But for one search that we can double check against known fact, how many can't we? Can we trust Google alone for information? Can we even trust a handful of web search engines all concentrated in the same part of the world?
Apple (and Creative Labs) just take a product designed in Asia and put their brand name on it. Said products are better than Archos' Jukeboxes, BUT remember Archos created its Jukeboxes a few years ago and were the first ones with hard drives mp3 players...
Plus, the new Archos players can read divx videos, act as a camera, video recorder, mp3 recorder, compact flash + SD card reader... apart from being a cool firewire+USB2 portable hard drive. I'm sure Apple will follow, but they're just doing that : following the trend.
Well that's just because you used your brain, checked the facts and actually read the paper !
Some things a lot of people here on/. seem unable to do. Language barrier ? I don't think so. Maybe a French judge should forbid access to/. to the French in the name of a "intellectual exception" ???
No, the UK income tax can go as much as 40%. But you won't pay more:)
To be compared with France, where it starts at 0% but on the other hand can go up to 56%...
So the ideal would be to be employed in the UK, paid in the UK, but to work in France for its more efficient infrastructure, its health system and its food !
Coming back to the subject, my brother-in-law moved from MA to Paris, France, last year, and adapted very quickly. He's not the typical american, though (ie. he's travelled, and could correctly show wher Europe is on a map), and the main difficulty for him might be to get used to urban life in a big multicultural city (coming from a town with where the only culture -ahem- is US TV)
The thing is, he's working in IT - same for me. I've already worked in Hong Kong, Paris and New York (besides London, I mean - that's in the UK for you americans) and workwise, it's all the same as long as you're good at your job.
I think you'll find the computers were born in the UK, the web designed in the French/Switzerland border (by an UK citizen), the microcomputer was born in France. The germans used crypto machines during WWII and a British submarine captured the first few ones (and that's in early 1941, way before the US entered the war), and reverse engineered it. Same for Linux, Nokia (scandinavian), PHP (German)
But then, Apple, C, Java,/., Unix and (aaargh) Microsoft are US creations.
(come to think of it, the French discovered radioactivity, the French and German created the atomic theory, the German scientists who fled to the US built the first atomic bomb, and the american actually DROPPED it !)
Well, actually, the productivity (per head) in the US is quite low compared to Europe in general, and France in particular, so I do not understand the people aren't especially hard workers bit;)
Having said that, France would achieve even more if people over there worked as much as americans do (US workers now work 10% more than they did 20 years ago).
Now, the so called leisure society we were supposed to have for the 21st Century looks much more like France (with its more reliable health system and transport infrastructure as well as less working hours thanks to automatization) than the US (with an appaling education and health system and more and more working hours...) !!
Here in the UK we are half way between the two (apart from health and transports, which are rock bottom), but I guess we'll finally head towards a more European model, while keeping what can be saved from the US system.
Slashdot *viewing* would not be banned. However, Slashdot could not be hosted in France - if the law is voted in its current status.
Obviously most of the slashdoters did not get the point (what strikes me there is the fact that non-anonymous posts are as clueless as anonymous ones.... or is it that Slashdot is no longer what is used to be ?)
(1) origins of the law proposal
The law is proposed to protect ISPs and web space providers from lawsuit-happy individuals. Over the last few years, several public figures (for example model Estelle Haliday) have sued providers for content displayed on their pages. They did not even ask *who* created the pages. Imagine Geocities sued because a user has mp3 files on his page, even after Geocities has removed the infringent files....
The law seeks to force the provider to be more careful.
(2) The proposal is good for eCommerce
Obviously, having an identification for every user is very good for eCommerce companies. But maybe slashdotters are too busy bashing the French to even think about that.
As a remark, where in the world do you find the only profitable eCommerce companies ? They are in France, where they still use a 17+ years old terminal based system called Minitel. State-of-the-art technology when introduced in the early 80's, it is now totally outclassed by the Internet. But the point is : people in France had a successful eCommerce system for years, while the US is still struggling for it today.
(3) this is a second vote, ie. it still needs to go thru a third vote (France has two legislative elected assemblies, the Senate and the National Assembly)
I live in London, UK, but have worked for some time in Paris, France.
When I moved from Paris to London, I nearly doubled my salary. I left behind me a highly concentrated urban chaos, its traffic jams, non smiling people, and a very polluted city.
