The real reason why they are banned: Because the majority of the parliament wanted it that way and voted for the rule. I don't get the outrage at all, why shouldn't the parliament get to decide how they run their own sessions?
300 karma · joined July 21, 2011
Incredible that I'm getting downvoted for this. So if you have 100,000 $ student debt, you should stop sending holiday cards and use email instead, to save 40 cents?
In large organizations some costs are just to minuscule to warrant any mindspace. In this case the spending doesn't even seem evidently frivolous, why shouldn't every parliamentarian have a tablet? In the Netherlands they replaced paper with tablets and even managed to achieve cost savings.
The only connection to the EU is that it received an EU financing in 2011. Clearly the content of the document is really troubling, but what would you expect from a document exclusively edited by some governments anti-terror departments? This reads more like a wishlist than anything having a remote chance of political survival.
Anyway there will be enough time to start worrying and outrage if these ideas actually appear in a legislative proposal by the EU commission. Even then it would likely take another 3-4 years to become law. Keep in mind that the current EU commission is only in place until the next EU elecions in 2014. It is very unlikely that a huge legislative project would be initiated before that.
If the personal data price is such a small to pay, convincing your users of that shouldn't be too much of a problem?
Now an internet company with customers around the world is different - but not so different that this should be possible under criminal law without a very clear pre-written law.
In my opinion the real reason is that some areas of law like patent litigation require highly specialiced knowledge that is almost impossible to acquire outside of a few special firms. An unexperienced law school graduate trying to do patent litigation would be like a med school graduate trying to do brain surgery - it just isn't feasible without years of additional training by someone who is already an expert in the field. But while after medical school this is provided by the residency programs at hospitals, all that exists for lawyers is starting as an associate at specialized for-profit biglaw firms - who have no interest in "teaching" as many people as possible, but raher in maximizing their billing rates...
But I agree with you on the source of the problem - socialism or uneconomic regulation. That is visible in the doing business rankings of the world bank (http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings). Ireland(rank 10), France(29),Portugal(30) will hopefully be fine. Spain at 44 is troubling; I'm only really worried about Italy (87) and Greece (100).
However Portugal+Spain+Greece have voted in conservative governments, Italy has an interim economist technocrat government. There is the European Fiscal Compact (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Fiscal_Compact). And Germany is pushing very hard for economic reforms in the bailout countries.
Overall it is just a problem with a few countries with bad governments/regulation, not a "Euro" problem and certainly not a European Union problem... And we seem to be taking more steps dealing with it then the US or UK with their problems!
I compared to the US$ because the import/export in USD or GBP is incredibly more significant than the few currencies the Euro has done badly against, like the Swiss Francs or Japanese Yen or Norwegian/Swedisch Krones etc...
To me the eurocrisis seems primarily a US/UK media thing...
Doesn't this seem a bit unusual for a company promising to deliver a $29,899 product?
In my personal case, I have bipolar depression and I have gone through several depressive episodes and have definately changed my internet usage during them as described in the article. So I believe this research has value and I will probably build a tool for self-tracking these variables...
What I disagree with is that there should be a central software to notify "counselors'' of this behavior. I believe there would be too many false positives and it would be a huge intrusion of privacy.
Maybe a system where users by the software get an automated "Need help?" email once where they can schedule an anonymous appointment with 1 click at the student health center or something would be fine. But it should really just be a relatively cheap way to screen for students who might be in trouble and contact them proactively, the internet usage itself shouldnt be logged or discussed as a problem ever...
I might be wrong, but in my imagination this would be awesome, offering nearly limitless possibilities for disruption. For example the adoption of open-source textbooks in schools would be much easier, academic research in some countries would really benefit from easier access to materials.
I think there is no question that this will be technologically feasible at some point in the future. The question is, if it happens and when. I hope it happens as fast as possible and judging by the development of the ebook world from 1990-2007 and 2007-Now, Amazon is by far more beneficial than the traditional publishers in this regard.
