As a Dutchman I feel obliged to give the details (quoted from Roger Thompson, Professor of Military Studies at Knightsbridge University):
"The Royal Netherlands Navy, with its small force of extremely quiet DE submarines, has made the U.S. Navy eat the proverbial slice of humble pie on more than one occasion. In 1989, naval analyst Norman Polmar wrote in Naval Forces that during NATO's exercise Northern Star, the Dutch submarine Zwaardvis was the only orange (enemy) submarine to successfully stalk and sink a blue (allied) aircraft carrier. Ten years later there were reports that the Dutch submarine Walrus had been even more successful in the exercise JTFEX/TMDI99.
During this exercise the Walrus penetrates the U.S. screen and sinks many ships, including the U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt CVN-71. The submarine launches two attacks and manages to sneak away. It was also reported that the Walrus also sank many of the Roosevelt's escorts, including the nuclear submarine USS Boise, a cruiser, several destroyers and frigates, plus the command ship USS Mount Whitney. The Walrus herself survived the exercise with no damage."
Why does the US need such a large submarine fleet? Perhaps to counter a possible naval conflict with China over Taiwan? I believe N. Korea has a few (ancient) subs...... More tactical boats perhaps would be prudent, but....
Apparently the US still has a shortage of submarines. According to the memoirs of a retired Dutch general the US routinely requests use of the Dutch (walrus class) diesel-electric submarines for eavesdropping operations.
Besides intelligence, the other obvious use of submarines is bringing people into countries unseen. Since the US is doing a lot of those things it never has enough submarines (and I suppose nuclear ones are far more expensive to deploy).
Even if it ends up costing you something priceless (which still ends up as being less precious than human life, no matter how fine the art).
Some art is more precious than most people's lives as far as I am concerned, but no art is more precious than my life. The problem is that the security guard is deciding about his own life. The solution is obviously to shoot the security guards if the precious art is taken.
Part of what drove me to become an out-and-out monarchist was a perception, raised by President Clinton's abuse of the executive order, that we were headed in that direction.
In 'constitutional monarchies ' like mine -- the Netherlands -- the word 'monarchy' is typically not used. We are a kingdom, or more accurately a democracy with a king (as long as the people want it). To me systems like the French or US system, with its concentration of power in the hands of the leader is a real (but sofar non-hereditary) monarchy in the literal sense.
The Clinton episode was interesting because it illustrates that 1) parliament's mandate is limited by the separate democratic mandate of the leader -- they hardly dare to send home an executive government (as opposed to the Netherlands), and 2) the demands made of the leader by the people involve values that we would demand of the king (sexual morality in this case), but never the prime minister (whose private life is unknown, not cared about, and considered off-limits by the media).
The 'first lady' phenomenon is unknown to us wrt. political leaders. Also the practice of electing democratic office holders from one family (Bush, Kennedy, Roosevelt) is odd to us. The US certainly has monarchical tendencies and the office of president represents a dangerous concentration of power at the top. In contrast the constitutional monarch is severely limited, even to the point of denying basic rights such as freedom of expression (of private political opinions) and choosing whom you marry without permission from parliament.
The king is also a kind of walking addendum to the constitution in the Netherlands, being the descendant of the father of the fatherland, William of Orange, and other Oranges that risked or lost their life to defend their flock, and the embodyment of the values they supposedly stood for (such as religious tolerance, consensus-building, perseverance, and sacrifice for the public cause).
Drugs in the Netherlands is regulated, but users (and to some extent licensed sellers of the less dangerous drugs) are not criminalized.
Prosecution policy is based on the premise that criminal prosecution must be no more damaging to the drug users than the drug use itself. Besides that, a "war on drugs" is a waste of taxpayer's money and leads to no results other than overcrowded jails.
With respect to drug users, the protection of health is the key aim of Dutch government. The aims of Dutch policy are 1) maintaining a separation between the market for soft drugs (cannabis products such as hashish and marijuana) and the market for drugs that carry an unacceptable risk (such as the hard drugs heroin and cocaine) and 2) preventing drug users from ending up in an illegal environment, where they are difficult to reach for prevention and intervention.
