I'd be interested if some knowledgeable person would explain here the current state of development of IA-64 compilers (gcc in particular).
IA-64 is peculiar in that respect, not so because it is 64-bit (though this is likely to hurt code that assumes 32-bit int's and pointers... and that's still quite a bit, look at the difficulties with Linux on Alpha). As decribed in Intel's documentation, IA-64 is a VLIW (Very Large Instruction Word) architecture where the burden of superscalar pipelining (deciding what assembler instructions can be executed in parallel) lies on the compiler. Let us take a simple example: where you are executing imull %edx, %eax addl $4, %eax the two instructions cannot be scheduled on two parallel pipelines since eax in the second depends on the output of the first. Advanced design allow the CPU to "swap" certain instructions (out-of-order execution).
From a hardware design point of view, the IA-64 design makes sense: out-of-order scheduling instructions over multiple pipelines in hardware is complicated. For this reason, IA-64 allows the assembly code to specify "bundles" of instructions that can be executed in parallel. The burden is then shifted to the compiler.
Such a design allows scheduling optimizations far further than the ordinary peephole optimizations (i.e. very local tricks). For instance, in numeric code like this: x[i][j]=expression1; x[j][k]=expression2; the compiler could schedule expression1 and expression2 in parallel, if they are sufficiently simple. Of course, for this to respect the semantics of the program, (i,j) must never be equal to (j,k). Answering such questions mechanically is impossible in general (Rice's theorem, reduction to the Turing machine halting problem). However, there are analysis techniques that can give the right result in most cases (such techniques can also be used to check whether two pointers never point to the same variable, or whether some array bound checks are useless) (an active research topic; see some of the research in the area).
I would like to know the current state of the art of industrial-grade compilers with respect to this automatic local parallelization techniques.
Ok, let me give you a few precisions. The PPP setting I was alluding to was a bit tricky. The PPP server I was using did not handle LCP (some feature of PPP) well. The Mac would complain and disconnect after 5 seconds of connection. Of course, the dialog box that was displayed did not display how to turn the non-working feature off. I browsed carefully through the PPP settings, and I found something where the acronym LCP did not appear, but I felt it sounded like some kind of periodic line check. Ok. Now tell me a normal user would find it...
A silly answer is "answers to such questions can be found on the 'Net". Come on, if I was trying to set up PPP, then maybe it meant I could only get 'Net access until after setting it up! "Documentation is on the 'Net" is not a proper answer: not everybody has a fast enough 'Net connection to be able to look for such information in a timely manner.
As for the printer problem, I had only one minute to help somebody. The program he used did not offer "Save to file" in its print dialogs. I tried to find a system setup to create a fake printer saving to file, I did not find it. I do not claim it was absent. I just think the system was not very helpful in helping me find it. Maybe it's possible to find it after spending half an hour looking in menus and dialogs; this is I think inadequate for a platform whose selling argument is that it caters for the needs of the most computer-challenged people.
Of course, I was thinking of ZIP disks. I have actually read TIFF files from a Mac disks using the HFS driver in Linux. As far as I remember, it associates to each Mac file its data and resource fork as two different files (but I was only interested in data forks, so I did not pay attention to the rest). Read the Linux kernel documentation for details.
A general pattern in those tests is that Linux is slower than Windows. We all know that Windows 95 (98 or Millenium) has little protection: most applications can tweak global system properties, whereas Linux puts severe restrictions on what applications can do (a bit less so when run as root).
I would like to know whether the performance is hit because of some of the protection stuff, for instance for transfers to video RAM (even with mmap, it's not necessarily easy on Linux because the system has to work a lot getting DMA to work around virtual memory). If there are knowledgeable people around here...
(Yes, that's a good question: how does Linux handle DMA transfers from userland to PCI busmaster devices? Temporary buffers?)
No, as far as I know PC Linux cannot read Mac floppies since Mac floppies are written with a low-level format that is peculiar to the Mac. However, Linux can read, on any platform, Mac ZIPs.
I have been programming for the last 10 years. I am pursuing a PhD in computer science. I have installed Linux networks, and even have coded some Linux device drivers. I can thus be called fairly familiar with computers.
Yet I think that systems are inadequate for the user:
Linux is not yet ready for the desktop. Installing fonts is a pain; printer support is pitiful (I have yet to see how to get colors right for the Deskjet 690C); decent desktop applications are not yet there (Gnumeric is still fairly weak and still has quite a few bugs etc...)
Windows automates everything and tries to think instead of the user. I do not appreciate it when a computer tells me what to do, even less when it does something stupid. Furthermore, the desire to make things simpler for the casual user had them not to include any diagnostic tool. The icing on the cake is the absence of protection, which favors the spread of a myriad of viruses.
