When it comes to an oppressive state and unjust laws privacy of course helps you to hide from the state, but what if the laws are fine and there is no need to hide, why should I care about privacy?
Because the society you live in might change, and the record of who you are and the things you did will still be there. These records are the first thing a future oppressive government will be interested in. In the Netherlands in WWII nearly 90% of the jews were taken away by the nazis, greatly helped by an immaculate administration of the population and their ancestors and religious background captured undamaged in 1940. In many countries less tolerant to jews the percentage is lower, mostly because they lacked the bureaucracy to organize the mass murder. No jew had any reason to fear the liberal Dutch governmment or its laws when they registered themselves. The register was attacked and burned down by the Dutch resistance in 1943, with the passive assistance of the firefighters who made sure nothing of value survived, but this was too late for most of the jewish population.
What do you think happened to people who had been involved in socialism or anti-fascist activism before WWII? The nazis had little respect for the legal taboo on retroactive application of law.
It also means that the information should be available to everybody, not just one group having all the info and another not having anything, spread it to every person and it will get much harder to abuse.
On the contrary. You don't want people who hate eachother to have the opportunity to investigate eachother's private lives. The nazis did not come from outer space you know. They (or rather their voters) were a large group of citizens who did mind a lot what their fellow citizens were doing, as they weren't very liberal, and wanted to prevent them by any means from destroying the nation, which was very dear to them.
Liberal democracy is based on the distinction between the private sphere and the public sphere, and the recognition that different sets of rules can apply to both spheres as long as citizens respect each other's private spheres, both in the sense of not breaking into eachother's bedrooms and in not doing any bedroom activities in the street. The problem of TV and Internet is exactly that to most people it is like the street, and it is therefore a threat to liberal democracy. The Amish for instance are intolerant, but as long as they have the discipline to avoid watching TV they are not a threat to the liberties of others.
The first to anticipate automated problem solving with a machine using logic gates (called by him the calculus ratiocinerator, which unfortunately never catched on) was lawyer and legal philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: "The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate [calculemus], without further ado, to see who is right."
Law and logic have a natural affinity, but the majority of law students today have no talent for or interest in mathematics. This was different in the time of the polymaths like Leibniz. I work at a law faculty (in computational legal theory, somewhat similar to CS & Law in the US), and it has always vexed me that the law study involves no introduction into formal logic and statistics. Most of our students are consequently CS and AI students. I have no law degree, but enough knowledge of law and legal procedure to succesfully plead my own cases in court (here in the Netherlands a lawyer is not strictly required in normal civil law cases). We can also teach basic legal theory in an organized way to new law students.
Judging by the highly publicized raids on "hemp farms" and closures of "rose buurts" (red light districts) i would say that the politicians are activelly supporting the police on this kind of measures. Couple this with active support of Bush's invasion of Iraq and a pattern of right-wing, neocon-style moralism starts to emerge.
There is a big difference: this is about the rule of law falling apart. Few politicians want to openly take credit for that. In the early nineties we also had a major scandal involving the use of illegal methods by the police to catch criminals (entrapment, obtaining confessions illegally). At that time the liberal parties were stronger, and they introduced new legislation to counteract it. The point is that the police will do this all by themselves, if you just give them the opportunity. They have to be kept in check.
Raiding hemp farms is different, because they really are a nuisance for neighbours. It's pretty pointless, as they will simply move and the police has better things to do, but it is not very shocking. Same with red light districts: you make the people who live near those areas happy, and few people stand up to defend the red light district, particularly if you justify your actions as protecting oppressed women from their customers (which is of course unlikely, since you don't display women who are coerced into prostitution in the window).
Conservative politicians do that openly. It's just populism. The opinions of most of the population haven't changed very much on these issues: it's the politicians that changed since the "Fortuyn revolution" and they are now more willing to make empty moralist gestures for their voters. Historically "Dutch tolerance" is more a (pre-democratic) style of administrating the country than a special characteristic of the population at large, who are no more tolerant than the rest of the European population in my view. "Dutch tolerance" finds its basis of support in the universities and the traditional regent class, and it shares in the general malaise of progressive and liberal parties worldwide.
Also don't underestimate the importance of placating important foreign powers for Dutch government, which traditionally feels very vulnerable. We return to an old, anxious conservative style instead of the progressive/liberal (purple) "Holland promotion" style of feeding the world press with good news about the Netherlands. We have seen this in the evening news, with government ministers worrying about how the Netherlands is "portrayed in the US" (obviously by fellow conservatives like fox) and stuff like that, despite their prostrations to Bush.
I can't tell which fear predominates in the mind of these politicians: of drugs, of the US, or of the voters.
How expensive and rigorous would the procedure for getting a bank.tv or bank.to domain be? Should a browser trust a bank.tv or bank.to website? There are obviously banks in Tuvalu and Tonga, but their ccTLD is mostly a way to get some hard currency for the treasury.
