Not to mention that promises of charitable donations are generally not enforceable. For example, see the MLK donation cases and the 'private school donation' case. Courts will generally enforce promises of charitable donation because it is against public policy to force people to give money to charities, even if they have said they would.
I wouldn't consider his offer a charitable donation. It is not a donation, but an counter-performance for a performance that was indeed made. The quality of the performance also seems adequate given the meagre reward.
I am not American, but I expect the courts here would enforce the agreement, taking into account that this attorney is definitely able to foresee the consequences of his open-ended and unilateral offer.
The EU is never going to get anywhere this way. At least one country is always going to throw a tantrum if it doesn't get its way, and it'll usually be the same one country. De Gaulle was right from the beginning; for the sake of the union, throw us out, NOW.
At least that would deal with the infamous British rebate, and that would make it far easier for the countries who pay for this charade to force some concessions on agricultural policy out of the French, who seem to be completely obsessed with making sure they get an even better deal than the British. The low net contributions of the UK and France are unfair to both the other wealthy members and the poor, new members. If they can't learn to stop being so childish to eachother, one of them should go. Geography suggests it should be the British.
The irony here being that it was the French who scuppered the EU constitution, rather than the UK (although the UK would probably have done the same, if they'd ever been given the chance.)
As a Dutchman who helped carrying the thing to its grave, I am very sorry the UK and other member states didn't proceed with referenda. This leaves us in a situation where the treaty basically cannot be renegotiated because other governments are not in a position to make any compromises with France and the Netherlands without a wish list from their own populations. Blair really helped the federalist commission, and himself, by announcing early to stop the ratification process. A no from referenda in the UK, Denmark, Sweden, and Belgium (which didn't consider a referendum because obviously a no would result) would have given some clarity about actual differences of opinion between peoples, instead of competing national interests of states.
Smaller countries need to realize that under unified economic policy, they will benifit from the wealth of the larger states more than they will suffer from less power.
The wealth of the larger states? The smaller states neighbouring larger states in the EU are already wealthier. Predatory economic and fiscal policies (Luxemburg, Switzerland, Netherlands Antilles) and other advantages from being able to use legislation as a competitive instrument are a major contributor to that wealth. A unified economic policy benefits the larger states, while the smaller states benefit mostly from not being bullied by the larger states and not having the larger states close their borders to them.
France has been demanding unified economic policy of its smaller neighbours since the 16th century, and England also has a history of war over economic injustices before it started posturing as a free trade champion.
The entertainment industry is a very specific problem. Language areas are of radically different sizes. If you sell a song or a movie to a few percent of a population that makes you a millionaire in the Anglosaxon language area, while you still need a day job in small language areas. The effect is that Anglosaxon movies for instance outcrowd local products even if people consistently prefer movies in their own language. Here in the Netherlands it is basically impossible to raise more than two million budget for a movie, even though they usually make about half of their turnover in foreign film houses (besides a guaranteed top ten position here) and they won some best foreign movie Academy Awards over the last two decades. This type of budget limits the kinds of movies you can make, and people will still go and see Hollywood movies to see more than five actors on a screen at once. This also explains why we are mainly interested in American movies involving battle, science fiction, fantasy, etc.
A 'unified economic policy' in entertainment will be perceived as opening the gates to 'cultural imperialism' completely. I believe the current combination of fees on blank media and allowing downloading through p2p tends to work in the favour of local artists because foreign products are easier to download, while the money is repartitioned based on sales and performances.
That probably comes the closest to being a simple example of what I'm talking about, though. IANE (I am not European), [..] It just makes it harder for their people, through their government, to speak or act in a solid, meaningful way.
I don't see it from that angle. This is ironic. To me the problem I signalled with the EU and its decision makers IS that they sometimes do try to act in a coherent and meaningful way while ignoring majorities in some member countries that want the EU to STFU.
There is a great moral pressure inside the council of ministers not to veto common policy because it would lead to incoherence at the European level, while at the same time the ministers often do not actually have the mandate to ignore the folks at home. There is no way of holding them accountable for ignoring the wishes of parliament in these cases except for firing them.
The same pressure is increasingly exerted at individual populations in EU member countries. We were threatened with a political crisis just short of WWIII by politicians from Brussels in the days before we killed the EU Constitution.
Re the Germans and foreign policy: the popularity of Germany inside and outside the EU is higher than ever, so they must be doing something right. I must admit I also like Germans best when they are being cute and non-threatening. At the same time Germans themselves seem not happy at all. Did this happen in the US during Clinton, when the US adopted a non-threatening posture towards the world?
We in the Netherlands in the meantime are doing something very wrong. Somehow we manage to balance getting vilified as ultraliberal baby killers (euthanasia on children, Natalee Holloway, soft drugs, etc.) by Fox in the US, and as militaristic (presence in Iraq and Afghanistan), mosque burning, constitution killing nazis in progressive circles in the EU. At the same time national pride has risen to it's highest point in decades.
I have to disagree with this. First of all, Both Bush and Kerry were moderates. Kerry was more liberal and Bush more conservative, but they are both centrists (for the US, understand that both look far right to the typical European)
Moderate left and moderate right. Still you don't get the choice between a real coalition spanning the center, and the more extreme options. It's refreshing, if only because the more extreme parties reinvent themselves during these periods.
US voter turnout was at all time records. 64% of those 18 and over voted. I know people who didn't vote, but it wasn't dissatisfaction it was disinterest. Now I'll agree this is a problem, but it isn't a problem that they would have voted if there was a choice they cared about.
Still turnouts are consistently 15-20% lower than here. Since up to 15% of the electorate here occasionally votes for irrelevant fringe parties that run with election slogans like "vote against, vote us into parliament", I will venture that this same group exists in the US and could give birth to a new major party if they could see the effects of their vote in parliament. Participation in parliament tends to make these extremists more reasonable and moderate over time, and helps their voters to discover what they want. In the US you can vote for an extremist too, but it has no effect whatsoever.
