What kind of mindset is that where cops are allowed to beat anyone (even a resisting criminal)? They are allowed to arrest him and to use force to break his resistance so that an arrest is possible. Anything further is a criminal offence. These cops in the video beat this guy for several minutes. I don't know if a cop's mind is *that* slow to recognize anything. I strongly doubt it. Suspension and retraining? Maybe retraining for his new job at McDonald's.
Oh please don't forget that gypsies, homosexuals, etc. were more of an ideological "by-catch". Though the Nazi ideology hit them, too, the main theme was "Kill the jews! And do it thoroughly!". That's kind of a difference.
I will start reading on the Al-Jazeera leaks soon enough, though I don't see the point in there. Why would Israel want to give up land to neighbors that are not of the "rational kind"? They were attacked first, their neighbors (official propaganda) are - plainly spoken - the closest to "nazi" you can get these days, and there's not much of a guarantee for Israel's security in what these failing states have to offer. Israel has to keep certain areas for strategic reasons alone, if they don't want to be run over.
That is, unless some of their neighbours develop a civic society that know more than just burning flags and keeping their neighborhoods "judenrein"!
The "peace process" is a joke unless not Israel, but their neighbors refrain from violence. Israel will have to do so the minute they are no longer threatened, because they ARE held accountable through public opinion. Their neighbors? They don't f****** care.
The problem is it isn't the consumers who really pay the tax, it's the retailers. How exactly do you propose that the government tax overseas retailers. I can think of a few options but each one of them forces me to think be careful what you wish for. What you and the retailers seem to support is not good for anybody at all except for the government.
And where exactly is your problem here? I am German, our VAT is generally 19% on all purchases, in stores and on the internet. Where non-physical goods like software downloads are sold from foreign retailers to German customers, foreign retailers have to collect the tax for the German state - and they do so, to save their customers the hassle of tax fraud investigations (a whole different issue here: German tax authorities can investigate your bank account at any time). Where physical goods enter the country, our customs office relies on the declaration form and sends invoices to the recipient, or stops the goods and tries to find out their sales price (you'll have to produce an eBay printout, whatever).
So, with enough regulatory power this is a non-issue.
I see your point, though: It's liberty. While I believe having the same tax rate on online and store purchases is a good thing, I do think that Germany's solution to ensure compliance is way over the top for any respectable free society.
In all the cases I know of, the thieves (in Germany) were pretty old-fashioned: they took the money and threw the wallet away. And emptied your bank account before they threw everything away. Not every store asks for ID on CC/debit card purchases.
That's what SKY (TV, Murdoch) doesn't understand. I just read their Q1 report (Germany): in large letters: "Gross subscriber growth: 123000". Smaller, underneath: "churn: 122000, net subscriber growth: 1000":-)
"Selling expenses: 31.9 million EUR" -> Selling expenses per additional subscriber: 31.900 EUR.
Oh don't worry about facebook, to me it's just a useful way to not lose any e-mail addresses & get a somewhat prompt reaction. I DO post stuff I find thought provoking there, and yes, the average reaction is less than the conversations on sushi. But hey, that may have something to do with time. A short comment on s.o.`s sushi is maybe just a way to "connect" again without having any points to argue about.
About video telephony - you might just want to read David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest". Somewhere in the first 250 pages, there's a lenghty piece about the reasons why video telephony didn't take off (the book is set in a not too distant future, probably our present, but was published in 1996). The basic argument is that video telephony is stressful because it destroys the illusion of a telephone call, i.e. the illusion on both sides of attentiveness clashing with the reality that in fact, most of the time, both sides of a telephone conversation are completely distracted by other things or simply not "presentable" enough to be shown on video.
So they're happy to "destroy" is but don't want to turn it over so Germany can see exactly what they were gathering? Smells fishy to me.
If you had followed the German Ministry of the Interior, especially under Mr. Schäuble, more closely, you would destroy the hard drives yourself, FOR Google.
Why would I, as a citizen, want that Google hands over this data to the same government that's been undermining privacy rights and the principles of a *federal* state for years? A centralized taxpayer database to circumvent the illegality of central databases on citizens? Got it! (ELENA). A central database of all online & telephony connections, recently deleted by order of the Bundesverfassungsgericht (supreme court)? Had it!
