As a small aside “Open Source Free Trials?” If it’s open source, can’t they just disable the trial part?

Yes. There’s a number of projects which distribute binaries which aren’t as liberally licensed as the source they’re built from. E.g. Ardour is another one. There’s a demo version, subscriptions start as low as $1/month, $45 buys you the current major version and the next major version with all its updates, perpetual license. There’s also the implicit understanding that if you don’t pay up and want support, your bug reports better be developer-grade.

Basically it’s a way to get artists who are used to either freeware or commercial offerings to donate. Also as far as DAWs go it’s a fucking steal.

I wouldn’t trust those poll numbers because practically noone actually understands the legal status of abortions. I would believe that for many people “legal” means “I won’t go to prison” and by that account yes Germany has legal abortions, even though technically they are… “not punished” is not the right term. I’m still not sure I actually understand what “the offence is not realised” actually means. Someone with a law degree please ELI20.

Declaring at-will abortions straight-up legal probably won’t fly as the constitutional court has quite good arguments against that, what should absolutely be possible is to, in very clear terms, say that the state does not rule on the legality of the abortion: The constitutional court never said that at-will abortions can’t be legal in specific cases, it said that there cannot be a general judgement that at-will abortions are legal in all cases: It always depends on how the rights of pregnant woman vs. fetus balance out in a particular case. You can’t have a court decide on the specific cases though as that’d be a grave impingement of the right to privacy, so it’s left to the woman.

tl;dr: To square that circle the state would say “Is your abortion legal, or just not punished? How would I know, ask your conscience”.

Oh and just for completeness’ sake that’s all about at-will abortions, abortions for medical or criminological reasons are always legal because, in essence, self-defence.

And lastly: I don’t think it’s the right construction site. How about we make sure that states actually fulfil their duty to have abortions actually available, which is something with actual practical impact, not just shuffling around legalese. Make sure there’s gynecologists performing them and so on. Looking specifically at you, Bavaria.

I’m not really acquainted with the details of how Spain does it but it’s common practice in Europe to need a license for short-term rentals, it’s usually municipal statute as an extension of zoning law. Details differ vastly depending on location because every municipality is different.

Before the days of AirBnB circumventing those municipal regulations was very hard as big hotels are kind of hard to hide, they’re rather obvious, and if you have small apartments where are you going to get your renters from. AirBnB made it possible to get renters for small properties that fall under the radar of authorities. So requiring AirBnB to, effectively, ensure that what they list is licensed is closing that loophole.

The “anti-tourist” thing only really comes into play when municipalities are actually limiting the number of licenses they give out: When licenses are abundant it doesn’t matter that you can skirt them with AirBnB. Cities like Barcelona do limit them, other places don’t, as such only places like Barcelona had an actual problem with AirBnB, as such cracking down on AirBnB is helping the anti-tourist “agenda” of places like Barcelona. With agenda I mean allow people to continue to live and work in their own city doing something else but wipe tourist asses.

Found a paper (a bit older, 2001, but should still be mostly accurate) comparing the two. Cliff notes:

• Despite legislative power going by default to the central state in Spain and to the states in Germany, distribution of power is overall comparable. Less uniform in Spain as every region gets its own autonomy statute instead of all German states pooling their sovereignty in a uniform way.
• Administration is practically completely state matter in Germany, while Spain retains central administration structures in all regions. Those largely delegate matters to the region’s administrations, though. So again overall not too dissimilar in practice.
• Regarding the judicature: The regions don’t have courts. They have some say when it comes to how court districts are drawn and that’s pretty much it. German states all have their own courts and appeals courts, the federal level only has cassation courts. In this area German states have way more autonomy. States elect judges for their own courts as well as 50% of federal judges, or 50% of the people who elect them are designated by the states, depending.
• Spanish regions have very limited means to influence central legislative. No right to initiative, no own legislative body, just a right to petition. German states can initiate federal law, have their own legislative body, and much federal law needs passing by both federal and state bodies because it tangentially affects state prerogatives.
• Interestingly, the federal level has larger powers of oversight over the German states than Spain does over the regions. In both cases the oversight isn’t large, though, in Germany it only exists in so far states are administering federal law on behalf of the federation, which isn’t often the case. E.g. (practically all) criminal law is federal law, but administered by the states on their own behalf.
• German states have more financial autonomy. I won’t get into details the distribution of taxes between federation and states in Germany is complex AF, also, has been renegotiated multiple times. Regarding administration, though, as said: The federation has no tax office, they couldn’t collect taxes if they wanted to.
• German states have much, much, much more power when it comes to asserting their power. Maybe that’s why they’re not as hell-bent on carving out power for themselves: Autonomous regions have to rely on public sentiment and the good will of the constitutional court, otherwise the central authority can just walk straight over them, so they take whatever they can get their hands on while German states are much more relaxed about it.

Not sure what you mean by IA but they e.g. completely razed Warsaw.

My suggestion: stop defending war criminals based your feeling and some hearsay.

Where did I defend war criminals? What part of me saying “Of course it’s a genocide” did give you that impression?

You said that trucks are more damaging, right?

…to roads. It’s a metaphor, if you stretch it too far of course it’s going to break. Side note though bikers mostly kill themselves, not others.

All of that is things that German states have. Not sure what federal agency you’re in contact with but it certainly isn’t the Ausländeramt that’s state-level.

