The summary and TFA is inaccurate. As this Swissinfo article explains, the Swiss parliament has not yet passed a law providing for a ban. They have passed a motion, which is a request that the government propose a bill that provides for a ban. Parliament must still discuss and vote on that proposed bill, and if it adopts that bill as a law, it will be made subject to a nationwide referendum if 50,000 voters request it.
Same thing here in Switzerland. Where I live, there's a website for securely filling out your tax return (taxme.ch), and everything is pre-filled with the data from last year. You make the necessary changes and print out a single confirmation sheet to sign and mail back.
It's realtively standard practice in such a lawsuit to include every party and let the judge determine which ones are actually potentially liable or not.
There's a simple way around this. In Continental European legal procedure, the losing party pays the lawyer's fees of the winning party. This really cuts down on indiscriminate lawsuits.
Affected Qataris can still edit Wikipedia if they open a Wikipedia user account, which is a no-confirmation-required one-click action. Only anonymous editing is being blocked.
The duration of this "soft" block is currently one month, and will probably be prolonged if there is more repeated vandalism and spam coming from this address once the block expires.
Anonymous reading of Wikipedia is of course not blocked at all.
Sigh, also. The parent post, for all of its pent-up feelings of injustice, does not tell us what the fuck a launch loop is. Neither does the link it provides, which links to some PDFs without comment. The crufty layout does not make me want to read them.
This loop thing might be the best thing since the proverbial sliced bread. But with advocates at that level of communication skills, it's no wonder no one knows about it, or cares.
It costs the consumer in the end (as it always does), but manufacturers have a strong incentive to minimize the disposal costs.
That's the idea behind the solution implemented in Switzerland: All commercial sellers of recyclable hardware must take back, for free, the sort of hardware they sell (consumer electronics, TVs etc.) But they can charge customers a recycling fee of circa $2 to $10 on the sale of new hardware (depending on the type of hardware). These fees are used (I gather) to fund an industry-run recycling association.
If the public efficiency matches the private efficiency and is judiciously aimed, what good is there to criticise it?
The point is that this condition is rarely met. Even an ideal government program (no corruption, no pork-barrel spending etc.) tends to be less efficient in providing any sort of good than the market, except maybe for utilities like electricity, where conditions of natural monopoly prevail. The reason for this is the lack of competitive pressure and, more importantly, the lack of market forces as a source of information to indicate where resources can be spent most effectively. Cf. the works of F.A. Hayek for more detail.
French citizens... expect their government to be the most prominent instrument of cultural expression.
Not being French, I can't assert whether that's true, but most prominent examples of French culture that come to mind are hardly a product of government commissions. If it is true, then, for the reasons set out above, it is not surprising that French culture is losing in the perceived competition with market-driven Atlantic popular culture.
At any rate, what Mr Jeanneney clearly is concerned with is global mindshare for Continental culture, not just the protection of his own excéption culturelle. It stands to reason that if French government programs are already unable to stop the encroachment of American popular culture in homogeneous France herself, they will be even less effective in meeting the wildly heterogeneous cultural needs of the global population.
It would have been better to... encourage other libraries to do similiar.
Indeed that would be better. But it's instructive to note the quite different plan of action that Mr Jeanneney proposes (my translation):
A multiyear plan could be defined and adopted at Brussels as of this year. A generous budget should be assured.... By mobilising specialised laboratories, we will provide for the development of search engines and software tools that will be our own.
Mr Jeanneney's solution is a classical French top-down, command-economy approach. The European states, who of course know best what literature and software Europeans want, are to pour millions of taxpayer euros in a number of bureaucratic white-elephant projects that will likely have little lasting impact on the respective public appeal of Continental or Atlantic culture. Google, in the meantime, is set to provide a real public service at zero public cost, using all private funding.
Above all, it's the zero-sum-mentality of the French approach that I consider most antithetical to the ideals of both cultural and software development. Every Yankee byte, in Mr Jeanneney's mind, is an octet that is lost to European (let's be frank and read: French) culture. What about cross-pollination, incremental progress, forks and code-sharing?
Is this about culture at all... or just about de Gaulle's une certaine idée de la France and the generous budgets that go with it?
I would like to have the option to point to a directory or file of email to be imported
My feelings exactly. I've been using Mozilla Mail so far as a mail client, and the only thing that stops me from switching to Thunderbird is the lack of a "Mozilla Mail" import feature. I've read somewhere that it can be done by copying files from one profile folder to another... but this isn't an end-user thing to do, really, and it's not documented.
