud. I'd assume it's typical, and nobody (or at least very few people) has been convicted of stealing based solely on computer data.
You don't seem to understand how the post office works in the UK. A sub-post-master is a mail-man.
His boss would be a full postmaster. Since the post is privatized technically all the subpostmasters are independent businesses, which means they are supposed to look out for themselves, they aren't really capable of hiring a QA team.
According to the article she wasn't prosecuted over the missing money. She was prosecuted for telling her superior the books were in balance when they actually showed she owed the post office 36,000 pounds. She didn't have much choice -- they wouldn't let her open if the books didn't balance, and they weren't exactly working overtime to fix the bug -- but in the UK this is "accounting fraud." That's what she got convicted of. It's not fair, but technically it's what is supposed to happen when you tell people your books are fine and they actually say you're in the whole thousands and thousands of quid.
There are very few court systems that will believe a convicted fraudster's claim that it was all just a misunderstanding (read: computer bug), so not only did she get convicted, and lose her business; she is also currently re-paying the 36k.
Open-source probably would not have helped her much. In theory the bug could have been fixed by somebody, but it's not like sub-post-masters who accidentally commit fraud are likely to understand code.
India has many old cultures, but it is not an old country in the sense that list-writer was using the term because the Mauryas and the British were the only people to own all (or even 75%) of modern India. The Mauryas fell in 185 BC. As a region of the world it hosts dozens (or hundreds, depending how you count) of cultures that are older then Judaism, but as a unified entity it's history starts with the British. Since the Indians didn't consider the British government of their sub-continent to be "their government" in any meaningful sense of the term they date the founding of their country to the late 40s.
As for the Chinese and Japanese, the Japanese are fine. They have continuity to their ancient governments via the Emperor, who is descended from the Sun-Goddess Amaterasu. The Chinese have more trouble, but the point of the list wasn't to create some arbitrary definition of "country" and then sit down with 196 experts in all 196 nations on the list and pin-point the exact day the country fit it. That would have cost a lot of money, and gone to plenty of strange places.
On this very thread I've had people argue Canada wasn't independent until 1982 due to a Constitutional maneuver Trudeau used. On previous threads I've had people claim the US stopped being a Republic in 1913 because we passed the 17th Amendment. I had to look that one up. It's direct election of Senators. The 16th Amendment (Income Tax), and the no-slavery-we-really-mean-it Amendments (14 and 15) were all huge Constitutional changes that had a larger impact on day-to-day life in the US then the actual Revolution did. Heck the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 was huge. Much bigger then any change the Japanese have ever made. Prior to the Constitution we had no Head of State, after the Constitution we had a President. OTOH the Japanese have always had a descendent of Amaterasu as Head of State. And I still haven't gotten to women voting.
As to the point of the list, I believe the entire point of every internet list is to piss people off. Pissed off people call you stupid, which means more eyeballs as people try to figure out whether you are, in fact, stupid. With a list like this there's no point in inserting bias, particularly if you're an American writing for Americans. As an American you know most of Europe is older, lots of Asian countries are older; but that other Western Hemisphere states, the Africans, and some Old World states are younger, so you're gonna be somewhere in the middle. You pick a simple methodology (in this case: when is the most recent day people in the country commemorate as an independence day), and then rake in the ad-money after the countries that swear they're old but had independence interrupted (ie: Poland, Sweden) freak out.
You aren't basing your argument on wikipedia. Every time wikipedia lists Swedish independence, or anything like Swedish independence, it uses 1523. Every time it lists Hungarian independence it uses a) something back in the mists of time (generally 895 or 1000), or b) 1989. Unless you're arguing that all of Eastern Europe should be younger then Palau the wikipedian list is exactly the same list the listicle writer used.
As for your interpretation of history, it's a pretty clear example of what happens when people who know nothing read a little. Hungarians never count 1848 or the early 18th as their date of independence because they lost. They generally got some concessions from the King (ie: the Austrians) out of it, but they still lost. I have no clue as to whether every nation, of the other 195 nations on the list, counts similar failed rebellions this way; but the standard on the list isn't that some foreigner looked through everyone's history books and told them what to think. It's that the foreigner asked everyone what they think and put that on a list.
What everyone in Sweden thinks is they became independent in 1523, and the Hungarians say they have been independent since time began.
BTW, the argument you bring up re: personal unions is a huge reason for just asking people and not trying to apply some one-size-fits-all standard. Today it's not hard to find Canadians who argue they aren't really independent because they share a Queen with the UK. Same with Australia. For years Jamaica's pols have been making noises that they want to "become fully independent" by replacing the Queen as well. So if you say Hungary wasn't independent until after WW1, despite protestations from numerous Hungarians, on the basis that it shared a head of state with Austria, how can you possibly justify recognizing ANY of these realms as independent?
For one thing you're even more confused then the list-writer if you think 'country' is less ambiguous then 'nation.' Nation can refer to everyone who speaks a language, which means the "Spanish nation" could just be talking about people from Spain, or it could include people who identify as Spanish-Canadians (who may not know Spanish), or it could include all of Mexico/Central America/Columbia/etc. And that's assuming everyone agrees on where languages start and stop. For example, my Scottish grandmother was strongly opposed to the people who told her she'd grown up speaking a unique language called Scots. To her it was bastard dialect, much inferior to the King's English her mother insisted she speak. If the list-writer had wanted maximum clarity he should have said nation-state, but that would be pretty formal language for an internet listicle.
