Your political compromise happens to be the fact that the parliament's own judicial department gave a no-go for the amendment since it was trying to detail regulate the judicial systems of the states.
The Union have not been given the authority to do so and trying to do so would be a massive step away from the principle of subsidiarity as it is today (not to say that there would be no legal basis for it either).
Though, in general the paragraph was good, and I would very much like to see the EP having authority of forcing that a state have A judicial process for certain things, but whatever you say, the EP has at the moment no mandate to write the paragraph in the form they did.
Funny in this entire thing, is that the MEPs that have been against Lisbon, against the Constitutional Treaty, against more powers to the Union are the ones who have been pushing most for the paragraph. One I heard from the EUL-NGL (the lefties (in the EU-sense, these are not Liberals in the American sense, but more or less borders with communism)) said something in the line of: "we are making a dangerous precedent if we allow judicial review to interfere with politics", the problem here is that that judicial review interpreted whether the EP was allowed to make legislation about the issue at hand. What they are saying (in American terms) is basically: "it would be a dangerous precedent if we allow the constitution to interfere with politics", a sort of scary statement.
The options they have, if they want to make politics in this area is that they make a non binding statement, those statements do not need to be compliant with the treaties.
As I said, I would actually like the Union and the EP to have legal authorities to make an amendment like the one they did, I also would like to see the amendment in law. But unfortunately, the treaty does not allow for that at the moment. Maybe it will be different when Lisbon come into effect, but I doubt it.
A fundamental principle for civilization is the "rule of law", I for one would not want to live in any place where due process is ignored and politics bypass the law as laid out. If you want to bypass the law, then by all means change the law, but do not try to sneak something in while the law is still there, that would just be absurd.
European is commonly used to refer to someone from the EU and the term now-days exclude a lot of people living on the continent Europe. A bit like the term American which refer to only USAians on the two American continents.
You do know that the EU, while not being a country per see, is not far from being a quasi-federal state. We even have EU-citizenship as a legal definition.
The main point with saying "first European commander" is that "Europeans" is pretty much synonymous with people from the EU. Normally, you do not refer to Russians as Europeans.
It is a bit like "Americans", this usually denominates people from the USA, and it does not include Canadians and Mexicans, not to forget Middle and South America. No one claims that Brasilians do not live in America, but on the other hand, you don't call them Americans, since that term denominates people from the USA.
It is basically the same with the EU and Russia. Though, in the given context, European refer to ESA member state national.
This is life, and not much to argue about. In the world, if you say "the Europeans have decided that..." this means, and everyone understand that it means that the Union have decided the thing.
Yes, sort of for one single bit. The last numbers I saw where something like one bit-flip per gigabyte-month RAM. So while the probability of flipping one specific bit is astronomical, it adds up pretty quickly...
Re:Some would call X3 the successor...
on
Elite Turns 25
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· Score: 1
"Movies depicting space travel with Newtonian manoeuvring are regarded as artsy."
Babylon 5 had a lot of space battles where there was newtonian mechanics involved. I would not call that artsy...
The battles where in-fact very exciting at some points, some of the best I have seen in a TV-series at least
COBOL will be around for a long time. According to some of the StarTrek episodes, they still in the 24th century use COBOL yield warheads. I find it amazing that a truly hated programming language of our era will still be used to cripple people 300 years in the future.
Executing code on the stack is prevented by the NX bit, it has nothing to do with address space layout. What it does prevent would be something like return to libc attacks and other nice things.
Firstly ObjC is not apples system programming language. It is however their application programming language which is a different thing.
I have tried both OpenMP and GCD, and I have to agree that GCD in combination with blocks is a lot more elegant. It actually makes concurrency dead simple.
