European SIGINT is much worse than the US SIGINT in many cases. While they tend to be stronger regulated, the SIGINT in Europe is effectively tapping every fiberoptic cable in the EU. NSA fiberoptic taps are on exit / entry points in the US, european state SIGINT taps the fiberoptic cables on exit / entry points of the country.
Consequently, if I email someone in NY from California, it is likely that the email content will never pass an NSA collection point/tap. If do something similar in Europe, say email from Spain to Sweden, the message is likely to be picked up by Spanish, French, Belgian, Dutch, German, Danish and Swedish intelligence.
The site in French Guyana was picked because it is close to the equator and you get an extra boost from the Earth's rotation there. Picking that site did not have anything to do with population density, though it would probably play a role if it was a problem.
Better to look at a site like ESRANGE in northern Sweden, this site was explicitly picked by the ESA because it was low on people.
Good question, wonder what happens if the Belgian police issues an EAW, does the GCHQ operators have immunity for their crimes in the UK? Does the EAW apply in this case; in my mind it should, it would put some needed control over this crap.
> "All in all, it's a really stupid idea. Which is what you'd expect from the EU."
Not really, this is a stupid idea made up by the Telegraph and The Mail with no basis in reality, which is what you'd expect from the Telegraph and The Mail.
If it sounds to preposterous to be true, it usually is...
Such systems are fitted already in many cars. As the Telegraph does not actually have any primary sources in this case, I would take the whole thing with a grain of salt. My guess would be that the Commission will be recommending that cars will be equipped with these systems, not that they are required to always be on.
That is a load of bullshit. Really, if you would spend some time outside your little memberstate that you come from you would notice that there is more stuff uniting us than dividing us.
Having lived and worked in 4 different member states, and being engaged with a woman from a 5th one, I can most definitely say that there is such a thing as a "European". About 500 millions of them by the way.
Yes, it uses the word will, but it takes time to prepare for the future. It is arguably so that, currently, EV does not really improve that much considering the average electricity plant in the world. But, we cannot ignore the future just because we live today. The fact is that we have to face the realities of today and the inevitabilities of the future.
Granted, an individual cannot really plan for the future in the same way as a society can, which is why a person not switch his brand of cigarets because of long term benefits. However, assuming either your private or public health care system offered you discounts if you switched your cigaret brand (or extra taxes on the old brand), because society see that on the whole, they will save money this way, would the average smoker still not switch, even if he/she saved money here and now?
As I mentioned, a society or a larger organisation have the ability to plan in long term in a way that you as an individual cannot do. Though the society can influence you to make the "right decision" in various ways. Meaning that, even something that may not make sense for an individual today from a utilitarian perspective, will make more sense from a financial perspective. In other words, society can plan for the "will happen" part and ensure that the current realities, at least in financial terms align with the future and the "will happen" part.
In addition to this, the fact is that infrastructure take a lot of time to build. Therefore, in order to build the infrastructure for the future, we need to invest in it today, because rest assured, at current consumption, oil (and natural gas) WILL run out (in reality it will just become ridiculously expensive, but that only gives us some additional time for the transition). When that happens, there better be a working infrastructure for EV (including fuel cells) in place, because neither coal nor nuclear is viable for direct installing in cars.
Perhaps, but this misses the point of EV or fuel cell vehicles. At present, it stands so that these will push power generation to coal or oil fired power plants in many areas.
BUT:
1. Power plants will be transitioned as well, and it is substantially easier to place efficient and centralised greenhouse reducing technologies in a couple of power plants than in 2 billion cars. 2. Fuel will run out, and a transition must be starting now in any case. 3. In some places, most electricity already comes from nuclear / hydro / wind / solar (e.g. France and Sweden).
The transition away from petrol and diesel to battery or fuel cells, is not so much as cutting green house gasses now, it is about enabling a new infrastructure that is easier to control and manage. The being clean argument does however help to sell the electric vehicles now.
"The EU never was a Union. It has always been a trade treaty and some fools tried to make more out of it."
The intent of the EU / EC / ECSC was always to form a political union. Granted it is not there yet, but the founding fathers where quite clear on this, and any state joining signs up for this long term goal.
I can guarantee you that a lot of citizens who are involved with anything dealing with more than two EU members are quite happy with the Union influencing the local legislation.
I for example have been living in 4 different member states, and often spend weekends with the in-laws in a fifth. The Union's influence on local legislation using directives and the Euro is absolutely essential for making life bearable for millions of people. As an example, due to the EU influence on the local legislation, a person moving to another state does for example no longer have to exchange their drivers licence any more (in my case, I would have had to change it 3 times during the last 5 years if the old rules would have applied). In addition, no paperwork has to be filled in if you get a job in another member state, this saves tons of money for business and a lot of time for citizens who have to deal with the mess otherwise. I could probably write a full book on how the influence on local legislation simplifies matters a lot.