However, I oversaw the following facts:
I had left a badly paid job in a service consultancy company for a highly pay job in an investment bank,
the GBP is currently quite high compared to the Euro,
health service in France is free and doesn't suck (in fact I got so scared by the low quality of equipment and service in the UK that I go to France when I need to see a doctor !),
Paris is a real city, London is nothing else than a very small center with very large suburbs,
London hasn't got many movie theaters (at least compared to Paris)
I pay USD 1100 per month for a studio here in London - the same would give me a 2 bedroom flat in the center of Paris (althought the Paris market is waking up now after a ten years slump...)
transport infrastructure in the UK is a shame - roads are in bad conditions, the Tube (London subway) a nightmare and as for the trains, well, now there's an accident every few months. On the opposite, France hosts the most advanced train system in the world with high speed trains (they hold the world speed record), good highways, and the Paris subway (they call it the Metro) is efficient and inexpensive (but how dirty !!)
UK credit cards still don't use smart cards - smart cards have been widely used in France for nearly 20 years!
French law forces the employer to give 5 weeks holidays, and to pay minimum 50% of everyone's daily expenses (transport and lunch),
UK IR taxes are much higher than French ones (but in France, they have stupidly high hidden charges no one understands, so I guess it's the same),
net connexions in Paris are thru cable or ADSL - I use a 56K modem in London...
Altogether, I know that life is much better in Paris than in London - except for the Parisians. Londonners are nice and friendly if compared to Parisians. And no one speaks english in France ! (in fact they do but why should they make an effort ?)
Actually, you're wrong : I guess they do not disregard the foreign films, they only have to adapt them to the appaling cultural level of the local population.
ex. : they don't know where Berlin is, so they move 'City Of Angels' to the US.
British and French and German will also soon be forced to eat american Genetically Modified food (and American hormon beef, and bananas harvested by children)
Not exactly, I think Hindhi and even Urdu (two languages from the Indian subcontinent and widely spoken in Ealing, UK) would come before english and spanish.
The minitel was a bad design, it was limited, unscalable, basically just a huge BBS, that was doomed very soon.
Of course, the Minitel was 70's desgin.!! They were slow ? Well, 1200 donwload/75 upload is slow compared to a 56000, but back in 1982-1986, how many americans actually owned a computer with a modem ? And what kind of modem ? (I had a 2400 with my 8086 in 1986)
The (freely available) Minitel was, and is still, generating a lot of money. The Internet is still an unsafe place for online transaction, and Amazon is still losing money...
The French are buying plane or train tickets online since 1984.
Around that date, every household discovered online chats - way before the IRC.
Since its beginings, you could find a search engine (Minitel Guide des Services) and a national telephone directory on the Minitel.
BTW what computer technologies did the French brought us that are used around the world?
Er... the first microcomputer was invented in France by a Franco/Vietnamese guy, the French were just too dumb to see its potential. And this was just a few years before the Altair.
The US brought the net, C, UNIX, mainframes, PCs, workstations, etc...
In the 70's, not only the US but also the UK, France and Germany designed and tested Arpanet-like networks. Do you really think American scientists came to Europe and installed a network ? Have you heard of EARN (equivalent of BitNet) ? Do you actually know why the Internet is called
InterNet (and not just ArpaNet) ?
The Internet technologies are not created by US people, they are created by everybody. If I was following the previous poster's idea, I would say that the Web is British (Tim Berners Lee 'invented' the Web, after all, innit ?) or perhaps Swiss (he worked in french speaking Geneva), and that IRC is Finnish (well, it *is*).
Probably the french were working on their "super cool" technologies on US mainframes.
Wrong - play again ! Until the mid-60's, the #2 computer company in the world was French - it was Bull (the #1 was IBM, but its dominance was not that obvious at the time).
Just to let you know :
1st man in space : russian.
invention of car : joint German and French.
Linux : finnish. and the World
smartcards : French. They have ued smartcards for more than 15 years, and pay everything with them. American phone companies only started using them in the early 90's.
Feeding cattle with mud from sewage : French. Sometimes, they can be very stupid, like everybody in general (and the americans in particular, except, being French, they do it with panache and culture, of course).
Slashdot Mirror
Why roll 8mb when other European countries are already pushing to 20mb?
In the UK, "broadband" starts at 128kb... while in France, providers move their customers from 4mb to 8mb or 16mb, sometimes for free.
Is this the only things Google is censoring? So far http://news.google.com/news?q=lynndie+england&hl=e n&lr=&tab=gn&ie=UTF-8&scoring=d seems to escape censorship.
