iPhoto does not write back all the metadata. Geotags especially. Even Aperture, which does have a "write metadata to master" option, refuse to write updated geotags to the masters (i.e. it will only write the IPCT tags, it will not update the EXIF-info written by the camera). I actually considered getting Aperture for the ability to write metadata to the masters since I have a GPS camera and sometimes, you want to make adjustments to the geotags, but to my surprise, it did not write EXIF GPS info back to the master (I have verified this experimentally).
iPhoto and Aperture will however allow you write the GPS location to files that you export from your library.
Actually, several MEPs have already retracted their signatures. They where asked to sign the declaration under false pretences. They where not told that the declaration included clauses about extending the data retention directive.
Though, if Pen and Tellers stunt where they pulled of a petition to ban di-hydrogen-monoxide, taught us anything is that we should not pay to much attention to petitions in general, and we should be a bit careful about what we sign. For MEPs, that include reading the entire declaration before signing, not just signing based on what he petitioner claims it is about.
EPC is not the EU (this is actually a huge problem, since if it was part of the union the EPC and the EPO would be under scrutiny of the parliament), further, the EPC only define what is patentable on European level, it does not prevent national patent offices from issuing local patents according to their own rules.
There is definitely a need to get rid of the national patent offices and get fully EU-wide patents where the rules are under the scrutiny of the parliament, this would at least get rid of the need to check 27 different patent systems in 26 different languages and make the EU market a bit less "scary" for SMEs and individual developers. It would actually be a far better situation, even if SW patents where granted on EU level (which I really hope will never be the case), since at least you would know what you have to deal with.
"You realize that “further integration” is the opposite of “democracy” because it is the removal of choices, do you?"
Democracy is about majority decisions, not about choices. But, if the plurality and diversity of your choices is something you are concerned about, would further integration not be the better thing here?
I mean, you get one more more choice of decision level: individual, family, community, municipality, province, state and union.
You will loose some options for the state, but in terms of choice for the individual, they increase with respect to the representation. Also, if you are talking about choice, I can now choose to move wherever in the Union I want to and take up a job there. An ability that a lot of people are using, that must surly increase your choices about where to live and settle down.
"Hence representative government is a hilarious absurdity."
Nothing is of-course perfect, the best decisions are taken by the individual, but since that is not practically possible for everything (e.g. where should we build a school et.c.), a public is necessary.
Direct democracy in term only work for small groups, where travelling distance is not a problem, though I suppose that now, we could in principle distribute the groups over a larger through technology, the groups must still be small.
Since, we need a public, I would be happy if the only unit was a municipality, however, this is not practically possible, since a municipality cannot build advanced infrastructure (small municipalities cannot build hospitals either). So, a province or state is necessary to manage these, here as in the municipality, direct democracy is impossible and you need representative governance, or it would all be chaos. If it would be possible, I would be happy with this being the limit and there was no higher level. But...
The state cannot by itself tackle the current problems such as climate change, the global economy et.c. The global economy in special as there are other big players there, like China, Russia, India and the US. If the Union would not exist and the European states would keep on bickering about petty things, then the entire continent would be divided into spheres of influence between these players (Sounds familiar? It already happened.) But since, we Europeans would be better off with keeping government local, a strong Union that can stand up against the rest is an absolute necessity, and the more accountable it is the better.
In fact, a federal Union is the only way to guarantee our independence in a reasonably democratic and accountable way (if it is not federal, i.e. confederal then it is not very democratic or accountable). If you have any other suggestions for how to do this in any other way, then please reply to this with your concrete suggestions.
Please tell me when this has happened, and I can reply. And no, Lisbon does not count since it was the Irish that changed their mind after amendments (as is usually the case in parliaments, a party may change its mind after some amendments). In the real world, no is not necessarily a no if there is a possibility for fixing the reason for the no, this is not undemocratic, unless you belong to the part that refuse to compromise in which case most likely anything that goes against your will is undemocratic.