But of course I still trust them with my data. Of course! Paying lip service to privacy and blaming the private sector is easy.
I seriously hope more EU countries will demand the same thing. It's outrageous how Google blatantly breaks laws, especially privacy ones, and get nothing for it.
Google does not break laws, they are doing this legally, (at worst) in an unregulated area - collecting publicly available data on an industry scale.
Whoever in the EU parliament will impose big fines for Google breaking privacy laws gets my vote.
I do not want EU legislation on this, thank you. There is still the rule of subsidiarity, so this is a national question anyways.
Don't use Google services you say? That's a little bit hard when they have their cars driving around sniffing web traffic.
Wow. Google is NOT sniffing web traffic, they are at best wardriving (but not accessing WLANs), maybe recording encryption schemes on found WLANs. So? Any telco/ISP-provided router is configured for WPA/WPA2 anyways.
Viviane Reding, the European justice commissioner,
Viviane Reding is, first of all, a typical EU politician. She has a history of interfering in national jurisdiction (ignoring the principle of subsidiarity to justify her existence), free markets,on whatever she "feels" is wrong. Sometimes she has a reason (as with absurd roaming charges), sometimes she should better stick to the principle that quite often, no law is the best law.
I certainly do not want to visit your house, then. Thanks, most ppl with spiral CFLs are just mad and would be better off living in a dark room.
My light requirements are: 1. Immediate 100% brightness. I have stairs! I am combining 2 7-W-CFLs with one 40-W bulb, just so that nobody gets hurt. The CFLs still suck, since their light is not nearly as bright as the 40W bulb - that is, in the 5 minutes until the timer turns them off again. 2. My living rooms are for living. I need comfortable light. You can stop thinking about CFLS from here (I have two 28W-daylight-CFLs in my home office - daylight CFLS, costing about 28 euros each. Good light for office work). 3. Dimming capability. My living room has a 3x75W G9 uplight, and I will not replace it. 4. And yes, I have LED lights: 8x Cree Q5 LEDs (21W/1440 lm) in the hall. Not comfortable, but far brighter (!) than one 100W conventional bulb. Since I used a cheap notebook adapter for the 19V they require, the light is still not immediately on (startup delay).
So you see, I *am* experimenting with energy saving light sources, but there's nothing above halogen bulbs, with the pure-white LEDs coming in second (problems: expensive, "yellow" light means low efficiency, good power sources required, dimming by PWM is not cheap and hard to implement in most situations).
If you look at the big picture: my 46" LCD is a bigger energy drain than all light sources combined, especially if you look at the daily usage.
I just wondered, do these businesses mostly use PIN/TAN security? Or a simple password? When I lived in the US, Citibank had a simple password protection - whereas my German bank account used (and still uses - no known successful attacks so far!) an HBCI compliant external card reader and home banking software.
I am wondering, because I can still imagine my banking software (StarMoney) being tricked into manipulating the online orders shown to me for verification and signing, but I have heard of no incidents so far .
I have been wondering for years how climate scientists can "know" so well that their forecasts "are right", when their scientific "models" are so simplistic compared to reality, that they most probably are wrong anyways. It kind of reminds me of a biologist who has just recently discovered neurons in the brain, and is now telling me that his model based on that can predict my thoughts. Or an LTCM manager telling me that he has a "bulletproof" way of making a profit.
After all, 99% of scientists who agree with GWT are *nothing* compared to the single person with the falsification of GWT.
Not everywhere, apparently, and competition is not "regulated" (as in Germany, where we have a government agency deciding on "fair" resale prices of the formerly government-owned Deutsche Telekom - d'oh!).
However, 16/1MBit unlimited usage*, 2 phone lines including unlimited calls to national landline numbers for 31.90 EUR *is* a good deal.
* unlimited as in "downloading 350GB/month once made me feel a little uneasy"
Look in Israel, a few of their people are killed in suicide bombings and they level city blocks in neighboring countries.
Well, if your country had to endure more than 6000 (!) rocket attacks over several years, with the attackers' elected government calling for your "eradication" from this planet, you'd probably ignore that. Am I right?
