What is there that prevents a rouge developer at the voting box company from adding some obfuscated code that skews the results on a national level (say, miscounting every 100 votes for party X as being for party Y)? In a paper based system, miscounts will happen, but they will be local and attacking the whole system requires a large scale conspiracy that is very difficult to hide.
I would suggest the following requirements before anyone designs an electronic voting system:
1. Must allow for anonymous fair voting et.c. (standard stuff from your country's constitution) 2. Should be robust against attacks from individuals. 3. Any attack should preferably leave a trace somewhere. 4. Should a local attack occur, the results should not affect the general results. 5. Voting mechanisms (not necessarily the mathematics, but the actual counting process) must be verifiable by non domain expert. It should be possible to train up an observer in 30 minutes. 6. Voting results should be stored and be possible to be verified and recounted for some time.
It turns out that number 2 and 5 is practically impossible to do with an electronic voting machine, number 6 is also very difficult but could possibly be solved with cryptography, but not without breaking number 1 (anonymous votes). And seriously, what is the point of building an electronic system that can most likely be manipulated without anyone noticing? What is so bad in having to wait a few hours extra for the results, is democracy not worth one hour of waiting?
I suppose that the only argument would be that you can carry out public votes more often, but do people really want to move away from democracy in the direction of ochlocracy?
What may be interesting if you want to speed up the counting process is to make the ballots machine readable, still on paper though.
Hopefully, but it depends as all things about law. It is however up to the Irish high court and (ultimatelly) the ECJ to decide on whether or not the Irish laws fulfill the requirements in the relevant directives.
No they can't, the EU regulates a minimum term copyright (which for physical persons is life plus 50 or 70 IIRC). Ireland is not sued without basis, they are sued about not implementing EU law. IP legislation is primarily made by the Union; most people who are trying to do something about this understands this, especially thanks to the EUCD directive which was a fundamental wakeup call for individuals who did not previously pay attention to EU-debate.
The big mass is unfortunately still unaware and whining when their state implement directives. To branch of a bit of topic, this is partially main stream media's fault. Media has an obligation to monitor the lawmakers, but apparently they ignore their duties when it comes to the EU. You need to start reading more specialized news like EU-observer, European Voice and the like to keep up with what is actually going on. Another issue (the BBC does this right however), is that many news papers and news outlets have two sections of news; domestic and foreign. EU issues are somehow clumped into the foreign news section so people don't understand that it is actually affecting them.
I thought so to, but it turns out (if you read the article) that the suit is about that Ireland has not implemented certain items in Union legislation. Thus, a court proceeding for Ireland is entirely appropriate, especially since Union law have precedence. The court is then asked to look at whether Irish law is compliant with Union law, so the court cannot force the state to make new laws, they can however force the state to follow Union law.
For the non-european who have no idea about how it works (this is a simplified version): EU legislation can be seen as federal law, but most of the legislation (known as directives), are actually laws about that the states should make laws fulfilling a certain set of requirements. If a state does not implement "federal" directives in local legislation within the directive's implementation period, those individuals and companies that suffer some kind of damage that they would not have suffered if the law was implemented, have the right to sue the state for non compliance. This is a normal procedure; try to solve it locally at first, the next step is to take it up with the Union so they can start infringement procedures against the state. Normally, the courts would in this case ask for union level courts for an opinion of the compatibility between state and union law.
Yeah, I just saw that, however, it seems that materials to produce PCBs are levied 6.5% tariffs, I cannot find data for just a bare PCB, but I would not be surprised that the issues are the PCBs.
One of the fundamental parts of the Union is the customs union. Essentially, import tariffs are set centrally by Brussels (they are levied by the states, who pay parts of it to the EU).
So it is not that the UKs levies appears to be based on the TARIC database, they are actually identical, without changes.
The article was not clear on whether or not it was an import tariff or some tax deduction, but in the first case, the competence to change the rules lie exclusively in Brussels.
This would be a perfect, probably very cheap way for the Commission to stimulate the economy, that is by making local manufacturing cheaper. I would guess that they are aware of this and are discussing this, the article seems to suggest that at least.