"You realize that “further integration” is the opposite of “democracy” because it is the removal of choices, do you?"
Umm... no, that does not compute. Further integration means more power to the EP, and less to the Council. Though, the Council certainly have been elected in some sense by being elected to government in the member-states, they are not really accountable to anyone as a body (you cannot fire the council since that would mean firing all state-governments). With democracy, any normal person today mean representative democracy, and usually would be explicit if they want direct democracy as your shell-script solution.
Since the EP is directly accountable to its voters and the Council is not, moving power to the EP and thus further strengthening the federal side of the Union on the cost of the states, is more democratic since the EP answers to the voters, i.e. they are actually your representatives.
Instead of pointing out the rhetoric they have been using in certain cases, you may want to address the issues that I pointed out initially. Explain why the UKIP, Conservatives and other "democrats" are constantly opposing granting more co-desicion rights to the ELECTED European parliament.
I am not going to watch all those videos now, since I am at work, but I may do that later tonight.
No, the main goal have always been further integration and democracy within the Union, however, certain groups who often complain that the EU is undemocratic refuse to let it become more democratic, i.e. Eurosceptics such as the British Conservative party or the UKIP, because apparently a democratic Union would undermine national sovereignty.
In Belgium they have devolved the federal state so much, that parties are either Flemish, French or German speaking, there are no multi-region parties that people vote for. Their failure of forming governments are related to that division, and not the fact that it is proportional.
In Sweden, there is a PR system based on regional lists and electoral districts, each district receives a number of seats in the parliament based on the districts share of the national population. Essentially, a party gets seats if they have more than 4% votes nationally, or more than 12% in the district (voters can also tick a preferred candidate on their ballot, so it is not only about party). Not everything is perfect in this system, but from a representation point of view, almost every persons vote counts, which is the main idea of democracy. This system have several times resulted in minority single party governments which have successfully lasted their mandated time. The system have also resulted in minority or majority coalition governments. Despite of the many minority governments and "hung parliaments" being the norm, very few Swedish governments have fallen.
The treaties are for the states, not the companies. The second issue is that at the moment the intellectual property market is split up due to the licensing agencies that are authorised to handle different states.
The EU is doing something about this though, and we can most likely expect to see something happen during the current commission, the last one took substantial steps in this area, but clearly not enough.
Yeah, that would be very scary. However, in some states, all that information is available for the public; in Sweden, you can use a web site to query the public registry of licence plates and query information on any car, you can also get the name of the owner and all the previous owners if you use the telephone service (which is automated and uses voice recognition). This can then be cross referenced with the public phone book which can be found online, and the tax office to get the last income declaration which is also public information. If you want to know what the guy looks like, you take your business to the police who issues the passports, there you can get a copy of the persons passport photo which is also public information (there are some restrictions on the photos after some incidents a couple of years ago). Despite this, the abuse of the information is pretty low. It is used extensively by reporters to dig up dirt on politicians.
In essence, a sending data via text will give you bills for around GBP 350 per MB. The funny thing with this is of-course that sending texts is basically for the operator free of charge as it is only using excess capacity of the mobile networks, that is, text messages have no guaranteed delivery and will simply be dropped in case a link is congested. The only cost that texts infer are the operational costs with maintaining the servers that manages the texts, but you cannot expect that that will be a very high cost.
Sometimes I wonder why people are so blind, the EU is culturally tied together. This stem from more than a thousand years of common history.
For example, I practice Historical European Martial Arts, especially focused on longswords. There are two major schools of longsword in Europe, the German and the Italian. But do you know what the difference is? Well, practically nothing (major) except the terminology (there are also British and Spanish schools, but they do not differ to any larger aspect either). Why is this, well, parts are just body mechanics, but the other part is the the Italian masters went to Germany to study, and vice versa. This is not only limited to these two countries, Europe has been integrated more or less for a very long time, especially when it comes to transferring culture over the borders.
