Ah... yes, we want the council of ministers to make the laws, it is always better if elected lawmakers have no influence on the laws, I mean really it is just so much better if the council who have their meetings partially in secret is the only body that makes European law. Silly commission and parliament that is accountable to the citizens, we should get rid of them!
I would guess, that IF the Mac would have had been closed down from the start (only allowing App store downloads), then it would be no problems with regulators. But, since the Mac is open, they cannot close it without getting the regulators on their throats. It would indeed be market abuse, if they started to require that existing developers must go through the App Store, share 30% revenue or go bust (just see the reactions after Apple started to require that all magazine subscriptions would go through the app store, Apple have since changed those rules since it was clear that they would not be able to pull it through a court or manage to convince the EC).
Backups are also included in the private copying argument, but the rules where initially introduced to compensate for when people copied cassettes back and forth; this is still part of the reasoning behind the rules.
Copying from an alien may be legal, it depends on whether or not he is distributing to just you, or to a million people. If you meet some guy in a bar, and he decides to give you a copy of some music file he has on his mp3 player, it is probably legal, at least in most of the EU. However, if you meet the same guy at the internet and he directs you to some download site he is running, then he is making a public performance (sort of) of the song, and downloading it is probably illegal (some EU-states only ban the uploading part). The key issue is if the person giving you the music files is making it available to a greater audience.
No, those fees are to compensate for private copying (copying a song from your sibling, friend or whatever), which is legal. The odd thing with it is that they have been raising the fees, and assume that people actually copy privately to any great extent, sure it happens, but not that often... while the logics in these laws is sound, the premises used to motivate the fees are complete utter bullshit.
Seriously... NAT is not easy to configure (at least not in any of the routers I tried it). An IPv6 firewall however is dead easy, a home router typically defaults to turning off all incoming traffic to IPv6 anyhow.
The main problem is not really the current location of binaries. The main problem is that resources related to binaries are spread out all over the place. For example, a library is associated with headers (and multiple versions of the library), a desktop application (and some cli-ones), have a tone of associated resources (png-files, scripts, audio files et.c.). At present these are all spread out in various locations, i.e./usr/lib/libfoo.so,/usr/include/foo/* and/usr/share/foo/*
I would suggest that the Linux vendors adopt a model similar to the OS X bundles. Essentially, libraries would become more like OS X frameworks.
I submitted an app to the Mac App Store (a three-pane address book app for Lion named Addresses). Honestly, talking from my experience here, I already had a computer which will be the case for most people who actually can program. Essentially, the only investment was a bit time, the dev program fees of 99 $ plus 60 EUR for a web hotel (you need some place to provide support).
Unlike others, I had no expectations of this (I actually wrote the program for myself), only hoped that I would get a return on investment and that is not a very difficult task to accomplish considering the very small investments and the potential market involved. It is not like I am getting rich from the app, but I am at least making some little money from it, and it is a pure hobby project at present.
I am sure there are diluted people who put one app online and expect to earn loads of money immediately, but I would not be surprised if most apps are written by hobbyists who just see it as a fun way of earning a few extra bucks.
In principle, Sweden cannot re-extradite him without the UKs approval. Which would probably hold the same standards as a normal request to the UK. This is an absolutely ridiculous conspiracy theory that has nothing to do with reality.
In Sweden, essentially a rape-victim is not as stigmatized as in many other places. This means that a lot of people will talk about it openly. Your assumption would possible have held valid in Sweden 20 years ago, but the social climate changes.
All EU-states. Sweden has declared that they are not and cannot remain neutral when it comes to EU-members and any potential conflict they get involved in.
Normally you cannot re-extradite people, for this to happen the initial extraditor needs to approve the secondary extradition. Essentially, if Sweden would want to extradite him to the US (very unlikely), then the UK must approve such extradition.
It IS NOT apparent that someone is trying to frame him. The Swedish legislation is a bit different in this area and may cast a wider net in terms of definition of the crime than many other states do. However, IT IS STILL THE LAW, and Assange is not above it in any way.