Secondly, having localized websites, but online banking redirected to a single.com https website for all international customers is a very common arrangement for banks. I use at least two of them, but I will not name them because I obviously don't want to connect my identity here to specific banks I use.
Certainly in the 27 states of the EU it is fairly easy to offer financial services in other member states without the overhead of a local organization. The many internet-only banks and financial product comparison web services nowadays make local organizations increasingly irrelevant, as more people move their money around based on interest rates and terms and conditions, not their perception of local service.
As someone which has lived in Holland for many years and just recently left the country due to it's high taxes, ever decreasing public services and progressive leaning to the conservative right (Note: as a foreigner i couldn't vote) allow me to point you that the Dutch did it to themselfs (and just recentely did it again by re-electing the same moralist, religious right-wing conservatives).
What basically happens is that the responsible politicians just stand idly by while overzealous police officers (as it seems on both sides of the ocean, and cooperatively, although that is hard to prove) exploit loopholes created by treaties to get to evildoers they otherwise would not be able to get convicted. Is this political risk avoidance or intent?
They certainly wouldn't dare to bring legislation to the same effect openly through parliament. An external scapegoat is always convenient, and conservatives have a habit anyway on blaming everything on the EU.
As an excuse for the politicians one could argue that the Dutch government is very easily blackmailed by the US in treaty negotiations, since lenient treatment by US customs of cargo containers from Rotterdam is absolutely essential to the Dutch economy: customs can hold up shipments from the ports of a specific country long as they please, and the trade will just go somewhere else where the government is more cooperative with the US. Since cargo handling is obviously related to drugs smuggling it is easy for the US to connect those issues without being an obvious bully. Not complying with US demands is a major risk.
The EU also works very hard to create a race to the bottom with its European arrest warrants. Other Europeans are hardly better protected by their own governments, who subscribe to equally dangerous treaties (for instance by exposing their citizens to a Dutch arrest warrant, who might then at a later stage extradite them to the US). The issue I brought forward is about exploiting differences in admissibility of evidence, and entrapment involving foreign police officers. Public debate always seems to focus on differences in what kinds of activities are criminal, which makes harmonization in law enforcement seem much easier than it is.
The Dutch police just happens to be in a good position to make use of the possibilities (let's call it an 'international outlook' on law enforcement) and traditionally attracts a lot of attention by law enforcement organizations in other countries. Maybe it will be the first to start extraditing citizens of your country to third countries that your government wants to please.
It would be like the US trying to extradite someone from Amsterdam for smoking pot.
The Netherlands does actually get dozens of US extradition requests a year for drugs related crimes, and regularly does extradite Dutch citizens for engaging in drugs transactions with Americans and in some cases even with DEA agents operating on Dutch soil. It's a major political issue here, but the major (conservative) government coalition parties apparently basically tolerate this kind of activity because it creates a possibility to use forms of entrapment that would otherwise be illegal here, and it is easier to get people in jail in the US, particularly through plea bargaining, which is also illegal here. Just smoking pot is safe, though.
And after the first billion have been sold prices are expected to come down due to economies of scale and they will be as cheap as a panel of plywood of comparable size.
In the US Budweiser, a "beer" made from rice, has a 50% market share. And normal Heineken beer, which is a crappy cheap lager to start with, is turned into "Heineken export" for the US market by sweetening it. Yuck. After the "export treatment" all lagers taste the same. It's beer vandalism.
He deserves to have someone ask him why he built the school in a video game. Let a psychologist evaluate him, and then either medicate the kid or let him go back to class.
That's also a disproportionate reaction. My brother in the past made an unreal map of a tiny Italian mountain village he stayed in on vacation, mostly because he had the time, equipment, and the right vantage points to photograph it from all angles, and the village had interesting height differences and bottlenecks for capture the flag games. No harm was intended towards the inhabitants of the village. It is reasonable that people want to make maps of places they are familiar with, and as you point out, schools, certainly old ones, are often symmetric and excellent for balanced team games (just like for instance subway stations).
As far as I know - I am European - there is no field of science is which the US has a stronger position than medicine. The US dominates in publications and patents, and it also clearly shows on the topic map mapping the strengths of nations a few months ago here on Slashdot.
However, if you look at what the US, Europe, and for instance the (late) Soviet Union have contributed to medical science, and what they generally do well in health care, there are notable differences. The US's contribution seems to consist mostly of psychoactive pills, viagra, and excellent cosmetic surgery, Europe introduced most of the standard inventory of medicine, but is past its prime, and the Soviet Union apparently had excellent and efficient emergency care (like Cuba today). A public health care system focuses on whatever helps most people live a little longer or healthier on average, often explicitly rejecting in principle successful treatments because they are not cost-effective, while a private system focuses on what brings in most money, which is often extending and improving the quality of life of the wealthy. This is apparent in health tourism: the rich in Europe sometimes go to the US for expensive and exotic treatments they can't get here (cosmetic, drugs rehab), in the other direction low and average incomes go from the US to Canada, or from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, for basic stuff like surgery.
