"I guess I have no proof either way, but I wouldn't be surprised in the least to find that this was NBC's idea."
I'd be extremely surprised to find that NBC had anything to do with VESA including HDCP in the DisplayPort 1.1 specification, or the fact that all 3rd. party DisplayPort chips which conform to said specification (and subsequent ones, currently 1.1a) implement it.
A quick perusal of the reviews reveals that (a) most people bought the version with Vista business on; (b) the Linux (Suse Enterprise 10.X) which comes with it machine doesn't work at all well with its hardware; and (c) many customers with both Vista and Linux pre-installs ended up putting XP on their machines.
Add the above to the bad experiences a lot of customers have reported with the various less-than-salutary Linux systems on some other netbooks, and you have a situation where the fact that Linux is being offered at all may end up being a mixed blessing in the long term due to do insufficient commitment from hardware vendors, who seem to expect the FOSS community to do most of their hardware compatibility work for them so they don't have to spend any money doing it themselves.
IMO Linux won't gain many converts among ordinary users while hardware manufacturers continue to treat it as an option for cheapskates who will put up with a substandard experience to save a little money, and geeks that solve problems for themselves and then put the results on the Internet where the manufacturer can take advantage of them without spending anything.
"Linux's biggest problem is lack of consumer awareness, which comes down to lack of marketing."
It isn't a lack of marketing so much as the fact that the majority of computer buyers haven't got any real idea of what an OS is, let alone what it does, hence the fact Apple's geek-annoying advertising campaigns go on about Macs and PCs, not OS X and Windows. This is why Linux is making significant inroads on netbooks, which are a relatively new type of device that people don't necessarily think of as "a computer", just as they don't think of their mobile phones as computers despite the fact that many of them can browse the Internet and send and receive various types of EMAIL, which are two of the most common things they use computers for. It's also notable that netbooks are where MS has responded to a perceived threat from Linux by offering a low-cost version of XP to manufacturers for the foreseeable future despite their announced plans to end-of-life it on "real" computers.
That's what I meant by saying that heads would roll as politicians scramble to distance themselves from it. The rolling heads would come from the people directly involved in the case (judge, lawyers, other court officials, catering staff, police, etc.) who would of course be found to have hatched a conspiracy to suborn justice entirely on their own by a parliamentary enquiry which issues a report saying that politicians are completely blameless, utterly shocked by what happened, and determined to ensure that nothing like it ever happens again.
And it's the above which provides the greatest level of protection against kangaroo courts that act on behalf of ruling political parties in democracies, because everybody with an IQ above that of packaging materials will know it'll be their bollocks in the fire if Amnesty International causes a worldwide press stink that embarrasses the politicos both at home and abroad. Self interest is a pretty big motivator in today's world, and this sort of act definitely isn't in line with the interests of any of those who would be required to participate in it.
"it's all too easy to just claim misunderstandings, clerical errors, or "innocent" shortcuts in procedure ("a proper trial would have been too expensive, we're doing this to save taxpayer's money")"
All of which would be grounds for appeal to a higher court, and eventually the Canadian Supreme Court, an organisation which isn't famed for its pro-government stance.
"Canada has strong data protection laws in place, which makes it easy to forestall any in-depth investigation."
I doubt that it would forestall the higher courts (because trials are supposed to be public, so they'll want to know why public records are being withheld from them), or the queue of anonymous leakers jumping up and down to exchange copies of those records for a large manilla envelope full of money that a reporter just happens to be wandering around a dark alley with.
"Welcome to the real world! Constitutional protections only have value if the people in power want to uphold them."
It goes a lot further than constitutional protections, because everything ordinary citizens have and do is at the sufferance of those with greater power than them, and it doesn't have to be regulatory or judicial power, as those whose jobs and homes have been lost or are in jeopardy because of the world financial crisis are discovering.
"If CBS wants to show boobies after a reasonable time, say, 9:00 (the internationally accepted "Boobie Hour)"
21:00 isn't internationally accepted as a watershed hour, and it's certainly not accepted as a boobie hour by countries who don't share the Anglo-Saxon terror of children catching a glimpse of something that most of them spent their infancy looking at, squeezing, and sucking.
There I was, smugly thinking I'd be completely immune from the law because I could claim I didn't know it was illegal to sell bridges that I don't own, and you pop up and ruin everything by telling me it's illegal.
"Only if the prosecuting authorities chose to try it as an "indictable offense" (felony), not as a misdeamor."
I think the right is actually more limited than that, i.e. an offender can only demand a jury trial when the potential sentence is 5 years or more. I could be wrong on this though, and would welcome being corrected.
"if they want you in the slammer badly enough, they can just hold a kangooroo court in route absence, video-tape it, and then edit footage of you into it after the fact (you get to "testify" before the camera after the verdict has already been spoken, and the footage will be "proof" that you had a proper trial)."
I'm not really familiar with the Canadian system per se, but the fact that it's based on the British one would mean that I'd imagine they'd need more than just an edited video to pull something like that off, i.e. collusion from judiciary, the defence, other court officials, forged court records, etc. I'm not disputing what you're saying here, but simply saying that it would take a lot of balls to try and pull something like this off given the risk that somebody would squall to the press and kick off what could end up as a massive scandal with heads rolling as ministers and other members of parliament do everything possible to distance themselves from it by shifting the blame on to everyone except themselves.
"Are not hunting rifles not designed to kill things like deer and wild boar?"
It depends on the hunting rifle. The ones that are (fairly) easy to buy in France are.22 calibre bolt action rifles, and the easy-to-obtain ammo is fairly low velocity. Weapons like these are OK for hunting rabbits and similarly small creatures, not deer, and certainly not wild boar, who are ill-tempered and dangerous at the best of times, let alone when annoyed by being shot at.