The ECHR is essentially embedded in the treaties. So unlike taking the route throughout he ECHR (who cannot really sanction a state), the human rights issues should be possible to be brought up through the ECJ.
I am not sure if this has already been done for individuals yet, but a company in Belgium did down national legislation breaking the treaties' human rights sections with respect to blanket internet filtering.
They did put it in, the de-facto standard for e-mail encryption is S/MIME; essentially all e-mail clients support it (including Outlook, Apple Mail (both OS X and iOS) and Thunderbird). OpenPGP however is lacking in support and typically requires you to install various plugins.
The referendum held in 1994 approved joining the EU (and also the Euro) with a majority of 52.3 %. Just how you get that into a rejection I don't know.
This would be great, if there where no other big countries around. If you are small these days, you will just do what the big guys tell you anyhow; the independence you see is just a charade in that case.
In other words; if China was split in 20, the US in 6 and India in 20, then the need for a federated Europe would be a lot less; especially in today's globalized world. However, if you want to be realistic; it is actually the only way to ensure European independence and protect our way of life in the long run.
Just to add though, your assumption that large countries are either despotic and/or run by corps ignoring human rights is pretty faulty; you are basing this on a sample size of 3 which is not enough to draw any conclusions from. The EU for example have a different basis for its parliamentary system; one thing is that proportional representation is the general norm, the second is that governments are accountable to the parliaments in general. As such, a corrupt government is likely to be sacked very quickly; in the US the procedure to sack the president and his cabinet is very very long and complicated.
Confederations are associations of sovereign states. In a pure confederation, only the states will count. The citizens are not represented. As such, since the states are really sovereign, all decisions must be taken using consensus among the member states. You cannot have a pesky parliament overriding the states decisions in a confederal system since such a parliament would be super national if it would have anything to say.
A confederal parliament may exist, but they would work something like the parliamentary assemblies of the CoE or similar organization. That is, they would typically consist of MP from the member states who have as an extra task the appointment of sitting in the parliamentary assembly of the confederation. They would also only be an advising body since anything else means supra nationality.
So, with a confederal system; only the member states have anything to say, which makes them very unrepresentative for the electorate.
Now, lets introduce a parliament that is directly elected, you immediately have a super national body; if this also have real power, the member states can get their proposals overridden by the super national parliament.
A fundamental part of democracy is that the legislative bodies should be directly elected (or there should be at least one chambers that is directly elected). Otherwise, imagine that a confederal non-elected council works with or without consensus, in that case the member states are usually obliged to implement the decisions the confederation takes. The member state's directly elected parliament cannot really overrule the decisions (or there wouldn't be much a point with the confederal level anyway). So in this case, the non elected confederal council makes law without direct input from the elected legislators.
By introducing federalism in the picture you can have a supra national directly elected parliament with the right to influence legislation. The people then have their say in the rules made for the community as hey elect their federal MPs, this is democracy.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. Since May 9, 1950, the goal for the European integration path have been peace by building a federation. Currently we have more of a confederation, but with some federal attributes.
If you read the declaration, it is clear that the purpose of the Union is to federate Europe.
I for one, think this is a good thing. Confederations can by definition never be democratic.
No power is ever delegated to the (member) states from the European Union. By definition and in practice, members delegate power to the EU, not the other way around.
De jure, (but maybe not de facto, like in the EU (an american would need to clarify this)) the same is actually the case in the US as the US states are the ones that need to ratify the US constitution, the federal government cannot just change it at a whim.
In Sweden, people would vote no about joining the Euro if there was an election TODAY. This is what the polls asked; I would probably not want Sweden to join TODAY (and I am a very convinced federalist), but whenever the bugs in the system have been fixed, then yes; Sweden should join.
Polling is a very interesting thing, since you can produce different answers on the same topic by just formulating the question a bit different.
Last time I saw any numbers about popular support for a USE-like future, this was around 20% of the Swedish population (and this is not just a few "insane politicians", but rather close to 2 million citizens). I doubt that this have changed that much, though even among these very few would say they supported a conversion to the Euro in the current climate of uncertainty.