Others examples are famous artists such as George Friedrich Händel who was born in Prussia, but moved to London and wrote some brilliant master pieces. I would argue that science is also culture and scientists have been moving around, exchanging ideas in Europe for hundreds of years.
The main point here is that the EU really is unified in the cultural aspects (there are regional differences, but so there are between for example southern and northern Sweden).
You are partially correct about the social issues, but I see them breaking down every day.
Further, the EU will not break up in any way, because as High Rep Ashton said it (not an exact quote, but the essence is there): "Either we come together or we let Washington, Deli and Beijing make our decisions, it really is that simple", and it is...
This is pretty pointless, the UK could raise their contribution to the ESA and ESA would need to hand more contracts back to the UK. There really is no point to having their own space agency, compared to ensuring our common European interests.
And the same goes to the rest. If they need one, set it up as the Swedish Space Agency, they don't really do anything except oversee the Swedish contribution to ESA and some research. There really is no need to develop launchers or satellites locally.
That is incorrect, communism is also a political system. Even though, according to the original ideas, a communistic society (not the state since the states would be abolished, though who would define laws without states I have no idea of) would be democratic (the workers would decide what to produce in a democratic way). Communistic theory dictates that the proletarian revolution would need to be carried out followed by a period of proletarian dictatorship.
Thus, while somehow, the final outcome would be partially democratic (certainly not democracy as we know it), the way there would definitely not be democratic, and would actually be run as a dictatorship. This is at odds with the very foundation of democracy.
The following are against (by their EU party grouping) EFD: Agnew, Andreasen, Batten, Bufton, Colman, (The Earl of) Dartmouth, Farage, Nattrass, Nuttall NI: Bontes, Sinclaire, Stassen, van der Stoep
These are from the UK and the Netherlands. All of them UKIP (British anti-eu party) or PVV (Dutch anti-islam party).
The British MEPs are the following UKIP: Andreasen, Agnew, Batten, Bufton, Colman, Farage, Nattrass, Nuttall Previous UKIP (expelled): Sinclare
The Dutch ones the following PVV: Bontes, Stassen, van der Stoep
I have not bothered to include the ones who abstained their vote.
The commission usually don't mess up that much, on the other hand the council has messed up a lot. The council has a lot less power to actually mess things up now after the Lisbon treaty since the parliament must approve all legislation.
The only thing I have heard from the commission on this was that their policy was that the negotiation should NOT result in new directives or regulations being implemented in the EU. This was before I saw any leaks, but if you have any sources for your claim then please give them.
Also, do not forget that the commission has changed since the negotiations started.
Precedents matter also in civil law, but they are only there to interpret the written law for certain cases.
Several precedents in Sweden have for example thrown out local legislation when it has not been compliant with EU law or the ECHR. In most cases where EU-law is involved, the judges would request an opinion from the EU/EC-court on how they should judge when the laws are in conflict. Lower courts have been known to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the reasoning here is completely flawed:
The list should be:
_Boy_, girl
_Boy_, boy
Boy, _boy_
Girl, _boy_
Where the precondition is one of the underlined ones. Thus the probability become 1/2 that the other kid is a boy.
The thing is, if the "girl, boy" event differs from "boy, girl", then "_boy_, boy" must differ from "boy, _boy_".
iPhoto does not write back all the metadata. Geotags especially. Even Aperture, which does have a "write metadata to master" option, refuse to write updated geotags to the masters (i.e. it will only write the IPCT tags, it will not update the EXIF-info written by the camera). I actually considered getting Aperture for the ability to write metadata to the masters since I have a GPS camera and sometimes, you want to make adjustments to the geotags, but to my surprise, it did not write EXIF GPS info back to the master (I have verified this experimentally).
iPhoto and Aperture will however allow you write the GPS location to files that you export from your library.
A lot of the MEPs signed it without actually reading the text. Some of them have now retracted their signatures.