The bank guarantee covers 100k€ per bank you have accounts in. If you have more than 150k€, you would typically have accounts on two banks (preferably in different eurozone states to reduce the risks), and divide the money between those banks to ensure that all your money is covered by the bank guarantee. Some people do of-course have their cash there for temporary measures, like they just sold their house and have not bought a new one yet.
This is an incorrect understanding of law. There are several types of law. You are apparently only recognising vertical law, but breaking a horizontal law (e.g. a contract) is also against the law and illegal. It may not be a criminal act and breaking a state imposed law, but it is still illegal.
"clang is still a pain in the ass to compile, with unclear instructions, and a massive, huge compile time. gcc on the other hand is built by automated scripts quite frequently as part of, for example, cross-toolchain builds."
Clang is really easy to build, usually easier than building GCC which often requires you to checkout multiple additional libraries (mpfr etc). Clang only requires that you clone two repositories: llvm and clang, clang is checked out into llvm/tools and the build process of llvm will automatically build clang for you. You then use cmake or autotools to configure, the first one is usually faster. GCC does take quite some time to build, but a lot of that time is spent in the configuration process which is slow as hell.
Clang does support multiple targets out of the box, but it is not very easy to use (you need to pass a lot of different compiler switches to set the host triple, target cpu, system include directories et.c.). GCC on the other hand requires one installation per cross target and supports spec files that configures all these flags (e.g. system include directories) using the -B option.
The Irish government went out and reviewed why people voted no. It turned out that the primary reason was mostly unfounded fears of certain issues. The Irish government then got a protocol attached to the treaty which spelled out these fears and that any rules potentially messing with these areas would not apply to Ireland.
So:
1. The Irish voted no due to specific concerns. 2. Concerns where addressed. 3. New proposal subject to another plebiscite.
How is this ignoring the Irish referendum results?
Compile that with -m32 and you will see that time_t is 32 for many Linux systems, you are probably building a 64 bit app by default. You think, no 32 bit compiled software exists?
The main problem is actually not that the time_t in the OS is 32 or 64, hardware and operating systems are upgraded. And, very few systems shipping today will have 32 bit time_t. This will not be the main problem (even if it will be a problem with some systems, for example, some nuclear reactors are managed by custom unices that are not maintained anymore and they don't dare to touch those systems, but this is solvable in the few cases where this is a problem)!
The BIG problem for more mainstream software is all the software using binary file formats, such software will completely break down, if time is stored as a 32 bit UNIX time stamp. There may also be problem for text based file formats if for example the reading code uses %d with sscanf to read in the timestamp, but if these are compiled with a modern compiler, the compiler will warn that %d is being used with a 64 bit time_t integer. It is thus solvable, but will require recompiling the software and some minor patching. Binary file-formats will however be a pain in the ass, so bad that software systems will probably have to be certified as Y2038-safe.
Do not underestimate the size of this undertaking.
The EU is not just the institutions, it is an idea as well. Governments do indeed blame the Union for things they have been along negotiating in the council, this being quite unfair in many cases.
You complain that the commission is not elected, well firstly, strictly speaking, neither is any government of any member state in the Union. The main problem has been that the commission has not actually represented the parliamentary election results. Will you be happy to know that from the next elections (in 2014), the commission will be appointed based on the EP election results? This is actually a result of the Lisbon treaty.
Further, the commission are not breaking any local laws they prime mandate is to guarantee that the treaties are upheld by the member states. The member states have ratified the treaties, and this means that the treaties are law in the member states. Typically the treaties take president over every law in the member state except for their constitutions, which in turn means that any law that is incompatible with the treaties is an illegal law. Remember, membership in the Union means that your country has ratified the treaty and that the treaty (and accompanying directives) is the law. The commission is therefore strictly say, when they point out errors in member states laws, telling the member states that they do not follow their own laws.
The EU does indeed employ around 40k civil servants, but you should compare this to a medium sized city in Europe. These cities will by themselves often have more bureaucrats on their payroll than the entire Union.
You claim that MEPs are not present most of the time, such claim requires proof, and to be frank a comparison with attendance records for the member states. If you wish to look at different MEPs, research has shown that eurosceptic MEPs produce far fewer amendments, documents and have lower attendance records than main stream or euro centric MEPs. The point of this is that the "lazy MEPs" are in fact, predominately those with eurosceptic tendencies.