Certainly a monopoly is never optimal, but let's worry about that once the future has arrived. There is always antitrust law. Until then, I hope Amazon (or Google or Apple or ...) achieves as much marketshare as possible and pushes the development onward.
However there is a petition by law professors against ACTA coordinated by Prof. Metzger of the University of Hanover and signed by practically all leading German professors in the field of IT law. (See: http://www.iri.uni-hannover.de/acta-1668.html)
However I'm a bit sad the protests happened so late and only in Poland. ACTA had been negotiated since 2008, the final draft being leaked online in 2010... Since some members including USA signed already on 1 October 2011, realistically it already was to late to stop it.
Maybe if SOPA had happened 1 year earlier, the spillover activism could have stopped ACTA too? :/
However Greece is a totally different graph, it seems that the Euro gave access to cheap credit for the first time and they took as much as they could get. Or some of the former numbers are fake, who knows.
I guess there are two problems: 1) Current interest rates are unsustainably high 2) Unsustainable public policies... Eurobonds would probably solve 1) but increase the danger that 2) doesn't get addressed.
If you look at the world banks doing business report + transparency internationals corruption report you get: - Iceland: Rank 9 / 13 - Ireland: Rank 10 / 19 - Italy: Rank 87 / 69 - Greece: Rank 100 / 80
No wonder that Ireland+Iceland are doing better, growing again. Even if you forgave Greece+Italy their entire debt, gave them their own currency back etc... I would bet in 20-30 years they would be in the exact same situation as now! I studied in Italy for 2 semesters and I love the country but every time I had to deal with the public bureaucracy I wanted to blow my brains out... I don't know how anyone could run a business in Italy and it is really astonishing how many great companies there are, which shows that a large part of the population has a very good education and work ethic...
For example I could have easily gone to med school with my grades, which is one of the majors with the higher grade cutoffs, but it is maybe open for the top 10-15%? At this level I don't believe parental involvement matters too much, everyone at age 18-19 is mature enough to know: OK, if I want to study medicine, I should try to get these grades etc...
But if admission is based in the 99,99% area, I don't know if a system based on merit alone is "fair". If I look at areas like competitive sports or piano competitions etc., I would believe at least 2/3 of the contestants at the national stage had "helicopter parents" relentlessly pushing them, often against their own will...
So having a "tiger mom" simply gives you a huge competitive advantage over "normal" kids/families. So if your system is based on ideas like affirmative action, where people from disadvantage backgrounds get a boost, it seems sensible to give people from advantageous backgrounds a detriment.
The EU flexibility rather concerns other aspects. For example in Germany if you wanted to have a limited liability company (GmbH), you needed to have 20,000€ capital. The british limited had a lower requirement so lots of small german businesses incorporated as a Ltd. Now there is a new limited liability company in Germany called the "UG" without the minimum capital, which otherwise would never have happend or at least not as fast.
However like anything in the EU it moves very slow, I believe the target is to phase the first national systems out in 2013/2014, but delays are not unlikely...
One of the EU ideas is to give the user a right to "export" their personal data. If there was a functionality where it took you 1 click to recreate all your facebook-data on "SocialNetwork2.0" the switching costs would seem to be very low. I sometimes feel that network advantages are overestimated. Here in Germany we had the facebook clone "StudiVZ" a few years ago, and practically all students were members. Nowadays Facebook dominates here too and many new students don't bother joining "StudiVZ" anymore.
Anyway if the Euro problems get solved, you would probably lose at least 10-15% of your assets. Of course maybe such an "insurance" is worth it, but it is by no means an easy decision.
If you look at the rankings in "World Bank Ease of Doing Business" and "Heritage Economic Freedom" the picture is very clear:
"AAA Euro Countries": (Ranking WorldBank - Heritage) Finland: 11 // 17 Germany: 19 // 23 Netherlands 31 // 15 Austria 32 // 21 Luxembourg 50 // 13
Portugal: 30 // 69 Spain: 44 // 31 Italy: 87 // 87 Greece: 100 // 88