A possible solution: Open a second account. Keep all your money in an account you NEVER give out the details about, and specifically make sure you don't have an overdraft facility on the account you do give out details for. Then you transfer money from the account you keep most your money in only as needed.
Do you ever buy ready made food? Why? You can make it yourself, can't you?
Sometimes people don't have the skills, or the time, but would want the benefits of a product anyway, so they pay for it.
I don't see how this is any different from buying any other product.
People have been buying hint books and books with cheat codes for decades, so why are people surprised they now buy objects that will help them with their games just because the objects reside in the game itself?
Next time you visit the UK, take a look at the bank ads. They regularly list and the competitors they provide better terms than. The main limitation is that they can't use unproven claims, and so they usually include disclaimers referring to an independent source. In the case of the bank ads that usually means MoneyFacts.
You're mistaken. The purpose of trademark law is to protect the investment the company made in getting recognition for the product.
That is why it's the company that is required to file for a trademark and the company that is required to enforce the trademark to avoid it from becoming generic. If trademarks were intended for the public good, then it would have been more natural for the government to be required to protect trademarks.
Consumer protection when it comes to product labelling is a relatively recent phenomenon in most countries, and in the case of products being misrepresented that is usually taken care of by product labelling regulations and by protecting specific product descriptions (as opposed to product names).
For instance, in most countries you can't call a product chocolate unless it has some specified minimum amount of cocoa in it, or try to sell a product as lemonade if it doesn't even have citric acid, or sell a product as juice if it contains less than a certain amount of natural juices.
As the poster you replied to stated, there are restrictions on key lengths etc. intended to make it easier for their security services to crack, and there are some other limitations, but there would be no reason whatsoever for anyone to turn encryption off entirely.
But how much would LV lose if they lost their trademark?
Which something the will do if they don't protect it well enough by going after potentially infringing uses - that is one of the problems for businesses with trademarks. If the ads in Google results in people getting used to being able to searching for LV to get a nice list of competitors, then they'd be on a slippery slope towards the trademark becoming generic and unprotectable.
For a company like LV, where their brand is virtually all that counts, that is a risk they simply can't afford to take.
I keep hearing claims that Java is now so damn fast, however the only thing that matters to me is that on all machines where I executve Java applet or Java applications they slow my machines to a crawl and have response times that would make a 286 blush.
I have no particular reason for mistrusting all the people that claim their Java code runs fast, but my experience is the opposite: I've never experienced running a Java application without being horrified at the low performance, particularly in terms of UI responsiveness, to the point where I now actively avoid applications written in Java.
I'm not convinced the issue is difficult at all. It may be difficult from a pure legal standpoint, but when it boils down to it the issue is quite simple:
If any member state wants to secede, their parliament wants to secede, and their courts consider itself supreme arbiter of their laws, then the opinions of the ECJ and the EU are not relevant - at the very least not in the countries with written constitutions.
What the treaties say has no bearing on it - history is littered with treaties ignored by one or more of the parties.
Fact is, law is only enforcable if you have the power to back it up, and in the case of sovereign nations that means either accepting that any treaty can be broken at will by any party OR grabbing at weapons such as embargos or war.
The risk of having the ECJ whine won't leave anyone sleepless.
I also doubt that the issue would be very hard if the UK parliament truly at any point wanted to secede. It would perhaps cause a "war of attrition" between the legislative and the courts, but unless such a secession did not have the support of the people, no government intent on doing so would allow the courts to stop them.
Particularly as under the Parliamentary Sovereignty doctrine, the House of Lords does not have the power to strike down a Act of Parliament except as provided by the European Communities Act - an act that can itself be unilaterally struck down by parliament.
Hence, should the parliament decide to repeal the European Communities Act, the House of Lords would lose it's (extremely limited) power to excercise judicial review, and since the European Communities Act is the only basis for establishing EU law in the UK, the ECJ would lose it's legal basis for making rulings binding to the UK at the same time.
In any case what lawyers often seem to ignore is that laws are not absolute. They don't exist in a vacuum. They exist at the mercy of whoever holds power to enforce them, and are interpreted within the context the expectations of current society. If the courts starts "inventing" interpretations of law that does not have support of parliament or society at large, laws will change regardless of what the courts might decide they think is legal.
Any constitutional "issue" here is as interesting as discussing how many angels fits on the head of a pin - it has no practical relevance, as the law is what you make it.
For that matter, looking at the history of the US, the only thing that have kept the states in line and prevented them from repeatedly challenging the federal government has been the treat of force - as recently as during the civil rights struggles in the 60's.
And that in a country where the legal foundation for federal supremacy is clear.
