"Natural rights" may be the American way of looking at rights, but it's also a completely meaningless notion. Rights do not grow on trees. They're not laws of physics or mathematics. (If they were, they couldn't be violated.) Instead rights are a legal notion, and every society and individual has different views on what rights should be recognized.

For instance, you can certainly feel that gays should have the right to marry (as I do), but to say that the right to gay marriage has existed since the dawn of time but just wasn't recognized by the government is meaningless and pointless. You can certainly feel that certain rights should be universal, but there is no sense in pretending that they are.

And if "natural rights" really exist, what are they? Is my "right" not to pay taxes a natural right? Clearly there are people who feel that way. How do you decide in an objective way?

But the GP was referring to "big government", and in that sense the EU is absolutely tiny compared to any modern nation state: its budget is about 1% of the EU's GDP, and the European Commission has fewer civil servants than a largish European city.

100% CPU usage is not a bug but a symptom of a bug. There are numerous bugs and warts in numerous programs that cause 100% CPU usage. (And of course, it's not a bug if the program is doing useful computation...)

Amazing how you manage to spin two giant downsides of NAT as advantages. #1 is especially bad: no end-to-end connectivity means whole classes of applications (like peer-to-peer systems) are only possible with awful hacks (if you are lucky). #2 is really a non-issue. Things like SLAAC and DNS were invented for a reason.

If that were true, then every country with its own currency would have a AAA rating. They don't.

The notion that countries with their own currency can't default seems to be a strange meme that has emerged from the Eurozone crisis. In fact, countries with their own currency have defaulted all the time in history (including Greece before the Euro). This is because printing money to repay your debt is likely to lead to inflation, which will in turn cause lenders to demand a higher interest rate, requiring you to print even more money, and so on. This will ruin your economy so defaulting may be the better solution. Also, if investors distrust your currency because of inflation, you may be forced to start borrowing in a foreign currency, which you can't just print.

National governments are not supposed to "instruct" their commissioner since the commissioners (in theory) do not represent member states but the interests of the EU as a whole. They even take an oath of office to that effect ("neither to seek nor to take instructions from any Government or from any other institution, body, office or entity").

Which means they can do a lot - if the EP doesn't like it, it doesn't become law. Having the right to initiative would be great, but lack of it doesn't make the EP powerless (especially since they can (try to) amend proposals in the co-decision procedure).

If national governments or the EP don't like what the Commision is doing, they can refrain from giving them a second term. Also, the EP can dismiss the Commission (and has done so in the past).

What a strange thing to say. Do you have any example of this? It's not even plausible - Commissioners are nominated by national governments, so if an MEP makes himself popular at home by blocking some legislation, why wouldn't they nominate him?

Why is it undemocratic? The Council of the European Union has a democratic mandate because they're representatives of democratically elected governments (and can be sent home by voters if they don't approve), and more importantly, directives have to be approved by the European Parliament, who are elected directly. (Obligatory link)

You're seriously misinformed or just trolling. The European Commission did no such thing - in fact, they have been relatively absent in the entire debt crisis. You could argue that Merkozy got rid of Papandreou and Berlusconi, but that's rather dubious as well: Papandreou did himself in by calling for a referendum (a stupid unilateral move that was rightly met with condemnation from the other EU states; should you organise a referendum when your house is on fire?) and then reversing course a few days later, while Berlusconi (finally!) lost his majority in parliament. Governments fall all the time - I don't see what's undemocratic here.

It's not "lazy developers", it's right there in the IPv6 standard. It's pretty much the standard way of forming IPv6 interface identifiers (basically, the lower 64 bits of most IPv6 addresses). Generating interface identifiers randomly to protect privacy is a later invention.

The headline and the summary are pretty much completely wrong: as the NY Times article explains, the trial was two years ago, but the government cancelled plans to introduce "rekeningrijden" (GPS-based metered driving) last year. So it's not going to happen anytime soon - unless the Netherlands suddenly gets a left-wing government, which is unlikely.

Nonsense.

They always were control whores.

In most of CS, conference publications are actually more prestigious than journals. Top conferences such as PLDI, OOPSLA/Splash, Usenix ATC, ICSE and so on are highly selective, difficult to get into, and look very good on your CV (if you're pursuing an academic career). By contrast, journal articles tend to be published almost as an afterthought, years after anybody still cared about the research in question.

Or just include it in the system-wide bashrc. That doesn't seem particularly hard to me from a distro-maintainer point of view. And it seems preferable to hard-coding a scheduling policy choice in the kernel.

Classic example of the broken window fallacy. Are you really saying we should prefer one protocol over another because it employs more sysadmins and developers in activities that would otherwise be unnecessary? Continuing this line of reasoning, we should abolish protocols such as DHCP and require manual configuration of all machines.