The article states: "If Microsoft can convince the TRIPS enforcers that massive patent infringement is taking place, it doesn't need to convince a court.".
It so happens that IAMAITL (I am an international trade lawyer). I can assure you that the article, in that regard, is utter bullshit on various levels:
First, the "TRIPS enforcers" are the national courts. The TRIPS provision the article links to specifically requires the WTO Member nations to provide for courts to review alleged patent violations. The WTO by itself does not (directly) enforce anything.
Second, it is very much open to academic debate whether WTO Members must recognise software patents at all under the TRIPS. Most WTO Members still don't, and there is no WTO case law on this issue.
Third, the TRIPS (like most national patent laws) excludes from patentability inventions that are not new, useful and non-obvious. These safeguards can still be invoked to protect one's software against fraudulent patents.
And finally, nowhere in the article is there any mention that MS does in fact want to use the WTO in any way to enforce their patents. It only links to the WTO provisions at issue and goes on to ramble on how bad it would be if MS could indeed press the WTO into its service in the way the author imagines.
Let's assume that situations will arise in real life that robots cannot react to adequately using simple algorithms such as Asimov's laws, and which necessitate an ethical choice; e.g. when, in a given situation, all possible actions as well as inaction may result in harm to human beings, compounded with uncertainties as to the extent and probability of such harm.
In your opinion, what ethical valueset, if any, would be appropriate for incorporation in a robot AI of human-level intelligence, taking into account issues of technical implementation, functionality, and control (of the robot by humans)?
In particular, do you favor Benthamian utilitarianism ("the greatest good for the greatest number") or Kantian formal deontologism ("act under the rule you would have all others follow")?
"Trade" in the wide WTO sense encompasses all cross-border economic activity. There is no movements of goods, but there is a service being provided across borders, which is covered by the WTO GATS agreement. (The WTO package of agreements includes GATT, GATS, TRIPs and about a dozen other agreements covering most forms of trade and trade barriers).
Are countries where kiddie porn is legal going to claim the US kiddie porn laws are restraint of trade?
It is a restraint of trade, technically, but the U.S. should have no trouble invoking the public morals exemption of GATT Art. XX (a) or GATS Art. XIV (a), to legitimize the prohibition of child pornography.
[nitpick] Actually, in this case the relevant article is Article XIV of GATS (since this is a service issue), which basically says the same thing. And there is no discrimination between countries going on, as the U.S. presumably prohibits all foreign online gambling, irrespective of where the server is.
You are correct, however, in your analysis that the U.S. cannot argue in good faith that gambling is contrary to U.S. public morals, such as they are...
the W.T.O. turns out to be a tool to not only resolve trade disputes but also to (attempt to) force nations to change their laws
Yes, the WTO has an agenda: promote global welfare by reducing barriers to trade. "Force" doesn't enter into it, though: our governments have freely entered into this treaty, and our parliaments have approved it.
What is the actual product in gambling? There is no trade going on here.
Correct, there is no trade in goods, but running an online casino is providing a service. There is a WTO Agreement that deals with services - the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). As I explained in an earlier post, by signing GATS the U.S. has entered a legal obligation to allow other WTO Members the cross-border provision of entertainment services on a national treatment and most-favoured-nation basis.
The specifics do not remain confidential; this is a factual error in the article. All WTO rulings are open to the public, accessible via this link (case number 285). It will take some time - a few hours or up to two days, as this is the weekend on Europe now - for the ruling to appear, however.
For those interested in the actual case law, the report of the panel (read: the court's verdict) ought to appear on this page in a few hours. You should probably take a look at this basic primer in WTO law first to make any sense of it, though.
The case is actually pretty straightforward, I guess - in the course of GATS negotiations, the U.S. has voluntarily opened its entertainment services sector to foreign competition (check the U.S. schedule of commitments, page 71) and forgot to schedule an exemption for gambling services.
This is somewhat understandable, I guess - after all, the 1994 Uruguay Round negotiations have not been called "the most complex negotiations in all history" for nothing. But now the U.S. will have to stand by its word.
A hint to the incensed U.S. Congressman: The WTO Agreements have caused significant changes in public policy all over the world, often in furtherance of U.S. interests (for example, the EU can't prohibit, according to a Panel ruling, the import of U.S. meat treated with growth hormones). Don't cry foul when you're forced to open up your economy under the same rules you promoted and signed.
