erroneous thoughts

I’m not that much informed on most EU stuff, but one of the ideas I had about the treaty of Lisbon, was that it was essentially the same thing as the proposed European Constitution (proposed but rejected a few years earlier), with a new “look and feel”. And guess what, turns out it was true. In this petition, 20 reasons are given to reject the Lisbon treaty. It’s aimed at Irish people (Ireland did a referendum on the issue, and the majority of voters voted against the treaty), and the first reason states:

1 The Lisbon Treaty agreed by EU leaders in November 2007 is almost identical to the EU Constitution agreed by EU leaders in 2004.
The Constitution was democratically rejected by the electorates of France and the Netherlands in referenda in the summer of 2005. They objected to the undemocratic and right-wing content of the Constitution. That EU leaders have returned with the same text in a different format is undemocratic and is an insult to the democratically-expressed wishes of the peoples of France and the Netherlands.

However, the most worrisome, IMHO, are these (emphasis added):

14 Article 28c mandates: “Member states shall undertake to improve their military capabilities.” Taken with the “start-up fund” and “specific procedures for guaranteeing rapid access to appropriations… for urgent financing of [unspecified] initiatives in the framework of the common foreign and security policy” (detailed in Article 28d), member states will be obliged to increase their financial contributions to the military capabilities of the EU.

15 Article 28/7 reaffirms that “commitments and co-operation” in the area of common security and defence “shall be consistent with commitments under the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation”. This effective alignment to NATO is not balanced with any commitment to protect the neutrality of member states such as Ireland.

The major role for the military, during peace time, is to enforce a nation’s sovereignty, namely by guaranteeing its territorial integrity. To transfer this role to the EU effectively changes its nature. And it does so in a very dangerous way, for it subtly crafts the same kind of alliances that a century ago, swiftly caused the assassination of an Austrian nobleman to transform into a gigantic conflict that plunged the entire world — it now goes by the name of World War I.

To finish up, I want to add the following: as a Portuguese citizen, one of the things that shocked me the most to hear about the Lisbon treaty, was our President (Head of State) saying that (in a comment regarding Ireland’s rejection) governments should not do any kind of referenda regarding international treaties! Yes, he said that, in a TV interview. On this, the only thing I can say is that at the core of any healthy democracy, lies the sovereignty of its people. Alienations of that sovereignty, such as the one proposed, irrespective of their motivations, subvert the democratic regime. For it keeps the name “democracy”, but slowly reduces the amount of power that the actual people can wield — de facto decreasing their freedom. Healthy democracies endure as long as we are able and willing to strive for freedom, true freedom, and not just the illusion thereof.

A melhor explicação que vi até hoje para a importância e razão de restringir as leis de copyright à regulação de actividades comerciais, traduzido para português. Obrigado ao Miguel Caetano pela tradução:

Esta já não é a primeira vez que Stallman manifesta publicamente uma posição contrária à campanha da RIAA e de outras organizações representantes da indústria discográfica mas creio que este ensaio resume de uma forma magistral o seu ponto de vista em relação à partilha de ficheiros, tendo ainda o bónus de conter uma série de sugestões realistas com vista a conciliar os interesses dos partilhadores e dos artistas. Segue em baixo a minha tradução:

Cliquem no link da tradução, e boas leituras!

From phdcomics.com:

Ao ler ontem o Que Treta!, isto chamou a atenção:

** Já devem estar bastante chateados. Parece que alguém mexericou no site deles. Experimentem ir a www.mapinet.org. Neste momento está redireccionado para o BTJunkie. É maldade. Não deviam fazer isto. A sério. Mas, bolas, que dá vontade de rir, isso dá…

O que acontecia era que o site da MAPiNET, um suposto movimento “cívico” contra a pirataria na internet, era sucessivamente redireccionado para outros sites, também eles virtuosos cavaleiros do Apocalipse, implacáveis na sua luta contra o flagelo da “pirataria” como o Pirate Bay, TorrentFreak, btjunkie, … dá para perceber a ideia.

