IIRC the script-support exist primarily for input validation in PDF-forms. This is a not so baffling reason in my mind. Not that I agree with adding the scripting support in PDF, but it is understandable...
URLs will not be mandatory logged, the commissioner responsible rejected a proposal from the EP (a petition that a lot of MEPs signed without actually checking the content since it was all about fighting child porn). The rejection of the petition came as commissioner Malmström saw that the proposals where not proportional.
The current commissioner for JHA actually wants to get rid of the data retention directive, but the council wants it in place.
The surprising in all of this though, is that the UK has not implemented the directive and it was one of their ideas (working together with the Swedish government that has also not implemented the directive, but in the Swedish case, the government was sacked by the electorate; this happened in the UK only this year).
I was looking forward for the new iLife, but nothing essential for the first time since they released the first version. I only use iPhoto anyway, but am now seriously considering getting Aperture instead.
Steve seems to be in bad shape, I did not feel the RDF, not even once.
The commission is not the one you should worry about, they have never had any law making power (they have mandate to issue decrees in certain regulatory areas, but this is seldom used, I seem to recall 2 times in the last 10 or 15 years). In any case, the main problem earlier was that the council that is not directly elected had lawmaking powers, allowing them to make law that no elected official had the power to object formally.
You are right that this got better with Lisbon, but the commission is not to blame.
Lisbon did address this with two main points, firstly the MEPs have co-decision rights in almost every area. In the areas where they do not, there is a subsidiarity clause that allow national parliaments to formally object when a law is agreed to by the council when that should be handled by the national parliaments instead.
It is far from perfect, but this is a compromise between the federalists who want to give the EP the power and the confederalists that want to give the council the power when the EU is granted power. Obviously (for anyone who thinks for more then two seconds), the federalists are right when one considers the democratic legitimacy of laws made by the Union.
The Union does not represent foreign interests for any European state, since the Union represents Europe it represents all members of the Union. This cannot be argued in anyway to be a foreign interest since it is formed by your own state.
They where really annoying at various forums on the Internet (like the ones at the major newspapers), spreading of-topic propaganda as soon as anything of interest was discussed.
The document is not an EU policy document. It does not describe how the EU wants to monitor its citizens. It is a research project under the seventh framework programme (i.e. a grant program where scientists can apply for Union grants for larger projects). As with all research, it will not necessarily be used by the EU or the member states.
Yes, I remember, but as far as the original SW pat directive, it is absolutely dead.
The problem with that specific aspect, is that the patent system in Europe really needs to be europeanised. Thus, when the proposals for the new patentsystem are being developed, the old SW patent lobby see their opportunity.
The main point being that the SW pat issue is very special as we all knew when the directive was being pushed initially, there would be another directive later harmonising the patent law in total and establishing the community patent properly.
So, while you are partially right, you are also partially wrong on this.
My guess is that ACTA is not something that is really critical from an institutional point of view as the community patent is, so if it is rejected, I would be very surprised to see a similar treaty showing up the next 10-15 years.
There are only two readings of the proposals by the EP. If they say no during both, and the consolidation attempts with the council fails, the proposal is dead and the commission will not bring it up again, unless the EP wants it.
Yes, the EP must approve (almost) all international treaties that the commission negotiates, the ACTA treaty is among these.
Now, the EP have several options if they really want to force their will through. These include:
1. A vote of no confidence, which would get the commission sacked. 2. Try the old methods of Tiberius Gracchus and veto everything that comes out as a proposal from the commission or the council.
No one has claimed anywhere that the women wanted to have him charged with rape. This is up to the authorities, and essentially for a good reason, since a lot of crimes happen where the victim is terrified about the perpetrator and dont't want to press charges as they fear their life.
Now, in this case, Assange is clearly not a dangerous person that the women in this case fear.
My impression is that they went to the police to ask them if there was any way to force Assange to do an STD test. I am not sure you can force someone to do it, except in the case you have been infected, in which case the Swedish decease control will trace the infection. Honestly, if I would be worried about that, I would not go to the police, I would go to the doctor, do a test by myself and ask him/her if it is possible to force someone else to do a test.
