don't you worry : the government-sponsored GSM standard (that is technically of French origin, the original meaning being Groupe Systemes Mobiles, which was a division of France Telecom's research labs) may be one of the best example ever of what harmonious inter-government regulations working on par with industry consortiums can lead to, but we (in Europe) totally fucked up the sequel to that success story.
Entangled in the free-market ideology that is ruling the mind of every european bureaucrat nowadays, decision has been made not to make any decisions about the next generation, and to let competition, not only between companies, but also between governments, yield to the best for the consummer.
Hence the UMTS fiasco, a technical failure and financial disaster that puts at stake the very existence of previously prosperous European telcos, will never give birth to any viable product or service, and has dramaticaly delayed the exploitation of current technology for intersting internet-on-the-road services (expecially through GPRS packet tehcnology).
This and the US still struggling to have a mobile voice network that is not a joke, and the whole world can watch the Japanese comfortably take a 4-to-5 years headstart in mobile internet usage and tehcnologies. Japan : the country where telecommunications are the most regulated in the world, the last country where the main telco has a de facto monopoly.
once an information is created, it can be moved and duplicated at virtually no cost, hence the abundance.
I think that there are other ways to give an incentive to creating arts, sofware, etc, than to try to create an artificial scarcity. Moreover, I think that this particular method is unfair and inefficient.
Copyright is one very particular method for rewarding artists. Others exist, more or less officialy. Some informally (voluntary gifts to a street performer, various advantages linked to celebrity for example), others formally, as the French droit d'auteur, in which artists (esp. composers), have an non-transferable right to a revenue derived from how much their work is disseminated (esp. public performance).
Most of the 'IP' that we enjoy today, from the architecture of cathedrals to Heisenberg's quantum formalism, including Beethoven's 9th symphony, have never been subject to a copyright.
That someone must be rewarded of his efforts is obvious, but it is hardly an argument in favor of IP as it exists today, especialy of copyright laws.
first, what do you mean by 'his efforts' do you mean how hard he had to work, the impact on the society (popularity of the work), the positive or negative aspect of that impact, etc ? Here you see that the definition of the 'effort' is not clear.
Which leads to the second loophole : the fact that copyright makes the reward proportional to whatever you call 'effort' or 'merit' is an illusion, an utopian goal of the proponents of IP. Take the example of a movie director : he can ask for a salary, or work for free and ask for a share of the movie's revenue. Depending on the success of the movie and his choice, his income can be vary a lot for the same effort. If you write a unintersting book but your a celebrity, or a relative of a celebrity, you will sell it. If you're an unknown would-be writer, even if your book is good, you'll have a lot of trouble selling one book.
The real argument against copyright is the expression you use yourself : artificial scarcity. You may remember that communists wanted to create artificial abundance of things that were naturaly scarce. You want artificial scarcity out of things that are naturaly abundant. This is doomed to be proven as inefficient.
a) Thomson doesn't sell smartcards themselves. Smartcard vendors are Gemplus, Schlumberger and Oberthur.
b) A lot of smartcards application are already widespread: SIMs, debit cards, phonecards, electronic wallets, IDs. Smartcards have been in use since the early 90s.
Nazi Germany has never been a world power : they have been at war with the rest of the world. World powers can impose their point of view without fighting. This happens sometimes as a result of winning a war, but has never happened to nazi germany.
FT promoted the Minitel in the early 80s, which is not, I believe, the time when the Internet for the masses started to take off.
The Minitel generated a huge online business with profitable companies, whose total revenue exceded the whole world's ebusiness revenue until 1997.
FT realized that the Minitel was doomed in 1995, when they decided to cancel the presentation of a next generation terminal in the CeBit. This is the very same time when Microsoft realized that a proprietary MSN was doomed.
Today, NTT Docomo is pushing the Japanese governement for a clearance to launch a "non mobile" version of its extremely successful wireless online service i-mode, that would be dubbed L-mode. L-mode business model is exactly that of the Minitel.
in telecomunications alone, French contribution include for example a big chunk of the development of ATM and GSM technologies (France Telecom). Alcatel is the world biggest maker of ADSL hardware. The European branch of W3C is based in France. Lots of work on IPv6 was done here, etc.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
France (art. 11, declaration of human rights, 1789)
Freedom to communicate thoughts and opinons is one of the most precious rights of human beings : therefore any Citizen may talk, write, print freely, except if abusing this freedom in the cases the law shall define.
Conclusion : US says what the government cannot do, but does not guarantee that some other power will do what the government cannot.
France defines a general principle of free speech, applicable in all circumstances, but doesn't define how the government can and cannot legislate to enforce this principle.
So the French human rights are more modern, since it encompasses the fact that government itself is not the main threat to individual freedom anymore.