Ao tentar resolver o domínio mapinet.org, era devolvido um A-record para mapinet.org, com o respectivo IP. Não era do DNS que vinha a súbita mudança de face. Fazendo repetidos acessos ao site com um sniffer a correr, rapidamente se percebe o que se passava: a resposta era sempre uma HTTP response 302 – Moved Temporarily, juntamente com a localização “actualizada” — sempre um dos sites referidos no parágrafo anterior. Simples, e bastante eficaz…

Mas não creio que isto ajude a fortalecer o argumento de que é preciso mudar muita muita coisa no que aos “direitos de autor” et al. diz respeito. Aliás, porque o se vai passar é que eles se vão fazer de vítimas, e usar isto para fortalecer o argumento do “mais copyright para salvar a indústria”, acabando por ter o efeito contrário. Mas que diabo, principalmente depois de todas os disparates e desinformação que se lê no site/blog deles (entretanto regressado à primitiva forma), “que dá vontade de rir, isso dá“.

Current copyright laws are insane. Courts having to enforce such laws produce even more insane insanities. And as it’s all to obvious, insane laws plus even more insane verdicts only breed ever-increasing contempt for law. But sadly, it’s not obvious to everyone. But despair not! These are time of looming uncertainty for The Pirate Bay’s future, but for now, it’s still just like its old self! Meaning that like the writers of times past resorted to laughter to criticise insane social costumes, TPB (whose crew are no strangers to the art of mocking), has just been endowed with a brand new CD: the list of musics for which Joel Tenenbaum was ordered to plunge into bankruptcy, is now available in a brand new compilation, free of charge, of course. And it even comes with cover art:

Quoting from the torrent’s description:

I too downloaded them!

These are the tracks Joel Tenenbaum downloaded. For 30 tracks he is ordered by the court to pay $675,000 to the RIAA.
Well, all I can say: the RIAA can come and try to get half a million bucks from me too, let’s see if they can make me pay…
Btw, it’s amazing how easy to become rich, ain’t it? You just download this pack two times and you already have something that worths more than a million…

Since in all likelihood these idiotic laws are going nowhere, might as well get a good laugh from such idiocy (as far as it is possible), and enjoy the music…

Via Remixtures

And so is promptly demonstrated in this sharply wit satire:

Via a comment in Que Treta

So things have been quiet for a while. A big while. I was involved in a pretty big project, that ended in the meantime, and in that meantime off I went in vacations.

But far from me the thought of minds being left idle, here’s something to churn those surplus neurons: If only gay sex caused global warming.

Yup, you read that correctly. It’s a small article, that I first heard of while reading a not so small book, that revolves around the reasons of why we (as a species, but I’m guessing the author meant US americans in particular) care so much about terrorism, and so little about global warming:

The odds of this [global warming] happening in the next few decades are better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb. And yet our government will spend billions of dollars this year to prevent global terrorism and … well, essentially nothing to prevent global warming.

Now, if indeed gay sex (or anything else that goes against established moral rules) caused global warming, we would mobilize and demand action be taken, for “Moral emotions are the brain’s call to action.” This is indeed one of the problems with global warming: “It doesn’t cause our blood to boil (at least not figuratively)“, and that’s also the reason for the article’s name.

The author deals with three more problems that threaten to render global warming into oblivion — at least while it doesn’t come back for revenge. First, “global warming lacks a mustache” — seriously. We tend to overestimate big time threats that come from other humans, while systematically underestimating those not related to human intent, viz. natural disasters. Indeed “If two airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date on which it happened.” Secondly, environmentalists’ discourse to the contrary, global warming is not happening fast enough — fast enough for us to actually realize it, in a “oh my God we need to DO SOMETHING about this” kind of way.

The third reason, which is the one besides this post’s title, has to do our good old brains. If they originally evolved to allow better and quicker responses to a changing environment, we now have within our grasp the ability of not only responding to environmental changes, but also predict them before they actually happen. But there’s the rub:

But this innovation is in the early stages of development. The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing.

I guess it remains to be seen if we can drop off the beta before falling victim of what might well prove to be the ultimate software bug.