"I would of thought they would be equally effective at killing another creature of similar size, say a person? "
You _might_ kill a person with one if you were really, really good with it, but a recent incident in France when some youths shot at police with them resulted in one slightly injured leg and some small dents in the sides of police cars (which aren't armoured), so they're not much more dangerous than the.22 "hunting" air rifles that I had as a kid in the UK during the 1960s, which were capable of taking an eye out, but not much more than that on a human-sized target.
"I certainly don't intend to test this hypothesis by standing in front of the business end of one in the near future."
I reckon you'd be OK if you were wearing some thick clothes as long as you didn't get hit in the face and were a reasonable distance from it. The same is true of shotguns when firing bird-shot, which can be very nasty at close range, but both spreads out and loses velocity pretty quickly with distance. Neither is intended for killing animals weighing more than a couple of pounds, so while both are capable of doing so under specific sets of circumstances, they're not designed or sold for that purpose, and aren't at all well suited to it without applying for (and being granted) a license to buy and use more lethal types of ammunition. That same license would also allow you to buy much more dangerous sorts of guns as well, so anybody who wanted to use a firearm to kill a human would be unlikely to choose one of these little rifles or a shotgun when they can legally buy something that's far more likely to have the desired result.
Agreed. I'm quite happy to accept the statistical data, but it does not in and of itself support the conclusions made by the sociologists, who are (unsurprisingly to anyone who knows some sociologists) spouting a load of rubbish that the statistical data in and of itself doesn't support. Here are some other possible explanations for the data:
1) Loneliness is a factor in how much TV a person watches, and lonely people are less happy than non-lonely ones. This is not a function of marital status, income, or any other definable factors, because a bored housewife who watches daytime TV while the kids are at school can feel just as lonely, isolated, and bored once the daily household chores are finished as an aged widow or widower with little in the way of a social life does.
2) People who don't go out much tend to buy less magazines, books, and newspapers. They also tend to be less happy than those who go out more.
3) There was no attempt to define happiness levels in an objective way, so what's being measured is how happy each respondent said they were, which is not the same as measuring how happy they actually were. It's therefore quite possible for a significant proportion of respondents to have given TV watching an artificially low happiness rating because they didn't want to admit to themselves or those gathering the data that they really were happiest when being lazy, passive couch potatoes.
4) Those who live with one or more other people and share a TV often end up being stuck watching stuff they don't like much, which makes them less happy than they would be if allowed to watch what they wanted. This can be a factor even in homes with several TVs in the case of cable and satellite broadcasts, which are usually only available on one set per household.
"If that's the case, they should have let him go, followed him around and busted him in the actual act of distributing."
This assumes that the person supplying what ends up being multiply copied and distributed is also the one making and distributing those copies, which isn't necessarily the case. There doesn't even need to be any physical contact between the person doing the recording and the copier / distributor, who can be sent physical media by post or have a non-physical version transferred to them electronically.
"Mens rea, or the mindset of the criminal, is the defining characteristic of a crime."
It actually defines which of a set of possible crimes a person is charged with, not whether they are charged.
" Traditionally, a person is not guilty of a crime unless it could be *proven* that he/she intended to commit a crime."
Please cite a legal tradition where ignorance of a law is an excuse for breaking it. This certainly hasn't ever been the case in the British legal system that underlies both the US and Canadian ones, and it wasn't the case under the Napoleonic system that's still used in some European countries, or the Roman system, the ancient Greek system, the Code Of Hammurabi which Shariah Law is based on, or anything else I can think of.
"It is only in recent times that we have started punishing people for doing things they plainly did not intend or know was a crime."
No system based on the rule of law has _ever_ regarded ignorance of laws as being an excuse for breaking them. The only exception to this is (the legal rather than medical definition of) insanity, but even that doesn't usually result in all charges against the law breaker being dropped.
"I attribute this to businesses using the law as their own personal enforcement arms."
The laws of most countries in nearly all historic periods have been tilted heavily towards the wealthy and powerful for as long as there have been codified laws, because it was the wealthy and powerful who both wrote and enforced them. That's why horse thieves were hanged in both America and Europe until fairly recently in historic terms, pepper thieves had their throats cut under mediaeval European law, and Islamic law cut the hands off thieves of any type. And if you think for one moment that "I didn't realise taking pepper that isn't mine is illegal" would wash with the judiciary of those periods any more than it would today, then I've got a catalogue of lovely bridges to show you that I'm willing to sell at bargain prices.
"I think there may be one more obvious question; despite the illegality of his actions,how could anyone expect to come up with a good image while just sitting there with a video camera aimed at the screen?"
Judging by some of the terrible stuff that's been on the torrent sites (which, by virtue of being an upstanding and law-abiding citizen, I have of course only viewed for research purposes), not being able to get a good image doesn't stop people from uploading movies that were obviously recorded in theatres under appalling conditions using less than wonderful equipment.
"Not to mention this means that the guy will not be able to have a cell phone for a year,since it has been ages since I have seen even a shitty cell that didn't have a camera built in."
He's only prohibited from having one with video recording facilities, not a camera. There are plenty of phones that have cameras without video capabilities, e.g. the source-of-a-million-Slashdot-articles iPhone.
"Their products have a sole purpose - killing people"
What reports are you talking about here? I'm asking sincerely here, because I've not seen any report that gives Linux more than a small fraction of the Mac's desktop market share.
"Definately not even close if you include servers."
Which aren't used to run office software, and are therefore completely irrelevant to those writing and / or selling such software.
"So why aren't they suing weapons manufacturer making handguns or assault rifles. Their products have a sole purpose - killing people"
It probably has something to do with the fact that gun ownership is strictly regulated in France. The only categories of firearms that are freely sold are hunting rifles and shotguns, neither of which are designed to kill people.
"the story of Noah's Ark found in Judeo-Christian & Muslim literature seems to have been adapted from the Epic of Gilgamesh from Sumerian legends dating back to the 17th century BC."