OpenMP was the last time I checked based on pragmas for specifying concurrency in various places like a for-loop for example. GCD is based on closures and thread pools and is just so much nicer to hack with. One nice thing with GCD is that you can register event handlers acting on various system events, one I tried out was a mini server that creates a listening block that is triggered as soon as there is data in the input socket, GCD is quite flexible. It's main issue in the beginning was that libdispatch was only on Snow Leopard, now it is open source, and for my part that means that the code is actually portable (as long as you stick with clang or llvm-gcc for the compiler) and I might actually end up writing code using this.
It is hardly reinventing the wheel (OMP is not equivalent to GCD, that is like saying that Python is reinventing the wheel called C (well they are both procedural programming languages after all)), one of the main problems with todays software is that writing concurrent apps is quite hard, yes OpenMP is nice, but it is mostly tailored to scientific code, and it cannot handle events in the way i mentioned for example.
So, you mean that this thing, which would reach an altitude of 80 km, be 2000 km long, effectively being the largest human built construct on the planet (save for the wall of china perhaps), would only cost a mere $10 billion. Contrast this to the construction of one of the worlds largest suspension bridges the sound bridge between Malmà and Copenhagen. This bridge which is about 7 km in total length costed around $6 billion to build in an area where there where infrastructure enough to support the project, and where they where using well known engineering principles and techniques.
So, building a 285 times large constructs (not adjusted for it going up as well), based on unproven methods, in a remote area of the world with little infrastructure, probably infested with malaria, is of course very likely to cost only a mere 40% more than that bridge.
Funny, but insightful as well. Some scientists published a paper on using magnetic shields for deep space journeys in order to protect your crew against solar radiation. IIRC they found the idea plausible, but that you needed a lot of energy on board, like a nuclear reactor or something in that style.
Can't remember where the paper was published though.
Well, define country... some define England, Wales and Scotland as separate countries, but some call the GB or the UK a country. The Union is moving closer, and might very much one day be considered a country, whether you like it or not is irrelevant. Further, an ever closing Union is a must, in the current world where large groups of people exist as countries (US, China and India), without building up a common Union (a Federation since anything else would be undemocratic if you think of it), we Europeans will be completely screwed (so far we have been OK since China and India are still developing countries); in the end it all falls down to pragmatism, do you want Europe in total to be fucked up by the rest of the planet in the future or do you want to help with building up something common so that we have a chance to defend our values and future.
On the other hand, in order to go back to the topic, from my impression, TBP for some time (after they got busted by the police in Sweden) moved their servers to mirrors in the Netherlands, my further impressions are that they have been moved again.
So, in this case the jurisdiction is very much uncertain. In general, my feel is that the jurisdiction should be the site where the main operators are. For example, if I use Google Sites (me being located in the NL), then Dutch law should apply, not Californian (where the site host comes from in that case). But that is of course what makes sense in general, not necessarily how it would work.
I believe that they are setting a very frightening precedent with this. If I launch a site, I suddenly have to consider the entire planets laws before opening the site, this is counter to the very spirit of the EU. And no, a Dutch court should not be qualified to rule for a Swedish site, even if the EU was a completely integrated federation (i.e. the applicable laws in that case would be Swedish and European, but not the Dutch laws), anything else would be a legal quagmire that certainly would make me think twice before starting any sort of business in the EU.
You are partly right. But as soon as anyone tries to give the EP more power at the cost of the Council, the same people who scream about the "democratic deficit" start screaming about federalism (technically, I suppose this is correct, as a stronger EP will be at the cost of the member states, and thus federalism).
I do sincerely now hope that the Lisbon treaty will be ratified by the Irish, since it will give more say to the EP, maybe the EP will be able to stop this if the ratification is done.
Until now, the ISS has been under manned, mostly due to safety reasons as not enough lifeboats have been installed. Crew complement have thus been limited to 3 persons when not docked with the shuttle or the Russian Soyuz capsule. This have barely been enough to run the station.
Crew complement of the ISS is now 6. This mean that there is more (hu)manpower to use for experiments. Most notable of these is the AMS particle detector. Which must be in a human controlled setting and above the atmosphere. So, the ISS is the only place that can offer a place for that experiment.