The Macintosh is even worse. You just can't order it to do something if it is not proposed in the standard choices. Some system options, for instance in PPP, are hidden in some obscure dialog boxes and no documentation is available. I have just spent some time trying to get a Mac to export a drawing into PostScript: impossible, or there is yet another obscure choice to make.
It is a pity that with the power of current computers, nobody is able to make a system that is truly user-friendly; that is, that does what the user wants instead of getting him to do stuff in obscure command lines described in even more obscure documentation (Linux) or pissing him off with silly restrictions and railroaded choices (Windows).
I have seen the Eazel presentation at Guadec. I have hopes that it will be a bit more like what I'd like. Yet I am a bit afraid that it is going to be the next step of evolution of the current interfaces: more eye candy and gizmos, but little actual change.
The situation is a bit complex: freedom of speech is a constitutional right, and the 1881 law on the Press (revised many times since) states so. However, restrictions of this freedom have been inserted into this law; to the old prohibition of public advocacy to commit crimes and felonies was added a prohibition on the advocacy of racial hatred and of putting into doubt the reality of the nazi crimes.
Apparently, the jurisprudence considers nazi emblems and books such as Mein Kampf or the Protocols of the Sages of Zion to be banned antisemitic propaganda. It is nevertheless possible to trade such goods provided they are used as historic documentation; this is a very murky area and I do not know the exact criteria applied.
In Germany, where for obvious reason people are wary of anything reminding of nazism, such restrictions are even more stringent.
As for the legal ground of ordering Yahoo US to comply, I think it is quite weak, but I am not a lawyer. I would wait until the legal matters are sorted out (appeals, maybe going before the supreme court).
As for the social opinion of the people here, I think the French people are a bit too prone on legislating on what should be or not be done (mind, after all, many US states legislate on what sex positions are legal between consenting adults). There are reasons for this: there are every so often racist or antisemitic attacks, many old people suffered during WWII, and there is still the remembrance of the traitors of the Vichy government.
I read the press trying to get a few hard facts on the said court ruling. All I got is from imprecise sources such as newspapers, so take it with a grain of salt.
The ruling is a summary injunction (référé), which means that it has been issued by a single judge.
The matter has not yet been appealed to a court of appeal. We should probably wait until such things get appealed to the supreme court (cour de cassation) before we conclude that French jurisprudence has been defined with respect to sites abroad selling forbidden material. Unfortunately, with the current overload of the supreme court, it should take several years.
As with the Georgia Tech case, the lawsuit was not brought by the government but by private nonprofit associations, LICRA (International League against Racism and Antisemitism) and UEJF (Union of Jewish Students of France). Therefore it is wrong to conclude anything from this case about the position of either the president, the cabinet, the national assembly or the senate. They apparently ask for reparations in accordance with article 48.2 of the (revised) law on the Press of 1981 which allows a nonprofit association whose statutory goals include fighting racism to ask for reparations even though the association is no direct victim.
Apparently, the motive of the lawsuit is article 24 of the same law, which prohibits inciting discrimination, hatred or violence against a person or a group of persons because of their origin or their belonging or non-belonging to an ethnic group, a nation or a determined religion (punishable by one year of prison and/or a 300,000 FRF fine, not precluding the civil damages). Means of such incitation to hatred include drawings or emblems (article 23).
So we have two different issues here:
Whether or not a nazi emblem promotes racial hatred;
Whether or not a French court can order an US company to comply to its rulings (apparently, the matter will have to be brought before an US court); of course, Yahoo France must comply.
Furthermore, as far as I know, are exempt from the ban prints of such items for education or scholarly research. I do not know where this comes from legally. Surely indeed, some public libraries, including the National Library of France have printouts of Mein Kampf available for readers!
I therefore think the Slashdot community should wait and see further progress in the case; jumping to conclusions is clearly overreacting.
I believe that there is a state telecom monopoly in France, so...
Long distance telecommunications have been deregulated for quite a long time in France, and there are quite a few companies providing such services.
Furthermore, you seem to confuse the opinion of a single judge in a lower court and the opinion of the legislative body or the cabinet of ministers. For instance, when I talk about the United States, I take care of not presenting the opinion of, say, governor Bush of Texas as "the will of the United States".
There is a translation problem here. In French, gouvernement means the cabinet of ministers at the head of the executive branch, which in American gets translated as the administration (whereas in French, the administration is the set of government agencies).
