f he's a real anarchist, then shooting him should be perfectly legal.
Do you hear yourself ? You think it's legal to shoot someone for what she thinks ? Fidel Castro just puts them into jail for that, you nazi (and so does the US now).
The evolution cycle of operating systems is well over 20 years. So in ten years, things will be just as they are. As the persistence of Unix, including its MacOS X and Linux derivatives, te demise of BeOS show, nobody is interested in revolutionnary OS architectures. They're just useless. Wasted time. Better hardware, network protocols that are universally supported, and more specialized software is wht makes computer do more things than they used to. Nobody wants a new OS architecture.
No, don't mod this down, actually that's pretty true, the British media are pretty much specialists of sensationalist, distorted reports, when not plain lies. It seems to be a kind of tradition with them. Look at the tabloid press.
In Europe most if not all Dial-up access have some form of time metering. They charge you a fee on a per-minute, per-second of connection base, or they give you a time credit (usually around 30 hours) per month for a flat fee. This is due to the historical charging scheme for local phone calls.
Therefore, when a salesman arrives and tries to sell you DSL access, he is like the messiah when he tells you you'll have 24/7 access for a flat fee. He doesn't even have to mention the speed increase, he already has sold his thing.
This and a better abitlity in general to manage and develop heavy investment networked infrastructure that there is in Europe, due to the governements being less shy stepping in, makes that broadband internet access is doomed to be better, more generalized and cheaper than in the US.
I said they can. I'm French and live in the US. I don't question the obvious fact that rail, and actually any form of nationwide networked heavy infrastructure should be run as a public service (for example, the power grid).
But I've heard that the UK government has finally decided to inject public money into the rail system. At the beginning of the 70s in France we hd a very shitty phone system, then the government suddenly decided to fund its modernization, and within 15 years it had turned into one of the most modern in the world. So there's hope for British commuters...
Because trains, when properly designed (which is not the case in the US), can be an extremely efficient transportation system, moving at 200mph in total safety, with the lowest per-passenger pollution bottom line possible (better than car, way better than plane).
There is a huge difference between having one car run on a piece of track and developping a whole network of it. There is a huge difference also between having technology that works on paper and the real-life problem in deploying it and making the proper investments.
Public transportation networks are not pieces of software. It's not the futuristic design and technical niceties that count, the issues are a omplex entanglment of environmental, economical, political and social factors.
Bottom line : don't worry, it's gonna be the same commute for you in Cardif and all over the world for a long time
It's been a long time there are permanent earth stations around the globe doing that. Maybe bigger telescope is more precision (I've heard of centimeter-precision so far).
It was the theme of a science exam I took in 1994 to enter a college. Every aspect of it, including the ways the moon mirrors are designed so that they always send the light back to its source (vaguely mentionned in the article)
Funy how each time someone comes out with a remark about how shitty everything "national network" is in the US (cellphone, train, powergrid), some American tries to justify with that "population density" story. The US has many, relatively close, highly populated and developed areas, from Seattle to LA on the West Coast for example, and it is only because of the laissez faire, lack of government intervention and free market obsession that no harmoniously developed and efficient network of anything seems to exist there.
the US _imports_ PS2... they're made in Japan, remember ?
Anyway it's been long that anyone can make a supercomputer with an cluster of Alphas or Itaniums.
Re:Different countries...
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Germany is technically i a recession, just as the US is, and it's been a couple of years since their annual growth has not hit 2%.
Re:When the rest of the world switch to the Euro ?
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well actually it would make sense.
Unlike the dollar, the euro is constructed as a multi-state currency, and many thirld world countries that have dollarized their economies, but still make more business with Europe than they do with the US, might adopt the euro, or the peggind of their currency to the euro. Do you imagine the Fed and the US government concerting their monetary policy to take into account the interests of Brasil and Argentina ? I don't, but I can imagine the ECB letting them in, as a partnership with spain and portugal for example.
Re:The real reason the Euro is BAD NEWS
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
How is that different than being whore to Berlin or Brussels?
Simple : people in European countries get to vote for those who will represent them in the European institutions. Do you get to vote for who's president of the US ? Even Americans don't, after all : they're now like the British, they just pick the son of the previous head of state and designate him hte new one.