As for how hard he should work to explain this, keep in mind that the only people who seem to care about this are European. Europe is pretty much the only continent where an ancient nation can re-appear on the map after being conquered. Everywhere else you get conquered, and you either co-opt the Conquerors (ie: China), or declare yourself a completely new nation once you get rid of your conquerors (ie: Africa, the entire Western Hemisphere, India, Vietnam). Nobody else really goes through cycles of being independent and then being conquered, while insisting the being conquered bits make you the most oppressed nation in history, but they do not (in any way) make your country young.
The only thing more annoying then a Euro trying to prove his nation is superior to all the others (generally by switching between a 1000-year-old myth and tyrannies inflicted by the Soviets), is some South American nationalist whose gotten three other South American nationalists to recognize a legal principle and is stunned that outside of South American nobody gives a damn.
I'll give you Oswiecim (better known by it's German name, Auschtwitz), but the vast majority of Silesia was part of Bohemia. Which meant that as of the early 18th it belonged to Austria, and it passed to Prussia by the mid-18th in the Silesian Wars. Prussian Silesia and the bits of East Prussia Stalin gave new Poland alone are about a third of the current country's land area.
As for the rules, you're intentionally misinterpreting them. There is only one rule. It is that the popular answer within a country as to it's independence day is what goes on the list. That is, in many cases, related to objectively true history because it is simply objectively true that prior to July 1776 there was no America. Even that "objectively true" fact is extremely deceiving because the date most Americans give is July 4th, but the actual day the resolution was passed was July 2nd.
If most Poles answer the question "when was your country independent?" with a date in 1918 then 1918 is the year used on the list. The fact that Poles would immediately give you seventeen bajillion paragraphs explaining that it's really fucking complicated is irrelevant. What's relevant is their answer to the question. The entire point of the rule is to render those "it's complicated" paragraphs irrelevant, because if you admit it's complicated for Poland you're gonna have to delve deeply into the history of all 196 countries on the list.
Even some really simple ones can be legally quite complicated. In the late 70s Trudeau of Canada wanted to create a Canadian Bill of Rights. Under the Canadian Constitution he needed all 10 provinces to ok the deal, and Quebec said no. Officially they wanted to re-negotiate their deal with the rest of the country, but everyone knew they were just being dicks. Then he noticed the official name of Canada's Constitution was British North America Act. So he got Thatcher to amend the British North America Act, adding the "Charter of Rights and Freedoms," included a clause saying that would never work again, and told everyone he was repatriating the Canadian Constitution. And everyone went along with it because fuck Quebec. So is Canada's date of independence 1867 or 1982?
I consider that a clever Parliamentary maneuver, not prima facia evidence Canada was not independent in 1981. But there is a definite legal case to be made that if the Mother Country can amend your Constitution you aren't independent.
This is in response to your post re the UK and Russia: To an extent you have a point.
OTOH, unions of nations that are recognized as single nations by the international community are always going to be problematic for a list of dates of independence. If we're judging this list based on double-standards then the question isn't "Has this guy picked the most logical standard?," it's "Does he always use the same standard?" And the answer to that question is yes. He's defining countries basically entirely by their status as sovereign states, and a Union by definition is only one sovereign state. When the Union breaks up that's the independence day for it's members.
As for the answer to the question he asks, in Russia there's actually a day celebrating the fall of the Soviet Union which is frequently referred to as Russian Independence Day, and the Brits are pretty clear the closest thing Britain has to an independence day is the date the Act of Union was signed.
The UK, BTW, is a more centralized union in legal terms then any Brit will admit. If 2/3 of English MPs decided to turn Scotland into a "nuclear testing zone" without letting any Scots leave then all Scots would die. 2/3 of English MPs are a majority, and all laws in the UK (including the British Constitution, who gets to be Queen, etc.) are subject to amendment by majority vote in parliament.
If you ask a Pole when his country became independent he will tell that it was when the last King of Congress Poland (aka: the Czar) fell in 1918.
No, he will say that is when Poland regained independence, having already been independent before; no Pole would ever agree that Poland did not exist at any time prior to 1918 (unlike the US, which most definately did not exist prior to 1776) and the current state of Poland just like France claims direct lineage to a state ("Poland") founded many hundreds of years before.
That's a mighty fine distinction to expect an internet list of almost 200 countries to include. It's pretty arrogant to assume that obviously the non-Polish 99.4% of the human race will automatically know that off the top their heads, and will immediately un-do the entire job just because the Polish 0.6% has a case.
I'm not saying you are wrong. I'm not saying that the list's entirely fair to Poland. I really don't care one way or the other. This is a list on the internet, not a scientific paper. It's based on history. That means there will be judgement calls. That also means that it's going to be unfair to somebody. The way you get around that on this lists is strict standards, which leads me to:
You can argue that the French and Chinese are full of shit, or that the "age of a country" like Poland can't accurately be calculated by it's independence day. You cannot argue that the author used a double-standard.
Yes, he did. He calculates the age of France from the founding of France in the 9th century, ignoring a bunch of revolutions and upheavals, but the age of Poland from 1918 not the founding of Poland in the 10th century. That is a double standard (for other countries also, France and Poland are just the example here).