The executive has apparently nothing to do with this case. As it appears from the press, two private plaintiffs, noprofit associations, sued Yahoo on grounds of a restriction of the freedom of the press law that prohibits incitation to racial hatred. A judge issued an injunction against Yahoo. The matter has not been fully judged yet, neither appealed. It is therefore totally premature to speak of any official French policy on the Internet. This is only a single judgment by a single judge in a local correctional court.
I actually see a pattern here, too!:-) As you know, members of parliament are prohibited by the constitution (article 40) to increase the financiary burden of the state. This means that they cannot vote a law providing funding for developers.
I suggest that we lobby the government so that they provide funding for the free software projects that make software used in government administrations, universities and schools. That actually would help.
Incidentally, someone was mentioning the bizarre French laws on encryption. These laws have been repealed a year or so ago: by that same (socialist) government which is now proposing this bill.
More precisely, the (socialist) government issued regulations (decrees 99-199 and 99-200) superseding the former regulations. Most notably, these new regulations say that people can use freely 128-bit encryption as long as the software has been declared. The user does not need to declare the software; it is sufficient that somebody has declared the availability of the software to the authorities. For instance, IN2P3 (a national research center on particle physics) modified SSH and made SSF (limiting the lenght of the private key to 128 bits) and declared it. Now just anybody can download it (source code available) and use it fully legally without further hassle.
A key length of 128-bit is supposed to be sure against attacks by corporations and governments for a certain number of years. The French government was nevertheless forced to set a limit since simply removing any limit would have been... illegal. The decree setting limits is actually a supplement to a law voted by parliament; this law stipulated that a limit should be set by the executive branch. The executive branch could not legally put no limit on keylength, since this would void the law of its substance; such a decree would be open to litigation and likely to be cancelled by the judiciary.
The government said at the time that they were going to propose a law (to be voted by parliament) removing the last restrictions. However, this has not taken place; reasons may be the relative lack of interest of the public in the matter and the general overload of Parliament (greatly made worse, I must say, by the silly campaign from the right wing against the domestic partnership law).
I suggest that we lobby a bit on this issue.
Note: in France, the socialist party is more or less like the US democratic party (a bit further to the left). They have little to do with the so-called "socialist republics".
What you are talking of would be really interesting to discuss if you had some hard, real facts to rely on. No, I do not think that your site is informative. It is a mixture of ramblings on elections results, quotes from legal texts whose status (proposed? voted? pending to be signed into law by the President) is not even clearly stated, and comments whose pertinence is not proved. In short, this site is very much akin to fringe political propaganda (say, communist leaflets): it surely alludes to something true, but is not convincing.
As far as I know, theoretically, nowadays Web sites are considered by law as akin to the written press. A paper publication (say, a magazine or daily newspaper) has to have a "director of publication" and to be declared to the authorities. The basic idea is to have a clear liability trace in case of libel or other publications prohibited by law (such as a call to murder or similar things).
However, in the case of WWW sites, this becomes very unwieldy and is not enforced: people that open a WWW page do not declare themselves as a proper publication. Therefore, some people in parliament found it a good idea to replace these requirements by something more modern. Of course, this attempt was a bit misguided, and surely the law will be repealed and/or amended a lot.
Apparently, they wish users to register with their real name to their ISP. That way, if a user posts, say, a public call to murder black people on his or her WWW site, the judiciary has a clearly defined person to prosecute. Of course, the lawmakers forgot that anyway users could simply ftp such contents to off-shore sites; perhaps showing them how the WWW actually works could make them a little more in touch with what is technically possible.
Members of parliament propose dozens of ill-designed laws each year. I think you overreacted. Posting a comment such as your on a site like Slashdot, where most of the audience is not too knowledgeable about European issues and is prone to knee-jerk libertarian comments, was irresponsible and useless. You had better collect actual facts and make a WWW site that reminds less of the anarchist propaganda leaflets dirty young men give to passers-by outside of universities!:-)
> Oh, wai, france have minitel, they don't use the > internet.
That's surely the reason why all French ministries have web sites, most of which with translations in several languages. I can't say as much of the US or British governments.
> There would be only a minor impact. Probably > this is to reduce the number of people using > internet in favor of minitel.
Bummer. Internet traffic is driving telcos high, would you think they'd kill the hen that lays golden eggs? The government has shared in France Telecom and gets dividends!
A personne morale is a legal entity, as opposed to a personne physique (human being), that nevertheless enjoys some of the same powers and rights, such as suing in courts, opening bank accounts and owning goods or real estate. Corporations, non-profit associations and similar entities are personnes morales
> Also most European countries are the size of > American STATES. France is the size of Texas. > Shouldn't they be capable of > moving faster on things than the US?
A more meaningful comparison would be on respective populations. France has around 60 million inhabitants, the US 270. Thus, changes in French law would amount to changes in something like one fourth of the US, which vastly exceeds a single US state.