Re:The Euro and the Dollar
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
By knowing my history, that's all.
Bretton Woods conference 1944.
Going from 1.25 to.90/$ is not exactly a big success, is it ?
In three years, it's nothing exceptionnal.
I don't eat USD. I don't pay my rent and my car in USD. And actually my food, rent and car haven't been 30% more expensive in three years.
The remarkable period of growth that has just ended in the US had begun with a ridiculously undervalued dollar in the early 90s. If you use the FF and DM rates to 1 euro, the dollar was then worth about 0.80 euros, and the Americans were quite happy with it, and the european governments were actually complaining.
1.25$/euro was grossly overvalued. 0.90$/euro is slightly undervalued. That's all.
Re:The real reason the Euro is BAD NEWS
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
Poor guy. I don't know if you've been intoxicated with propaganda or if you're trying to make some new yourself.
There's no control of the German government on the euro. Actually there's no control of any government on the euro. And the German government in particular has spent the last year pleading for relaxing interests rates, and the ECB didn't budge, because it's a truly independant institution.
As for the UK economy the most powerful in Europe... That's a joke, isn't it. British finance ministers are locked out of European councils on economic policy because the UK is not in the euro zone. There is no hope of having a british commissioner on competition or trade negociations, which are the only people in Europe who really have a say on the world stage of economics. And the living standards of people outside of the City are really miserable, with low wages and high prices for everything.
The UK is just a little shitty country stuck between having to do most of their business with Europe and wanting to be a boot licking whore to Washington. They are just as narrow minded and NIH affected as their American masters, except they're a very little country.
Different countries...
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's true, but contrary to the case of south American coutries which don't have a say about the Fed's policy, the economics policies of European countries are more or less concerted, but more importantly, they are bound by restrictive rules about public deficits and inflation. Actually Argentina was considering sharing it's currency pegging between the euro and the USD, which would have made sense since the Europe, and particularly Spain, is their main trading partner.
The European Central Bank has proven in three years that it was truly independant, and deaf to the claims of governments and private financial institutions. This makes it more credible that they are actually solely commited to controlling the only true measure of a currencie's value : inflation (what you can actually buy with your money).
Also, ironically, the one government that is pushing the most currently towards a more "flexible" monetary and public deficits policy, is not Italy and Greece, but... Germany, the only country in Europe that is in a recession, and the one with the worst surge in unemployement and pubic deficits.
Remember, the inclusion of former east Germany has made their average per capita GDP lower than the ones in the UK, France and Italy !
The Euro and the Dollar
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
When banknotes where first introduced over 17th to 19th century, they were viewed as certificates that a certain bank (usually a single "central bank" per country), would exchange for something of tangible value (usually an equivalent in coins made of precious metal). After WWII a monetary system was introduced in which the USD was the only bill pegged to gold, and other currencies were floating against it. The emptyness of the Fed's gold reserve and the oil crisis broke that system in the 70s, replaced for the first time by the complete floating of all currencies agains each other, with none pegged to any tangible good, and the IMF playinga pivotal role of watchdog to ensure this balance does not diverge.
But the USD became used so widely in international transactions, that it became the de-facto standard against which the currencies values were measured. This gave a huge technical priviledge to the US : the USD could be ridiculously cheap, as it was in the early 90s (when a USD was worth the equivalent of about 0.80 euros in the european currencies of the time), without making holders of USD poorer, since the price of goods on international markets was labelled in USD, giving the US industry an artificial competitive advantage.
Conversely, the USD could be ridiculously overpriced, such as in the mid 80s when it was 25% more expensive then it is now compared to European currencies, making it easier for the US government to finance a huge deficit, while still being able to sustain an abysmal deficit in the balance of payments (since creditor institutions used USD as their reserve currency)
The main economic sense behind the euro is to take away part of that privilege from the US, by making Europe a zone where internal business could be made without any influence of the USD's values. Actual euro banknotes allows banks around the world to actually stash the currency, and makes the integration irreversible, and hence more reliable.
So the US has been considerably opposed to Europe monetary integration, and have worked hard, with their British sidekicks, to make it not happen. Actually the changeover might be seen as the biggest thing that has went in the face of US national interest in the last 30 years, maybe since the end of WWII.
but then again, what does "natural" and "artificial" mean, apart from attesting value to only one of the statements?
