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Clearly, Intel has been trying to take advantage of the weak dollar to expand its market in Japan, and the ever-watchful Japanese regulatory agencies moved to stymie foreign intrusion into one of their most tightly protected markets.

Looks to me like this could be the opening salvo of a new trade war. I just hope it doesn't affect the price of ramen.

Britain's example show that even a problem as simple as upgrading the ID system cannot be entrusted to carreer politicians, who'll attach their side agendas to what should be a strictly technical affair. See this for instance.

Are the Continentals more serious? Hardly. This article talks about how tens of thousands of blank Belgian passports are routinely stolen every years and turn up as "real" fakes in the hands of fraudsters. And such a passport is valid accross all of the EU, mind you.

As for France, an authentic blank passport is worth about $2000 in the street. Grab one and put your prefered ID on it.

So, with such a track record, I am afraid you cannot trust the government to certify ID. It would cost you a few thousands to produce an official document certifying your fake ID, which would then be use to defeat your scheme.

Regarding ChoicePoint, I hope they are sent to jail because they are irresponsible and unaccountable. But irresposability and unaccountability are the defining trait of most government-run administrations (can't be fired, no big raise to expect, few incentives), so replacing these rotten apples by other rotten apples won't fix the problem.

the US did not make anything from the oil-for-food program

My mistake, that was a typo in my post, I meant UK, not US. I've found this and this link that provide more information on the oil for food scandal.
What I find shocking is the apparent concensus here (not from you from what I can see) that only France abused the program. There were 250 companies of 61 countries involved in this program, and it looks like the majority did abuse it at one point or another. And it looks like countries abusing it were for or against the war, without much distinction. Russia, France, UK, Italia... are supposed to have abused it.
I guess that we will have to wait for the investigations to see more clearly into these apparent abuses. For the moment, nothing is sure, and since this topic is hottly politics, we must be wary of all the accusations and declaration of innocence, since it's likely that all parties are more or less lying (and I don't trust Chalabi for giving fair informations).

So, it looks like major corruption occured (but note that the program was under supervision of US, so we will have to wait to see what happened really). What looks sure is that abusers were either for or against the war, so accusing the anti-war countries of being anti-war just for this program looks misguided.

Sure everyone condemmed the kiddnapping ... but they still got kidnapped and they're still not back. It does no good to have Muslim leaders back you if the Muslim people do not.
Actually, Muslims do back the liberation of the French reporters. Only the group (a very scarse number of muslims) that did the kidnapping is to blame, not all muslims. Other radical groups have even publicaly proposed their help to free the reporters. On this particular point, there is absolutly no doubt that if you're kidnapped in Iraq, it's better to be French than American.

However, sometimes the right thing to do is not the popular thing to do.
This is very true, but, in my opinion, France did the right thing, but that's only my opinion. What is sure is that the reasons given by Bush's administration (WMD and link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda) are blatently false. Even Rumsfield acknowleged that neither existed.
So, I think that France was right and the US was wrong.

Bitter? No, just a little sad.
I should have make the precision that I wasn't specifically speaking of you when I spoke about bitterness. That is the sentiment I have about people here bashing the French.

Last, but not least, I'm tired of all the French bashing I see here, and i'm glad you and I can have a pleasant and intelligent discussion of this. That is conforting, and I hope some of the worst war supporter and "anyone not supporting the war is a coward and corrupt bastard" crowd on Slashdot will take a lesson from our discussion. Too many people (but again, not you) have listenned too much to Bush's "You're either with us or against us" stupidity.

The comp.* and sci.* hierarchies, from my experience, have been good. e.g. comp.text.xml, comp.protocols.kerberos, etc.

Many of the big players would like Usenet to go away as it is decentralized and distributed which makes it hard to censor and control. ISP what a bottleneck though which users must pass and view ads while doing so.

The BBC article brings up a good point, but perhaps it is more practical to look to Usenet again. It is the only decentralized, distributed service I have seen. Mozilla, Opera and other web browsers include news readers so there is no need to install extra software, though dedicated news readers do have advantages. (Ask your ISP for details on how to connect) I prefer when mailing lists have SMTP/NTTP gateways so that I can check the list with a threaded news reader.