I sure was right in saying "Perhaps I missed something".:-) The point is that StarOffice has a graphical install program that does not offer the option in some obvious fashion. I do not think that multi-user install is a kind of special feature only useable by expert system> administrators; it is in fact needed by any person maintaining a shared computer (for instance, a family machine).
As for the "You should have read the instruction first": StarDivision and Sun made a big fuss about making the Linux desktop more useable for end-users. I thought that precluded having to read the doc and combing it for obscure features before running the install program. I was wrong. I prefer compiling Gnome on Solaris: you just understand better how it's supposed to install itself.
Last time I checked, StarOffice could only install itself for a single user (perhaps I missed something). This is crazy: our machines are multi-user and I do not want each user to do a private installation of a package weighing 100MB.
You should perhaps consider what was done with the TGV in France. The TGV is an inter-city train. Its most used route is Paris Lyon (two biggest cities in France, 500 km apart). The TGV takes about 2 hours to do the trip. It goes into high speed (a little less than 300 km/h) in the countryside.
The idea is that going to the airport in Paris (CDG or ORL), flying and coming back from the airport in Lyon takes a long time because of the urban commute times, check-in delays and airport congestion. The train stations are located in the middle of the cities; taking the train is just a matter of reaching the station (taxi, metro, bus, car...), punching the ticket and sitting down.
The idea is therefore to use high-speed trains between cities several hundred miles away between which exists a lot a passenger traffic. Noise is not that a problem since high-speed is reached in the countryside; furthermore, I can tell you that TGVs are not that noisy (good aerodynamics).
Consider MODERN TECHNOLOGY
on
Flying Trains
·
· Score: 1
I agree with you that trains can be noisy... if they used technology that is outdated by 40 years, as it is the case in the US. I took Caltrain, in Silicon Valley, and from personal experience I can say that it is difficult to board when you carry luggage or you have difficulties in walking (high, steep stairs), it is slow, and it is quite noisy.
However, there are some countries whose technology in the area is much more advanced than the American one, although the obstacles to modern trains in the US are more political than technological.
As explained in this Scientific American article, it is possible to build trains that reach high speeds without making too much noise, using aerodynamics and a clever profile for the track. Small details, such as how to conduct power from the feeder cables to the locomotive, are important.
The TGV has commercial speed around 300 km/h (180 mph). It departs from a city center at slow speed, revs up to cross the suburbs, departs from tracks shared with other trains and goes into some special track (with smooth curves). It then revs up to cruise speed. The reverse steps are taken at the end. Cities that high-speed tracks do not reach are not lost: the train simply goes at the speed of normal trains (100 mph for instance). On the latest generation of TGVs, the ride is extremely smooth: you barely feel any vibration.
A run of a shortened stock TGV reached more than 500 km/h in an 1990 experiment. Engineers are working on increasing the commercial speed to 400 km/h.
The idea is that trains run from city center to city center; no more clogged highways to reach airports dozens of miles outside of the city! A businessman going from Paris to Lyon takes the train a few metro stations from his office and arrives 2 hours later near the offices of his business partners.
Actually, I got mixed up. It's not articles 25 and 26 but 35 and 36. Disclosing information filed on an individual may be subject to a fee, but the amount of this fee is regulated (I do not know the details). On the other hand, the information holder must update the information and give a copy of the updated information to the individual at no fee.
France passed similar legislation as the one you describe in 1978 (Loi n 78-17 du 6 janvier 1978 relative à l'informatique, aux fichiers et aux libertés, available from this government site).
At the time the law was mainly seen as a precaution against big brother behavior by the state. With hindsight, it seems that today the most serious intruders on privacy are rather businesses that establish databases on clients and pass them to each other.
A few features:
Article 2 says that no justice decision implying an appreciation on human behavior can be based on automated data processing giving a personality profile of the person.
Article 25 and 26 say that people on which information is gathered can
ask to check this information at no cost;
have it rectified in case of errors.
Furthermore, the law prohibits gathering information on political, philosophical or religious opinions, as well as on race (with obvious exceptions for churches or political parties and the like, who, by definition, must collect respectively religious and political information).
You are right in saying that having to package the same program n times because there exist n Linux distributions is annoying.
However I disagree with your comparison with the Unix situations. This comparison has been agressively fed to the press by Microsoft, although it is vastly inaccurate:
Unix vendors (such as Sun, HP) sold proprietary operating systems running on incompatible hardware platforms. While paying lip service to API compatibility, they kept APIs very much incompatible with each other. Compiling a package on several of these systems meant maintaining a database of various weirdnesses.