Regarding having multiple plebiscites over and over again, Sweden have done just that about the Euro. When the plebiscite about joining the EU was carried out, joining the Euro was included in the deal; despite this the government announced a second referendum, despite that the populous had already approved joining the Euro (legally, Sweden has agreed to join but stays out using a loophole). So, yes, repeating plebiscites happens, but in this case, it was in the opposite way of what you are complaining about.
Secondly, about repeating plebiscites, this is not that strange. For example, if you run something through normal parliamentary procedures; different groups / parties may want to make amendments, and they often do this. This is obviously unpractical during a plebiscite, so if the population rejects a proposal of a complicated legal text, would it not be prudent to make amendments in this case? This is exactly the reason that parliamentary democracy is so much more superior to direct democracy in every kind of way.
Federation has been the path of Europe since May 9, 1950, and it is not just a few politicians, also a sizable proportion of the citizens want this as well. It was around 20% in Sweden last time they made a large scale poll on the topic (larger among young people, so mortality will take care of the numbers in the long run), and Sweden is a rather Eurosceptic place.
Not necessarily like the US (with a very strong federal government). But in simple terms, yes we are and have since the Schuman declaration on May 9, 1950. There are many parallels though.
No, you will have proven that you cannot detect it and under the circumstances you are very sure that the teapot is not there. However, it is not a proof in a strict mathematical sense. Good enough I would say, but it is not a strict mathematical proof. Imagine that the teapot moves out of the solar system just when you start you scan and moves back when you finished it.
It may be seen as a proof of the absence of the teapot for any sane person and any physicist, but rest assured that this is not an absolutely irrefutable mathematically valid proof of the teapots absence.
Indeed, the existence of the teapot may be completely meaningless, but it does not disprove its existence. Just that you could not detect it at the time when you tried to find it.
We can also imagine that the teapot moves out of the solar system just before you conduct your scan (how, I do not know, but this is a thought experiment), after you scanned for the teapot, you conclude rightly that it was not there when you scanned for it and then suddenly the teapot magically moves back into the solar system.
No, you can only prove known properties. You cannot prove a negative. Or to rephrase, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
To take someone else's example, imagine the flying teapot in orbit some where in the solar system, you cannot disprove that it is there. However, by finding it you can prove its existence. What you can probably do is to show that it is unlikely that something exists; so unlikely that you consider that the thing does not exist. However disproving it completely is not possible. We can thus assume that a flying teapot in the orbit around jupiter does not exist, because it would be very unlikely that it did, however you cannot disprove it completelly by not finding it.
They would probably also reverse the charge, so the GP still have a valid point. The banks probably have reasonably automated systems for this. So the only one to suffer is the person who got his card stolen who have to go through all kinds of steps and waste time on reversing the charges.
In this case, even the payee will not loose on it as they seemed to be charities; and as such they don't loose anything that they sold to the person with the stolen CC when the charge is reversed.
Evolution is a scientific fact. It is an observable process. Period, end of discussion. Evolution by natural selection is however a scientific theory explaining how this evolution happens, as theories are in the scientific world, they are strongly supported by evidence; models and so on.
You may want to interpret the evidence for natural selection in different ways if you like you may even try to claim that God did it or whatever; but the process of evolution is still a fact. And as with everything else, you are entitled to your own opinions and views, but not your own facts.
My impression is that the ECHR place "freedom of religion" lower than the other rights that the convention guarantees; that is if there are conflicts between the rights. As such, "freedom of speech" in general has a higher precedence than "freedom of religion". Also, the rights in the convention all have certain exceptions, meaning that laws can still regulate what you are allowed to do. For example, a person is not allowed to smoke pot by referring to his religious beliefs (in the UK, Sikhs are allowed to carry knives, but this is sort of an exception, and the right would probably not be protected by the convention, just by the UK gov); also a religion that have some sort of law that gives some the death sentence is still not allowed to carry out this, as for example the right to life is higher valued than the freedom of religion by the courts.