Besides, the real "leveling of city blocks" you're talking about last happened in WW2, right here, where I live (I live in a post-war building). And now I am not calling even THAT "out of proportion", since at that time, this country's government had the same plans about the Jews as Hamas has today.
Are you seriously considering percentage rates when it comes to the judgment of killings, instead of motives and absolute numbers?
If I kill myself now, I will have exterminated all human life in this house. So, can I just scale up and say "well, that's worse than Waco!"?
And do you really want to start comparing motives of a) a military of a country surrounded by enemies constantly threatening their *existence* (and incessantly firing rockets at them, while calling the situation "truce") and b) muslim fanatics blowing up *only* the twin towers, because they lacked the means to do more harm?
You'll need a hell of a lot of "other men" to make up for the usual 50%-or-so probability that murderers are usually close friends or relatives of the victim.
Come on, "internet stalkers" - been reading too many tabloids lately?
I have an espresso machine with a Faema E61 brewing group (Poccino Opus One). Very nice machine indeed - what are a few hundred cups of espresso to get the "brandnewness" out of these machines? We're on slashdot, probably the world's biggest bermuda triangle for coffee:-)
Maybe comparison to a different country, one with strict gun laws, helps. I am German, so choosing Germany seems natural.
Germany has a population of roughly 80 million, the US roughly 300 million. That's a ratio of 1 : 3.75.
Germany has no guns, but, according to 2004 statistical data, 211,000 "violent crimes" (of which 139,000 were assault, 60,000 robbery, 8,900 rape 792 (first degree) murder, 1808 manslaughter), and an additional 124,000 non-violent cases of burglary.
Together (335,000), this should cover almost every crime you could hope to prevent with a gun (burglary - if you happen to be at home. But the statistic also includes stolen cars and bikes, cell phones etc.).
Now, if we deduct (1.5 million / 3.75=) 400.000 crimes that we should have *less* once we allowed for free gun ownership, we'd live in Utopia, where the only crimes left are tax evasion, corruption and parking offenses.
Yes, that certainly is a convincing argument. Riiight.
You're right. Guns make sense in movies, as they allow to trade in realism for interesting plots (except for movies like Lord of War, sadly).
I mean, the worst thing most 1st world country citizens experience (I am German) are scratches on their cars, or a missing car audio system. I have an electronic door lock, yes - but only because I kept forgetting my keys. My door's hardly ever locked anyways. I need *indoor* video surveillance to be able to watch myself burying my wallet under newspapers, not *outdoor* cams to catch nonexistant thiefs.
I don't know if VW used the fact for their marketing elsewhere, but I remember hearing exactly this reason from their German marketing dept. when the blue light was first introduced somewhere in 1997.
I don't know US contract law, but in other parts of the world (Germany), courts have regularly ruled that an on-line order is not in itself a contract, but simply a demand for a contract that must be acknowledged by the other party (the dealer) in words or deeds to become a valid contract. So, delivery of the item, immediate billing, or an e-mail (not a simple "we received your order" e-mail) would make this a contract.
"Europe can be the safe and free place to conduct business"?
Where in Europe do you live? Must be out of reach of the EU. I live in Germany, and in recent years, we have had a massive shift towards a kind of "social" police state. Just ONE example: I'm a landlord, with three apartments on lease. I cannot choose my tenant freely, since there's "anti-discrimination" legislation. If I care to NOT accept a certain tenant because I think he won't pay his bills on time, I'm open to legislation: Maybe the guy is old, foreign-looking, obviously gay? Boom! He has a "right" to sue me into the contract. And the best thing: Shifting of burden of the proof - It's ME who has to prove I am not discriminating! So there was a time when an I was free to make a contract with whoever I like. That's gone!
You know what's best? I've heard politicians argue in interviews, asked about the implications that this law has, that it "was not meant this way", and that "it's just to protect people". No, it's not! It's meant to intimidate, undermine constitutional rights, and weaken every sense of justice.
If you want to put it that way, it's an Ayn Rand textbook 101 case! You will find every detail outlined in "Atlas Shrugged" (yes, I took the time to skim through it).