Linux vendors sell the same free operating system on the same platforms. They basically sell a copy of the same free software. APIs are mostly identical. Differences between distributions as for software programmers are minimal, and efforts are being made to lessen them (for instance, for configuration files).
[1. "This report, drawn up by the Strategic Affairs Delegation (DAS), the intelligence arm of the French Defence Ministry". Hmm. Isn't the defense intelligence agency called the DRM (Direction du Renseignement Militaire)?]
2. There have been occasionnal concerns in the French political world that reliance on foreign (read here: american) software could pose a security problem, since it can potentially contain backdoors left for US intelligence to spy on officials and industries.
There have already been attempts by the United States to influence the politics of France, as shown in this document from the US Senate. I guess American taxpayers won't be happy to learn that their tax money was used to fund an "union" of posh French students whose main activity is to put political stickers on just about every flat surface they can.
With this precedent in mind, it is therefore not sheer paranoia to think that US intelligence still tries to influence the politics of allied democratic governments, including France.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be interested if some knowledgeable person would explain here the current state of development of IA-64 compilers (gcc in particular).
IA-64 is peculiar in that respect, not so because it is 64-bit (though this is likely to hurt code that assumes 32-bit int's and pointers... and that's still quite a bit, look at the difficulties with Linux on Alpha). As decribed in Intel's documentation, IA-64 is a VLIW (Very Large Instruction Word) architecture where the burden of superscalar pipelining (deciding what assembler instructions can be executed in parallel) lies on the compiler. Let us take a simple example: where you are executing
imull %edx, %eax
addl $4, %eax the two instructions cannot be scheduled on two parallel pipelines since eax in the second depends on the output of the first. Advanced design allow the CPU to "swap" certain instructions (out-of-order execution).
From a hardware design point of view, the IA-64 design makes sense: out-of-order scheduling instructions over multiple pipelines in hardware is complicated. For this reason, IA-64 allows the assembly code to specify "bundles" of instructions that can be executed in parallel. The burden is then shifted to the compiler.
Such a design allows scheduling optimizations far further than the ordinary peephole optimizations (i.e. very local tricks). For instance, in numeric code like this:
x[i][j]=expression1;
x[j][k]=expression2;
the compiler could schedule expression1 and expression2 in parallel, if they are sufficiently simple. Of course, for this to respect the semantics of the program, (i,j) must never be equal to (j,k). Answering such questions mechanically is impossible in general (Rice's theorem, reduction to the Turing machine halting problem). However, there are analysis techniques that can give the right result in most cases (such techniques can also be used to check whether two pointers never point to the same variable, or whether some array bound checks are useless) (an active research topic; see some of the research in the area).
I would like to know the current state of the art of industrial-grade compilers with respect to this automatic local parallelization techniques.
Ok, let me give you a few precisions. The PPP setting I was alluding to was a bit tricky. The PPP server I was using did not handle LCP (some feature of PPP) well. The Mac would complain and disconnect after 5 seconds of connection. Of course, the dialog box that was displayed did not display how to turn the non-working feature off. I browsed carefully through the PPP settings, and I found something where the acronym LCP did not appear, but I felt it sounded like some kind of periodic line check. Ok. Now tell me a normal user would find it...
A silly answer is "answers to such questions can be found on the 'Net". Come on, if I was trying to set up PPP, then maybe it meant I could only get 'Net access until after setting it up! "Documentation is on the 'Net" is not a proper answer: not everybody has a fast enough 'Net connection to be able to look for such information in a timely manner.
As for the printer problem, I had only one minute to help somebody. The program he used did not offer "Save to file" in its print dialogs. I tried to find a system setup to create a fake printer saving to file, I did not find it. I do not claim it was absent. I just think the system was not very helpful in helping me find it. Maybe it's possible to find it after spending half an hour looking in menus and dialogs; this is I think inadequate for a platform whose selling argument is that it caters for the needs of the most computer-challenged people.
Of course, I was thinking of ZIP disks. I have actually read TIFF files from a Mac disks using the HFS driver in Linux. As far as I remember, it associates to each Mac file its data and resource fork as two different files (but I was only interested in data forks, so I did not pay attention to the rest). Read the Linux kernel documentation for details.
A general pattern in those tests is that Linux is slower than Windows. We all know that Windows 95 (98 or Millenium) has little protection: most applications can tweak global system properties, whereas Linux puts severe restrictions on what applications can do (a bit less so when run as root).
I would like to know whether the performance is hit because of some of the protection stuff, for instance for transfers to video RAM (even with mmap, it's not necessarily easy on Linux because the system has to work a lot getting DMA to work around virtual memory). If there are knowledgeable people around here...