Of course, even then there is a leftover group that is simply not interested and thinks every coalition is equally good or evil. One could qualify these people as anti-democratic, but on the other hand we do have an anti-democratic calvinist/monarchist party in parliament, and they are infamous for their religiously consistent turnout (their representatives can predict their local election results by following the obituaries). They are pliable enough in parliament. This party would actually be twice as big if their women voted too, so that explains another group of non-voters;).
This Christian radical party has always been tolerated because they pose no danger to the state. They are in fact fiercely loyal to the monarch and fight any foreign invader. Only now people start to consider them a problem, because it is impossible to act on radical Islam as long as we legally tolerate them without a great amount hypocrysy.
The US system, annoying as it can be, at least gets you elected officials with a much larger representation of the population, more often. No one can suggest that having enough people to control 10 or 20% of the seats in parliment/congress is anything like a mandate from the population. But when you have a situation where an extremist group that can get a fifth or so of the votes actually has a controlling presence in the elected body, then you've got a problem.
What controlling presence? Every representative in the parliament represents the same number number of voters, and the parliament has a right of initiative. The representatives in the political middle tend to dominate regardless of size, because they are always the swing voters. That is true everywhere. Executive bodies based on coalitions are usually not elected, but appointed by either parliament or (in my case) the Crown and can be discharged the same way. No individual office holder is elected in my country. Our constitution also instructs them to 'speak with one voice' to the people. To meet this requirement they will have to make sure they have a required majority or two thirds supermajority in parliament before they bring anything there.
Don't compare a continental prime minister with a US president. They don't have similar mandates. He can do little without parliament. He can't move troops abroad etc. In our case he is not even the head of executive government. The monarch is head, and the prime minister is chairman in her absence and represents the government abroad on occasions where the presence of the monarch is ill-advised (because of even stricter 'speaks on behalf of the state' restrictions). That is preferable to a US president who happily negotiates and signs treaties he knows in advance won't fly in the US representative bodies.
These weak mandates are btw one of the primary reasons for the perceived lack of democracy in the EU. In EU councils, ministers with weak mandates at home are placed in a position where they vote on behalf of their country.
Germany's recent difficulty in choosing a new Chancellor shows the problems with parliamentary systems that give rise to numerous parties.
This problem is an accurate reflection of the outcome of the election. People withdrew support for the left coalition, without giving support to a right one. Therefore they get a center one.
In the American system, there are still numerous parties, it's just that the coalitions are permanent, and you vote for the coalitions.
The problem there is that the American people often seem to vote for a center coalition, but get a left or right one. The outcome of the last two US elections was roughly similar to the outcome of the current German election in my interpretation (accounting for the extremely low turnout in US elections, which is clearly a sign of voter dissatisfaction with the choice they get).
Both the Democrats and the Republicans represent a range of differing views that would be quite unusual in a single European political party, but to get elected in America they must present themselves as a single party. Division pretty much guarantees defeat. This tends to push both parties towards the center, which I personally regard as a good thing.
The push to the center happens everywhere. The difference is that parties being IN the center coalitions for some time tend to alienate their base and ecentually get outflanked and destroyed by a newcomer (Christians, Socialists, Social-Democrats, Greens, Conservative Liberals, Social Liberals, Fascists, etc.). This is why you find few monolithic 'conservative' and 'liberal' parties in Europe, even though they did exist everywhere in the 19th century. They died long ago.
In addition to that you can also get coalitions that are based on commonalities other than being near in the left-right axis. We recently had two left-right coalitions (SocDem, SocLib, ConsLib) excluding the Christian Democrats (moderate right) in the middle. This coalition brought us homosexual marriage, regulated euthanasia, etc. while quarreling on all the time on the economy and social security. It was the first time for us since 1945 that the Christians were ousted from power. If we had two parties, the Christian right would have been in power permanently. Now, for the first time in history, we have a clear leftwing (Soc, Green, SocDem) absolute majority in the polls. They will probably send a 'thank you' telegram to George Bush when they win the election.
This only works as long as both parties have a credible chance of getting elected. If one party becomes weak, the stronger party tends to split along ideological faultlines as the differing groups see a chance to put their own policies into action. (See the Whigs, for example.)
A comparison of political party constellations in different countries will show that replacement of political parties happens more often in countries with proportional voting.
Certainly America is a functioning democracy (and was even during the Civil War), so it has to be said that the system works in that respect. France's democratic history on the other hand is rather patchy - this is, after all, their Fifth Republic.
On the European mainland, France has the most US-like system. Why not compare to the Scandinavian and Benelux monarchies, who have been using a proportional voting system for some time without major problems? Most of them didn't even have civil wars.
The Netherlands-Belgium civil war of 1831, which did lead to successful secession, is an exception, but it is worth noting that Belgium did keep using a very similar organization of the state and the same voting system.
America has become a corporatocracy. The bankruptcy and energy bills are only two recent examples of legislation passed for corporate benefit and public detriment.
Why the neologism? Is this system substantially different from Mussolini's Corporatism aka Economic Fascism? To me this describes any political system that disconnects economic 'national interests' from the private interests of the majority of citizens that make up the national economy.
Communism nationalizes big industry, and Fascism jumps into bed with big industry. Corporations run the state, or the state runs the corporations. Both are faces of the same coin: the same kind of people are in charge. You don't make a free market by letting industrial policy be dictated by captains of industry.
Fortunately, there is not now (and never will be) a shortage of places to dump our trash, and recycling anything other than aluminum is a complete waste of time and energy anyway.
