It all boils down to the presence (US) or absence (EU) of private credit rating and consumer data collection industries. In Europe, banks are required to do their own risk assessment.
Germany has credit reporting agencies just like the US, for example SCHUFA. (Where do you people come up with this kind of nonsense?)
If any data collected about a consumer falls in the wrong hands, the collecting party is liable for any damages UNLESS the consumer has given formal (i.e. written) consent for that information to be passed on. In the US, the entire credit industry is predicated on the ability to collect large amounts of data about consumers and then to create risk profiles based on that data.
In both the US and Germany, private financial data is only handed out to third parties with our consent. And in both countries, you basically have to give that consent if you want to have any kind of economic existence at all.
Both C++ and Scala are attempts to modernize limited, poorly designed languages (C, Java) by adding things like type parameters and functional features. There are a bunch more of those attempts and I think they have mostly been failures. It's roughly like: "Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes time and annoys the pig"
C++ started out as a small set of focused, simple enhancements to C. It didn't pretend to be a great new language, just provide workarounds for some of C's most annoying problems. It was nice and I started using back then, about 25 years ago.
Now C++ has turned into a disaster, a bloated pig of a language, with features added left and right, incoherently, in order to try to catch up with other languages. But if you want speed, you still have to get rid of all the layers of abstraction that C++ offers and write it in plain C (or a C-like subset). And C++'s attempts at module systems, separate compilation, and garbage collection are still much worse than pretty much any other language.
We don't like Europe becoming totalitarian, and for good reason. And we don't need to send in the army, they are already there, for that very reason. Or did you think the US has 70000 soldiers and a dozen military bases in Europe just for fun?
in a nutshell, it means that as a civilian, you have the right to ask a company to delete your data
You're swallowing the propaganda. You already have that right in Europe, so this can't be what this law is about. In fact, this law is uch broader than that. Go read it.
This is a threat to free speech. Don't "think of the children", think of the sleazy businessmen and politicians who want to be able to hide their past and their true convictions. Think of criminals who go through an ineffective criminal justice system that has little demonstrated ability to keep them from reoffending and then are let loose on society. Think of a justice system that itself is above public scrutiny because many of its judgments and decisions can only be accessed with special permission by the government under the pretext of protecting the rights of the convicted criminals.
What right is that? The EU is talking about human rights, so stuff like copyright is trumped. That has always been the case.
The EU is pulling one human right out of its ass (a supposed "right to be forgotten") and destroying a very real human right in the process (the right to fee speech). That's how totalitarianism gets started: "for your own good / for the good of the country / for the good of humanity, we need to curtail this right".
Read the speeches by which German parliamentarians voted freely to give Hitler absolute power; it's the same kind of reasoning.
Perhaps he is just mirroring the behavior of the so-called "spiritually inclined", who miss few opportunities to insult atheists and denigrate their moral convictions and humanity.
Just the distinction you draw between "atheists" and "spiritually inclined" is insulting, since you imply that atheists are not spiritually inclined. Many atheists are not only spiritually inclined, they are religions, they just don't believe the monotheistic bullshit you seem to identify with "spirituality".
Speaking as an American, I want the European version of privacy and the American version of Free Speech.
Unfortunately, you'll have to make a choice. Like so many things European governments do, it seems "right" and "good" in the short term, and it leads to disaster in the long term.
No, it does not. You can't force anybody to "forget" you, you never have been. And when most people lived in small communities (until the 19th century), any slight mistake was with you for life. It didn't take the Internet.
what im i saying. taking this shit seriously : the real issue is google, facebook and similar going deprived of 2% of their annual income. that's the whole point of this anxiety.
No, the whole point of "this anxiety" is that Europe is increasingly turning towards totalitarian structures, structures in which the past can be rewritten and in which speech can be controlled.
and, this does not have any kind of effect on the 90-100% of the rest of the internet
No, it doesn't not. In fact, it doesn't have any kind of effect on 99.999% of the internet. It's the 0.0001% you have to worry about: the murderers, criminals, politicians, church leaders, etc. that can hide from their past and get into positions of power. It's the system of secret justice that now exists in places like Germany, where you can't easily find out what the legal system is doing. That's what you should worry about.