Actually, several MEPs have already retracted their signatures. They where asked to sign the declaration under false pretences. They where not told that the declaration included clauses about extending the data retention directive.
Though, if Pen and Tellers stunt where they pulled of a petition to ban di-hydrogen-monoxide, taught us anything is that we should not pay to much attention to petitions in general, and we should be a bit careful about what we sign. For MEPs, that include reading the entire declaration before signing, not just signing based on what he petitioner claims it is about.
EPC is not the EU (this is actually a huge problem, since if it was part of the union the EPC and the EPO would be under scrutiny of the parliament), further, the EPC only define what is patentable on European level, it does not prevent national patent offices from issuing local patents according to their own rules.
There is definitely a need to get rid of the national patent offices and get fully EU-wide patents where the rules are under the scrutiny of the parliament, this would at least get rid of the need to check 27 different patent systems in 26 different languages and make the EU market a bit less "scary" for SMEs and individual developers. It would actually be a far better situation, even if SW patents where granted on EU level (which I really hope will never be the case), since at least you would know what you have to deal with.
"You realize that “further integration” is the opposite of “democracy” because it is the removal of choices, do you?"
Democracy is about majority decisions, not about choices. But, if the plurality and diversity of your choices is something you are concerned about, would further integration not be the better thing here?
I mean, you get one more more choice of decision level: individual, family, community, municipality, province, state and union.
You will loose some options for the state, but in terms of choice for the individual, they increase with respect to the representation. Also, if you are talking about choice, I can now choose to move wherever in the Union I want to and take up a job there. An ability that a lot of people are using, that must surly increase your choices about where to live and settle down.
"Hence representative government is a hilarious absurdity."
Nothing is of-course perfect, the best decisions are taken by the individual, but since that is not practically possible for everything (e.g. where should we build a school et.c.), a public is necessary.
Direct democracy in term only work for small groups, where travelling distance is not a problem, though I suppose that now, we could in principle distribute the groups over a larger through technology, the groups must still be small.
Since, we need a public, I would be happy if the only unit was a municipality, however, this is not practically possible, since a municipality cannot build advanced infrastructure (small municipalities cannot build hospitals either). So, a province or state is necessary to manage these, here as in the municipality, direct democracy is impossible and you need representative governance, or it would all be chaos. If it would be possible, I would be happy with this being the limit and there was no higher level. But...
The state cannot by itself tackle the current problems such as climate change, the global economy et.c. The global economy in special as there are other big players there, like China, Russia, India and the US. If the Union would not exist and the European states would keep on bickering about petty things, then the entire continent would be divided into spheres of influence between these players (Sounds familiar? It already happened.) But since, we Europeans would be better off with keeping government local, a strong Union that can stand up against the rest is an absolute necessity, and the more accountable it is the better.
In fact, a federal Union is the only way to guarantee our independence in a reasonably democratic and accountable way (if it is not federal, i.e. confederal then it is not very democratic or accountable). If you have any other suggestions for how to do this in any other way, then please reply to this with your concrete suggestions.
Please tell me when this has happened, and I can reply. And no, Lisbon does not count since it was the Irish that changed their mind after amendments (as is usually the case in parliaments, a party may change its mind after some amendments). In the real world, no is not necessarily a no if there is a possibility for fixing the reason for the no, this is not undemocratic, unless you belong to the part that refuse to compromise in which case most likely anything that goes against your will is undemocratic.
"You realize that “further integration” is the opposite of “democracy” because it is the removal of choices, do you?"
Umm... no, that does not compute. Further integration means more power to the EP, and less to the Council. Though, the Council certainly have been elected in some sense by being elected to government in the member-states, they are not really accountable to anyone as a body (you cannot fire the council since that would mean firing all state-governments). With democracy, any normal person today mean representative democracy, and usually would be explicit if they want direct democracy as your shell-script solution.