We burn most of the clean trash (producing energy for heating homes) and ship toxic stuff to Belgium, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Lots of places to dump over there, but the economics of doing that works out differently for us. Not exporting it is very expensive in a densely populated and already very polluted country. We already live on top of meters of human waste from the past and have to dispose of huge amounts of toxic dredging sludge from the great rivers (with thanks to our upstream neighbours) and part of the 80 million metric tons of dung we produce every year and cannot use on our already excessively 'fertile' soil. The point of recycling is to reduce the amount we have to export and increase the average value of what we export by sorting and processing it so that we have to pay less.
It is economically viable to do so because the trash has a high negative value for us to start with, because we have too much of it and too little land. In addition to that we have to import almost every basic resource, including soil, stone, and wood. We are the world's biggest importer of (clean) soil for construction. Shipping stuff with a low or negative value to or from other continents is relatively expensive. The US has huge economic advantages in that it is more autonomous in resources and has huge reserves of cheap land.
The vending machine companies are some of the biggest boosters of replacing the paper dollar with a dollar coin. They know it is psychologically much easier for people to part with their "chicken feed" than to spend folding money.
Switching to larger or smaller denomination coins does seem to have psychological effects for a few years apparently. I heard Italians complain of how they spend the 1 and 2 euro coins too easily, while we in the Netherlands would have preferred also having 5 euro coins (as we already had fives, and would have moved to ten coins at some point). To me using paper for denominations like $1 buying you 15 minutes on a parking meter is weird. You would have to take huge amounts of quarters to park for a day. To me coins simply signify hard, Northern European currency and bills signify soft, Southern European currency.
The issue is becoming irrelevant anyway since parking meters and vending machines increasingly only accept bank cards, which signify the receding state and the disintegration of national identity.
Wow...where do you live where you have to sort all the shit?
In a small town in the Netherlands. It makes a difference where you live. In urban areas like Amsterdam (where people don't have gardens) you generally only sort paper, glass, textiles, and the chemical/toxic stuff (and even then people keep throwing stuff like batteries into general purpose bags). They also don't use containers because the streets are too narrow.
In practice you throw things like tea bags into the general purpose container, of course. I make a trip to the municipal sorting center about once a month to dispose of electronic equipment, paper, and construction materials; I can't possibly fit the amount of garbage we produce into the standard size household containers issued by the municipality.
Rumour has it that all this sorting hardly works for the recycling industry. Besides willingness, correct sorting requires knowledge of packaging materials. I think the real purpose of this sorting business is to make you produce less garbage, but the Netherlands is too small a market to pressure manufacturers into using less packaging. I do leave pointless layers of packaging materials behind in the shop and always take my own bag, and I certainly will try to return goods with RFID chips as 'electronic equipment' to shops.
Glad I live where I do...you throw everything away in one big trash container
Fortunately Euro coins are available in denominations up to 400 euros (the Spanish gold Don Quichote). Unfortunately denominations above 2 euros are usually rare - and therefore more valuable than the denomination - and nobody recognizes them.
Dutch 5 euro Peace and Freedom series and 10 euro Queen Beatrix 25 years Reign series coins are still 5 and 10 euros, respectively. I am going to start collecting coins.
1. Paper is the blue bag 2. Glass Bottle must be brought back to the shop. 3. cans and plastic in the Blue Bag 4. Black bag for other waste... and now, after sorting all this, think about EMP the bag.
That's not the way! I will give an example. Proper procedure of disposing of a tea bag with embedded RFID tag:
1. the bag and the label go in the paper container (blue in your case); 2. the tea goes into the green container; 3. the rope goes into the textiles container at the supermarket; 4. the metal staple goes with scrap metal, to be taken to the municipal garbage sorting center; 5. the rfid tag goes into the small chemical garbage container at the supermarket.
This is assuming that separating scrap metal (?) from an RFID chip would be as difficult as separating the plastic, paper, and metal in tetrapak (which goes into the general purpose grey container, and btw happens to be a great water proof, light weight, and heat isolating building material).
There is an even better alternative.
Technically speaking the shops in the EU are required to take old electronics back when you buy a replacement, so you can also save up the tea bags and give them to the cashier when you buy a new box of tea bags. You can get rid of all of your garbage with RFID chips in this convenient way, and inconvenience the manufacturers at the same time without any extra effort!
If not and you have 2 children and a cat, you may be thinking hiring a project manager.
I do think you need to hire someone who knows what he is doing, if you don't mind me saying it.
Looking at the way the **AA are carpet-bombing all and sundry with outree requests in support of their business model - in the hope that the odd one will stick - once RFID tech is used widly, I foresee a future where first major brands, then other retailers and law enforcement will be making similar requests, more or less "because it's technically possible".
That makes sense. The most basic tests for legislative drafting we use here in the Netherlands are: 1) it is possible to comply efficiently (= without disproportionate economic side-effects), and 2) compliance is effectively and efficiently enforceable. That's why minor immorality like softdrugs and prostitution are 'tolerated', and capital gains tax is for instance charged on a fictional gain of 4% instead of the actual amount which is too easy to misrepresent. Many of our small liberties are based on little more than lack of enforceability. Off-topic sneer: the US legislator doesn't have a reputation of taking enforceability very seriously.
We need fundamental debate on privacy, copyright and fair use, patents etc. instead of complaining how the new regimes are more restrictive than the old ones like most critics do. That has never been a valid argument. We need to face the fact that the majority of the population would happily prohibit anything they don't do, like, or understand if it can be done efficiently without too much inconvenience to them. The tolerance (or should I call it political correctness?) taught by the 17th century religious wars and WWII seems to be wearing off again.
Let them create their own closed networks then vai for a "trust" relationship to ours. Problem solved.
That is more or less what is happening. The world "creates a network" and the US can opt to be part of it by merely reconfiguring its DNS servers. The US has no claim to network infrastructure in the rest of the world, and the communication protocols are in the public domain.