At least the US feels that as long as the 'wronged' party is in a jurdiction that they control, they have the right to have foreign citizens extradited.
A lot of other nations feel the same way. European nations have extradition treaties among them, and use them. The only reason you think this is anything special when it comes to the US is because of some latent anti-Americanism.
I am not saying in its present form it's workable, but the idea that somehow the right to be forgotten is at odds with free speech is total bullshit.
No, it's not. Under US law, you have a legal right to say pretty much anything, true or false, insulting, upsetting, offensive, as long as the act of speaking doesn't threaten someone's life. Period.
The limitations on that are civil in nature: if your speech violates copyrights, patents, or trademarks, you may have to pay. If you obtained the information in a position of trust or through surreptitious means, you may be guilty of violations of privacy. And if you make false statements about someone, you may be guilty of libel.
But you can make truthful statements about another human being even if that harms them. In fact, in part, that's the whole point of free speech: we want free speech to "harm" bad politicians, bad businesses. We want free speech to discredit bad political ideologies and bad religions.
Never before in human history have people been unable to walk away from truly youthful indiscretions.
In Europe, until the 20th century, most people effectively couldn't "walk away" from anything: they had nowhere to go, except perhaps emigrate to the US. And the tiny communities in which they lived remembered their lives in minute detail. Serfdom existed in Europe well into the 19th century, meaning people couldn't even legally walk away, they were owned by their lord. The idea that the "right to be forgotten" is a long-standing right people enjoyed is ludicrous.
Furthermore, unlike Europe, the US does give you the option of changing your name and identity easily. So, if you really want to "be forgotten", you have that option in the US, without infringing on anybody's free speech. There are some limits on that, for example, the US has limits on your ability to make past sex offenses or murders go away; you may disagree with those limits, but they are a deliberate choice.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of the US Constitution: it doesn't "enshrine" specific rights for human beings at all, it defines the rights that the federal government has, a small list of specific rights. All other rights belong to the people. (And the phrase "inalienable rights" isn't part of the US Constitution at all, it's part of the Declaration of Independence).
This is much better than the European legal tradition, which does indeed enshrine specific rights of citizens--and leaves all the remaining rights to the king or some nebulous government or society. It's a recipe for totalitarianism.
No, the US Constitution isn't perfect, but it has served the US quite well, along side a civil society and a legal system that have had a commitment first and foremost to keeping as many people free as possible. Sometimes, this entailed ugly compromises (like living with slavery for nearly a century), sometimes this means making hard choices.
This is in stark contrast to Europe, which like a drunken schoolboy would fall in love with one ugly, dangerous ideology after another and over and over again sacrifice its democracy and liberty for it. The US Constitution isn't perfect, but it's a whole lot better than anything European nations have produced in 2000 years.
The biggest threat to the US is to adopt a European-style view of government, a government that is paternalistic and tries to invade every aspect of people's lives with its supposed benevolence and help. In the short term, this may make lives better, but in the long term, it spells disaster.
Whether prices patents are good or bad really has nothing to do with the Eolas patent. The Eolas patent is simply bad patent. Eolas didn't invent anything, didn't contribute to society, they simply wanted to extort money from lots of people. Thankfully, the courts put a stop to that. Unfortunately, it took way to long.
Santorum is a bigot and a threat to American values and principles. It isn't bullying to criticise him in the sharpest possible terms. And it isn't intolerant to condemn him and his radical social agenda sharply.
If you don't understand the difference between criticizing and ridiculing a right wing lunatic and bullying of insecure teenagers, you really have a serious problem.
somebody doesn't understand "pardon"
on
No Pardon For Turing
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The term "pardon" means forgiveness of a crime, so the fact that Turing was properly convicted under the law back then isn't an obstacle to a pardon it is a requirement; if he hadn't been convicted, he couldn't be pardoned now.
Furthermore, you pardon someone when you find that his positive contributions have outweighed the harm he has caused. For Turing, that is true not only because of his immense positive contributions, but because what he was punished for then is now not even considered worthy of punishment.