But for one search that we can double check against known fact, how many can't we? Can we trust Google alone for information? Can we even trust a handful of web search engines all concentrated in the same part of the world?
And this is only a taste of things to come...
Apple (and Creative Labs) just take a product designed in Asia and put their brand name on it. Said products are better than Archos' Jukeboxes, BUT remember Archos created its Jukeboxes a few years ago and were the first ones with hard drives mp3 players...
:)
Plus, the new Archos players can read divx videos, act as a camera, video recorder, mp3 recorder, compact flash + SD card reader... apart from being a cool firewire+USB2 portable hard drive. I'm sure Apple will follow, but they're just doing that : following the trend.
Good thing Archos is a French company
Well that's just because you used your brain, checked the facts and actually read the paper !
/. seem unable to do. Language barrier ? I don't think so. Maybe a French judge should forbid access to /. to the French in the name of a "intellectual exception" ???
Some things a lot of people here on
No, the UK income tax can go as much as 40%. But you won't pay more :)
To be compared with France, where it starts at 0% but on the other hand can go up to 56%...
So the ideal would be to be employed in the UK, paid in the UK, but to work in France for its more efficient infrastructure, its health system and its food !
funny, but (1) untrue and (2) off topic.
Coming back to the subject, my brother-in-law moved from MA to Paris, France, last year, and adapted very quickly. He's not the typical american, though (ie. he's travelled, and could correctly show wher Europe is on a map), and the main difficulty for him might be to get used to urban life in a big multicultural city (coming from a town with where the only culture -ahem- is US TV)
The thing is, he's working in IT - same for me. I've already worked in Hong Kong, Paris and New York (besides London, I mean - that's in the UK for you americans) and workwise, it's all the same as long as you're good at your job.
I think you'll find the computers were born in the UK, the web designed in the French/Switzerland border (by an UK citizen), the microcomputer was born in France. The germans used crypto machines during WWII and a British submarine captured the first few ones (and that's in early 1941, way before the US entered the war), and reverse engineered it. Same for Linux, Nokia (scandinavian), PHP (German)
/., Unix and (aaargh) Microsoft are US creations.
But then, Apple, C, Java,
(come to think of it, the French discovered radioactivity, the French and German created the atomic theory, the German scientists who fled to the US built the first atomic bomb, and the american actually DROPPED it !)
It may be true but you should not be *that* provocative. I thought the French were more subtle... ;)
Having said that, France would achieve even more if people over there worked as much as americans do (US workers now work 10% more than they did 20 years ago).
Now, the so called leisure society we were supposed to have for the 21st Century looks much more like France (with its more reliable health system and transport infrastructure as well as less working hours thanks to automatization) than the US (with an appaling education and health system and more and more working hours...) !!
Here in the UK we are half way between the two (apart from health and transports, which are rock bottom), but I guess we'll finally head towards a more European model, while keeping what can be saved from the US system.
By the way, I have lived in France, too.
[too bad I missed the first post !]
Obviously most of the slashdoters did not get the point (what strikes me there is the fact that non-anonymous posts are as clueless as anonymous ones.... or is it that Slashdot is no longer what is used to be ?)
(1) origins of the law proposal
The law is proposed to protect ISPs and web space providers from lawsuit-happy individuals. Over the last few years, several public figures (for example model Estelle Haliday) have sued providers for content displayed on their pages. They did not even ask *who* created the pages. Imagine Geocities sued because a user has mp3 files on his page, even after Geocities has removed the infringent files....
The law seeks to force the provider to be more careful.
(2) The proposal is good for eCommerce
Obviously, having an identification for every user is very good for eCommerce companies. But maybe slashdotters are too busy bashing the French to even think about that.
As a remark, where in the world do you find the only profitable eCommerce companies ? They are in France, where they still use a 17+ years old terminal based system called Minitel. State-of-the-art technology when introduced in the early 80's, it is now totally outclassed by the Internet. But the point is : people in France had a successful eCommerce system for years, while the US is still struggling for it today.
(3) this is a second vote, ie. it still needs to go thru a third vote (France has two legislative elected assemblies, the Senate and the National Assembly)
-- Patrick
When I moved from Paris to London, I nearly doubled my salary. I left behind me a highly concentrated urban chaos, its traffic jams, non smiling people, and a very polluted city.
