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This little 1200/75 baud terminal which is in almost every french home is great for searching local businesses.
We just have to switch it on and dial 3611 (the annuaire ). type in what you are looking for in the "Activite" field (restaurant, music store, whatever..) and you get results in the city or departement you've chosen, or in a certain range.

That outdated tech is really fast for this task :). but it's France only, as local.google is US only :D

Don't you mean the Minitel?

No evidence to date has been submitted by ANY organisation which shows any involvement whatsoever by Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. According to all intelligence sources (except North America) that I have heard speaking about 9/11, they all insist no terrorist organisation is capable of carrying out a sophisticated attack of this nature, and it could ONLY have been done by high level officials within the US government itself! So the question is, why is nobody investigating the probability that elements within the US government did these acts?

Wait a second. I thought that the proported reason the extension was to bring the US inline with the European Copyright laws. At least that was the justification the Supreme Court used...

The French reduced the term to 50 years (for books, films, music) in 1985, and so far as I understand this has been adopted across Europe. (In any event, the healthy industry of independant reissues which this decision spun also flourishes in Spain, Austria, the UK,...)

Of course as the limit now approaches the beginnings of the LP era, the RIAA is starting to call this piracy.

It should also be undestood that "Copyrights" (or "Author's rights" as they call them) have a different meaning over there. For one thing they belong to the author forever -- publishing companies cannot buy them as part of their contracts.

(The day they can be bought is probably the day we'll hear a clamor to extend them in order to "protect the artists" :-)

• 2002-12-04 15:16:13 France to introduce own DMCA (articles,news) (rejected)

Today's Libé previews a new bill introduced by the French government to, in one stroke and all too familiar terms, not only legalize anticopy media , but also prohibit everyone from diffusing, advertising and even making known any means of circumvention. (Google translation.) Meanwhile, no plans to end a 56 tax on blank CDs, which brought the industry 95.3 million in 2001. Sad news from a country which, in more enlightened times, pioneered copyright reduction (to 50 years) and thus enabled such wonderful reissue programs as Chronological Classics.

France has tried to move into the electronic realm, but the Governmental Idiots botched it. The LaPoste.Net service has no clear advantages over any other e-mail provider, except maybe that you can access your mailbox from a Minitel terminal. But this is no big deal, since (1) France Telecom has ceased distributing free terminals, you're forced to rent one, (2) the service isn't free (a shame), and (3) would you like reading your e-mail on a 40-column VT100 with a 1200bps line ? Oh, and to top that great picture, the morons outsourced the service to a bunch of idiots who made an unsecure site. Fantastic!

Oh, well, this just confirms that a lot of people in the Governements still cannot understand they should try to *think* for at least a minute before spending taxpayers' money in such moronic stunts. And whatever the government you elect, they make the *very same* mistakes... Depressing :-(

... and it can be found here.