The police then took the decision to treat the event as rape.
One guy (Billy Butt) in Sweden who was a record company director, got convicted of rape several years ago. The only evidence was that there where so many women telling their stories (10 or so), and the court wrote in their verdict that they could not believe that any of the girls would sleep with the guy voluntarily because he was so ugly (I think the court used the term "peculiar appearance" instead of outright calling him ugly, but anyway...).
Fast forward a few years (the guy having served his sentence), and several of the girls involved in the charge now admit that they where paid by one of the tabloids to claim they where raped, and that they did so to get even with the guy. The guy admits that he was a bastard and tricked the women into sleeping with him by promising them record contracts, but being an unethical bastard does not make you a rapist. It may make you a sexist pig, but that is not a crime.
Billy was last time I heard trying to appeal the verdict in order to clear his name.
The main point with this is that you should not assume that it is difficult to fabricate such charges (as in this case, at least a few of them where fabricated).
That is why there was another crime called "sexual harassment".
An extreme example would be assault and murder. What if the Swedish parliament would change the law so that if you beat the crap out of someone, you would be convicted of murder.
This is essentially what the parliament did with the rape-definition. If you force petting on someone, you should definitely get sentenced for it, but that sentence should be for "sexual harassment", not rape.
Doesn't have to be, in Sweden, you can be convicted for rape without penetrating anything. Forced petting is enough. You do not even have to use force, only go against the will of the person that is the victim is enough.
The bad thing with this is that it leads to people starting to distrust the law and the authorities.
Secondly, Sweden is not neutral, earlier the idea was that it is free from military alliances so that it can elect to be neutral in the case of war. This, was the case of Swedish defence policy until about two years ago when the Swedish parliament agreed on a new formulation of its policy, and essentially it now says that if any EU member state is attacked, Sweden will come to that states aid with military means if necessary.
Swedish neutrality is dead, both de-facto and de-jure.
Reverse engineering for compatibility is allowed (at least where I live). Thus, headers cannot be considered code, since they are only expressing an interface, essential for compatibility.
If you want to be compatible with say int foo(int, float), then you actually need to write that exact sequence in your own headers, since the header define the symbol name and the calling convention for the functions. You do also, by the way need to name the header the same as in the system you are emulating for compatibility reasons, as otherwise the programs that you want to run on your system will not compile.
OK, the file called Tab 409, is basically given by SCO in their ELF documentation, they cannot possibly claim that this is illegal copying since all the defines and structs are given by the documentation which scream out: Please implement me!
Anyone who implements ELF will write those lines of code.
Though, I do agree that it looks like copying. I do not think (having read the ELF spec and implemented it), that code would look that similar in general (some of the duplicated enums are not in the ELF spec (which funny enough is published by SCO)), however, I was under the impression that header files where not copyrightable since they only describe an interface.
If there were any reason to implement source level compatibility with SCO, i think this would be allowed (though IANAL). Ridiculous is to bring in the dlopen header, this is implemented on every UNIX-like system, and headers are needed for compatibility, which is explicitly allowed by most copyright laws around the world (the same headers are also in OS X, BSD, Solaris), the important part, if you want to determine whether code was copied is the code, not the headers.
From the looks of it, the ELF code was actually copied, and I do not think that you need any liberal notion of copying for seeing that, I have seen this kind of copying by students earlier, and they usually rightfully get into troubles for it.
Outside of the EU they do not longer think of the individual states that much. The problem is that Europeans, in general, fail to see their importance in the world as _Europeans_.
Now, I wouldn't mind seeing a European team, but practicalities prevent this from happening except for maybe some exhibition game. Some states are so devolved that they field several teams, like for instance the UK (which most people outside of UK think as one country, but is actually 4 countries under one flag), where each of 4 countries in the UK have their own team.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC the script-support exist primarily for input validation in PDF-forms. This is a not so baffling reason in my mind. Not that I agree with adding the scripting support in PDF, but it is understandable...
URLs will not be mandatory logged, the commissioner responsible rejected a proposal from the EP (a petition that a lot of MEPs signed without actually checking the content since it was all about fighting child porn). The rejection of the petition came as commissioner Malmström saw that the proposals where not proportional.
