Even after I became a born-again atheist a few years ago, I still don't like the Catholic Church bashing that is based on the Galileo affair. It seems to me like a form of rabbid anti-clerical or anti-catholic myth that misunderstands the real context of the time.
First the Church is depicted as bent on hiding promethean secrets from the "people", while in fact, in a time before widespread litteracy, before technology and thus before science had any economic value of its own, the Catholic Church was the main patron and funder of serious scientific research, including that of Galileo.
Secondly, Galileo specifically tried to re-interpret religious beliefs in the light of his own theories, which is why he was tried by the Inquisition, not because of the theories themselves.
In other words, Galileo tried to cross the science/spirituality borderline in the opposite way that creationnists today, and the Church was not happy about that, it was not about some calculations which, while groundbreaking, nobody really cared about.
And after all, our modern understanding of the Cosmos does not put the Sun at the center of the universe any more than the Earth. So in a way heliocentrism as a philosophy is as wrong as Anthropocentrism. As a matter of fact, and again, as an ATHEIST, if I had to choose I would pick terra-centrism since after all, what we call Cosmos, is a product of our common Human perception, and Terra is where we live.
I didn't mean otherwise. By free-market ideology I was not referring to the actual economic mechanism of free markets, but to the ideology of corporate wellfare, attacks on the sovereignty of nations and people self-determination that nowadays fraudulently passes for economic pragmatism and libertarianism.
It is a sad fact, indeed, that stringent intellectual property status-quo passes for economic libertarianism, and that people forget that they essentially consist in government-enforced monopolies and limitations to freedom of speech.
The Commission is one thing, the Council another. The obvious problem with the commission is that it is non-elected and non-accountable, however to a certain extent. We must remember that a commission was cornered into resignation by a parliementary enquiry a while ago, and this Italian homophobic dude who was kept out also based on parliementary pressure. The Commission is supposedly strictly technocratic and apolitical, and in reality very strongly ideologically molded into a free-market worshipping sorcerer apprentice that thinks Europe should be turned into the ultimate Adam Smith lab test.
However the commission only drafts directives, and doesn't vote on them. Its defeat on the patent directive shows that there are limits to its powers after all, and its bad name puts it right in the cross-hairs of each and every EU bashing force in Europe.
Another problem is the Council. As a meeting of national government representative, they bear the seal of democracy. The problem with them is that their debades occur behind closed doors, and in effect there is few oversight from the individual nations political forces. One solution is to institutionalize the oversight of Council discussions by national parliements, which the draft constitution did in a way that was too weak to be valuable.
I disagree with RMS in saying that the way to prevent software patent for being enforced in Europe is to have individual sovereignty of countries over their patent laws. The votes in the Council have proved that individual countries easily cave in to corporate interest. The best hope to durably keep software patents from Europe is to have them explicitely banned by EU directive. A small but prosperous country like Denmark caved in to corporate pressure. A country with not much vested interest in existing technology like Poland caved in. Bigger countries all are home to big corporate patent huggers like Alcatel and Thomson in France, Siemens and Infineon in Germany, Philips in the Netherlands, etc... Only at the EU level can the conflicting national interests be conciliated and the pressure from non-EU powers be resisted.
A directive is a standard to which national law is required to comply before a certain deadline, otherwise the country can be fined and its justice decisions overturned by appeals to EU courts.
There is currently no directive standardizing patent law in Europe, and thus there is a lot of legal uncertainty as to the real enforcability of the many patents, including software patents issued by the European Patent Office from country to country.
Big corporation wanted, on the occasion of a directive cleaning up things, for this directive to explicitely validate software patents, and drafted the directive accordingly. The European parliement initially amended the draft to explicitely exclude _most_ software patents. The Council, made up of the cabinet-level person in charge from each country, largely unaccountable to their national parliements in the matter, reverted the amendments to again allow software patents and sent the draft back to the parliement (which meanwhile had been elected anew), which refused to vote it as is, but this time didn't write new amendments.
The directive has been dropped at that point so we're back to the legal uncertainty, but at least with no explicit software patents at the EU level.