Simple : to differenciate laws that are just the reflect of natural notions (such as property of material goods, enforcement of contracts, etc), from laws that try to introduce artificial, ideology-based notions (such as collectivization of land or IP), just ask if you can trace back when the notion was introduced.
Even though, for example the right to property is explicitely mentioned in the French declaration of human rights (1789), you'll have a hard time finding exactly when in History a state/king/authority began enforcing the propery of land upon its vassals/subjects/citizens.
On the other hand, its easy to remember when and where systems such as patents were introduced (patents = 16th, 17th century ?)
IP is a harmful ideology of economics, just the same way communism was. Think about it:
Start from a plausible moral point:
In one case :
Some people spend their lives working for other people, one the sole fact that the latter own the means of production
In the other case:
Using (whatever 'using' means) ideas,art, whatever that someone else has made (whatever 'made' means) amounts to taking advantage of that person's work without due compensation
Second step : governments steps in, and tries to devise from scratch a totally arbitrary legal system, consisting in restrictions to freedom, in order to change the things are naturally:
In the case of communism, change the natural scarcity of means of production into an artificial abundance.
In the case of IP, change the natural abundance of an idea into an artificial scarcity.
Third steps, when the shortcommings of the laws become obvious, the government reacts by saying that it will be OK when the next generation has been indoctrinated at school (see recent/. news about the UK), and tightens the restrictions to freedom.
France - Mainly short range but do have ICBM capability - You can bet US knows where they all are at any time
Four Triomphant class submarines with 16 x M45 ICBMs each. This generation of submarines was commisionned in the mid 1990s.
Middle range ASMP cruise missiles that can be delivered by Mirage 2000D or carrier-based Super Etendard and Rafale aircraft
Have been decomissioned in the mid 1990s:
-Silo-based S63 ICBMs (could only hit Russia).
- Hades mobile missiles (could only hit Germany if fired from French territory. A cold war souvenir.
6 years after being obsoleted by the internet, the Minitel business model comes back :
paying for service indirectly through the provider was indeed the grounds for the huge online revenue that the Minitel system made in France from the early 80s to the mid 90s. This system had already been reproduced in the succesful i-mode mobile online services in Japan.
For the records, France Telecom realized in 1995 that the minitel system was dead and canceled plans to update the terminal. 6 years later, the online business as a whole is still a loss maker.
I understand that when Meccano's UK operations closed in 1979, their French branch bought the whole thing and carried on production. I (living in France), vaguely remember relatively recent (mid 90s ?) marketing efforts to make it popular again, and also hearing about it finaly shutting up the Calais factory too, or being about to.
Slashdot Mirror
f he's a real anarchist, then shooting him should be perfectly legal.
Do you hear yourself ? You think it's legal to shoot someone for what she thinks ? Fidel Castro just puts them into jail for that, you nazi (and so does the US now).
The evolution cycle of operating systems is well over 20 years. So in ten years, things will be just as they are. As the persistence of Unix, including its MacOS X and Linux derivatives, te demise of BeOS show, nobody is interested in revolutionnary OS architectures. They're just useless. Wasted time. Better hardware, network protocols that are universally supported, and more specialized software is wht makes computer do more things than they used to. Nobody wants a new OS architecture.
No, don't mod this down, actually that's pretty true, the British media are pretty much specialists of sensationalist, distorted reports, when not plain lies. It seems to be a kind of tradition with them. Look at the tabloid press.
Anyhow, the "inventor" claims that his machine runs only until it wears out. So you need to to replace it. So it is not energy at no cost.
Therefore, when a salesman arrives and tries to sell you DSL access, he is like the messiah when he tells you you'll have 24/7 access for a flat fee. He doesn't even have to mention the speed increase, he already has sold his thing.
This and a better abitlity in general to manage and develop heavy investment networked infrastructure that there is in Europe, due to the governements being less shy stepping in, makes that broadband internet access is doomed to be better, more generalized and cheaper than in the US.