He should be handed over based on the EAW. But, it may be said that it is absolutely ridiculous to issue an arrest warrant for having him show up for interrogation, which seems to be the case. Cheaper and more suitable would be a video link based interrogation which is by the way very common these days.
Having seen a Belgian energy bill, I can't say I fully agree. The price per kWh is not that high, however Electrabel charges something like 10 times the normal price as network connection fees. Which means that the end bill is a LOT higher than for the average European. The end result for the consumer (some of the highest bills to the electrical companies) is the same, but the devil is in the detail.
There was a very nice disclaimer though, which went something like "if alternatives can be found to replace the power plants". Without going with coal/oil (and Belgium is not very rich in hydro), there are not that many solid options. Effectively they are saying to the public that "yes we will turn them off" but in reality they are saying "yeah, we will turn them off (but you know... there are no realistic alternatives, so we will just kick the can in front of us and make a decision later)".
Why? If I would re-rip my current lossy compressed music collection, which is 15 GiB it would grow in size 3.7 times (assuming lossless compression to 55%), thus my music collection would be close to 60 GiB. That will not fit on my phone for sure.
So tell me again, why is not doing a transcode a good thing? Fair enough, in X years when all phones come with 200 GB flash drives, then I will reconsider, but for now and the upcoming few years, the argument makes no sense.
Another thing, would a transcode from FLAC/ALAC not run faster then the transfer rate of USB? If so, why do I want to wait all that extra transfer time.
There has been plenty of research showing that female voices are easier to pickup in a noisy airplane cockpit. I would not be surprised if the same holds in a car.
The BMW story really has a citation needed tag as far as I see it. A university professor, specialized in avionics told me the same thing, but about some airlines (situated in some politically and religiously conservative countries) who complained that their pilots did not want to listen to a female voice.
Essentially accuracy will be increased to sub-meter positioning enabling interesting applications such as Galileo GPS guided automatic landing. Navstar GPS also have big issues in the extreme north (and south), essentially preventing efficient use of it in northern Sweden and Finland. This is also a key improvement from Galileo.
Relative positioning using the Navstar GPS is already dead-on accurate, so don't expect that to be improved. Galileo was also designed to send reliability info, essentially telling the receivers whether they can accurately rely on the data for SOL critical tasks.
How it is done exactly, no clue! Any Galileo designer who feel to weigh in around here?
I call bull. Mostly because you can already do this with the Navstar GPS and secondly, because it would be way more cost effective to do that using terrestrial means.
Galileo GPS does not enable the uplink of data (even though the rescue channel will be supported for SOL devices, this channel already exists and is part of another satellite constellation). And besides, there is not enough bandwidth to monitor every european car from space using 1 W transmitters and low power receivers on the satellites, any monitoring of car positions would have to be done using the GSM network. This is already possible by using Navstar GPS receivers (which can pinpoint your position to within a few meters) and GSM transmitters.
Indeed, it is sensible. But the even more sensible thing would be to administer the km-tax though petrol tax as this is already implemented as part of the infrastructure and reduces the administrational overhead by only falling on the petrol sellers that are far fewer than the consumer. It is also automatically punishing cars that burn too much fuel.
And guess what, this is already done...
By the way, you don't need Galileo for km-tax. You could do this reasonably well with the GPS system or without the GPS system. Or, by placing a black box in the car that is read out when you pass a border and yearly at your car inspection (also, every car keeps track of the km driven as it is), administrationally, this is a lot easier and cheaper than placing a GPS plus cellphone device in every car.
But wait... now comes the standard objection to doing a simple system for this, what if people manipulate the system? Well, it turns out that it is easy to jam a GPS receiver, and it may also break easily. In both cases you need to check the GPS logger against the mechanical km logger that is already in the car; and the manipulation of this meter is already illegal and more cumbersome than jamming a GPS.