I once heard a talk by the guy behind this experiment when he was visiting the ESA facilities in the Netherlands, the experiment is one of the coolest things I've ever heard about and it can only be done at the space station where there is a permanent crew around.
Besides the AMS which will be launched next year, there is all the human space science going on. There is a lot of that, and from what I heard from some people involved, the ISS is absolutely invaluable with respect to future human long term space flight (e.g. bone loss issues, how to grow food in micro gravity et.c.).
Yeah, you may not have seen as many pretty pictures from the ISS, and people have already been there, but a permanent base in low gravity is vital for humanity in the long run. We are learning a huge amount, and for Europe (it's the International Spaces Station after all), the station has given us valuable knowledge in how to build human rated space crafts.
PS! Disclamer: I don't work or speak for the ESA DS!
Secondly: "if it starts with 46 you route it to Germany and so on", I am sure that if you route 46 to Germany, havoc would asume in Sweden:)
Thirdly: "You could also imagine the post office offering a unique identifier, which they could then look up in a table and deliver to anyway in the country"
This was the best idea ever. I can't remember how many letters I had to send out last time I moved with address updates. Usually you can get the post-office to forward old letters, but that cost extra money. Having an address neutral post-address would probably save piles of money in administrational fees for the entire society, though the post office would have some additional expenses. But anyway, this was the best idea ever.:)
Yes, like a couple of friends of mine that did the mistake of doing some window shopping at a petrol station (they where checking whether the petrol station sold bicycle pumps).
Definitely suspects for something, right?
They managed to get away with a warning after they tried to show their Swedish drivers licenses, but only since the police officer did not know whether those should have been accepted as IDs and he didn't feel like going through all paper work for it.
You do not only need to show the license if you are a suspect, but also if you are a witness to something.
Once, on the train from Paris, I was the victim of an ID-check on the entire train by the Duch police. They, simply stated that it was not a border check (which would have been illegal according to the Schengen treaty) and that they had the right to do ID-checks on international trains.
Not being a Nato member have nothing to do with the mutual defense agreement in the treaty of Lisbon. The treaty of Lisbon is dealing with the foundational rules for the EU. Finland is part of the EU, and therefor as soon as the treaty of Lisbon is ratified, all states (except perhaps Sweden, Austria and Ireland since there is a neutrality disclaimer), will be required to assist with all means at their disposal.
Not being a member of Nato might be a problem if you want US support. But, I am quite confident that the EU could successfully defend the Union against Russia.
A district court can of course make a judgement in a case where there is no precedent, but any subsequent court cases cannot refer to a district or appeals court verdict and refer to that as precedent.
A precedent can only be set by the supreme court of Sweden, and that precedent in term direct the interpretation of the law which is codified by the riksdag.
The problem with the case, is that there is no precedent from the supreme court, so the district court really have no idea about how to apply the law in this case, but they still have to apply it within the bounds of the codified law itself (whether they reach the correct conclusions or the correct proportionality of the sentence is another question, that will take the supreme court to solve for good).
Since there is no precedent for the verdict, when the case have gone through the court of appeals, it will most likely (independent of the outcome) be appealed to the supreme court.
This process will take time, don't expect any final outcome until late 2010 at earliest.
Yeah, but then, a constitution is basically a law of how a country is supposed to be run and what powers it has, so the constitution have precedence over the other laws.
In Sweden, the constitution is called "grundlag" which literally translates to foundation law. The Swedish constitution specifically say that: no law shall be in violation with the ECHR, so that embeds the human rights part.
So, it can be nitpicked the other way. Since the Swedish constitution say that the ECHR must be taken into account, so must the judges and courts.
Human rights is very subjective to definitions, and are typically defined by constitutional laws and treaties. For example, the ECHR (and also the EU entry criteria) bans all form of capital and corporal punishments. This is thus seen as human rights in Europe, but as we know it, the US allows for capital punishment, which is seen as a human rights violation in the EU.
