someone is seriously confused. The cameras we're talking about do not broadcast images to the public.
These are traffic cameras used to track car license plates to enforce compliance with the London congestion charging system (where you need to pay £5 per day to drive in central London during weekday rush hours). The pictures are never made available to the public -- they get sent to the charging control system (which is run by the Mayor of London, not the UK government), which automatically checks them against a database of license numbers. The only time a member of the public will ever see one of the images is if they challenge a fine for non-payment of the charge. Then the photos can be produced as evidence in court.
As for the May Day thing, it's perfectly possible that the cameras being used to monitor the demonstration. However it's not clear that's legal -- it might be considered an "improper use" of the system, since that wasn't why it was built. Moreover most of central London is covered by CCTV, so there's not much advantage to be gained.
You're confusing the need of record companies to make volume sales with the need of a reseller.
I'm sure the record companies will need Apple to sell millions of songs before they start seeing much profit out of it (especially if it steals CD sales). But Apple is a music retailer - they're akting a cut on every song they sell. They don't invest in musicians who never make it big, they don't pay stars for their lavish lifestyles. The only investment they have to recoup is the cost of setting up the store and once that's done (since the running costs will be low), every penny they make will be pure profit.
Basically the Apple music store is like Amazon -- but without all the expensive infrastructure (like book warehouses, inventory control). Web sales tied to web delivery really is the holy grail of online profitability.
I agree. In fact, it strikes me that far from increasing creativity, the "copyright era" that started about 40 years ago has seen a massive drop in creativity.
Why? because copyright protection lasting decades, like we have today, rewards "one-hit wonders" so much that there's no incentive for sustained creative effort.
If you (and your grandchildren) can retire on the royalties from just a few hit songs or movies, where's the incentive to push the boundaries of your art?
For example, in the 19th century, musicians didn't have royalties, nor did they have rich patrons. They survived by constantly producing new work. Yes it would be copied, but that just meant you had to always stay ahead of the copiers -- the original creator always has an initial monopoly since it takes copiers time to catch on.
Successful musicians could still be rich (though not by today's bloated standards). But they also knew that to stay rich they had to keep working and keep satisfying audiences.
WHy does a musician have the right to keep making a fortune from royalties from old songs, when he hasn't produced anything worth listening to for a decade? What kind of incentive is that?
I agree without copyright we'd have far fewer artists. But the ones who would be les would be those who wanted to make art, not those who wanted to make a quick buck.
Actually, if you sell someone an orange they can easily go an make lots of (partial) copies. They just need to plant the pips and wait.
Unless of course it's a genetically modified, patented orange. In which case it would be illegal to drop the pips in your yard and let nature take its course...
Prior art is already considered globally -- everywhere except the US. You can't patent an invention in the UK if it's already been invented somewhere else, for example. But you can patent it in the US even if it's in use in every other country in the world.
Consider what that means. Suppose I patent something in Japan, for example. When a patent is issued, the details of the patent are made public. That means that someone else could take my Japanese patent and use it as a basis for their own US patent. I then wouldn't be able to sell my own invention in the US.
Patents are supposed to promote innovation by protecting inventors' rights. The US law on prior art makes a complete travesty of this -- why bother inventing something when you can just patent a foreign invention?
Effectively, this means that foreign inventors are forced to file a US patent at the same time they file for one in their own country. No wonder the USPTO has a massive backlog.
I'm writing this as someone who with postgrad degrees in theoretical physics from Harvard and Cambridge (I've also met Martin Rees), so I probably know what I'm talking about:
There's no minimum mass needed to form a black holes. A "few heavy atoms" is plenty. All that is necesasary is to compress the matter to the necessary density. Now under normal conditions, to achieve this compression takes an enormous gravitational field (i.e. a massive star) in order to overcome the repulsive nuclear forces that usually keep subatomic particles apart.
Now particle accelerators are not usual conditions. You don't normally find gold atoms smashing into each other at relativistic speeds. Making a black hole in this way is beyond the power of current particle accelerators, but that could change.
But that's not the only way of making mini black holes. It's been suggested that protons and neutrons might spontaneously turn into black holes if all their quarks (which move around prety randomly) happened to get close enough together. If this does happen, it must be very rare as experiments to measure proton decay haven't found anything yet.
