As I understand it, the concept of "freedom of the press" doesn't just apply to the relationship between official and semi-official authorities and the press -- it is a general measure of the ability of the press to uphold basic freedoms for its reports. Thus, even if the government works hard to protect individual journalists from the repercussions of their writings, it can still lose ground if such protection is either ineffective, or if the entire situation is so hostile as to constitute an oppressive environment.
In other words, if you have to have a police escort to protect you following a controversial article, then your willingness as a journalist to write another one at a later date (and by extension, of your colleagues to do the same) will necessarily be affected negatively.
Believe me, psychological pressure counts, too. Do you think Salman Rushdie would have written "The Satanic Verses", if he had known beforehand what it was going to mean for him, personally?
Getting back to the Danish situation, it is not just the need for police protection that affects the rating. Looking at the broader picture, many major players in Danish political and business circles have disavowed a number of journalistic freedoms in the context of the Muhammad caricatures -- often with reference to the old saw about "not yelling fire in a crowded theater". Spurious arguments such as these (which amount to "don't print anything that might offend a country that Denmark exports to") form part of an oppressive, unfree environment for the press.
As sarcastic as the parent poster is, I don't think he's entirely wrong. There's something to be said for teaching children that science is subject to perversion -- that scientists can be led into morally questionable activities. There are plenty of examples, and they don't all need to be as overtly hideous as Mengele.
Of course, given that these are fairly young children, I'd say that it's probably a bit early to throw this kind of information in their faces -- but you can gently approach the subject of "wicked science", and gray areas of scientific activity.
How about Hans Christian Ørsted? It seems to me that kids will understand his significance well enough, if you remind them that every device electrical and electronic (from light bulbs to computers) owes its existence to his discovery of electromagnetism.
Or you could go back far enough that the "science" enters the realm of the absurd (to us, but reasonable enough at the time). People like Hippocrates and Galen could serve to illustrate how very, very far medical science has come. And at the same time, the fact that their teachings were in use up until just over a century ago could illustrate how recent many of the innovations in medical theory are.
While we're on the topic of medicine, it's not a bad idea to remind children that, not too terribly long ago, most people died young. The impending eradication of infant paralysis, or poliomyelitis (down from 190 thousand cases worldwide in 1993, to 1900 in 2003, thanks to a coördinated effort by the WHO), can be a good reason to discuss Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin.
I'm from Denmark, so naturally my first thought was to see which vids were considered most popular in Denmark, according to Google. The results were disheartening, embarrassing, but far from surprising.
Crazy Frog.
Dozens and dozens of crappy variations of a done-to-death meme.
Oh, I get it - you had to take a shot at the US. Yeah, that was probably important to get off your chest. Sorry, carry on, help yourself to feel good.
Thank you, but I'm fine now. I've filled my quota of US-bashing for this week. Next, I'm going to find a thread which can provide me with a good excuse to bash France.
But looking at my list, I can see I've got a problem coming up. Where am I going to find a thread with an excuse to bash Bhutan?
The only people who spell the word feces "faeces" are those attempting to legitimize it.
"Legitimize it"? What does that mean? Making it acceptable to smoke shit? Hmm. I guess someone can come up with a medical reason to stuff a turd in your pipe and toke down. Stranger things have happened.
There's another group of people who spell it "faeces": people with some sort of connection to medicine -- doctors, nurses, psychologists, medical historians.
Oh wait... I'm a medical historian. Guess that explains it.
I'll just go back to "legitimizing" stuff, now. Buh-bye.
I'm a Dane, too. I wrote to all my country's MEPs, urging them to vote "no" to this directive. I received answers from less than half of them, most of them whinging and evasive.
The worst part of this directive is that its provisions violate or devalue a number of the rights we are supposed to have, through the European Declaration on Human Rights - most importantly, the rights of privacy and freedom of association. When someone can decide to keep tabs on the people you associate with, and when they are given the means to do so, then you have no real freedom of association.
And let us not forget that the European arrest warrant allows for extradition to other European countries for something that may not even be a crime in your home country. What happens if a European country decides to make something (say, "being a communist" or "being a homosexual" or "being a member of a certain religious group") a crime? Even if extradition is unlikely, how difficult do you think it will be for the police of that country to track other EU countries' citizens, using this directive's authority? I can see ample opportunities for abuse - and where such opportunities exist, it is a given that abuse will happen, sooner or later.
The way to avoid governmental excesses is to make those excesses impossible, or prohibitively difficult. This directive is a huge step in the wrong direction.