Even if the US and the rest of the world would disconnect their Internets, most users would actually hardly notice. Search engines, newspapers, universities, Slashdot, etc. would obviously want to be on both Internets, and email across the boundaries would have to use some kind of remailer. It's awkward, but not a great technical challenge.
The U.N. is a front for corruption and a tolerator or terrorism. The EU is just trying to be relevant.
the right of assembly means nothing if it is only about physical proximity and not about communication of information during the congregation
The right of assembly is only meaningful in the context of freedom of expression, and that right does not cover exchanging copies of someone else's expression without permission, unless in the public interest. It is not uncommon to prohibit specific instruments, attempts, conspiracies, and criminal organization. Criminal organizations don't have a right of assembly. I agree this attitude to copyright is wrong, but Finland is not restricting human rights in ways that are unacceptable to most people or most countries.
Your rationalization fails the laugh test. If that kind of arbitrary limit on assembly were allowed then there would be no teeth to the article at all.
Treaties obviously have no teeth (except where they are used by a country as an excuse to attack another one). Rights are useful to the extent that they have to be restricted explicitly by law. The right only means that exercising the right, as a substantive fact, is not illegal (a strong permission) and that there should be some legal way of exercising the right (to vote for instance; the protective perimeter). Absolute rights are just political rhetoric.
In combination with other arbitrary facts exercising the right can be illegal: no assembly obstructing traffic (unless you have a license), no criminal organization, etc. Freedom of speech can be restricted in front of minors (for indecency), in commercial advertising (no advertising for pharmaceuticals), because of its insulting or libelous content, etc. It also does not give you permission to start a radio station without a license, for instance. You are free to express your opinions, but not anytime, to anyone, or by any means. You can also only exercise the right (to vote) in compliance with any legal procedures devised for that purpose.
We have all of the above restrictions in the Netherlands, and (fortunately) a pretty transparent constitution (compared to the vague and ambigous US one anyway) that in most cases explicitly states for what reasons basic rights can be cancelled. Since Finland and the Netherlands both usually rank very high in freedom ratings (example), we can safely assume that other countries do not interpret rights in a more comprehensive way in legal practice.
Notably, the Netherlands and Finland are also the only two Western countries with a written constitution, as far as I know, that have no form of constitutional review whatsoever. The constitution doesn't really seem to make a substantial difference. Prosperity and social peace creates freedom and democracy, and poverty and strife creates slavery and tyrrany.
This actually makes me glad to be an american... for the first time in a while...
Why? Because the current US government's inefficiency somehow makes up for it's destructiveness? The US government is moving in the same direction; It just takes it longer to get there.
Social Security cards Driver's licenses Recent photos, head only and full body (clothed!) Passports Contact info of relatives, friends Vehicle registration Birth certificates Wedding license Property deeds Will Living will Account and contact information: banks, credit cards, utilities, insurance (health, house, car), mortgages, loans
Make sure you insure yourself with an insurance company with little exposure to the disaster. Japanese maybe? Mortgage and loans on the other hand should be only with local banks that will go out of business.
Since I live in the Netherlands, which is a small country and largely below sea-level, and I have no family above sea level at all, I will fake an identity with lots of German and Scandinavian ancestors. I also have an inflatable boat and a 1 bar hand pump on the attic, and a bow and arrows (no guns allowed here). Taking some dead children floating around with me on the boat and pretending they are my own will make me more cuddly. I will destroy any photos and information identifying me before I leave. I don't think I will need a USB stick. I will only take my MP3 player with some German audiobooks on it.
For all that is wrong with court, it can be a good way to ask your enemies questions so that they have to answer.
Indeed. They will have to explain in a non-technical way to the judge that they did not in fact "enter" the computer, but only gathered some information floating around on the internet relating an IP address (which purportedly identifies Ms. Anderson) to certain (descriptions of) copyright-protected files. In doing so their case against Ms. Anderson will hopefully fall apart, which would be a great service to P2P IF the case ends up in the relevant case law search engines.
Hook up your UPS to a two 70AH car batteries and let it run unplugged at full-load for an hour, it will be hotter. I read many stories about UPSes overheating or even catching fire when run for too long beyond what their stock batteries would normally allow at full-load.
Does this only apply to the kind of situation you get when you for instance have solar panels hooked up to the UPS during a blackout, or also to seriously oversizing your ups (for instance 1500VA for a laptop) for extended time?
My UPS is only used for occasional voltage drops of less than a second now. I have been looking for a cheap emergency backup though (not involving gas; Katrina lesson). Hooking up solar panels and a bicycle generator to the UPS in some way is exactly what I had in mind.
I doubt the power supply would last very long running at 500 W for any extended period of time..
I doubt it is possible to get even near 500W with actual computer equipment connected to the power supply. You need to get the configuration exactly right to reproduce that number.
It's either that or alter the form factor of the powersupply by removing it from the console box. Probably combining it with an UPS and just use the extra area to properly disperse the heat, replacing the powersuppy box with an empty box that takes DC in and splits it up properly (just wires).
I vote for this option. I have a huge fanless UPS that is not even warm to the touch. Why do I need this hot "power supply" next to my CPU inside the computer, when the UPS could output DC and easily disperse the heat? Laptops and mini-ITX already use external bricks. For big computers we simply need bigger bricks.
It is not difficult to be funny, but I will grant that it is difficult to understand natives' humor, or to be funny in the same way they are. Humor is often based on subtle word meanings, and therefore requires a deep understanding of the language.
You are right, of course. There is another way of being funny in front of a native audience. In a meeting of all non-native speakers where English is the lingua franca it is more difficult to break the ice. The joke can get lost on the side of the speaker and the side of the listener. As a lecturer it is also more difficult to be entertaining.
I did succeed in making some +5 funny comments in the past in this forum. I am really proud of those.