So, the point being, yes, a judge must take human rights into account, but only because that is specified in the law.
Closing those loopholes is not the task of a district court. The only ones that have the right to make new interpretations of the law, or change it is in Sweden:
1. Supreme court of Sweden, EC Court and the European human rights court 2. The riksdag and the European Council in conjunction with the European Parliament.
There is no case law in Sweden, except for the one that the supreme court makes. This also include civil cases.
The organisations that he was a member of were for having tougher punishments for copyright violations.
So a more suitable analogy:
How a bout a judge who publicly states that he is for tougher sentences for murder and in an interest organisation working for capital punishment being the only verdict for murder.
Can he sit in a murder case.
My answer to this would be NO.
The thing is not whether he is for the law or not, a judge must be for the rule of law in general, so this is not really the point.
However, his membership in organisations that are for tougher punishments, clearly indicate that he is biased in this aspect. I don't doubt his qualifications to deliver a guilty/not-guilty verdict, but since the judge is involved in sizing the punishment, where there is considerable room of choice for him, he is not suitable for ruling on what the punishment should be.
The second thing, which I think is also true in America is that a judge will be considered bias if there is a risk for the public confidence in the legal system, whatever your opinions about these organisations are (they are not appropriate in my meaning, and he could probably have chosen better and less biased organisations to join), you cannot really deny that people are loosing their faith in the legal system for this. That is very troubling in my mind.
Well said. I am pretty much inline with you, so what all this "majority of slashdotters" is, I have no idea.
I would however, rather have some synchronisation of patent law and copyright with respect to the time, that means 20 years. Where did you get your 28 years from?
Slashdot Mirror
Your political compromise happens to be the fact that the parliament's own judicial department gave a no-go for the amendment since it was trying to detail regulate the judicial systems of the states.
The Union have not been given the authority to do so and trying to do so would be a massive step away from the principle of subsidiarity as it is today (not to say that there would be no legal basis for it either).
Though, in general the paragraph was good, and I would very much like to see the EP having authority of forcing that a state have A judicial process for certain things, but whatever you say, the EP has at the moment no mandate to write the paragraph in the form they did.
Funny in this entire thing, is that the MEPs that have been against Lisbon, against the Constitutional Treaty, against more powers to the Union are the ones who have been pushing most for the paragraph. One I heard from the EUL-NGL (the lefties (in the EU-sense, these are not Liberals in the American sense, but more or less borders with communism)) said something in the line of: "we are making a dangerous precedent if we allow judicial review to interfere with politics", the problem here is that that judicial review interpreted whether the EP was allowed to make legislation about the issue at hand. What they are saying (in American terms) is basically: "it would be a dangerous precedent if we allow the constitution to interfere with politics", a sort of scary statement.
The options they have, if they want to make politics in this area is that they make a non binding statement, those statements do not need to be compliant with the treaties.
As I said, I would actually like the Union and the EP to have legal authorities to make an amendment like the one they did, I also would like to see the amendment in law. But unfortunately, the treaty does not allow for that at the moment. Maybe it will be different when Lisbon come into effect, but I doubt it.
A fundamental principle for civilization is the "rule of law", I for one would not want to live in any place where due process is ignored and politics bypass the law as laid out. If you want to bypass the law, then by all means change the law, but do not try to sneak something in while the law is still there, that would just be absurd.
European is commonly used to refer to someone from the EU and the term now-days exclude a lot of people living on the continent Europe. A bit like the term American which refer to only USAians on the two American continents.
You do know that the EU, while not being a country per see, is not far from being a quasi-federal state. We even have EU-citizenship as a legal definition.
If it is anything like the Swedish term civilingenjör, then it simply means MSc (roughly).
The main point with saying "first European commander" is that "Europeans" is pretty much synonymous with people from the EU. Normally, you do not refer to Russians as Europeans.
It is a bit like "Americans", this usually denominates people from the USA, and it does not include Canadians and Mexicans, not to forget Middle and South America. No one claims that Brasilians do not live in America, but on the other hand, you don't call them Americans, since that term denominates people from the USA.
