You're required by law to carry ID at all times in France, and the police may ask to see it at their discretion.
No. The police needs authorization from a judge. It's not a case by case authorization though. A judge might state, for example, that IDs can be checked at a particular time, in a particular neighborhood on people that look suspicious. While it's true that the police sometimes uses ID checking as a means of pressure on people in the street that are identified as potential troublemaker, the idea that a camera wielding, bermuda wearing tourist can be snatched at random and end up in jail because she has left her passport at her hotel is completely a myth.
Firstly, people for whom programming is too complicated should not code at all. We need less programmers building better code, not more programmers adding to the crap heap that the software legacy is as of today.
Secondly, I think that what is needed is the other way around : automated analysis of code and production of natural language reports that designers could browse more easily than the code itself looking for bugs or designing extensions and additionnal feature. They would then intervene directly on the code itself. Sort of a souped up version of Knuth's literate programming, only with a much more radical transformation of the code for its vizualisation, bringing up the essential and critical aspects.
Think of how a reasonably complicated mathematical proof, say within the formal set theory, would look like in a math paper or book meant to be read. Compare with how it would be coded in a theorem prover. Different. Yet the former can be automatically generated from the later.
The Commission is similar to the executive branch of the "government", while the council is similar to the upper house of a bi-cameral legislative branch (like the US Senate or the UK House of Lords). The Commission is supposedly accountable to the Parliement, and that has been leveraged a couple of times in the past, including recently when a overly conservative Italian candidate was barred from being the Justice Commissionner by the liberally minded Parliement.
Of course the euro-Parliement has no sway in who sits in the Council since this is determined by the democratic process in each country.
I think the majority rule for the Council in the future constitution is "a majority of countries representing 60% of the EU population" or something like that. The over-representation of smaller countries is a standard characteristic of upper-houses in bi-cameral legislative systems. For example the US Senate has two senators per state, regardless of the size of the state. Upper houses are supposed to act as an element of moderation to the rule of the plurality.
EU Parliement: Directly elected by the people, all at the same time. The number of representatives per country is correlated to the population of the country, but the smallest countries are overrepresented. Euro-MPs are grouped by political affiliation, rather than by nationality, even though the major political groups, don't have much political coherence across the members from different countries.
EU Commission: Civil servants designated by the national governments and approved by the Euro-parliement. One commissionner per country (the total number of commissionners will be capped by the future constitution, and a rotating system will be used). Commissionners are each assigned an domain of regulation (fishing, scientific research, external relations, trade, etc).
EU Council: Made of the ministers from each national government. Ministers of a given domain sit together to discuss and vote on regulation related to that domain. There is a special group called the euro-group of the finance ministers from the 12 countries that use the euro currency. Ministers in the council vote with a certain weight correlated to the country's size, which over-represents smaller countries even more than the parliement seat assignment.
Legilative process: It varies according to the domain. There is a "non-democratic" process that requires unanimity in the council and gives only a advisory role to the parliement, that is applied to domains such as defence, taxes, immigration, when national governments want to keep full sovereignty . There is a more democratic, "co-decision" process for matters of trade, to which the patents issue belong. In this process, the parliement and council act approximately like a bi-cameral parliementary system, trying to agree on a version of the bill.
This would amount to replacing the metric system by the Planck unit system. The metric system would be in effect to the new system what the imperial system if, for Americans, to the metric system nowadays.
A New Hope opened Cannes in 77. It seems like a proper closure to me, that the last Star Wars to be shot opens Cannes. And by the way, the opening movie is not part of the competition. It is often a popular movie, often from Hollywood, and has nothing to do with the artsy offering that acutally runs for the prizes.
For shareholders, this cash is only a few cents to the dollar. So they would not allow the MS management to spend it in vain. Plus I understand that they have distributed much of it as an exceptionnal dividend anyway. When and if the MS business model, which consists in Windows and Office, collapses, MS will disappear as we know it. They can always re-invest their cash in building mice and keyboards and putting the MS brand on it, it won't make a difference. Shareholders will not allow them to develop their OS if nobody will use it. And people will stop using it the second they don't have to.
Here's how it works : China manufactures a huge amount of shoes, electronics, cloths, etc, while much of their own popultion leves with no electricity at home and one pair of shoes for the whole family. How come ? Low standard of living is accepted in the same way that it was accepted by pioneers in the Wild West : they know and are conviced that the future of their children is bright, that they will themselves be better off the next year. Throw in an oppressive central government and you have 1.3 bn+ people sticking together on the path of industrialization and toward being the most powerful single nation economy in the world.
