It's kinda like what happened in Europe with gas prices in fact... Here, we have very high taxes on gas and this forced people to buy very efficient cars (and in return forced the car makers to invest a lot in r&d toward efficiency).
My car does 60 mpg, and it's an average french car. When I was in the US I had a very inefficient car and the funny thing was that despite gas prices being much lover in the US I was spending as much on gas a month than I'm doing now in France for approximately the same commute distance.
The hardest part here is making sure poor people will be able to renew their old inefficient cars with brand new ones. In France the government did that through a program where you could get a fixed amount of money for any 10+ years old car whatever the condition of the car for any new car purchase. It worked very well.
And saying that a bigger car is more secure is total bullshit. Crash-tests proved that a long time ago.
If you could send information back through time (which is what the FA is all about) then there would be no need to physically travel back through time.
I don't think it's possible though, otherwise we would probably be getting messages from the future, wouldn't we?
Unfortunately for them, Microsoft's money doesn't buy a lot in France. Recently, the whole administration switched to Firefox and Thunderbird. It started with the state police (300000 computers if I remember correctly) and then continued with the rest of the state employees (I don't have the number but it's definitely a lot).
Basically, and from what I heard, the idea is to first swith the Windows softwares the administration uses to equivalent softwares that do exist on other OS the ultimate goal being to switch from Windows to Linux when all the applications are replaced. I guess the ODF switch is just another step in that direction.
Government websites and web services are already all built on open source software. I'm happy to hear that my government is spending less on windows licences and I do really hope that they'll make it and that it will be used as an example for other European countries.
Yeah, I guess it sounds a lot better to put it that way than to say "A 0.5% reduction in electricity usage". That's great, let's have every household buy 200 of those and we have a 100% reduction in energy usage !
Man, with 201 for every household we could even CREATE energy!
Will western companies continue to outsource to China if the country puts up too many obstacles to free communication?
Of course they will. There is too much money to be made in China and western companies will just buy a new domain name on the Chinese root system and make it link to their websites...
Y2K was NOT an hoax. It was a real problem and if nothing really bad happened on 1st of January 2000, it is because there was all this 'hype' around it and thus many problems were fixed in the months preceding.
The last US presidential elections were a joke. At least that's how many people saw it in my country.
There were so many 'problems' with e-voting (no paper trails, machines starting with 5000 votes already in memory, malfunctions, etc) that it was not even funny.
In my country, if there were ANY doubt, even on ONE ballot, we would restart the whole electing process, no questions asked.
I don't understand why you americans didn't do anything when all this 'bugs' appeared...
You do realize, don't you, that France is a nuclear power[0], and sold[1] to Iraq 12.5kg of 93% U-235 and "research reactor". ... and they used it to build a ton of WMDs that we know they are hiding. We know where the WMDs are, they are near Bagdad, North, South, West and East of Bagdad.
We are addicted to oil. Everyone in the developed world is addicted to oil. We are not going to stop. We used to be addicted to wood and then we switched to coal because it was more efficient. We used to be addicted to coal and then we switched to oil because it was more efficient.
In the 70s, some countries even switched to nuclear energy because it was then more efficient than oil (oil crisis).
The same will happen in the future, oil prices are going to go up and then other energy sources will become more efficient than oil.
Trust me, there will be a lot of oil remaining in the fields when we'll switch.
If you look around it's actually already happening. The PM of my country (France) recently said that we are already in the post-oil era.
There have been a lot of investments in renewables recently. Thanks to tax incentives people are buying solar arrays and investing in wind energy massively (at least that's what I can see in my country).
We even have a lot of solutions for most petro-chemicals products. It's just too expensive today, but the way I see it it'll be soon much less expensive than oil.
I heard yesterday that in Brazil a lot of cars were now running on alcohol (some say 25% of the cars, others 60%, I don't know the real number but it's definitely huge). It seems that in this country, 80% of the cars that were sold in 2005 were alcohol ready.
The Kyoto treaty, whatever you might think of it, already triggered a lot of reactions. Some countries want to lead the field of renewable energies because they know that there is going to be a lot of money in there soon.
The technology is already there, it's now only a matter of money/time.
Your country, like any other one in the world, has the choice to follow this trend or to stick to a dying oil economy. It seems mine picked the good choice a long time ago.
I can't be happier than when I see the oil prices going up.
I'm working in a company that provides that very service.