All the activist documents and webpages say that the European Parliament will be voting on this on the 13th of December.
However, I just had a look at the parliament's own pages, dealing with the plenary session in question (12th to 15th December 2005), and it looks to me like the matter will be up for voting already on the 12th. I'm no great genius at figuring out the (deliberately?) Byzantine structure of the EU's documentation, but that's what it looks like to me.
I do agree that a boycott of Sony CDs is unlikely to be fully effective - because slumping sales due to a boycott are just as likely to be falsely (deliberately?) interpreted as the result of "music piracy", and presented to the media as such.
What might work is a boycott of Sony hardware as well.
But dimes will get you dollars that some corporate drone will find a way to blame a slump in hardware sales on "piracy", too.
Regardless, Sony is now on my boycott list, joining a number of other companies with bad habits that they need to be broken of.
Certainly, the effects of a boycott may not be obvious on the scale that Sony operates, but I can guarantee you that anything that whittles away even a few percent of the bottom line will hurt them.
A case in point: In my native Denmark, dairy conglomerate Arla got on the wrong side of consumer opinion, a few years back, by pressuring retail chains to sell only Arla products. The consumers decided that removing their free choice of goods was unacceptable, and responded with a boycott. Not everybody participated, and many gave up the boycott once the news had faded back into the background noise. But the overall effects of this are still being felt by Arla, years later - as many people have formed the habit of deliberately avoiding Arla products whenever possible. Net result was a loss of several percent of market share, which translates into a huge loss on the corporate scale.
Another program, called the Global Intellectual Property Rights Academy, would train foreign judges, enforcement officials and other stakeholders
Yes... that's just what we crave, in the rest of the benighted world: for Americans to come over here and tell our judges and police how to enforce American corporations' interests in our countries.
Hmm... let's see... what would be an appropriate response?
You're not the only one with that impression. It seems like he's mentioning "humanities graduates" (as a sort of monolithic, faceless, Adversary) with barely-disguised vitriol, in every other paragraph. He loses a lot of points to the fact that he comes across as bitter and resentful, rather than neutral. In other words, that he's being unscientific in letting emotion, not reason, guide his analysis of the situation.
As a humanities graduate with a background in the sciences, and with a solid understanding of the scientific method, I find his analysis of the situation tainted by personal bias. Not that he doesn't raise a lot of interesting points, many of which I agree with - but he ought to have done so methodically, rather than emotionally.
Is the "Queen's English" an American expression? Can anybody give me the root of where this phrase came from? In the UK I'm more aware of people talking about "BBC English" (but this is as much to do with pronunciation).
Oh, for shame...
"Here will be an old abusing of God's patience, and the king's English." (Shakespeare,
The Merry Wives of Windsor, act I, scene 4)
LONDON (Reuters) - In a press release, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) today announced its intention to pursue legal action against Robert Louis Stevenson, over his poem Summer Sun, for two "illicit" uses of the word "golden", and one of the word "summer".
Stevenson, being long dead, declined to respond. However, visitors to his grave on Mount Vaea on Upolu, Samoa, have reported hearing a grinding sound from underground, as of something rotating in the dirt.
In fact, Amazon's ad copy makes it clear that they do mean stacked back-to-back, not end-to-end:
"From Edwin A. Abbott to Emile Zola, the 1,082 titles in the Penguin Classics Complete Library total nearly half a million pages--laid end to end they would hit the 52-mile mark. Approximately 700 pounds in weight, the titles would tower 828 feet if you stacked them atop each other--almost as tall as the Empire State Building."
And I completely agree with the previous poster who pointed out that there is now way that 1082 paperback volumes laid back-to-back would total 828 feet. My own personal library probably totals less than 400 feet of shelf space, and numbers over 4500 volumes, including some pretty hefty hardcover editions.
So, any which way you slice it (or stack it), the math sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll trade you my deed to the Brooklyn Bridge for those condos. Well, do we have a deal? ...
"1984" was not supposed to be a how-to book.
A Dane weighing in, here....
As I understand it, the concept of "freedom of the press" doesn't just apply to the relationship between official and semi-official authorities and the press -- it is a general measure of the ability of the press to uphold basic freedoms for its reports. Thus, even if the government works hard to protect individual journalists from the repercussions of their writings, it can still lose ground if such protection is either ineffective, or if the entire situation is so hostile as to constitute an oppressive environment.