In other words, the thing that defines law is will and power.
And then you've just defeated the entire purpose in making it easier to use - most people have problems enough remembering their four digit pins and short passwords.
Not really, as you can't very well invalidate the fingerprint as you can a card number, which means that once they've gotten your print, they'll be able to make tries at your pin forever. You'd be able to slow them down by rate controlling authorisation attempts, or issue warnings to the real owner of the account, or temporarily block the account, but none of these would stop the abuse, and all of them would be annoying as hell for the user.
I learned a couple of new things here, but I'm going to nitpick;-)
One of the "fundamental concepts of EU law" may very well be it's supremacy over national law (but of course it's worth noting that this is still limited to specific areas).
To my knowledge none of the EU members have gone through any of the processes their respective constitutions would require for their governments to allow the handover of sovereignty that would be required to grant EU law supremacy, as I understand it, over national law in their respective nations; and nothing prevents these governments from ultimately walking away from the respective treaties.
That is, while the US constitution binds the states to follow US constitutional and federal law and does not allow them to pass laws conflicting with US federal law in their state and to regulate under what terms they may secede from the union, the EU member states have no such restrictions imposed upon them from the outside.
EU member states are bound "only" by treaties between sovereign nations, not (yet) by a common constitution that they can not unilaterally override.
I concede that you're right when you say that the EU can pass laws that are enforcable in the member states without actions by the member states parliaments in the areas covered by the various treaties.
However, there is still a fundamental difference there: In the UK for instance, such laws are enforced only because the European Communities Act of 1972 was passed by Parliament, which in section 2 effectively "imported by reference" all EU legislation covered by the relevant treaties.
As a result, UK courts have since assumed EU law to take precedence if there are conflicts between EU and UK law, and ordinarily the net result gives EU law "supremacy" over UK law for most practical purposes.
But nothing is in principle stopping parliament from either explicitly counteracting EU law by passing and amendment to the European Communities Act to explicly exclude a EU law from being enforcable in the UK.
It's possible that we understand supremacy to mean different things here - to me what matters is that EU laws, while ordinarily enforced "above" national law, are enforcable only as a result of national laws that the member states parliaments have the sovereign right to repeal or modify.
If you by supremacy refer only to the enforcement, we agree, but from your post it doesn't look like that is what you mean.
For the UK again, that the Parliament has sovereign rights to amend the European Communities Act is well recognised and demonstrated by the fact that Parliament has amended it - in 1993 it was amended to take into account the Maastricht treaty, for instance.
It's exactly because the EU is NOT assuming powers similar to that of a federal government that this is happening. The EU is in most respects closer to a confederation. That is, the member states are in most cases sovereign, and there is no concept of federal law that is inherently above national law except where the member states have themselves granted EU superiority via treaties that the states can bow out of whenever they want.
This is a situation similar to the situation in the US between the Articles of Confederation and up until the US Constitution was ratified.
The EU Council isn't directly responsible to the people of the EU, they are responsible to the national parliament of the member state the respective councillors represent, and those parliaments are responsible to their respective peoples. The EU Parliament is, on the other hand, directly responsible to their respective constituencies. However the parliament only has power to make binding decisions in the areas where the member states have been able to agree to giving up sovereignty to the EU in, which in effect means mostly related to the the affairs of the EU itself.
The Council is a result of the fact that the EU can't directly make law. The EU can makes laws for the EU (as in the organiation, not the group of countries), and treaties regulate how EU law is made into national law in the member states.
This is a compromise because granting the EU Parliament legislative power would mean that the member states would be giving up sovereignty over their legislation, which would be a tough sell in most EU countries.
While EU law is in practice always made into law in the EU member states, there is nothing in principle stopping a national parliament from refusing to accept a new EU law. The EU would take the state to court to enforce the relevant treaties, but it can't force the law into effect - the very act of issuing a directive doesn't automatically create law that is enforcable in the member states.
It's a situation that can create quite weird results, but the parliament has gradually been getting more power as time goes by and the member states manage to agree on giving up power to the EU organs.
Duh. Read the spec. Most people who include binary in XML DO base64 encode it. But base64 wastes a lot of space. If you want to include larger amounts of binary data, this standard lets you save space by using a MIME wrapper and referencing a MIME part containing the raw binary data from the document instead of inlining it directly.
And you're right, most people don't want to include huge binary stuff in their XML. But sometimes you DO need to combine XML with huge amounts of binary data. So far, the alternatives have been non-standard wrappers (including people doing more or less what this standard does, by using MIME multipart documents) or base64 or some other space wasting encoding inside the XML document, or wrapping everything in an archival format (like OpenOffice does, for instance).
