This is true, except that the Commission cannot easily change ACTA as is as the treaty is signed. They could ask to have a protocol added which would require the approvals of all the original signing parties which include the US, Canada, the EU, the individual EU member states et.c. This in turn would mean that most governments need to acquire new negotiating mandates from their respective parliaments and so on. This is not a trivial operation.
No, it cannot be bypassed. What he can do is have it subject to judicial review and try to resubmit the ratification proposal. However, I would assume that parliament will not take kindly to this. Maybe they should move for a no confidence vote on Karel.
No, but it does mean that some of the clauses are not valid. This is also usually covered by the EULAs which go in the line of: "Blah blah blah, does not infringe on your rights granted by law in some jurisdictions."
Et.c. et.c.
Though, in all fairness, first sale doctrines are absolutely ludicrous when it comes to software (and any other type of IP) that has been downloaded from the Internet unless they come with really strong DRM protections in which case the DRM server operator should provide license transfers as a service. But obviously, if I buy a boxed copy I should be able to transfer it to another party one and only one time. But many EULAs already explicitly allow you to do this.
Presumably you are only talking about local parties in Sweden, these are parts of larger European parties. In the EP, the greens (incl. the mijöpartiet and piratpartiet), the lefts (EUL/NGL incl. Vänsterpartiet), the social democrats (S&D, including Socialdemokraterna) and the liberals (ALDE/ELDR incl. Centern and Folkpartiet) have whole heartily rejected ACTA. And so have a ton of different EP committees. The conservatives (EPP incl. Moderaterna and Kristdemokraterna) seem to be more or less divided about the issue though, in the EPP part, especially Cristoffer Fjellner have been a strong supporter of ACTA.
That sentence can however be extended indefinitely. Effectively, he will get life, but the Norwegian system simply works in an inverted way.
Most states: you get life in prison, and after 20 years we will see if you should get a timed sentence. Norway: you get 20 years, after that we will see if you still should be in prison.
The effective result is the same, he will not be released before he is close to 60, and likely not at all.
Your arguments also hold as a promotion of fiscal federalism in the EU. As such, the only real reason against fiscal federalism and a monetary union is simply the promotion of national sovereignty and nationalism. If you are against it for those reasons, then fine, I respect the opinion, but at least be honest enough to say so.
And as a side note, no, the OCA theory does not hold as an argument against the Euro. In principle it means that we should identify the currency areas that can be merged, including splitting some countries into two currency areas. For example, northern and middle Sweden would be good to be in the same currency area as Finland (and perhaps parts of Russia) due to the dependency on the forestry and paper industries, however southern Sweden would benefit from having the same currency as Denmark and parts of Germany. The OCA that was discussed so much before the introduction of the Euro is in-fact not a theory against a currency union, but rather a theory against the use of national currencies.
What's the point of doing olympic fencing, iaido or kendo, same thing... the longsword styles died out precisely for the reason you describe, there is obviously no reason to learn any type of swordfighting from a self defense point of view; the reason that people do this is simply that it is fun (although, the hand to hand and dagger styles are applicable today).
Martial arts are no longer really about defense, but rather about the sports value, competition and fun. Do you need any other reason? For HEMA in particular, some people are simply historically interested and want to explore what their ancestors did instead of learning about Asian fighting styles; there is also the research aspects where old fighting manuals are still being discovered (last year some guys found a previously unknown Dutch dagger fighting manual, and immediately started to experiment with the new principles they learned, not because they are going to fight, but because it is fun).
Why would they want to? Considering the purpose of Stuxnet, it would be essential that it remains hidden from security firms. It escaping into the wild was most definitely an accident.
State monopoly on violence is essential for building a civilized society. It actually reduces the number of murders and killings in total. Steven Pinker has put forward an excellent theory (building on works of others), which he illustrate solidly with lots of data that when states where formed, having monopoly on violence, the violence rate (including the violence from the state) went down by a factor of 10.
Actually, I would say that the state is evil, but it is a necessary evil and better than the alternative (absolute anarchy). We should always choose the lesser of evils.
