The hole in the argument is the presumption of guilt. I should not have to pay a levy on a product because others use it to pirate.
As I said in my post, the system was designed to compensate fair use, not piracy. Fair use is kept legal, and the loss in copyright and royalty revenues that it is supposed to incur (w.r.t. a situation where fair use would be completely forbidden), is compensated by the blank media levy.
To be a bit more accurate than the news summary, in France, as in many other European countries, blank media has a long history of having an additional tax that is not aimed as at fighting piracy, but as a way to remunerate _fair use_. The money is passed on to the various artist unions that handle the distribution of royalties, and of course, Britney Spears and other American "artists" get a share of that.
I think it started with blank VHS tapes back in the 80s. More recently, CD-Rs and the likes, and even more recently, hard drives in general.
While it was questionable to tax hard drives in general, since many of them are not used to store media, it is hard to make a case for the iPod's hard drive to be exempt.
I personaly kind of like this system, which is by itself a better, more modern way of artist compensation than copyright is. Of course in France the two systems coexist, so you get the worse of both worlds.
JL-Gassee, founder of the late Be Corp and ex Apple executive, has nothing to do with patenting the smart card. The inventor of the smart card is Roland Moreno, who is indeed French also. The 20-years patent expired a few years ago.
It makes you wonder : what is the next country with a 6% GDP deficit that is going to get bankrupted by bellicose technological developpment... oh, wait...
By the way nice try propagating this worn out reaganite theory that the arms race in the 80s was a clever American plot to win the cold war. Interesting is that it comes in contradiction with the idea that communism as a system is unable to sustain its own people, if it took an artificial arms race to bankrupt it.
I'm kind of tired of the perpetual whining of armchair hardware designers. So the happy few, highly paid architects, 30 years-experience in the industry, hundred-published scientific papers at Intel decide that the next gen chip will have more stages and they have to be called morons ? How do you know better ? Hasn't intel produced the fastest chips on the market with each and every micro-architectural generation ? Long pipelines = costly branch mispredicts, whoooaah, you're so bright why don't YOU have the job leading the prescott team ? branches can be predicted. Long pipelines can improve throughput. Microprocessors are all about trade-offs. Let the pros do the work and go back playing Quake.
There's no technical separation between design and realizaton of software. What you call implementation is just a further refinement of what you call design. Even what the compiler and linker do automatically is just a further refinement of that, in a continuous process.
You're right : in my opinion licenses should require all of the following: - US citizen - born in the US - currently living in the US - registered Republican - $500 donation to "Jeb Bush for America 2008"
Regular church going would be a plus, but optional. The license granting ceremony would involve an oath on the Bible though.
1 - Buy the exclusive right for a Harry Potter board game for $500M to J.K.Rowling's publisher 2 - Replace the street names in Monopoly with Potter stuff. 3 - Have it manufactured by 12 years olds in the Phillipines (their small hands are good at grabbing the small game pieces and put them in the box) 4 - Profit.
I remember having counted paper ballots for the French parliement elections a few years ago. Anyone could volunteer, or at least look over shoulders if the counting tables where already staffed. We were randomly dispatched, four on each table. We were given a batch of envelopes then #1 would open the envelope, #2 read aloud the name, #3 tally the count on a piece of paper, #4 check again, or something like that. Ballots were pre-printed under the responsibility of each candidate, but any piece of paper with just a name on it was accepted. Any identifying mark or message added on a ballot would discard the ballot altogether (not counted), but discarded ballots were kept in a separate bunch so that the discarding could be appealed. Each batch was kept intact and the results were phoned in to the interior ministry, which would publish them station by station the next day so that the party representatives could check again. We were home about two and a half hours after the closing of the polls.
Even when the train ride is longer door to door, there are other benefits to rail:
Instead of spending half of your time changing transportation, waiting in line for check-in or security, waiting to pick up your luggage, etc, you spend 95% of your time seating comfortably, able to use your cellphone and to plug in your laptop. So your time is much more useful and comfortable. If you're a professional you can really get some work done, and hence can afford to spend more time on the trip.
Rail first class is affordable to individuals and offers the comfort and legroom of Air Business classes. Even the Rail cheapest fares are much more comfortable than airline coach classes.
You're right for the speed record (which is still the world's record on conventional rail), but the peak commercial speed on the TGV network is around 320 km/h. And unless you go between certain pairs of major cities such as Paris/Brussels or Paris/Lyon, an average of 50% of your mileage will be done on non-highspeed rails, at much slower speeds.
The main merit of the French highspeed network is to have been started more than twenty years ago. It is also extremely safe. Not one single person has died due to a technical glitch or a human error aboard a TGV ever, while about 1 billion people have taken it.