All this does is define a standard way of letting you keep a document and associated raw binary data together, while allowing you to treat it as if it is inlined in the XML if you so choose.
The principles are exactly the same as for sending an HTML e-mail containing images (or other data) as attachments and referring to them with url's of the format "cid:foo" (they refer to the MIME element with the matching "Content-ID: foo" header.
You do realise that the examples where not intended to demonstrate the benefits, don't you? (as in, the fact that they're only showing it used for tiny binary sequences doesn't mean that will be the normal usage) The complexity increase is minimal, as there are tons of libraries available to handle MIME, and "cid:..." style URL's have been in use for e-mail for ages, and it'll be fairly trivial to scan a document for nodes in the right namespace and expand the include tags.
The main reason it is defined the way it is, is exactly so that the "complexity" of it can be easily hidden in the parsers if you prefer not to deal with it yourself - base64 is well established as the preferred way of inlining binary in XML. With this spec you now have a way of saving space by using a MIME document to wrap it and move any large binary sections out, while allowing software using parsers with support for this standard to treat it just as if the binary data is still inlined base64 if you don't want to change your app.
Ignoring the comic idea of your company getting a class B these days, yes, you are right, there is no guarantee. The companies and organizations building databases for this tend to start out with the ARIN/APNIC/RIPE databases and massage the data a lot by creating huge lists of exceptions, which obviously won't cover companies that spread their IP space out without making the fact known (for instance like ISP's that use blatantly obvious contractions of location names in DNS).
Combine that with tracing the route and applying some common sense heuristics to the path, and you can get pretty good results.
But of course the moment you hit a corporate firewall somehere, and there are no clues in DNS, all bets are off about the routing after that.
It's not that simple. The proposal was originally approved. However, the approved version was not translated, and hence needed a formal approval after translation - that is standard procedure. It was first after that the resistance in the council started growing. However even now, there is nothing that is preventing the Council from abandoning it by refusing to adopt the common position it itself voted for, if there truly was a majority against it it in the council.
The thing is, there might be sufficient resistance in the council that the proposal would not have been approved in the first case as that required an absolute majority of all votes (i.e. an abstention would effectively be a vote against the proposal), but as it stands it's quite likely that there is not sufficient support to actively prevent the common position from being adopted in spite of the previous vote.
Keep in mind that this proposal was originally approved in the Council with a qualified majority, which in the Council means they got well over 70% of the votes, more than half the member states voted for AND the member states that voted for represented more than 62% of the EU population.
Inertia against doing something that just hasn't previously even been considered an option might be part of the reason why the Council doesn't show much will to stop this charade, and may explain why Poland is stalling so the Parliament can get a chance to do the honours instead.
But this clearly isn't only about the EU Commission. Note that even Poland hasn't officially outright rejected the proposal, and originally intended to abstain rather than vote against it originally.
I understand law/directive can be made by the Commission/Council by approving amendments 'on the nod'.
No, you are wrong. In this case, the commission originally proposed the change. The EU parliament then discussed it, proposed a long list of amendments and voted on it. The Council then discussed it and produced a new version, in the new version they reversed most of the parliaments ammendments - that is within their rights and is a result of the fact that the Council represents the member states while the parliament have no legal standing over the member states. The council then voted, and their version was approved.
That version then had to be translated, and the final translation had to be approved again by the council. THAT can be done as an A list item, as it is usually just a formality.
The thing that is unusual in this case is that the voting weights have changed dramatically, AND there have been elections AND several of the governments represented in the council had misled their parliaments or misrepresented the council position. That is the only reason why there is a reason to worry over the A list treatment.
Now, while this is happening, the Parliament can request a restart of the whole process. This is a safeguard to prevent the Council from ignoring them, giving the Parliament somewhat more influence over the final result.
Whenever the Council approves it, however, whether after a restart or not, the draft goes back to the parliament for a second reading. If the parliament rejects it at that stage (requires an absolute majority) it's dead and the commission/council will have to try again later.
While one could wish that the directly elected parliament had more say, the voting public doesn't have that much less to say about this than about any law in the member states, seeing as the council of ministers is made up of the elected governments of the member states and the parliament is directly elected.
In this case,of course, we are talking about a directive concerning a European institution, the EPO which, I believe, does not require all governments to ratify any directive. It'll happen of the Council says it will happen.
Yes and no. NO EU directives require all governments to ratify them. EU directives are made by the EU, period. Some requires the Council to unanimously approve them, some require qualified majority etc., but in any case it is the EU itself that decide directives.
However once the directive has been approved, all EU member states are required to implement the directive, and failure to do so can result in sanctions or legal action. That is exactly why the Council has so much power - none of the member states are particularly interested in handing too much power over to organs that does not directly represent their own governments.