As you know, the game of chess is violent - you have to destroy the enemy's army (Battlechess in particular also uses violent animations whenever a piece is captured).
My guess: game of chess linked to increased contemplation. Correlational studies shows that chess players are more thoughtful, randomized ones that people playing chess end the game in a more contemplative mood (one for instance rarely sees the winner jumping up and down and cheering, or the loser kicking against stuff).
Obviously many games are linked to adrenalin rushes. They would be bad games if they weren't. Trying to prove this connection is taking down a straw man. What needs to be addressed is firstly that playing games is a sine qua non cause of some violent crimes (like having possession of a bomb is sine qua non cause of a bomb attack), and secondly that legislative action against the games is a proportional instrument for curtailing violent crime (as opposed to for instance proper gun control in the case of the US).
Actually the only peoples that see themselves as winners in the western world are the British, the Russians, and the Americans. The others have either suffered major defeats and occupations in the last two centuries, or are so weak compared to a greater neighbour that they never had an interest in provoking wars (Switzerland for instance).
The main difference between the North American continent and Europe is that North America is unipolar (hence no balance of power to maintain, and a natural leadership of the US that the others must simply accept) while Europe is multipolar, and an attack by a major power on a weaker state tends to draw in other major powers.
As a weaker state this mechanism can be used to preserve independence and autonomy: here in the Netherlands the policy of using one bigger neighbour as assurance against domination by the other one and vice versa was called "double anchor policy" in previous centuries. The doctrine involves 1) making sure you neighbours are not eachothers allies, and 2) giving them sufficient reason (for instance with trade policy) to strongly prefer an independent Netherlands over one occupied by the other major neighbour. The doctrine has basically been abandoned (in favour of the cold war "keep the Americans in, Russians out, and Germans under the feet" doctrine) in the twentieth century, since the doctrine naturally involves being someone else's battlefield from time to time and this is getting increasingly costly. The price to pay is loss of autonomy. A new "double anchor policy" has been in vogue that involves competition of "Europe" and "the Atlantic" (US and UK).
There are many more countries and borders in Europe than in North America, making it easier for one society to export its shit to its neighbours. Most of the smaller countries are stable: radical changes of system of government only occur coincident to attack or occupation by a bigger country, being France, Germany, or Russia in most cases. Don't generalize these three to "Europe".
Here in the Netherlands we have two major points of discontinuity over our existence - nazi occupation during WWII and the occupation by France during the Napoleonic wars (17 years) - and five high profile political murders - of which two were by foreign powers (England and Spain), two others (prime ministers lynched) during the stresses of a major war with a bigger power, and the last one recently (Fortuyn) with no apparent external reason. Even in the case of nazi occupation the system survived unscathed, and the population remained loyal to the monarch in exile. A presidential system would not easily be able to survive an occupation lasting much longer than than the mandate of the elected leaders in exile, which is a point in favour of monarchy for smaller countries that tend to get occupied regularly.
It must not be reported very often since most Americans seem to believe that they are living in some kind of unprecedented Mad-Max dystopia that requires their children to be on lockdown 24/7.
The crime statistics do not disprove the existence of a Mad-Max dystopia. What if behaving as if you live in a Mad-Max dystopia actually works well for lowering crime rates, but at the expense of quality of life? Criminals will generally pick the easiest targets, and the supply of criminals decreases, with a delay, as the targets get harder on average. The easy targets in the meantime become more vulnerable to crime, and the crimes become increasingly impudent, and therefore increasingly frightening.
If some people get robbed in the park and the robberies get a lot of media attention, many people will avoid walking in the park, making it more likely that the people who do keep walking alone in the park get robbed. In the end the park effectively stops being part of public space, and no robberies take place there anymore because there are no targets. The robbers now either move on to another career, or they progress to robbing people on the roads along the park, advancing even further into public space, at the expense of a higher chance of being caught, and get even more media attention because the robbers are becoming increasingly impudent, etc.
Something similar happened in the transformation of the classical age into the dark age, I suppose. Isolated countryside farms were deserted for fortified towns and villages because of raids by barbarians, resulting in less raids (as many barbarians moved on to protecting towns and villages as feodal lords and mercenaries), but also in an empty and more dangerous countryside and less freedom, agriculture, and trade. It took centuries to get out of that vicious cycle, but there is no doubt that it stopped the barbarian raids eventually.
So if we want to follow this strategy, we first employ all potential robbers, rapists, and murderers as politicians and police officers, civilize them, and then start a renewed struggle for rule of law, democracy, etc. The alternative is to accept that the crime rates of a few decades ago were OK and didn't really bother us then.