And also even with their "out-of-nuclear energy" legislation, the German industry (Siemens, E.ON) has partnered with the French industry (Areva, GDF) to develop a next-generation nuclear reactor EPR, a prototype of which will be built in France, and I think the design has already been exported (Finland, something like that). So the German nuclear power industry is alive and kicking.
Germany hasn't dismantled their nuclear power plants just yet. They have a law saying that the existing plants will be shut down after a shorter than expected lifetime (20 years instead of 30) and that no new plants will be built, but this is expected to be turned around by the next legislature way before a single plant is actually concerned. I don't know whether they export lots of electricity from France. France does a lot of business selling electricity to Spain and Italy though.
kW.h prices for individual households in France are close to the European average, but the effective price is somewhat lower since the monopoly electrical utility belongs to the state, and that the juicy profits it makes are that much tax that doesn't have to be paid.
Nobody's a loser. The stakes were different. France wants local jobs and hi-tech projects to fill up vast, empty, but hospitable spaces (Provence) where people will be happy to relocate. Japan is a cramped country as it is, and they don't have an unemployement problem. But on the other hand they get much more bang for their buck in terms of industrial benefits and control of the project.
The key here is that the EU WOULD indeed have done the project by themselves, especially in these times where big, pan-european hi-tech grand projects are all the rage in Brussels (see the Galileo GPS project and talks of "re-orienting" the EU budget towards research and science). Japan then would have been left in a duo with the US to whom the would have had to yield everything.
Much better energy efficiency per passenger*mile travelled.
More flexible scheduling in peak hours and seasons.
More security. France's TGV high speed train network has moved hundreds of millions of passengers since the early 80s and not a single person lost her life in an accident, even though trains went off track at full speed (180+ mph) on one or two occasions.
More comfort. No more going to and from remote airports. No more stripping for the security. No more waiting for boarding or for checking in your luggage. Infinitely more leg room. Affordable first class with even more room. A restaurant-bar car in every train. Possibility to use your cellphone at any time.
more than half of the top 500 runs on Intel processors, including 77 on Itanium, the rest essentially Xeon, and that's versus 25 AMDs and a quickly fading Alpha.
France is indeed the only country, besides the US and Russia, to be able to build and aquit a modern fighter jet all on its own, as in structure AND engines AND radar/avionics AND weapons.
England, Italy, Brazil and Japan have no such project on their own. The UK hasn't had a fully national project since the Harrier in the 70s, which they passed on to the US which developped the Harrier II essentially on its own. The Eurofighter Typhoon is made in cooperation with Germany, Italy and Spain, and the UK is a junior partner on the JSF. They have an advanced trainer program (the Hawk) which is just a trainer and not very new either.
China, Japan and Brazil have never developped a full plane on their own, even though they have done / have the capacity to produce under license.
As for Sweden, it is true that the Gripen is quite indigeneous. However it depends on foreign suppliers for its weapons and they sell it in a joint venture with Britain's BAe Systems.
The EU was the one that would be negotiating at the international level from the start. The French bid first disputed a primary within the EU against a Spanish proposal for who would host ITER if awarded to the EU. After the Spanish retracted their bid the French project officially became the EU proposition.
These things have already killed 14 people, more than all the other space programs in the world combined. Will there ever be an end to this madness. It is a flawed, pointless program.
Apple is not interested in a chip because it occasionaly has a good performance. What they went to Intel for is
Depth in the roadmap. Remember how in the good old days many personal computera were strangled out of the market because they were stuck in a dead-end CPU line ? All the 68k machines (Apple back then already made a good move of jumping ship), all the 8-bit stuff (Apple failed to keep the Apple II line alive because there was no good successor to the 6502), etc. Intel may occasionaly tumble on their roadmap, but you know for a fact that 15 years from now they'll be making IA-32 compatible chips that are gonna have up-to-date performance, whatever that means then.
Reliability in delivering volumes. Apple is a small player that has to manage lots of things vertically. They have had inventory problems and want to minimize risk in this department.
Range of products. It is known that at any given time Intel will have a resonnably good laptop proc AND a reasonnably good economy desktop proc AND a reasonnably good performance desktop proc AND workstation AND server, etc. And since Apple wants to cover all of these markets they are comfortable with someone who can deliver everywhere.