The current commissioner for JHA actually wants to get rid of the data retention directive, but the council wants it in place.
The surprising in all of this though, is that the UK has not implemented the directive and it was one of their ideas (working together with the Swedish government that has also not implemented the directive, but in the Swedish case, the government was sacked by the electorate; this happened in the UK only this year).
I was looking forward for the new iLife, but nothing essential for the first time since they released the first version. I only use iPhoto anyway, but am now seriously considering getting Aperture instead.
Steve seems to be in bad shape, I did not feel the RDF, not even once.
Ignore the troll Florian, you are doing a great job. I salute you!
Not anymore, welcome to the new world!
Europe is used as a synonym with the EU in many contexts, just like America is used as a synonym for the US. Get used to it. :)
The commission is not the one you should worry about, they have never had any law making power (they have mandate to issue decrees in certain regulatory areas, but this is seldom used, I seem to recall 2 times in the last 10 or 15 years). In any case, the main problem earlier was that the council that is not directly elected had lawmaking powers, allowing them to make law that no elected official had the power to object formally.
You are right that this got better with Lisbon, but the commission is not to blame.
Lisbon did address this with two main points, firstly the MEPs have co-decision rights in almost every area. In the areas where they do not, there is a subsidiarity clause that allow national parliaments to formally object when a law is agreed to by the council when that should be handled by the national parliaments instead.
It is far from perfect, but this is a compromise between the federalists who want to give the EP the power and the confederalists that want to give the council the power when the EU is granted power. Obviously (for anyone who thinks for more then two seconds), the federalists are right when one considers the democratic legitimacy of laws made by the Union.
The Union does not represent foreign interests for any European state, since the Union represents Europe it represents all members of the Union. This cannot be argued in anyway to be a foreign interest since it is formed by your own state.
OK: 12750 * pi = 40055.3 => 40055.3 / 2 = 20027.7
Your point being?
They where really annoying at various forums on the Internet (like the ones at the major newspapers), spreading of-topic propaganda as soon as anything of interest was discussed.
The document is not an EU policy document. It does not describe how the EU wants to monitor its citizens. It is a research project under the seventh framework programme (i.e. a grant program where scientists can apply for Union grants for larger projects). As with all research, it will not necessarily be used by the EU or the member states.
Yes, I remember, but as far as the original SW pat directive, it is absolutely dead.
The problem with that specific aspect, is that the patent system in Europe really needs to be europeanised. Thus, when the proposals for the new patentsystem are being developed, the old SW patent lobby see their opportunity.
The main point being that the SW pat issue is very special as we all knew when the directive was being pushed initially, there would be another directive later harmonising the patent law in total and establishing the community patent properly.
So, while you are partially right, you are also partially wrong on this.
My guess is that ACTA is not something that is really critical from an institutional point of view as the community patent is, so if it is rejected, I would be very surprised to see a similar treaty showing up the next 10-15 years.
There are only two readings of the proposals by the EP. If they say no during both, and the consolidation attempts with the council fails, the proposal is dead and the commission will not bring it up again, unless the EP wants it.
Yes, the EP must approve (almost) all international treaties that the commission negotiates, the ACTA treaty is among these.
Now, the EP have several options if they really want to force their will through. These include:
1. A vote of no confidence, which would get the commission sacked.
2. Try the old methods of Tiberius Gracchus and veto everything that comes out as a proposal from the commission or the council.
Patentus Trollus Obsoleticus?
The lawyer of the women also said that the women where not qualified to determine whether they where raped or not.
Apparently you need a 5 year law degree for that.
No one has claimed anywhere that the women wanted to have him charged with rape. This is up to the authorities, and essentially for a good reason, since a lot of crimes happen where the victim is terrified about the perpetrator and dont't want to press charges as they fear their life.
Now, in this case, Assange is clearly not a dangerous person that the women in this case fear.