This claim is often bandied about, but there's absolutely no evidence to support it, and a significant body of contrary evidence such as an even older written account (2300 BC) of a flood in Akkadian, a Semitic language that is the root of both Hebrew and Aramaic. This is a far more likely source of the Biblical flood story than a later document written in a completely unrelated language, especially given the fact that various other elements of the Old Testament are now known to be Akkadian in origin.
NB: it's very likely that both the Akkadians and Sumerians were writing down their own versions of much older oral traditions rather than one having influenced the other, either directly or indirectly.
Just like for example the World Trade Organisation, which also makes rules that governments agree to.
"How can a group of governments not be a government?"
You said it yourself: by being a group of governments.
"Would you call a group of African men anything other than African men?"
I would indeed call them a group of African men, but not, as you are arguing, an African man.
"Also it's not always a case of complete agreement and the EU does try to force things on its members."
And how precisely does the EU "force" members to do something if they refuse?
"Just in the case of Sweden and Snus. Snus is illegal for sale everywhere else in the EU and the EU wanted to Sweden to give it up too buy and it was not just a case of Sweden saying "no thanks." but that they had to fight it and even after the EU Okayed it there were still fights with surrounding areas and Snus."
This is a complete misrepresentation of what happened, because Sweden obtained a concession from the EU to continue selling snus domestically as part of its entry negotiations in 1994, a year before they actually joined the EU, so the EU didn't attempt to force Sweden to stop selling it at any time.
Furthermore, the only two cases that resembled a "fight" were a demand by Sweden that the cancer warnings printed on snus packaging be removed in 2001, which the EU conceded to based on new scientific evidence that was to presented to them, and a case in the ECJ where Sweden and its snus manufacturers tried (and failed) to get the EU-wide ban overturned on the grounds that it was contrary to EU law (which they lost).
"So much for their rules being so amicable."
This is straw man, because I didn't claim it was amicable, or for that matter cordial, only that it has no actual mechanisms for forcing members to comply with its rules.
"That is a silly argument since, if you want to be technical, the early US didn't have a federal government either until deciding it was wise to not rely on militia men and actually have a federal military."
What bearing does America before it had a federal government have on your claim that (quote) "it functions exactly like the US federal government"? It seems to me that you're the one who is making silly arguments here. Note though that I agree there are several parallels between the pre-federal American Union and the EU, but this doesn't mean they're functionally equivalent, and it certainly doesn't mean that your claim of it functioning
"Secondly, a union of states / countries doesn't have a strict definition that implies that they have to have a single military force. I'll eat my words if you can find something that strictly defines what a union of territories must have."
Another straw man, because you were claiming that the EU "functions exactly like the US federal government", and this was the point I was disputing, not whether it is or is not a union (it obviously is one, because its name is the "European Union").
"Lastly, just like the EU, states have the freedom to do some things their own way. Hence the reason US states have different speed limits, different alcohol laws, different fireworks laws, etc."
They do not however have the ability to maintain their own currencies, central banks, independent armed forces with nuclear capabilities, treaties with foreign governments, external territories, monarchies, passports, intelligence agencies, and many other things that the _sovereign national governments_ of EU member states have. American states used to have many of the same freedoms, but they haven't got them now.
NB: American seem to be ignorant of the fact that some EU members are themselves semi-autonomous federations of states (e.g. Spain), so Europeans do actually know what they are and how they work, and also therefore why the EU isn't one (yet!!!).
"So, just like EU states, the US states have the freedom to do what they want in a lot of instances. "
The 14th Amendment removed that right by making all citizens of member states into US citizens, giving that US citizenship primacy over state citizenship, and making it illegal for states to remove, revoke, or limit that citizenship in any way. The precise text is as follows:
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States..."
The reason for the amendment was to prevent (primarily southern) states from denying citizenship (or some of the rights of citizens) to non-whites after the American Civil War, but its effect is to make secession effectively impossible due to the fact that it would by its nature involve removing the US citizenship from everyone living in the seceding state.
"My god this [contractdirectory.gov] was difficult to find [google.com]."
You could have avoided embarrassing yourself yet again if you'd actually bothered to read the single paragraph Slashdot topic summary (which is, somewhat unusually, fairly accurate) instead of repeatedly shooting your mouth off from the hip. You would then be aware of the fact that the MEP was asking to _see the contracts_ between MS and the European Council, not 4 lines of text telling him what any EU citizen can find out for themselves from publicly available sources.
"We already have the largest genitals of any primate. (Not to mention some humans have a second one sitting on their shoulders)"
They also have a second arsehole sitting just under the duplicate genitals, but strangely reversed because it's at the front instead of the back. One of the great medical tragedies of modern times is the chronic and incurable case of cholera that afflicts such arseholes, hence their tendency for emitting continuous streams of shit.
"It's so closed that a government website [fbo.gov] doesn't exist that lists every open non-security related active procurement in the federal government, along with all the related information (i.e. rfp, rfq, amendments, attachments) so that every citizen and business has the opportunity to review what the government is buying, how they are going about buying it, and to bid on selling it to them."
None of which has anything whatsoever to do with the topic being discussed, which concerns the ability to view _existing contracts_ between suppliers and publicly funded national governments or supra-national organisations such as the EU. If you want to use straw men instead of actually answering the points, then you should be aware of the fact that I will (a) call you out when you do, and (b) regard it as indicating that you're resorting to a base debating tactic because you're not capable of coming up with any valid refutations.
" I was unfamiliar with Mother Jones, but a quick glance at their front page makes it pretty clear where they stand. But do continue to froth at the mouth regarding the Bush administration, it makes it considerably easier to spot your bias and ignorance."
So now we can add shooting the messenger when you can't handle the message to the list of your cheap debating tricks.
"And by the way, outsourcing with oversight isn't a problem."
It is a problem when said outsourcing is used to put public data into the hands of private corporations, where it isn't subject to freedom of information laws.