You are gravely mistaken about the neoliberals in Sweden, most neoliberals in Sweden believe that the EU is a socialist experiment, while the socialists believe the EU is a neoliberal capitalist experiment. This is obviously contradictory, but stems from the fact that the EU in some cases make social policy that does not suite the neoliberals and in some cases make economic policy that the socialist don't like.
Many don't want to talk about the F-word, but on specific issues people (even in Scandinavia) are very much federalists. For example, if you ask whether they want the EP to have more power on the behalf of the council, then most people will say YES, despite this is very much the definition of federalism.
It is quite OK to destroy statues of Stalin and Lenin in the eastern parts of Europe as there are still people around who suffered from those bastard's reign. However, it would not be OK to destroy them if they where 2000 years old. Whatever you think, it is not OK to destroy 2000 year old statues of Julius Caesar in France, even though the guy was responsible for killing off something like a quarter of the local Gauls.
It may also be understandable if the statues where old, but symbolizing an oppressor that just left. If the Buddhists would have ruled and oppressed the Afghans until say 20 years ago, it would be understandable that the statues where destroyed during the processes of liberation (not nice, but understandable). As it stands however, Afghanistan has been islamic for a very very long time. Destroying the statues this long after, is thus just simply put a crime against our common cultural heritage.
It is not so much about priorities, being poor is no excuse for actively ruining such a site, it would be an excuse for letting it slowly crumble due to the lack of maintenance however.
Actually, the Commission do usually ask before they start writing directives. They tend to request comments from the public, though the public is in general not aware of this.
Whether they did so in this case, I have no idea, but I would not claim that they haven't asked the public without double checking that first.
There is nothing wrong with the EU project as such, however there are several implementation bugs, like the lack of parliamentary control. However, the memberstate governments and the nationalists do not want to have parliamentary control over the Union as it a) would prevent governments from blaming the EU when they push through a directive in the council without proper scrutiny (i.e. the member state gov made the shit up, but blames the EU) or b) infringes on their sovereignty (not that sovereignty will matter if the Chinese rule Europe by divide and conquer). The latter group is especially interesting as they value sovereignty and complain that the EU is undemocratic, well... you cannot have both, so either they should shut up, admitting that they have a complete utterly flawed base for their arguments, or they should change the arguments into something like: "well, you know, we prefer sovereignty over democracy on EU level, so we will vote like this".
Of course, some of the "nationalists" want to abolish the EU (I have still not seen them admitting that you can have either sovereignty or democracy on EU level), and I am sure they will be very happy when Europe's states gets chopped up in pieces and divided between the Yanks, Chinese and the Indians.
"Irish people voted No, until they were told, no that was the wrong answer, vote again."
This argument is really sickening, in a normal parliamentary setting a complex legal document will undergo scrutiny by the MPs, the MPs may then make amendments, so if they are against the initial proposition from the government, the amendments may make the proposition acceptable.
For plebiscites, the same thing should naturally hold. However, it is not practical to crowd source amendments (or protocols as they are usually called in a treaty setting), if you then have a referendum and it is a reasonably close call, what the heck is wrong with adopting a protocol that address the major issues that the people had with the treaty. There is nothing wrong with this, it is not re-asking the same question until you get a yes, but more like: Is this proposal acceptable for you? If not, what if we change this into this, would that be acceptable?
The main point of this, is that agreements, treaties and law in general can be modified to suite the different parties that are stakeholders in it. There is nothing undemocratic about having a second plebiscite if you change the question, or the text that you are voting about.
In the Lisbon treaty case, Ireland secured an amendment (protocol) that essentially made the treaty acceptable after it cleared up a number of major issues that the voters had with the initial text.
The right to be forgotten is about one thing: If I delete my Facebook account, they should also delete all the data associated with that account (including face tags in other people's photos).
It does not force Facebook to delete comments written by others mentioning your name, just the material you posted.
This is not that unreasonable. It does in no way effect free speech (although, the preliminary text in the directive may not be clear enough, but it has to go through the parliament and the council that will amend the directive), except that you have the right to delete all the posts you made, but if you are the one who expressed yourself initially, you are still free to repost the information elsewhere.
Several have tried, but many of the attempts where localized to one or two states, no-one tried to make their system global. Which is why they failed. Now that Facebook have achieved world domination, it is very tricky to fix the mistakes of the past for the smaller companies.