Another possibility is that mini black holes spontaneously form around us as a result of quantum fluctuations in the vacuum. This is very likely: it just needs two virtual particles to be created close enough to each other.
However, we don't need to worry too much about naturally occurring mini black holes because they're very short lived: Stephen Hawking proved that all black holes, unless fed with more matter, ultimately "evaporate". Subatomic ones would evaporate in microseconds. But imagine someone created a micro black hole and fed it matter fast enough that it grew before it evaporated...say using a particle accelerator.
As for the other worries: a quantum phase transition is perfectly possible (if unlikely) given our current knowledge of quantum relativity. For examnple string theory predicts the possible existence of multiple vacuum states, only one of which is the "true" lowest-energy ground state. So it's possible that the universe was created in a higher-energy but metastable state: i.e. a sort of energy valley which is stable only until you've got enough energy to push it "over the hill" and into the deeper valley on the other side. Now it's possible that an event with a high enough energy concentration could overcome this energy barrier and cause the universe to flip into a new energy state -- one in which all the particles wouldnhave different masses and forces have different strengths.
What could create such an event? Possibly a particle accelerator (though not at the moment since we haven't reached energies that don't occur naturally, eg when 2 cosmic rays collide). Some people think it could happen if you went back in time and saw yourself, but this is really entering the realm of hollywood fantasy..
If you think about what an ISP does, you'll realise that the clause (as it is now) is really no more and no less than what is needed to protect itself from disgruntled customers. Let's focus on it section by section, from the end. First of all, the last part:
in each case for the limited purposes for which you provided or made the Customer Materials available or to enable us and our suppliers to provide the Services.
This is saying that whatever they do with your content, they can only do it for the purposes you gave it to them i.e. distribute it via http over the internet.
* sublicence to any third parties the unrestricted right to exercise any of the rights granted.
Xtra doesn't own the entire internet. So whatever rights they have over the content, they have to be able to pass those rights on to the next person in the equipment chain (and so on down to the end user -- check your ISP's T&Cs). They can't give the content away since the don't own it, so they need to be able to sublicense it.
Obviously as an ISP they have to be able to use, copy, redistribute, transmit, publish, broadcast or display the content (over wired and wireless connections, hence broadcast). They need to be able to delete and edit it (in case what you post fall foul of local laws somewhere in the world). They need to be able to grant a sublicensee the right to publicly perform it incase someone hooks up a computer in public and goes to your site.
By placing any content, software or anything else ("Materials") on our Websites or Systems (including posting messages, uploading files, importing data or engaging in any other form of communication), you grant to Xtra a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable, unrestricted, worldwide licence to do the following in respect of the Materials:
So you're giving the the right to do the things discussed above forever and anywhere, without being able to charge royalties. Well, of course an ISP doesn't want you to be able to charge royalties for every time someone downloads your content, so that's fair enough.
What about the perpetuity, irrevocable and worldwide parts? You need to consider this in relation to the sublicences part discussed earlier. Obviously the license needs to be worldwide, as they need to be able to grant sublicenses to anyone anywhere in the world who accesses the content. And since Xtra can't possibly contact all the sublicensees to revoke their sublicense (now that would be spam), the licence has to be perpetual and irrevocable. Otherwise, when you revoked the licence, Xtra would be liable for all the other parts of the internet infrastructure still hosting your content.
Read like that, it doesn't seem too onerous, does it?
US media can't afford to upset the military
on
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· Score: 1
It's good to see that you support free speech.
The problem with the Western, and especially US, media, is not so much that they are deliberately biased but that they can't afford to upset the military and the Bush administration.
Think about it: do you toe the party line, and get rewarded with live reports of on-the-ground action from your "embeds", or do you occasionally upset the generals and get relegated to the back row of the press conference room in Qatar? Which do you think your shareholders would prefer? The result is that our "unbiased" news sources are really just feeding us US propaganda.
Al-Jazeera is just playing the same game from the other side. They want to get access to the Iraqi side of the action and in return they have to follow the Iraqi line. It doesn't make them less or more independent than any other news organisation; they're just playing under a different set of rules.
The military control of the Western press agenda is so obvious, it's surprising that the network anchors can keep a straight face. For example:
- Daily claims that various towns have been "secured", when clearly they haven't
- only reporting the (estimated) number of Iraqi combat casualties. We've only got Iraqi propaganda to go on how many US and UK casualties have happened.