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What is there that prevents a rouge developer at the voting box company from adding some obfuscated code that skews the results on a national level (say, miscounting every 100 votes for party X as being for party Y)? In a paper based system, miscounts will happen, but they will be local and attacking the whole system requires a large scale conspiracy that is very difficult to hide.
Not anymore...
I would suggest the following requirements before anyone designs an electronic voting system:
1. Must allow for anonymous fair voting et.c. (standard stuff from your country's constitution)
2. Should be robust against attacks from individuals.
3. Any attack should preferably leave a trace somewhere.
4. Should a local attack occur, the results should not affect the general results.
5. Voting mechanisms (not necessarily the mathematics, but the actual counting process) must be verifiable by non domain expert. It should be possible to train up an observer in 30 minutes.
6. Voting results should be stored and be possible to be verified and recounted for some time.
It turns out that number 2 and 5 is practically impossible to do with an electronic voting machine, number 6 is also very difficult but could possibly be solved with cryptography, but not without breaking number 1 (anonymous votes). And seriously, what is the point of building an electronic system that can most likely be manipulated without anyone noticing? What is so bad in having to wait a few hours extra for the results, is democracy not worth one hour of waiting?
I suppose that the only argument would be that you can carry out public votes more often, but do people really want to move away from democracy in the direction of ochlocracy?
What may be interesting if you want to speed up the counting process is to make the ballots machine readable, still on paper though.
Hopefully, but it depends as all things about law. It is however up to the Irish high court and (ultimatelly) the ECJ to decide on whether or not the Irish laws fulfill the requirements in the relevant directives.
No they can't, the EU regulates a minimum term copyright (which for physical persons is life plus 50 or 70 IIRC). Ireland is not sued without basis, they are sued about not implementing EU law. IP legislation is primarily made by the Union; most people who are trying to do something about this understands this, especially thanks to the EUCD directive which was a fundamental wakeup call for individuals who did not previously pay attention to EU-debate.
The big mass is unfortunately still unaware and whining when their state implement directives. To branch of a bit of topic, this is partially main stream media's fault. Media has an obligation to monitor the lawmakers, but apparently they ignore their duties when it comes to the EU. You need to start reading more specialized news like EU-observer, European Voice and the like to keep up with what is actually going on. Another issue (the BBC does this right however), is that many news papers and news outlets have two sections of news; domestic and foreign. EU issues are somehow clumped into the foreign news section so people don't understand that it is actually affecting them.
I thought so to, but it turns out (if you read the article) that the suit is about that Ireland has not implemented certain items in Union legislation. Thus, a court proceeding for Ireland is entirely appropriate, especially since Union law have precedence. The court is then asked to look at whether Irish law is compliant with Union law, so the court cannot force the state to make new laws, they can however force the state to follow Union law.
For the non-european who have no idea about how it works (this is a simplified version): EU legislation can be seen as federal law, but most of the legislation (known as directives), are actually laws about that the states should make laws fulfilling a certain set of requirements. If a state does not implement "federal" directives in local legislation within the directive's implementation period, those individuals and companies that suffer some kind of damage that they would not have suffered if the law was implemented, have the right to sue the state for non compliance. This is a normal procedure; try to solve it locally at first, the next step is to take it up with the Union so they can start infringement procedures against the state. Normally, the courts would in this case ask for union level courts for an opinion of the compatibility between state and union law.
Yeah, I just saw that, however, it seems that materials to produce PCBs are levied 6.5% tariffs, I cannot find data for just a bare PCB, but I would not be surprised that the issues are the PCBs.
One of the fundamental parts of the Union is the customs union. Essentially, import tariffs are set centrally by Brussels (they are levied by the states, who pay parts of it to the EU).
So it is not that the UKs levies appears to be based on the TARIC database, they are actually identical, without changes.
The article was not clear on whether or not it was an import tariff or some tax deduction, but in the first case, the competence to change the rules lie exclusively in Brussels.
This would be a perfect, probably very cheap way for the Commission to stimulate the economy, that is by making local manufacturing cheaper. I would guess that they are aware of this and are discussing this, the article seems to suggest that at least.