Here in the Netherlands it is already established that a flashmob that intentionally blocks a road is in principle a criminal organization, with the people who show up and participate as its members. Good chance that the courts will feel that given the choice between a) informing the authorities and b) organizing a mob to block roads, option b is a really bad choice and not an excuse for knowingly disturbing public order.
The next big thing is sitting behind security cams and play "click on the criminal": it's the perfect prolefeed. As you gather points (in an ESP-game style fashion) you level up: 1) police unit despatched immediately without verification to arrest criminal, 2) prosecution started immediately without verification, 3) criminal locked up without trial.
Cocoon can do kerning and ligatures, but it has to be switched on and the right fonts must be used. There are also alternatives, like XEP.
I would use for instance TEI as source and XSL-FO for transforming to output formats if you manage a large online repository of generic text. LaTeX is very useful as an additional output format, but inconvenient as an input to your own transformations and validations. I have experience managing a body of legislation with Cocoon, and we use XSL for verifying constraints on dates, on citations, etc. The XML source also makes it easy to generate PDFs of excerpts of a document (for instance relevant articles in search results, or a specific chapter), or multi-version consolidations, or annotated versions, on the fly.
I agree LaTeX is brilliant. I write papers and reports in it. But it doesn't work well for content management in my opinion.
The right is merely the correlative of someone else's duty. If you have a duty towards me, I have a right towards you. A constitutional right is a vertical right: you are the beneficiary and the goverment is the addressee (of the correlated duty). Rights without counterparty are meaningless. What a people gives away when it recognizes a legislator's competence to legislate on a certain matter is naked (unprotected) freedom in that matter.
Permission is something else entirely. You ask someone for the permission to do something (enter someone's house, use his lawnmower, etc.) if a) you presume that it would otherwise by default be prohibited by that person, and b) you recognize their competence in the matter. Permission is an exception to a more general obligation or prohibition. It has nothing to do with rights or freedom.
The obvious solution is to use multiple airships, and put a sensor on each one of them.
Weapons location radar (artillery hunting radar) are btw usually single point systems, but those are probably not very practical for locating hand gun firefights in a city.
Freedom from an overbearing government only becomes an issue when a government has first established a credible monopoly on violence. Before a society reaches that stage, people are generally more concerned with freedom from oppression by more powerful fellow citizens.
Mark up the books with XSL-FO, or some XML language that translates to it, and use Apache Cocoon or FOP or something like that to generate the XHTML for the web and the PDF version for download. Many websites already work like this. Even when you insist on taking a detour via LaTeX (for mathematical stuff, or diagrams, for instance) I would start with XSL-FO and transform with XSL. LaTeX cannot be properly validated.
It is perceived (true or not) that it would be much easier to put down a rebellion or militia/terrorist group armed with bolt-action.30-06s than the exact same assault rifle issued to the everyman GI. Although, insurgencies and revolutions throughout modern history have been quite successful with older and even antique weapons.
The point of the second amendment as I understand it (I am not American), is that The People can resist a standing army of the state. This is obviously not what is on the mind of the American people: if it were, they would never have allowed the abandonment of conscription, which is a much better safeguard against the state. Revolutions generally succeed if the army is representative of the general population. Arming The People also doesn't have to involve having weapons in a usable state at home. Uniforms and weapons of the militia can for instance be stored at local police stations, or at home but with an (electronic) seal.
I suppose issuing innocent citizen beacons before an invasion is impractical. 'Friend or foe' beacons seem to be based on the principle that if you are not with us, you are against us. This works fairly well for fighter planes, since there are usually few innocent bystanders in fighter planes around, but on the ground IFF beacons and increasing dependence on electronics are a recipe for collateral damage.
The military uniform is also primarily intended to distinguish participants in the game from bystanders. What we need is an international treaty requiring all armies to equip their soldiers with beacons that broadcast their identity in a certain radius. Not wearing it is a war crime and you loose your right to treatment as a POW. When soldiers have to use beacons to make their presence known to the enemy, first world nations will move on to fighting robots in no time.
The Solutrean ice pyramids for instance (19,000 BCE), that served as an example for the smaller Egyptian pyramids, left no trace whatsoever. We will never be able to prove that they existed: we can only surmise their existence from the stone copies by the Egyptians (who had no access to ice), and the similarities between Solutrean and early Egyptian tools and art (both made tools from stone and bone, both made images of animals, etc). And the Solutreans also discovered and colonized America, of course, leaving countless ice pyramids in their wake, which unfortunately left no trace whatsoever.
A single species extinction event doesn't tell us anything about the general fitness of species for environments. Assume an especially avaricious predator evolves that specifically targets your species or only lives in the environment where you live: you go extinct and so does the predator. Tough luck. A less talented species over time can fill up the empty ecological niche because there is no better competitor around any more. Only on the level of many extinction events natural selection becomes evolution. Evolution is not some kind of Crusoe economics: no straightforward hill-climbing towards better species X environment matches with a static environment.