Maybe it's time to look at a new version of the NNTP protocol, and/or to the message format to make up for shortcomings. RSS is trying to do something with the web, which is perhaps more suited to NNTP or its successor.

That must explain why there are Arab members of the Knesset. It must also explain the "Suffrage: 18 years of age; universal" on the World factbook entry for Israel.

But since it is Israel, we are exercising our veto power in the UN Security Council to PREVENT a condemnation of the assassination.

The assassination of a the leader of a known terrorist organization that is responsible for hundreds of innocent deaths of both Arabs and Isreali's. Breaks my fucking heart that they killed him. Even the spineless EU considers Hamas to be a terrorist organization. Tell me again why the Israeli's shouldn't have killed this SOB? Would we pass up Bin Ladan if we had a shot at him?

This double standard is only one part of why so many in the arabic world hate us.

Double standard? The Arab fanatics want another Holocost of the Jewish people. It'll be over our dead bodies before that happens. Too bad the Europeans don't seem to remember history very well. They will be doomed to repeat it.

And don't think I haven't paid my share of taxes.

But who said anything about "the US auto industry?" Others might, so perhaps you're responding to them - I simply mentioned the auto industry. And in what world are Chevvy and Ford "US Auto companies?" Ford may have its headquarters in Dearborn and its earliest roots in Detroit, but it's an international corporation every bit as much as Wal-Mart, Nike, NEC and Nissan: there are ford and chevvy plants all over the world, and have been for decades. You haven't been able to buy a Falcon in the US since the 60's, but new ones are running all over Australia. Where are those Falcons made? They damn sure aren't made in the US.

There are auto plants in Mississippi and Alabama and Tennessee and Ohio and more locales are looking to bring them in. No, they're not all "US names" - so what? They're good paying jobs. Ford closed a plant in Flat Rock, Mi (just around the corner from my home town) when I was a kid and by the time I was old enough to work there was a shiny new Mazda (er, Ford/Mazda) plant there.

And BTW, those aren't Japanese cars I was talking about with the 400hp, either. 400hp is the oft touted number for the new Ford Mustang... that is, unless you get the Cobra. Buzz is that one will come with a 24 valve, 500HP, supercharged SOHC V8. (Yeesh, what a sickly american car!)

So, is that car American or Australian? Or is it British? Or German? Oh, wait, they're being assembled by 1,400 UAW workers in Flat Rock, Michigan... so I guess it must be a Japanese car after all.

Yeah, dat's da ticket.

To back up the above poster, world's fastest marathon times are 2:04:55 for men and 2:15:25 for women. That's a 8.4% difference. That's closer than I would have expected, honestly, so I'd believe that women are better-suited towards endurance than other activities (say, power lifting).

Criminal uses cell phone to call in kidnapping ransom. Police trace phone, find criminal + kid. Summer 2003

Kidnap victim memorizes rapists cellphone. Police check registry, find perp. Jun 2003

Kidnapped woman had cellphone hidden on person. Cops trace it to car, catch perp in parking lot. Nov 2003

And many more...

Don't forget, "The prudes write the obscenity laws"

One more reason to be glad you don't live in L.A.

~Philly

> Sure, a supersonic airliner would be much higher, but the sonic booms would still be unacceptable.

There is work in progress to drastically the sonic boom... As this article shows...

It's not clear what the impact on efficiency is, so it's not clear if this is a true solution, but it's an interesting possibility!

I actually think the U.S. Military would be interested in a high passenger-load super-sonic airplane. It could be a good way to mobilize a rapid-response team in a hurry...

It's working on its own problems right now.

What do you know?!

Those dictators put only 2% of the GNP in education, (you can compare the number with Canada or even India), and hundreds of millions people are starved there, and they can not even commit suicide, because that is illegal!

Let me tell you something: China's own problem is the Evil CCP. The whole moon thing is, like Slave Society's Great Pyramid: build on others' death -- those you don't fscking know, and you don't fscking care.

While the US presence in europe undoubtedly has helped prevent europe from self destructing into war (again) another factor is the increased co-operation and the knowledge of what another world war would due to Europe. Europe seems content with the idea of preserving each individual countries unique

Saying that European countries do not possess formidable armies is wrong. Germany and France both maintain armies of comparable size to the US' and comparable equipment. Now, air force and navy is quite another matter. They also rely almost wholly upon the US for all their military R&D needs, especially aircraft and high technology weapons systems. In that respect, yes, the US does prop them up a bit. But as of currently, iirc, the US maintains only 2 divisons in Europe plus air and naval forces of course.