"In fact, Goddard Space Flight Center, the largest NASA space research laboratory, houses only 3,186 actual government employees, whereas the other 7,590 that report there work for the companies that NASA contracts to perform the work."
Which again has no relevance to the topic, because paying private companies or individuals to do jobs with public money is a very different proposition from giving them a gatekeeper role for information that was gathered with that public money and concerns how said public money is being spent on non-security related projects. Whichever way you try and argue it, the effect of this is that a central information database which was previously accessible to anyone under freedom of information laws is now in the hands of a private corporation that is exempt from those laws, and can either refuse to divulge certain pieces of information, or place such a prohibitive price on accessing them that the effect is the same as a refusal.
"Private industry is also much more efficient than even an open government."
That statement might have carried a lot more weight before governments all over the world had to use huge amounts of public money to pull a whole bunch of private industries out of some disastrous holes they'd dug themselves into.
"eah with a European Parliament, the EU creating rules to govern over its member states makes it nothing like a government. "
The EU does not make rules to _govern_ its member states, it makes rules that its member states _agreed to abide by and implement_ as a condition of their membership.
"It's a political union which if you want to be anal is not the word government but it functions exactly like the US federal government whose origins began as a union of states which is also why, in the civil war, the northern troops were union troops."
The terms "civil war" and "union troops" highlight just one of the key differences between the EU and the US federation of states, because the EU has no armed forces, and while it's entirely possible for two or more EU member states to declare war on each other, it would not be a civil war, but a case of sovereign nations going to war with other sovereign nations. Such a situation would very likely result in the warring nations being immediately expelled from the EU until hostilities ceased (and possibly for a considerable time thereafter) because they would by definition be unable to comply with fundamental EU principles such as ensuring the free movement of goods, services, money, and people between all member states.
"They wanted to keep the union together"
Which raises another difference in that EU members may leave if they choose to without any repercussions other than a loss of the benefits that membership confers on them, as Greenland did in 1985. Furthermore, using force to "keep the union together" is not something the EU or its members would tolerate, because the idea of it was originally preventing a reoccurrence of the situations that led to two devastating wars in Europe during the 20th century, so _any_ attempt to use military force of any type by the EU itself or any members acting on its behalf against other members would result in its immediate collapse.
"So yeah the EU so not a government."
The EU isn't a government because it doesn't govern -- it has rules by which members are expected to abide, but there are no actual mechanisms for enforcing those rules beyond financial penalties (which they also have no way of enforcing) and the threat of expulsion from the EU, which has never actually happened, and would in any case mean that the expelled country was immediately freed from the requirement to abide by EU rules, including the financial penalties incurred for not abiding by the rules!
"Your right, a political and economic union of member states is so much different than a government."
The EU is indeed an economic union, and in some senses a political one, but only in some senses. There have been two attempts to make it into more of a political union: the first one (the EU Constitution) was rejected by citizen referendums in two countries; and the second (the Lisbon Treaty) has been rejected by an Irish referendum, and hasn't been ratified by Germany or Poland either, so it's currently in limbo because no changes to existing EU treaties can be made without being ratified by the _governments_ of all members.
"Wait a second, that almost sounds like a federation of independent states got together, and created a ruling body to oversee and coordinate them."
If the EU is a federation, then WIPO and the WTO are federations, because they also have ruling bodies to oversee and coordinate members.
"We did that here, and we called it the United States Federal Government"
The EU has nothing whatsoever in common with the US federation of states. Some notable differences between them are listed below (please note that it's by no means an exhaustive list):
1) All US states must use the same currency, which has exactly the same appearance everywhere; membership of the European currency is voluntary, and each country that elects to join has its own national version of every coin and note.
2) The EU doesn't collect taxes from individuals or companies, whereas the US federal government does.
3) Nothing remotely equivalent to the FBI, CIA, NSA, federal prisons, nor any of the other federal policy enforcement mechanisms or support systems (e.g. FBI laboratories) that exist in US are present in the EU.
4) Unlike the US, the EU has no armed forces, and it cannot declare war on anyone or end hostilities with them. Individual members on the other hand can and do have their own armed forces (with independent nuclear capabilities in some cases), can use them without the consent of other EU members or the EU itself, and may unilaterally may declare war or sign peace treaties with foreign countries.
5) The EU cannot make new treaties with non-EC governments or organisations that are binding on members without the unanimous consent of those members.
6) European laws (and the courts which arbitrate them) are entirely dependant on the willingness of member states to abide by them. Financial penalties may be applied to those who fail to comply, but there is no EU apparatus to enforce payment of those sanctions. Members may theoretically be expelled for repeated transgressions, but this (a) requires unanimous assent from member governments, and (b) has never happened despite the fact that some members have repeatedly and openly refused to abide by EC laws and / or rulings from the European Courts.
7. There is no such thing as an EU passport, nobody owes allegiance to the EU or its flag, and it's impossible to perform a treasonous act against the EU itself.
8. Membership of the EU is entirely voluntary, so members can leave it if they wish (as Greenland did in 1985). This hasn't been the case in the US since the 14th Amendment defined a US citizen to prevent a repeat of what happened in your civil war.
9. The EU hasn't got a head of state or anything equivalent to one.
"If it makes you feel better to not call a spade a spade, go for it".
It's actually a case of you classifying brooms, hoes, and rakes as spades because they all have handles. The EU has far more parallels with an exclusive club than a government: countries apply to join it, and only those who meet certain criteria will be accepted; they pay periodic membership fees in return for various benefits, and agree to abide by a common set of club rules or risk expulsion; and they may leave if they wish, at which point they cease to be bound by the rules, are no longer required to pay membership fees, and lose any benefits that membership conferred.
Slashdot Mirror
"I guess I have no proof either way, but I wouldn't be surprised in the least to find that this was NBC's idea."