- reporting as "fact" that Iraqis will use chemical weapons to defend Baghdad. Is this based on the same intelligence sources that claimed the Iraqis army would surrender, Saddam was dead and US forces would be welcomes as liberators?
- Describing Iraqis in civilian clothing who attack US military targets as "terrorists". Terrorists attack _civilians_ in order to spread panic and fear. Military targets from a country you're at war with cannot be anything other than legitimate. If US special forces infiltrated an Iraqi army base, would they be terrorists?
- Accepting uncritically the line that a find of chemical protection suits in Basra is "proof" that Iraq has chemical weapons. The science journal Nature (www.nature.com) reports that the US plans to use "riot control" gases, such as tear gas and sedatives, in urban areas. Given that, why wouldn't the Iraqi army want to protect itself?
Not quite. When you "buy" the software, you're making a contract with the retailer for whatever is in the box: manuals, CDs etc. Once you've bought it, you can do whatever you like with the contents of that box. Use it as a football, eat it, even install the software... whatever.
However, when you agree to the EULA, you're making a new contract with the software company. Your benefit: by agreeing, they let you use the software, get upgrades, tech support etc. Their benefit: they get to control what you do with it.
Now even if you argue that your contract with the retailer included a right to use the software, that doesn't mean that you don't benefit (legally speaking) from right to use it in the EULA. There's no restriction in law in making the same commitment to two people (eg. if I make a contract with you do do X, and I make a contract with another person to do X, then both of you can enforce that contract, even though I've not promised B to do anything new).
A possible way around this is to install the software without agreeing to the EULA. Then you're just using your right under the contract with the retailer to use the software without extra conditions. The problem is figuring out (for a layman like me) how to persuade the software to install without needing to agree to the EULA...
One thing to keep in mind is that plastic cars would be much lighter in weight than steel ones. This has two big advantages: firstly, fuel consumption would be much lower. Now that doesn't seem to be much of an issue in George W's vision of America but in the rest of the world it's a serious concern. (You'd also get better acceleration for the same engine power)
Second, because advanced plastics are both lighter and stronger than steel, if all cars were made of plastic the roads would be a much safer place (because the energy released in impact is proportional to the mass of the cars involved, plus lighter cars can stop more quickly). Of course, if a plastic car hit a steel car, then the plastic car would probably come off worse -- but then these days anyone not driving an SUV is likely to die in an accident ('cos they're most likely to hit an out-of-control SUV rolling over after taking a corner too fast...)
Don't you just hate it when someone who actually knows something about the issue makes a post. It totally kills off the debate...AC, you've just ruined it for the rest of us.
"Harmonization" is pretty much what all directives say they are about, because the main purpose of EU law is to harmonize commercial law throughout its members.
But whether harmonization involves all-new laws or modifying existing ones... well, that depends on the directive.
Now if you were a poster from a developing nation, you'd have agood point.
But let's not forget that Dubya recently signed a massive increase in US farm subsidies. True, they're still less that EU ones, but that doesn't make them any more virtuous.
The reason various industries get subsidies is a question of politics rather than economics. Lots of US steelworkers live in swing states => they get subsidies to protect them from more efficient foreign producers. France has a large rural population => French farmers get big subsidies.
In the long run, though, everyone loses from these subsidies. For example with steel in the US, not only are the subsidies being paid from taxpayers' money, but the artificially high steel prices resulting mean that all the US industries that use steel have to pay more for it. Result: car prices go up, sales go down, factories get shut, people get fired. Just not steelworkers...
The EU has NO criminal jurisdiction. All EU laws are purely civil.
You know, the odd thing with all the anti-EU comments by Americans on/. is that the EU is far closer the the "founding fathers" vision of the USA than the USA is today -- a fairly loose federation of almost autonomous states. Washington would be outraged to see the powers now enjoyed by the federal government...
Actually, any EU citizen has the automatic right to work in any EU country -- so an Italian citizen can come right on over to the UK, no problems. Hell, he can even come and claim unemployment benefit while looking for the job, get free health care, send his kids to school etc.
Basically, the only right that a UK citizen in the UK has over an Italian citizen is voting in general elections (EU citizens can vote in local & EU elections), plus being able to work in various security-sensitive areas such as defence.