We catch NXDOMAIN answers on any domain and then try to redirect the user to the website he was looking for (mainly through a simple typo correction algorithm).
We loaded a database with 60% real domain names and 40% sponsored links (well, you know, we have got to make money from this) and plugged our system within the network of 2 small ISPs in France (our system works at the DNS level through a bind patch).
Looking at this slashdot story, I was wondering how long it would be until somebody else would think about it.
Researchers have estimated that temperatures inside the imploding bubbles reach 10 million degrees Celsius and pressures comparable to 1,000 million earth atmospheres at sea level.
Well, actually I'm concerned with the fact that this product is going to be distributed for free and will probably end up by being integrated in Windows.
I'm not sure it would be very good for what you call 'competition'.
Text of the NYT article. Mod this one up, no karma whoring here.
From Apple, a Tiger to Put in Your Mac
IF anyone considers tomorrow a special day at all, it's probably because it's Friday, or because "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" movie opens, or because it's Uma Thurman's birthday.
But for one particular group of 25 million computer owners, April 29 is a much bigger deal. It's the day Apple releases Mac OS X 10.4, nicknamed Tiger - the latest version of the software suite that makes up the Macintosh operating system.
Ordinarily, of course, reading about operating systems is about as much fun as a seminar on tax policy. Very few people line up at 5 a.m. to be the first to upgrade the software in their microwaves, cellphones or cars.
But Mac OS X has recently become interesting even to people outside the Cult of Macintosh. The more Microsoft Windows is bogged down by viruses, spyware and disruptive security updates, the more miserable life becomes - and the more the long-suffering Windows majority begins to investigate virus-free, spyware-free alternatives like Mac OS X.
One nice thing about Windows, though, is that Microsoft sics a new version on its customers only once every few years. (Windows XP, for example, made its debut in 2001. The next version is scheduled for 2006.) Apple has asked its faithful followers to upgrade Mac OS X about every year, at $130 a pop (or free with a new Mac). What could Tiger offer that could justify yet another expenditure?
Apple's Tiger Web site lists over 200 new features. Not all of them are, ahem, likely to set off a mass exodus to the Macintosh. Will anyone upgrade to Tiger because, for example, "you can easily find any glyph by typing its Unicode ID"?
Still, there are a few humdingers in that list. The most important is Spotlight, which is like Google for your hard drive. As you type into the Spotlight box in your menu bar, a tidy menu instantly drops down. It lists every file, folder, program, e-mail message, address book or calendar entry, photograph, PDF document and even font that contains what you typed, regardless of its name or folder location. This isn't just a fast Find command. It's an enhancement that's so deep, convenient and powerful, it threatens to reduce the 20-year-old Mac/Windows system of nested folders to irrelevance. Why burrow around in folders when you can open any file or program with a couple of keystrokes?
Out of the box, for example, tapping Command and the space bar highlights the Spotlight box. So if you hit Command-Space and type "Schw," the list shows every message Arnold Schwarzenegger sent to you by e-mail, every appointment you've got with him and, of course, his address book entry. It's all organized neatly by category; a quick click or keystroke opens the item you want.
You can also save a Spotlight search as a "smart folder," a self-updating folder that always contains stuff that matches certain criteria - for example, all documents created in the last week containing the phrase "wombat mating habits."
Unfortunately, Spotlight can't "see inside" many programs other than Apple's, although that will change as software companies upgrade their wares. For example, Spotlight can search the contents of Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, but doesn't yet see the messages in Microsoft's Entourage e-mail program.
The second most heavily hyped Tiger feature is called Dashboard. It's a constellation of gorgeous miniprograms that appear or disappear en masse when you touch a selected key. They include real-time stock tickers, weather forecasts and airline flight information, along with a calculator, dictionary, Yellow Pages and other doodads. They're handy enough, and they appear with a dazzling rippling effect that turns your screen into the surface of a Zen pond. But Dashboard isn't a Tiger exclusive; the shareware program Konfabulator, available for Windows and older Mac OS versions, does pretty much the same thing.
The biggest problem with Michel Rocard is that he is too intelligent.
Usually, when he speaks, nobody understand him and that's why he didn't make it very high in politics.
But I agree that he definitely is one of the last honest politicians.
He has been against software patents since the very beginning partly because he is probably the only one who really understands what they are all about and partly because money can't buy him.