Repression is mostly directed towards smugglers of drugs (both import and export).
Although numbers of users appear to be lower than in the US and many other western countries according to some sources, it is not clear that this is causally related to policy (or vice versa). Dutch culture is generally not more tolerant to drugs use in my experience.
Drugs policy is getting more repressive in the last decade, partially because of foreign pressure and partially because the Netherlands started attracting unwelcome foreign problematic drug users from the EU (since the Schengen treaty).
The numbers are available through many drugs advocacy websites based in the US (google), but if you want a Dutch source in English on policy I recommend this .
Here's a question: Why do you think a President ought to be chosen by popular vote?
I'm sure your instinct will be to tell me that I'm asking that question the wrong way around. That's a sign that you've been thoroughly indoctrinated. Make an effort to cast aside your assumptions and try to build a case for chosing a President by a simple majority. If you're honest about it, you'll find it surprisingly difficult.
I am a monarchist and live in a hereditary monarchy with a parliamentary democracy, so I have been 'indoctrinated' the other way around. I indeed fail to see why executive government, or even worse a symbolic head of state or any other office held by a single person, ought to be elected. I will present some of arguments in favor of placing a random person on the throne instead of an elected one.
Paliaments, which legislate and control government, should be elected and (proportionally) represent the people. Parliament should send away an incompetent or disobedient government and appoint a new one.
A head of state, as a single person, can never represent the people's opinions proportionally. The fact that he is elected makes it problematic for him to demand loyalty from those who didn't elect him. Since many people naturally tend to be loyal it leads to an incumbency bonus in the next election. Also, because he has a popular mandate of his own, parliaments will rarely dare to send him away.
In most stable democracies the head of state is not directly elected. Often it is the republics with a strong elected head of government (think of Hitler's Germany, Napoleon III's France, Putin's Russia (?)) that degenerate into dictatorships.
In the case of the USA it is loyalty to the Constitution that stabilizes the system which puts too much power in the hands of one person. In the case of monarchies it is the monarch which provides a symbolic and stable focus of loyalty. In the Netherlands it is sometimes said that the monarch represents the "right to be divided" (politicially) while still being united (in the loyalty to the crown).
Monarchs of course have the advantage over Constitutions that they can actually intervene, as in 1981 in Spain, to preserve freedom and democracy. On the other hand a stupid or frivolous monarch that interferes without broad public support is a danger to the system, so it is good to have a Constitution too.
Another advantage of monarchies is that they tend to be more progressive in changing the Constitution because such changes lead to less anxiety among the population as long as the monarchy itself remains unchanged (Dutch social-democrat politician in 1992: "since 1945 only war and threats to the Royal family can shake the foundations of the Nation").
There are other options, of course: the appointed head of state, the proportionally elected or appointed college as head of state (the preferred options of organized Republicans in the Netherlands),selection by lottery, or having no head of state at all. The last option does not solve the loyalty problem, because people wil simply redirect loyalty to the closest thing available (prime minister, constitution, flag, army).
fuck that. when all racers are equally prepared the best one will win. we have "lots" of choices, but only two have enough financing to become public enough for the average joe to see.
The winner takes all. If voters see that one (close-to-least-preferred) candidate is taking a clear lead then many will naturally decide to throw their weight behind any more preferred candidate most likely to keep the other one from a majority in parliament. The other candidates will be invisible for another term. Only parties with a strong regional appeal (e.g. Scottish Nationalist Party in UK) have a serious chance of gaining a few seats.
In a proportional system all parties that make it into parliament will be relevant and visible during the term. Because there are multiple ways to form a majority, parties will form temporary majority coalitions to deal with a specific decision. In a first-past-the-post or two-party system it will be easier to take decisions on minor issues that are not supported by a majority of the population and get away with it unscathed in the next election. It also impoverishes political thought by reducing every issue to a 'left' and 'right' way to deal with it.
every party should be given equal amounts to "advertise" to the public.