In NL, a system called Hyves was very popular, they are still there but virtually no one is using it anymore; I would not be surprised if they declared bankruptcy in the next two years. In SE, there was a company called Lunarstorm, they failed by only supporting social stuff in Sweden and Finland (for the Swedish speaking finns), plus their user interface was horrible and essentially only tested with Internet Explorer; this company folded a couple of years ago. I am sure that there have been similar systems in the other states of Europe.
The big problem is that these companies never realized that Internet is a global thing, people have friends that are spread out in all of the world and would probably want to be in touch with them over the social networks. So, when you apparently need at least one "global" Facebook account in addition to your local "national social internet service here" account, why stay in the local service?
The main point is that the EU is planning on introducing the "right to be forgotten", that is if you terminate your Facebook account, they have to delete the data you uploaded.
The parliament is directly elected, they in turn together with the local governments elect the Commission. The Commission does intact have the same legitimacy as most parliamentary governments.
You thought wrong about what you believe the EU to be about, since the founding the purpose has been to lay a foundation for peace in Europe by slowly federating the member states.
IIRC, the register estimated that BT owned copper cables worth more than the company itself (current day's copper prices). Obviously, would all that copper come out on the market, copper prices would fall down to essentially nothing.
If telcos start digging up their copper cables, replacing it with the steel cables with less copper contents. The telcos need to sell their excess copper; and so the copper price will plummet, eliminating the need for digging out the cables...
If it would have had been only a security feature, there would be an SD-card in the device storing encryption keys for approved OS software manufactures. The SD-card could in this case be made read only and if the user wants to disable any tampering, he could glue it in the slot. A user could add additional approved keys (even his own keys) by placing the card with write enabled in another machine.
In this case, it would have only been about security. As it stands now the MS rules is to lock out competitors from the market.
Slashdot Mirror
It is always an election year in Europe :)
We Europeans strongly believe that people not eating brie cheese are really uncivilized. I think we are at least 8 sigmas sure of this... ;)
This is true, except that the Commission cannot easily change ACTA as is as the treaty is signed. They could ask to have a protocol added which would require the approvals of all the original signing parties which include the US, Canada, the EU, the individual EU member states et.c. This in turn would mean that most governments need to acquire new negotiating mandates from their respective parliaments and so on. This is not a trivial operation.
No, it cannot be bypassed. What he can do is have it subject to judicial review and try to resubmit the ratification proposal. However, I would assume that parliament will not take kindly to this. Maybe they should move for a no confidence vote on Karel.
No, but it does mean that some of the clauses are not valid. This is also usually covered by the EULAs which go in the line of: "Blah blah blah, does not infringe on your rights granted by law in some jurisdictions."
Et.c. et.c.
Though, in all fairness, first sale doctrines are absolutely ludicrous when it comes to software (and any other type of IP) that has been downloaded from the Internet unless they come with really strong DRM protections in which case the DRM server operator should provide license transfers as a service. But obviously, if I buy a boxed copy I should be able to transfer it to another party one and only one time. But many EULAs already explicitly allow you to do this.
Presumably you are only talking about local parties in Sweden, these are parts of larger European parties. In the EP, the greens (incl. the mijöpartiet and piratpartiet), the lefts (EUL/NGL incl. Vänsterpartiet), the social democrats (S&D, including Socialdemokraterna) and the liberals (ALDE/ELDR incl. Centern and Folkpartiet) have whole heartily rejected ACTA. And so have a ton of different EP committees. The conservatives (EPP incl. Moderaterna and Kristdemokraterna) seem to be more or less divided about the issue though, in the EPP part, especially Cristoffer Fjellner have been a strong supporter of ACTA.
That sentence can however be extended indefinitely. Effectively, he will get life, but the Norwegian system simply works in an inverted way.
Most states: you get life in prison, and after 20 years we will see if you should get a timed sentence.
Norway: you get 20 years, after that we will see if you still should be in prison.
The effective result is the same, he will not be released before he is close to 60, and likely not at all.
Your arguments also hold as a promotion of fiscal federalism in the EU. As such, the only real reason against fiscal federalism and a monetary union is simply the promotion of national sovereignty and nationalism. If you are against it for those reasons, then fine, I respect the opinion, but at least be honest enough to say so.