Keep in mind that most countries does give to more than one cause.
Incidentally, since you're picking on Norway: Norway gives 5-6 times more in official and private development aid per person than the US does, including Gates' donations.
Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg, Sweden and the Netherlands are also the ONLY countries that are consistently meeting (and generally significantly exceeding) the UN target of 0.7% of GDP for official development aid. The US doesn't meet this target even if you consider private donations (including Gates') as well.
This is from his foundation, so it doesn't leave him with anything less than he already has. He does regularly donate to his foundation though. However, what should be kept in mind is that he usually donates Microsoft stock.
This likely has the double advantage for him in that it avoids the very very bad signal effect it would have if he sells massive amounts of Microsoft stock (he does regularly sell, but quite small amounts, which is "business as usual" since most of his fortune is still tied up in Microsoft) and hence avoid having a detrimental effect on the Microsoft shareprice, while at the same time presumably his foundation have been structured so that his donations are tax deductable.
I don't know HOW beneficial this would be as I don't know US tax regulations in detail, but best case this lets him donate the gross value of the shares without capital gains tax and at the same times deduct the market value of the shares from his taxes.
No matter the exact mechanics of how much he can save on taxes, it's clear that the potential is there for him to save a lot if he's structured things right, and with a lot less impact on Microsoft than if he just sold enough shares to generate the same equivalent net amount directly.
I'm not saying that to belittle his donation (no matter how much I dislike him) - it's great that he does spend his money that way. Just pointing out that it's quite likely that this have even less actual effect on his net wealth than people think.
Instead of focusing on the dollar amount, focus on the fact that he does mostly donate to causes that can relatively universally be seen as good. After all, he could probably have gotten the same benefits from setting up non-profits designed to benefit for instance Microsoft (through "education" initiatives etc.) and donating to that instead.
As much as I dislike the way he has gotten rich, at least some of it is being put to good use.
All past experience shows that when the child mortality rate drops the population quickly adapts and the birt rate drops. So while massive vaccination programs in a short timespan MAY cause a short term growth, it is likely to have only minor net impacts on the population size.
And diseases rarely become immune against vaccinations. Polio and smallpox are now for all practical purposes wiped out thanks to vaccination programs - immunity was never an issue.
Vaccinations is one of the best ways of helping the developing world for the simple reason that apart from reducing the pain and suffering caused by these deaths, it also helps improve economic conditions: Children are a net drain on resources. Children that die never get a chance to make up for that drain. It may seem cynical to see it that way, but the fact remains that the more you can reduce child mortality rates, the fewer children need be born to produce one adult capable of helping sustain a family and grow the economy.
So apart from showing compassion, helping reduce child mortality is also a perfectly valid way of improving the developing countries ability to take care of themselves in the longer term.
It is the Berne convention, not the Paris convention.
Opt-out has its good sides - it avoids the problem of mistakenly releasing something or having to clutter everything with copyright notices. Opt-in in itself isn't the problem. The problem is the form it has taken, where protection has gotten longer and longer.
I'd have no problem with opt-out if it was structured differently. Say, copyright on a work that doesn't either have a copyright notice, OR have been registered expires after a short amount of time after publication - say 5 years - unless copyright is registered in the meantime. It would mean that even if you couldn't prove the publication date, if you receive a work and it is not registered, you KNOW it will be out of copyright in 5 years unless there is registration at the end of that period. That's not much of a burden.
If you then further requires all work to be registered to get longer protection than, say, 20 years from publication, and be renewed every 20 years after that up to a maximum, then works that have commercial value can remain protected, while work where the owner loses interest or "disappears" will still enter the public domain relatively quickly.
It would give you automatic protection, the ability to easily prevent "mistakes" where you released something without a notice, and the ability to get protection up to 20 years without a registration by placing a notice on your work, or significantly longer if you bother with the paperwork.
There are many ways of making both opt-in and opt-out work. The problem is that the people with significant investments in copyrighted works aren't interested, and they spend fortunes on lobbying.
Ignoring the fact that the patent issue is currently going through the Council of Ministers and not the Comission, neither of them can make law on their own.
The EU process for creating and ratifying a law is long winded - a simplified version (likely to contain errors - there is a proper long winded description at the official EU website but I can't be bothered looking it up) is that the comission will usually suggest a law, whereupon the parliament will discuss it and suggest changes and vote on it, after which the council will debate it and vote upon it, at which point it will go back to the parliament, giving parliament a second chance to reject it and force a reconsideration or restart the process.