Not realistic. In the Netherlands we have the "Party Party". Serious taxpayers do not want to subsidize it. In the past (20's and 30's) we also had a fairly successful "Free Beer Party".
It is not about advertising, but about relevance. The best advertising is being in parliament and doing something useful with the mandate you received from your voters.
While the Islandic parliament started in 930 it was abolished in 1800 and not reinstated until 1845.
I didn't know about the interruption. Apparently even Iceland failed to escape absolute monarchy. I don't think parliaments as such are very useful for tracing the descent of democracy. More important is how much power they have (both vis a vis any monarch and vis a vis the ruled citizens), and who votes for them. Medieval parliaments often functioned as little more than a court of (private) law.
As a citizen of a small country (the Netherlands) between bigger ones I also object to the idea implicit in the notion of 'stability' in this discussion that for instance a military occupation from the outside represents an interruption of democracy and therefore a blemish on the 'stability' of democracy. That standard favors big and powerful countries, and the isolated tiny ones.
The mother of all parliaments is located in London, not Washington.
Iceland has the most viable claim to having the oldest continuous parliament. I do not believe London has any special role in the coming about of parliaments or democracy in the rest of Europe. It was not an early adopter of universal (male) suffrage. France and Germany preceded it. USA was very, very late in granting the right to vote for blacks.
The problem isn't so much overpopulation. The problem is that a small segment of the world's population has acquired a taste for a lifestyle that uses a disproportionate amount of resources.
People need to start choosing to live in a smaller house, driving a smaller car.
The population density of the United States now is roughly similar to a conservative estimate of peak population density of Celtic Belgium in pre-Roman times. In those days import of resources was negligable, and the yield of agriculture was probably roughly 1:3. Theoretically, the US population should be able to survive on subsistence agriculture with prehistoric techniques. Of course the geographic features of the US are different (subtract much of Alaska and mountain ranges), but the US does not appear to have an overpopulation problem from a subsistence point of view. It must therefore be a lifestyle issue.
If houses are smaller, you spend less money, time, and/or resources in heating, maintaining, and cleaning your house. If the neighbours houses are also small and there are less than 1.5 parking spaces (monumental waste of space in the US) per inhabitant in the country you can walk to the shops instead of driving there.
75m^2 is not impossibly small for a new 3 to 4 bedroom house in in the more expensive areas of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. 105m^2 is a typical size for a new 3 bedroom house (built on 80m^2 land, max. 60% covered with the house, and selling in the range $250.000-400.000 depending on location) in the west of the Netherlands.
In the Netherlands, the first known spam was sent by Verkade food company in 1892 to people with an income of more than 1500 guilders per year. That is 112 years ago. The list of addresses was obtained from local governments.
4 years earlier, in 1888, they started including trading cards in packages as a marketing technique, if I remember correctly.
Ink and paper: tried that also. Unfortunately, people wouldn't appreciate my sending HTML letters (which took so much time to write down).
Don't use HTML. You might transmit viruses that way if people copy it to their computer and then open IE to see what it says. I always use LaTeX on my postcards just to be sure.
Typical academic arrogance. Letters after your name do not make your more correct. From what I've seen, the more letters you have, the less "new stuff" you're going to come up with. You may be right in this case---but show where the mathematical errors are, don't point at credentials.
Part of the news value for me, as an employee of an establishment that used to be called 'university' before the EU decided to harmonize education systems and upgraded these kinds of schools to universities, is that this paper was produced by a student of a hogeschool. Academic arrogance is what makes a story 'hogeschool student produces proof of something' newsworthy in the Netherlands regardless of how relevant the something is.
Re:US $100 bills aren't that hard to counterfeit.
on
Make Money Fast
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· Score: 1
Keeping track of 100 USD notes through ATM's is impossible. A large part of the supply is circulating in the third world and will never be dispensed by an ATM. 100 USD notes are the currency of choice for the rich in the third world. Obviously that is also the reason why it is difficult for the US to replace easily counterfeited bank notes. The USD would devalue rapidly if the US decided not to accept old notes. It is a viable method for currencies of smaller countries though.