I'd be extremely surprised to find that NBC had anything to do with VESA including HDCP in the DisplayPort 1.1 specification, or the fact that all 3rd. party DisplayPort chips which conform to said specification (and subsequent ones, currently 1.1a) implement it.
A quick perusal of the reviews reveals that (a) most people bought the version with Vista business on; (b) the Linux (Suse Enterprise 10.X) which comes with it machine doesn't work at all well with its hardware; and (c) many customers with both Vista and Linux pre-installs ended up putting XP on their machines.
Add the above to the bad experiences a lot of customers have reported with the various less-than-salutary Linux systems on some other netbooks, and you have a situation where the fact that Linux is being offered at all may end up being a mixed blessing in the long term due to do insufficient commitment from hardware vendors, who seem to expect the FOSS community to do most of their hardware compatibility work for them so they don't have to spend any money doing it themselves.
IMO Linux won't gain many converts among ordinary users while hardware manufacturers continue to treat it as an option for cheapskates who will put up with a substandard experience to save a little money, and geeks that solve problems for themselves and then put the results on the Internet where the manufacturer can take advantage of them without spending anything.
"Linux's biggest problem is lack of consumer awareness, which comes down to lack of marketing."
It isn't a lack of marketing so much as the fact that the majority of computer buyers haven't got any real idea of what an OS is, let alone what it does, hence the fact Apple's geek-annoying advertising campaigns go on about Macs and PCs, not OS X and Windows. This is why Linux is making significant inroads on netbooks, which are a relatively new type of device that people don't necessarily think of as "a computer", just as they don't think of their mobile phones as computers despite the fact that many of them can browse the Internet and send and receive various types of EMAIL, which are two of the most common things they use computers for. It's also notable that netbooks are where MS has responded to a perceived threat from Linux by offering a low-cost version of XP to manufacturers for the foreseeable future despite their announced plans to end-of-life it on "real" computers.
"Heads rolling? Maybe at a local level"
That's what I meant by saying that heads would roll as politicians scramble to distance themselves from it. The rolling heads would come from the people directly involved in the case (judge, lawyers, other court officials, catering staff, police, etc.) who would of course be found to have hatched a conspiracy to suborn justice entirely on their own by a parliamentary enquiry which issues a report saying that politicians are completely blameless, utterly shocked by what happened, and determined to ensure that nothing like it ever happens again.
And it's the above which provides the greatest level of protection against kangaroo courts that act on behalf of ruling political parties in democracies, because everybody with an IQ above that of packaging materials will know it'll be their bollocks in the fire if Amnesty International causes a worldwide press stink that embarrasses the politicos both at home and abroad. Self interest is a pretty big motivator in today's world, and this sort of act definitely isn't in line with the interests of any of those who would be required to participate in it.
"it's all too easy to just claim misunderstandings, clerical errors, or "innocent" shortcuts in procedure ("a proper trial would have been too expensive, we're doing this to save taxpayer's money")"
All of which would be grounds for appeal to a higher court, and eventually the Canadian Supreme Court, an organisation which isn't famed for its pro-government stance.
"Canada has strong data protection laws in place, which makes it easy to forestall any in-depth investigation."
I doubt that it would forestall the higher courts (because trials are supposed to be public, so they'll want to know why public records are being withheld from them), or the queue of anonymous leakers jumping up and down to exchange copies of those records for a large manilla envelope full of money that a reporter just happens to be wandering around a dark alley with.
"Welcome to the real world! Constitutional protections only have value if the people in power want to uphold them."
It goes a lot further than constitutional protections, because everything ordinary citizens have and do is at the sufferance of those with greater power than them, and it doesn't have to be regulatory or judicial power, as those whose jobs and homes have been lost or are in jeopardy because of the world financial crisis are discovering.
"If CBS wants to show boobies after a reasonable time, say, 9:00 (the internationally accepted "Boobie Hour)"
21:00 isn't internationally accepted as a watershed hour, and it's certainly not accepted as a boobie hour by countries who don't share the Anglo-Saxon terror of children catching a glimpse of something that most of them spent their infancy looking at, squeezing, and sucking.
There I was, smugly thinking I'd be completely immune from the law because I could claim I didn't know it was illegal to sell bridges that I don't own, and you pop up and ruin everything by telling me it's illegal.
"Only if the prosecuting authorities chose to try it as an "indictable offense" (felony), not as a misdeamor."
I think the right is actually more limited than that, i.e. an offender can only demand a jury trial when the potential sentence is 5 years or more. I could be wrong on this though, and would welcome being corrected.
"if they want you in the slammer badly enough, they can just hold a kangooroo court in route absence, video-tape it, and then edit footage of you into it after the fact (you get to "testify" before the camera after the verdict has already been spoken, and the footage will be "proof" that you had a proper trial)."
I'm not really familiar with the Canadian system per se, but the fact that it's based on the British one would mean that I'd imagine they'd need more than just an edited video to pull something like that off, i.e. collusion from judiciary, the defence, other court officials, forged court records, etc. I'm not disputing what you're saying here, but simply saying that it would take a lot of balls to try and pull something like this off given the risk that somebody would squall to the press and kick off what could end up as a massive scandal with heads rolling as ministers and other members of parliament do everything possible to distance themselves from it by shifting the blame on to everyone except themselves.
"Are not hunting rifles not designed to kill things like deer and wild boar?"
It depends on the hunting rifle. The ones that are (fairly) easy to buy in France are .22 calibre bolt action rifles, and the easy-to-obtain ammo is fairly low velocity. Weapons like these are OK for hunting rabbits and similarly small creatures, not deer, and certainly not wild boar, who are ill-tempered and dangerous at the best of times, let alone when annoyed by being shot at.