But I've heard that the UK government has finally decided to inject public money into the rail system. At the beginning of the 70s in France we hd a very shitty phone system, then the government suddenly decided to fund its modernization, and within 15 years it had turned into one of the most modern in the world. So there's hope for British commuters...
Because trains, when properly designed (which is not the case in the US), can be an extremely efficient transportation system, moving at 200mph in total safety, with the lowest per-passenger pollution bottom line possible (better than car, way better than plane).
Public transportation networks are not pieces of software. It's not the futuristic design and technical niceties that count, the issues are a omplex entanglment of environmental, economical, political and social factors.
Bottom line : don't worry, it's gonna be the same commute for you in Cardif and all over the world for a long time
It was the theme of a science exam I took in 1994 to enter a college. Every aspect of it, including the ways the moon mirrors are designed so that they always send the light back to its source (vaguely mentionned in the article)
Funy how each time someone comes out with a remark about how shitty everything "national network" is in the US (cellphone, train, powergrid), some American tries to justify with that "population density" story. The US has many, relatively close, highly populated and developed areas, from Seattle to LA on the West Coast for example, and it is only because of the laissez faire, lack of government intervention and free market obsession that no harmoniously developed and efficient network of anything seems to exist there.
the US _imports_ PS2... they're made in Japan, remember ?
Anyway it's been long that anyone can make a supercomputer with an cluster of Alphas or Itaniums.
Germany is technically i a recession, just as the US is, and it's been a couple of years since their annual growth has not hit 2%.
Well actually it would make sense.
Unlike the dollar, the euro is constructed as a multi-state currency, and many thirld world countries that have dollarized their economies, but still make more business with Europe than they do with the US, might adopt the euro, or the peggind of their currency to the euro. Do you imagine the Fed and the US government concerting their monetary policy to take into account the interests of Brasil and Argentina ? I don't, but I can imagine the ECB letting them in, as a partnership with spain and portugal for example.
How is that different than being whore to Berlin or Brussels?
Simple : people in European countries get to vote for those who will represent them in the European institutions. Do you get to vote for who's president of the US ? Even Americans don't, after all : they're now like the British, they just pick the son of the previous head of state and designate him hte new one.
By knowing my history, that's all.
Bretton Woods conference 1944.
Going from 1.25 to
In three years, it's nothing exceptionnal.
I don't eat USD. I don't pay my rent and my car in USD. And actually my food, rent and car haven't been 30% more expensive in three years.
The remarkable period of growth that has just ended in the US had begun with a ridiculously undervalued dollar in the early 90s. If you use the FF and DM rates to 1 euro, the dollar was then worth about 0.80 euros, and the Americans were quite happy with it, and the european governments were actually complaining.
1.25$/euro was grossly overvalued. 0.90$/euro is slightly undervalued. That's all.
Poor guy. I don't know if you've been intoxicated with propaganda or if you're trying to make some new yourself.
There's no control of the German government on the euro. Actually there's no control of any government on the euro. And the German government in particular has spent the last year pleading for relaxing interests rates, and the ECB didn't budge, because it's a truly independant institution.
As for the UK economy the most powerful in Europe... That's a joke, isn't it. British finance ministers are locked out of European councils on economic policy because the UK is not in the euro zone. There is no hope of having a british commissioner on competition or trade negociations, which are the only people in Europe who really have a say on the world stage of economics. And the living standards of people outside of the City are really miserable, with low wages and high prices for everything.
The UK is just a little shitty country stuck between having to do most of their business with Europe and wanting to be a boot licking whore to Washington. They are just as narrow minded and NIH affected as their American masters, except they're a very little country.
It's true, but contrary to the case of south American coutries which don't have a say about the Fed's policy, the economics policies of European countries are more or less concerted, but more importantly, they are bound by restrictive rules about public deficits and inflation. Actually Argentina was considering sharing it's currency pegging between the euro and the USD, which would have made sense since the Europe, and particularly Spain, is their main trading partner. The European Central Bank has proven in three years that it was truly independant, and deaf to the claims of governments and private financial institutions. This makes it more credible that they are actually solely commited to controlling the only true measure of a currencie's value : inflation (what you can actually buy with your money). Also, ironically, the one government that is pushing the most currently towards a more "flexible" monetary and public deficits policy, is not Italy and Greece, but ... Germany, the only country in Europe that is in a recession, and the one with the worst surge in unemployement and pubic deficits.