The EU does also indeed want more money. But, on the other hand, since the Lisbon treaty, the EU has not received any more money, despite having (based on the treaties negotiated by the member state governments) to set up the european foreign service (including embassies all over the world); and despite having to expand certain areas such as the ECB being given more work to do with the latest treaty. There is only so much you can do in order to optimising the current funds with respect to the job the Union has been given by the member states.
The governments are represented in the Council, they are the assholes that pushed this through in the first place, the leading culprits where the British and the Swedish (previous) government under lead of the Swedish minister of justice Thomas Bodström. The Parliament did approve of it, but only after the Council said that if you don't approve, we will treat it as a matter of "criminal and justice cooperation", an area where the Parliament had no co-legeslative rights with the Council before the Lisbon treaty went into effect. Some MEPs where not happy though, Alexander Alvaro had his name stricken from the EP report on the issue.
The Parliament approving it, did in the end ensure that they could at least water it down a little bit with amendments, even though I am uncertain as to this was a good thing in the end. The EP keeping their hands clean of the crap could have resulted in a real debate of the Council's behaviour and as to how the governments of the member states could be controlled in the EU setting.
In any case, it is not the Austrian government that is fighting the directive (they are after all part of the body that approved it in the first place), it is the Austrian constitutional court and the EU court, and it is about time the EU court seriously evaluate the legality and treaty compatibility of the directive!
Well, if this is found to break the fundamental charter, which is part of the treaties, it is not that easy to lobby for it to change. That would require a massive effort which would not be very practical.
This sort of thing is done in many many EU member states, that it does not violate EU-law is not that strange. However, it is strange that the German constitution does not ban it with respect to the background.
Then don't buy CFLs, buy LED bulbs instead. Problem solved...
Honestly, cleaning out after you break a disconnected CFL is not that hard, the mercury is in liquid form. If you break it while it is on, I would be more worried about the fire hazard coming from the exposed conductors, which is even worse in a incandescent bulb.
IPCC being a body with representation from different states (with a lot of political interest in the reports), that more or less work with consensus, their reports are often watered down when released. This means that the published science is often more pessimistic than the IPCC report.
Slashdot Mirror
European SIGINT is much worse than the US SIGINT in many cases. While they tend to be stronger regulated, the SIGINT in Europe is effectively tapping every fiberoptic cable in the EU. NSA fiberoptic taps are on exit / entry points in the US, european state SIGINT taps the fiberoptic cables on exit / entry points of the country.
Consequently, if I email someone in NY from California, it is likely that the email content will never pass an NSA collection point/tap. If do something similar in Europe, say email from Spain to Sweden, the message is likely to be picked up by Spanish, French, Belgian, Dutch, German, Danish and Swedish intelligence.
The site in French Guyana was picked because it is close to the equator and you get an extra boost from the Earth's rotation there. Picking that site did not have anything to do with population density, though it would probably play a role if it was a problem.
Better to look at a site like ESRANGE in northern Sweden, this site was explicitly picked by the ESA because it was low on people.
British are not citizens, they are subjects.
Good question, wonder what happens if the Belgian police issues an EAW, does the GCHQ operators have immunity for their crimes in the UK? Does the EAW apply in this case; in my mind it should, it would put some needed control over this crap.
> "All in all, it's a really stupid idea. Which is what you'd expect from the EU."
Not really, this is a stupid idea made up by the Telegraph and The Mail with no basis in reality, which is what you'd expect from the Telegraph and The Mail.
If it sounds to preposterous to be true, it usually is...
No, the base speed is 110 on motorways in Sweden, however there are several places where there are signs explicitly allowing 120 km/h
Such systems are fitted already in many cars. As the Telegraph does not actually have any primary sources in this case, I would take the whole thing with a grain of salt. My guess would be that the Commission will be recommending that cars will be equipped with these systems, not that they are required to always be on.
That is a load of bullshit. Really, if you would spend some time outside your little memberstate that you come from you would notice that there is more stuff uniting us than dividing us.
Having lived and worked in 4 different member states, and being engaged with a woman from a 5th one, I can most definitely say that there is such a thing as a "European". About 500 millions of them by the way.
Yes, it uses the word will, but it takes time to prepare for the future. It is arguably so that, currently, EV does not really improve that much considering the average electricity plant in the world. But, we cannot ignore the future just because we live today. The fact is that we have to face the realities of today and the inevitabilities of the future.
Granted, an individual cannot really plan for the future in the same way as a society can, which is why a person not switch his brand of cigarets because of long term benefits. However, assuming either your private or public health care system offered you discounts if you switched your cigaret brand (or extra taxes on the old brand), because society see that on the whole, they will save money this way, would the average smoker still not switch, even if he/she saved money here and now?