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Not to mention that promises of charitable donations are generally not enforceable. For example, see the MLK donation cases and the 'private school donation' case. Courts will generally enforce promises of charitable donation because it is against public policy to force people to give money to charities, even if they have said they would.
I wouldn't consider his offer a charitable donation. It is not a donation, but an counter-performance for a performance that was indeed made. The quality of the performance also seems adequate given the meagre reward.
I am not American, but I expect the courts here would enforce the agreement, taking into account that this attorney is definitely able to foresee the consequences of his open-ended and unilateral offer.
The EU is never going to get anywhere this way. At least one country is always going to throw a tantrum if it doesn't get its way, and it'll usually be the same one country. De Gaulle was right from the beginning; for the sake of the union, throw us out, NOW.
At least that would deal with the infamous British rebate, and that would make it far easier for the countries who pay for this charade to force some concessions on agricultural policy out of the French, who seem to be completely obsessed with making sure they get an even better deal than the British. The low net contributions of the UK and France are unfair to both the other wealthy members and the poor, new members. If they can't learn to stop being so childish to eachother, one of them should go. Geography suggests it should be the British.
The irony here being that it was the French who scuppered the EU constitution, rather than the UK (although the UK would probably have done the same, if they'd ever been given the chance.)
As a Dutchman who helped carrying the thing to its grave, I am very sorry the UK and other member states didn't proceed with referenda. This leaves us in a situation where the treaty basically cannot be renegotiated because other governments are not in a position to make any compromises with France and the Netherlands without a wish list from their own populations. Blair really helped the federalist commission, and himself, by announcing early to stop the ratification process. A no from referenda in the UK, Denmark, Sweden, and Belgium (which didn't consider a referendum because obviously a no would result) would have given some clarity about actual differences of opinion between peoples, instead of competing national interests of states.
Smaller countries need to realize that under unified economic policy, they will benifit from the wealth of the larger states more than they will suffer from less power.
The wealth of the larger states? The smaller states neighbouring larger states in the EU are already wealthier. Predatory economic and fiscal policies (Luxemburg, Switzerland, Netherlands Antilles) and other advantages from being able to use legislation as a competitive instrument are a major contributor to that wealth. A unified economic policy benefits the larger states, while the smaller states benefit mostly from not being bullied by the larger states and not having the larger states close their borders to them.
France has been demanding unified economic policy of its smaller neighbours since the 16th century, and England also has a history of war over economic injustices before it started posturing as a free trade champion.
The entertainment industry is a very specific problem. Language areas are of radically different sizes. If you sell a song or a movie to a few percent of a population that makes you a millionaire in the Anglosaxon language area, while you still need a day job in small language areas. The effect is that Anglosaxon movies for instance outcrowd local products even if people consistently prefer movies in their own language. Here in the Netherlands it is basically impossible to raise more than two million budget for a movie, even though they usually make about half of their turnover in foreign film houses (besides a guaranteed top ten position here) and they won some best foreign movie Academy Awards over the last two decades. This type of budget limits the kinds of movies you can make, and people will still go and see Hollywood movies to see more than five actors on a screen at once. This also explains why we are mainly interested in American movies involving battle, science fiction, fantasy, etc.
A 'unified economic policy' in entertainment will be perceived as opening the gates to 'cultural imperialism' completely. I believe the current combination of fees on blank media and allowing downloading through p2p tends to work in the favour of local artists because foreign products are easier to download, while the money is repartitioned based on sales and performances.
That probably comes the closest to being a simple example of what I'm talking about, though. IANE (I am not European), [..] It just makes it harder for their people, through their government, to speak or act in a solid, meaningful way.
I don't see it from that angle. This is ironic. To me the problem I signalled with the EU and its decision makers IS that they sometimes do try to act in a coherent and meaningful way while ignoring majorities in some member countries that want the EU to STFU.
There is a great moral pressure inside the council of ministers not to veto common policy because it would lead to incoherence at the European level, while at the same time the ministers often do not actually have the mandate to ignore the folks at home. There is no way of holding them accountable for ignoring the wishes of parliament in these cases except for firing them.
The same pressure is increasingly exerted at individual populations in EU member countries. We were threatened with a political crisis just short of WWIII by politicians from Brussels in the days before we killed the EU Constitution.
Re the Germans and foreign policy: the popularity of Germany inside and outside the EU is higher than ever, so they must be doing something right. I must admit I also like Germans best when they are being cute and non-threatening. At the same time Germans themselves seem not happy at all. Did this happen in the US during Clinton, when the US adopted a non-threatening posture towards the world?
We in the Netherlands in the meantime are doing something very wrong. Somehow we manage to balance getting vilified as ultraliberal baby killers (euthanasia on children, Natalee Holloway, soft drugs, etc.) by Fox in the US, and as militaristic (presence in Iraq and Afghanistan), mosque burning, constitution killing nazis in progressive circles in the EU. At the same time national pride has risen to it's highest point in decades.
I have to disagree with this. First of all, Both Bush and Kerry were moderates. Kerry was more liberal and Bush more conservative, but they are both centrists (for the US, understand that both look far right to the typical European)
;).
Moderate left and moderate right. Still you don't get the choice between a real coalition spanning the center, and the more extreme options. It's refreshing, if only because the more extreme parties reinvent themselves during these periods.
US voter turnout was at all time records. 64% of those 18 and over voted. I know people who didn't vote, but it wasn't dissatisfaction it was disinterest. Now I'll agree this is a problem, but it isn't a problem that they would have voted if there was a choice they cared about.
Still turnouts are consistently 15-20% lower than here. Since up to 15% of the electorate here occasionally votes for irrelevant fringe parties that run with election slogans like "vote against, vote us into parliament", I will venture that this same group exists in the US and could give birth to a new major party if they could see the effects of their vote in parliament. Participation in parliament tends to make these extremists more reasonable and moderate over time, and helps their voters to discover what they want. In the US you can vote for an extremist too, but it has no effect whatsoever.