My impression is that they went to the police to ask them if there was any way to force Assange to do an STD test. I am not sure you can force someone to do it, except in the case you have been infected, in which case the Swedish decease control will trace the infection. Honestly, if I would be worried about that, I would not go to the police, I would go to the doctor, do a test by myself and ask him/her if it is possible to force someone else to do a test.
The police then took the decision to treat the event as rape.
One guy (Billy Butt) in Sweden who was a record company director, got convicted of rape several years ago. The only evidence was that there where so many women telling their stories (10 or so), and the court wrote in their verdict that they could not believe that any of the girls would sleep with the guy voluntarily because he was so ugly (I think the court used the term "peculiar appearance" instead of outright calling him ugly, but anyway...).
Fast forward a few years (the guy having served his sentence), and several of the girls involved in the charge now admit that they where paid by one of the tabloids to claim they where raped, and that they did so to get even with the guy. The guy admits that he was a bastard and tricked the women into sleeping with him by promising them record contracts, but being an unethical bastard does not make you a rapist. It may make you a sexist pig, but that is not a crime.
Billy was last time I heard trying to appeal the verdict in order to clear his name.
The main point with this is that you should not assume that it is difficult to fabricate such charges (as in this case, at least a few of them where fabricated).
That is why there was another crime called "sexual harassment".
An extreme example would be assault and murder. What if the Swedish parliament would change the law so that if you beat the crap out of someone, you would be convicted of murder.
This is essentially what the parliament did with the rape-definition. If you force petting on someone, you should definitely get sentenced for it, but that sentence should be for "sexual harassment", not rape.
Doesn't have to be, in Sweden, you can be convicted for rape without penetrating anything. Forced petting is enough. You do not even have to use force, only go against the will of the person that is the victim is enough.
The bad thing with this is that it leads to people starting to distrust the law and the authorities.
Sweden has troops in Afghanistan idiot.
Secondly, Sweden is not neutral, earlier the idea was that it is free from military alliances so that it can elect to be neutral in the case of war. This, was the case of Swedish defence policy until about two years ago when the Swedish parliament agreed on a new formulation of its policy, and essentially it now says that if any EU member state is attacked, Sweden will come to that states aid with military means if necessary.
Swedish neutrality is dead, both de-facto and de-jure.
The article does not even mention the word Sweden or Zweden. It does however mention Denmark, which is not equal to Sweden.
Reverse engineering for compatibility is allowed (at least where I live). Thus, headers cannot be considered code, since they are only expressing an interface, essential for compatibility.
If you want to be compatible with say int foo(int, float), then you actually need to write that exact sequence in your own headers, since the header define the symbol name and the calling convention for the functions. You do also, by the way need to name the header the same as in the system you are emulating for compatibility reasons, as otherwise the programs that you want to run on your system will not compile.
OK, the file called Tab 409, is basically given by SCO in their ELF documentation, they cannot possibly claim that this is illegal copying since all the defines and structs are given by the documentation which scream out: Please implement me!
Anyone who implements ELF will write those lines of code.
Though, I do agree that it looks like copying. I do not think (having read the ELF spec and implemented it), that code would look that similar in general (some of the duplicated enums are not in the ELF spec (which funny enough is published by SCO)), however, I was under the impression that header files where not copyrightable since they only describe an interface.
If there were any reason to implement source level compatibility with SCO, i think this would be allowed (though IANAL). Ridiculous is to bring in the dlopen header, this is implemented on every UNIX-like system, and headers are needed for compatibility, which is explicitly allowed by most copyright laws around the world (the same headers are also in OS X, BSD, Solaris), the important part, if you want to determine whether code was copied is the code, not the headers.
From the looks of it, the ELF code was actually copied, and I do not think that you need any liberal notion of copying for seeing that, I have seen this kind of copying by students earlier, and they usually rightfully get into troubles for it.
Outside of the EU they do not longer think of the individual states that much. The problem is that Europeans, in general, fail to see their importance in the world as _Europeans_.
Now, I wouldn't mind seeing a European team, but practicalities prevent this from happening except for maybe some exhibition game. Some states are so devolved that they field several teams, like for instance the UK (which most people outside of UK think as one country, but is actually 4 countries under one flag), where each of 4 countries in the UK have their own team.