If anybody ever was deserving of a pardon, it is Alan Turing. And you really have to wonder about the motivation of the UK government for denying it.
The kind of voting scheme you advocate just lets people look at the issues, pick the candidates that most closely matches what they want, and then get on with their lives. That may seem like a good idea, but it isn't, because the compromise candidate is then determined mechanically and may turn out to be unexpected and a disaster (there is historical precedent from other democracies).
Voting is about making tough choices and analyzing the political situation, and that includes thinking about what choices other people make and how your choice interacts with theirs.
Ballot stuffing (or even voting two or more times) is very rare. So rare as to be a non-issue. Despite claims to the contrary.
And we should take your word for this? In fact, the courts disagree.
Most attempts at "fixing" the "voter fraud" issue are really aimed at making it more difficult for people to vote. They have to jump through more hoops so they might not be able to afford it in time or money (or both)
Nonsense. A voter ID requirement is a requirement for voters to prove that they are eligible to vote, nothing more and nothing less. The fact that that may impose a small extra burden on a tiny minority of voters is incidental, and the burden is not unreasonable. It is also what all other democracies in the world require, to no ill effect.
Well, it more comes down to "what you're getting is a turtle or a salamander". And in that case, I don't care. So I might as well voter for who I really do care about.
Yes Romneys qualified. He's had years of experience plundering companies for his own personal profit.Now he can bring that experience to the whole country!
I sure hope so, because "plundering" failing companies is far preferable to bailing them out with taxpayer money, which is what Bush and Obama have been doing.
IMO every one of the Republican nominees are pretty damned creepy
Unfortunately, Obama turned out to be pretty creepy as well (disclaimer: I voted for him last time around). Unfortunately, he has been a disaster for civil liberties,
I don't have a problem with Google agreeing not to link to infringing material that's illegally distributed.
However, Google should be permitted to link to copyrighted materials and use fair-use excerpts, and they should also be permitted to charge companies for placement. Demands by media companies for free, high-ranking results are unacceptable.
Do basic concepts of random samples and surveys just elude you? To put it very simply: the population samples in Italy and the population sampled in the US have not been shown by the survey to be statistically the same, hence comparing their survey responses is meaningless, and the entire ranking is meaningless. That's really all one needs to say in order to reject this "index" as useless.
Now, if you really want to micro-analyze this: Italy ranks higher than it objectively should, and the US ranks lower than it objectively should. Since Italy starts from such a low place and the US from such a high place, they don't switch despite the results. But the US press does switch with lots of other nations, who should be ranked far below the US. Is that intellectually too complex for you to grasp?
As for the human development index trends you point to. On the surface, those are encouraging. The problem is, those graphs don't show available resources. The simple fact is, most of that improvement is built on the back of unsustainable industrial and agricultural growth.
For as long as our species has existed, it has experienced sustainable growth despite unsustainable resource usage. The idea that things should be different now is preposterous, in particular since we already know energy generation technologies that can see us centuries past the end of fossil fuel.
What exactly do you think we're all going to eat when we run out of cheap petrochemical fertilizers? What is the farm equipment going to run on? What will the industry run on? If we don't get our act together now, we're going to run out of those things and have nothing to replace them.
We already have the technology to replace them: nuclear (Uranium, Thoriium), bioengineered materials, solar cells, etc. In the long run, fossil fuel is going to be replaced and we are going to be better off for it. But we shouldn't make the mistake of forcing a changeover by government mandate.
I'm not. In absolute terms there's more suffering because things haven't gotten _that_ much better, but the population has increased dramatically
No, you simply are wrong. There were local maxima for hunger, disease, poverty, war, and violence in the 20th century, but things have improved in both relative _and_ absolute terms since then, thanks to ending fascist, socialist, and communist forms of government and liberalizing trade, markets, mobility, and politics.
Of course, eventually, the population on earth must stabilize. But that's already happening. Once the human population stops growing, it will be a shame because it will limit our potential (unless we find a way to settle the solar system and beyond).
Do you have any idea how frustrating people who actually want things to get better find it when people block their way, insisting that nothing be done because things are just going to get better anyway? If things are so great, what's your motivation?