The standard he uses in all cases is "What will an average citizen say if I ask when his country became independent?" You don't have to like this particular standard, but you do have to admit he applies it rigorously. OTOH the French refuse to admit they were conquered in the 40s, therefore if you ask a Frenchmen when his country gained it's independence he'll give you a very early date.
I'll give you the same capital. But the borders are completely different.
Most of what is now Poland has as strong historical ties to Germany as it does to Poland. Silesia, Prussia, and Pomerania alone are damn near 50% of the current Republic's territory and none of them was firmly in Poland's control at any time between 1400 and the Versailles treaty. At Versailles the Poles regained Pomerania, but nothing else. Silesia and Prussia remained German. After WW2 the majority of old Poland's territory was sliced off by Stalin to become Belarus, Lithuania, or Ukraine. By virtue of having Warsaw, and being ethnically Polish, the Poles have as strong a claim on the old Republic of Poland then anyone else, but if the Belarussians or Ukraineans decided to pick up the mantle of the old Republic it would be very hard for us poor foreigners to tell who was full of shit. Belurussian ethnicity was as much a core of that old Republic as Poles, and they ended up with more of old Poland's territory then new Poland did.
Keep in mind that the rules of this are clear: independence is your birthday. If we let anybody change it we have to let everybody change it. That means we get to argue about whether the March of Carniola counts as a predecessor state to Slovenia, we get to argue about why Romania doesn't get to count it's predecessor states (it was created by the union of two truly ancient countries: Wallachia and Moldova), etc.
In other words polish history gave them a choice. They could choose to interpret Congress Poland as a legitimate Polish government co-equal to the Czars and therefore a constant continuation of the prior government, or they could look really young in country-age lists compiled by Americans who haven't really put in the effort to understand their history. They chose the latter.
It's not about when the countries were founded. If you did that you'd get Hungarians talking about Attilla the Hun because that's the best way to be older then the Germans. It's about independence, which is generally what you get when you win a War of Liberation.
If you guys want us poor, nonPhD-in-Swedish-History-having-Anglos to acknowledge that you've had continuous independence since ancient times you're gonna have to start counting Christian the Tyrant as a legitimate King of Sweden and start calling it a Civil War.
Apparently you know nothing about Africa. In Sweden/Germany/etc. nobody ever sides with an anti-Democrat against a Democrat just to get another vote in the UN General Assembly. If the guy selling guns to third-world gives bribes in Northern Europe he gets outted by his home country, and the bribee gets to go to jail.
France, OTOH, was recently faced with a situation where the French-allied-government was accused of using hundreds of thousands of Chinese machetes which he intended to hack his political opponents to death with. There was video. The French hemmed and hawed and vetoed at the UN Security Council because the government swore the video was staged. A month or two later the murderers were basically done because they'd run out of victims, but their opponents turned out to be really good at winning battles so they were all about to be arrested and sent to the Hague. Which would look really bad on TV for France. Especially since the anti-government types not only had very good reasons to be pissed at France personally, they were also basically an army unit from English-speaking Uganda, and therefore virtually guaranteed to not vote with France in the UN.
France leaped into action. Within days a UN Force was on it's way to "stop the fighting," which was code for "protect the French-allied government because their ass is getting kicked by fighting." France's puppets ended up fleeing the country to Zaire, which they turned into the huge mess we now call the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Prime Minister responsible for allowing those 800k innocent civilians to die in the Rwandan Genocide, and the subsequent multiple Congo-Wars which killed millions? Jaques Chirac, who subsequently became President. And nobody cares about this in France because it's fucking France.
So yeah, I'll be stunned if the worst surveillance-violations Le Monde can come with is this metadata crap. There's probably a database of Malians who look at the foreign legion funny, with a hotline to the local torturer in case some poor bastard does it twice.
But I expect a lot better from the Northern Europeans. France are self-righteous assholes because that's how the game is played. You pretend to be the most moral country ever, and everybody needs you so you get away with it. Sweden/Germany/etc. are self-righteous assholes because actually try to be righteous. Collecting data while complaining that the US collects doesn't sound righteous, therefore it's unlikely they do it.
Judging that is really tricky. The Swedes, for example, haven't really had a revolution since the Napoleonic Wars, which wasn't so much a change in form of government as a change in who ran the government. Since then they haven't replaced the Constitution because in 1810 there was no Constitution to replace, but they have passed no less then three major new documents which make a four-document Constitution. It's really hard to pick a date for their Constitution?
That said most of Europe has had Communists rise and fall since 1789, unification wars, Civil Wars, been France, etc. I'd guess the Danes, Swedes, Brits, and European microstates may have a claim to older Constitutional orders then us. San Marino actually has a six-document Constitution from 1600 that's still in force.
[sarcasm] Canadians. So trusting. Trudeau would never try to push through major Constitutional changes, be thwarted by an asshole from Quebec, and then outflank the guy by singlehandedly convincing the entire country they'd been on crack since 1867. Independence had been faked, they needed a whole process called repatriation. And whadyaknow, repatriating just happens to outflank the Premier of Quebec and allow the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to pass.