The reason the council has the power it has is that the council represents the national parliaments, and because the EU is not a state/country or a federation it does not have real law making power itself. The EU can NOT create binding laws for the member states. It can issue directives requiring the member states to create laws or face sanctions.
The council members can be directed by national parliaments using whatever processes the member states prefer, while the national parliaments have no such authority over the EU parliament, and hence the EU parliament CAN'T be given control over the law making process without a dramatic shift in the power balance towards the EU.
Allowing the EU parliament to effectively make law (as opposed to now, when it can prevent a directive from being passed, which doesn't prevent the member states from unilaterally creating a law) would likely require ammendments to the custitutions of most EU member states since it would involve giving up sovereignty. Under the current process, on the other hand, the governments are only bound to treaties which, though costly to do, they can pull out of, and which retain the national parliaments sovereign rights to pass laws on behalf of their citizens.
In essence, the council is a result of the process by which the EU has been created as a loose confederation where the EU government is subordinate to the member states' governments. If the EU at some point becomes a federation, it would be logical to remove the council, or transfer large parts of the power to the parliament, but that's not a very likely prospect for many years.
There is the slight problem of age, though. Given their ages, odds are pretty good that at least a couple of them will die over the next few years, or find themselves in too bad health to continue. It might not be a matter of choice for them to "hang in there".
Slashdot Mirror
A possible solution: Open a second account. Keep all your money in an account you NEVER give out the details about, and specifically make sure you don't have an overdraft facility on the account you do give out details for. Then you transfer money from the account you keep most your money in only as needed.
Sometimes people don't have the skills, or the time, but would want the benefits of a product anyway, so they pay for it.
I don't see how this is any different from buying any other product.
People have been buying hint books and books with cheat codes for decades, so why are people surprised they now buy objects that will help them with their games just because the objects reside in the game itself?
Next time you visit the UK, take a look at the bank ads. They regularly list and the competitors they provide better terms than. The main limitation is that they can't use unproven claims, and so they usually include disclaimers referring to an independent source. In the case of the bank ads that usually means MoneyFacts.
That is why it's the company that is required to file for a trademark and the company that is required to enforce the trademark to avoid it from becoming generic. If trademarks were intended for the public good, then it would have been more natural for the government to be required to protect trademarks.
Consumer protection when it comes to product labelling is a relatively recent phenomenon in most countries, and in the case of products being misrepresented that is usually taken care of by product labelling regulations and by protecting specific product descriptions (as opposed to product names).
For instance, in most countries you can't call a product chocolate unless it has some specified minimum amount of cocoa in it, or try to sell a product as lemonade if it doesn't even have citric acid, or sell a product as juice if it contains less than a certain amount of natural juices.
As the poster you replied to stated, there are restrictions on key lengths etc. intended to make it easier for their security services to crack, and there are some other limitations, but there would be no reason whatsoever for anyone to turn encryption off entirely.
Which something the will do if they don't protect it well enough by going after potentially infringing uses - that is one of the problems for businesses with trademarks. If the ads in Google results in people getting used to being able to searching for LV to get a nice list of competitors, then they'd be on a slippery slope towards the trademark becoming generic and unprotectable.
For a company like LV, where their brand is virtually all that counts, that is a risk they simply can't afford to take.
Apparently it's not just Sun, seeing as the apps I've tried include things like Eclipse etc. that doesn't use Sun's UI libraries.
I have no particular reason for mistrusting all the people that claim their Java code runs fast, but my experience is the opposite: I've never experienced running a Java application without being horrified at the low performance, particularly in terms of UI responsiveness, to the point where I now actively avoid applications written in Java.
Maybe it's just the quality of Java developers :-)
If any member state wants to secede, their parliament wants to secede, and their courts consider itself supreme arbiter of their laws, then the opinions of the ECJ and the EU are not relevant - at the very least not in the countries with written constitutions.
What the treaties say has no bearing on it - history is littered with treaties ignored by one or more of the parties.
Fact is, law is only enforcable if you have the power to back it up, and in the case of sovereign nations that means either accepting that any treaty can be broken at will by any party OR grabbing at weapons such as embargos or war.
The risk of having the ECJ whine won't leave anyone sleepless.
I also doubt that the issue would be very hard if the UK parliament truly at any point wanted to secede. It would perhaps cause a "war of attrition" between the legislative and the courts, but unless such a secession did not have the support of the people, no government intent on doing so would allow the courts to stop them.
Particularly as under the Parliamentary Sovereignty doctrine, the House of Lords does not have the power to strike down a Act of Parliament except as provided by the European Communities Act - an act that can itself be unilaterally struck down by parliament.