I have a very good idea, because people like me want things to get better, whereas people like you want to make things worse and even destroy the progress we already have made. I don't want the world to fall back to failed fascist or Marxist ideas about government and the economy, but that is exactly what ultimate underlies your kind of thinking ("progressives" are, after all, neo-Marxists by their own description).
But even if you were right, even if we were headed for some kind of resource-related disaster and collapse, any such disaster is still preferable to creating the kind of global governmental structure that could avert it against the aggregate wishes of the market and voters. Germany and the Soviet Union both had created such governmental structures to overcome daunting problems. Both were successful at fixing the immediate problems they were intended to fix, and both then went on to create the worst catastrophies in human history. No natural disaster or ecological catastrophe can even compare to that. If it really came down to it (fortunately it doesn't), I'd take a global oil shortage and a 4C temperature rise over global central economic planning or government by experts any day.
There are lots of good magazines on the newsstands. But there are lots of good magazines in the US as well, though increasingly online (and, of course, many have been replaced by news sites and blogs).
The reason you see more in newsstands is that Europe has been slow to go to digital publications. One of the reasons for that is that the publishing industry is subsidized in various ways through fees and taxes in Europe. I don't think it's a good system.
Slashdot Mirror
Germany has credit reporting agencies just like the US, for example SCHUFA. (Where do you people come up with this kind of nonsense?)
In both the US and Germany, private financial data is only handed out to third parties with our consent. And in both countries, you basically have to give that consent if you want to have any kind of economic existence at all.
Both C++ and Scala are attempts to modernize limited, poorly designed languages (C, Java) by adding things like type parameters and functional features. There are a bunch more of those attempts and I think they have mostly been failures. It's roughly like: "Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes time and annoys the pig"
C++ started out as a small set of focused, simple enhancements to C. It didn't pretend to be a great new language, just provide workarounds for some of C's most annoying problems. It was nice and I started using back then, about 25 years ago.
Now C++ has turned into a disaster, a bloated pig of a language, with features added left and right, incoherently, in order to try to catch up with other languages. But if you want speed, you still have to get rid of all the layers of abstraction that C++ offers and write it in plain C (or a C-like subset). And C++'s attempts at module systems, separate compilation, and garbage collection are still much worse than pretty much any other language.
We don't like Europe becoming totalitarian, and for good reason. And we don't need to send in the army, they are already there, for that very reason. Or did you think the US has 70000 soldiers and a dozen military bases in Europe just for fun?
You're swallowing the propaganda. You already have that right in Europe, so this can't be what this law is about. In fact, this law is uch broader than that. Go read it.
This is a threat to free speech. Don't "think of the children", think of the sleazy businessmen and politicians who want to be able to hide their past and their true convictions. Think of criminals who go through an ineffective criminal justice system that has little demonstrated ability to keep them from reoffending and then are let loose on society. Think of a justice system that itself is above public scrutiny because many of its judgments and decisions can only be accessed with special permission by the government under the pretext of protecting the rights of the convicted criminals.
The EU is pulling one human right out of its ass (a supposed "right to be forgotten") and destroying a very real human right in the process (the right to fee speech). That's how totalitarianism gets started: "for your own good / for the good of the country / for the good of humanity, we need to curtail this right".
Read the speeches by which German parliamentarians voted freely to give Hitler absolute power; it's the same kind of reasoning.
Perhaps he is just mirroring the behavior of the so-called "spiritually inclined", who miss few opportunities to insult atheists and denigrate their moral convictions and humanity.
Just the distinction you draw between "atheists" and "spiritually inclined" is insulting, since you imply that atheists are not spiritually inclined. Many atheists are not only spiritually inclined, they are religions, they just don't believe the monotheistic bullshit you seem to identify with "spirituality".
Unfortunately, you'll have to make a choice. Like so many things European governments do, it seems "right" and "good" in the short term, and it leads to disaster in the long term.
No, it does not. You can't force anybody to "forget" you, you never have been. And when most people lived in small communities (until the 19th century), any slight mistake was with you for life. It didn't take the Internet.
No, the whole point of "this anxiety" is that Europe is increasingly turning towards totalitarian structures, structures in which the past can be rewritten and in which speech can be controlled.