It is true that the USA (as well as the EU) tends to lose many WTO legal cases for violating the WTO agreements. This is, of course, due to the same public-choice-considerations that influence all national economic policymakers: the political benefit for the policymakers for engaging in protectionism is almost always higher than the benefit from engaging in free trade, since import-sensitive interest groups exert great influence on politics, while the general public, who stand to benefit from free trade, generally don't care.
More to the point, though, the WTO legal system is not effective enough: countries that win a WTO case gain the right to "withdraw concessions", that is, to retaliate with protectionism of their own against the losing party. This is supposed to dissuade would-be offenders from violating the agreements in the first place. However, if a small country such as, say, Cuba, wins in a WTO court against the USA, the volume of retaliatory action Cuba can take is so small compared to U.S. overall trade streams that U.S. exporters won't notice at all.
Past cases show that only the Big Three (USA, EU and Japan) have the economic clout to actually force other countries into WTO compliance. This has been demonstrated in the US-Steel case, where President Bush was forced to abolish illegal steel tariffs in order to avoid EU retaliation against products from U.S. states Bush needs to win in the presidential elections.
What Prof. Sykes said was that any given liberalization measure will not directly affect the overall number of jobs due to the balance in import and export sectors affected.
It seems to me that you argue that more export-sensitive jobs will be created than import-sensitive jobs lost. This can be answered only with empirical data, though one should take into account that the "transaction costs" of this job shift, e.g. the costs associated with finding IT jobs for textile workers, do affect the equation in the short term.
It is certainly true that free trade, in the long run, increases everyone's wealth (as you said, "getting stuff for cheaper"), which in turn affects the labour market as well.
China is free to use its anti-trust laws, if it has any, against any abuse of MS's market-dominating position. China can for example demand that MS breaks up its OS and application software divisions as a prerequisite to doing business in China.
However, and this is the point, China is not allowed to counter a foreign monopoly with protectionist, trade-distorting measures: providing a 70% domestic software quota will probably *reduce* competition on the Chinese software market, because now all other foreign companies can no longer compete with MS in China.
This raises the extremely interesting issue of rules of origin for software: if one line of code is inserted into the Linux kernel, residing on a U.S. CVS server, by a Chinese programmer, complementing the work of thousands of programmers of varying nationality, in what country is the resulting kernel deemed to originate in?
There are complicated national laws regulating this, but most boil down to: the country in which the most substantial production or transformation process takes place confers its origin on the product. While commercial software can often be attributed an origin (country of coding, country where the software corporation resides etc.), there is, IMHO, no meaningful way to assign a national origin to your typical OSS product.
This will drive us trade lawyers crazy in the long run, I suppose, because world trade laws such as the WTO agreements implicitly assume every product has a national origin, on which the treatment allowed is very much dependent.
Slashdot Mirror
is this crap doing on the front page of any news website? I've had it. I'm removing Slashdot from my bookmarks. Goodbye.
The summary and TFA is inaccurate. As this Swissinfo article explains, the Swiss parliament has not yet passed a law providing for a ban. They have passed a motion, which is a request that the government propose a bill that provides for a ban. Parliament must still discuss and vote on that proposed bill, and if it adopts that bill as a law, it will be made subject to a nationwide referendum if 50,000 voters request it.
Same thing here in Switzerland. Where I live, there's a website for securely filling out your tax return (taxme.ch), and everything is pre-filled with the data from last year. You make the necessary changes and print out a single confirmation sheet to sign and mail back.
There's a simple way around this. In Continental European legal procedure, the losing party pays the lawyer's fees of the winning party. This really cuts down on indiscriminate lawsuits.
Yes. This is the media age, after all. :-)
Sigh, also. The parent post, for all of its pent-up feelings of injustice, does not tell us what the fuck a launch loop is. Neither does the link it provides, which links to some PDFs without comment. The crufty layout does not make me want to read them.
This loop thing might be the best thing since the proverbial sliced bread. But with advocates at that level of communication skills, it's no wonder no one knows about it, or cares.
See also the Wikipedia entry for very extensive additional information about the Kliper project.
It costs the consumer in the end (as it always does), but manufacturers have a strong incentive to minimize the disposal costs.
That's the idea behind the solution implemented in Switzerland: All commercial sellers of recyclable hardware must take back, for free, the sort of hardware they sell (consumer electronics, TVs etc.) But they can charge customers a recycling fee of circa $2 to $10 on the sale of new hardware (depending on the type of hardware). These fees are used (I gather) to fund an industry-run recycling association.
So far, this seems to work just fine.