Since the EP is directly accountable to its voters and the Council is not, moving power to the EP and thus further strengthening the federal side of the Union on the cost of the states, is more democratic since the EP answers to the voters, i.e. they are actually your representatives.
Instead of pointing out the rhetoric they have been using in certain cases, you may want to address the issues that I pointed out initially. Explain why the UKIP, Conservatives and other "democrats" are constantly opposing granting more co-desicion rights to the ELECTED European parliament.
I am not going to watch all those videos now, since I am at work, but I may do that later tonight.
No, the main goal have always been further integration and democracy within the Union, however, certain groups who often complain that the EU is undemocratic refuse to let it become more democratic, i.e. Eurosceptics such as the British Conservative party or the UKIP, because apparently a democratic Union would undermine national sovereignty.
In Belgium they have devolved the federal state so much, that parties are either Flemish, French or German speaking, there are no multi-region parties that people vote for. Their failure of forming governments are related to that division, and not the fact that it is proportional.
In Sweden, there is a PR system based on regional lists and electoral districts, each district receives a number of seats in the parliament based on the districts share of the national population. Essentially, a party gets seats if they have more than 4% votes nationally, or more than 12% in the district (voters can also tick a preferred candidate on their ballot, so it is not only about party). Not everything is perfect in this system, but from a representation point of view, almost every persons vote counts, which is the main idea of democracy. This system have several times resulted in minority single party governments which have successfully lasted their mandated time. The system have also resulted in minority or majority coalition governments. Despite of the many minority governments and "hung parliaments" being the norm, very few Swedish governments have fallen.
The treaties are for the states, not the companies. The second issue is that at the moment the intellectual property market is split up due to the licensing agencies that are authorised to handle different states.
The EU is doing something about this though, and we can most likely expect to see something happen during the current commission, the last one took substantial steps in this area, but clearly not enough.
I live in the Netherlands, am Scandinavian and side with Iceland on this issue. Please avoid collateral damage on us expats.
Yeah, that would be very scary. However, in some states, all that information is available for the public; in Sweden, you can use a web site to query the public registry of licence plates and query information on any car, you can also get the name of the owner and all the previous owners if you use the telephone service (which is automated and uses voice recognition). This can then be cross referenced with the public phone book which can be found online, and the tax office to get the last income declaration which is also public information. If you want to know what the guy looks like, you take your business to the police who issues the passports, there you can get a copy of the persons passport photo which is also public information (there are some restrictions on the photos after some incidents a couple of years ago). Despite this, the abuse of the information is pretty low. It is used extensively by reporters to dig up dirt on politicians.
No, there have however been discussion on the cost of the downlink from the Hubble space telescope: http://www2.le.ac.uk/ebulletin/news/press-releases/2000-2009/2008/05/nparticle.2008-05-12.4476906328
In essence, a sending data via text will give you bills for around GBP 350 per MB. The funny thing with this is of-course that sending texts is basically for the operator free of charge as it is only using excess capacity of the mobile networks, that is, text messages have no guaranteed delivery and will simply be dropped in case a link is congested. The only cost that texts infer are the operational costs with maintaining the servers that manages the texts, but you cannot expect that that will be a very high cost.
Sometimes I wonder why people are so blind, the EU is culturally tied together. This stem from more than a thousand years of common history.
For example, I practice Historical European Martial Arts, especially focused on longswords. There are two major schools of longsword in Europe, the German and the Italian. But do you know what the difference is? Well, practically nothing (major) except the terminology (there are also British and Spanish schools, but they do not differ to any larger aspect either). Why is this, well, parts are just body mechanics, but the other part is the the Italian masters went to Germany to study, and vice versa. This is not only limited to these two countries, Europe has been integrated more or less for a very long time, especially when it comes to transferring culture over the borders.
Others examples are famous artists such as George Friedrich Händel who was born in Prussia, but moved to London and wrote some brilliant master pieces. I would argue that science is also culture and scientists have been moving around, exchanging ideas in Europe for hundreds of years.