As I mentioned, a society or a larger organisation have the ability to plan in long term in a way that you as an individual cannot do. Though the society can influence you to make the "right decision" in various ways. Meaning that, even something that may not make sense for an individual today from a utilitarian perspective, will make more sense from a financial perspective. In other words, society can plan for the "will happen" part and ensure that the current realities, at least in financial terms align with the future and the "will happen" part.
In addition to this, the fact is that infrastructure take a lot of time to build. Therefore, in order to build the infrastructure for the future, we need to invest in it today, because rest assured, at current consumption, oil (and natural gas) WILL run out (in reality it will just become ridiculously expensive, but that only gives us some additional time for the transition). When that happens, there better be a working infrastructure for EV (including fuel cells) in place, because neither coal nor nuclear is viable for direct installing in cars.
Perhaps, but this misses the point of EV or fuel cell vehicles. At present, it stands so that these will push power generation to coal or oil fired power plants in many areas.
BUT:
1. Power plants will be transitioned as well, and it is substantially easier to place efficient and centralised greenhouse reducing technologies in a couple of power plants than in 2 billion cars.
2. Fuel will run out, and a transition must be starting now in any case.
3. In some places, most electricity already comes from nuclear / hydro / wind / solar (e.g. France and Sweden).
The transition away from petrol and diesel to battery or fuel cells, is not so much as cutting green house gasses now, it is about enabling a new infrastructure that is easier to control and manage. The being clean argument does however help to sell the electric vehicles now.
"The EU never was a Union. It has always been a trade treaty and some fools tried to make more out of it."
The intent of the EU / EC / ECSC was always to form a political union. Granted it is not there yet, but the founding fathers where quite clear on this, and any state joining signs up for this long term goal.
I can guarantee you that a lot of citizens who are involved with anything dealing with more than two EU members are quite happy with the Union influencing the local legislation.
I for example have been living in 4 different member states, and often spend weekends with the in-laws in a fifth. The Union's influence on local legislation using directives and the Euro is absolutely essential for making life bearable for millions of people. As an example, due to the EU influence on the local legislation, a person moving to another state does for example no longer have to exchange their drivers licence any more (in my case, I would have had to change it 3 times during the last 5 years if the old rules would have applied). In addition, no paperwork has to be filled in if you get a job in another member state, this saves tons of money for business and a lot of time for citizens who have to deal with the mess otherwise. I could probably write a full book on how the influence on local legislation simplifies matters a lot.
I am expecting that the newspapers soon find documents linking the NSA to the Athens affair and the death of Kostas Tsalikidis.
The bank guarantee covers 100k€ per bank you have accounts in. If you have more than 150k€, you would typically have accounts on two banks (preferably in different eurozone states to reduce the risks), and divide the money between those banks to ensure that all your money is covered by the bank guarantee. Some people do of-course have their cash there for temporary measures, like they just sold their house and have not bought a new one yet.
This is an incorrect understanding of law. There are several types of law. You are apparently only recognising vertical law, but breaking a horizontal law (e.g. a contract) is also against the law and illegal. It may not be a criminal act and breaking a state imposed law, but it is still illegal.
"clang is still a pain in the ass to compile, with unclear instructions, and a massive, huge compile time. gcc on the other hand is built by automated scripts quite frequently as part of, for example, cross-toolchain builds."
Clang is really easy to build, usually easier than building GCC which often requires you to checkout multiple additional libraries (mpfr etc). Clang only requires that you clone two repositories: llvm and clang, clang is checked out into llvm/tools and the build process of llvm will automatically build clang for you. You then use cmake or autotools to configure, the first one is usually faster. GCC does take quite some time to build, but a lot of that time is spent in the configuration process which is slow as hell.
Clang does support multiple targets out of the box, but it is not very easy to use (you need to pass a lot of different compiler switches to set the host triple, target cpu, system include directories et.c.). GCC on the other hand requires one installation per cross target and supports spec files that configures all these flags (e.g. system include directories) using the -B option.
Sigh... the Irish referendum was not ignored.
The Irish government went out and reviewed why people voted no. It turned out that the primary reason was mostly unfounded fears of certain issues. The Irish government then got a protocol attached to the treaty which spelled out these fears and that any rules potentially messing with these areas would not apply to Ireland.
So:
1. The Irish voted no due to specific concerns.
2. Concerns where addressed.
3. New proposal subject to another plebiscite.
How is this ignoring the Irish referendum results?
Compile that with -m32 and you will see that time_t is 32 for many Linux systems, you are probably building a 64 bit app by default. You think, no 32 bit compiled software exists?