Sir, I have commented on your post, for reasons of argumentative coherence, as a reply to the second comment of my parent post.
If the public efficiency matches the private efficiency and is judiciously aimed, what good is there to criticise it?
... expect their government to be the most prominent instrument of cultural expression.
The point is that this condition is rarely met. Even an ideal government program (no corruption, no pork-barrel spending etc.) tends to be less efficient in providing any sort of good than the market, except maybe for utilities like electricity, where conditions of natural monopoly prevail. The reason for this is the lack of competitive pressure and, more importantly, the lack of market forces as a source of information to indicate where resources can be spent most effectively. Cf. the works of F.A. Hayek for more detail.
French citizens
Not being French, I can't assert whether that's true, but most prominent examples of French culture that come to mind are hardly a product of government commissions. If it is true, then, for the reasons set out above, it is not surprising that French culture is losing in the perceived competition with market-driven Atlantic popular culture.
At any rate, what Mr Jeanneney clearly is concerned with is global mindshare for Continental culture, not just the protection of his own excéption culturelle. It stands to reason that if French government programs are already unable to stop the encroachment of American popular culture in homogeneous France herself, they will be even less effective in meeting the wildly heterogeneous cultural needs of the global population.
It would have been better to ... encourage other libraries to do similiar.
... By mobilising specialised laboratories, we will provide for the development of search engines and software tools that will be our own.
Indeed that would be better. But it's instructive to note the quite different plan of action that Mr Jeanneney proposes (my translation):
A multiyear plan could be defined and adopted at Brussels as of this year. A generous budget should be assured.
Mr Jeanneney's solution is a classical French top-down, command-economy approach. The European states, who of course know best what literature and software Europeans want, are to pour millions of taxpayer euros in a number of bureaucratic white-elephant projects that will likely have little lasting impact on the respective public appeal of Continental or Atlantic culture. Google, in the meantime, is set to provide a real public service at zero public cost, using all private funding.
Above all, it's the zero-sum-mentality of the French approach that I consider most antithetical to the ideals of both cultural and software development. Every Yankee byte, in Mr Jeanneney's mind, is an octet that is lost to European (let's be frank and read: French) culture. What about cross-pollination, incremental progress, forks and code-sharing?
Is this about culture at all... or just about de Gaulle's une certaine idée de la France and the generous budgets that go with it?
I would like to have the option to point to a directory or file of email to be imported
My feelings exactly. I've been using Mozilla Mail so far as a mail client, and the only thing that stops me from switching to Thunderbird is the lack of a "Mozilla Mail" import feature. I've read somewhere that it can be done by copying files from one profile folder to another... but this isn't an end-user thing to do, really, and it's not documented.
It so happens that IAMAITL (I am an international trade lawyer). I can assure you that the article, in that regard, is utter bullshit on various levels:
Let's assume that situations will arise in real life that robots cannot react to adequately using simple algorithms such as Asimov's laws, and which necessitate an ethical choice; e.g. when, in a given situation, all possible actions as well as inaction may result in harm to human beings, compounded with uncertainties as to the extent and probability of such harm.
In your opinion, what ethical valueset, if any, would be appropriate for incorporation in a robot AI of human-level intelligence, taking into account issues of technical implementation, functionality, and control (of the robot by humans)?
In particular, do you favor Benthamian utilitarianism ("the greatest good for the greatest number") or Kantian formal deontologism ("act under the rule you would have all others follow")?
Is Gambleing trade?
"Trade" in the wide WTO sense encompasses all cross-border economic activity. There is no movements of goods, but there is a service being provided across borders, which is covered by the WTO GATS agreement. (The WTO package of agreements includes GATT, GATS, TRIPs and about a dozen other agreements covering most forms of trade and trade barriers).
Are countries where kiddie porn is legal going to claim the US kiddie porn laws are restraint of trade?
It is a restraint of trade, technically, but the U.S. should have no trouble invoking the public morals exemption of GATT Art. XX (a) or GATS Art. XIV (a), to legitimize the prohibition of child pornography.
[nitpick]
Actually, in this case the relevant article is Article XIV of GATS (since this is a service issue), which basically says the same thing. And there is no discrimination between countries going on, as the U.S. presumably prohibits all foreign online gambling, irrespective of where the server is.