A country that would start now to invest in a high speed rail network is hundreds of billions of euros away from a comparable network. And given the ever increasing economic and regulatory pressures against massive government investment, especially in competitive, commercial sectors such as civil transportation, this is unlikely to ever happen.
Paper Receipts are a bad, bad idea for electronic voting, or voting in general for that matter, since it opens the door to commercializing votes ("show me that you voted as I told you, and I will pay you"), vote under pressure ("prove to me that you voted right, or else"), etc.
I am actually even opposed to massive vote by mail. What I don't understand is why the issue of electronic voting even exists. Most countries' elections just with little papers with names in a box. And none of them has recently had anything ressembling to the 2000 presidential fiasco.
But I would certainly rather take an obscure electronic vote with no paper receipt than one that has even optional paper receipts.
Thank god, the Internet, which has been mainly created by government-funded research, has competed "unfairly" with proprietary online services such as MSN, AOL and Compuserve.
The power still works, even though the heatwave has put the biggest strain ever on the grid (for lack of production, most of the electricity being nuclear, and nuclear power plant heat the water from rivers, and the upstram water is already too hot).
Now that's quite a stupid comment. So if Lichtenshtein or Switzerland have more GDP PER CAPITA than the US that means that their are more influential than the US ?
The last time a big country had all of its high tech concentrated in defense and other government mandated sectors, it was the USSR I think.
Seriously, if nothing comes to replace exported jobs, then the external payments deficit and the federal budget deficit bubbles will grow until they pop, and the government won't be able to pay for defense programs anymore.
If you wish that LISP features were added to C++, then why don't you just use one of the CLISP or Scheme dialect compilers that generate code as fast as native C ? Or a ML dialect like Haskell or Objective CAML. Scheme dialect Bigloo has objects, pattern matching, threads, regexp, optional explicit typing and type inference, a GUI library, etc in addition to the original blessings of Scheme : closures, full introspection, meta-programming, absence of syntax, garbage collector.
pure funds infusion is a hell of a lot more of a subsidy than even the most generous of military contracts.
Airbus gets loan guaranties from the states, not direct funding. And the latest "leasing" deal that boeing got on tankers is not merely a "generous military contract". It is a rip-off of US taxpayers that would have made proud an Enron accountant.
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As I said in my post, the system was designed to compensate fair use, not piracy. Fair use is kept legal, and the loss in copyright and royalty revenues that it is supposed to incur (w.r.t. a situation where fair use would be completely forbidden), is compensated by the blank media levy.
Not quite : the SACEM represent artists (authors rights holders), while the RIAA represents producers (copy rights holders).
To be a bit more accurate than the news summary, in France, as in many other European countries, blank media has a long history of having an additional tax that is not aimed as at fighting piracy, but as a way to remunerate _fair use_. The money is passed on to the various artist unions that handle the distribution of royalties, and of course, Britney Spears and other American "artists" get a share of that.
I think it started with blank VHS tapes back in the 80s. More recently, CD-Rs and the likes, and even more recently, hard drives in general.
While it was questionable to tax hard drives in general, since many of them are not used to store media, it is hard to make a case for the iPod's hard drive to be exempt.
I personaly kind of like this system, which is by itself a better, more modern way of artist compensation than copyright is. Of course in France the two systems coexist, so you get the worse of both worlds.
JL-Gassee, founder of the late Be Corp and ex Apple executive, has nothing to do with patenting the smart card. The inventor of the smart card is Roland Moreno, who is indeed French also. The 20-years patent expired a few years ago.
let's be fair : 95% of Americans over 3 years old.
It makes you wonder : what is the next country with a 6% GDP deficit that is going to get bankrupted by bellicose technological developpment... oh, wait ...
By the way nice try propagating this worn out reaganite theory that the arms race in the 80s was a clever American plot to win the cold war. Interesting is that it comes in contradiction with the idea that communism as a system is unable to sustain its own people, if it took an artificial arms race to bankrupt it.
Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming was illustrating the algorithm in an imaginary assembly language.
I'm kind of tired of the perpetual whining of armchair hardware designers. So the happy few, highly paid architects, 30 years-experience in the industry, hundred-published scientific papers at Intel decide that the next gen chip will have more stages and they have to be called morons ? How do you know better ? Hasn't intel produced the fastest chips on the market with each and every micro-architectural generation ? Long pipelines = costly branch mispredicts, whoooaah, you're so bright why don't YOU have the job leading the prescott team ? branches can be predicted. Long pipelines can improve throughput. Microprocessors are all about trade-offs. Let the pros do the work and go back playing Quake.
For what I know, the hamas is not responsible for MS products. I just know that the words algorithm and algebra originated in the Arabic language.
There's no technical separation between design and realizaton of software. What you call implementation is just a further refinement of what you call design. Even what the compiler and linker do automatically is just a further refinement of that, in a continuous process.