And as a side note, no, the OCA theory does not hold as an argument against the Euro. In principle it means that we should identify the currency areas that can be merged, including splitting some countries into two currency areas. For example, northern and middle Sweden would be good to be in the same currency area as Finland (and perhaps parts of Russia) due to the dependency on the forestry and paper industries, however southern Sweden would benefit from having the same currency as Denmark and parts of Germany. The OCA that was discussed so much before the introduction of the Euro is in-fact not a theory against a currency union, but rather a theory against the use of national currencies.
What's the point of doing olympic fencing, iaido or kendo, same thing... the longsword styles died out precisely for the reason you describe, there is obviously no reason to learn any type of swordfighting from a self defense point of view; the reason that people do this is simply that it is fun (although, the hand to hand and dagger styles are applicable today).
Martial arts are no longer really about defense, but rather about the sports value, competition and fun. Do you need any other reason? For HEMA in particular, some people are simply historically interested and want to explore what their ancestors did instead of learning about Asian fighting styles; there is also the research aspects where old fighting manuals are still being discovered (last year some guys found a previously unknown Dutch dagger fighting manual, and immediately started to experiment with the new principles they learned, not because they are going to fight, but because it is fun).
It seems from the Kickstarter page that they will focus on the longsword, Lichtenauer-style.
Why would they want to? Considering the purpose of Stuxnet, it would be essential that it remains hidden from security firms. It escaping into the wild was most definitely an accident.
State monopoly on violence is essential for building a civilized society. It actually reduces the number of murders and killings in total. Steven Pinker has put forward an excellent theory (building on works of others), which he illustrate solidly with lots of data that when states where formed, having monopoly on violence, the violence rate (including the violence from the state) went down by a factor of 10.
Actually, I would say that the state is evil, but it is a necessary evil and better than the alternative (absolute anarchy). We should always choose the lesser of evils.
The proposal is not written by european politicians, but rather by a an interest organization for european telecom operators.
You are gravely mistaken about the neoliberals in Sweden, most neoliberals in Sweden believe that the EU is a socialist experiment, while the socialists believe the EU is a neoliberal capitalist experiment. This is obviously contradictory, but stems from the fact that the EU in some cases make social policy that does not suite the neoliberals and in some cases make economic policy that the socialist don't like.
Many don't want to talk about the F-word, but on specific issues people (even in Scandinavia) are very much federalists. For example, if you ask whether they want the EP to have more power on the behalf of the council, then most people will say YES, despite this is very much the definition of federalism.
It is quite OK to destroy statues of Stalin and Lenin in the eastern parts of Europe as there are still people around who suffered from those bastard's reign. However, it would not be OK to destroy them if they where 2000 years old. Whatever you think, it is not OK to destroy 2000 year old statues of Julius Caesar in France, even though the guy was responsible for killing off something like a quarter of the local Gauls.
It may also be understandable if the statues where old, but symbolizing an oppressor that just left. If the Buddhists would have ruled and oppressed the Afghans until say 20 years ago, it would be understandable that the statues where destroyed during the processes of liberation (not nice, but understandable). As it stands however, Afghanistan has been islamic for a very very long time. Destroying the statues this long after, is thus just simply put a crime against our common cultural heritage.
It is not so much about priorities, being poor is no excuse for actively ruining such a site, it would be an excuse for letting it slowly crumble due to the lack of maintenance however.
Actually, the Commission do usually ask before they start writing directives. They tend to request comments from the public, though the public is in general not aware of this.
Whether they did so in this case, I have no idea, but I would not claim that they haven't asked the public without double checking that first.
There is nothing wrong with the EU project as such, however there are several implementation bugs, like the lack of parliamentary control. However, the memberstate governments and the nationalists do not want to have parliamentary control over the Union as it a) would prevent governments from blaming the EU when they push through a directive in the council without proper scrutiny (i.e. the member state gov made the shit up, but blames the EU) or b) infringes on their sovereignty (not that sovereignty will matter if the Chinese rule Europe by divide and conquer). The latter group is especially interesting as they value sovereignty and complain that the EU is undemocratic, well... you cannot have both, so either they should shut up, admitting that they have a complete utterly flawed base for their arguments, or they should change the arguments into something like: "well, you know, we prefer sovereignty over democracy on EU level, so we will vote like this".