Of course, even then there is a leftover group that is simply not interested and thinks every coalition is equally good or evil. One could qualify these people as anti-democratic, but on the other hand we do have an anti-democratic calvinist/monarchist party in parliament, and they are infamous for their religiously consistent turnout (their representatives can predict their local election results by following the obituaries). They are pliable enough in parliament. This party would actually be twice as big if their women voted too, so that explains another group of non-voters
This Christian radical party has always been tolerated because they pose no danger to the state. They are in fact fiercely loyal to the monarch and fight any foreign invader. Only now people start to consider them a problem, because it is impossible to act on radical Islam as long as we legally tolerate them without a great amount hypocrysy.
The US system, annoying as it can be, at least gets you elected officials with a much larger representation of the population, more often. No one can suggest that having enough people to control 10 or 20% of the seats in parliment/congress is anything like a mandate from the population. But when you have a situation where an extremist group that can get a fifth or so of the votes actually has a controlling presence in the elected body, then you've got a problem.
What controlling presence? Every representative in the parliament represents the same number number of voters, and the parliament has a right of initiative. The representatives in the political middle tend to dominate regardless of size, because they are always the swing voters. That is true everywhere. Executive bodies based on coalitions are usually not elected, but appointed by either parliament or (in my case) the Crown and can be discharged the same way. No individual office holder is elected in my country. Our constitution also instructs them to 'speak with one voice' to the people. To meet this requirement they will have to make sure they have a required majority or two thirds supermajority in parliament before they bring anything there.
Don't compare a continental prime minister with a US president. They don't have similar mandates. He can do little without parliament. He can't move troops abroad etc. In our case he is not even the head of executive government. The monarch is head, and the prime minister is chairman in her absence and represents the government abroad on occasions where the presence of the monarch is ill-advised (because of even stricter 'speaks on behalf of the state' restrictions). That is preferable to a US president who happily negotiates and signs treaties he knows in advance won't fly in the US representative bodies.
These weak mandates are btw one of the primary reasons for the perceived lack of democracy in the EU. In EU councils, ministers with weak mandates at home are placed in a position where they vote on behalf of their country.
Germany's recent difficulty in choosing a new Chancellor shows the problems with parliamentary systems that give rise to numerous parties.
This problem is an accurate reflection of the outcome of the election. People withdrew support for the left coalition, without giving support to a right one. Therefore they get a center one.
In the American system, there are still numerous parties, it's just that the coalitions are permanent, and you vote for the coalitions.
The problem there is that the American people often seem to vote for a center coalition, but get a left or right one. The outcome of the last two US elections was roughly similar to the outcome of the current German election in my interpretation (accounting for the extremely low turnout in US elections, which is clearly a sign of voter dissatisfaction with the choice they get).
Both the Democrats and the Republicans represent a range of differing views that would be quite unusual in a single European political party, but to get elected in America they must present themselves as a single party. Division pretty much guarantees defeat. This tends to push both parties towards the center, which I personally regard as a good thing.
The push to the center happens everywhere. The difference is that parties being IN the center coalitions for some time tend to alienate their base and ecentually get outflanked and destroyed by a newcomer (Christians, Socialists, Social-Democrats, Greens, Conservative Liberals, Social Liberals, Fascists, etc.). This is why you find few monolithic 'conservative' and 'liberal' parties in Europe, even though they did exist everywhere in the 19th century. They died long ago.
In addition to that you can also get coalitions that are based on commonalities other than being near in the left-right axis. We recently had two left-right coalitions (SocDem, SocLib, ConsLib) excluding the Christian Democrats (moderate right) in the middle. This coalition brought us homosexual marriage, regulated euthanasia, etc. while quarreling on all the time on the economy and social security. It was the first time for us since 1945 that the Christians were ousted from power. If we had two parties, the Christian right would have been in power permanently. Now, for the first time in history, we have a clear leftwing (Soc, Green, SocDem) absolute majority in the polls. They will probably send a 'thank you' telegram to George Bush when they win the election.
This only works as long as both parties have a credible chance of getting elected. If one party becomes weak, the stronger party tends to split along ideological faultlines as the differing groups see a chance to put their own policies into action. (See the Whigs, for example.)
A comparison of political party constellations in different countries will show that replacement of political parties happens more often in countries with proportional voting.
Certainly America is a functioning democracy (and was even during the Civil War), so it has to be said that the system works in that respect. France's democratic history on the other hand is rather patchy - this is, after all, their Fifth Republic.
On the European mainland, France has the most US-like system. Why not compare to the Scandinavian and Benelux monarchies, who have been using a proportional voting system for some time without major problems? Most of them didn't even have civil wars.
The Netherlands-Belgium civil war of 1831, which did lead to successful secession, is an exception, but it is worth noting that Belgium did keep using a very similar organization of the state and the same voting system.
America has become a corporatocracy. The bankruptcy and energy bills are only two recent examples of legislation passed for corporate benefit and public detriment.
Why the neologism? Is this system substantially different from Mussolini's Corporatism aka Economic Fascism? To me this describes any political system that disconnects economic 'national interests' from the private interests of the majority of citizens that make up the national economy.
Communism nationalizes big industry, and Fascism jumps into bed with big industry. Corporations run the state, or the state runs the corporations. Both are faces of the same coin: the same kind of people are in charge. You don't make a free market by letting industrial policy be dictated by captains of industry.
Fortunately, there is not now (and never will be) a shortage of places to dump our trash, and recycling anything other than aluminum is a complete waste of time and energy anyway.