That would be way too cynical. [/sarcasm]
Let me put it to you this way. If Mackenzie Lyon King and the Premier of Quebec decided to add some MLAs to the Quebec Legislative Assembly*, that requires a Constitutional Amendment because the Legislative Assembly is set at 65 in Section 80. To amend the document they need a majority vote in the Legislative Assembly, the Legislative Council, and both houses of Federal Parliament. They do that. Then they decide that they aren't gonna bother to send a memo to Britain and ask for the British north America Act to be officially amended. Do you think the Courts would rule the Amendment was invalid and there were only 65 Riodings in the Legislative Assembly elections? I don't.
*In Mackenzie King's day the Quebec National Assembly was called the Legislative Assembly and there was also an upper house called the Legislative Council. Today there's just the national Assembly.
Serb independence on this list is dated to whenever the current Serb government dates it's independence. Serbs date that to the dissolution of Yugoslavia seven years ago, so it's seven. It's not necessarily accurate (the difference between "Yugoslavia" and "Serbia" is a lot smaller then the Serbs claimed), but it is rigorously fair.
If you want a 100% accurate, perfect list then why don;t you do some of this research yourself. There's only 200 or so countries, and you'll only offend a Billion or so if you get China wrong, so really it's a trivial task. There's no way at all lazy people will flame you on the internet without even reading the report.
But that's not the Chinese take on the situation. The Chinese take is that all land currently owned by the PRC (and some more, like Taiwan) has always rightfully belonged to the legitimate government of China. Sometimes the various bits of China have disagreed about who is the rightful legitimate government (ie: the rise of the Manchus, Tibet in the 50s), but it's all always been China.
I don't entirely agree with that take on the situation, but the standard this guy is using for his list is what does the government say about when it became independent. And the Chinese do date their independence way back.
That's an incredibly restrictive definition of "Republic." It's also very odd. The 17th says we directly vote for Senators, instead of having them appointed by the states. I have never heard of a definition of Republic which hinged on whether a single House of the Legislature was appointed or elected.
The general definition of republic is any state that has a non-hereditary Head-of-State. That's why France, Ireland, India, Nigeria, Iraq, Communist China, Iran etc. are Republics despite vastly different forms of government.
Americans will accept a daily commute of 100 miles (50 miles a way), and won't understand why you didn't drive 150 miles out of your way to see them on the holidays. After all it's only two-and-a-half hours.
OTOH things that happened even 50 years ago (like the Civil Rights Movement) are ancient history.
Unfortunately the masses do not know these things.
Which means that now the various government have to spend weeks complaining about each-other's spies, whicl quietly re-assuring everyone nothing's changed, and prying no Wikileaks-type group has evidence they're lying asses off...
I'm guessing the next "revelation" is gonna be that it's really hard to be gay in Africa. The only drawback is that it doesn't embarrass anyone Putin dislikes, therefore it's unlikely to make headlines in Le Monde or the Guardian.
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Legit purpose is easy to find.
I got a kid. I'm paranoid that if he goes to a gun-owning house he'll blow his own brains out. Therefore if you're on the map everybody's coming to my house, or we're all going to Chuck E Cheese. This is a legitimate use of the map.
Maybe I don't want to live next door to a guy who thinks Gun Safety is a Liberal conspiracy AND owns six weapons. This is a legitimate use of the map.
Frankly the least likely use of this map is for criminals to find targets. A criminal doesn't usually plan things out that way. He learns a neighborhood, and goes for targets of opportunity, figuring something sellable will be in every house. I actually lived on a block where a guy got out of prison, within six months every house but his had been broken into, and he hired one of his victims as his lawyer because he had no cash. These are not people who spend hours and hours on the internet trying to figure out whether to break into 1750 Drury Lane or 1745 Drury Lane.
Gun guys really do not understand people who are not gun guys.
As a non-gun-guy I don't give a shit whether you know that I have no gun. That's the entire point of not being a gun guy. I do not believe that personal weapons increase safety, therefore I do not believe not having one decreases my personal safety, therefore I do not care whether people know I don't have one. It's like putting out a list of people who do not have dowsing rods.
Feel free to message me for my address so I can be included on your list. Don't bother until you have a working app. I'm not here to reward laziness.
You'd be surprised.
Us Liberal Socialists take that phrase "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" pretty seriously.
Now if you guys started actually showing up at our houses we'd freak a bit, but simply giving you the ability to find out where our houses are does not scare us.
BTW, political terms are fascinating. When they were first created Liberals and Socialists hated each-other. Liberals were laissez-faire to the point that they let most of Ireland starve to death because clearly those idiots should have planned their agriculture better. If only they'd diversified their crops their kids would not be starving, and if their kids didn't starve they'd have no incentive to plan better next time. At the time conservatives were anti-Socialist in that they were Monarchist, and in favor of hereditary government, but they would not have let thousands of people starve to death on principle. Noblesse oblige.
State-side everybody was liberal, so nobody really used the term. It kinda went without saying.
It can't be libel if the person saying it thinks it's true. That's the First Amendment. More importantly he's not responsible for the vast majority of taggings on his map because he's not the one doing the tagging. Under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA he's only responsible for the ones he does himself.
He could be in trouble if burglaries start being linked to his app, but even then what would you charge him with? The newspaper which just printed the name and address of every gun-owner in multiple counties of New York didn't start a rash of burglaries. It was accused of numerous and sundry crimes by gun enthusiasts no actual law enforcement personal bothered charging it with a crime.