As so many answers point out, the standards for the rights of individuals that are in the US constitution don't apply to private contracts.
This just means that, as boasted as it is by people who are governed by it, the US constitution is nonetheless one of the less protecting, and the less respectful of individual rights in the industrialized world.
Most other countries who have a seriously enforced constitution, consider that the responsibility of the government is to ensure the well being of the citizens it protects, not to ensure restriction on governement itself. It is useless to arbitrarily restrict the government actions (and hence, the guaranties it provides to individual effective freedom), if something else comes and dictates the life of people (corporations, private education).
a) personnal encryption with up to 128 bits key is totally legal in France.
b) privacy is not cryptography. Privacy is your doctor not selling your health data to insurers or drug companies.
c) French legislation addressed IT-related privacy problems in 1978 or 1979. The resulting law, dubbed "freedom and IT", became the template for European online privacy standards, and is backed by a permanent independant enforcement commission (CNIL). Basically, anyone owns his/her data, has a right to access and modify it. Filing the race, religion or political opinions is illegal.
Noticable enforcements of this law have included the finance ministry being refused access to a private pay-TV customers files (to x-check with people paying or not the TV tax), and the defense ministry being kept from having a file of HIV-pos servicemen.
There is nothing new in studying asynchronous design. There is already some asynchrony in edgy circuit design currently. Note that asynchronous design also brings its own overhead, in "self synchronization" circuitry, such as handshakes. It allows for higher throughputs, but is a pain to design and to debug.
I think there's a point where the FSF's fanatism might harmful to the free software movement's image. The FSF has no right to a monopoly on the definition of what free (libre) is. When a company that is the quintessence of the notion of proprietary standard makes that big a step toward basic notions such as source code availability and using without having to pay a license fee, the effort must be welcomed, not despised.
Programming language theory as always dealt with "semantics", which are mathematical objects that correspond to a program, and to which you can make mathematical reasonings in order to proove desirable properties (security of protocols, correctness of a compiler, etc).
So all computer languages are already in a sense "independant from the text of their source code".
Most of the usual languages such as C, C++ or even Java have rather non-rigorous semantics, due to thir being too close to the complexity of the computer their run, which makes it difficult to have a mathematical model of execution, and also due to making to many compromises toward such things as compatibility and readability.
But there exist languages that have always been developped keeping very rigorous semantics, such as the Haskell and OCAML functional languages.
Slashdot Mirror
Entangled in the free-market ideology that is ruling the mind of every european bureaucrat nowadays, decision has been made not to make any decisions about the next generation, and to let competition, not only between companies, but also between governments, yield to the best for the consummer.
Hence the UMTS fiasco, a technical failure and financial disaster that puts at stake the very existence of previously prosperous European telcos, will never give birth to any viable product or service, and has dramaticaly delayed the exploitation of current technology for intersting internet-on-the-road services (expecially through GPRS packet tehcnology).
This and the US still struggling to have a mobile voice network that is not a joke, and the whole world can watch the Japanese comfortably take a 4-to-5 years headstart in mobile internet usage and tehcnologies. Japan : the country where telecommunications are the most regulated in the world, the last country where the main telco has a de facto monopoly.
I think that there are other ways to give an incentive to creating arts, sofware, etc, than to try to create an artificial scarcity. Moreover, I think that this particular method is unfair and inefficient.
Copyright is one very particular method for rewarding artists. Others exist, more or less officialy. Some informally (voluntary gifts to a street performer, various advantages linked to celebrity for example), others formally, as the French droit d'auteur, in which artists (esp. composers), have an non-transferable right to a revenue derived from how much their work is disseminated (esp. public performance).
Most of the 'IP' that we enjoy today, from the architecture of cathedrals to Heisenberg's quantum formalism, including Beethoven's 9th symphony, have never been subject to a copyright.
first, what do you mean by 'his efforts' do you mean how hard he had to work, the impact on the society (popularity of the work), the positive or negative aspect of that impact, etc ? Here you see that the definition of the 'effort' is not clear.
Which leads to the second loophole : the fact that copyright makes the reward proportional to whatever you call 'effort' or 'merit' is an illusion, an utopian goal of the proponents of IP. Take the example of a movie director : he can ask for a salary, or work for free and ask for a share of the movie's revenue. Depending on the success of the movie and his choice, his income can be vary a lot for the same effort. If you write a unintersting book but your a celebrity, or a relative of a celebrity, you will sell it. If you're an unknown would-be writer, even if your book is good, you'll have a lot of trouble selling one book.