However, I oversaw the following facts
I had left a badly paid job in a service consultancy company for a highly pay job in an investment bank,
the GBP is currently quite high compared to the Euro,
health service in France is free and doesn't suck (in fact I got so scared by the low quality of equipment and service in the UK that I go to France when I need to see a doctor !),
Paris is a real city, London is nothing else than a very small center with very large suburbs,
London hasn't got many movie theaters (at least compared to Paris)
I pay USD 1100 per month for a studio here in London - the same would give me a 2 bedroom flat in the center of Paris (althought the Paris market is waking up now after a ten years slump...)
transport infrastructure in the UK is a shame - roads are in bad conditions, the Tube (London subway) a nightmare and as for the trains, well, now there's an accident every few months. On the opposite, France hosts the most advanced train system in the world with high speed trains (they hold the world speed record), good highways, and the Paris subway (they call it the Metro) is efficient and inexpensive (but how dirty !!)
UK credit cards still don't use smart cards - smart cards have been widely used in France for nearly 20 years!
French law forces the employer to give 5 weeks holidays, and to pay minimum 50% of everyone's daily expenses (transport and lunch),
UK IR taxes are much higher than French ones (but in France, they have stupidly high hidden charges no one understands, so I guess it's the same),
net connexions in Paris are thru cable or ADSL - I use a 56K modem in London...
Altogether, I know that life is much better in Paris than in London - except for the Parisians. Londonners are nice and friendly if compared to Parisians. And no one speaks english in France ! (in fact they do but why should they make an effort ?)
Actually, you're wrong : I guess they do not disregard the foreign films, they only have to adapt them to the appaling cultural level of the local population.
ex. : they don't know where Berlin is, so they move 'City Of Angels' to the US.
Unluckilly, you're right.
French people will soon eat British beef;
British and French and German will also soon be forced to eat american Genetically Modified food (and American hormon beef, and bananas harvested by children)
Not exactly, I think Hindhi and even Urdu (two languages from the Indian subcontinent and widely spoken in Ealing, UK) would come before english and spanish.
Of course, the Minitel was 70's desgin.!!
They were slow ? Well, 1200 donwload/75 upload is slow compared to a 56000, but back in 1982-1986, how many americans actually owned a computer with a modem ? And what kind of modem ? (I had a 2400 with my 8086 in 1986)
The (freely available) Minitel was, and is still, generating a lot of money. The Internet is still an unsafe place for online transaction, and Amazon is still losing money...
The French are buying plane or train tickets online since 1984.
Around that date, every household discovered online chats - way before the IRC.
Since its beginings, you could find a search engine (Minitel Guide des Services) and a national telephone directory on the Minitel.
BTW what computer technologies did the French brought us that are used around the world?
Er... the first microcomputer was invented in France by a Franco/Vietnamese guy, the French were just too dumb to see its potential.
And this was just a few years before the Altair.
The US brought the net, C, UNIX, mainframes, PCs, workstations, etc...
In the 70's, not only the US but also the UK, France and Germany designed and tested Arpanet-like networks. Do you really think American scientists came to Europe and installed a network ? Have you heard of EARN (equivalent of BitNet) ? Do you actually know why the Internet is called
InterNet (and not just ArpaNet) ?
The Internet technologies are not created by US people, they are created by everybody. If I was following the previous poster's idea, I would say that the Web is British (Tim Berners Lee 'invented' the Web, after all, innit ?) or perhaps Swiss (he worked in french speaking Geneva), and that IRC is Finnish (well, it *is*).
Probably the french were working on their "super cool" technologies on US mainframes.
Wrong - play again !
Until the mid-60's, the #2 computer company in the world was French - it was Bull (the #1 was IBM, but its dominance was not that obvious at the time).
Just to let you know :
1st man in space : russian.
invention of car : joint German and French.
Linux : finnish. and the World
smartcards : French. They have ued smartcards for more than 15 years, and pay everything with them. American phone companies only started using them in the early 90's.
Feeding cattle with mud from sewage : French. Sometimes, they can be very stupid, like everybody in general (and the americans in particular, except, being French, they do it with panache and culture, of course).
Actually nuking another country : US. Twice
Well way I'm off topic, but you get the idea.
as a Perl progammer, you can work in a financial institution and do fancy programs (or so you think).
as a VB programmer, you can work in a financial institution and do stupid, but easy-to-write and fancy (or so the business users think) programs.
And most of all, the second option usually gives you a much better salary, God knows why !
So I guess one should really learn VB, and keep Perl (or better, PHP3) as well as Java for home programming (if there's such a thing).