Obviously it is most attractive to counterfeit USD, and use it in third world countries. Most people there don't know the difference anyway, and it may circulate unnoticed for decades.
Well, the discovery of gold and silver created a monetary mess in places like Spain, which didn't really have a sound economic foundation to begin with, and wasted much of their American riches on projects that created no useful value. On the other hand, look at what the New World did for countries like England and the Netherlands.
A fool and his gold are easily parted. The Spanish kings invested most of their newly minted money in huge mercenary armies in the Netherlands and Italy. The mercenaries mostly spent it on the local market and strengthened the economies of these territories, and Spain eventually lost both.
In the Netherlands the Spanish mercenary armies were even outfitted with cannons bought from gun foundries in the United Provinces. At the same time the United Provinces' war effort was focused on interrupting Spanish trade through privateering.
I do believe the Spanish gold had a beneficial effect on the European economy as a whole, but Spain itself became a victim of the idiots that ruled it.
It's like being in a shop - because it rains outside for instance - without the intention of buying anything.
You are using a scarce resource (space) but the shop owner is clearly making it available as public space in the first place. The owner is able to control access to the resource (WEP) to signal that it is not intended for public use and chooses not to do so.
The Swiss army is based on the non-provocative defense (NPD) concept. One of the axioms of that concept is that short-range weapons are preferred over long-range weapons because they clearly serve a defensive purpose only.
That't why Swiss army knives are much shorter than U.S. Army knives.
You know, only the US (of developed Western democracies at least) makes such a big fricken' mess out of the whole voting process.
Of the 45 countries considered real democracies, only the United States, Mongolia, Canada, and the United Kingdom use plurality, or first past the post, as their primary system for legislative elections.
In the 37 countries where proportional, or parallel proportional, voting systems are used it is not possible to change the outcome of elections by tampering with just a few thousands votes in strategic places. To influence the outcome of the election in a significant way a massive fraud involving most districts in the country would be required. Small-scale fraud is irrelevant.
You're talking about paper. I'm talking about email. Totally different things, as they should be.
In what way are they totally different? The only relevant difference is a different degree of legal protection of privacy. Both delivery systems are fallible, and both types of messages can be opened by people unauthorized to do so.
Well, for starters, email sure as hell shouldn't be treated as a reliable method of informing someone of a lawsuit. That's not what it's there for. Maybe someday when we have fully-verified end-to-end proof of who sent and received what. But not today. And not with SMTP.
When it happens, it will be backed up by law. The equation of e-mail to paper mail in the context of communication between government and citizen is backed in the Netherland by the new law on electronic transactions between government and citizen (Stb. 214, 2004). At the moment the validity of electronic signature in email is backed by European directive 1999/93/EG. Contractual agreements and legal notifications are valid evidence in Dutch courts if backed by relevant ISP archives (at the sending and receiving end). I have used email for official notifications for years without any problems. I even bought my house by email.
The last few months we are starting to have problems, because we now have a few ISP's stealing people's mail through new 'spam filters' based on blacklists they installed (without asking permission to users and with an 'opt-out' procedure users must be aware of). They are really annoying the ministry of justice who is one of the regular victims.
My prediction is the EU will prohibit or strictly regulate this use of blacklists in the next two years to make its 'electronic government' directives work.
Anyone has a right to refuse email from anyone else they want.
They don't. There is no such 'right' in Dutch law, and I don't believe it exists anywhere else. Government communication is exempted from the system ('no' stickers obtained from the municipality) we have here for preventing unsollicited mail entering out mailboxes. The government is legally obliged to inform relevant citizens of the decisions it takes pertaining to them (in the general sense), and you are legally obliged to have a valid address 1) physically capable of receiving mail (with a mail slot of the prescribed dimensions:)) and 2) through which you can be contacted.
Besides that, we are talking about the 'right' to decide for others what they are going to refuse.
Besides that, how can you sue someone if you cannot inform them? Electronic communication will have to abide by the same rules as paper communication or we will remain stuck forever in the world of paper communication.