We burn most of the clean trash (producing energy for heating homes) and ship toxic stuff to Belgium, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Lots of places to dump over there, but the economics of doing that works out differently for us. Not exporting it is very expensive in a densely populated and already very polluted country. We already live on top of meters of human waste from the past and have to dispose of huge amounts of toxic dredging sludge from the great rivers (with thanks to our upstream neighbours) and part of the 80 million metric tons of dung we produce every year and cannot use on our already excessively 'fertile' soil. The point of recycling is to reduce the amount we have to export and increase the average value of what we export by sorting and processing it so that we have to pay less.
It is economically viable to do so because the trash has a high negative value for us to start with, because we have too much of it and too little land. In addition to that we have to import almost every basic resource, including soil, stone, and wood. We are the world's biggest importer of (clean) soil for construction. Shipping stuff with a low or negative value to or from other continents is relatively expensive. The US has huge economic advantages in that it is more autonomous in resources and has huge reserves of cheap land.
The vending machine companies are some of the biggest boosters of replacing the paper dollar with a dollar coin. They know it is psychologically much easier for people to part with their "chicken feed" than to spend folding money.
Switching to larger or smaller denomination coins does seem to have psychological effects for a few years apparently. I heard Italians complain of how they spend the 1 and 2 euro coins too easily, while we in the Netherlands would have preferred also having 5 euro coins (as we already had fives, and would have moved to ten coins at some point). To me using paper for denominations like $1 buying you 15 minutes on a parking meter is weird. You would have to take huge amounts of quarters to park for a day. To me coins simply signify hard, Northern European currency and bills signify soft, Southern European currency.
The issue is becoming irrelevant anyway since parking meters and vending machines increasingly only accept bank cards, which signify the receding state and the disintegration of national identity.
Wow...where do you live where you have to sort all the shit?
In a small town in the Netherlands. It makes a difference where you live. In urban areas like Amsterdam (where people don't have gardens) you generally only sort paper, glass, textiles, and the chemical/toxic stuff (and even then people keep throwing stuff like batteries into general purpose bags). They also don't use containers because the streets are too narrow.
In practice you throw things like tea bags into the general purpose container, of course. I make a trip to the municipal sorting center about once a month to dispose of electronic equipment, paper, and construction materials; I can't possibly fit the amount of garbage we produce into the standard size household containers issued by the municipality.
Rumour has it that all this sorting hardly works for the recycling industry. Besides willingness, correct sorting requires knowledge of packaging materials. I think the real purpose of this sorting business is to make you produce less garbage, but the Netherlands is too small a market to pressure manufacturers into using less packaging. I do leave pointless layers of packaging materials behind in the shop and always take my own bag, and I certainly will try to return goods with RFID chips as 'electronic equipment' to shops.
Glad I live where I do...you throw everything away in one big trash container
Even glass and paper?
Fortunately Euro coins are available in denominations up to 400 euros (the Spanish gold Don Quichote). Unfortunately denominations above 2 euros are usually rare - and therefore more valuable than the denomination - and nobody recognizes them.
Dutch 5 euro Peace and Freedom series and 10 euro Queen Beatrix 25 years Reign series coins are still 5 and 10 euros, respectively. I am going to start collecting coins.
1. Paper is the blue bag ...
2. Glass Bottle must be brought back to the shop.
3. cans and plastic in the Blue Bag
4. Black bag for other waste
and now, after sorting all this, think about EMP the bag.
That's not the way! I will give an example. Proper procedure of disposing of a tea bag with embedded RFID tag:
1. the bag and the label go in the paper container (blue in your case);
2. the tea goes into the green container;
3. the rope goes into the textiles container at the supermarket;
4. the metal staple goes with scrap metal, to be taken to the municipal garbage sorting center;
5. the rfid tag goes into the small chemical garbage container at the supermarket.
This is assuming that separating scrap metal (?) from an RFID chip would be as difficult as separating the plastic, paper, and metal in tetrapak (which goes into the general purpose grey container, and btw happens to be a great water proof, light weight, and heat isolating building material).
There is an even better alternative.
Technically speaking the shops in the EU are required to take old electronics back when you buy a replacement, so you can also save up the tea bags and give them to the cashier when you buy a new box of tea bags. You can get rid of all of your garbage with RFID chips in this convenient way, and inconvenience the manufacturers at the same time without any extra effort!
If not and you have 2 children and a cat, you may be thinking hiring a project manager.
I do think you need to hire someone who knows what he is doing, if you don't mind me saying it.
Looking at the way the **AA are carpet-bombing all and sundry with outree requests in support of their business model - in the hope that the odd one will stick - once RFID tech is used widly, I foresee a future where first major brands, then other retailers and law enforcement will be making similar requests, more or less "because it's technically possible".
That makes sense. The most basic tests for legislative drafting we use here in the Netherlands are: 1) it is possible to comply efficiently (= without disproportionate economic side-effects), and 2) compliance is effectively and efficiently enforceable. That's why minor immorality like softdrugs and prostitution are 'tolerated', and capital gains tax is for instance charged on a fictional gain of 4% instead of the actual amount which is too easy to misrepresent. Many of our small liberties are based on little more than lack of enforceability. Off-topic sneer: the US legislator doesn't have a reputation of taking enforceability very seriously.
We need fundamental debate on privacy, copyright and fair use, patents etc. instead of complaining how the new regimes are more restrictive than the old ones like most critics do. That has never been a valid argument. We need to face the fact that the majority of the population would happily prohibit anything they don't do, like, or understand if it can be done efficiently without too much inconvenience to them. The tolerance (or should I call it political correctness?) taught by the 17th century religious wars and WWII seems to be wearing off again.
Let them create their own closed networks then vai for a "trust" relationship to ours. Problem solved.
That is more or less what is happening. The world "creates a network" and the US can opt to be part of it by merely reconfiguring its DNS servers. The US has no claim to network infrastructure in the rest of the world, and the communication protocols are in the public domain.