"I would of thought they would be equally effective at killing another creature of similar size, say a person? "
You _might_ kill a person with one if you were really, really good with it, but a recent incident in France when some youths shot at police with them resulted in one slightly injured leg and some small dents in the sides of police cars (which aren't armoured), so they're not much more dangerous than the .22 "hunting" air rifles that I had as a kid in the UK during the 1960s, which were capable of taking an eye out, but not much more than that on a human-sized target.
"I certainly don't intend to test this hypothesis by standing in front of the business end of one in the near future."
I reckon you'd be OK if you were wearing some thick clothes as long as you didn't get hit in the face and were a reasonable distance from it. The same is true of shotguns when firing bird-shot, which can be very nasty at close range, but both spreads out and loses velocity pretty quickly with distance. Neither is intended for killing animals weighing more than a couple of pounds, so while both are capable of doing so under specific sets of circumstances, they're not designed or sold for that purpose, and aren't at all well suited to it without applying for (and being granted) a license to buy and use more lethal types of ammunition. That same license would also allow you to buy much more dangerous sorts of guns as well, so anybody who wanted to use a firearm to kill a human would be unlikely to choose one of these little rifles or a shotgun when they can legally buy something that's far more likely to have the desired result.
Agreed. I'm quite happy to accept the statistical data, but it does not in and of itself support the conclusions made by the sociologists, who are (unsurprisingly to anyone who knows some sociologists) spouting a load of rubbish that the statistical data in and of itself doesn't support. Here are some other possible explanations for the data:
1) Loneliness is a factor in how much TV a person watches, and lonely people are less happy than non-lonely ones. This is not a function of marital status, income, or any other definable factors, because a bored housewife who watches daytime TV while the kids are at school can feel just as lonely, isolated, and bored once the daily household chores are finished as an aged widow or widower with little in the way of a social life does.
2) People who don't go out much tend to buy less magazines, books, and newspapers. They also tend to be less happy than those who go out more.
3) There was no attempt to define happiness levels in an objective way, so what's being measured is how happy each respondent said they were, which is not the same as measuring how happy they actually were. It's therefore quite possible for a significant proportion of respondents to have given TV watching an artificially low happiness rating because they didn't want to admit to themselves or those gathering the data that they really were happiest when being lazy, passive couch potatoes.
4) Those who live with one or more other people and share a TV often end up being stuck watching stuff they don't like much, which makes them less happy than they would be if allowed to watch what they wanted. This can be a factor even in homes with several TVs in the case of cable and satellite broadcasts, which are usually only available on one set per household.
"If that's the case, they should have let him go, followed him around and busted him in the actual act of distributing."
This assumes that the person supplying what ends up being multiply copied and distributed is also the one making and distributing those copies, which isn't necessarily the case. There doesn't even need to be any physical contact between the person doing the recording and the copier / distributor, who can be sent physical media by post or have a non-physical version transferred to them electronically.
"Mens rea, or the mindset of the criminal, is the defining characteristic of a crime."
It actually defines which of a set of possible crimes a person is charged with, not whether they are charged.
" Traditionally, a person is not guilty of a crime unless it could be *proven* that he/she intended to commit a crime."
Please cite a legal tradition where ignorance of a law is an excuse for breaking it. This certainly hasn't ever been the case in the British legal system that underlies both the US and Canadian ones, and it wasn't the case under the Napoleonic system that's still used in some European countries, or the Roman system, the ancient Greek system, the Code Of Hammurabi which Shariah Law is based on, or anything else I can think of.
"It is only in recent times that we have started punishing people for doing things they plainly did not intend or know was a crime."
No system based on the rule of law has _ever_ regarded ignorance of laws as being an excuse for breaking them. The only exception to this is (the legal rather than medical definition of) insanity, but even that doesn't usually result in all charges against the law breaker being dropped.
"I attribute this to businesses using the law as their own personal enforcement arms."
The laws of most countries in nearly all historic periods have been tilted heavily towards the wealthy and powerful for as long as there have been codified laws, because it was the wealthy and powerful who both wrote and enforced them. That's why horse thieves were hanged in both America and Europe until fairly recently in historic terms, pepper thieves had their throats cut under mediaeval European law, and Islamic law cut the hands off thieves of any type. And if you think for one moment that "I didn't realise taking pepper that isn't mine is illegal" would wash with the judiciary of those periods any more than it would today, then I've got a catalogue of lovely bridges to show you that I'm willing to sell at bargain prices.
The parent said that _the accused_ has the right to choose whether to be tried by a jury or only a judge, not the prosecuting authorities.
"I think there may be one more obvious question; despite the illegality of his actions,how could anyone expect to come up with a good image while just sitting there with a video camera aimed at the screen?"
Judging by some of the terrible stuff that's been on the torrent sites (which, by virtue of being an upstanding and law-abiding citizen, I have of course only viewed for research purposes), not being able to get a good image doesn't stop people from uploading movies that were obviously recorded in theatres under appalling conditions using less than wonderful equipment.
"Not to mention this means that the guy will not be able to have a cell phone for a year,since it has been ages since I have seen even a shitty cell that didn't have a camera built in."
He's only prohibited from having one with video recording facilities, not a camera. There are plenty of phones that have cameras without video capabilities, e.g. the source-of-a-million-Slashdot-articles iPhone.
I gladly concede to your excellent riposte, sir.
"Their products have a sole purpose - killing people"
What reports are you talking about here? I'm asking sincerely here, because I've not seen any report that gives Linux more than a small fraction of the Mac's desktop market share.
"Definately not even close if you include servers."
Which aren't used to run office software, and are therefore completely irrelevant to those writing and / or selling such software.
"So why aren't they suing weapons manufacturer making handguns or assault rifles. Their products have a sole purpose - killing people"
It probably has something to do with the fact that gun ownership is strictly regulated in France. The only categories of firearms that are freely sold are hunting rifles and shotguns, neither of which are designed to kill people.
"the story of Noah's Ark found in Judeo-Christian & Muslim literature seems to have been adapted from the Epic of Gilgamesh from Sumerian legends dating back to the 17th century BC."