The real argument against copyright is the expression you use yourself : artificial scarcity. You may remember that communists wanted to create artificial abundance of things that were naturaly scarce. You want artificial scarcity out of things that are naturaly abundant. This is doomed to be proven as inefficient.
a) Thomson doesn't sell smartcards themselves. Smartcard vendors are Gemplus, Schlumberger and Oberthur.
b) A lot of smartcards application are already widespread: SIMs, debit cards, phonecards, electronic wallets, IDs. Smartcards have been in use since the early 90s.
EADS-DSN
farms went corporate in Russia as well 80 years ago ... they called that sovkhozs ...
Nazi Germany has never been a world power : they have been at war with the rest of the world. World powers can impose their point of view without fighting. This happens sometimes as a result of winning a war, but has never happened to nazi germany.
prices higher ? even London might have cheaper appt rentals than the bay area.
how do you think you keep your inflation down ?
The Minitel generated a huge online business with profitable companies, whose total revenue exceded the whole world's ebusiness revenue until 1997.
FT realized that the Minitel was doomed in 1995, when they decided to cancel the presentation of a next generation terminal in the CeBit. This is the very same time when Microsoft realized that a proprietary MSN was doomed.
Today, NTT Docomo is pushing the Japanese governement for a clearance to launch a "non mobile" version of its extremely successful wireless online service i-mode, that would be dubbed L-mode. L-mode business model is exactly that of the Minitel.
in telecomunications alone, French contribution include for example a big chunk of the development of ATM and GSM technologies (France Telecom). Alcatel is the world biggest maker of ADSL hardware. The European branch of W3C is based in France. Lots of work on IPv6 was done here, etc.
On peut soigner la forme, mais le fonds est assez vrai.
Slashdot is welcome to apply for political asylum in any European country.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
France (art. 11, declaration of human rights, 1789)
Freedom to communicate thoughts and opinons is one of the most precious rights of human beings : therefore any Citizen may talk, write, print freely, except if abusing this freedom in the cases the law shall define.
Conclusion : US says what the government cannot do, but does not guarantee that some other power will do what the government cannot.
France defines a general principle of free speech, applicable in all circumstances, but doesn't define how the government can and cannot legislate to enforce this principle.
So the French human rights are more modern, since it encompasses the fact that government itself is not the main threat to individual freedom anymore.
As so many answers point out, the standards for the rights of individuals that are in the US constitution don't apply to private contracts.
This just means that, as boasted as it is by people who are governed by it, the US constitution is nonetheless one of the less protecting, and the less respectful of individual rights in the industrialized world.
Most other countries who have a seriously enforced constitution, consider that the responsibility of the government is to ensure the well being of the citizens it protects, not to ensure restriction on governement itself. It is useless to arbitrarily restrict the government actions (and hence, the guaranties it provides to individual effective freedom), if something else comes and dictates the life of people (corporations, private education).
Hercules' assets and brand have been bought in by French PC devices maker Guillemot, who recently "reactivated" the brand.
a) personnal encryption with up to 128 bits key is totally legal in France.
b) privacy is not cryptography. Privacy is your doctor not selling your health data to insurers or drug companies.
c) French legislation addressed IT-related privacy problems in 1978 or 1979. The resulting law, dubbed "freedom and IT", became the template for European online privacy standards, and is backed by a permanent independant enforcement commission (CNIL). Basically, anyone owns his/her data, has a right to access and modify it. Filing the race, religion or political opinions is illegal.
Noticable enforcements of this law have included the finance ministry being refused access to a private pay-TV customers files (to x-check with people paying or not the TV tax), and the defense ministry being kept from having a file of HIV-pos servicemen.
they frighten me.
There is nothing new in studying asynchronous design. There is already some asynchrony in edgy circuit design currently. Note that asynchronous design also brings its own overhead, in "self synchronization" circuitry, such as handshakes. It allows for higher throughputs, but is a pain to design and to debug.
countries that record race and/or religion as census data are sick.
I think there's a point where the FSF's fanatism might harmful to the free software movement's image. The FSF has no right to a monopoly on the definition of what free (libre) is. When a company that is the quintessence of the notion of proprietary standard makes that big a step toward basic notions such as source code availability and using without having to pay a license fee, the effort must be welcomed, not despised.
In other news, the FBI has not yet commented on reports that civilians touring the FBI HQ had actually conducted Philip Hanssen's screening interview.
gee, what's next ?
sober lawyers for the sentenced to death ?
vi is the only modeller that POV needs.
<p>
and POV is the only renderer that true artists need.
So all computer languages are already in a sense "independant from the text of their source code".
Most of the usual languages such as C, C++ or even Java have rather non-rigorous semantics, due to thir being too close to the complexity of the computer their run, which makes it difficult to have a mathematical model of execution, and also due to making to many compromises toward such things as compatibility and readability.
But there exist languages that have always been developped keeping very rigorous semantics, such as the Haskell and OCAML functional languages.