As the cherry on top of the cake, Intel happens to have a popular line of chips for mobile devices, and Apple likes to sell those too.
While I oppose patents on business methods, software and algorithm, I think I am in favor for such a case as video games patent. What better mean to force some diversity in the gameplay at last ? It would be a form of copyright, a form of author's rights, the same that enable novels and movies to have passably differing scripts and stories and not copy on each other. Enabling incremental technical improvements, which is the main reason to oppose other forms of patents, doesn't seem as important in this case.
Why would it be ? You think AMD has some magical trick to make processors at a cheaper cost ? If boxed processors from AMD are cheaper than Intel it's because they HAVE TO. AMD is the challenger, and that's how it works in all domain of economics : the market leader can afford to price higher that's all. Are you privvy to the deals that are actually made between Intel and the likes of Dell or IBM ? What to you know of their high quantitiy pricing policy ?
The fact is, if Apple wants to go x86 (which I think they should), they'll consider both Intel and AMD, talk to them, see what they can get and make a strategic desicison. If Intel decides that it's worth it then they'll underbid AMD. Or maybe Apple might decide that they want a supplier that is more reliable for delivering big quantity orders given that they've themselves been bitten so often by back-ordering problems.
Well then know that tuition paid by foreign students in US universities are vital for funding these and hence keep the domestic tuitions from increasing even more. And on the macroeconomic scale it is a sizeable ease on the country's abysmal trade deficit.
It looks like a small helicopter to me. So what's new ?
In the 1950s when helicopters became commonplace, many people already thought that they would replace cars for individual transportation. We know what happened. They didn't even mange to grab a share of recreational flyers.
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Even after I became a born-again atheist a few years ago, I still don't like the Catholic Church bashing that is based on the Galileo affair. It seems to me like a form of rabbid anti-clerical or anti-catholic myth that misunderstands the real context of the time.
First the Church is depicted as bent on hiding promethean secrets from the "people", while in fact, in a time before widespread litteracy, before technology and thus before science had any economic value of its own, the Catholic Church was the main patron and funder of serious scientific research, including that of Galileo.
Secondly, Galileo specifically tried to re-interpret religious beliefs in the light of his own theories, which is why he was tried by the Inquisition, not because of the theories themselves.
In other words, Galileo tried to cross the science/spirituality borderline in the opposite way that creationnists today, and the Church was not happy about that, it was not about some calculations which, while groundbreaking, nobody really cared about.
And after all, our modern understanding of the Cosmos does not put the Sun at the center of the universe any more than the Earth. So in a way heliocentrism as a philosophy is as wrong as Anthropocentrism. As a matter of fact, and again, as an ATHEIST, if I had to choose I would pick terra-centrism since after all, what we call Cosmos, is a product of our common Human perception, and Terra is where we live.
If the creationists are right, then all biologists are in violation of the DMCA and can be sued by God.
I didn't mean otherwise. By free-market ideology I was not referring to the actual economic mechanism of free markets, but to the ideology of corporate wellfare, attacks on the sovereignty of nations and people self-determination that nowadays fraudulently passes for economic pragmatism and libertarianism.
It is a sad fact, indeed, that stringent intellectual property status-quo passes for economic libertarianism, and that people forget that they essentially consist in government-enforced monopolies and limitations to freedom of speech.
The Commission is one thing, the Council another. The obvious problem with the commission is that it is non-elected and non-accountable, however to a certain extent. We must remember that a commission was cornered into resignation by a parliementary enquiry a while ago, and this Italian homophobic dude who was kept out also based on parliementary pressure. The Commission is supposedly strictly technocratic and apolitical, and in reality very strongly ideologically molded into a free-market worshipping sorcerer apprentice that thinks Europe should be turned into the ultimate Adam Smith lab test.
However the commission only drafts directives, and doesn't vote on them. Its defeat on the patent directive shows that there are limits to its powers after all, and its bad name puts it right in the cross-hairs of each and every EU bashing force in Europe.