As for victims if said burglaries ever happen, you've got issues tracing weapons. Sometimes you can trace weapons to a specific robbery, but most of the time that's impossible. The government knows that a weapon was sold to a specific dealer, the dealer has a record of who he sold it to, but after that there are no records. It's not common for the government to have any record of the unique barrel characteristics of a weapon until they get their hands on it. So in a surprisingly large number of cases the government has no idea when a weapon left the control of it's last official owner and entered the underworld. Which makes it very tricky to link this app to any given murder.
Even if you pull off the linkage, you have to keep in mind that there is virtually no liability for anybody in the gun industry for having weapons appear in the hands of criminals. The Bush administration passed a law about this, which was extremely broadly written, and I would not be surprised if they hadn't included a provision exempting groups that let criminals know a gun is in a house. Otherwise everyone with a sign saying "gun-owner lives here" sign on their house could be sued if their weapons were stolen.
Uhh...
You do realize that in the US "Invasion of Privacy" is perfectly legal as long as the invaders aren't the government? The first amendment says that if I find something out about you legally you have no right to stop me from telling everyone else about it.
Libel could conceivably be an issue, but a) the safe harbor provision should protect him, and b) if the person saying it believes it to be true it's not libel. Since many, many Americans define unsafe gun ownership to mean any gun ownership it's gonna be mighty tricky to prove that they should have known that keeping the damn things unloaded in a gun safe is safe.
That last bit is also why the list won't be terribly useful. If people start using it it will basically be a map of suspected gun-owners, because most people who post to something like that don't know/care whether you've got the damn things locked up in a case or not.
Apparently you don't go to jail for the shortfall. You just have to make it up out of your own personal money.
God help you if you lie about the shortfall to your boss, because you know it's not real.
You may not understand what a "sub-post-master" does.
A sub-post-master runs a tiny little post office. The kind that doesn't have employees, or only has a couple employees. He's basically a mailman who can also sell stamps. Oh, and he's a private contractor so he can't get help from anyone in the government except the help desk. A subpostmaster simply does not have the money to hire an accounting guy full-time to go through the books every day.
Read the article.
The one case it mentions where someone was actually convicted, she was not convicted because the computers said she was short. She was convicted because she told someone else the computers said she wasn't short. Since the computers were her accounting system, and she was lying about what they said, this was accounting fraud. I'd assume it's typical, and nobody (or at least very few people) has been convicted of stealing based solely on computer data.
You don't seem to understand how the post office works in the UK. A sub-post-master is a mail-man.
His boss would be a full postmaster. Since the post is privatized technically all the subpostmasters are independent businesses, which means they are supposed to look out for themselves, they aren't really capable of hiring a QA team.
According to the article she wasn't prosecuted over the missing money. She was prosecuted for telling her superior the books were in balance when they actually showed she owed the post office 36,000 pounds. She didn't have much choice -- they wouldn't let her open if the books didn't balance, and they weren't exactly working overtime to fix the bug -- but in the UK this is "accounting fraud." That's what she got convicted of. It's not fair, but technically it's what is supposed to happen when you tell people your books are fine and they actually say you're in the whole thousands and thousands of quid.
There are very few court systems that will believe a convicted fraudster's claim that it was all just a misunderstanding (read: computer bug), so not only did she get convicted, and lose her business; she is also currently re-paying the 36k.
Open-source probably would not have helped her much. In theory the bug could have been fixed by somebody, but it's not like sub-post-masters who accidentally commit fraud are likely to understand code.
India has many old cultures, but it is not an old country in the sense that list-writer was using the term because the Mauryas and the British were the only people to own all (or even 75%) of modern India. The Mauryas fell in 185 BC. As a region of the world it hosts dozens (or hundreds, depending how you count) of cultures that are older then Judaism, but as a unified entity it's history starts with the British. Since the Indians didn't consider the British government of their sub-continent to be "their government" in any meaningful sense of the term they date the founding of their country to the late 40s.
As for the Chinese and Japanese, the Japanese are fine. They have continuity to their ancient governments via the Emperor, who is descended from the Sun-Goddess Amaterasu. The Chinese have more trouble, but the point of the list wasn't to create some arbitrary definition of "country" and then sit down with 196 experts in all 196 nations on the list and pin-point the exact day the country fit it. That would have cost a lot of money, and gone to plenty of strange places.
On this very thread I've had people argue Canada wasn't independent until 1982 due to a Constitutional maneuver Trudeau used. On previous threads I've had people claim the US stopped being a Republic in 1913 because we passed the 17th Amendment. I had to look that one up. It's direct election of Senators. The 16th Amendment (Income Tax), and the no-slavery-we-really-mean-it Amendments (14 and 15) were all huge Constitutional changes that had a larger impact on day-to-day life in the US then the actual Revolution did. Heck the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 was huge. Much bigger then any change the Japanese have ever made. Prior to the Constitution we had no Head of State, after the Constitution we had a President. OTOH the Japanese have always had a descendent of Amaterasu as Head of State. And I still haven't gotten to women voting.