You are correct, however, in your analysis that the U.S. cannot argue in good faith that gambling is contrary to U.S. public morals, such as they are...
the W.T.O. turns out to be a tool to not only resolve trade disputes but also to (attempt to) force nations to change their laws
Yes, the WTO has an agenda: promote global welfare by reducing barriers to trade. "Force" doesn't enter into it, though: our governments have freely entered into this treaty, and our parliaments have approved it.
What is the actual product in gambling? There is no trade going on here.
Correct, there is no trade in goods, but running an online casino is providing a service. There is a WTO Agreement that deals with services - the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). As I explained in an earlier post, by signing GATS the U.S. has entered a legal obligation to allow other WTO Members the cross-border provision of entertainment services on a national treatment and most-favoured-nation basis.
The specifics do not remain confidential; this is a factual error in the article. All WTO rulings are open to the public, accessible via this link (case number 285). It will take some time - a few hours or up to two days, as this is the weekend on Europe now - for the ruling to appear, however.
For those interested in the actual case law, the report of the panel (read: the court's verdict) ought to appear on this page in a few hours. You should probably take a look at this basic primer in WTO law first to make any sense of it, though.
The case is actually pretty straightforward, I guess - in the course of GATS negotiations, the U.S. has voluntarily opened its entertainment services sector to foreign competition (check the U.S. schedule of commitments, page 71) and forgot to schedule an exemption for gambling services.
This is somewhat understandable, I guess - after all, the 1994 Uruguay Round negotiations have not been called "the most complex negotiations in all history" for nothing. But now the U.S. will have to stand by its word.
A hint to the incensed U.S. Congressman: The WTO Agreements have caused significant changes in public policy all over the world, often in furtherance of U.S. interests (for example, the EU can't prohibit, according to a Panel ruling, the import of U.S. meat treated with growth hormones). Don't cry foul when you're forced to open up your economy under the same rules you promoted and signed.
It is true that the USA (as well as the EU) tends to lose many WTO legal cases for violating the WTO agreements. This is, of course, due to the same public-choice-considerations that influence all national economic policymakers: the political benefit for the policymakers for engaging in protectionism is almost always higher than the benefit from engaging in free trade, since import-sensitive interest groups exert great influence on politics, while the general public, who stand to benefit from free trade, generally don't care.
More to the point, though, the WTO legal system is not effective enough: countries that win a WTO case gain the right to "withdraw concessions", that is, to retaliate with protectionism of their own against the losing party. This is supposed to dissuade would-be offenders from violating the agreements in the first place. However, if a small country such as, say, Cuba, wins in a WTO court against the USA, the volume of retaliatory action Cuba can take is so small compared to U.S. overall trade streams that U.S. exporters won't notice at all.
Past cases show that only the Big Three (USA, EU and Japan) have the economic clout to actually force other countries into WTO compliance. This has been demonstrated in the US-Steel case, where President Bush was forced to abolish illegal steel tariffs in order to avoid EU retaliation against products from U.S. states Bush needs to win in the presidential elections.
What Prof. Sykes said was that any given liberalization measure will not directly affect the overall number of jobs due to the balance in import and export sectors affected.
It seems to me that you argue that more export-sensitive jobs will be created than import-sensitive jobs lost. This can be answered only with empirical data, though one should take into account that the "transaction costs" of this job shift, e.g. the costs associated with finding IT jobs for textile workers, do affect the equation in the short term.
It is certainly true that free trade, in the long run, increases everyone's wealth (as you said, "getting stuff for cheaper"), which in turn affects the labour market as well.
China is free to use its anti-trust laws, if it has any, against any abuse of MS's market-dominating position. China can for example demand that MS breaks up its OS and application software divisions as a prerequisite to doing business in China.
However, and this is the point, China is not allowed to counter a foreign monopoly with protectionist, trade-distorting measures: providing a 70% domestic software quota will probably *reduce* competition on the Chinese software market, because now all other foreign companies can no longer compete with MS in China.
This raises the extremely interesting issue of rules of origin for software: if one line of code is inserted into the Linux kernel, residing on a U.S. CVS server, by a Chinese programmer, complementing the work of thousands of programmers of varying nationality, in what country is the resulting kernel deemed to originate in?
There are complicated national laws regulating this, but most boil down to: the country in which the most substantial production or transformation process takes place confers its origin on the product. While commercial software can often be attributed an origin (country of coding, country where the software corporation resides etc.), there is, IMHO, no meaningful way to assign a national origin to your typical OSS product.
This will drive us trade lawyers crazy in the long run, I suppose, because world trade laws such as the WTO agreements implicitly assume every product has a national origin, on which the treatment allowed is very much dependent.