It is basically the same with the EU and Russia. Though, in the given context, European refer to ESA member state national.
This is life, and not much to argue about. In the world, if you say "the Europeans have decided that..." this means, and everyone understand that it means that the Union have decided the thing.
Yes, sort of for one single bit. The last numbers I saw where something like one bit-flip per gigabyte-month RAM. So while the probability of flipping one specific bit is astronomical, it adds up pretty quickly...
"Movies depicting space travel with Newtonian manoeuvring are regarded as artsy."
Babylon 5 had a lot of space battles where there was newtonian mechanics involved. I would not call that artsy...
The battles where in-fact very exciting at some points, some of the best I have seen in a TV-series at least
COBOL will be around for a long time. According to some of the StarTrek episodes, they still in the 24th century use COBOL yield warheads. I find it amazing that a truly hated programming language of our era will still be used to cripple people 300 years in the future.
Executing code on the stack is prevented by the NX bit, it has nothing to do with address space layout. What it does prevent would be something like return to libc attacks and other nice things.
Click the link... one of the first things that will hit you in the head is the line saying "Apache License, version 2.0".
Firstly ObjC is not apples system programming language. It is however their application programming language which is a different thing.
I have tried both OpenMP and GCD, and I have to agree that GCD in combination with blocks is a lot more elegant. It actually makes concurrency dead simple.
OpenMP was the last time I checked based on pragmas for specifying concurrency in various places like a for-loop for example. GCD is based on closures and thread pools and is just so much nicer to hack with. One nice thing with GCD is that you can register event handlers acting on various system events, one I tried out was a mini server that creates a listening block that is triggered as soon as there is data in the input socket, GCD is quite flexible. It's main issue in the beginning was that libdispatch was only on Snow Leopard, now it is open source, and for my part that means that the code is actually portable (as long as you stick with clang or llvm-gcc for the compiler) and I might actually end up writing code using this.
It is hardly reinventing the wheel (OMP is not equivalent to GCD, that is like saying that Python is reinventing the wheel called C (well they are both procedural programming languages after all)), one of the main problems with todays software is that writing concurrent apps is quite hard, yes OpenMP is nice, but it is mostly tailored to scientific code, and it cannot handle events in the way i mentioned for example.
So, you mean that this thing, which would reach an altitude of 80 km, be 2000 km long, effectively being the largest human built construct on the planet (save for the wall of china perhaps), would only cost a mere $10 billion. Contrast this to the construction of one of the worlds largest suspension bridges the sound bridge between Malmà and Copenhagen. This bridge which is about 7 km in total length costed around $6 billion to build in an area where there where infrastructure enough to support the project, and where they where using well known engineering principles and techniques.
So, building a 285 times large constructs (not adjusted for it going up as well), based on unproven methods, in a remote area of the world with little infrastructure, probably infested with malaria, is of course very likely to cost only a mere 40% more than that bridge.
Seriously, that sounds really ridiculous.
Funny, but insightful as well. Some scientists published a paper on using magnetic shields for deep space journeys in order to protect your crew against solar radiation. IIRC they found the idea plausible, but that you needed a lot of energy on board, like a nuclear reactor or something in that style.
Can't remember where the paper was published though.
"the EU is NOT a country, and never will be"
Well, define country... some define England, Wales and Scotland as separate countries, but some call the GB or the UK a country. The Union is moving closer, and might very much one day be considered a country, whether you like it or not is irrelevant. Further, an ever closing Union is a must, in the current world where large groups of people exist as countries (US, China and India), without building up a common Union (a Federation since anything else would be undemocratic if you think of it), we Europeans will be completely screwed (so far we have been OK since China and India are still developing countries); in the end it all falls down to pragmatism, do you want Europe in total to be fucked up by the rest of the planet in the future or do you want to help with building up something common so that we have a chance to defend our values and future.