You're right : in my opinion licenses should require all of the following:
- US citizen
- born in the US
- currently living in the US
- registered Republican
- $500 donation to "Jeb Bush for America 2008"
Regular church going would be a plus, but optional. The license granting ceremony would involve an oath on the Bible though.
After the dollar has lost 50% of its value over three years against the euro, it seems that fear is now the most reliable currency in the US.
1 - Buy the exclusive right for a Harry Potter board game for $500M to J.K.Rowling's publisher .
2 - Replace the street names in Monopoly with Potter stuff
3 - Have it manufactured by 12 years olds in the Phillipines (their small hands are good at grabbing the small game pieces and put them in the box)
4 - Profit.
I LOVE capitalism.
I remember having counted paper ballots for the French parliement elections a few years ago. Anyone could volunteer, or at least look over shoulders if the counting tables where already staffed. We were randomly dispatched, four on each table. We were given a batch of envelopes then #1 would open the envelope, #2 read aloud the name, #3 tally the count on a piece of paper, #4 check again, or something like that. Ballots were pre-printed under the responsibility of each candidate, but any piece of paper with just a name on it was accepted. Any identifying mark or message added on a ballot would discard the ballot altogether (not counted), but discarded ballots were kept in a separate bunch so that the discarding could be appealed. Each batch was kept intact and the results were phoned in to the interior ministry, which would publish them station by station the next day so that the party representatives could check again. We were home about two and a half hours after the closing of the polls.
The USA is a country where either one can easily be converted into the other. So I guess they're equally important.
Even when the train ride is longer door to door, there are other benefits to rail:
Instead of spending half of your time changing transportation, waiting in line for check-in or security, waiting to pick up your luggage, etc, you spend 95% of your time seating comfortably, able to use your cellphone and to plug in your laptop. So your time is much more useful and comfortable. If you're a professional you can really get some work done, and hence can afford to spend more time on the trip.
Rail first class is affordable to individuals and offers the comfort and legroom of Air Business classes. Even the Rail cheapest fares are much more comfortable than airline coach classes.
The time schedules are also way more reliable.
You're right for the speed record (which is still the world's record on conventional rail), but the peak commercial speed on the TGV network is around 320 km/h. And unless you go between certain pairs of major cities such as Paris/Brussels or Paris/Lyon, an average of 50% of your mileage will be done on non-highspeed rails, at much slower speeds.
The main merit of the French highspeed network is to have been started more than twenty years ago. It is also extremely safe. Not one single person has died due to a technical glitch or a human error aboard a TGV ever, while about 1 billion people have taken it.
A country that would start now to invest in a high speed rail network is hundreds of billions of euros away from a comparable network. And given the ever increasing economic and regulatory pressures against massive government investment, especially in competitive, commercial sectors such as civil transportation, this is unlikely to ever happen.
Paper Receipts are a bad, bad idea for electronic voting, or voting in general for that matter, since it opens the door to commercializing votes ("show me that you voted as I told you, and I will pay you"), vote under pressure ("prove to me that you voted right, or else"), etc.
I am actually even opposed to massive vote by mail. What I don't understand is why the issue of electronic voting even exists. Most countries' elections just with little papers with names in a box. And none of them has recently had anything ressembling to the 2000 presidential fiasco.
But I would certainly rather take an obscure electronic vote with no paper receipt than one that has even optional paper receipts.
Thank god, the Internet, which has been mainly created by government-funded research, has competed "unfairly" with proprietary online services such as MSN, AOL and Compuserve.
The power still works, even though the heatwave has put the biggest strain ever on the grid (for lack of production, most of the electricity being nuclear, and nuclear power plant heat the water from rivers, and the upstram water is already too hot).
Now that's quite a stupid comment. So if Lichtenshtein or Switzerland have more GDP PER CAPITA than the US that means that their are more influential than the US ?
The last time a big country had all of its high tech concentrated in defense and other government mandated sectors, it was the USSR I think.
Seriously, if nothing comes to replace exported jobs, then the external payments deficit and the federal budget deficit bubbles will grow until they pop, and the government won't be able to pay for defense programs anymore.
If you wish that LISP features were added to C++, then why don't you just use one of the CLISP or Scheme dialect compilers that generate code as fast as native C ? Or a ML dialect like Haskell or Objective CAML. Scheme dialect Bigloo has objects, pattern matching, threads, regexp, optional explicit typing and type inference, a GUI library, etc in addition to the original blessings of Scheme : closures, full introspection, meta-programming, absence of syntax, garbage collector.
With the RMLL taking place in Metz (very close to Germany) in July 9-12, many people can probably attend both.
Airbus gets loan guaranties from the states, not direct funding. And the latest "leasing" deal that boeing got on tankers is not merely a "generous military contract". It is a rip-off of US taxpayers that would have made proud an Enron accountant.