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When it comes to an oppressive state and unjust laws privacy of course helps you to hide from the state, but what if the laws are fine and there is no need to hide, why should I care about privacy?
Because the society you live in might change, and the record of who you are and the things you did will still be there. These records are the first thing a future oppressive government will be interested in. In the Netherlands in WWII nearly 90% of the jews were taken away by the nazis, greatly helped by an immaculate administration of the population and their ancestors and religious background captured undamaged in 1940. In many countries less tolerant to jews the percentage is lower, mostly because they lacked the bureaucracy to organize the mass murder. No jew had any reason to fear the liberal Dutch governmment or its laws when they registered themselves. The register was attacked and burned down by the Dutch resistance in 1943, with the passive assistance of the firefighters who made sure nothing of value survived, but this was too late for most of the jewish population.
What do you think happened to people who had been involved in socialism or anti-fascist activism before WWII? The nazis had little respect for the legal taboo on retroactive application of law.
It also means that the information should be available to everybody, not just one group having all the info and another not having anything, spread it to every person and it will get much harder to abuse.
On the contrary. You don't want people who hate eachother to have the opportunity to investigate eachother's private lives. The nazis did not come from outer space you know. They (or rather their voters) were a large group of citizens who did mind a lot what their fellow citizens were doing, as they weren't very liberal, and wanted to prevent them by any means from destroying the nation, which was very dear to them.
Liberal democracy is based on the distinction between the private sphere and the public sphere, and the recognition that different sets of rules can apply to both spheres as long as citizens respect each other's private spheres, both in the sense of not breaking into eachother's bedrooms and in not doing any bedroom activities in the street. The problem of TV and Internet is exactly that to most people it is like the street, and it is therefore a threat to liberal democracy. The Amish for instance are intolerant, but as long as they have the discipline to avoid watching TV they are not a threat to the liberties of others.
The first to anticipate automated problem solving with a machine using logic gates (called by him the calculus ratiocinerator, which unfortunately never catched on) was lawyer and legal philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: "The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate [calculemus], without further ado, to see who is right."
Law and logic have a natural affinity, but the majority of law students today have no talent for or interest in mathematics. This was different in the time of the polymaths like Leibniz. I work at a law faculty (in computational legal theory, somewhat similar to CS & Law in the US), and it has always vexed me that the law study involves no introduction into formal logic and statistics. Most of our students are consequently CS and AI students. I have no law degree, but enough knowledge of law and legal procedure to succesfully plead my own cases in court (here in the Netherlands a lawyer is not strictly required in normal civil law cases). We can also teach basic legal theory in an organized way to new law students.
Judging by the highly publicized raids on "hemp farms" and closures of "rose buurts" (red light districts) i would say that the politicians are activelly supporting the police on this kind of measures. Couple this with active support of Bush's invasion of Iraq and a pattern of right-wing, neocon-style moralism starts to emerge.
There is a big difference: this is about the rule of law falling apart. Few politicians want to openly take credit for that. In the early nineties we also had a major scandal involving the use of illegal methods by the police to catch criminals (entrapment, obtaining confessions illegally). At that time the liberal parties were stronger, and they introduced new legislation to counteract it. The point is that the police will do this all by themselves, if you just give them the opportunity. They have to be kept in check.
Raiding hemp farms is different, because they really are a nuisance for neighbours. It's pretty pointless, as they will simply move and the police has better things to do, but it is not very shocking. Same with red light districts: you make the people who live near those areas happy, and few people stand up to defend the red light district, particularly if you justify your actions as protecting oppressed women from their customers (which is of course unlikely, since you don't display women who are coerced into prostitution in the window).
Conservative politicians do that openly. It's just populism. The opinions of most of the population haven't changed very much on these issues: it's the politicians that changed since the "Fortuyn revolution" and they are now more willing to make empty moralist gestures for their voters. Historically "Dutch tolerance" is more a (pre-democratic) style of administrating the country than a special characteristic of the population at large, who are no more tolerant than the rest of the European population in my view. "Dutch tolerance" finds its basis of support in the universities and the traditional regent class, and it shares in the general malaise of progressive and liberal parties worldwide.
Also don't underestimate the importance of placating important foreign powers for Dutch government, which traditionally feels very vulnerable. We return to an old, anxious conservative style instead of the progressive/liberal (purple) "Holland promotion" style of feeding the world press with good news about the Netherlands. We have seen this in the evening news, with government ministers worrying about how the Netherlands is "portrayed in the US" (obviously by fellow conservatives like fox) and stuff like that, despite their prostrations to Bush.
I can't tell which fear predominates in the mind of these politicians: of drugs, of the US, or of the voters.
How expensive and rigorous would the procedure for getting a bank.tv or bank.to domain be? Should a browser trust a bank.tv or bank.to website? There are obviously banks in Tuvalu and Tonga, but their ccTLD is mostly a way to get some hard currency for the treasury.