On the other hand, in order to go back to the topic, from my impression, TBP for some time (after they got busted by the police in Sweden) moved their servers to mirrors in the Netherlands, my further impressions are that they have been moved again.
So, in this case the jurisdiction is very much uncertain. In general, my feel is that the jurisdiction should be the site where the main operators are. For example, if I use Google Sites (me being located in the NL), then Dutch law should apply, not Californian (where the site host comes from in that case). But that is of course what makes sense in general, not necessarily how it would work.
I believe that they are setting a very frightening precedent with this. If I launch a site, I suddenly have to consider the entire planets laws before opening the site, this is counter to the very spirit of the EU. And no, a Dutch court should not be qualified to rule for a Swedish site, even if the EU was a completely integrated federation (i.e. the applicable laws in that case would be Swedish and European, but not the Dutch laws), anything else would be a legal quagmire that certainly would make me think twice before starting any sort of business in the EU.
You are partly right. But as soon as anyone tries to give the EP more power at the cost of the Council, the same people who scream about the "democratic deficit" start screaming about federalism (technically, I suppose this is correct, as a stronger EP will be at the cost of the member states, and thus federalism).
I do sincerely now hope that the Lisbon treaty will be ratified by the Irish, since it will give more say to the EP, maybe the EP will be able to stop this if the ratification is done.
Until now, the ISS has been under manned, mostly due to safety reasons as not enough lifeboats have been installed. Crew complement have thus been limited to 3 persons when not docked with the shuttle or the Russian Soyuz capsule. This have barely been enough to run the station.
Crew complement of the ISS is now 6. This mean that there is more (hu)manpower to use for experiments. Most notable of these is the AMS particle detector. Which must be in a human controlled setting and above the atmosphere. So, the ISS is the only place that can offer a place for that experiment.
I once heard a talk by the guy behind this experiment when he was visiting the ESA facilities in the Netherlands, the experiment is one of the coolest things I've ever heard about and it can only be done at the space station where there is a permanent crew around.
Besides the AMS which will be launched next year, there is all the human space science going on. There is a lot of that, and from what I heard from some people involved, the ISS is absolutely invaluable with respect to future human long term space flight (e.g. bone loss issues, how to grow food in micro gravity et.c.).
Yeah, you may not have seen as many pretty pictures from the ISS, and people have already been there, but a permanent base in low gravity is vital for humanity in the long run. We are learning a huge amount, and for Europe (it's the International Spaces Station after all), the station has given us valuable knowledge in how to build human rated space crafts.
PS! Disclamer: I don't work or speak for the ESA DS!
1. British man hacks into US web-servers, while being on British soil. US demands extradition. UK thinks crime falls under US jurisdiction.
2. British man posts hate messages on US web server, while being on British soil. UK thinks crime falls under UK jurisdiction.
How convenient, just select the appropriate jurisdiction based on whatever suits the government at the moment.
The two things here does not compute, but unfortunately, that is exactly how the UK works at the moment.
Firstly: Very good post.
Secondly: "if it starts with 46 you route it to Germany and so on", I am sure that if you route 46 to Germany, havoc would asume in Sweden :)
Thirdly: "You could also imagine the post office offering a unique identifier, which they could then look up in a table and deliver to anyway in the country"
This was the best idea ever. I can't remember how many letters I had to send out last time I moved with address updates. Usually you can get the post-office to forward old letters, but that cost extra money. Having an address neutral post-address would probably save piles of money in administrational fees for the entire society, though the post office would have some additional expenses. But anyway, this was the best idea ever. :)
Yes, like a couple of friends of mine that did the mistake of doing some window shopping at a petrol station (they where checking whether the petrol station sold bicycle pumps).
Definitely suspects for something, right?
They managed to get away with a warning after they tried to show their Swedish drivers licenses, but only since the police officer did not know whether those should have been accepted as IDs and he didn't feel like going through all paper work for it.
You do not only need to show the license if you are a suspect, but also if you are a witness to something.