As for Canadians... well, if you're young (I think under 30) you can come and work for 2 years. Not quite the same thing.
well, I am a lawyer (almost), and I'm afraid that under the common law (in the UK and probably in the US too) if you know there are going to be conditions attached to a purchase -- even if you don't know what they are, then by going ahead with the purchase you're assumed to have agreed to the terms.
Whether or not you understand them -- or have even seen them -- is irrelevent. The logic is that, if you know there are going to be conditions but don't make the effort to find out what they are or mean, then the prudent thing is don't make the purchase. If you do, then face the consequences.
Of course there are safeguards; terms that are too restrictive might need to be given special prominence, and in the UK at least, consumers (but not businesses) are immune from blatantly "unfair" terms under EU directives.
There are also some good legal arguments as to why EULAs might not count as contracts anyway (after all, you bought the software from the store, not from the manufacturer, and nobody mentioned EULAs in the store), but this post is too short for them...
Who is fighting hardest for copyright protection? Musicians, artists and writers, or record companies, film studios and publishers?
Are the creations of pre-copyright musicians, artists and writers, like Mozart, Rembrandt or Shakespeare, worse than the work of modern-day creatives who need only write one hit and can sit back and rake in the money for the rest of their lives?
What is most depressing is that people have swallowed the corporate line that anyone who creates anything popular has the automatic right to become a millionaire.
I'm not denying that musicians shouldn't be paid for what they do. I do pay them -- I go to live concerts. That's all musicians had to live on until a hundred years ago, and there was no shortage of music before then.
I'm not denying that actors shouldn't be paid for their work -- I go to the theatre and to the cinema. That's all the movie and theatre industry had to live on until VCRs were invented in the 1970s, and there was no shortage of good plays or movies before then.
Extending copyright as restricively as is being done today does not protect artists or incentivise them to create. It encourages them to sign up with big record/movie companies who can guarantee them a lifetime of riches in return for very little effort.
Imagine if comedians copyrighted all their jokes. Would the world be a funnier place?
Slashdot Mirror
best time to perform maintenance probably isn't during an anarchist march!
Anyway the cameras are only in use weekdays from 7am to 6:30pm (the period of the congestion charge), so there's plenty of time to maintain them.
someone is seriously confused. The cameras we're talking about do not broadcast images to the public.
These are traffic cameras used to track car license plates to enforce compliance with the London congestion charging system (where you need to pay £5 per day to drive in central London during weekday rush hours). The pictures are never made available to the public -- they get sent to the charging control system (which is run by the Mayor of London, not the UK government), which automatically checks them against a database of license numbers. The only time a member of the public will ever see one of the images is if they challenge a fine for non-payment of the charge. Then the photos can be produced as evidence in court.
As for the May Day thing, it's perfectly possible that the cameras being used to monitor the demonstration. However it's not clear that's legal -- it might be considered an "improper use" of the system, since that wasn't why it was built.
Moreover most of central London is covered by CCTV, so there's not much advantage to be gained.
You're confusing the need of record companies to make volume sales with the need of a reseller. I'm sure the record companies will need Apple to sell millions of songs before they start seeing much profit out of it (especially if it steals CD sales). But Apple is a music retailer - they're akting a cut on every song they sell. They don't invest in musicians who never make it big, they don't pay stars for their lavish lifestyles. The only investment they have to recoup is the cost of setting up the store and once that's done (since the running costs will be low), every penny they make will be pure profit. Basically the Apple music store is like Amazon -- but without all the expensive infrastructure (like book warehouses, inventory control). Web sales tied to web delivery really is the holy grail of online profitability.
I agree. In fact, it strikes me that far from increasing creativity, the "copyright era" that started about 40 years ago has seen a massive drop in creativity.
Why? because copyright protection lasting decades, like we have today, rewards "one-hit wonders" so much that there's no incentive for sustained creative effort.
If you (and your grandchildren) can retire on the royalties from just a few hit songs or movies, where's the incentive to push the boundaries of your art?
For example, in the 19th century, musicians didn't have royalties, nor did they have rich patrons. They survived by constantly producing new work. Yes it would be copied, but that just meant you had to always stay ahead of the copiers -- the original creator always has an initial monopoly since it takes copiers time to catch on.
Successful musicians could still be rich (though not by today's bloated standards). But they also knew that to stay rich they had to keep working and keep satisfying audiences.