In other words, if you have to have a police escort to protect you following a controversial article, then your willingness as a journalist to write another one at a later date (and by extension, of your colleagues to do the same) will necessarily be affected negatively.
Believe me, psychological pressure counts, too. Do you think Salman Rushdie would have written "The Satanic Verses", if he had known beforehand what it was going to mean for him, personally?
Getting back to the Danish situation, it is not just the need for police protection that affects the rating. Looking at the broader picture, many major players in Danish political and business circles have disavowed a number of journalistic freedoms in the context of the Muhammad caricatures -- often with reference to the old saw about "not yelling fire in a crowded theater". Spurious arguments such as these (which amount to "don't print anything that might offend a country that Denmark exports to") form part of an oppressive, unfree environment for the press.
As sarcastic as the parent poster is, I don't think he's entirely wrong. There's something to be said for teaching children that science is subject to perversion -- that scientists can be led into morally questionable activities. There are plenty of examples, and they don't all need to be as overtly hideous as Mengele.
Of course, given that these are fairly young children, I'd say that it's probably a bit early to throw this kind of information in their faces -- but you can gently approach the subject of "wicked science", and gray areas of scientific activity.
Some random ideas for discussion:
How about Hans Christian Ørsted? It seems to me that kids will understand his significance well enough, if you remind them that every device electrical and electronic (from light bulbs to computers) owes its existence to his discovery of electromagnetism.
Or you could go back far enough that the "science" enters the realm of the absurd (to us, but reasonable enough at the time). People like Hippocrates and Galen could serve to illustrate how very, very far medical science has come. And at the same time, the fact that their teachings were in use up until just over a century ago could illustrate how recent many of the innovations in medical theory are.
While we're on the topic of medicine, it's not a bad idea to remind children that, not too terribly long ago, most people died young. The impending eradication of infant paralysis, or poliomyelitis (down from 190 thousand cases worldwide in 1993, to 1900 in 2003, thanks to a coördinated effort by the WHO), can be a good reason to discuss Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin.
>We in the old world have been having this system for about 2 years now.
Yes, indeed - a system like this has been in place in Copenhagen, Denmark for about two years.
>In Soviet Russia, the government controls the commerce.
In Soviet America, commerce controls the government.
I'm from Denmark, so naturally my first thought was to see which vids were considered most popular in Denmark, according to Google. The results were disheartening, embarrassing, but far from surprising.
Crazy Frog.
Dozens and dozens of crappy variations of a done-to-death meme.
Kill me now, and get it over with.
I'm guessing slashdotted. So what else is new?
Oh, I get it - you had to take a shot at the US. Yeah, that was probably important to get off your chest. Sorry, carry on, help yourself to feel good.
Thank you, but I'm fine now. I've filled my quota of US-bashing for this week. Next, I'm going to find a thread which can provide me with a good excuse to bash France.
But looking at my list, I can see I've got a problem coming up. Where am I going to find a thread with an excuse to bash Bhutan?
The only people who spell the word feces "faeces" are those attempting to legitimize it.
"Legitimize it"? What does that mean? Making it acceptable to smoke shit? Hmm. I guess someone can come up with a medical reason to stuff a turd in your pipe and toke down. Stranger things have happened.
There's another group of people who spell it "faeces": people with some sort of connection to medicine -- doctors, nurses, psychologists, medical historians.
Oh wait... I'm a medical historian. Guess that explains it.
I'll just go back to "legitimizing" stuff, now. Buh-bye.
Japanese people have good taste? I take it the crappy j-pop, tentacle rape hentai, and feces-based porn flicks haven't crossed your radar yet.
Hmm. They've crossed my radar, and I've pretty much passed on them.
I pass on the crappy J-Pop, like I pass on Britney Spears.
I pass on the tentacle rape hentai, like I pass on anything produced in the "Porn Capital of the World".
I pass on the faeces-based porn, like I pass on anything said or done by George W. Bush.
There, I think that sort of puts things into perspective.
Seriously... what does America have to feel superior about?
FTW: For The Win
Now you know.
Hmm... I was going to say something clever about "malware" and "Sony BMG's rootkit", but never mind.
I'm an Australian, and I'd be very happy if our Prime Minister was under the ground.
Six feet under?
I'm a Dane, too. I wrote to all my country's MEPs, urging them to vote "no" to this directive. I received answers from less than half of them, most of them whinging and evasive.