That is a general policy document, it does not mention the use of GPS or Galileo at all. Most of the document also only apply to freight, rail and air transport.
Some parts of the document is about personal vehicles, but there is nothing concrete mentioned except that congestion charges should not be avoided by non-local cars. Essentially they are in some cases when they are based on ANPR tech like in London and Stockholm.
The document does say the Union will develop guidelines for states that wish to implement certain measures for congestion / pollution taxes, but it does not say anything about forcing this on the member states. This is harmonization for the states that want to, not a top down directive forcing the member states to do something.
If a state want GPS-devices in cars, they can do so (though this hasn't been tried with the human right courts, I am only looking at the document itself), but the EU will not force them to. I suggest that if your state wish to implement GPS-devices, you take up the issue with your MP.
Essentially, the doc says something like this: the Union should develop rules so that if a state wish to do X, then X must comply with Y, but the Union will not force the state to do X if they do not want to.
Are you talking about the Dutch proposal? I thought it was dead after the new government came into power a year ago. In any case, with the exception of the Orwellian nightmare points this generates, it is a pointless waste of money exercise since people already pays per km by paying high petrol taxes. If the government needs the money, raise the petrol taxes! If it is to reduce car traffic, it will not be as efficient as raising petrol taxes since I see this every day. If I get a bill at the end of the month/year for my driven km, I will most likely not think of it in the meanwhile.
This will also generate huge headaches when planning your own finances, since the bills will be very difficult to forecast.
I suppose, you may want to reconsider when every single car runs on electricity, but I am not sure about whether that is needed; when that happens all that oil money that was payed to foreign powers, will stop flowing out of the country and most likely be available for local investments (assuming electricity is produced domestically).
I would really like to see some independent review of these proposals, do you know of any?
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Your proposal is called european federalism. I like it very much :)
Ah... yes, we want the council of ministers to make the laws, it is always better if elected lawmakers have no influence on the laws, I mean really it is just so much better if the council who have their meetings partially in secret is the only body that makes European law. Silly commission and parliament that is accountable to the citizens, we should get rid of them!
The Union cannot legally seize any power from the member states. The Union is formed on voluntary conferral of powers by the member states.
I would guess, that IF the Mac would have had been closed down from the start (only allowing App store downloads), then it would be no problems with regulators. But, since the Mac is open, they cannot close it without getting the regulators on their throats. It would indeed be market abuse, if they started to require that existing developers must go through the App Store, share 30% revenue or go bust (just see the reactions after Apple started to require that all magazine subscriptions would go through the app store, Apple have since changed those rules since it was clear that they would not be able to pull it through a court or manage to convince the EC).
Backups are also included in the private copying argument, but the rules where initially introduced to compensate for when people copied cassettes back and forth; this is still part of the reasoning behind the rules.
Copying from an alien may be legal, it depends on whether or not he is distributing to just you, or to a million people. If you meet some guy in a bar, and he decides to give you a copy of some music file he has on his mp3 player, it is probably legal, at least in most of the EU. However, if you meet the same guy at the internet and he directs you to some download site he is running, then he is making a public performance (sort of) of the song, and downloading it is probably illegal (some EU-states only ban the uploading part). The key issue is if the person giving you the music files is making it available to a greater audience.
No, those fees are to compensate for private copying (copying a song from your sibling, friend or whatever), which is legal. The odd thing with it is that they have been raising the fees, and assume that people actually copy privately to any great extent, sure it happens, but not that often... while the logics in these laws is sound, the premises used to motivate the fees are complete utter bullshit.
Easy firewall???
Seriously... NAT is not easy to configure (at least not in any of the routers I tried it). An IPv6 firewall however is dead easy, a home router typically defaults to turning off all incoming traffic to IPv6 anyhow.