As to the point of the list, I believe the entire point of every internet list is to piss people off. Pissed off people call you stupid, which means more eyeballs as people try to figure out whether you are, in fact, stupid. With a list like this there's no point in inserting bias, particularly if you're an American writing for Americans. As an American you know most of Europe is older, lots of Asian countries are older; but that other Western Hemisphere states, the Africans, and some Old World states are younger, so you're gonna be somewhere in the middle. You pick a simple methodology (in this case: when is the most recent day people in the country commemorate as an independence day), and then rake in the ad-money after the countries that swear they're old but had independence interrupted (ie: Poland, Sweden) freak out.
You aren't basing your argument on wikipedia. Every time wikipedia lists Swedish independence, or anything like Swedish independence, it uses 1523. Every time it lists Hungarian independence it uses a) something back in the mists of time (generally 895 or 1000), or b) 1989. Unless you're arguing that all of Eastern Europe should be younger then Palau the wikipedian list is exactly the same list the listicle writer used.
As for your interpretation of history, it's a pretty clear example of what happens when people who know nothing read a little. Hungarians never count 1848 or the early 18th as their date of independence because they lost. They generally got some concessions from the King (ie: the Austrians) out of it, but they still lost. I have no clue as to whether every nation, of the other 195 nations on the list, counts similar failed rebellions this way; but the standard on the list isn't that some foreigner looked through everyone's history books and told them what to think. It's that the foreigner asked everyone what they think and put that on a list.
What everyone in Sweden thinks is they became independent in 1523, and the Hungarians say they have been independent since time began.
BTW, the argument you bring up re: personal unions is a huge reason for just asking people and not trying to apply some one-size-fits-all standard. Today it's not hard to find Canadians who argue they aren't really independent because they share a Queen with the UK. Same with Australia. For years Jamaica's pols have been making noises that they want to "become fully independent" by replacing the Queen as well. So if you say Hungary wasn't independent until after WW1, despite protestations from numerous Hungarians, on the basis that it shared a head of state with Austria, how can you possibly justify recognizing ANY of these realms as independent?
For one thing you're even more confused then the list-writer if you think 'country' is less ambiguous then 'nation.' Nation can refer to everyone who speaks a language, which means the "Spanish nation" could just be talking about people from Spain, or it could include people who identify as Spanish-Canadians (who may not know Spanish), or it could include all of Mexico/Central America/Columbia/etc. And that's assuming everyone agrees on where languages start and stop. For example, my Scottish grandmother was strongly opposed to the people who told her she'd grown up speaking a unique language called Scots. To her it was bastard dialect, much inferior to the King's English her mother insisted she speak. If the list-writer had wanted maximum clarity he should have said nation-state, but that would be pretty formal language for an internet listicle.
As for how hard he should work to explain this, keep in mind that the only people who seem to care about this are European. Europe is pretty much the only continent where an ancient nation can re-appear on the map after being conquered. Everywhere else you get conquered, and you either co-opt the Conquerors (ie: China), or declare yourself a completely new nation once you get rid of your conquerors (ie: Africa, the entire Western Hemisphere, India, Vietnam). Nobody else really goes through cycles of being independent and then being conquered, while insisting the being conquered bits make you the most oppressed nation in history, but they do not (in any way) make your country young.
The only thing more annoying then a Euro trying to prove his nation is superior to all the others (generally by switching between a 1000-year-old myth and tyrannies inflicted by the Soviets), is some South American nationalist whose gotten three other South American nationalists to recognize a legal principle and is stunned that outside of South American nobody gives a damn.
I'll give you Oswiecim (better known by it's German name, Auschtwitz), but the vast majority of Silesia was part of Bohemia. Which meant that as of the early 18th it belonged to Austria, and it passed to Prussia by the mid-18th in the Silesian Wars. Prussian Silesia and the bits of East Prussia Stalin gave new Poland alone are about a third of the current country's land area.
As for the rules, you're intentionally misinterpreting them. There is only one rule. It is that the popular answer within a country as to it's independence day is what goes on the list. That is, in many cases, related to objectively true history because it is simply objectively true that prior to July 1776 there was no America. Even that "objectively true" fact is extremely deceiving because the date most Americans give is July 4th, but the actual day the resolution was passed was July 2nd.
If most Poles answer the question "when was your country independent?" with a date in 1918 then 1918 is the year used on the list. The fact that Poles would immediately give you seventeen bajillion paragraphs explaining that it's really fucking complicated is irrelevant. What's relevant is their answer to the question. The entire point of the rule is to render those "it's complicated" paragraphs irrelevant, because if you admit it's complicated for Poland you're gonna have to delve deeply into the history of all 196 countries on the list.
Even some really simple ones can be legally quite complicated. In the late 70s Trudeau of Canada wanted to create a Canadian Bill of Rights. Under the Canadian Constitution he needed all 10 provinces to ok the deal, and Quebec said no. Officially they wanted to re-negotiate their deal with the rest of the country, but everyone knew they were just being dicks. Then he noticed the official name of Canada's Constitution was British North America Act. So he got Thatcher to amend the British North America Act, adding the "Charter of Rights and Freedoms," included a clause saying that would never work again, and told everyone he was repatriating the Canadian Constitution. And everyone went along with it because fuck Quebec. So is Canada's date of independence 1867 or 1982?
I consider that a clever Parliamentary maneuver, not prima facia evidence Canada was not independent in 1981. But there is a definite legal case to be made that if the Mother Country can amend your Constitution you aren't independent.