The main point here is that the EU really is unified in the cultural aspects (there are regional differences, but so there are between for example southern and northern Sweden).
You are partially correct about the social issues, but I see them breaking down every day.
Further, the EU will not break up in any way, because as High Rep Ashton said it (not an exact quote, but the essence is there): "Either we come together or we let Washington, Deli and Beijing make our decisions, it really is that simple", and it is...
In that case, what is the difference between the UKSA and the BNSC?
This is pretty pointless, the UK could raise their contribution to the ESA and ESA would need to hand more contracts back to the UK. There really is no point to having their own space agency, compared to ensuring our common European interests.
And the same goes to the rest. If they need one, set it up as the Swedish Space Agency, they don't really do anything except oversee the Swedish contribution to ESA and some research. There really is no need to develop launchers or satellites locally.
That is incorrect, communism is also a political system. Even though, according to the original ideas, a communistic society (not the state since the states would be abolished, though who would define laws without states I have no idea of) would be democratic (the workers would decide what to produce in a democratic way). Communistic theory dictates that the proletarian revolution would need to be carried out followed by a period of proletarian dictatorship.
Thus, while somehow, the final outcome would be partially democratic (certainly not democracy as we know it), the way there would definitely not be democratic, and would actually be run as a dictatorship. This is at odds with the very foundation of democracy.
That is a good question, http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/65374/pvv--europa-moet-acta-tegenhouden.html#source=news_overview
English version here:
http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/65374/pvv--europa-moet-acta-tegenhouden.html%23source%3Dnews_overview&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&twu=1&usg=ALkJrhhFg6Snqu6B-En7s9sHYbDhEdrr0Q
suggest that PVV are also against ACTA.
Both parties are in general against the Union, so I assume they are just voting no to everything placed for a vote by the parliament.
See my other comment: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1577878&cid=31427022
A summary is that the against votes where from the British UKIP and Dutch PVV.
Firstly, the vote was not against ACTA, it was a resolution to force the Commission to open up the documents (See one of the Pirate Party MEPs blog: http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/epic-win-for-transparency-on-acta/ or the official EP website http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/expert/infopress_page/026-70281-067-03-11-903-20100309IPR70280-08-03-2010-2010-false/default_en.htm). The article is very very wrong. The 13 against are listed in the EUPs roll calls.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+PV+20100310+RES-RCV+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN
The following are against (by their EU party grouping)
EFD: Agnew, Andreasen, Batten, Bufton, Colman, (The Earl of) Dartmouth, Farage, Nattrass, Nuttall
NI: Bontes, Sinclaire, Stassen, van der Stoep
These are from the UK and the Netherlands. All of them UKIP (British anti-eu party) or PVV (Dutch anti-islam party).
The British MEPs are the following
UKIP: Andreasen, Agnew, Batten, Bufton, Colman, Farage, Nattrass, Nuttall
Previous UKIP (expelled): Sinclare
The Dutch ones the following
PVV: Bontes, Stassen, van der Stoep
I have not bothered to include the ones who abstained their vote.
The commission usually don't mess up that much, on the other hand the council has messed up a lot. The council has a lot less power to actually mess things up now after the Lisbon treaty since the parliament must approve all legislation.
The only thing I have heard from the commission on this was that their policy was that the negotiation should NOT result in new directives or regulations being implemented in the EU. This was before I saw any leaks, but if you have any sources for your claim then please give them.
Also, do not forget that the commission has changed since the negotiations started.
Precedents matter also in civil law, but they are only there to interpret the written law for certain cases.
Several precedents in Sweden have for example thrown out local legislation when it has not been compliant with EU law or the ECHR. In most cases where EU-law is involved, the judges would request an opinion from the EU/EC-court on how they should judge when the laws are in conflict. Lower courts have been known to do this.