(Yes, that's a good question: how does Linux handle DMA transfers from userland to PCI busmaster devices? Temporary buffers?)
The difference is that no Linux vendor makes a distribution where the email client executes arbitrary code embedded in attachments.
No, as far as I know PC Linux cannot read Mac
floppies since Mac floppies are written with
a low-level format that is peculiar to the
Mac. However, Linux can read, on any platform,
Mac ZIPs.
I have been programming for the last 10 years. I am pursuing a PhD in computer science. I have installed Linux networks, and even have coded some Linux device drivers. I can thus be called fairly familiar with computers.
Yet I think that systems are inadequate for the user:It is a pity that with the power of current computers, nobody is able to make a system that is truly user-friendly; that is, that does what the user wants instead of getting him to do stuff in obscure command lines described in even more obscure documentation (Linux) or pissing him off with silly restrictions and railroaded choices (Windows).
I have seen the Eazel presentation at Guadec. I have hopes that it will be a bit more like what I'd like. Yet I am a bit afraid that it is going to be the next step of evolution of the current interfaces: more eye candy and gizmos, but little actual change.
The situation is a bit complex: freedom of speech is a constitutional right, and the 1881 law on the Press (revised many times since) states so. However, restrictions of this freedom have been inserted into this law; to the old prohibition of public advocacy to commit crimes and felonies was added a prohibition on the advocacy of racial hatred and of putting into doubt the reality of the nazi crimes.
Apparently, the jurisprudence considers nazi emblems and books such as Mein Kampf or the Protocols of the Sages of Zion to be banned antisemitic propaganda. It is nevertheless possible to trade such goods provided they are used as historic documentation; this is a very murky area and I do not know the exact criteria applied.
In Germany, where for obvious reason people are wary of anything reminding of nazism, such restrictions are even more stringent.
As for the legal ground of ordering Yahoo US to comply, I think it is quite weak, but I am not a lawyer. I would wait until the legal matters are sorted out (appeals, maybe going before the supreme court).
As for the social opinion of the people here, I think the French people are a bit too prone on legislating on what should be or not be done (mind, after all, many US states legislate on what sex positions are legal between consenting adults). There are reasons for this: there are every so often racist or antisemitic attacks, many old people suffered during WWII, and there is still the remembrance of the traitors of the Vichy government.
I read the press trying to get a few hard facts on the said court ruling. All I got is from imprecise sources such as newspapers, so take it with a grain of salt.
- The ruling is a summary injunction (référé), which means that it has been issued by a single judge.
- The matter has not yet been appealed to a court of appeal. We should probably wait until such things get appealed to the supreme court (cour de cassation) before we conclude that French jurisprudence has been defined with respect to sites abroad selling forbidden material. Unfortunately, with the current overload of the supreme court, it should take several years.
- As with the Georgia Tech case, the lawsuit was not brought by the government but by private nonprofit associations, LICRA (International League against Racism and Antisemitism) and UEJF (Union of Jewish Students of France). Therefore it is wrong to conclude anything from this case about the position of either the president, the cabinet, the national assembly or the senate. They apparently ask for reparations in accordance with article 48.2 of the (revised) law on the Press of 1981 which allows a nonprofit association whose statutory goals include fighting racism to ask for reparations even though the association is no direct victim.
- Apparently, the motive of the lawsuit is article 24 of the same law, which prohibits inciting discrimination, hatred or violence against a person or a group of persons because of their origin or their belonging or non-belonging to an ethnic group, a nation or a determined religion (punishable by one year of prison and/or a 300,000 FRF fine, not precluding the civil damages). Means of such incitation to hatred include drawings or emblems (article 23).
So we have two different issues here:Furthermore, as far as I know, are exempt from the ban prints of such items for education or scholarly research. I do not know where this comes from legally. Surely indeed, some public libraries, including the National Library of France have printouts of Mein Kampf available for readers!
I therefore think the Slashdot community should wait and see further progress in the case; jumping to conclusions is clearly overreacting.
Long distance telecommunications have been deregulated for quite a long time in France, and there are quite a few companies providing such services.
Furthermore, you seem to confuse the opinion of a single judge in a lower court and the opinion of the legislative body or the cabinet of ministers. For instance, when I talk about the United States, I take care of not presenting the opinion of, say, governor Bush of Texas as "the will of the United States".
There is a translation problem here. In French, gouvernement means the cabinet of ministers at the head of the executive branch, which in American gets translated as the administration (whereas in French, the administration is the set of government agencies).