If you are a tenant in Germany: wonderful, you don't even have to pay your bills. Most smaller landlords will be bankrupt before they have sued YOU out of THEIR property. It usually takes 12-24 months and thousands of Euros, plus the damage your tenants will do to your apartment.
This kind of legislation is being put through in all EU countries, plus the police state cream on top: Like sharing passenger flight data with the U.S., without any data retention policies, or complete connection logs of all phone and internet connections in the EU.
A wonderful, safe and free place to do business indeed.
Germany has ID cards, too. You don't see any people being executed here, though.
Honestly, an ID card *per se* is not a scary thing. The scary thing is the collective databases your government or companies(*) create, and the tracking of phone records, movements (through ID cards, EC/credit cards,...).
My government (Germany) introduced biometric information into passports through the EU backdoor, when the first attempt failed on a federal level. THAT's scary! The former Secretary of the Interior pulled that trick on us.
(*) Yes, they WILL make the data available to the government, is "asked" to.
A good point, but this leads to the kind of TV advertising I'm used to see from Vodafone and O2: "Buy our unlimited phone and data plan!" - footnotes 1-34 following, you'd need a 40" screen and a still picture to be able to read the footnotes.
It makes an informed decision impossible, by exponentially increasing the cost of processing the information you need to make an informed decision.
Maybe the Australian Government should rethink their regulation of the market. Here in Germany the "Bundesnetzagentur" (federal network agency) regulates the prices and conditions under which the former monopoly (now: Deutsche Telekom) has to offer access to their infrastructure. It basically comes down to this: Competitors can rent space in Deutsche Telekom's switching centers AND can rent the "last mile" to the home. This last mile currently costs 11.80 EUR/month, with pressure from competitors' lobbying groups to further drop that number.
Currently, you can get DSL(2000-4000) for 29.90 EUR - including all national calls to landlines and unmetered DSL usage. I am currently on a DSL16000 plan for 34.90 EUR.
I know this is no sufficient solution to the Australian problem of intercontinental connections, but maybe a hint.
Slashdot Mirror
What kind of mindset is that where cops are allowed to beat anyone (even a resisting criminal)? They are allowed to arrest him and to use force to break his resistance so that an arrest is possible. Anything further is a criminal offence. These cops in the video beat this guy for several minutes. I don't know if a cop's mind is *that* slow to recognize anything. I strongly doubt it. Suspension and retraining? Maybe retraining for his new job at McDonald's.
Oh please don't forget that gypsies, homosexuals, etc. were more of an ideological "by-catch". Though the Nazi ideology hit them, too, the main theme was "Kill the jews! And do it thoroughly!". That's kind of a difference.
I will start reading on the Al-Jazeera leaks soon enough, though I don't see the point in there. Why would Israel want to give up land to neighbors that are not of the "rational kind"? They were attacked first, their neighbors (official propaganda) are - plainly spoken - the closest to "nazi" you can get these days, and there's not much of a guarantee for Israel's security in what these failing states have to offer. Israel has to keep certain areas for strategic reasons alone, if they don't want to be run over.
That is, unless some of their neighbours develop a civic society that know more than just burning flags and keeping their neighborhoods "judenrein"!
The "peace process" is a joke unless not Israel, but their neighbors refrain from violence. Israel will have to do so the minute they are no longer threatened, because they ARE held accountable through public opinion. Their neighbors? They don't f****** care.
The problem is it isn't the consumers who really pay the tax, it's the retailers. How exactly do you propose that the government tax overseas retailers. I can think of a few options but each one of them forces me to think be careful what you wish for . What you and the retailers seem to support is not good for anybody at all except for the government.
And where exactly is your problem here?
I am German, our VAT is generally 19% on all purchases, in stores and on the internet. Where non-physical goods like software downloads are sold from foreign retailers to German customers, foreign retailers have to collect the tax for the German state - and they do so, to save their customers the hassle of tax fraud investigations (a whole different issue here: German tax authorities can investigate your bank account at any time).
Where physical goods enter the country, our customs office relies on the declaration form and sends invoices to the recipient, or stops the goods and tries to find out their sales price (you'll have to produce an eBay printout, whatever).
So, with enough regulatory power this is a non-issue.
I see your point, though: It's liberty. While I believe having the same tax rate on online and store purchases is a good thing, I do think that Germany's solution to ensure compliance is way over the top for any respectable free society.