WHy does a musician have the right to keep making a fortune from royalties from old songs, when he hasn't produced anything worth listening to for a decade? What kind of incentive is that?
I agree without copyright we'd have far fewer artists. But the ones who would be les would be those who wanted to make art, not those who wanted to make a quick buck.
Actually, if you sell someone an orange they can easily go an make lots of (partial) copies. They just need to plant the pips and wait.
Unless of course it's a genetically modified, patented orange. In which case it would be illegal to drop the pips in your yard and let nature take its course...
Prior art is already considered globally -- everywhere except the US. You can't patent an invention in the UK if it's already been invented somewhere else, for example. But you can patent it in the US even if it's in use in every other country in the world.
Consider what that means. Suppose I patent something in Japan, for example. When a patent is issued, the details of the patent are made public. That means that someone else could take my Japanese patent and use it as a basis for their own US patent. I then wouldn't be able to sell my own invention in the US.
Patents are supposed to promote innovation by protecting inventors' rights. The US law on prior art makes a complete travesty of this -- why bother inventing something when you can just patent a foreign invention?
Effectively, this means that foreign inventors are forced to file a US patent at the same time they file for one in their own country. No wonder the USPTO has a massive backlog.
I'm writing this as someone who with postgrad degrees in theoretical physics from Harvard and Cambridge (I've also met Martin Rees), so I probably know what I'm talking about:
There's no minimum mass needed to form a black holes. A "few heavy atoms" is plenty. All that is necesasary is to compress the matter to the necessary density. Now under normal conditions, to achieve this compression takes an enormous gravitational field (i.e. a massive star) in order to overcome the repulsive nuclear forces that usually keep subatomic particles apart.
Now particle accelerators are not usual conditions. You don't normally find gold atoms smashing into each other at relativistic speeds. Making a black hole in this way is beyond the power of current particle accelerators, but that could change.
But that's not the only way of making mini black holes. It's been suggested that protons and neutrons might spontaneously turn into black holes if all their quarks (which move around prety randomly) happened to get close enough together. If this does happen, it must be very rare as experiments to measure proton decay haven't found anything yet.
Another possibility is that mini black holes spontaneously form around us as a result of quantum fluctuations in the vacuum. This is very likely: it just needs two virtual particles to be created close enough to each other.
However, we don't need to worry too much about naturally occurring mini black holes because they're very short lived: Stephen Hawking proved that all black holes, unless fed with more matter, ultimately "evaporate". Subatomic ones would evaporate in microseconds. But imagine someone created a micro black hole and fed it matter fast enough that it grew before it evaporated...say using a particle accelerator.
As for the other worries: a quantum phase transition is perfectly possible (if unlikely) given our current knowledge of quantum relativity. For examnple string theory predicts the possible existence of multiple vacuum states, only one of which is the "true" lowest-energy ground state. So it's possible that the universe was created in a higher-energy but metastable state: i.e. a sort of energy valley which is stable only until you've got enough energy to push it "over the hill" and into the deeper valley on the other side. Now it's possible that an event with a high enough energy concentration could overcome this energy barrier and cause the universe to flip into a new energy state -- one in which all the particles wouldnhave different masses and forces have different strengths.
What could create such an event? Possibly a particle accelerator (though not at the moment since we haven't reached energies that don't occur naturally, eg when 2 cosmic rays collide). Some people think it could happen if you went back in time and saw yourself, but this is really entering the realm of hollywood fantasy..
If you think about what an ISP does, you'll realise that the clause (as it is now) is really no more and no less than what is needed to protect itself from disgruntled customers. Let's focus on it section by section, from the end. First of all, the last part:
in each case for the limited purposes for which you provided or made the Customer Materials available or to enable us and our suppliers to provide the Services.
This is saying that whatever they do with your content, they can only do it for the purposes you gave it to them i.e. distribute it via http over the internet.
* sublicence to any third parties the unrestricted right to exercise any of the rights granted.
Xtra doesn't own the entire internet. So whatever rights they have over the content, they have to be able to pass those rights on to the next person in the equipment chain (and so on down to the end user -- check your ISP's T&Cs). They can't give the content away since the don't own it, so they need to be able to sublicense it.