This claim is often bandied about, but there's absolutely no evidence to support it, and a significant body of contrary evidence such as an even older written account (2300 BC) of a flood in Akkadian, a Semitic language that is the root of both Hebrew and Aramaic. This is a far more likely source of the Biblical flood story than a later document written in a completely unrelated language, especially given the fact that various other elements of the Old Testament are now known to be Akkadian in origin.
NB: it's very likely that both the Akkadians and Sumerians were writing down their own versions of much older oral traditions rather than one having influenced the other, either directly or indirectly.
"they EU makes rules that governments agree to"
Just like for example the World Trade Organisation, which also makes rules that governments agree to.
"How can a group of governments not be a government?"
You said it yourself: by being a group of governments.
"Would you call a group of African men anything other than African men?"
I would indeed call them a group of African men, but not, as you are arguing, an African man.
"Also it's not always a case of complete agreement and the EU does try to force things on its members."
And how precisely does the EU "force" members to do something if they refuse?
"Just in the case of Sweden and Snus. Snus is illegal for sale everywhere else in the EU and the EU wanted to Sweden to give it up too buy and it was not just a case of Sweden saying "no thanks." but that they had to fight it and even after the EU Okayed it there were still fights with surrounding areas and Snus."
This is a complete misrepresentation of what happened, because Sweden obtained a concession from the EU to continue selling snus domestically as part of its entry negotiations in 1994, a year before they actually joined the EU, so the EU didn't attempt to force Sweden to stop selling it at any time.
Furthermore, the only two cases that resembled a "fight" were a demand by Sweden that the cancer warnings printed on snus packaging be removed in 2001, which the EU conceded to based on new scientific evidence that was to presented to them, and a case in the ECJ where Sweden and its snus manufacturers tried (and failed) to get the EU-wide ban overturned on the grounds that it was contrary to EU law (which they lost).
"So much for their rules being so amicable."
This is straw man, because I didn't claim it was amicable, or for that matter cordial, only that it has no actual mechanisms for forcing members to comply with its rules.
"That is a silly argument since, if you want to be technical, the early US didn't have a federal government either until deciding it was wise to not rely on militia men and actually have a federal military."
What bearing does America before it had a federal government have on your claim that (quote) "it functions exactly like the US federal government"? It seems to me that you're the one who is making silly arguments here. Note though that I agree there are several parallels between the pre-federal American Union and the EU, but this doesn't mean they're functionally equivalent, and it certainly doesn't mean that your claim of it functioning
"Secondly, a union of states / countries doesn't have a strict definition that implies that they have to have a single military force. I'll eat my words if you can find something that strictly defines what a union of territories must have."
Another straw man, because you were claiming that the EU "functions exactly like the US federal government", and this was the point I was disputing, not whether it is or is not a union (it obviously is one, because its name is the "European Union").
"Lastly, just like the EU, states have the freedom to do some things their own way. Hence the reason US states have different speed limits, different alcohol laws, different fireworks laws, etc."
They do not however have the ability to maintain their own currencies, central banks, independent armed forces with nuclear capabilities, treaties with foreign governments, external territories, monarchies, passports, intelligence agencies, and many other things that the _sovereign national governments_ of EU member states have. American states used to have many of the same freedoms, but they haven't got them now.
NB: American seem to be ignorant of the fact that some EU members are themselves semi-autonomous federations of states (e.g. Spain), so Europeans do actually know what they are and how they work, and also therefore why the EU isn't one (yet!!!).
"So, just like EU states, the US states have the freedom to do what they want in a lot of instances. "
The 14th Amendment removed that right by making all citizens of member states into US citizens, giving that US citizenship primacy over state citizenship, and making it illegal for states to remove, revoke, or limit that citizenship in any way. The precise text is as follows:
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States..."
The reason for the amendment was to prevent (primarily southern) states from denying citizenship (or some of the rights of citizens) to non-whites after the American Civil War, but its effect is to make secession effectively impossible due to the fact that it would by its nature involve removing the US citizenship from everyone living in the seceding state.
"My god this [contractdirectory.gov] was difficult to find [google.com]."
You could have avoided embarrassing yourself yet again if you'd actually bothered to read the single paragraph Slashdot topic summary (which is, somewhat unusually, fairly accurate) instead of repeatedly shooting your mouth off from the hip. You would then be aware of the fact that the MEP was asking to _see the contracts_ between MS and the European Council, not 4 lines of text telling him what any EU citizen can find out for themselves from publicly available sources.
"We already have the largest genitals of any primate. (Not to mention some humans have a second one sitting on their shoulders)"
They also have a second arsehole sitting just under the duplicate genitals, but strangely reversed because it's at the front instead of the back. One of the great medical tragedies of modern times is the chronic and incurable case of cholera that afflicts such arseholes, hence their tendency for emitting continuous streams of shit.
"It's so closed that a government website [fbo.gov] doesn't exist that lists every open non-security related active procurement in the federal government, along with all the related information (i.e. rfp, rfq, amendments, attachments) so that every citizen and business has the opportunity to review what the government is buying, how they are going about buying it, and to bid on selling it to them."
None of which has anything whatsoever to do with the topic being discussed, which concerns the ability to view _existing contracts_ between suppliers and publicly funded national governments or supra-national organisations such as the EU. If you want to use straw men instead of actually answering the points, then you should be aware of the fact that I will (a) call you out when you do, and (b) regard it as indicating that you're resorting to a base debating tactic because you're not capable of coming up with any valid refutations.
" I was unfamiliar with Mother Jones, but a quick glance at their front page makes it pretty clear where they stand. But do continue to froth at the mouth regarding the Bush administration, it makes it considerably easier to spot your bias and ignorance."
So now we can add shooting the messenger when you can't handle the message to the list of your cheap debating tricks.