The bank's problem, as you say ? Currency is just paper, or at least it has been since the USD stopped being pegged to gold in the 70s, and the effective ultimate world currency became oil. What will happen is that China will gradually keep more and more of the shoes and DVD players that they make for their own population, trigering inflation in those countries that depend too much on imports for the comfort of their citizens.
The US govt bet is that this process will be too slow and that the Chinese population will grow impatient, spoiled and greedy, undermining the central authority and breaking up the country into a myriad of third world, submissive entities.
Funny thing : it was PRECISELY the topic of an engineer degree internship that I've made in the summer of 1997. Making a universal C++ template lib for SIMD programming, with application to the IA-32 MMX system. At the time there was already similar work all around, with the introduction of the MMX and the popular Alpha architecture that had a similar system. All that to say that it does not sound really new to me.
Does this mean that in a few years you will be able to charge $2000 for a transistor audio amplifier to a dorky audiophile who claims that "crossbar amps does not sound as good as old technology" ?
The Linux community is fighting for more sensible intelectual property laws, which would make life-saving drugs much more accessible to developing countries than money would.
This is disgusting. How much of that money will go directly back into big pharma ? How much stock of big pharma companies does Gates hold, directly or indirectly ? Is this legal in the first place since the money is coming from his foundation (presumably tax-free ?)
I'll try to avoid being modded down as redundant by adding that programming language designers should start tackling the difficult issues rather than ever discussing how to abstract the programming of van Neuman machine and being anal about re-use, B.S. "elegance" and useless concepts such as OO or whatnot-Oriented-programming. Do you keep changing the grammar of your native spoken language just because it's not optimal for expressing certain things ? Do you speak in 10 different languages according to which is best for what you have to say.
While many posters here rightly argue that early work on LISP, Scheme and ML essentially invented everything that had to be invented on programming sequential machines, my opinion is that people should settle on a simple, extremely mature, accessible standard such as C.
It's not that language design work is useless. It actually is my job. However, there are really useful problems out there in programming certain parterns of concurrency and synchronicity/asynchronycity, for example programming hardware behavior, systolic arrays, reconfigurable logic, multi-core processors, stream processors, grids, etc.
My main problem with this? Why should my cleaner pay taxes to fund a new airplane which she will likely never be able to afford to fly on!
Because your cleaner will have the opportunity to get well-paid business from well-paid aerospace engineers if the aircraft are designed in the country where she lives.
This has to be one of the most insightful posts ever on Slashdot about EU/US disputes, especially the last sentence about adapting to a world where China will be the biggest economic power by far, where India will be at lest much more important than it is now, and even when Russia will have made a significant comeback.
Decision-makers in the US have since the end of the cold war have seen the world as a "new world" on the rise, including the western hemisphere, the other smaller English-speaking nations, the small Asian economic tigers such as S. Korea and Singapore, and Eastern Europe, as opposed to a declining "old world", made of Continental Europe and Russia, the rest making up a hopeless "third world", including China, the non-industrial SE Asia and Africa.
This view mainly stems from two ideological mistakes. One is to oversee China based on the fact that they read in the National Review that it is a "communist country". The other is to stay in a world view based on the sovereignty of nation-states, while this view is undermined by globalization and increased economic co-dependence. The result of this shift is their inability to understand that what the "old world" lacks in internal growth, they make up by the external growth of patterns of cooperation, the most significant one being the enlargement of the EU and China's new membership in the WTO, soon to be followed by Russia's. This growth severely limits the US's ability to individually arm-twist nations based on the bilateral balance of power.
By knowing how to cooperate and how to live with relatively limited resources, most rich nations of the world are much better prepared than the US to cope with the arrival of new giant players in the clu.
From a Frenchman living in the US, who just bought a house here after extensive research on alternatively buying an investment property/comeback place in his native country:
Rates are actually a bit lower over there currently, about 4% for 20 years.
Downpayments are about the same, that is, 20% is considered normal, but from that point the banks will do whatever it takes to sell a loan to a solvent candidate, and in practice there are ways to buy with 10% or less, or even with next to nothing except for the high closing costs and taxes which can represent between 5 and 10%
However the loan durations are typically shorter. 10 to 20 years used to be standard, in the last few years it has been extended to 25 years, usually not more. 40 years or interest-only loans are unheard of. Like here there is a choice betwen fixed-rate and adjustable.
The biggest difference is that pre-payment is usually heavily penalized, and that refinancing is rare.