My Peugeot HDi (120 HP) does more than 600 miles (1000 kms) with a tank of 13 US Gal. That's 46 mpg. It's an average car, some of our cars can do much more than 60 mpg.
I use Diesel which is 0.99 euros for a liter today. That's 3.75 euros for a gallon (4.83 US Dollar).
You pay gas 2.30 US Dollar on average in the US today. So gas cost 2.1 times more than in the US.
If your average car in North America can do 22 mpg (46/2.1) then I would say we pay a little more for gas. But it's hardly a huge difference so taxation is not a bad idea after all because overall we consume much less oil and are then much more independent in term of foreign oil than you are (Saudi Arabia owns 8% of the US alone).
And also, note that the money collected through taxation goes to social services which means it's a win-win scenario here as my gas tax indirectly pays for my complete health-care coverage.
With the oil prices rising it is actually going to be an excellent idea (cause in some europeans countries, if oil prices go up the taxes go down to compensate we call that 'floating petroleum taxes').
If you tax gasoline more, you increase the burden on everyone, including poor people that cannot afford to buy a new gas-efficient car.
Well, this is actually a little more complicated than that.
If you increase taxation, the people will ask for more efficient cars. This will increase the demand of such vehicles and the vehicle manufacturers will start to do a lot of R&D to improve the efficiency of their cars.
20 years later you have a country with efficient cars and highly priced gas.
That's what happened in most European countries and that's why europeans cars are more efficients than those in North America.
Slashdot Mirror
It's kinda like what happened in Europe with gas prices in fact... Here, we have very high taxes on gas and this forced people to buy very efficient cars (and in return forced the car makers to invest a lot in r&d toward efficiency).
My car does 60 mpg, and it's an average french car. When I was in the US I had a very inefficient car and the funny thing was that despite gas prices being much lover in the US I was spending as much on gas a month than I'm doing now in France for approximately the same commute distance.
The hardest part here is making sure poor people will be able to renew their old inefficient cars with brand new ones. In France the government did that through a program where you could get a fixed amount of money for any 10+ years old car whatever the condition of the car for any new car purchase. It worked very well.
And saying that a bigger car is more secure is total bullshit. Crash-tests proved that a long time ago.
In short, if it gets that bad, the weapons will show.
So why would you need the 2nd amendment in the first place?
If you could send information back through time (which is what the FA is all about) then there would be no need to physically travel back through time.
I don't think it's possible though, otherwise we would probably be getting messages from the future, wouldn't we?
[HEAD EXPLODES]
Unfortunately for them, Microsoft's money doesn't buy a lot in France. Recently, the whole administration switched to Firefox and Thunderbird. It started with the state police (300000 computers if I remember correctly) and then continued with the rest of the state employees (I don't have the number but it's definitely a lot).
Basically, and from what I heard, the idea is to first swith the Windows softwares the administration uses to equivalent softwares that do exist on other OS the ultimate goal being to switch from Windows to Linux when all the applications are replaced. I guess the ODF switch is just another step in that direction.
Government websites and web services are already all built on open source software. I'm happy to hear that my government is spending less on windows licences and I do really hope that they'll make it and that it will be used as an example for other European countries.
Yeah, I guess it sounds a lot better to put it that way than to say "A 0.5% reduction in electricity usage".
That's great, let's have every household buy 200 of those and we have a 100% reduction in energy usage !
Man, with 201 for every household we could even CREATE energy!
I absolutely HAVE TO patent this idea...
Oh wait...
No WMDs, we told you so.
- The French.
Will western companies continue to outsource to China if the country puts up too many obstacles to free communication?
Of course they will. There is too much money to be made in China and western companies will just buy a new domain name on the Chinese root system and make it link to their websites...
"They think it's like Y2K."
Y2K was NOT an hoax. It was a real problem and if nothing really bad happened on 1st of January 2000, it is because there was all this 'hype' around it and thus many problems were fixed in the months preceding.
Am I the only who finds the idea that a modification of only 100 K of the sun surface temperature means a 4 K change on earth frightening?
Yah, but somehow I got modded down to Troll!
The last US presidential elections were a joke. At least that's how many people saw it in my country.
There were so many 'problems' with e-voting (no paper trails, machines starting with 5000 votes already in memory, malfunctions, etc) that it was not even funny.
In my country, if there were ANY doubt, even on ONE ballot, we would restart the whole electing process, no questions asked.