* use, copy, sublicence, redistribute, adapt, transmit, publish, delete, edit and/or broadcast, publicly perform or display
Obviously as an ISP they have to be able to use, copy, redistribute, transmit, publish, broadcast or display the content (over wired and wireless connections, hence broadcast). They need to be able to delete and edit it (in case what you post fall foul of local laws somewhere in the world). They need to be able to grant a sublicensee the right to publicly perform it incase someone hooks up a computer in public and goes to your site.
By placing any content, software or anything else ("Materials") on our Websites or Systems (including posting messages, uploading files, importing data or engaging in any other form of communication), you grant to Xtra a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable, unrestricted, worldwide licence to do the following in respect of the Materials:
So you're giving the the right to do the things discussed above forever and anywhere, without being able to charge royalties. Well, of course an ISP doesn't want you to be able to charge royalties for every time someone downloads your content, so that's fair enough.
What about the perpetuity, irrevocable and worldwide parts? You need to consider this in relation to the sublicences part discussed earlier. Obviously the license needs to be worldwide, as they need to be able to grant sublicenses to anyone anywhere in the world who accesses the content. And since Xtra can't possibly contact all the sublicensees to revoke their sublicense (now that would be spam), the licence has to be perpetual and irrevocable. Otherwise, when you revoked the licence, Xtra would be liable for all the other parts of the internet infrastructure still hosting your content.
Read like that, it doesn't seem too onerous, does it?
It's good to see that you support free speech.
The problem with the Western, and especially US, media, is not so much that they are deliberately biased but that they can't afford to upset the military and the Bush administration.
Think about it: do you toe the party line, and get rewarded with live reports of on-the-ground action from your "embeds", or do you occasionally upset the generals and get relegated to the back row of the press conference room in Qatar? Which do you think your shareholders would prefer? The result is that our "unbiased" news sources are really just feeding us US propaganda.
Al-Jazeera is just playing the same game from the other side. They want to get access to the Iraqi side of the action and in return they have to follow the Iraqi line. It doesn't make them less or more independent than any other news organisation; they're just playing under a different set of rules.
The military control of the Western press agenda is so obvious, it's surprising that the network anchors can keep a straight face. For example:
- Daily claims that various towns have been "secured", when clearly they haven't
- only reporting the (estimated) number of Iraqi combat casualties. We've only got Iraqi propaganda to go on how many US and UK casualties have happened.
- reporting as "fact" that Iraqis will use chemical weapons to defend Baghdad. Is this based on the same intelligence sources that claimed the Iraqis army would surrender, Saddam was dead and US forces would be welcomes as liberators?
- Describing Iraqis in civilian clothing who attack US military targets as "terrorists". Terrorists attack _civilians_ in order to spread panic and fear. Military targets from a country you're at war with cannot be anything other than legitimate. If US special forces infiltrated an Iraqi army base, would they be terrorists?
- Accepting uncritically the line that a find of chemical protection suits in Basra is "proof" that Iraq has chemical weapons. The science journal Nature (www.nature.com) reports that the US plans to use "riot control" gases, such as tear gas and sedatives, in urban areas. Given that, why wouldn't the Iraqi army want to protect itself?
Not quite. When you "buy" the software, you're making a contract with the retailer for whatever is in the box: manuals, CDs etc. Once you've bought it, you can do whatever you like with the contents of that box. Use it as a football, eat it, even install the software... whatever.
However, when you agree to the EULA, you're making a new contract with the software company. Your benefit: by agreeing, they let you use the software, get upgrades, tech support etc. Their benefit: they get to control what you do with it.
Now even if you argue that your contract with the retailer included a right to use the software, that doesn't mean that you don't benefit (legally speaking) from right to use it in the EULA. There's no restriction in law in making the same commitment to two people (eg. if I make a contract with you do do X, and I make a contract with another person to do X, then both of you can enforce that contract, even though I've not promised B to do anything new).
A possible way around this is to install the software without agreeing to the EULA. Then you're just using your right under the contract with the retailer to use the software without extra conditions. The problem is figuring out (for a layman like me) how to persuade the software to install without needing to agree to the EULA...