The government does have valid reasons for unsollicited bulk communication with its citizens, and the ubiquitous spam blacklists are an easy way for people who have a quarrel with a particular public body to frustrate its work.
This is happening in the Netherlands, and the language barrier often slows down the process of getting unlisted. I wonder whether this also happens in English-speaking jurisdictions.
I expect falsely reporting a government body as a spammer will be a crime in many countries in a few years time. It will probably be called "blacklist terrorism".
Although I use LaTeX for the creation of serious documents, and I hate Word in principle, I still find myself firing it up whenever I have to create a document with some low-level formatting.
I find myself firing it up whenever I receive a document from outside the organization where I work, or when I co-operate on a document with some outsider.
Even my new boss is not familiar with LaTeX. I don't want an alternative for Word. I don't want to use a WYSIWYG editor.
CLASSPATH. This thing sucks. Worst design decision ever, I swear. [..] I'd love my CLASSPATH to just be "/usr/local/java/lib:${HOME}/java/lib" or something rather than specifying a million.jar files...
You want to dump all your libraries in one directory? Now that's a good design decision. Don't forget to check whether Micro$oft patented that practice.
Slashdot Mirror
As a Dutchman I feel obliged to give the details (quoted from Roger Thompson, Professor of Military Studies at Knightsbridge University):
"The Royal Netherlands Navy, with its small force of extremely quiet DE submarines, has made the U.S. Navy eat the proverbial slice of humble pie on more than one occasion. In 1989, naval analyst Norman Polmar wrote in Naval Forces that during NATO's exercise Northern Star, the Dutch submarine Zwaardvis was the only orange (enemy) submarine to successfully stalk and sink a blue (allied) aircraft carrier. Ten years later there were reports that the Dutch submarine Walrus had been even more successful in the exercise JTFEX/TMDI99.
During this exercise the Walrus penetrates the U.S. screen and sinks many ships, including the U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt CVN-71. The submarine launches two attacks and manages to sneak away. It was also reported that the Walrus also sank many of the Roosevelt's escorts, including the nuclear submarine USS Boise, a cruiser, several destroyers and frigates, plus the command ship USS Mount Whitney. The Walrus herself survived the exercise with no damage."
Apparently the US still has a shortage of submarines. According to the memoirs of a retired Dutch general the US routinely requests use of the Dutch (walrus class) diesel-electric submarines for eavesdropping operations.
Besides intelligence, the other obvious use of submarines is bringing people into countries unseen. Since the US is doing a lot of those things it never has enough submarines (and I suppose nuclear ones are far more expensive to deploy).
Some art is more precious than most people's lives as far as I am concerned, but no art is more precious than my life. The problem is that the security guard is deciding about his own life. The solution is obviously to shoot the security guards if the precious art is taken.
Part of what drove me to become an out-and-out monarchist was a perception, raised by President Clinton's abuse of the executive order, that we were headed in that direction.
In 'constitutional monarchies ' like mine -- the Netherlands -- the word 'monarchy' is typically not used. We are a kingdom, or more accurately a democracy with a king (as long as the people want it). To me systems like the French or US system, with its concentration of power in the hands of the leader is a real (but sofar non-hereditary) monarchy in the literal sense.
The Clinton episode was interesting because it illustrates that 1) parliament's mandate is limited by the separate democratic mandate of the leader -- they hardly dare to send home an executive government (as opposed to the Netherlands), and 2) the demands made of the leader by the people involve values that we would demand of the king (sexual morality in this case), but never the prime minister (whose private life is unknown, not cared about, and considered off-limits by the media).
The 'first lady' phenomenon is unknown to us wrt. political leaders. Also the practice of electing democratic office holders from one family (Bush, Kennedy, Roosevelt) is odd to us. The US certainly has monarchical tendencies and the office of president represents a dangerous concentration of power at the top. In contrast the constitutional monarch is severely limited, even to the point of denying basic rights such as freedom of expression (of private political opinions) and choosing whom you marry without permission from parliament.