In all the cases I know of, the thieves (in Germany) were pretty old-fashioned: they took the money and threw the wallet away. And emptied your bank account before they threw everything away. Not every store asks for ID on CC/debit card purchases.
That's what SKY (TV, Murdoch) doesn't understand. I just read their Q1 report (Germany): in large letters: "Gross subscriber growth: 123000". Smaller, underneath: "churn: 122000, net subscriber growth: 1000" :-)
"Selling expenses: 31.9 million EUR" -> Selling expenses per additional subscriber: 31.900 EUR.
(cough)
Oh don't worry about facebook, to me it's just a useful way to not lose any e-mail addresses & get a somewhat prompt reaction. I DO post stuff I find thought provoking there, and yes, the average reaction is less than the conversations on sushi. But hey, that may have something to do with time. A short comment on s.o.`s sushi is maybe just a way to "connect" again without having any points to argue about.
About video telephony - you might just want to read David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest". Somewhere in the first 250 pages, there's a lenghty piece about the reasons why video telephony didn't take off (the book is set in a not too distant future, probably our present, but was published in 1996). The basic argument is that video telephony is stressful because it destroys the illusion of a telephone call, i.e. the illusion on both sides of attentiveness clashing with the reality that in fact, most of the time, both sides of a telephone conversation are completely distracted by other things or simply not "presentable" enough to be shown on video.
So they're happy to "destroy" is but don't want to turn it over so Germany can see exactly what they were gathering? Smells fishy to me.
If you had followed the German Ministry of the Interior, especially under Mr. Schäuble, more closely, you would destroy the hard drives yourself, FOR Google.
Why would I, as a citizen, want that Google hands over this data to the same government that's been undermining privacy rights and the principles of a *federal* state for years? A centralized taxpayer database to circumvent the illegality of central databases on citizens? Got it! (ELENA). A central database of all online & telephony connections, recently deleted by order of the Bundesverfassungsgericht (supreme court)? Had it!
But of course I still trust them with my data. Of course! Paying lip service to privacy and blaming the private sector is easy.
How can this be modded "interesting"?
I seriously hope more EU countries will demand the same thing. It's outrageous
how Google blatantly breaks laws, especially privacy ones, and get nothing for it.
Google does not break laws, they are doing this legally, (at worst) in an unregulated area - collecting publicly available data on an industry scale.
Whoever in the EU parliament will impose big fines for Google breaking privacy laws gets my vote.
I do not want EU legislation on this, thank you. There is still the rule of subsidiarity, so this is a national question anyways.
Don't use Google services you say? That's a little bit hard when they have their cars driving around sniffing web traffic.
Wow. Google is NOT sniffing web traffic, they are at best wardriving (but not accessing WLANs), maybe recording encryption schemes on found WLANs. So? Any telco/ISP-provided router is configured for WPA/WPA2 anyways.
Viviane Reding, the European justice commissioner,
Viviane Reding is, first of all, a typical EU politician. She has a history of interfering in national jurisdiction (ignoring the principle of subsidiarity to justify her existence), free markets,on whatever she "feels" is wrong. Sometimes she has a reason (as with absurd roaming charges), sometimes she should better stick to the principle that quite often, no law is the best law.
How do you prove something true?
You don't. To (really) quickly summarize Karl Popper's work: You can only falsify a hypothesis, not prove it.
"I have only CFL's in my house."
I certainly do not want to visit your house, then. Thanks, most ppl with spiral CFLs are just mad and would be better off living in a dark room.
My light requirements are:
1. Immediate 100% brightness. I have stairs! I am combining 2 7-W-CFLs with one 40-W bulb, just so that nobody gets hurt. The CFLs still suck, since their light is not nearly as bright as the 40W bulb - that is, in the 5 minutes until the timer turns them off again.
2. My living rooms are for living. I need comfortable light. You can stop thinking about CFLS from here (I have two 28W-daylight-CFLs in my home office - daylight CFLS, costing about 28 euros each. Good light for office work).