One thing to keep in mind is that plastic cars would be much lighter in weight than steel ones. This has two big advantages: firstly, fuel consumption would be much lower. Now that doesn't seem to be much of an issue in George W's vision of America but in the rest of the world it's a serious concern. (You'd also get better acceleration for the same engine power)
Second, because advanced plastics are both lighter and stronger than steel, if all cars were made of plastic the roads would be a much safer place (because the energy released in impact is proportional to the mass of the cars involved, plus lighter cars can stop more quickly). Of course, if a plastic car hit a steel car, then the plastic car would probably come off worse -- but then these days anyone not driving an SUV is likely to die in an accident ('cos they're most likely to hit an out-of-control SUV rolling over after taking a corner too fast...)
Don't you just hate it when someone who actually knows something about the issue makes a post. It totally kills off the debate...AC, you've just ruined it for the rest of us.
"Harmonization" is pretty much what all directives say they are about, because the main purpose of EU law is to harmonize commercial law throughout its members. But whether harmonization involves all-new laws or modifying existing ones... well, that depends on the directive.
Now if you were a poster from a developing nation, you'd have agood point.
But let's not forget that Dubya recently signed a massive increase in US farm subsidies. True, they're still less that EU ones, but that doesn't make them any more virtuous.
The reason various industries get subsidies is a question of politics rather than economics. Lots of US steelworkers live in swing states => they get subsidies to protect them from more efficient foreign producers. France has a large rural population => French farmers get big subsidies.
In the long run, though, everyone loses from these subsidies. For example with steel in the US, not only are the subsidies being paid from taxpayers' money, but the artificially high steel prices resulting mean that all the US industries that use steel have to pay more for it. Result: car prices go up, sales go down, factories get shut, people get fired. Just not steelworkers...
This is so wrong...
/. is that the EU is far closer the the "founding fathers" vision of the USA than the USA is today -- a fairly loose federation of almost autonomous states. Washington would be outraged to see the powers now enjoyed by the federal government...
The EU has NO criminal jurisdiction. All EU laws are purely civil.
You know, the odd thing with all the anti-EU comments by Americans on
Actually, any EU citizen has the automatic right to work in any EU country -- so an Italian citizen can come right on over to the UK, no problems. Hell, he can even come and claim unemployment benefit while looking for the job, get free health care, send his kids to school etc.
Basically, the only right that a UK citizen in the UK has over an Italian citizen is voting in general elections (EU citizens can vote in local & EU elections), plus being able to work in various security-sensitive areas such as defence.
As for Canadians... well, if you're young (I think under 30) you can come and work for 2 years. Not quite the same thing.
well, I am a lawyer (almost), and I'm afraid that under the common law (in the UK and probably in the US too) if you know there are going to be conditions attached to a purchase -- even if you don't know what they are, then by going ahead with the purchase you're assumed to have agreed to the terms.
Whether or not you understand them -- or have even seen them -- is irrelevent. The logic is that, if you know there are going to be conditions but don't make the effort to find out what they are or mean, then the prudent thing is don't make the purchase. If you do, then face the consequences.
Of course there are safeguards; terms that are too restrictive might need to be given special prominence, and in the UK at least, consumers (but not businesses) are immune from blatantly "unfair" terms under EU directives.
There are also some good legal arguments as to why EULAs might not count as contracts anyway (after all, you bought the software from the store, not from the manufacturer, and nobody mentioned EULAs in the store), but this post is too short for them...
Even if Norway were in the EU, Jon couldn't go to jail -- EU law is purely civil, not criminal. So the most he'd be faced with is a whopping fine.
Who is fighting hardest for copyright protection? Musicians, artists and writers, or record companies, film studios and publishers?
Are the creations of pre-copyright musicians, artists and writers, like Mozart, Rembrandt or Shakespeare, worse than the work of modern-day creatives who need only write one hit and can sit back and rake in the money for the rest of their lives?
What is most depressing is that people have swallowed the corporate line that anyone who creates anything popular has the automatic right to become a millionaire.
I'm not denying that musicians shouldn't be paid for what they do. I do pay them -- I go to live concerts. That's all musicians had to live on until a hundred years ago, and there was no shortage of music before then.
I'm not denying that actors shouldn't be paid for their work -- I go to the theatre and to the cinema. That's all the movie and theatre industry had to live on until VCRs were invented in the 1970s, and there was no shortage of good plays or movies before then.
Extending copyright as restricively as is being done today does not protect artists or incentivise them to create. It encourages them to sign up with big record/movie companies who can guarantee them a lifetime of riches in return for very little effort.
Imagine if comedians copyrighted all their jokes. Would the world be a funnier place?