The main problem is actually not that the time_t in the OS is 32 or 64, hardware and operating systems are upgraded. And, very few systems shipping today will have 32 bit time_t. This will not be the main problem (even if it will be a problem with some systems, for example, some nuclear reactors are managed by custom unices that are not maintained anymore and they don't dare to touch those systems, but this is solvable in the few cases where this is a problem)!
The BIG problem for more mainstream software is all the software using binary file formats, such software will completely break down, if time is stored as a 32 bit UNIX time stamp. There may also be problem for text based file formats if for example the reading code uses %d with sscanf to read in the timestamp, but if these are compiled with a modern compiler, the compiler will warn that %d is being used with a 64 bit time_t integer. It is thus solvable, but will require recompiling the software and some minor patching. Binary file-formats will however be a pain in the ass, so bad that software systems will probably have to be certified as Y2038-safe.
Do not underestimate the size of this undertaking.
Sweden for example have church tax for church members, this tax is taken out directly on your salary payed to the tax office.
The EU is not just the institutions, it is an idea as well. Governments do indeed blame the Union for things they have been along negotiating in the council, this being quite unfair in many cases.
You complain that the commission is not elected, well firstly, strictly speaking, neither is any government of any member state in the Union. The main problem has been that the commission has not actually represented the parliamentary election results. Will you be happy to know that from the next elections (in 2014), the commission will be appointed based on the EP election results? This is actually a result of the Lisbon treaty.
Further, the commission are not breaking any local laws they prime mandate is to guarantee that the treaties are upheld by the member states. The member states have ratified the treaties, and this means that the treaties are law in the member states. Typically the treaties take president over every law in the member state except for their constitutions, which in turn means that any law that is incompatible with the treaties is an illegal law. Remember, membership in the Union means that your country has ratified the treaty and that the treaty (and accompanying directives) is the law. The commission is therefore strictly say, when they point out errors in member states laws, telling the member states that they do not follow their own laws.
The EU does indeed employ around 40k civil servants, but you should compare this to a medium sized city in Europe. These cities will by themselves often have more bureaucrats on their payroll than the entire Union.
You claim that MEPs are not present most of the time, such claim requires proof, and to be frank a comparison with attendance records for the member states. If you wish to look at different MEPs, research has shown that eurosceptic MEPs produce far fewer amendments, documents and have lower attendance records than main stream or euro centric MEPs. The point of this is that the "lazy MEPs" are in fact, predominately those with eurosceptic tendencies.
The EU does also indeed want more money. But, on the other hand, since the Lisbon treaty, the EU has not received any more money, despite having (based on the treaties negotiated by the member state governments) to set up the european foreign service (including embassies all over the world); and despite having to expand certain areas such as the ECB being given more work to do with the latest treaty. There is only so much you can do in order to optimising the current funds with respect to the job the Union has been given by the member states.
The governments are represented in the Council, they are the assholes that pushed this through in the first place, the leading culprits where the British and the Swedish (previous) government under lead of the Swedish minister of justice Thomas Bodström. The Parliament did approve of it, but only after the Council said that if you don't approve, we will treat it as a matter of "criminal and justice cooperation", an area where the Parliament had no co-legeslative rights with the Council before the Lisbon treaty went into effect. Some MEPs where not happy though, Alexander Alvaro had his name stricken from the EP report on the issue.
The Parliament approving it, did in the end ensure that they could at least water it down a little bit with amendments, even though I am uncertain as to this was a good thing in the end. The EP keeping their hands clean of the crap could have resulted in a real debate of the Council's behaviour and as to how the governments of the member states could be controlled in the EU setting.
In any case, it is not the Austrian government that is fighting the directive (they are after all part of the body that approved it in the first place), it is the Austrian constitutional court and the EU court, and it is about time the EU court seriously evaluate the legality and treaty compatibility of the directive!
Well, if this is found to break the fundamental charter, which is part of the treaties, it is not that easy to lobby for it to change. That would require a massive effort which would not be very practical.
This sort of thing is done in many many EU member states, that it does not violate EU-law is not that strange. However, it is strange that the German constitution does not ban it with respect to the background.
Then don't buy CFLs, buy LED bulbs instead. Problem solved...
Honestly, cleaning out after you break a disconnected CFL is not that hard, the mercury is in liquid form. If you break it while it is on, I would be more worried about the fire hazard coming from the exposed conductors, which is even worse in a incandescent bulb.
IPCC being a body with representation from different states (with a lot of political interest in the reports), that more or less work with consensus, their reports are often watered down when released. This means that the published science is often more pessimistic than the IPCC report.