The main problem is not really the current location of binaries. The main problem is that resources related to binaries are spread out all over the place. For example, a library is associated with headers (and multiple versions of the library), a desktop application (and some cli-ones), have a tone of associated resources (png-files, scripts, audio files et.c.). At present these are all spread out in various locations, i.e. /usr/lib/libfoo.so, /usr/include/foo/* and /usr/share/foo/*
I would suggest that the Linux vendors adopt a model similar to the OS X bundles. Essentially, libraries would become more like OS X frameworks.
I submitted an app to the Mac App Store (a three-pane address book app for Lion named Addresses). Honestly, talking from my experience here, I already had a computer which will be the case for most people who actually can program. Essentially, the only investment was a bit time, the dev program fees of 99 $ plus 60 EUR for a web hotel (you need some place to provide support).
Unlike others, I had no expectations of this (I actually wrote the program for myself), only hoped that I would get a return on investment and that is not a very difficult task to accomplish considering the very small investments and the potential market involved. It is not like I am getting rich from the app, but I am at least making some little money from it, and it is a pure hobby project at present.
I am sure there are diluted people who put one app online and expect to earn loads of money immediately, but I would not be surprised if most apps are written by hobbyists who just see it as a fun way of earning a few extra bucks.
Never blame on malice what you can on incompetence! Considering the prosecutors history, it even hints more on the incompetence side of the scale.
In principle, Sweden cannot re-extradite him without the UKs approval. Which would probably hold the same standards as a normal request to the UK. This is an absolutely ridiculous conspiracy theory that has nothing to do with reality.
In Sweden, essentially a rape-victim is not as stigmatized as in many other places. This means that a lot of people will talk about it openly. Your assumption would possible have held valid in Sweden 20 years ago, but the social climate changes.
All EU-states. Sweden has declared that they are not and cannot remain neutral when it comes to EU-members and any potential conflict they get involved in.
Normally you cannot re-extradite people, for this to happen the initial extraditor needs to approve the secondary extradition. Essentially, if Sweden would want to extradite him to the US (very unlikely), then the UK must approve such extradition.
It IS NOT apparent that someone is trying to frame him. The Swedish legislation is a bit different in this area and may cast a wider net in terms of definition of the crime than many other states do. However, IT IS STILL THE LAW, and Assange is not above it in any way.
He should be handed over based on the EAW. But, it may be said that it is absolutely ridiculous to issue an arrest warrant for having him show up for interrogation, which seems to be the case. Cheaper and more suitable would be a video link based interrogation which is by the way very common these days.
That is why they added a disclaimer in the line of (don't remember the exact details): "if we find working alternatives".
Having seen a Belgian energy bill, I can't say I fully agree. The price per kWh is not that high, however Electrabel charges something like 10 times the normal price as network connection fees. Which means that the end bill is a LOT higher than for the average European. The end result for the consumer (some of the highest bills to the electrical companies) is the same, but the devil is in the detail.
There was a very nice disclaimer though, which went something like "if alternatives can be found to replace the power plants". Without going with coal/oil (and Belgium is not very rich in hydro), there are not that many solid options. Effectively they are saying to the public that "yes we will turn them off" but in reality they are saying "yeah, we will turn them off (but you know... there are no realistic alternatives, so we will just kick the can in front of us and make a decision later)".
Why? If I would re-rip my current lossy compressed music collection, which is 15 GiB it would grow in size 3.7 times (assuming lossless compression to 55%), thus my music collection would be close to 60 GiB. That will not fit on my phone for sure.
So tell me again, why is not doing a transcode a good thing? Fair enough, in X years when all phones come with 200 GB flash drives, then I will reconsider, but for now and the upcoming few years, the argument makes no sense.
Another thing, would a transcode from FLAC/ALAC not run faster then the transfer rate of USB? If so, why do I want to wait all that extra transfer time.
There has been plenty of research showing that female voices are easier to pickup in a noisy airplane cockpit. I would not be surprised if the same holds in a car.
The BMW story really has a citation needed tag as far as I see it. A university professor, specialized in avionics told me the same thing, but about some airlines (situated in some politically and religiously conservative countries) who complained that their pilots did not want to listen to a female voice.