I don't understand why you americans didn't do anything when all this 'bugs' appeared...
You do realize, don't you, that France is a nuclear power[0], and sold[1] to Iraq 12.5kg of 93% U-235 and "research reactor".
... and they used it to build a ton of WMDs that we know they are hiding. We know where the WMDs are, they are near Bagdad, North, South, West and East of Bagdad.
You americans are soooooooooo funny.
We are addicted to oil. Everyone in the developed world is addicted to oil. We are not going to stop.
We used to be addicted to wood and then we switched to coal because it was more efficient. We used to be addicted to coal and then we switched to oil because it was more efficient.
In the 70s, some countries even switched to nuclear energy because it was then more efficient than oil (oil crisis).
The same will happen in the future, oil prices are going to go up and then other energy sources will become more efficient than oil.
Trust me, there will be a lot of oil remaining in the fields when we'll switch.
If you look around it's actually already happening. The PM of my country (France) recently said that we are already in the post-oil era.
There have been a lot of investments in renewables recently. Thanks to tax incentives people are buying solar arrays and investing in wind energy massively (at least that's what I can see in my country).
We even have a lot of solutions for most petro-chemicals products. It's just too expensive today, but the way I see it it'll be soon much less expensive than oil.
I heard yesterday that in Brazil a lot of cars were now running on alcohol (some say 25% of the cars, others 60%, I don't know the real number but it's definitely huge). It seems that in this country, 80% of the cars that were sold in 2005 were alcohol ready.
The Kyoto treaty, whatever you might think of it, already triggered a lot of reactions. Some countries want to lead the field of renewable energies because they know that there is going to be a lot of money in there soon.
The technology is already there, it's now only a matter of money/time.
Your country, like any other one in the world, has the choice to follow this trend or to stick to a dying oil economy. It seems mine picked the good choice a long time ago.
I can't be happier than when I see the oil prices going up.
3 failures, right, but how many successes?
How interesting...
I'm working in a company that provides that very service.
We catch NXDOMAIN answers on any domain and then try to redirect the user to the website he was looking for (mainly through a simple typo correction algorithm).
We loaded a database with 60% real domain names and 40% sponsored links (well, you know, we have got to make money from this) and plugged our system within the network of 2 small ISPs in France (our system works at the DNS level through a bind patch).
Looking at this slashdot story, I was wondering how long it would be until somebody else would think about it.
Seems like you just won.
RTFA:
Researchers have estimated that temperatures inside the imploding bubbles reach 10 million degrees Celsius and pressures comparable to 1,000 million earth atmospheres at sea level.
This is NOT cold fusion, this is sonofusion.
Well, it looks like my computer is not powerful enough to print Longhorn screenshots.
Saying that this OS will require lot of computing power is clearly an understatment.
Well, actually I'm concerned with the fact that this product is going to be distributed for free and will probably end up by being integrated in Windows.
I'm not sure it would be very good for what you call 'competition'.
But maybe that's just me...
I run virus checkers, adware checking...am behind a hardware router/firewall. Basically the same thing I would be running on OSX also.
Once again, that's part of the point. I don't run any of these on my iBook and have had no problem so far. I just don't need any of these.
The fact that you HAVE TO run these software to use you computer correctly is a clear indication that your OS is flawed.
Text of the NYT article. Mod this one up, no karma whoring here.
From Apple, a Tiger to Put in Your Mac
IF anyone considers tomorrow a special day at all, it's probably because it's Friday, or because "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" movie opens, or because it's Uma Thurman's birthday.
But for one particular group of 25 million computer owners, April 29 is a much bigger deal. It's the day Apple releases Mac OS X 10.4, nicknamed Tiger - the latest version of the software suite that makes up the Macintosh operating system.
Ordinarily, of course, reading about operating systems is about as much fun as a seminar on tax policy. Very few people line up at 5 a.m. to be the first to upgrade the software in their microwaves, cellphones or cars.
But Mac OS X has recently become interesting even to people outside the Cult of Macintosh. The more Microsoft Windows is bogged down by viruses, spyware and disruptive security updates, the more miserable life becomes - and the more the long-suffering Windows majority begins to investigate virus-free, spyware-free alternatives like Mac OS X.