Another problem is the Council. As a meeting of national government representative, they bear the seal of democracy. The problem with them is that their debades occur behind closed doors, and in effect there is few oversight from the individual nations political forces. One solution is to institutionalize the oversight of Council discussions by national parliements, which the draft constitution did in a way that was too weak to be valuable.
I disagree with RMS in saying that the way to prevent software patent for being enforced in Europe is to have individual sovereignty of countries over their patent laws. The votes in the Council have proved that individual countries easily cave in to corporate interest. The best hope to durably keep software patents from Europe is to have them explicitely banned by EU directive.
A small but prosperous country like Denmark caved in to corporate pressure. A country with not much vested interest in existing technology like Poland caved in. Bigger countries all are home to big corporate patent huggers like Alcatel and Thomson in France, Siemens and Infineon in Germany, Philips in the Netherlands, etc...
Only at the EU level can the conflicting national interests be conciliated and the pressure from non-EU powers be resisted.
A directive is a standard to which national law is required to comply before a certain deadline, otherwise the country can be fined and its justice decisions overturned by appeals to EU courts.
There is currently no directive standardizing patent law in Europe, and thus there is a lot of legal uncertainty as to the real enforcability of the many patents, including software patents issued by the European Patent Office from country to country.
Big corporation wanted, on the occasion of a directive cleaning up things, for this directive to explicitely validate software patents, and drafted the directive accordingly. The European parliement initially amended the draft to explicitely exclude _most_ software patents. The Council, made up of the cabinet-level person in charge from each country, largely unaccountable to their national parliements in the matter, reverted the amendments to again allow software patents and sent the draft back to the parliement (which meanwhile had been elected anew), which refused to vote it as is, but this time didn't write new amendments.
The directive has been dropped at that point so we're back to the legal uncertainty, but at least with no explicit software patents at the EU level.
We hardly knew ya.
I can indeed hear that laugh, albeit muffled by six feet of earth.
And also even with their "out-of-nuclear energy" legislation, the German industry (Siemens, E.ON) has partnered with the French industry (Areva, GDF) to develop a next-generation nuclear reactor EPR, a prototype of which will be built in France, and I think the design has already been exported (Finland, something like that). So the German nuclear power industry is alive and kicking.
Germany hasn't dismantled their nuclear power plants just yet. They have a law saying that the existing plants will be shut down after a shorter than expected lifetime (20 years instead of 30) and that no new plants will be built, but this is expected to be turned around by the next legislature way before a single plant is actually concerned. I don't know whether they export lots of electricity from France. France does a lot of business selling electricity to Spain and Italy though.
kW.h prices for individual households in France are close to the European average, but the effective price is somewhat lower since the monopoly electrical utility belongs to the state, and that the juicy profits it makes are that much tax that doesn't have to be paid.
Nobody's a loser. The stakes were different. France wants local jobs and hi-tech projects to fill up vast, empty, but hospitable spaces (Provence) where people will be happy to relocate. Japan is a cramped country as it is, and they don't have an unemployement problem. But on the other hand they get much more bang for their buck in terms of industrial benefits and control of the project.
The key here is that the EU WOULD indeed have done the project by themselves, especially in these times where big, pan-european hi-tech grand projects are all the rage in Brussels (see the Galileo GPS project and talks of "re-orienting" the EU budget towards research and science). Japan then would have been left in a duo with the US to whom the would have had to yield everything.
Much better energy efficiency per passenger*mile travelled.
More flexible scheduling in peak hours and seasons.
More security. France's TGV high speed train network has moved hundreds of millions of passengers since the early 80s and not a single person lost her life in an accident, even though trains went off track at full speed (180+ mph) on one or two occasions.
More comfort. No more going to and from remote airports. No more stripping for the security. No more waiting for boarding or for checking in your luggage. Infinitely more leg room. Affordable first class with even more room. A restaurant-bar car in every train. Possibility to use your cellphone at any time.
more than half of the top 500 runs on Intel processors, including 77 on Itanium, the rest essentially Xeon, and that's versus 25 AMDs and a quickly fading Alpha.
France is indeed the only country, besides the US and Russia, to be able to build and aquit a modern fighter jet all on its own, as in structure AND engines AND radar/avionics AND weapons.