Of course it’s genocide. And yes the Nazis did all those things. And the Nazis did a whole fucking lot more than that. That’s the issue, here: By Nazi standards Israelis are amateurs. What they’re doing is more in line with what Turks did to Armenians.

Spains regions lack of their own police, tax collection (the German federal level doesn’t even have a tax office), only partial cultural autonomy. Also the powers they have are only devolved, they’re not guaranteed those rights.

German states are fully formed states in themselves, they have their own sovereignty, delegating the exercise of parts of it to the federal level just as EU member states delegate sovereignty to the EU. “Fully formed state” here meaning that they do not rely on the federal level for their administration, in fact living in Germany you generally don’t come into contact with federal bureaucracy at all, it’s all state or municipal level (district level is technically state level, they’re devolved public bodies).

I’ll grant you that among unitary states Spain is quite federal, but it’s not “more federal than federal countries”.

Well it is an anti-tourist thing in the sense that regulations on AirBnBs and the like are meant to close the “hotel license” loophole. Touristy places generally don’t mind new short-term accommodation and give out licenses like candy, likewise small places with relaxed property markets, non-touristy places are much more restrictive because they don’t want to tank their economy.

For grandma in a village renting out some rooms to visitors getting delisted will result in her going to the municipality, asking for a license, getting one, and putting the listing up again. For an investor buying up apartments in big cities to illegally use as a hotel because renting long-term has lower ROI, well, they won’t get a hotel license, their listings are going to stay down. If you want to build only hotels and have no long-term accommodation may I suggest building a theme park somewhere.

Under Article 80, the GDPR foresees that non-profit organizations can take action or represent users.

Emphasis mine. Just in case anyone is still denying that Euro-English is a thing. It provides for it, which implies it anticipats it, so if we get rid of unnecessary Romance it foresees it. Plans for, as Wikipedia puts it, but not only the French etymology (prevoir) works, there’s also German vorhersehen/vorsehen which collapse when you calque them into English. Gives Brits all kinds of headaches, they were writing lots of huffy memos before Brexit.

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I think there’s some „reasonable” keyword in the right to be forgotten.

The original case was a Spanish cook being haunted by the first google result for his name being an article in a local newspaper about his restaurant going bankrupt decades ago. No scandal or such, just an ordinary bankruptcy, but he could demonstrate that it was impacting his current business.

He sued, and google had to remove the thing. Not when you search for his name and bankruptcy, not when you search for “what happened to that restaurant”, and the newspaper itself also didn’t have to do anything. As far as I know you can still find the article.

If you’re a journalist writing the guy’s biography, you’ll find it, push come to shove in some offline archive. But random people won’t see him nailed to a virtual pillory, that’s what all this is about.

I don’t think it’s really an issue for AI, but it has to be engineered in. Ultimately it’s about judging relevancy.

Of course it’s ok, that’s a proper comparison, you’re actually going into details. You can say that they’re both meant for transport, but one for goods, the other for single passengers. There’s plenty of differences such as weight, speed, also, amount of road tax they have to pay: Trucks are much heavier, they chew up roads much much faster, so they pay more.

Comparing them, we see that they share some things in common, but are far from the same thing. If we were to pretend that they are the same, if we were equating them, we couldn’t apply lower road taxes to motorbikes than to trucks, we would, indeed, be trivialising the damage trucks do to roads. We would be willingly blinding ourselves to the damage trucks inflict far in excess of motorbikes, we would be sticking our heads in the sand.

Dude the issue in Barcelona is that AirBNBs take up housing that’s supposed to be occupied by supercomputer researchers. The city also already has plenty of Hotels. Licensed ones.

If more tourists want to come than there are hotel rooms tough luck why should Barcelona tank its economy for them. Barcelona is a city, not a theme park. The reason it’s beautiful is not because it was built to attract tourists, but because it’s an economical powerhouse run and lived in by people who value things like architecture and urban planning.

Take your tourism dollars and spend them in Extremadura, Barcelona won’t mind. Great food there, nature, small places, little industry, Roman architecture, they can actually use that money.

Both Motorbikes and trucks are vehicles but motorbikes are not trucks.

The song in question, it would’ve been glorious.

Hmmm, ja, ich sehe. Germanistik auf Lehramt studiert. Welche Gefühle kommen da bei Ihnen auf wenn ich das sage?

Kommt von das Platt her das hat wie auch Englisch Nominativ, Genitiv, und Objektiv.

Der Bauer sein Nachbar gibt den Schmied den Hammer.

They talk a good game about eliminating child labor, but always seem to look the other way in their supply chain.

Maybe in the past, but they actually lobbied against the EU diluting the supply chain act which makes companies responsible for human rights abuses of their suppliers.

My best guess it’s that it’s a combination of being sick and tired of being sued and not having due diligence documentation at the ready to defend themselves not just in state courts but also the court of public opinion, as well as the realisation that human rights abuses don’t make cocoa any cheaper for them: It’s not like slave plantations would cut them a share of the extra profit, they’re still paying word market prices. So for them it’s a way to get rid of grift and corruption within their own supply chain and they don’t want to be the only ones playing along those rules.

It definitely isn’t caused by Nestle suddenly growing a conscience, it’s just that making money, for a change, in this specific case, actually aligns with corporate responsibility.