Remember, the inclusion of former east Germany has made their average per capita GDP lower than the ones in the UK, France and Italy !
When banknotes where first introduced over 17th to 19th century, they were viewed as certificates that a certain bank (usually a single "central bank" per country), would exchange for something of tangible value (usually an equivalent in coins made of precious metal). After WWII a monetary system was introduced in which the USD was the only bill pegged to gold, and other currencies were floating against it. The emptyness of the Fed's gold reserve and the oil crisis broke that system in the 70s, replaced for the first time by the complete floating of all currencies agains each other, with none pegged to any tangible good, and the IMF playinga pivotal role of watchdog to ensure this balance does not diverge.
But the USD became used so widely in international transactions, that it became the de-facto standard against which the currencies values were measured. This gave a huge technical priviledge to the US : the USD could be ridiculously cheap, as it was in the early 90s (when a USD was worth the equivalent of about 0.80 euros in the european currencies of the time), without making holders of USD poorer, since the price of goods on international markets was labelled in USD, giving the US industry an artificial competitive advantage.
Conversely, the USD could be ridiculously overpriced, such as in the mid 80s when it was 25% more expensive then it is now compared to European currencies, making it easier for the US government to finance a huge deficit, while still being able to sustain an abysmal deficit in the balance of payments (since creditor institutions used USD as their reserve currency)
The main economic sense behind the euro is to take away part of that privilege from the US, by making Europe a zone where internal business could be made without any influence of the USD's values. Actual euro banknotes allows banks around the world to actually stash the currency, and makes the integration irreversible, and hence more reliable.
So the US has been considerably opposed to Europe monetary integration, and have worked hard, with their British sidekicks, to make it not happen. Actually the changeover might be seen as the biggest thing that has went in the face of US national interest in the last 30 years, maybe since the end of WWII.
The guy is for patents and admits lefty leanings !! This prooves my point in my other post ! click on my name to find out !!
Simple : to differenciate laws that are just the reflect of natural notions (such as property of material goods, enforcement of contracts, etc), from laws that try to introduce artificial, ideology-based notions (such as collectivization of land or IP), just ask if you can trace back when the notion was introduced.
Even though, for example the right to property is explicitely mentioned in the French declaration of human rights (1789), you'll have a hard time finding exactly when in History a state/king/authority began enforcing the propery of land upon its vassals/subjects/citizens.
On the other hand, its easy to remember when and where systems such as patents were introduced (patents = 16th, 17th century ?)
Start from a plausible moral point:
In one case : Some people spend their lives working for other people, one the sole fact that the latter own the means of production
In the other case: Using (whatever 'using' means) ideas,art, whatever that someone else has made (whatever 'made' means) amounts to taking advantage of that person's work without due compensation
Second step : governments steps in, and tries to devise from scratch a totally arbitrary legal system, consisting in restrictions to freedom, in order to change the things are naturally:
In the case of communism, change the natural scarcity of means of production into an artificial abundance.
In the case of IP, change the natural abundance of an idea into an artificial scarcity.
Third steps, when the shortcommings of the laws become obvious, the government reacts by saying that it will be OK when the next generation has been indoctrinated at school (see recent /. news about the UK), and tightens the restrictions to freedom.
Four Triomphant class submarines with 16 x M45 ICBMs each. This generation of submarines was commisionned in the mid 1990s.
Middle range ASMP cruise missiles that can be delivered by Mirage 2000D or carrier-based Super Etendard and Rafale aircraft
Have been decomissioned in the mid 1990s: -Silo-based S63 ICBMs (could only hit Russia).
- Hades mobile missiles (could only hit Germany if fired from French territory. A cold war souvenir.
For the records, France Telecom realized in 1995 that the minitel system was dead and canceled plans to update the terminal. 6 years later, the online business as a whole is still a loss maker.
I understand that when Meccano's UK operations closed in 1979, their French branch bought the whole thing and carried on production. I (living in France), vaguely remember relatively recent (mid 90s ?) marketing efforts to make it popular again, and also hearing about it finaly shutting up the Calais factory too, or being about to.