.com https website for all international customers is a very common arrangement for banks. I use at least two of them, but I will not name them because I obviously don't want to connect my identity here to specific banks I use.
Secondly, having localized websites, but online banking redirected to a single
Certainly in the 27 states of the EU it is fairly easy to offer financial services in other member states without the overhead of a local organization. The many internet-only banks and financial product comparison web services nowadays make local organizations increasingly irrelevant, as more people move their money around based on interest rates and terms and conditions, not their perception of local service.
As someone which has lived in Holland for many years and just recently left the country due to it's high taxes, ever decreasing public services and progressive leaning to the conservative right (Note: as a foreigner i couldn't vote) allow me to point you that the Dutch did it to themselfs (and just recentely did it again by re-electing the same moralist, religious right-wing conservatives).
What basically happens is that the responsible politicians just stand idly by while overzealous police officers (as it seems on both sides of the ocean, and cooperatively, although that is hard to prove) exploit loopholes created by treaties to get to evildoers they otherwise would not be able to get convicted. Is this political risk avoidance or intent?
They certainly wouldn't dare to bring legislation to the same effect openly through parliament. An external scapegoat is always convenient, and conservatives have a habit anyway on blaming everything on the EU.
As an excuse for the politicians one could argue that the Dutch government is very easily blackmailed by the US in treaty negotiations, since lenient treatment by US customs of cargo containers from Rotterdam is absolutely essential to the Dutch economy: customs can hold up shipments from the ports of a specific country long as they please, and the trade will just go somewhere else where the government is more cooperative with the US. Since cargo handling is obviously related to drugs smuggling it is easy for the US to connect those issues without being an obvious bully. Not complying with US demands is a major risk.
The EU also works very hard to create a race to the bottom with its European arrest warrants. Other Europeans are hardly better protected by their own governments, who subscribe to equally dangerous treaties (for instance by exposing their citizens to a Dutch arrest warrant, who might then at a later stage extradite them to the US). The issue I brought forward is about exploiting differences in admissibility of evidence, and entrapment involving foreign police officers. Public debate always seems to focus on differences in what kinds of activities are criminal, which makes harmonization in law enforcement seem much easier than it is.
The Dutch police just happens to be in a good position to make use of the possibilities (let's call it an 'international outlook' on law enforcement) and traditionally attracts a lot of attention by law enforcement organizations in other countries. Maybe it will be the first to start extraditing citizens of your country to third countries that your government wants to please.
It would be like the US trying to extradite someone from Amsterdam for smoking pot.
The Netherlands does actually get dozens of US extradition requests a year for drugs related crimes, and regularly does extradite Dutch citizens for engaging in drugs transactions with Americans and in some cases even with DEA agents operating on Dutch soil. It's a major political issue here, but the major (conservative) government coalition parties apparently basically tolerate this kind of activity because it creates a possibility to use forms of entrapment that would otherwise be illegal here, and it is easier to get people in jail in the US, particularly through plea bargaining, which is also illegal here. Just smoking pot is safe, though.
And after the first billion have been sold prices are expected to come down due to economies of scale and they will be as cheap as a panel of plywood of comparable size.
In the US Budweiser, a "beer" made from rice, has a 50% market share. And normal Heineken beer, which is a crappy cheap lager to start with, is turned into "Heineken export" for the US market by sweetening it. Yuck. After the "export treatment" all lagers taste the same. It's beer vandalism.
He deserves to have someone ask him why he built the school in a video game. Let a psychologist evaluate him, and then either medicate the kid or let him go back to class.
That's also a disproportionate reaction. My brother in the past made an unreal map of a tiny Italian mountain village he stayed in on vacation, mostly because he had the time, equipment, and the right vantage points to photograph it from all angles, and the village had interesting height differences and bottlenecks for capture the flag games. No harm was intended towards the inhabitants of the village. It is reasonable that people want to make maps of places they are familiar with, and as you point out, schools, certainly old ones, are often symmetric and excellent for balanced team games (just like for instance subway stations).
As far as I know - I am European - there is no field of science is which the US has a stronger position than medicine. The US dominates in publications and patents, and it also clearly shows on the topic map mapping the strengths of nations a few months ago here on Slashdot.
However, if you look at what the US, Europe, and for instance the (late) Soviet Union have contributed to medical science, and what they generally do well in health care, there are notable differences. The US's contribution seems to consist mostly of psychoactive pills, viagra, and excellent cosmetic surgery, Europe introduced most of the standard inventory of medicine, but is past its prime, and the Soviet Union apparently had excellent and efficient emergency care (like Cuba today). A public health care system focuses on whatever helps most people live a little longer or healthier on average, often explicitly rejecting in principle successful treatments because they are not cost-effective, while a private system focuses on what brings in most money, which is often extending and improving the quality of life of the wealthy. This is apparent in health tourism: the rich in Europe sometimes go to the US for expensive and exotic treatments they can't get here (cosmetic, drugs rehab), in the other direction low and average incomes go from the US to Canada, or from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, for basic stuff like surgery.