No, it doesn't not. In fact, it doesn't have any kind of effect on 99.999% of the internet. It's the 0.0001% you have to worry about: the murderers, criminals, politicians, church leaders, etc. that can hide from their past and get into positions of power. It's the system of secret justice that now exists in places like Germany, where you can't easily find out what the legal system is doing. That's what you should worry about.
A lot of other nations feel the same way. European nations have extradition treaties among them, and use them. The only reason you think this is anything special when it comes to the US is because of some latent anti-Americanism.
No, it's not. Under US law, you have a legal right to say pretty much anything, true or false, insulting, upsetting, offensive, as long as the act of speaking doesn't threaten someone's life. Period.
The limitations on that are civil in nature: if your speech violates copyrights, patents, or trademarks, you may have to pay. If you obtained the information in a position of trust or through surreptitious means, you may be guilty of violations of privacy. And if you make false statements about someone, you may be guilty of libel.
But you can make truthful statements about another human being even if that harms them. In fact, in part, that's the whole point of free speech: we want free speech to "harm" bad politicians, bad businesses. We want free speech to discredit bad political ideologies and bad religions.
In Europe, until the 20th century, most people effectively couldn't "walk away" from anything: they had nowhere to go, except perhaps emigrate to the US. And the tiny communities in which they lived remembered their lives in minute detail. Serfdom existed in Europe well into the 19th century, meaning people couldn't even legally walk away, they were owned by their lord. The idea that the "right to be forgotten" is a long-standing right people enjoyed is ludicrous.
Furthermore, unlike Europe, the US does give you the option of changing your name and identity easily. So, if you really want to "be forgotten", you have that option in the US, without infringing on anybody's free speech. There are some limits on that, for example, the US has limits on your ability to make past sex offenses or murders go away; you may disagree with those limits, but they are a deliberate choice.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of the US Constitution: it doesn't "enshrine" specific rights for human beings at all, it defines the rights that the federal government has, a small list of specific rights. All other rights belong to the people. (And the phrase "inalienable rights" isn't part of the US Constitution at all, it's part of the Declaration of Independence).
This is much better than the European legal tradition, which does indeed enshrine specific rights of citizens--and leaves all the remaining rights to the king or some nebulous government or society. It's a recipe for totalitarianism.
No, the US Constitution isn't perfect, but it has served the US quite well, along side a civil society and a legal system that have had a commitment first and foremost to keeping as many people free as possible. Sometimes, this entailed ugly compromises (like living with slavery for nearly a century), sometimes this means making hard choices.
This is in stark contrast to Europe, which like a drunken schoolboy would fall in love with one ugly, dangerous ideology after another and over and over again sacrifice its democracy and liberty for it. The US Constitution isn't perfect, but it's a whole lot better than anything European nations have produced in 2000 years.
The biggest threat to the US is to adopt a European-style view of government, a government that is paternalistic and tries to invade every aspect of people's lives with its supposed benevolence and help. In the short term, this may make lives better, but in the long term, it spells disaster.
Whether prices patents are good or bad really has nothing to do with the Eolas patent. The Eolas patent is simply bad patent. Eolas didn't invent anything, didn't contribute to society, they simply wanted to extort money from lots of people. Thankfully, the courts put a stop to that. Unfortunately, it took way to long.
Santorum is a bigot and a threat to American values and principles. It isn't bullying to criticise him in the sharpest possible terms. And it isn't intolerant to condemn him and his radical social agenda sharply.
If you don't understand the difference between criticizing and ridiculing a right wing lunatic and bullying of insecure teenagers, you really have a serious problem.
The term "pardon" means forgiveness of a crime, so the fact that Turing was properly convicted under the law back then isn't an obstacle to a pardon it is a requirement; if he hadn't been convicted, he couldn't be pardoned now.
Furthermore, you pardon someone when you find that his positive contributions have outweighed the harm he has caused. For Turing, that is true not only because of his immense positive contributions, but because what he was punished for then is now not even considered worthy of punishment.
If anybody ever was deserving of a pardon, it is Alan Turing. And you really have to wonder about the motivation of the UK government for denying it.