The executive has apparently nothing to do with this case. As it appears from the press, two private plaintiffs, noprofit associations, sued Yahoo on grounds of a restriction of the freedom of the press law that prohibits incitation to racial hatred. A judge issued an injunction against Yahoo. The matter has not been fully judged yet, neither appealed. It is therefore totally premature to speak of any official French policy on the Internet. This is only a single judgment by a single judge in a local correctional court.
I actually see a pattern here, too! :-) As you know, members of parliament are prohibited by the constitution (article 40) to increase the financiary burden of the state. This means that they cannot vote a law providing funding for developers.
I suggest that we lobby the government so that they provide funding for the free software projects that make software used in government administrations, universities and schools. That actually would help.
More precisely, the (socialist) government issued regulations (decrees 99-199 and 99-200) superseding the former regulations. Most notably, these new regulations say that people can use freely 128-bit encryption as long as the software has been declared. The user does not need to declare the software; it is sufficient that somebody has declared the availability of the software to the authorities. For instance, IN2P3 (a national research center on particle physics) modified SSH and made SSF (limiting the lenght of the private key to 128 bits) and declared it. Now just anybody can download it (source code available) and use it fully legally without further hassle.
A key length of 128-bit is supposed to be sure against attacks by corporations and governments for a certain number of years. The French government was nevertheless forced to set a limit since simply removing any limit would have been... illegal. The decree setting limits is actually a supplement to a law voted by parliament; this law stipulated that a limit should be set by the executive branch. The executive branch could not legally put no limit on keylength, since this would void the law of its substance; such a decree would be open to litigation and likely to be cancelled by the judiciary.
The government said at the time that they were going to propose a law (to be voted by parliament) removing the last restrictions. However, this has not taken place; reasons may be the relative lack of interest of the public in the matter and the general overload of Parliament (greatly made worse, I must say, by the silly campaign from the right wing against the domestic partnership law).
I suggest that we lobby a bit on this issue.
Note: in France, the socialist party is more or less like the US democratic party (a bit further to the left). They have little to do with the so-called "socialist republics".
What you are talking of would be really interesting to discuss if you had some hard, real facts to rely on. No, I do not think that your site is informative. It is a mixture of ramblings on elections results, quotes from legal texts whose status (proposed? voted? pending to be signed into law by the President) is not even clearly stated, and comments whose pertinence is not proved. In short, this site is very much akin to fringe political propaganda (say, communist leaflets): it surely alludes to something true, but is not convincing.
As far as I know, theoretically, nowadays Web sites are considered by law as akin to the written press. A paper publication (say, a magazine or daily newspaper) has to have a "director of publication" and to be declared to the authorities. The basic idea is to have a clear liability trace in case of libel or other publications prohibited by law (such as a call to murder or similar things).
However, in the case of WWW sites, this becomes very unwieldy and is not enforced: people that open a WWW page do not declare themselves as a proper publication. Therefore, some people in parliament found it a good idea to replace these requirements by something more modern. Of course, this attempt was a bit misguided, and surely the law will be repealed and/or amended a lot.
Apparently, they wish users to register with their real name to their ISP. That way, if a user posts, say, a public call to murder black people on his or her WWW site, the judiciary has a clearly defined person to prosecute. Of course, the lawmakers forgot that anyway users could simply ftp such contents to off-shore sites; perhaps showing them how the WWW actually works could make them a little more in touch with what is technically possible.
Members of parliament propose dozens of ill-designed laws each year. I think you overreacted. Posting a comment such as your on a site like Slashdot, where most of the audience is not too knowledgeable about European issues and is prone to knee-jerk libertarian comments, was irresponsible and useless. You had better collect actual facts and make a WWW site that reminds less of the anarchist propaganda leaflets dirty young men give to passers-by outside of universities! :-)
> Oh, wai, france have minitel, they don't use the > internet.
That's surely the reason why all French ministries have web sites, most of which with translations in several languages. I can't say as much of the US or British governments.
> There would be only a minor impact. Probably
> this is to reduce the number of people using
> internet in favor of minitel.
Bummer. Internet traffic is driving telcos high,
would you think they'd kill the hen that lays
golden eggs? The government has shared in France
Telecom and gets dividends!
A personne morale is a legal entity, as opposed to a personne physique (human being), that nevertheless enjoys some of the same powers and rights, such as suing in courts, opening bank accounts and owning goods or real estate. Corporations, non-profit associations and similar entities are personnes morales
> Also most European countries are the size of
> American STATES. France is the size of Texas.
> Shouldn't they be capable of
> moving faster on things than the US?
A more meaningful comparison would be on respective populations. France has around 60 million inhabitants, the US 270. Thus, changes in French law would amount to changes in something like one fourth of the US, which vastly exceeds a single US state.
