Remixing Rawls: Constitutional Cultural Liberties in Liberal Democracies

This article develops a liberal theory of cultural rights that must be guaranteed by just legal and political institutions. People form their own individual conceptions of the good in the cultural space constructed by the political societies they inhabit. This article argues that only rarely do individuals develop views of what is valuable that diverge more than slightly from the conceptions of the good widely circulating in their societies. In order for everyone to have an equal opportunity to autonomously form their own independent conception of the good, rather than merely following others, culture must be democratically controlled. Equal respect for members of a liberal democracy requires that all citizens have roughly equal opportunities to do things like make movies, publish novels, and exhibit paintings. This article contends that the contemporary American legal order fails to guarantee that all cititizens have roughly equal opportunities to shape and influence their shared culture. Guaranteeing the liberty to do so would require reforms to many areas of law, including applying anti-discrimination law more broadly to the conduct of cultural organizations, expanding fair use protections in copyright law, limiting the ability of businesses to arbitrarily refuse service to customers, and restricting private control of capital in order to democratize the means of cultural production

MobiThin management framework: design and evaluation

In thin client computing, applications are executed on centralized servers. User input (e.g. keystrokes) is sent to a remote server which processes the event and sends the audiovisual output back to the client. This enables execution of complex applications from thin devices. Adopting virtualization technologies on the thin client server brings several advantages, e.g. dedicated environments for each user and interesting facilities such as migration tools. In this paper, a mobile thin client service offered to a large number of mobile users is designed. Pervasive mobile thin client computing requires an intelligent service management to guarantee a high user experience. Due to the dynamic environment, the service management framework has to monitor the environment and intervene when necessary (e.g. adapt thin client protocol settings, move a session from one server to another). A detailed performance analysis of the implemented prototype is presented. It is shown that the prototype can handle up to 700 requests/s to start the mobile thin client service. The prototype can make a decision for up to 700 monitor reports per second

Revisiting Size-Based Scheduling with Estimated Job Sizes

We study size-based schedulers, and focus on the impact of inaccurate job size information on response time and fairness. Our intent is to revisit previous results, which allude to performance degradation for even small errors on job size estimates, thus limiting the applicability of size-based schedulers. We show that scheduling performance is tightly connected to workload characteristics: in the absence of large skew in the job size distribution, even extremely imprecise estimates suffice to outperform size-oblivious disciplines. Instead, when job sizes are heavily skewed, known size-based disciplines suffer. In this context, we show -- for the first time -- the dichotomy of over-estimation versus under-estimation. The former is, in general, less problematic than the latter, as its effects are localized to individual jobs. Instead, under-estimation leads to severe problems that may affect a large number of jobs. We present an approach to mitigate these problems: our technique requires no complex modifications to original scheduling policies and performs very well. To support our claim, we proceed with a simulation-based evaluation that covers an unprecedented large parameter space, which takes into account a variety of synthetic and real workloads. As a consequence, we show that size-based scheduling is practical and outperforms alternatives in a wide array of use-cases, even in presence of inaccurate size information.Comment: To be published in the proceedings of IEEE MASCOTS 201

Issues in reforming financial systems in Eastern Europe : the case of Bulgaria

The author uses the situation in Bulgaria to illustrate the financial system most Eastern European countries have inherited. Reforming these financial systems is especially difficult because of the problems inherited from a centrally planned economy (CPE). The financial system in a CPE is completely different from a financial system in a market economy. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that reforming the financial systems in these countries means creating a financial system from scratch. The author illustrates the types of problems Eastern European countries face in reforming their financial systems. He argues that these countries can stimulate the supply response by giving the emerging private sector more access to credit and by increasing the savings deposited in the financial system. He argues that the authorities should: (i) link reform of the financial sector to the privatization of banks and enterprises, (ii) quickly privatize a group of banks, (iii) encourage privatized banks to lend exclusively to the emerging private sector, and (iv) turn the of the banks into investment banks and make them participate in the restructuring and privatization of state-owned enterprises.Financial Intermediation,Economic Theory&Research,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Banking Law,Banks&Banking Reform

CURRENT TRENDS IN GUARANTEEING LOANS – INSTITUTIONAL GUARANTEES –

In this period, an often debated topic is related to credit risk, as more as it manifested lately and caused the trigger of the current crisis. Credit risk is not directly the subject of this work, but especially the ways of hedging credit risk. Therefore I examined in this paper the current trends in guaranteeing loans, respectively the institutional guarantees. Even if, in the other EU countries, loans guarantee funds work from many years in the case of Romania the activity of these funds is at the beginning. Therefore, the experience from other European countries, should lead to some measures that have to be taken in Romania in order to encourage the loans guarantee funds activity and to increase the confidence of the banks in the guarantees provided by this. This action may, on the one hand, facilitate the access of more companies to the credits provided by banks, and on the other hand a way to encourage lending, which can lead to an economic development and can contribute to the overcome of the actual economic crisis.loans guarantee funds, credit risk, SME’s, economic crisis

FPGA based remote code integrity verification of programs in distributed embedded systems

The explosive growth of networked embedded systems has made ubiquitous and pervasive computing a reality. However, there are still a number of new challenges to its widespread adoption that include scalability, availability, and, especially, security of software. Among the different challenges in software security, the problem of remote-code integrity verification is still waiting for efficient solutions. This paper proposes the use of reconfigurable computing to build a consistent architecture for generation of attestations (proofs) of code integrity for an executing program as well as to deliver them to the designated verification entity. Remote dynamic update of reconfigurable devices is also exploited to increase the complexity of mounting attacks in a real-word environment. The proposed solution perfectly fits embedded devices that are nowadays commonly equipped with reconfigurable hardware components that are exploited to solve different computational problems

Governance and citizenship in contested states: the Northern Ireland peace agreement as internationalised governance

The Good Friday Agreement signed in Belfast in 1998, but still in a process of development, is one of a number of peace agreements emerging from apparently intractable conflicts, since the end of the cold war. This article focuses on a relatively unexamined aspect of the Agreement - the international relevance of its innovative provisions on equality of citizenship and internationalised governance. The Belfast Agreement both implicitly and explicitly deals with the problematic issue of citizenship in a state which is highly contested at the constitutional level. Its development of an equality agenda and dynamic cross-border institutions of governance in a situation where ultimate sovereignty and allegiance remains contested is a departure from current international norms. The peace process around the Agreement also reflects a significantly increased international involvement in the Northern Ireland conflict. External support and mediation was essential in brokering an Agreement and will inevitably be important in sustaining the new forms of citizenship which are promised in its provisions. Both in its processes and in the framework for citizenship and governance suggested by the Agreement, Northern Ireland can provide a useful example to the increasing number of nationalist conflicts in the post cold war world. ..