Essentially accuracy will be increased to sub-meter positioning enabling interesting applications such as Galileo GPS guided automatic landing. Navstar GPS also have big issues in the extreme north (and south), essentially preventing efficient use of it in northern Sweden and Finland. This is also a key improvement from Galileo.
Relative positioning using the Navstar GPS is already dead-on accurate, so don't expect that to be improved. Galileo was also designed to send reliability info, essentially telling the receivers whether they can accurately rely on the data for SOL critical tasks.
How it is done exactly, no clue! Any Galileo designer who feel to weigh in around here?
I call bull. Mostly because you can already do this with the Navstar GPS and secondly, because it would be way more cost effective to do that using terrestrial means.
Galileo GPS does not enable the uplink of data (even though the rescue channel will be supported for SOL devices, this channel already exists and is part of another satellite constellation). And besides, there is not enough bandwidth to monitor every european car from space using 1 W transmitters and low power receivers on the satellites, any monitoring of car positions would have to be done using the GSM network. This is already possible by using Navstar GPS receivers (which can pinpoint your position to within a few meters) and GSM transmitters.
Indeed, it is sensible. But the even more sensible thing would be to administer the km-tax though petrol tax as this is already implemented as part of the infrastructure and reduces the administrational overhead by only falling on the petrol sellers that are far fewer than the consumer. It is also automatically punishing cars that burn too much fuel.
And guess what, this is already done...
By the way, you don't need Galileo for km-tax. You could do this reasonably well with the GPS system or without the GPS system. Or, by placing a black box in the car that is read out when you pass a border and yearly at your car inspection (also, every car keeps track of the km driven as it is), administrationally, this is a lot easier and cheaper than placing a GPS plus cellphone device in every car.
But wait... now comes the standard objection to doing a simple system for this, what if people manipulate the system? Well, it turns out that it is easy to jam a GPS receiver, and it may also break easily. In both cases you need to check the GPS logger against the mechanical km logger that is already in the car; and the manipulation of this meter is already illegal and more cumbersome than jamming a GPS.
That is a general policy document, it does not mention the use of GPS or Galileo at all. Most of the document also only apply to freight, rail and air transport.
Some parts of the document is about personal vehicles, but there is nothing concrete mentioned except that congestion charges should not be avoided by non-local cars. Essentially they are in some cases when they are based on ANPR tech like in London and Stockholm.
The document does say the Union will develop guidelines for states that wish to implement certain measures for congestion / pollution taxes, but it does not say anything about forcing this on the member states. This is harmonization for the states that want to, not a top down directive forcing the member states to do something.
If a state want GPS-devices in cars, they can do so (though this hasn't been tried with the human right courts, I am only looking at the document itself), but the EU will not force them to. I suggest that if your state wish to implement GPS-devices, you take up the issue with your MP.
Essentially, the doc says something like this: the Union should develop rules so that if a state wish to do X, then X must comply with Y, but the Union will not force the state to do X if they do not want to.
A bit off-topic, but anyway...
Are you talking about the Dutch proposal? I thought it was dead after the new government came into power a year ago. In any case, with the exception of the Orwellian nightmare points this generates, it is a pointless waste of money exercise since people already pays per km by paying high petrol taxes. If the government needs the money, raise the petrol taxes! If it is to reduce car traffic, it will not be as efficient as raising petrol taxes since I see this every day. If I get a bill at the end of the month/year for my driven km, I will most likely not think of it in the meanwhile.
This will also generate huge headaches when planning your own finances, since the bills will be very difficult to forecast.
I suppose, you may want to reconsider when every single car runs on electricity, but I am not sure about whether that is needed; when that happens all that oil money that was payed to foreign powers, will stop flowing out of the country and most likely be available for local investments (assuming electricity is produced domestically).
I would really like to see some independent review of these proposals, do you know of any?