As you know, the game of chess is violent - you have to destroy the enemy's army (Battlechess in particular also uses violent animations whenever a piece is captured).
My guess: game of chess linked to increased contemplation. Correlational studies shows that chess players are more thoughtful, randomized ones that people playing chess end the game in a more contemplative mood (one for instance rarely sees the winner jumping up and down and cheering, or the loser kicking against stuff).
Obviously many games are linked to adrenalin rushes. They would be bad games if they weren't. Trying to prove this connection is taking down a straw man. What needs to be addressed is firstly that playing games is a sine qua non cause of some violent crimes (like having possession of a bomb is sine qua non cause of a bomb attack), and secondly that legislative action against the games is a proportional instrument for curtailing violent crime (as opposed to for instance proper gun control in the case of the US).
Actually the only peoples that see themselves as winners in the western world are the British, the Russians, and the Americans. The others have either suffered major defeats and occupations in the last two centuries, or are so weak compared to a greater neighbour that they never had an interest in provoking wars (Switzerland for instance).
The main difference between the North American continent and Europe is that North America is unipolar (hence no balance of power to maintain, and a natural leadership of the US that the others must simply accept) while Europe is multipolar, and an attack by a major power on a weaker state tends to draw in other major powers.
As a weaker state this mechanism can be used to preserve independence and autonomy: here in the Netherlands the policy of using one bigger neighbour as assurance against domination by the other one and vice versa was called "double anchor policy" in previous centuries. The doctrine involves 1) making sure you neighbours are not eachothers allies, and 2) giving them sufficient reason (for instance with trade policy) to strongly prefer an independent Netherlands over one occupied by the other major neighbour. The doctrine has basically been abandoned (in favour of the cold war "keep the Americans in, Russians out, and Germans under the feet" doctrine) in the twentieth century, since the doctrine naturally involves being someone else's battlefield from time to time and this is getting increasingly costly. The price to pay is loss of autonomy. A new "double anchor policy" has been in vogue that involves competition of "Europe" and "the Atlantic" (US and UK).
There are many more countries and borders in Europe than in North America, making it easier for one society to export its shit to its neighbours. Most of the smaller countries are stable: radical changes of system of government only occur coincident to attack or occupation by a bigger country, being France, Germany, or Russia in most cases. Don't generalize these three to "Europe".
Here in the Netherlands we have two major points of discontinuity over our existence - nazi occupation during WWII and the occupation by France during the Napoleonic wars (17 years) - and five high profile political murders - of which two were by foreign powers (England and Spain), two others (prime ministers lynched) during the stresses of a major war with a bigger power, and the last one recently (Fortuyn) with no apparent external reason. Even in the case of nazi occupation the system survived unscathed, and the population remained loyal to the monarch in exile. A presidential system would not easily be able to survive an occupation lasting much longer than than the mandate of the elected leaders in exile, which is a point in favour of monarchy for smaller countries that tend to get occupied regularly.
It must not be reported very often since most Americans seem to believe that they are living in some kind of unprecedented Mad-Max dystopia that requires their children to be on lockdown 24/7.
The crime statistics do not disprove the existence of a Mad-Max dystopia. What if behaving as if you live in a Mad-Max dystopia actually works well for lowering crime rates, but at the expense of quality of life? Criminals will generally pick the easiest targets, and the supply of criminals decreases, with a delay, as the targets get harder on average. The easy targets in the meantime become more vulnerable to crime, and the crimes become increasingly impudent, and therefore increasingly frightening.
If some people get robbed in the park and the robberies get a lot of media attention, many people will avoid walking in the park, making it more likely that the people who do keep walking alone in the park get robbed. In the end the park effectively stops being part of public space, and no robberies take place there anymore because there are no targets. The robbers now either move on to another career, or they progress to robbing people on the roads along the park, advancing even further into public space, at the expense of a higher chance of being caught, and get even more media attention because the robbers are becoming increasingly impudent, etc.
Something similar happened in the transformation of the classical age into the dark age, I suppose. Isolated countryside farms were deserted for fortified towns and villages because of raids by barbarians, resulting in less raids (as many barbarians moved on to protecting towns and villages as feodal lords and mercenaries), but also in an empty and more dangerous countryside and less freedom, agriculture, and trade. It took centuries to get out of that vicious cycle, but there is no doubt that it stopped the barbarian raids eventually.
So if we want to follow this strategy, we first employ all potential robbers, rapists, and murderers as politicians and police officers, civilize them, and then start a renewed struggle for rule of law, democracy, etc. The alternative is to accept that the crime rates of a few decades ago were OK and didn't really bother us then.