The king is also a kind of walking addendum to the constitution in the Netherlands, being the descendant of the father of the fatherland, William of Orange, and other Oranges that risked or lost their life to defend their flock, and the embodyment of the values they supposedly stood for (such as religious tolerance, consensus-building, perseverance, and sacrifice for the public cause).
Drugs in the Netherlands is regulated, but users (and to some extent licensed sellers of the less dangerous drugs) are not criminalized.
Prosecution policy is based on the premise that criminal prosecution must be no more damaging to the drug users than the drug use itself. Besides that, a "war on drugs" is a waste of taxpayer's money and leads to no results other than overcrowded jails.
With respect to drug users, the protection of health is the key aim of Dutch government. The aims of Dutch policy are 1) maintaining a separation between the market for soft drugs (cannabis products such as hashish and marijuana) and the market for drugs that carry an unacceptable risk (such as the hard drugs heroin and cocaine) and 2) preventing drug users from ending up in an illegal environment, where they are difficult to reach for prevention and intervention.
Repression is mostly directed towards smugglers of drugs (both import and export).
Although numbers of users appear to be lower than in the US and many other western countries according to some sources, it is not clear that this is causally related to policy (or vice versa). Dutch culture is generally not more tolerant to drugs use in my experience.
Drugs policy is getting more repressive in the last decade, partially because of foreign pressure and partially because the Netherlands started attracting unwelcome foreign problematic drug users from the EU (since the Schengen treaty). The numbers are available through many drugs advocacy websites based in the US (google), but if you want a Dutch source in English on policy I recommend this .
Here's a question: Why do you think a President ought to be chosen by popular vote? I'm sure your instinct will be to tell me that I'm asking that question the wrong way around. That's a sign that you've been thoroughly indoctrinated. Make an effort to cast aside your assumptions and try to build a case for chosing a President by a simple majority. If you're honest about it, you'll find it surprisingly difficult.
I am a monarchist and live in a hereditary monarchy with a parliamentary democracy, so I have been 'indoctrinated' the other way around. I indeed fail to see why executive government, or even worse a symbolic head of state or any other office held by a single person, ought to be elected. I will present some of arguments in favor of placing a random person on the throne instead of an elected one.
Paliaments, which legislate and control government, should be elected and (proportionally) represent the people. Parliament should send away an incompetent or disobedient government and appoint a new one.
A head of state, as a single person, can never represent the people's opinions proportionally. The fact that he is elected makes it problematic for him to demand loyalty from those who didn't elect him. Since many people naturally tend to be loyal it leads to an incumbency bonus in the next election. Also, because he has a popular mandate of his own, parliaments will rarely dare to send him away.
In most stable democracies the head of state is not directly elected. Often it is the republics with a strong elected head of government (think of Hitler's Germany, Napoleon III's France, Putin's Russia (?)) that degenerate into dictatorships. In the case of the USA it is loyalty to the Constitution that stabilizes the system which puts too much power in the hands of one person. In the case of monarchies it is the monarch which provides a symbolic and stable focus of loyalty. In the Netherlands it is sometimes said that the monarch represents the "right to be divided" (politicially) while still being united (in the loyalty to the crown).
Monarchs of course have the advantage over Constitutions that they can actually intervene, as in 1981 in Spain, to preserve freedom and democracy. On the other hand a stupid or frivolous monarch that interferes without broad public support is a danger to the system, so it is good to have a Constitution too.
Another advantage of monarchies is that they tend to be more progressive in changing the Constitution because such changes lead to less anxiety among the population as long as the monarchy itself remains unchanged (Dutch social-democrat politician in 1992: "since 1945 only war and threats to the Royal family can shake the foundations of the Nation").
There are other options, of course: the appointed head of state, the proportionally elected or appointed college as head of state (the preferred options of organized Republicans in the Netherlands),selection by lottery, or having no head of state at all. The last option does not solve the loyalty problem, because people wil simply redirect loyalty to the closest thing available (prime minister, constitution, flag, army).
fuck that. when all racers are equally prepared the best one will win. we have "lots" of choices, but only two have enough financing to become public enough for the average joe to see.