Hence, should the parliament decide to repeal the European Communities Act, the House of Lords would lose it's (extremely limited) power to excercise judicial review, and since the European Communities Act is the only basis for establishing EU law in the UK, the ECJ would lose it's legal basis for making rulings binding to the UK at the same time.
In any case what lawyers often seem to ignore is that laws are not absolute. They don't exist in a vacuum. They exist at the mercy of whoever holds power to enforce them, and are interpreted within the context the expectations of current society. If the courts starts "inventing" interpretations of law that does not have support of parliament or society at large, laws will change regardless of what the courts might decide they think is legal.
Any constitutional "issue" here is as interesting as discussing how many angels fits on the head of a pin - it has no practical relevance, as the law is what you make it.
For that matter, looking at the history of the US, the only thing that have kept the states in line and prevented them from repeatedly challenging the federal government has been the treat of force - as recently as during the civil rights struggles in the 60's.
And that in a country where the legal foundation for federal supremacy is clear.
In other words, the thing that defines law is will and power.
And then you've just defeated the entire purpose in making it easier to use - most people have problems enough remembering their four digit pins and short passwords.
Not really, as you can't very well invalidate the fingerprint as you can a card number, which means that once they've gotten your print, they'll be able to make tries at your pin forever. You'd be able to slow them down by rate controlling authorisation attempts, or issue warnings to the real owner of the account, or temporarily block the account, but none of these would stop the abuse, and all of them would be annoying as hell for the user.
I learned a couple of new things here, but I'm going to nitpick ;-)
One of the "fundamental concepts of EU law" may very well be it's supremacy over national law (but of course it's worth noting that this is still limited to specific areas).
To my knowledge none of the EU members have gone through any of the processes their respective constitutions would require for their governments to allow the handover of sovereignty that would be required to grant EU law supremacy, as I understand it, over national law in their respective nations; and nothing prevents these governments from ultimately walking away from the respective treaties.
That is, while the US constitution binds the states to follow US constitutional and federal law and does not allow them to pass laws conflicting with US federal law in their state and to regulate under what terms they may secede from the union, the EU member states have no such restrictions imposed upon them from the outside.
EU member states are bound "only" by treaties between sovereign nations, not (yet) by a common constitution that they can not unilaterally override.
I concede that you're right when you say that the EU can pass laws that are enforcable in the member states without actions by the member states parliaments in the areas covered by the various treaties.
However, there is still a fundamental difference there: In the UK for instance, such laws are enforced only because the European Communities Act of 1972 was passed by Parliament, which in section 2 effectively "imported by reference" all EU legislation covered by the relevant treaties.
As a result, UK courts have since assumed EU law to take precedence if there are conflicts between EU and UK law, and ordinarily the net result gives EU law "supremacy" over UK law for most practical purposes.
But nothing is in principle stopping parliament from either explicitly counteracting EU law by passing and amendment to the European Communities Act to explicly exclude a EU law from being enforcable in the UK.
It's possible that we understand supremacy to mean different things here - to me what matters is that EU laws, while ordinarily enforced "above" national law, are enforcable only as a result of national laws that the member states parliaments have the sovereign right to repeal or modify.
If you by supremacy refer only to the enforcement, we agree, but from your post it doesn't look like that is what you mean.
For the UK again, that the Parliament has sovereign rights to amend the European Communities Act is well recognised and demonstrated by the fact that Parliament has amended it - in 1993 it was amended to take into account the Maastricht treaty, for instance.
This is a situation similar to the situation in the US between the Articles of Confederation and up until the US Constitution was ratified.
The EU Council isn't directly responsible to the people of the EU, they are responsible to the national parliament of the member state the respective councillors represent, and those parliaments are responsible to their respective peoples. The EU Parliament is, on the other hand, directly responsible to their respective constituencies. However the parliament only has power to make binding decisions in the areas where the member states have been able to agree to giving up sovereignty to the EU in, which in effect means mostly related to the the affairs of the EU itself.
The Council is a result of the fact that the EU can't directly make law. The EU can makes laws for the EU (as in the organiation, not the group of countries), and treaties regulate how EU law is made into national law in the member states.
This is a compromise because granting the EU Parliament legislative power would mean that the member states would be giving up sovereignty over their legislation, which would be a tough sell in most EU countries.
While EU law is in practice always made into law in the EU member states, there is nothing in principle stopping a national parliament from refusing to accept a new EU law. The EU would take the state to court to enforce the relevant treaties, but it can't force the law into effect - the very act of issuing a directive doesn't automatically create law that is enforcable in the member states.
It's a situation that can create quite weird results, but the parliament has gradually been getting more power as time goes by and the member states manage to agree on giving up power to the EU organs.
