The EU institutions have exclusive competence over regulating competition within the EU (it is one of the very few areas where almost all of the Member State powers have been given up). The European Commission in particular has been pushing the liberalisation of formerly state-owned monopolistic services. Read more... http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/liberalisatio n/overview_en.html
I have just seen a BBC documentary series about Leonardo where they tested Leonardo's designs for a robot, a parachute, a tank, a scubasuit and a glider. It was pretty cool and there was indeed in each drawing of the machines some kind of an (intentional) error which prevented them from working in the beginning.
More about the BBC series:
http://www.open2.net/leonardo/index.htm
The power is shared among the bodies of the EU. To break it down in a simplistic way:
Commission: The only institution which has the right to initiate Community law (which also includes the right to take back the proposal if it is changed too much against their wishes). This composes of EU civil servants who in theory at least should only consider what is good for Europe as a whole and not just for the country where they are from.
Council: Member State government ministers. Documents are prepared for them by their own permanent bureaucracy (COREPER), which consists of bureaucrats from various Member State ministries. The Council is the most powerful body, it has final say in all EU legislation. Parliament: Has an increasing role, but still might be overrun by the Council (this is becoming more and more difficult and time-consuming). It is directly elected and is divided into different Europe-wide political party groups.
These institutions rarely work independently. There are semi-official consultations involving all three bodies conducted all the time.
P.S. The Estonian Minister of Economic Affairs seemed to think that the proposal he was voting on had excluded possibilities for patenting software so he voted for it.
It does not matter whether payment has been made or not prior to delivery. The delivery of the object of the contract is the most important aspect this. So what really happened here in legal terms is failure to deliver the object of the contract to the buyer. It is clearly intentional fraud.
So in terms of law the delivery of an object comes first and payment second. The scammer in this case has no obligation to pay for the powerbook because he did not get one. The scammer could have a case to get back the fees he had to pay.
A right course of action would have been to contact the anti-fraud authorities both in the US and UK so they could have picked the guy up. But now the scammer might be a few bucks short of money, but he'll have a chance to make up for it at the expense of his next victim.
I agree that Member States would have quite an issue with giving such powers to the EU. They also would lack resources to manage such a thing.
Sometimes it is quite funny to see how the EU is made up to be somekind of leviathan superstate, when in reality it is still quite weak and powerless (except maybe in antitrust issues) compared to the states.
It is the right to freely access the Internet. There are quite a large number of govt and privately sponsored free public internet access points in rural areas and in Tallinn, getting cheap and fast broadband services (Cable or ADSL) is not an issue.
All this has been achieved partly because of government who has embraced technology and also due to the mobility of the private sector (ie the soviet infrastructure was in such a bad state that everything was quickly re-built using modern techonlogies). There are several programmes which support the development of information society such as The Tiger Leap Foundation and Look@World project.
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The EU institutions have exclusive competence over regulating competition within the EU (it is one of the very few areas where almost all of the Member State powers have been given up). The European Commission in particular has been pushing the liberalisation of formerly state-owned monopolistic services. Read more... http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/liberalisatio n/overview_en.html
I have just seen a BBC documentary series about Leonardo where they tested Leonardo's designs for a robot, a parachute, a tank, a scubasuit and a glider. It was pretty cool and there was indeed in each drawing of the machines some kind of an (intentional) error which prevented them from working in the beginning. More about the BBC series: http://www.open2.net/leonardo/index.htm
The power is shared among the bodies of the EU. To break it down in a simplistic way:
Commission: The only institution which has the right to initiate Community law (which also includes the right to take back the proposal if it is changed too much against their wishes). This composes of EU civil servants who in theory at least should only consider what is good for Europe as a whole and not just for the country where they are from.
Council: Member State government ministers. Documents are prepared for them by their own permanent bureaucracy (COREPER), which consists of bureaucrats from various Member State ministries. The Council is the most powerful body, it has final say in all EU legislation.
Parliament: Has an increasing role, but still might be overrun by the Council (this is becoming more and more difficult and time-consuming). It is directly elected and is divided into different Europe-wide political party groups.
These institutions rarely work independently. There are semi-official consultations involving all three bodies conducted all the time.
P.S. The Estonian Minister of Economic Affairs seemed to think that the proposal he was voting on had excluded possibilities for patenting software so he voted for it.
It does not matter whether payment has been made or not prior to delivery. The delivery of the object of the contract is the most important aspect this. So what really happened here in legal terms is failure to deliver the object of the contract to the buyer. It is clearly intentional fraud.
So in terms of law the delivery of an object comes first and payment second. The scammer in this case has no obligation to pay for the powerbook because he did not get one. The scammer could have a case to get back the fees he had to pay.
A right course of action would have been to contact the anti-fraud authorities both in the US and UK so they could have picked the guy up. But now the scammer might be a few bucks short of money, but he'll have a chance to make up for it at the expense of his next victim.
Here in Estonia we have GPRS-based connection in trains. Haven't tried it myself, but I've been told it's quite slow and sluggish.
I agree that Member States would have quite an issue with giving such powers to the EU. They also would lack resources to manage such a thing. Sometimes it is quite funny to see how the EU is made up to be somekind of leviathan superstate, when in reality it is still quite weak and powerless (except maybe in antitrust issues) compared to the states.
It is the right to freely access the Internet. There are quite a large number of govt and privately sponsored free public internet access points in rural areas and in Tallinn, getting cheap and fast broadband services (Cable or ADSL) is not an issue. All this has been achieved partly because of government who has embraced technology and also due to the mobility of the private sector (ie the soviet infrastructure was in such a bad state that everything was quickly re-built using modern techonlogies). There are several programmes which support the development of information society such as The Tiger Leap Foundation and Look@World project.