This is in response to your post re the UK and Russia:
To an extent you have a point.
OTOH, unions of nations that are recognized as single nations by the international community are always going to be problematic for a list of dates of independence. If we're judging this list based on double-standards then the question isn't "Has this guy picked the most logical standard?," it's "Does he always use the same standard?" And the answer to that question is yes. He's defining countries basically entirely by their status as sovereign states, and a Union by definition is only one sovereign state. When the Union breaks up that's the independence day for it's members.
As for the answer to the question he asks, in Russia there's actually a day celebrating the fall of the Soviet Union which is frequently referred to as Russian Independence Day, and the Brits are pretty clear the closest thing Britain has to an independence day is the date the Act of Union was signed.
The UK, BTW, is a more centralized union in legal terms then any Brit will admit. If 2/3 of English MPs decided to turn Scotland into a "nuclear testing zone" without letting any Scots leave then all Scots would die. 2/3 of English MPs are a majority, and all laws in the UK (including the British Constitution, who gets to be Queen, etc.) are subject to amendment by majority vote in parliament.
He's using political dates for all countries.
If you ask a Pole when his country became independent he will tell that it was when the last King of Congress Poland (aka: the Czar) fell in 1918.
No, he will say that is when Poland regained independence, having already been independent before; no Pole would ever agree that Poland did not exist at any time prior to 1918 (unlike the US, which most definately did not exist prior to 1776) and the current state of Poland just like France claims direct lineage to a state ("Poland") founded many hundreds of years before.
That's a mighty fine distinction to expect an internet list of almost 200 countries to include. It's pretty arrogant to assume that obviously the non-Polish 99.4% of the human race will automatically know that off the top their heads, and will immediately un-do the entire job just because the Polish 0.6% has a case.
I'm not saying you are wrong. I'm not saying that the list's entirely fair to Poland. I really don't care one way or the other. This is a list on the internet, not a scientific paper. It's based on history. That means there will be judgement calls. That also means that it's going to be unfair to somebody. The way you get around that on this lists is strict standards, which leads me to:
You can argue that the French and Chinese are full of shit, or that the "age of a country" like Poland can't accurately be calculated by it's independence day. You cannot argue that the author used a double-standard.
Yes, he did. He calculates the age of France from the founding of France in the 9th century, ignoring a bunch of revolutions and upheavals, but the age of Poland from 1918 not the founding of Poland in the 10th century. That is a double standard (for other countries also, France and Poland are just the example here).
The standard he uses in all cases is "What will an average citizen say if I ask when his country became independent?" You don't have to like this particular standard, but you do have to admit he applies it rigorously. OTOH the French refuse to admit they were conquered in the 40s, therefore if you ask a Frenchmen when his country gained it's independence he'll give you a very early date.
I'll give you the same capital. But the borders are completely different.
Most of what is now Poland has as strong historical ties to Germany as it does to Poland. Silesia, Prussia, and Pomerania alone are damn near 50% of the current Republic's territory and none of them was firmly in Poland's control at any time between 1400 and the Versailles treaty. At Versailles the Poles regained Pomerania, but nothing else. Silesia and Prussia remained German. After WW2 the majority of old Poland's territory was sliced off by Stalin to become Belarus, Lithuania, or Ukraine. By virtue of having Warsaw, and being ethnically Polish, the Poles have as strong a claim on the old Republic of Poland then anyone else, but if the Belarussians or Ukraineans decided to pick up the mantle of the old Republic it would be very hard for us poor foreigners to tell who was full of shit. Belurussian ethnicity was as much a core of that old Republic as Poles, and they ended up with more of old Poland's territory then new Poland did.
Keep in mind that the rules of this are clear: independence is your birthday. If we let anybody change it we have to let everybody change it. That means we get to argue about whether the March of Carniola counts as a predecessor state to Slovenia, we get to argue about why Romania doesn't get to count it's predecessor states (it was created by the union of two truly ancient countries: Wallachia and Moldova), etc.
In other words polish history gave them a choice. They could choose to interpret Congress Poland as a legitimate Polish government co-equal to the Czars and therefore a constant continuation of the prior government, or they could look really young in country-age lists compiled by Americans who haven't really put in the effort to understand their history. They chose the latter.
Re-read the original post.
It's not about when the countries were founded. If you did that you'd get Hungarians talking about Attilla the Hun because that's the best way to be older then the Germans. It's about independence, which is generally what you get when you win a War of Liberation.
If you guys want us poor, nonPhD-in-Swedish-History-having-Anglos to acknowledge that you've had continuous independence since ancient times you're gonna have to start counting Christian the Tyrant as a legitimate King of Sweden and start calling it a Civil War.
Umm...
Apparently you know nothing about Africa. In Sweden/Germany/etc. nobody ever sides with an anti-Democrat against a Democrat just to get another vote in the UN General Assembly. If the guy selling guns to third-world gives bribes in Northern Europe he gets outted by his home country, and the bribee gets to go to jail.