Once, on the train from Paris, I was the victim of an ID-check on the entire train by the Duch police. They, simply stated that it was not a border check (which would have been illegal according to the Schengen treaty) and that they had the right to do ID-checks on international trains.
It is also a state that mandates that you carry an ID at all times.
Not being a Nato member have nothing to do with the mutual defense agreement in the treaty of Lisbon. The treaty of Lisbon is dealing with the foundational rules for the EU. Finland is part of the EU, and therefor as soon as the treaty of Lisbon is ratified, all states (except perhaps Sweden, Austria and Ireland since there is a neutrality disclaimer), will be required to assist with all means at their disposal.
Not being a member of Nato might be a problem if you want US support. But, I am quite confident that the EU could successfully defend the Union against Russia.
Well, it is a bit more complex.
A district court can of course make a judgement in a case where there is no precedent, but any subsequent court cases cannot refer to a district or appeals court verdict and refer to that as precedent.
A precedent can only be set by the supreme court of Sweden, and that precedent in term direct the interpretation of the law which is codified by the riksdag.
The problem with the case, is that there is no precedent from the supreme court, so the district court really have no idea about how to apply the law in this case, but they still have to apply it within the bounds of the codified law itself (whether they reach the correct conclusions or the correct proportionality of the sentence is another question, that will take the supreme court to solve for good).
Since there is no precedent for the verdict, when the case have gone through the court of appeals, it will most likely (independent of the outcome) be appealed to the supreme court.
This process will take time, don't expect any final outcome until late 2010 at earliest.
In order to nitpick back a little bit...
Yeah, but then, a constitution is basically a law of how a country is supposed to be run and what powers it has, so the constitution have precedence over the other laws.
In Sweden, the constitution is called "grundlag" which literally translates to foundation law. The Swedish constitution specifically say that: no law shall be in violation with the ECHR, so that embeds the human rights part.
So, it can be nitpicked the other way. Since the Swedish constitution say that the ECHR must be taken into account, so must the judges and courts.
Human rights is very subjective to definitions, and are typically defined by constitutional laws and treaties. For example, the ECHR (and also the EU entry criteria) bans all form of capital and corporal punishments. This is thus seen as human rights in Europe, but as we know it, the US allows for capital punishment, which is seen as a human rights violation in the EU.
So, the point being, yes, a judge must take human rights into account, but only because that is specified in the law.
Closing those loopholes is not the task of a district court. The only ones that have the right to make new interpretations of the law, or change it is in Sweden:
1. Supreme court of Sweden, EC Court and the European human rights court
2. The riksdag and the European Council in conjunction with the European Parliament.
There is no case law in Sweden, except for the one that the supreme court makes. This also include civil cases.
No, but this was not the case either.
The organisations that he was a member of were for having tougher punishments for copyright violations.
So a more suitable analogy:
How a bout a judge who publicly states that he is for tougher sentences for murder and in an interest organisation working for capital punishment being the only verdict for murder.
Can he sit in a murder case.
My answer to this would be NO.
The thing is not whether he is for the law or not, a judge must be for the rule of law in general, so this is not really the point.
However, his membership in organisations that are for tougher punishments, clearly indicate that he is biased in this aspect. I don't doubt his qualifications to deliver a guilty/not-guilty verdict, but since the judge is involved in sizing the punishment, where there is considerable room of choice for him, he is not suitable for ruling on what the punishment should be.
The second thing, which I think is also true in America is that a judge will be considered bias if there is a risk for the public confidence in the legal system, whatever your opinions about these organisations are (they are not appropriate in my meaning, and he could probably have chosen better and less biased organisations to join), you cannot really deny that people are loosing their faith in the legal system for this. That is very troubling in my mind.
Well said. I am pretty much inline with you, so what all this "majority of slashdotters" is, I have no idea.
I would however, rather have some synchronisation of patent law and copyright with respect to the time, that means 20 years. Where did you get your 28 years from?