"And by the way, outsourcing with oversight isn't a problem."
It is a problem when said outsourcing is used to put public data into the hands of private corporations, where it isn't subject to freedom of information laws.
"In fact, Goddard Space Flight Center, the largest NASA space research laboratory, houses only 3,186 actual government employees, whereas the other 7,590 that report there work for the companies that NASA contracts to perform the work."
Which again has no relevance to the topic, because paying private companies or individuals to do jobs with public money is a very different proposition from giving them a gatekeeper role for information that was gathered with that public money and concerns how said public money is being spent on non-security related projects. Whichever way you try and argue it, the effect of this is that a central information database which was previously accessible to anyone under freedom of information laws is now in the hands of a private corporation that is exempt from those laws, and can either refuse to divulge certain pieces of information, or place such a prohibitive price on accessing them that the effect is the same as a refusal.
"Private industry is also much more efficient than even an open government."
That statement might have carried a lot more weight before governments all over the world had to use huge amounts of public money to pull a whole bunch of private industries out of some disastrous holes they'd dug themselves into.
"eah with a European Parliament, the EU creating rules to govern over its member states makes it nothing like a government. "
The EU does not make rules to _govern_ its member states, it makes rules that its member states _agreed to abide by and implement_ as a condition of their membership.
"It's a political union which if you want to be anal is not the word government but it functions exactly like the US federal government whose origins began as a union of states which is also why, in the civil war, the northern troops were union troops."
The terms "civil war" and "union troops" highlight just one of the key differences between the EU and the US federation of states, because the EU has no armed forces, and while it's entirely possible for two or more EU member states to declare war on each other, it would not be a civil war, but a case of sovereign nations going to war with other sovereign nations. Such a situation would very likely result in the warring nations being immediately expelled from the EU until hostilities ceased (and possibly for a considerable time thereafter) because they would by definition be unable to comply with fundamental EU principles such as ensuring the free movement of goods, services, money, and people between all member states.
"They wanted to keep the union together"
Which raises another difference in that EU members may leave if they choose to without any repercussions other than a loss of the benefits that membership confers on them, as Greenland did in 1985. Furthermore, using force to "keep the union together" is not something the EU or its members would tolerate, because the idea of it was originally preventing a reoccurrence of the situations that led to two devastating wars in Europe during the 20th century, so _any_ attempt to use military force of any type by the EU itself or any members acting on its behalf against other members would result in its immediate collapse.
"So yeah the EU so not a government."
The EU isn't a government because it doesn't govern -- it has rules by which members are expected to abide, but there are no actual mechanisms for enforcing those rules beyond financial penalties (which they also have no way of enforcing) and the threat of expulsion from the EU, which has never actually happened, and would in any case mean that the expelled country was immediately freed from the requirement to abide by EU rules, including the financial penalties incurred for not abiding by the rules!
"Your right, a political and economic union of member states is so much different than a government."
The EU is indeed an economic union, and in some senses a political one, but only in some senses. There have been two attempts to make it into more of a political union: the first one (the EU Constitution) was rejected by citizen referendums in two countries; and the second (the Lisbon Treaty) has been rejected by an Irish referendum, and hasn't been ratified by Germany or Poland either, so it's currently in limbo because no changes to existing EU treaties can be made without being ratified by the _governments_ of all members.
"Wait a second, that almost sounds like a federation of independent states got together, and created a ruling body to oversee and coordinate them."
If the EU is a federation, then WIPO and the WTO are federations, because they also have ruling bodies to oversee and coordinate members.
"We did that here, and we called it the United States Federal Government"
The EU has nothing whatsoever in common with the US federation of states. Some notable differences between them are listed below (please note that it's by no means an exhaustive list):
1) All US states must use the same currency, which has exactly the same appearance everywhere; membership of the European currency is voluntary, and each country that elects to join has its own national version of every coin and note.
2) The EU doesn't collect taxes from individuals or companies, whereas the US federal government does.
3) Nothing remotely equivalent to the FBI, CIA, NSA, federal prisons, nor any of the other federal policy enforcement mechanisms or support systems (e.g. FBI laboratories) that exist in US are present in the EU.
4) Unlike the US, the EU has no armed forces, and it cannot declare war on anyone or end hostilities with them. Individual members on the other hand can and do have their own armed forces (with independent nuclear capabilities in some cases), can use them without the consent of other EU members or the EU itself, and may unilaterally may declare war or sign peace treaties with foreign countries.
5) The EU cannot make new treaties with non-EC governments or organisations that are binding on members without the unanimous consent of those members.
6) European laws (and the courts which arbitrate them) are entirely dependant on the willingness of member states to abide by them. Financial penalties may be applied to those who fail to comply, but there is no EU apparatus to enforce payment of those sanctions. Members may theoretically be expelled for repeated transgressions, but this (a) requires unanimous assent from member governments, and (b) has never happened despite the fact that some members have repeatedly and openly refused to abide by EC laws and / or rulings from the European Courts.
7. There is no such thing as an EU passport, nobody owes allegiance to the EU or its flag, and it's impossible to perform a treasonous act against the EU itself.
8. Membership of the EU is entirely voluntary, so members can leave it if they wish (as Greenland did in 1985). This hasn't been the case in the US since the 14th Amendment defined a US citizen to prevent a repeat of what happened in your civil war.
9. The EU hasn't got a head of state or anything equivalent to one.
"If it makes you feel better to not call a spade a spade, go for it".
It's actually a case of you classifying brooms, hoes, and rakes as spades because they all have handles. The EU has far more parallels with an exclusive club than a government: countries apply to join it, and only those who meet certain criteria will be accepted; they pay periodic membership fees in return for various benefits, and agree to abide by a common set of club rules or risk expulsion; and they may leave if they wish, at which point they cease to be bound by the rules, are no longer required to pay membership fees, and lose any benefits that membership conferred.
"the fact of the matter is