The winner takes all. If voters see that one (close-to-least-preferred) candidate is taking a clear lead then many will naturally decide to throw their weight behind any more preferred candidate most likely to keep the other one from a majority in parliament. The other candidates will be invisible for another term. Only parties with a strong regional appeal (e.g. Scottish Nationalist Party in UK) have a serious chance of gaining a few seats.
In a proportional system all parties that make it into parliament will be relevant and visible during the term. Because there are multiple ways to form a majority, parties will form temporary majority coalitions to deal with a specific decision. In a first-past-the-post or two-party system it will be easier to take decisions on minor issues that are not supported by a majority of the population and get away with it unscathed in the next election. It also impoverishes political thought by reducing every issue to a 'left' and 'right' way to deal with it.
every party should be given equal amounts to "advertise" to the public.
Not realistic. In the Netherlands we have the "Party Party". Serious taxpayers do not want to subsidize it. In the past (20's and 30's) we also had a fairly successful "Free Beer Party".
It is not about advertising, but about relevance. The best advertising is being in parliament and doing something useful with the mandate you received from your voters.
I didn't know about the interruption. Apparently even Iceland failed to escape absolute monarchy. I don't think parliaments as such are very useful for tracing the descent of democracy. More important is how much power they have (both vis a vis any monarch and vis a vis the ruled citizens), and who votes for them. Medieval parliaments often functioned as little more than a court of (private) law.
As a citizen of a small country (the Netherlands) between bigger ones I also object to the idea implicit in the notion of 'stability' in this discussion that for instance a military occupation from the outside represents an interruption of democracy and therefore a blemish on the 'stability' of democracy. That standard favors big and powerful countries, and the isolated tiny ones.
Iceland has the most viable claim to having the oldest continuous parliament. I do not believe London has any special role in the coming about of parliaments or democracy in the rest of Europe. It was not an early adopter of universal (male) suffrage. France and Germany preceded it. USA was very, very late in granting the right to vote for blacks.
European countries with stable democracies also invite the OSCE in to increase its legitimacy. It is clearly not a humiliation.
fyi: don't crash on my property. Trespassers will be eaten alive by my cat.
People need to start choosing to live in a smaller house, driving a smaller car.
The population density of the United States now is roughly similar to a conservative estimate of peak population density of Celtic Belgium in pre-Roman times. In those days import of resources was negligable, and the yield of agriculture was probably roughly 1:3. Theoretically, the US population should be able to survive on subsistence agriculture with prehistoric techniques. Of course the geographic features of the US are different (subtract much of Alaska and mountain ranges), but the US does not appear to have an overpopulation problem from a subsistence point of view. It must therefore be a lifestyle issue.
If houses are smaller, you spend less money, time, and/or resources in heating, maintaining, and cleaning your house. If the neighbours houses are also small and there are less than 1.5 parking spaces (monumental waste of space in the US) per inhabitant in the country you can walk to the shops instead of driving there.
75m^2 is not impossibly small for a new 3 to 4 bedroom house in in the more expensive areas of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. 105m^2 is a typical size for a new 3 bedroom house (built on 80m^2 land, max. 60% covered with the house, and selling in the range $250.000-400.000 depending on location) in the west of the Netherlands.
4 years earlier, in 1888, they started including trading cards in packages as a marketing technique, if I remember correctly.
Don't use HTML. You might transmit viruses that way if people copy it to their computer and then open IE to see what it says. I always use LaTeX on my postcards just to be sure.
Part of the news value for me, as an employee of an establishment that used to be called 'university' before the EU decided to harmonize education systems and upgraded these kinds of schools to universities, is that this paper was produced by a student of a hogeschool. Academic arrogance is what makes a story 'hogeschool student produces proof of something' newsworthy in the Netherlands regardless of how relevant the something is.
Obviously it is most attractive to counterfeit USD, and use it in third world countries. Most people there don't know the difference anyway, and it may circulate unnoticed for decades.