3. Dimming capability. My living room has a 3x75W G9 uplight, and I will not replace it.
4. And yes, I have LED lights: 8x Cree Q5 LEDs (21W/1440 lm) in the hall. Not comfortable, but far brighter (!) than one 100W conventional bulb. Since I used a cheap notebook adapter for the 19V they require, the light is still not immediately on (startup delay).
So you see, I *am* experimenting with energy saving light sources, but there's nothing above halogen bulbs, with the pure-white LEDs coming in second (problems: expensive, "yellow" light means low efficiency, good power sources required, dimming by PWM is not cheap and hard to implement in most situations).
If you look at the big picture: my 46" LCD is a bigger energy drain than all light sources combined, especially if you look at the daily usage.
I just wondered, do these businesses mostly use PIN/TAN security? Or a simple password? When I lived in the US, Citibank had a simple password protection - whereas my German bank account used (and still uses - no known successful attacks so far!) an HBCI compliant external card reader and home banking software.
I am wondering, because I can still imagine my banking software (StarMoney) being tricked into manipulating the online orders shown to me for verification and signing, but I have heard of no incidents so far .
Maybe this makes for an interesting read: http://masterresource.org/?p=3847
I have been wondering for years how climate scientists can "know" so well that their forecasts "are right", when their scientific "models" are so simplistic compared to reality, that they most probably are wrong anyways. It kind of reminds me of a biologist who has just recently discovered neurons in the brain, and is now telling me that his model based on that can predict my thoughts. Or an LTCM manager telling me that he has a "bulletproof" way of making a profit.
After all, 99% of scientists who agree with GWT are *nothing* compared to the single person with the falsification of GWT.
Not everywhere, apparently, and competition is not "regulated" (as in Germany, where we have a government agency deciding on "fair" resale prices of the formerly government-owned Deutsche Telekom - d'oh!).
However, 16/1MBit unlimited usage*, 2 phone lines including unlimited calls to national landline numbers for 31.90 EUR *is* a good deal.
* unlimited as in "downloading 350GB/month once made me feel a little uneasy"
Look in Israel, a few of their people are killed in suicide bombings and they level city blocks in neighboring countries.
Well, if your country had to endure more than 6000 (!) rocket attacks over several years, with the attackers' elected government calling for your "eradication" from this planet, you'd probably ignore that. Am I right?
Besides, the real "leveling of city blocks" you're talking about last happened in WW2, right here, where I live (I live in a post-war building). And now I am not calling even THAT "out of proportion", since at that time, this country's government had the same plans about the Jews as Hamas has today.
Are you seriously considering percentage rates when it comes to the judgment of killings, instead of motives and absolute numbers?
If I kill myself now, I will have exterminated all human life in this house. So, can I just scale up and say "well, that's worse than Waco!"?
And do you really want to start comparing motives of a) a military of a country surrounded by enemies constantly threatening their *existence* (and incessantly firing rockets at them, while calling the situation "truce") and b) muslim fanatics blowing up *only* the twin towers, because they lacked the means to do more harm?
You'll need a hell of a lot of "other men" to make up for the usual 50%-or-so probability that murderers are usually close friends or relatives of the victim.
Come on, "internet stalkers" - been reading too many tabloids lately?
I have an espresso machine with a Faema E61 brewing group (Poccino Opus One). Very nice machine indeed - what are a few hundred cups of espresso to get the "brandnewness" out of these machines? We're on slashdot, probably the world's biggest bermuda triangle for coffee :-)
Maybe comparison to a different country, one with strict gun laws, helps. I am German, so choosing Germany seems natural.
Germany has a population of roughly 80 million, the US roughly 300 million. That's a ratio of 1 : 3.75.
Germany has no guns, but, according to 2004 statistical data, 211,000 "violent crimes" (of which 139,000 were assault, 60,000 robbery, 8,900 rape 792 (first degree) murder, 1808 manslaughter), and an additional 124,000 non-violent cases of burglary.
Together (335,000), this should cover almost every crime you could hope to prevent with a gun (burglary - if you happen to be at home. But the statistic also includes stolen cars and bikes, cell phones etc.).
Now, if we deduct (1.5 million / 3.75=) 400.000 crimes that we should have *less* once we allowed for free gun ownership, we'd live in Utopia, where the only crimes left are tax evasion, corruption and parking offenses.