France, OTOH, was recently faced with a situation where the French-allied-government was accused of using hundreds of thousands of Chinese machetes which he intended to hack his political opponents to death with. There was video. The French hemmed and hawed and vetoed at the UN Security Council because the government swore the video was staged. A month or two later the murderers were basically done because they'd run out of victims, but their opponents turned out to be really good at winning battles so they were all about to be arrested and sent to the Hague. Which would look really bad on TV for France. Especially since the anti-government types not only had very good reasons to be pissed at France personally, they were also basically an army unit from English-speaking Uganda, and therefore virtually guaranteed to not vote with France in the UN.
France leaped into action. Within days a UN Force was on it's way to "stop the fighting," which was code for "protect the French-allied government because their ass is getting kicked by fighting." France's puppets ended up fleeing the country to Zaire, which they turned into the huge mess we now call the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Prime Minister responsible for allowing those 800k innocent civilians to die in the Rwandan Genocide, and the subsequent multiple Congo-Wars which killed millions? Jaques Chirac, who subsequently became President. And nobody cares about this in France because it's fucking France.
So yeah, I'll be stunned if the worst surveillance-violations Le Monde can come with is this metadata crap. There's probably a database of Malians who look at the foreign legion funny, with a hotline to the local torturer in case some poor bastard does it twice.
But I expect a lot better from the Northern Europeans. France are self-righteous assholes because that's how the game is played. You pretend to be the most moral country ever, and everybody needs you so you get away with it. Sweden/Germany/etc. are self-righteous assholes because actually try to be righteous. Collecting data while complaining that the US collects doesn't sound righteous, therefore it's unlikely they do it.
Judging that is really tricky. The Swedes, for example, haven't really had a revolution since the Napoleonic Wars, which wasn't so much a change in form of government as a change in who ran the government. Since then they haven't replaced the Constitution because in 1810 there was no Constitution to replace, but they have passed no less then three major new documents which make a four-document Constitution. It's really hard to pick a date for their Constitution?
That said most of Europe has had Communists rise and fall since 1789, unification wars, Civil Wars, been France, etc. I'd guess the Danes, Swedes, Brits, and European microstates may have a claim to older Constitutional orders then us. San Marino actually has a six-document Constitution from 1600 that's still in force.
[sarcasm]
Canadians. So trusting. Trudeau would never try to push through major Constitutional changes, be thwarted by an asshole from Quebec, and then outflank the guy by singlehandedly convincing the entire country they'd been on crack since 1867. Independence had been faked, they needed a whole process called repatriation. And whadyaknow, repatriating just happens to outflank the Premier of Quebec and allow the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to pass.
That would be way too cynical.
[/sarcasm]
Let me put it to you this way. If Mackenzie Lyon King and the Premier of Quebec decided to add some MLAs to the Quebec Legislative Assembly*, that requires a Constitutional Amendment because the Legislative Assembly is set at 65 in Section 80. To amend the document they need a majority vote in the Legislative Assembly, the Legislative Council, and both houses of Federal Parliament. They do that. Then they decide that they aren't gonna bother to send a memo to Britain and ask for the British north America Act to be officially amended. Do you think the Courts would rule the Amendment was invalid and there were only 65 Riodings in the Legislative Assembly elections? I don't.
*In Mackenzie King's day the Quebec National Assembly was called the Legislative Assembly and there was also an upper house called the Legislative Council. Today there's just the national Assembly.
Look, this isn't deep.
Serb independence on this list is dated to whenever the current Serb government dates it's independence. Serbs date that to the dissolution of Yugoslavia seven years ago, so it's seven. It's not necessarily accurate (the difference between "Yugoslavia" and "Serbia" is a lot smaller then the Serbs claimed), but it is rigorously fair.
If you want a 100% accurate, perfect list then why don;t you do some of this research yourself. There's only 200 or so countries, and you'll only offend a Billion or so if you get China wrong, so really it's a trivial task. There's no way at all lazy people will flame you on the internet without even reading the report.
But that's not the Chinese take on the situation. The Chinese take is that all land currently owned by the PRC (and some more, like Taiwan) has always rightfully belonged to the legitimate government of China. Sometimes the various bits of China have disagreed about who is the rightful legitimate government (ie: the rise of the Manchus, Tibet in the 50s), but it's all always been China.
I don't entirely agree with that take on the situation, but the standard this guy is using for his list is what does the government say about when it became independent. And the Chinese do date their independence way back.
That's an incredibly restrictive definition of "Republic." It's also very odd. The 17th says we directly vote for Senators, instead of having them appointed by the states. I have never heard of a definition of Republic which hinged on whether a single House of the Legislature was appointed or elected.
The general definition of republic is any state that has a non-hereditary Head-of-State. That's why France, Ireland, India, Nigeria, Iraq, Communist China, Iran etc. are Republics despite vastly different forms of government.
On the US side it really under-states things.
Americans will accept a daily commute of 100 miles (50 miles a way), and won't understand why you didn't drive 150 miles out of your way to see them on the holidays. After all it's only two-and-a-half hours.
OTOH things that happened even 50 years ago (like the Civil Rights Movement) are ancient history.
Unfortunately the masses do not know these things.
Which means that now the various government have to spend weeks complaining about each-other's spies, whicl quietly re-assuring everyone nothing's changed, and prying no Wikileaks-type group has evidence they're lying asses off...
I'm guessing the next "revelation" is gonna be that it's really hard to be gay in Africa. The only drawback is that it doesn't embarrass anyone Putin dislikes, therefore it's unlikely to make headlines in Le Monde or the Guardian.