The worst part of this directive is that its provisions violate or devalue a number of the rights we are supposed to have, through the European Declaration on Human Rights - most importantly, the rights of privacy and freedom of association. When someone can decide to keep tabs on the people you associate with, and when they are given the means to do so, then you have no real freedom of association.
And let us not forget that the European arrest warrant allows for extradition to other European countries for something that may not even be a crime in your home country. What happens if a European country decides to make something (say, "being a communist" or "being a homosexual" or "being a member of a certain religious group") a crime? Even if extradition is unlikely, how difficult do you think it will be for the police of that country to track other EU countries' citizens, using this directive's authority? I can see ample opportunities for abuse - and where such opportunities exist, it is a given that abuse will happen, sooner or later.
The way to avoid governmental excesses is to make those excesses impossible, or prohibitively difficult. This directive is a huge step in the wrong direction.
Anonymous Coward, I love you.
All the activist documents and webpages say that the European Parliament will be voting on this on the 13th of December.
However, I just had a look at the parliament's own pages, dealing with the plenary session in question (12th to 15th December 2005), and it looks to me like the matter will be up for voting already on the 12th. I'm no great genius at figuring out the (deliberately?) Byzantine structure of the EU's documentation, but that's what it looks like to me.
Draft agenda for the plenary session, 12 December 2005
I do agree that a boycott of Sony CDs is unlikely to be fully effective - because slumping sales due to a boycott are just as likely to be falsely (deliberately?) interpreted as the result of "music piracy", and presented to the media as such.
What might work is a boycott of Sony hardware as well.
But dimes will get you dollars that some corporate drone will find a way to blame a slump in hardware sales on "piracy", too.
Regardless, Sony is now on my boycott list, joining a number of other companies with bad habits that they need to be broken of.
Certainly, the effects of a boycott may not be obvious on the scale that Sony operates, but I can guarantee you that anything that whittles away even a few percent of the bottom line will hurt them.
A case in point: In my native Denmark, dairy conglomerate Arla got on the wrong side of consumer opinion, a few years back, by pressuring retail chains to sell only Arla products. The consumers decided that removing their free choice of goods was unacceptable, and responded with a boycott. Not everybody participated, and many gave up the boycott once the news had faded back into the background noise. But the overall effects of this are still being felt by Arla, years later - as many people have formed the habit of deliberately avoiding Arla products whenever possible. Net result was a loss of several percent of market share, which translates into a huge loss on the corporate scale.
Now I feel cheated. I only got a Rolex.
Another program, called the Global Intellectual Property Rights Academy, would train foreign judges, enforcement officials and other stakeholders
Yes... that's just what we crave, in the rest of the benighted world: for Americans to come over here and tell our judges and police how to enforce American corporations' interests in our countries.
Hmm... let's see... what would be an appropriate response?
Ah, I have it!
YANKEE GO HOME!
Brilliantly misposted. This is not the /. thread you're looking for. You want this one.
You're not the only one with that impression. It seems like he's mentioning "humanities graduates" (as a sort of monolithic, faceless, Adversary) with barely-disguised vitriol, in every other paragraph. He loses a lot of points to the fact that he comes across as bitter and resentful, rather than neutral. In other words, that he's being unscientific in letting emotion, not reason, guide his analysis of the situation.
As a humanities graduate with a background in the sciences, and with a solid understanding of the scientific method, I find his analysis of the situation tainted by personal bias. Not that he doesn't raise a lot of interesting points, many of which I agree with - but he ought to have done so methodically, rather than emotionally.
Is the "Queen's English" an American expression? Can anybody give me the root of where this phrase came from? In the UK I'm more aware of people talking about "BBC English" (but this is as much to do with pronunciation).
Oh, for shame...
LONDON (Reuters) - In a press release, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) today announced its intention to pursue legal action against Robert Louis Stevenson, over his poem Summer Sun, for two "illicit" uses of the word "golden", and one of the word "summer".
Stevenson, being long dead, declined to respond. However, visitors to his grave on Mount Vaea on Upolu, Samoa, have reported hearing a grinding sound from underground, as of something rotating in the dirt.
In fact, Amazon's ad copy makes it clear that they do mean stacked back-to-back, not end-to-end:
And I completely agree with the previous poster who pointed out that there is now way that 1082 paperback volumes laid back-to-back would total 828 feet. My own personal library probably totals less than 400 feet of shelf space, and numbers over 4500 volumes, including some pretty hefty hardcover editions.
So, any which way you slice it (or stack it), the math sucks.
Don't forget, they need a corresponding girl group: "Bund IP Mädeln"?