And you're right, most people don't want to include huge binary stuff in their XML. But sometimes you DO need to combine XML with huge amounts of binary data. So far, the alternatives have been non-standard wrappers (including people doing more or less what this standard does, by using MIME multipart documents) or base64 or some other space wasting encoding inside the XML document, or wrapping everything in an archival format (like OpenOffice does, for instance).
All this does is define a standard way of letting you keep a document and associated raw binary data together, while allowing you to treat it as if it is inlined in the XML if you so choose.
The principles are exactly the same as for sending an HTML e-mail containing images (or other data) as attachments and referring to them with url's of the format "cid:foo" (they refer to the MIME element with the matching "Content-ID: foo" header.
The main reason it is defined the way it is, is exactly so that the "complexity" of it can be easily hidden in the parsers if you prefer not to deal with it yourself - base64 is well established as the preferred way of inlining binary in XML. With this spec you now have a way of saving space by using a MIME document to wrap it and move any large binary sections out, while allowing software using parsers with support for this standard to treat it just as if the binary data is still inlined base64 if you don't want to change your app.
Well, that part does seem to apply to the UK at the moment, even though the Law Lords found it illegal.
Combine that with tracing the route and applying some common sense heuristics to the path, and you can get pretty good results.
But of course the moment you hit a corporate firewall somehere, and there are no clues in DNS, all bets are off about the routing after that.
The thing is, there might be sufficient resistance in the council that the proposal would not have been approved in the first case as that required an absolute majority of all votes (i.e. an abstention would effectively be a vote against the proposal), but as it stands it's quite likely that there is not sufficient support to actively prevent the common position from being adopted in spite of the previous vote.
Keep in mind that this proposal was originally approved in the Council with a qualified majority, which in the Council means they got well over 70% of the votes, more than half the member states voted for AND the member states that voted for represented more than 62% of the EU population.
Inertia against doing something that just hasn't previously even been considered an option might be part of the reason why the Council doesn't show much will to stop this charade, and may explain why Poland is stalling so the Parliament can get a chance to do the honours instead.
But this clearly isn't only about the EU Commission. Note that even Poland hasn't officially outright rejected the proposal, and originally intended to abstain rather than vote against it originally.
No, you are wrong. In this case, the commission originally proposed the change. The EU parliament then discussed it, proposed a long list of amendments and voted on it. The Council then discussed it and produced a new version, in the new version they reversed most of the parliaments ammendments - that is within their rights and is a result of the fact that the Council represents the member states while the parliament have no legal standing over the member states. The council then voted, and their version was approved.
That version then had to be translated, and the final translation had to be approved again by the council. THAT can be done as an A list item, as it is usually just a formality.
The thing that is unusual in this case is that the voting weights have changed dramatically, AND there have been elections AND several of the governments represented in the council had misled their parliaments or misrepresented the council position. That is the only reason why there is a reason to worry over the A list treatment.
Now, while this is happening, the Parliament can request a restart of the whole process. This is a safeguard to prevent the Council from ignoring them, giving the Parliament somewhat more influence over the final result.
Whenever the Council approves it, however, whether after a restart or not, the draft goes back to the parliament for a second reading. If the parliament rejects it at that stage (requires an absolute majority) it's dead and the commission/council will have to try again later.
While one could wish that the directly elected parliament had more say, the voting public doesn't have that much less to say about this than about any law in the member states, seeing as the council of ministers is made up of the elected governments of the member states and the parliament is directly elected.
In this case,of course, we are talking about a directive concerning a European institution, the EPO which, I believe, does not require all governments to ratify any directive. It'll happen of the Council says it will happen.
Yes and no. NO EU directives require all governments to ratify them. EU directives are made by the EU, period. Some requires the Council to unanimously approve them, some require qualified majority etc., but in any case it is the EU itself that decide directives.
However once the directive has been approved, all EU member states are required to implement the directive, and failure to do so can result in sanctions or legal action. That is exactly why the Council has so much power - none of the member states are particularly interested in handing too much power over to organs that does not directly represent their own governments.
Incidentally, since you're picking on Norway: Norway gives 5-6 times more in official and private development aid per person than the US does, including Gates' donations.
Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg, Sweden and the Netherlands are also the ONLY countries that are consistently meeting (and generally significantly exceeding) the UN target of 0.7% of GDP for official development aid. The US doesn't meet this target even if you consider private donations (including Gates') as well.
This likely has the double advantage for him in that it avoids the very very bad signal effect it would have if he sells massive amounts of Microsoft stock (he does regularly sell, but quite small amounts, which is "business as usual" since most of his fortune is still tied up in Microsoft) and hence avoid having a detrimental effect on the Microsoft shareprice, while at the same time presumably his foundation have been structured so that his donations are tax deductable.