Indeed, most military sucess' of the UN have come with US forces involved, most often heavily. This is somewhat due to the fact that only the United States has the resources and equipment necassary to project force on a worldwide scale. No other country in the world can do this.

Noooo, the Chinese like rats while the vietnamese eat dogs

At the risk of being Offtopic... I know it's fashionable to bash MS and their products, but this statement is simply silly. What you're referring to MS doing with the X-Box is called a "loss leader." They make the platform at a loss with the hopes of making up the dividends on the individual games. All the major consoles do the exact same thing as do manufacturers of printers (ever wonder why you can get a printer for 80 bucks, but the carts are 15-30 bucks each, not to mention paper?), and several other industries.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but what lexmark does is profitable to them, what microsoft is doing is still losing them money. They are using the xbox merely to get their foot in the proverbial console door, in preparation hopefully to become profitable with the xbox2.

Next time someone mentions microsoft and one of their products, they might not be just trying to blame the problems of the world on them, and the poster might actually be talking about something that pertains to the subject.

Imagine that.

there has been 167 in this year alone in india. 229 people were killed and 394 injured. this is good news for people in india. we can only hope that it does not become another vapurware. india in the past has given up on good projects like this one.

Concerning a question made above, the format specs and a Linux software both exist here.

Now I'm pretty happy with another device, i.e. the Hiebook (site; groups), that provides the same, important capability: you can upload to it any .txt/.htm content.

Not as as good a display as the rocket, though...

"No matter what the circumstances, France will vote 'no,'" Chirac said in a televised interview in France. "There is no cause for war to achieve the objective that we fixed -- the disarmament of Iraq."

However, the Saudis have promised to boost their oil production to make up for the loss of Iraqi oil. On the other hand, Islamic leaders have suggested using oil to dissuade the US from attacking Iraq.

Let's say Microsoft is required to hire only Americans. Because of their increased labor costs, their OS becomes more expensive.

They already have a 86% profit margin on the OS.

But your point is correct for non-criminal non-monopolists.

To put in a plug (though I no longer have any ownership interest in it) one of the things about
ClariNet is that it can handle any load.

Because it feeds out news in USENET format from the major wire services, the load is placed on the local server. ClariNet's servers never even feel increased demand. Even highly saturated internet pipes would only slow things slightly, USENET doesn't care about the latency of the pipe.

And all this using 20 year old technology, oddly enough. People always talk about the news sites failing during things like the Olympics, Sept. 11 etc. but the distributed technology never has that problem.

On top of that, USENET is designed for serial news, so that it shows you what's new. You don't have to sit there constantly refereshing a page to see if there is new material, you only see the new material. We even had a system so that urgent stories could be fed directly to your screen, and it's not a polling style of "push" like PointCast was.

Generally the newsreader is, surprise surprise, a great way to read news. What surprises me is that all these years later -- ClariNet was the first of the dot-com companies -- nobody has done the same. I sold it 5 years ago, but it's still running, if a bit shrunk from the economy.

Why let MSNBC filter your news? These others are one step closer to the source.

If you don't have access to Clarinet (which you should) then you can check via the web:

• Reuters
• The Associated Press
• United Press International
• BBC
• CBC
• NPR
• even Times of India

(AFP don't count - spelling, grammar, and factual errors. NYT - heavy circulation does not a good news source make. )

To communicate with your Rocket eBook, Matt Greenwood has written Merlin, a java-based tool for communicating with your Rocket. It's still in alpha, but works okay.

Good luck - the Rocket is a great little tool. I carry mine around with me all the time when I'm travelling.

(Slightly off-topic, but...)

My father back in the 50's, on the other hand, got stuck with this new game called "Adventure". Plugh. (One of his roomates at MIT helped write it.)

Given the plugh reference, I would point out that Crowther and Woods wrote Adventure in the early Seventies. (Reference 1: T he Craft of Adventure, chapter 2 [P DF]) (Reference 2: A History of 'Adventure'). So, it's a little improbable that the Adventure of plugh fame was available in the 50's =)

(You can play it on-line at any of several locations these days, including here and here.)