Even if the US and the rest of the world would disconnect their Internets, most users would actually hardly notice. Search engines, newspapers, universities, Slashdot, etc. would obviously want to be on both Internets, and email across the boundaries would have to use some kind of remailer. It's awkward, but not a great technical challenge.
The U.N. is a front for corruption and a tolerator or terrorism. The EU is just trying to be relevant.
But the world trusts them more than the US.
the right of assembly means nothing if it is only about physical proximity and not about communication of information during the congregation
The right of assembly is only meaningful in the context of freedom of expression, and that right does not cover exchanging copies of someone else's expression without permission, unless in the public interest. It is not uncommon to prohibit specific instruments, attempts, conspiracies, and criminal organization. Criminal organizations don't have a right of assembly. I agree this attitude to copyright is wrong, but Finland is not restricting human rights in ways that are unacceptable to most people or most countries.
Your rationalization fails the laugh test. If that kind of arbitrary limit on assembly were allowed then there would be no teeth to the article at all.
Treaties obviously have no teeth (except where they are used by a country as an excuse to attack another one). Rights are useful to the extent that they have to be restricted explicitly by law. The right only means that exercising the right, as a substantive fact, is not illegal (a strong permission) and that there should be some legal way of exercising the right (to vote for instance; the protective perimeter). Absolute rights are just political rhetoric.
In combination with other arbitrary facts exercising the right can be illegal: no assembly obstructing traffic (unless you have a license), no criminal organization, etc. Freedom of speech can be restricted in front of minors (for indecency), in commercial advertising (no advertising for pharmaceuticals), because of its insulting or libelous content, etc. It also does not give you permission to start a radio station without a license, for instance. You are free to express your opinions, but not anytime, to anyone, or by any means. You can also only exercise the right (to vote) in compliance with any legal procedures devised for that purpose.
We have all of the above restrictions in the Netherlands, and (fortunately) a pretty transparent constitution (compared to the vague and ambigous US one anyway) that in most cases explicitly states for what reasons basic rights can be cancelled. Since Finland and the Netherlands both usually rank very high in freedom ratings (example), we can safely assume that other countries do not interpret rights in a more comprehensive way in legal practice.
Notably, the Netherlands and Finland are also the only two Western countries with a written constitution, as far as I know, that have no form of constitutional review whatsoever. The constitution doesn't really seem to make a substantial difference. Prosperity and social peace creates freedom and democracy, and poverty and strife creates slavery and tyrrany.
This actually makes me glad to be an american... for the first time in a while...
Why? Because the current US government's inefficiency somehow makes up for it's destructiveness? The US government is moving in the same direction; It just takes it longer to get there.
Social Security cards
Driver's licenses
Recent photos, head only and full body (clothed!)
Passports
Contact info of relatives, friends
Vehicle registration
Birth certificates
Wedding license
Property deeds
Will
Living will
Account and contact information: banks, credit cards, utilities, insurance (health, house, car), mortgages, loans
Make sure you insure yourself with an insurance company with little exposure to the disaster. Japanese maybe? Mortgage and loans on the other hand should be only with local banks that will go out of business.
Since I live in the Netherlands, which is a small country and largely below sea-level, and I have no family above sea level at all, I will fake an identity with lots of German and Scandinavian ancestors. I also have an inflatable boat and a 1 bar hand pump on the attic, and a bow and arrows (no guns allowed here). Taking some dead children floating around with me on the boat and pretending they are my own will make me more cuddly. I will destroy any photos and information identifying me before I leave. I don't think I will need a USB stick. I will only take my MP3 player with some German audiobooks on it.
For all that is wrong with court, it can be a good way to ask your enemies questions so that they have to answer.
Indeed. They will have to explain in a non-technical way to the judge that they did not in fact "enter" the computer, but only gathered some information floating around on the internet relating an IP address (which purportedly identifies Ms. Anderson) to certain (descriptions of) copyright-protected files. In doing so their case against Ms. Anderson will hopefully fall apart, which would be a great service to P2P IF the case ends up in the relevant case law search engines.
Hook up your UPS to a two 70AH car batteries and let it run unplugged at full-load for an hour, it will be hotter. I read many stories about UPSes overheating or even catching fire when run for too long beyond what their stock batteries would normally allow at full-load.
Does this only apply to the kind of situation you get when you for instance have solar panels hooked up to the UPS during a blackout, or also to seriously oversizing your ups (for instance 1500VA for a laptop) for extended time?
My UPS is only used for occasional voltage drops of less than a second now. I have been looking for a cheap emergency backup though (not involving gas; Katrina lesson). Hooking up solar panels and a bicycle generator to the UPS in some way is exactly what I had in mind.
I doubt the power supply would last very long running at 500 W for any extended period of time..
I doubt it is possible to get even near 500W with actual computer equipment connected to the power supply. You need to get the configuration exactly right to reproduce that number.
It's either that or alter the form factor of the powersupply by removing it from the console box. Probably combining it with an UPS and just use the extra area to properly disperse the heat, replacing the powersuppy box with an empty box that takes DC in and splits it up properly (just wires).
I vote for this option. I have a huge fanless UPS that is not even warm to the touch. Why do I need this hot "power supply" next to my CPU inside the computer, when the UPS could output DC and easily disperse the heat? Laptops and mini-ITX already use external bricks. For big computers we simply need bigger bricks.
It is not difficult to be funny, but I will grant that it is difficult to understand natives' humor, or to be funny in the same way they are. Humor is often based on subtle word meanings, and therefore requires a deep understanding of the language.
You are right, of course. There is another way of being funny in front of a native audience. In a meeting of all non-native speakers where English is the lingua franca it is more difficult to break the ice. The joke can get lost on the side of the speaker and the side of the listener. As a lecturer it is also more difficult to be entertaining.
I did succeed in making some +5 funny comments in the past in this forum. I am really proud of those.