I don't know HOW beneficial this would be as I don't know US tax regulations in detail, but best case this lets him donate the gross value of the shares without capital gains tax and at the same times deduct the market value of the shares from his taxes.
No matter the exact mechanics of how much he can save on taxes, it's clear that the potential is there for him to save a lot if he's structured things right, and with a lot less impact on Microsoft than if he just sold enough shares to generate the same equivalent net amount directly.
I'm not saying that to belittle his donation (no matter how much I dislike him) - it's great that he does spend his money that way. Just pointing out that it's quite likely that this have even less actual effect on his net wealth than people think.
Instead of focusing on the dollar amount, focus on the fact that he does mostly donate to causes that can relatively universally be seen as good. After all, he could probably have gotten the same benefits from setting up non-profits designed to benefit for instance Microsoft (through "education" initiatives etc.) and donating to that instead.
As much as I dislike the way he has gotten rich, at least some of it is being put to good use.
And diseases rarely become immune against vaccinations. Polio and smallpox are now for all practical purposes wiped out thanks to vaccination programs - immunity was never an issue.
Vaccinations is one of the best ways of helping the developing world for the simple reason that apart from reducing the pain and suffering caused by these deaths, it also helps improve economic conditions: Children are a net drain on resources. Children that die never get a chance to make up for that drain. It may seem cynical to see it that way, but the fact remains that the more you can reduce child mortality rates, the fewer children need be born to produce one adult capable of helping sustain a family and grow the economy.
So apart from showing compassion, helping reduce child mortality is also a perfectly valid way of improving the developing countries ability to take care of themselves in the longer term.
Opt-out has its good sides - it avoids the problem of mistakenly releasing something or having to clutter everything with copyright notices. Opt-in in itself isn't the problem. The problem is the form it has taken, where protection has gotten longer and longer.
I'd have no problem with opt-out if it was structured differently. Say, copyright on a work that doesn't either have a copyright notice, OR have been registered expires after a short amount of time after publication - say 5 years - unless copyright is registered in the meantime. It would mean that even if you couldn't prove the publication date, if you receive a work and it is not registered, you KNOW it will be out of copyright in 5 years unless there is registration at the end of that period. That's not much of a burden.
If you then further requires all work to be registered to get longer protection than, say, 20 years from publication, and be renewed every 20 years after that up to a maximum, then works that have commercial value can remain protected, while work where the owner loses interest or "disappears" will still enter the public domain relatively quickly.
It would give you automatic protection, the ability to easily prevent "mistakes" where you released something without a notice, and the ability to get protection up to 20 years without a registration by placing a notice on your work, or significantly longer if you bother with the paperwork.
There are many ways of making both opt-in and opt-out work. The problem is that the people with significant investments in copyrighted works aren't interested, and they spend fortunes on lobbying.
The EU process for creating and ratifying a law is long winded - a simplified version (likely to contain errors - there is a proper long winded description at the official EU website but I can't be bothered looking it up) is that the comission will usually suggest a law, whereupon the parliament will discuss it and suggest changes and vote on it, after which the council will debate it and vote upon it, at which point it will go back to the parliament, giving parliament a second chance to reject it and force a reconsideration or restart the process.
The reason the council has the power it has is that the council represents the national parliaments, and because the EU is not a state/country or a federation it does not have real law making power itself. The EU can NOT create binding laws for the member states. It can issue directives requiring the member states to create laws or face sanctions.
The council members can be directed by national parliaments using whatever processes the member states prefer, while the national parliaments have no such authority over the EU parliament, and hence the EU parliament CAN'T be given control over the law making process without a dramatic shift in the power balance towards the EU.
Allowing the EU parliament to effectively make law (as opposed to now, when it can prevent a directive from being passed, which doesn't prevent the member states from unilaterally creating a law) would likely require ammendments to the custitutions of most EU member states since it would involve giving up sovereignty. Under the current process, on the other hand, the governments are only bound to treaties which, though costly to do, they can pull out of, and which retain the national parliaments sovereign rights to pass laws on behalf of their citizens.
In essence, the council is a result of the process by which the EU has been created as a loose confederation where the EU government is subordinate to the member states' governments. If the EU at some point becomes a federation, it would be logical to remove the council, or transfer large parts of the power to the parliament, but that's not a very likely prospect for many years.
There is the slight problem of age, though. Given their ages, odds are pretty good that at least a couple of them will die over the next few years, or find themselves in too bad health to continue. It might not be a matter of choice for them to "hang in there".