England, Italy, Brazil and Japan have no such project on their own. The UK hasn't had a fully national project since the Harrier in the 70s, which they passed on to the US which developped the Harrier II essentially on its own. The Eurofighter Typhoon is made in cooperation with Germany, Italy and Spain, and the UK is a junior partner on the JSF. They have an advanced trainer program (the Hawk) which is just a trainer and not very new either.
China, Japan and Brazil have never developped a full plane on their own, even though they have done / have the capacity to produce under license.
As for Sweden, it is true that the Gripen is quite indigeneous. However it depends on foreign suppliers for its weapons and they sell it in a joint venture with Britain's BAe Systems.
The EU was the one that would be negotiating at the international level from the start. The French bid first disputed a primary within the EU against a Spanish proposal for who would host ITER if awarded to the EU. After the Spanish retracted their bid the French project officially became the EU proposition.
France's bid to build ITER is the backed by the EU, so we're talking 450 "mega-people" and 10+ "giga-dollars" of GDP.
And it is in fact the EU that has promised to build the project on its own anyway if it doesn't go through internationally.
The whole world treats the US as damage and goes around it.
These things have already killed 14 people, more than all the other space programs in the world combined. Will there ever be an end to this madness. It is a flawed, pointless program.
No, AMD couldn't increase capacity on an order from Apple. Chip production plants cost billions to build. That's BILLIONS, not millions.
Depth in the roadmap. Remember how in the good old days many personal computera were strangled out of the market because they were stuck in a dead-end CPU line ? All the 68k machines (Apple back then already made a good move of jumping ship), all the 8-bit stuff (Apple failed to keep the Apple II line alive because there was no good successor to the 6502), etc. Intel may occasionaly tumble on their roadmap, but you know for a fact that 15 years from now they'll be making IA-32 compatible chips that are gonna have up-to-date performance, whatever that means then.
Reliability in delivering volumes. Apple is a small player that has to manage lots of things vertically. They have had inventory problems and want to minimize risk in this department.
Range of products. It is known that at any given time Intel will have a resonnably good laptop proc AND a reasonnably good economy desktop proc AND a reasonnably good performance desktop proc AND workstation AND server, etc. And since Apple wants to cover all of these markets they are comfortable with someone who can deliver everywhere. As the cherry on top of the cake, Intel happens to have a popular line of chips for mobile devices, and Apple likes to sell those too.
While I oppose patents on business methods, software and algorithm, I think I am in favor for such a case as video games patent. What better mean to force some diversity in the gameplay at last ? It would be a form of copyright, a form of author's rights, the same that enable novels and movies to have passably differing scripts and stories and not copy on each other. Enabling incremental technical improvements, which is the main reason to oppose other forms of patents, doesn't seem as important in this case.
Why would it be ? You think AMD has some magical trick to make processors at a cheaper cost ? If boxed processors from AMD are cheaper than Intel it's because they HAVE TO. AMD is the challenger, and that's how it works in all domain of economics : the market leader can afford to price higher that's all. Are you privvy to the deals that are actually made between Intel and the likes of Dell or IBM ? What to you know of their high quantitiy pricing policy ?
The fact is, if Apple wants to go x86 (which I think they should), they'll consider both Intel and AMD, talk to them, see what they can get and make a strategic desicison. If Intel decides that it's worth it then they'll underbid AMD. Or maybe Apple might decide that they want a supplier that is more reliable for delivering big quantity orders given that they've themselves been bitten so often by back-ordering problems.
Well then know that tuition paid by foreign students in US universities are vital for funding these and hence keep the domestic tuitions from increasing even more. And on the macroeconomic scale it is a sizeable ease on the country's abysmal trade deficit.
This is another nail in the coffin of the US education industry. Universities in Canada and Australia probably celebrated the news with champagne.
It looks like a small helicopter to me. So what's new ?
In the 1950s when helicopters became commonplace, many people already thought that they would replace cars for individual transportation. We know what happened. They didn't even mange to grab a share of recreational flyers.
Bricolage is the French word for DIY, or, sometimes, hacking.