Of course, some of the "nationalists" want to abolish the EU (I have still not seen them admitting that you can have either sovereignty or democracy on EU level), and I am sure they will be very happy when Europe's states gets chopped up in pieces and divided between the Yanks, Chinese and the Indians.
"Irish people voted No, until they were told, no that was the wrong answer, vote again."
This argument is really sickening, in a normal parliamentary setting a complex legal document will undergo scrutiny by the MPs, the MPs may then make amendments, so if they are against the initial proposition from the government, the amendments may make the proposition acceptable.
For plebiscites, the same thing should naturally hold. However, it is not practical to crowd source amendments (or protocols as they are usually called in a treaty setting), if you then have a referendum and it is a reasonably close call, what the heck is wrong with adopting a protocol that address the major issues that the people had with the treaty. There is nothing wrong with this, it is not re-asking the same question until you get a yes, but more like: Is this proposal acceptable for you? If not, what if we change this into this, would that be acceptable?
The main point of this, is that agreements, treaties and law in general can be modified to suite the different parties that are stakeholders in it. There is nothing undemocratic about having a second plebiscite if you change the question, or the text that you are voting about.
In the Lisbon treaty case, Ireland secured an amendment (protocol) that essentially made the treaty acceptable after it cleared up a number of major issues that the voters had with the initial text.
Hard right wing anti-unionist people call the EU socialist.
Hard left wing anti-unionist people call the EU capitalist.
Neither of these two groups are right.
The right to be forgotten is about one thing: If I delete my Facebook account, they should also delete all the data associated with that account (including face tags in other people's photos).
It does not force Facebook to delete comments written by others mentioning your name, just the material you posted.
This is not that unreasonable. It does in no way effect free speech (although, the preliminary text in the directive may not be clear enough, but it has to go through the parliament and the council that will amend the directive), except that you have the right to delete all the posts you made, but if you are the one who expressed yourself initially, you are still free to repost the information elsewhere.
Several have tried, but many of the attempts where localized to one or two states, no-one tried to make their system global. Which is why they failed. Now that Facebook have achieved world domination, it is very tricky to fix the mistakes of the past for the smaller companies.
In NL, a system called Hyves was very popular, they are still there but virtually no one is using it anymore; I would not be surprised if they declared bankruptcy in the next two years. In SE, there was a company called Lunarstorm, they failed by only supporting social stuff in Sweden and Finland (for the Swedish speaking finns), plus their user interface was horrible and essentially only tested with Internet Explorer; this company folded a couple of years ago. I am sure that there have been similar systems in the other states of Europe.
The big problem is that these companies never realized that Internet is a global thing, people have friends that are spread out in all of the world and would probably want to be in touch with them over the social networks. So, when you apparently need at least one "global" Facebook account in addition to your local "national social internet service here" account, why stay in the local service?
The main point is that the EU is planning on introducing the "right to be forgotten", that is if you terminate your Facebook account, they have to delete the data you uploaded.
The parliament is directly elected, they in turn together with the local governments elect the Commission. The Commission does intact have the same legitimacy as most parliamentary governments.
You thought wrong about what you believe the EU to be about, since the founding the purpose has been to lay a foundation for peace in Europe by slowly federating the member states.
IIRC, the register estimated that BT owned copper cables worth more than the company itself (current day's copper prices). Obviously, would all that copper come out on the market, copper prices would fall down to essentially nothing.
If telcos start digging up their copper cables, replacing it with the steel cables with less copper contents. The telcos need to sell their excess copper; and so the copper price will plummet, eliminating the need for digging out the cables...
If it would have had been only a security feature, there would be an SD-card in the device storing encryption keys for approved OS software manufactures. The SD-card could in this case be made read only and if the user wants to disable any tampering, he could glue it in the slot. A user could add additional approved keys (even his own keys) by placing the card with write enabled in another machine.
In this case, it would have only been about security. As it stands now the MS rules is to lock out competitors from the market.