Yes, that certainly is a convincing argument. Riiight.
You're right. Guns make sense in movies, as they allow to trade in realism for interesting plots (except for movies like Lord of War, sadly).
I mean, the worst thing most 1st world country citizens experience (I am German) are scratches on their cars, or a missing car audio system. I have an electronic door lock, yes - but only because I kept forgetting my keys. My door's hardly ever locked anyways. I need *indoor* video surveillance to be able to watch myself burying my wallet under newspapers, not *outdoor* cams to catch nonexistant thiefs.
I don't know if VW used the fact for their marketing elsewhere, but I remember hearing exactly this reason from their German marketing dept. when the blue light was first introduced somewhere in 1997.
I don't know US contract law, but in other parts of the world (Germany), courts have regularly ruled that an on-line order is not in itself a contract, but simply a demand for a contract that must be acknowledged by the other party (the dealer) in words or deeds to become a valid contract. So, delivery of the item, immediate billing, or an e-mail (not a simple "we received your order" e-mail) would make this a contract.
"Europe can be the safe and free place to conduct business"?
Where in Europe do you live? Must be out of reach of the EU. I live in Germany, and in recent years, we have had a massive shift towards a kind of "social" police state. Just ONE example: I'm a landlord, with three apartments on lease. I cannot choose my tenant freely, since there's "anti-discrimination" legislation. If I care to NOT accept a certain tenant because I think he won't pay his bills on time, I'm open to legislation: Maybe the guy is old, foreign-looking, obviously gay? Boom! He has a "right" to sue me into the contract. And the best thing: Shifting of burden of the proof - It's ME who has to prove I am not discriminating! So there was a time when an I was free to make a contract with whoever I like. That's gone!
You know what's best? I've heard politicians argue in interviews, asked about the implications that this law has, that it "was not meant this way", and that "it's just to protect people". No, it's not! It's meant to intimidate, undermine constitutional rights, and weaken every sense of justice.
If you want to put it that way, it's an Ayn Rand textbook 101 case! You will find every detail outlined in "Atlas Shrugged" (yes, I took the time to skim through it).
If you are a tenant in Germany: wonderful, you don't even have to pay your bills. Most smaller landlords will be bankrupt before they have sued YOU out of THEIR property. It usually takes 12-24 months and thousands of Euros, plus the damage your tenants will do to your apartment.
This kind of legislation is being put through in all EU countries, plus the police state cream on top: Like sharing passenger flight data with the U.S., without any data retention policies, or complete connection logs of all phone and internet connections in the EU.
A wonderful, safe and free place to do business indeed.
Germany has ID cards, too. You don't see any people being executed here, though.
...).
Honestly, an ID card *per se* is not a scary thing. The scary thing is the collective databases your government or companies(*) create, and the tracking of phone records, movements (through ID cards, EC/credit cards,
My government (Germany) introduced biometric information into passports through the EU backdoor, when the first attempt failed on a federal level. THAT's scary! The former Secretary of the Interior pulled that trick on us.
(*) Yes, they WILL make the data available to the government, is "asked" to.
A good point, but this leads to the kind of TV advertising I'm used to see from Vodafone and O2: "Buy our unlimited phone and data plan!" - footnotes 1-34 following, you'd need a 40" screen and a still picture to be able to read the footnotes.
It makes an informed decision impossible, by exponentially increasing the cost of processing the information you need to make an informed decision.
Sometimes, standardization is a good thing.
Maybe the Australian Government should rethink their regulation of the market. Here in Germany the "Bundesnetzagentur" (federal network agency) regulates the prices and conditions under which the former monopoly (now: Deutsche Telekom) has to offer access to their infrastructure. It basically comes down to this: Competitors can rent space in Deutsche Telekom's switching centers AND can rent the "last mile" to the home. This last mile currently costs 11.80 EUR/month, with pressure from competitors' lobbying groups to further drop that number.
Currently, you can get DSL(2000-4000) for 29.90 EUR - including all national calls to landlines and unmetered DSL usage. I am currently on a DSL16000 plan for 34.90 EUR.
I know this is no sufficient solution to the Australian problem of intercontinental connections, but maybe a hint.