The kind of voting scheme you advocate just lets people look at the issues, pick the candidates that most closely matches what they want, and then get on with their lives. That may seem like a good idea, but it isn't, because the compromise candidate is then determined mechanically and may turn out to be unexpected and a disaster (there is historical precedent from other democracies).
Voting is about making tough choices and analyzing the political situation, and that includes thinking about what choices other people make and how your choice interacts with theirs.
And we should take your word for this? In fact, the courts disagree.
Nonsense. A voter ID requirement is a requirement for voters to prove that they are eligible to vote, nothing more and nothing less. The fact that that may impose a small extra burden on a tiny minority of voters is incidental, and the burden is not unreasonable. It is also what all other democracies in the world require, to no ill effect.
Well, it more comes down to "what you're getting is a turtle or a salamander". And in that case, I don't care. So I might as well voter for who I really do care about.
I sure hope so, because "plundering" failing companies is far preferable to bailing them out with taxpayer money, which is what Bush and Obama have been doing.
Unfortunately, Obama turned out to be pretty creepy as well (disclaimer: I voted for him last time around). Unfortunately, he has been a disaster for civil liberties,
I don't have a problem with Google agreeing not to link to infringing material that's illegally distributed.
However, Google should be permitted to link to copyrighted materials and use fair-use excerpts, and they should also be permitted to charge companies for placement. Demands by media companies for free, high-ranking results are unacceptable.
Do basic concepts of random samples and surveys just elude you? To put it very simply: the population samples in Italy and the population sampled in the US have not been shown by the survey to be statistically the same, hence comparing their survey responses is meaningless, and the entire ranking is meaningless. That's really all one needs to say in order to reject this "index" as useless.
Now, if you really want to micro-analyze this: Italy ranks higher than it objectively should, and the US ranks lower than it objectively should. Since Italy starts from such a low place and the US from such a high place, they don't switch despite the results. But the US press does switch with lots of other nations, who should be ranked far below the US. Is that intellectually too complex for you to grasp?
For as long as our species has existed, it has experienced sustainable growth despite unsustainable resource usage. The idea that things should be different now is preposterous, in particular since we already know energy generation technologies that can see us centuries past the end of fossil fuel.
We already have the technology to replace them: nuclear (Uranium, Thoriium), bioengineered materials, solar cells, etc. In the long run, fossil fuel is going to be replaced and we are going to be better off for it. But we shouldn't make the mistake of forcing a changeover by government mandate.
No, you simply are wrong. There were local maxima for hunger, disease, poverty, war, and violence in the 20th century, but things have improved in both relative _and_ absolute terms since then, thanks to ending fascist, socialist, and communist forms of government and liberalizing trade, markets, mobility, and politics.
Of course, eventually, the population on earth must stabilize. But that's already happening. Once the human population stops growing, it will be a shame because it will limit our potential (unless we find a way to settle the solar system and beyond).
I have a very good idea, because people like me want things to get better, whereas people like you want to make things worse and even destroy the progress we already have made. I don't want the world to fall back to failed fascist or Marxist ideas about government and the economy, but that is exactly what ultimate underlies your kind of thinking ("progressives" are, after all, neo-Marxists by their own description).
But even if you were right, even if we were headed for some kind of resource-related disaster and collapse, any such disaster is still preferable to creating the kind of global governmental structure that could avert it against the aggregate wishes of the market and voters. Germany and the Soviet Union both had created such governmental structures to overcome daunting problems. Both were successful at fixing the immediate problems they were intended to fix, and both then went on to create the worst catastrophies in human history. No natural disaster or ecological catastrophe can even compare to that. If it really came down to it (fortunately it doesn't), I'd take a global oil shortage and a 4C temperature rise over global central economic planning or government by experts any day.
There are lots of good magazines on the newsstands. But there are lots of good magazines in the US as well, though increasingly online (and, of course, many have been replaced by news sites and blogs).
The reason you see more in newsstands is that Europe has been slow to go to digital publications. One of the reasons for that is that the publishing industry is subsidized in various ways through fees and taxes in Europe. I don't think it's a good system.