One nice thing about Windows, though, is that Microsoft sics a new version on its customers only once every few years. (Windows XP, for example, made its debut in 2001. The next version is scheduled for 2006.) Apple has asked its faithful followers to upgrade Mac OS X about every year, at $130 a pop (or free with a new Mac). What could Tiger offer that could justify yet another expenditure?
Apple's Tiger Web site lists over 200 new features. Not all of them are, ahem, likely to set off a mass exodus to the Macintosh. Will anyone upgrade to Tiger because, for example, "you can easily find any glyph by typing its Unicode ID"?
Still, there are a few humdingers in that list. The most important is Spotlight, which is like Google for your hard drive. As you type into the Spotlight box in your menu bar, a tidy menu instantly drops down. It lists every file, folder, program, e-mail message, address book or calendar entry, photograph, PDF document and even font that contains what you typed, regardless of its name or folder location. This isn't just a fast Find command. It's an enhancement that's so deep, convenient and powerful, it threatens to reduce the 20-year-old Mac/Windows system of nested folders to irrelevance. Why burrow around in folders when you can open any file or program with a couple of keystrokes?
Out of the box, for example, tapping Command and the space bar highlights the Spotlight box. So if you hit Command-Space and type "Schw," the list shows every message Arnold Schwarzenegger sent to you by e-mail, every appointment you've got with him and, of course, his address book entry. It's all organized neatly by category; a quick click or keystroke opens the item you want.
You can also save a Spotlight search as a "smart folder," a self-updating folder that always contains stuff that matches certain criteria - for example, all documents created in the last week containing the phrase "wombat mating habits."
Unfortunately, Spotlight can't "see inside" many programs other than Apple's, although that will change as software companies upgrade their wares. For example, Spotlight can search the contents of Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, but doesn't yet see the messages in Microsoft's Entourage e-mail program.
The second most heavily hyped Tiger feature is called Dashboard. It's a constellation of gorgeous miniprograms that appear or disappear en masse when you touch a selected key. They include real-time stock tickers, weather forecasts and airline flight information, along with a calculator, dictionary, Yellow Pages and other doodads. They're handy enough, and they appear with a dazzling rippling effect that turns your screen into the surface of a Zen pond. But Dashboard isn't a Tiger exclusive; the shareware program Konfabulator, available for Windows and older Mac OS versions, does pretty much the same thing.
On the other hand, som
The biggest problem with Michel Rocard is that he is too intelligent.
Usually, when he speaks, nobody understand him and that's why he didn't make it very high in politics.
But I agree that he definitely is one of the last honest politicians.
He has been against software patents since the very beginning partly because he is probably the only one who really understands what they are all about and partly because money can't buy him.
Read the report, you'll see what I mean.
By the way, he is a socialist.
Come on, don't tell me that you think that the report is actually the slashdot headline.
As usual, the slashdot headline IS misleading, the report, believe me, is much more clear on this topic.
Please, RTFR.
My Peugeot HDi (120 HP) does more than 600 miles (1000 kms) with a tank of 13 US Gal. That's 46 mpg. It's an average car, some of our cars can do much more than 60 mpg.
I use Diesel which is 0.99 euros for a liter today. That's 3.75 euros for a gallon (4.83 US Dollar).
You pay gas 2.30 US Dollar on average in the US today. So gas cost 2.1 times more than in the US.
If your average car in North America can do 22 mpg (46/2.1) then I would say we pay a little more for gas. But it's hardly a huge difference so taxation is not a bad idea after all because overall we consume much less oil and are then much more independent in term of foreign oil than you are (Saudi Arabia owns 8% of the US alone).
And also, note that the money collected through taxation goes to social services which means it's a win-win scenario here as my gas tax indirectly pays for my complete health-care coverage.
With the oil prices rising it is actually going to be an excellent idea (cause in some europeans countries, if oil prices go up the taxes go down to compensate we call that 'floating petroleum taxes').
If you tax gasoline more, you increase the burden on everyone, including poor people that cannot afford to buy a new gas-efficient car.
Well, this is actually a little more complicated than that.
If you increase taxation, the people will ask for more efficient cars. This will increase the demand of such vehicles and the vehicle manufacturers will start to do a lot of R&D to improve the efficiency of their cars.
20 years later you have a country with efficient cars and highly priced gas.
That's what happened in most European countries and that's why europeans cars are more efficients than those in North America.
Come on, you said it yourself: Mars rocks!
So let's go to Mars.