The ECHR is essentially embedded in the treaties. So unlike taking the route throughout he ECHR (who cannot really sanction a state), the human rights issues should be possible to be brought up through the ECJ.
I am not sure if this has already been done for individuals yet, but a company in Belgium did down national legislation breaking the treaties' human rights sections with respect to blanket internet filtering.
They did put it in, the de-facto standard for e-mail encryption is S/MIME; essentially all e-mail clients support it (including Outlook, Apple Mail (both OS X and iOS) and Thunderbird). OpenPGP however is lacking in support and typically requires you to install various plugins.
The referendum held in 1994 approved joining the EU (and also the Euro) with a majority of 52.3 %. Just how you get that into a rejection I don't know.
This would be great, if there where no other big countries around. If you are small these days, you will just do what the big guys tell you anyhow; the independence you see is just a charade in that case.
In other words; if China was split in 20, the US in 6 and India in 20, then the need for a federated Europe would be a lot less; especially in today's globalized world. However, if you want to be realistic; it is actually the only way to ensure European independence and protect our way of life in the long run.
Just to add though, your assumption that large countries are either despotic and/or run by corps ignoring human rights is pretty faulty; you are basing this on a sample size of 3 which is not enough to draw any conclusions from. The EU for example have a different basis for its parliamentary system; one thing is that proportional representation is the general norm, the second is that governments are accountable to the parliaments in general. As such, a corrupt government is likely to be sacked very quickly; in the US the procedure to sack the president and his cabinet is very very long and complicated.
Huh? A unified Europe is run by all Europeans, not by Germany.
Confederations are associations of sovereign states. In a pure confederation, only the states will count. The citizens are not represented. As such, since the states are really sovereign, all decisions must be taken using consensus among the member states. You cannot have a pesky parliament overriding the states decisions in a confederal system since such a parliament would be super national if it would have anything to say.
A confederal parliament may exist, but they would work something like the parliamentary assemblies of the CoE or similar organization. That is, they would typically consist of MP from the member states who have as an extra task the appointment of sitting in the parliamentary assembly of the confederation. They would also only be an advising body since anything else means supra nationality.
So, with a confederal system; only the member states have anything to say, which makes them very unrepresentative for the electorate.
Now, lets introduce a parliament that is directly elected, you immediately have a super national body; if this also have real power, the member states can get their proposals overridden by the super national parliament.
A fundamental part of democracy is that the legislative bodies should be directly elected (or there should be at least one chambers that is directly elected). Otherwise, imagine that a confederal non-elected council works with or without consensus, in that case the member states are usually obliged to implement the decisions the confederation takes. The member state's directly elected parliament cannot really overrule the decisions (or there wouldn't be much a point with the confederal level anyway). So in this case, the non elected confederal council makes law without direct input from the elected legislators.
By introducing federalism in the picture you can have a supra national directly elected parliament with the right to influence legislation. The people then have their say in the rules made for the community as hey elect their federal MPs, this is democracy.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. Since May 9, 1950, the goal for the European integration path have been peace by building a federation. Currently we have more of a confederation, but with some federal attributes.
If you read the declaration, it is clear that the purpose of the Union is to federate Europe.
I for one, think this is a good thing. Confederations can by definition never be democratic.
No power is ever delegated to the (member) states from the European Union. By definition and in practice, members delegate power to the EU, not the other way around.
De jure, (but maybe not de facto, like in the EU (an american would need to clarify this)) the same is actually the case in the US as the US states are the ones that need to ratify the US constitution, the federal government cannot just change it at a whim.
In Sweden, people would vote no about joining the Euro if there was an election TODAY. This is what the polls asked; I would probably not want Sweden to join TODAY (and I am a very convinced federalist), but whenever the bugs in the system have been fixed, then yes; Sweden should join.
Polling is a very interesting thing, since you can produce different answers on the same topic by just formulating the question a bit different.
Last time I saw any numbers about popular support for a USE-like future, this was around 20% of the Swedish population (and this is not just a few "insane politicians", but rather close to 2 million citizens). I doubt that this have changed that much, though even among these very few would say they supported a conversion to the Euro in the current climate of uncertainty.