Here in the Netherlands it is already established that a flashmob that intentionally blocks a road is in principle a criminal organization, with the people who show up and participate as its members. Good chance that the courts will feel that given the choice between a) informing the authorities and b) organizing a mob to block roads, option b is a really bad choice and not an excuse for knowingly disturbing public order.
The next big thing is sitting behind security cams and play "click on the criminal": it's the perfect prolefeed. As you gather points (in an ESP-game style fashion) you level up: 1) police unit despatched immediately without verification to arrest criminal, 2) prosecution started immediately without verification, 3) criminal locked up without trial.
Cocoon can do kerning and ligatures, but it has to be switched on and the right fonts must be used. There are also alternatives, like XEP.
I would use for instance TEI as source and XSL-FO for transforming to output formats if you manage a large online repository of generic text. LaTeX is very useful as an additional output format, but inconvenient as an input to your own transformations and validations. I have experience managing a body of legislation with Cocoon, and we use XSL for verifying constraints on dates, on citations, etc. The XML source also makes it easy to generate PDFs of excerpts of a document (for instance relevant articles in search results, or a specific chapter), or multi-version consolidations, or annotated versions, on the fly.
I agree LaTeX is brilliant. I write papers and reports in it. But it doesn't work well for content management in my opinion.
The right is merely the correlative of someone else's duty. If you have a duty towards me, I have a right towards you. A constitutional right is a vertical right: you are the beneficiary and the goverment is the addressee (of the correlated duty). Rights without counterparty are meaningless. What a people gives away when it recognizes a legislator's competence to legislate on a certain matter is naked (unprotected) freedom in that matter.
Permission is something else entirely. You ask someone for the permission to do something (enter someone's house, use his lawnmower, etc.) if a) you presume that it would otherwise by default be prohibited by that person, and b) you recognize their competence in the matter. Permission is an exception to a more general obligation or prohibition. It has nothing to do with rights or freedom.
The obvious solution is to use multiple airships, and put a sensor on each one of them.
Weapons location radar (artillery hunting radar) are btw usually single point systems, but those are probably not very practical for locating hand gun firefights in a city.
Freedom from an overbearing government only becomes an issue when a government has first established a credible monopoly on violence. Before a society reaches that stage, people are generally more concerned with freedom from oppression by more powerful fellow citizens.
Mark up the books with XSL-FO, or some XML language that translates to it, and use Apache Cocoon or FOP or something like that to generate the XHTML for the web and the PDF version for download. Many websites already work like this. Even when you insist on taking a detour via LaTeX (for mathematical stuff, or diagrams, for instance) I would start with XSL-FO and transform with XSL. LaTeX cannot be properly validated.
It is perceived (true or not) that it would be much easier to put down a rebellion or militia/terrorist group armed with bolt-action .30-06s than the exact same assault rifle issued to the everyman GI. Although, insurgencies and revolutions throughout modern history have been quite successful with older and even antique weapons.
The point of the second amendment as I understand it (I am not American), is that The People can resist a standing army of the state. This is obviously not what is on the mind of the American people: if it were, they would never have allowed the abandonment of conscription, which is a much better safeguard against the state. Revolutions generally succeed if the army is representative of the general population. Arming The People also doesn't have to involve having weapons in a usable state at home. Uniforms and weapons of the militia can for instance be stored at local police stations, or at home but with an (electronic) seal.
I suppose issuing innocent citizen beacons before an invasion is impractical. 'Friend or foe' beacons seem to be based on the principle that if you are not with us, you are against us. This works fairly well for fighter planes, since there are usually few innocent bystanders in fighter planes around, but on the ground IFF beacons and increasing dependence on electronics are a recipe for collateral damage.
The military uniform is also primarily intended to distinguish participants in the game from bystanders. What we need is an international treaty requiring all armies to equip their soldiers with beacons that broadcast their identity in a certain radius. Not wearing it is a war crime and you loose your right to treatment as a POW. When soldiers have to use beacons to make their presence known to the enemy, first world nations will move on to fighting robots in no time.
The Solutrean ice pyramids for instance (19,000 BCE), that served as an example for the smaller Egyptian pyramids, left no trace whatsoever. We will never be able to prove that they existed: we can only surmise their existence from the stone copies by the Egyptians (who had no access to ice), and the similarities between Solutrean and early Egyptian tools and art (both made tools from stone and bone, both made images of animals, etc). And the Solutreans also discovered and colonized America, of course, leaving countless ice pyramids in their wake, which unfortunately left no trace whatsoever.
A single species extinction event doesn't tell us anything about the general fitness of species for environments. Assume an especially avaricious predator evolves that specifically targets your species or only lives in the environment where you live: you go extinct and so does the predator. Tough luck. A less talented species over time can fill up the empty ecological niche because there is no better competitor around any more. Only on the level of many extinction events natural selection becomes evolution. Evolution is not some kind of Crusoe economics: no straightforward hill-climbing towards better species X environment matches with a static environment.