I sure was right in saying "Perhaps I missed something". :-) The point is that StarOffice has a graphical install program that does not offer the option in some obvious fashion. I do not think that multi-user install is a kind of special feature only useable by expert system> administrators; it is in fact needed by any person maintaining a shared computer (for instance, a family machine).
As for the "You should have read the instruction first": StarDivision and Sun made a big fuss about making the Linux desktop more useable for end-users. I thought that precluded having to read the doc and combing it for obscure features before running the install program. I was wrong. I prefer compiling Gnome on Solaris: you just understand better how it's supposed to install itself.
Last time I checked, StarOffice could only install itself for a single user (perhaps I missed something). This is crazy: our machines are multi-user and I do not want each user to do a private installation of a package weighing 100MB.
Have they fixed that problem?
You should perhaps consider what was done with the TGV in France. The TGV is an inter-city train. Its most used route is Paris Lyon (two biggest cities in France, 500 km apart). The TGV takes about 2 hours to do the trip. It goes into high speed (a little less than 300 km/h) in the countryside.
The idea is that going to the airport in Paris (CDG or ORL), flying and coming back from the airport in Lyon takes a long time because of the urban commute times, check-in delays and airport congestion. The train stations are located in the middle of the cities; taking the train is just a matter of reaching the station (taxi, metro, bus, car...), punching the ticket and sitting down.
The idea is therefore to use high-speed trains between cities several hundred miles away between which exists a lot a passenger traffic. Noise is not that a problem since high-speed is reached in the countryside; furthermore, I can tell you that TGVs are not that noisy (good aerodynamics).
I agree with you that trains can be noisy... if they used technology that is outdated by 40 years, as it is the case in the US. I took Caltrain, in Silicon Valley, and from personal experience I can say that it is difficult to board when you carry luggage or you have difficulties in walking (high, steep stairs), it is slow, and it is quite noisy.
However, there are some countries whose technology in the area is much more advanced than the American one, although the obstacles to modern trains in the US are more political than technological.
As explained in this Scientific American article, it is possible to build trains that reach high speeds without making too much noise, using aerodynamics and a clever profile for the track. Small details, such as how to conduct power from the feeder cables to the locomotive, are important.
The TGV has commercial speed around 300 km/h (180 mph). It departs from a city center at slow speed, revs up to cross the suburbs, departs from tracks shared with other trains and goes into some special track (with smooth curves). It then revs up to cruise speed. The reverse steps are taken at the end. Cities that high-speed tracks do not reach are not lost: the train simply goes at the speed of normal trains (100 mph for instance). On the latest generation of TGVs, the ride is extremely smooth: you barely feel any vibration.
A run of a shortened stock TGV reached more than 500 km/h in an 1990 experiment. Engineers are working on increasing the commercial speed to 400 km/h.
The idea is that trains run from city center to city center; no more clogged highways to reach airports dozens of miles outside of the city! A businessman going from Paris to Lyon takes the train a few metro stations from his office and arrives 2 hours later near the offices of his business partners.
Actually, I got mixed up. It's not articles 25 and 26 but 35 and 36. Disclosing information filed on an individual may be subject to a fee, but the amount of this fee is regulated (I do not know the details). On the other hand, the information holder must update the information and give a copy of the updated information to the individual at no fee.
France passed similar legislation as the one you describe in 1978 (Loi n 78-17 du 6 janvier 1978 relative à l'informatique, aux fichiers et aux libertés, available from this government site).
At the time the law was mainly seen as a precaution against big brother behavior by the state. With hindsight, it seems that today the most serious intruders on privacy are rather businesses that establish databases on clients and pass them to each other.
A few features:Article 2 says that no justice decision implying an appreciation on human behavior can be based on automated data processing giving a personality profile of the person.
Article 25 and 26 say that people on which information is gathered can
Furthermore, the law prohibits gathering information on political, philosophical or religious opinions, as well as on race (with obvious exceptions for churches or political parties and the like, who, by definition, must collect respectively religious and political information).
You are right in saying that having to package the same program n times because there exist n Linux distributions is annoying.
However I disagree with your comparison with the Unix situations. This comparison has been agressively fed to the press by Microsoft, although it is vastly inaccurate:
2. There have been occasionnal concerns in the French political world that reliance on foreign (read here: american) software could pose a security problem, since it can potentially contain backdoors left for US intelligence to spy on officials and industries.
There have already been attempts by the United States to influence the politics of France, as shown in this document from the US Senate. I guess American taxpayers won't be happy to learn that their tax money was used to fund an "union" of posh French students whose main activity is to put political stickers on just about every flat surface they can.
With this precedent in mind, it is therefore not sheer paranoia to think that US intelligence still tries to influence the politics of allied democratic governments, including France.