Regarding having multiple plebiscites over and over again, Sweden have done just that about the Euro. When the plebiscite about joining the EU was carried out, joining the Euro was included in the deal; despite this the government announced a second referendum, despite that the populous had already approved joining the Euro (legally, Sweden has agreed to join but stays out using a loophole). So, yes, repeating plebiscites happens, but in this case, it was in the opposite way of what you are complaining about.
Secondly, about repeating plebiscites, this is not that strange. For example, if you run something through normal parliamentary procedures; different groups / parties may want to make amendments, and they often do this. This is obviously unpractical during a plebiscite, so if the population rejects a proposal of a complicated legal text, would it not be prudent to make amendments in this case? This is exactly the reason that parliamentary democracy is so much more superior to direct democracy in every kind of way.
Federation has been the path of Europe since May 9, 1950, and it is not just a few politicians, also a sizable proportion of the citizens want this as well. It was around 20% in Sweden last time they made a large scale poll on the topic (larger among young people, so mortality will take care of the numbers in the long run), and Sweden is a rather Eurosceptic place.
Not necessarily like the US (with a very strong federal government). But in simple terms, yes we are and have since the Schuman declaration on May 9, 1950. There are many parallels though.
No, you will have proven that you cannot detect it and under the circumstances you are very sure that the teapot is not there. However, it is not a proof in a strict mathematical sense. Good enough I would say, but it is not a strict mathematical proof. Imagine that the teapot moves out of the solar system just when you start you scan and moves back when you finished it.
It may be seen as a proof of the absence of the teapot for any sane person and any physicist, but rest assured that this is not an absolutely irrefutable mathematically valid proof of the teapots absence.
Indeed, the existence of the teapot may be completely meaningless, but it does not disprove its existence. Just that you could not detect it at the time when you tried to find it.
We can also imagine that the teapot moves out of the solar system just before you conduct your scan (how, I do not know, but this is a thought experiment), after you scanned for the teapot, you conclude rightly that it was not there when you scanned for it and then suddenly the teapot magically moves back into the solar system.
No, you can only prove known properties. You cannot prove a negative. Or to rephrase, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
To take someone else's example, imagine the flying teapot in orbit some where in the solar system, you cannot disprove that it is there. However, by finding it you can prove its existence. What you can probably do is to show that it is unlikely that something exists; so unlikely that you consider that the thing does not exist. However disproving it completely is not possible. We can thus assume that a flying teapot in the orbit around jupiter does not exist, because it would be very unlikely that it did, however you cannot disprove it completelly by not finding it.
They would probably also reverse the charge, so the GP still have a valid point. The banks probably have reasonably automated systems for this. So the only one to suffer is the person who got his card stolen who have to go through all kinds of steps and waste time on reversing the charges.
In this case, even the payee will not loose on it as they seemed to be charities; and as such they don't loose anything that they sold to the person with the stolen CC when the charge is reversed.
Evolution is a scientific fact. It is an observable process. Period, end of discussion. Evolution by natural selection is however a scientific theory explaining how this evolution happens, as theories are in the scientific world, they are strongly supported by evidence; models and so on.
You may want to interpret the evidence for natural selection in different ways if you like you may even try to claim that God did it or whatever; but the process of evolution is still a fact. And as with everything else, you are entitled to your own opinions and views, but not your own facts.
My impression is that the ECHR place "freedom of religion" lower than the other rights that the convention guarantees; that is if there are conflicts between the rights. As such, "freedom of speech" in general has a higher precedence than "freedom of religion". Also, the rights in the convention all have certain exceptions, meaning that laws can still regulate what you are allowed to do. For example, a person is not allowed to smoke pot by referring to his religious beliefs (in the UK, Sikhs are allowed to carry knives, but this is sort of an exception, and the right would probably not be protected by the convention, just by the UK gov); also a religion that have some sort of law that gives some the death sentence is still not allowed to carry out this, as for example the right to life is higher valued than the freedom of religion by the courts.