A fool and his gold are easily parted. The Spanish kings invested most of their newly minted money in huge mercenary armies in the Netherlands and Italy. The mercenaries mostly spent it on the local market and strengthened the economies of these territories, and Spain eventually lost both.
In the Netherlands the Spanish mercenary armies were even outfitted with cannons bought from gun foundries in the United Provinces. At the same time the United Provinces' war effort was focused on interrupting Spanish trade through privateering.
I do believe the Spanish gold had a beneficial effect on the European economy as a whole, but Spain itself became a victim of the idiots that ruled it.
You are using a scarce resource (space) but the shop owner is clearly making it available as public space in the first place. The owner is able to control access to the resource (WEP) to signal that it is not intended for public use and chooses not to do so.
As usual, there is a rational explanation:
The Swiss army is based on the non-provocative defense (NPD) concept. One of the axioms of that concept is that short-range weapons are preferred over long-range weapons because they clearly serve a defensive purpose only.
That't why Swiss army knives are much shorter than U.S. Army knives.
Of the 45 countries considered real democracies, only the United States, Mongolia, Canada, and the United Kingdom use plurality, or first past the post, as their primary system for legislative elections.
In the 37 countries where proportional, or parallel proportional, voting systems are used it is not possible to change the outcome of elections by tampering with just a few thousands votes in strategic places. To influence the outcome of the election in a significant way a massive fraud involving most districts in the country would be required. Small-scale fraud is irrelevant.
That is why dictators pretending to be elected prefer first past the post.
In what way are they totally different? The only relevant difference is a different degree of legal protection of privacy. Both delivery systems are fallible, and both types of messages can be opened by people unauthorized to do so.
Well, for starters, email sure as hell shouldn't be treated as a reliable method of informing someone of a lawsuit. That's not what it's there for. Maybe someday when we have fully-verified end-to-end proof of who sent and received what. But not today. And not with SMTP.
When it happens, it will be backed up by law. The equation of e-mail to paper mail in the context of communication between government and citizen is backed in the Netherland by the new law on electronic transactions between government and citizen (Stb. 214, 2004). At the moment the validity of electronic signature in email is backed by European directive 1999/93/EG. Contractual agreements and legal notifications are valid evidence in Dutch courts if backed by relevant ISP archives (at the sending and receiving end). I have used email for official notifications for years without any problems. I even bought my house by email.
The last few months we are starting to have problems, because we now have a few ISP's stealing people's mail through new 'spam filters' based on blacklists they installed (without asking permission to users and with an 'opt-out' procedure users must be aware of). They are really annoying the ministry of justice who is one of the regular victims.
My prediction is the EU will prohibit or strictly regulate this use of blacklists in the next two years to make its 'electronic government' directives work.
They don't. There is no such 'right' in Dutch law, and I don't believe it exists anywhere else. Government communication is exempted from the system ('no' stickers obtained from the municipality) we have here for preventing unsollicited mail entering out mailboxes. The government is legally obliged to inform relevant citizens of the decisions it takes pertaining to them (in the general sense), and you are legally obliged to have a valid address 1) physically capable of receiving mail (with a mail slot of the prescribed dimensions :)) and 2) through which you can be contacted.
Besides that, we are talking about the 'right' to decide for others what they are going to refuse.
Besides that, how can you sue someone if you cannot inform them? Electronic communication will have to abide by the same rules as paper communication or we will remain stuck forever in the world of paper communication.
This is happening in the Netherlands, and the language barrier often slows down the process of getting unlisted. I wonder whether this also happens in English-speaking jurisdictions.
I expect falsely reporting a government body as a spammer will be a crime in many countries in a few years time. It will probably be called "blacklist terrorism".
I find myself firing it up whenever I receive a document from outside the organization where I work, or when I co-operate on a document with some outsider.
Even my new boss is not familiar with LaTeX. I don't want an alternative for Word. I don't want to use a WYSIWYG editor.
You want to dump all your libraries in one directory? Now that's a good design decision. Don't forget to check whether Micro$oft patented that practice.