Life, disability and unemployment insurances are usually mandatory. The loan security system is complicated, and since setting up an individual mortgage is complicated and costly, most of people buy security from specialized loan insurance firms which mutualize risks. These firms will still sue you for your house if you default though.
Yes, the brits spent a lot of PR resources insisting on how Beagle 2 was a pure product of "British ingenuity" and how the whole mission was a continuation of "daring British explorers" etc.
They should have spent these resource on better design because Beagle 2 crashed without leaving any trace or signal.
Huygens is the ESA part of the NASA/ESA Cassini/Huygens mission. The probe's main contractor is Alcatel Space of France.
This article is just an indeological blurb recycling for the millionth time Americans' usual excuse for their telecom backwardness -- their land mass -- and adding some free-markedroid mantra to boot (the part about "wacky govt regulations").
About govt regulations : European countries _regulate_ their former monopoly telcos into offering to host their competitors' routers into their own last-mile hubs for _regulated_ fees, allowing customers to subscribe directly to a competitor's DSL offering bypassing the telco completely. So in this case gvt regulations _enable_ competition and the effect on prices and qos is dramatic. I will leave the most ideologically blindsided anti-gvt drones think about the paradoxical situation.
As for landmass, well, it brings obvious benefits to US residents, here are the drawbacks. You don't here from Japan that they are the #1 nation in agriculture because they make do with their small space. They just say ok, we depend on imports to eat, let's make up to that on smthg else.
Korea is more connected than the US, and that's a fact. The same way that Finland will nevercompte with spain for the tourism euros of the Germans seeking sun during their vacation, the US will have to cope with a huge overhead to keep up in the world of connected societies.
Maybe they should throw a little bit of gvt regulation into it.
-grames is the French version of a common (latin?) suffix indicating something written, or a record. Program, Sonogram, Grammar, (Deutsch) Grammophon, etc.
They haven't changed the name under which they are incorporated in France, but after they acquired the Atari brand name, they started using it for their communication and marketing.
There is no mention anywhere of subsidizing Infogrames. Anyway each and every government on earth "subsidizes" various economic sectors and corporations as they see fit. Direct subsidies are outlawed by various trade pacts and international treaties, but there are many holes in those and many other indirect ways for a government to weight in on an economic sector if it think this is strategically useful.
The US federal government does a lot of this, sometimes directly through subsidies (for example, the agriculture), through pork barrel programs, often of military nature (how many billions have the useless NMD poured into Boeing's and Lockheed's R&D depts ?), often through corporate wellfare, such as the Foreign Sales tax breaks that have been recently outlawed by the WTO, sometimes through tarriffs, for example on steel, which were also outlawed by the WTO, but lasted just enough for the American mills to restructure and survive until the explosion of Asian demand for steel, or the on Canadian lumber. The tax deduction of mortgage interest and the "soft sponsoring" of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac correspond to an effective subsidizing of the residential real-estate sector, etc...
Your US Airways example is bad, because the US has precisely massively, if indirectly, subsidized airlines after 9/11, in a manner that has drawn numerous complaints from Europe.
What of the most unexpected pieces of happiness that came with becoming a father a few months ago was for me to return to toy stores. I had left the "Toy scene" twenty years ago when all my attention was diverted to getting and upgrading home computers for myself. European toys rule : Lego, Playmobil, Smurf figures were here for me, are still here.
Oh yeah how about this : in the US, interest on mortgage is tax-deductible. This effectively means a subsidy from the federal gvt to the housebuilding industry corresponding to billions of dollars a year. So the house builders, those toolbelt wearing, ford 450 riding, W'04 bumper sticker showing heroes of entrepreneurship, individualism and self-sufficiency are a vastly subsidized industry.
(in France, interest on mortgage is tax deductible only for investment property that is put on the rental market).
Then how come the US govt does not pay for the health insurance of the 45 millions Americans who currently don't have any ? These people are much more at risk of dying from not getting the prescription drugs and medical attention they need then they are from a incoming ICBM.
Slashdot Mirror
No. The police needs authorization from a judge. It's not a case by case authorization though. A judge might state, for example, that IDs can be checked at a particular time, in a particular neighborhood on people that look suspicious. While it's true that the police sometimes uses ID checking as a means of pressure on people in the street that are identified as potential troublemaker, the idea that a camera wielding, bermuda wearing tourist can be snatched at random and end up in jail because she has left her passport at her hotel is completely a myth.
Firstly, people for whom programming is too complicated should not code at all. We need less programmers building better code, not more programmers adding to the crap heap that the software legacy is as of today.
Secondly, I think that what is needed is the other way around : automated analysis of code and production of natural language reports that designers could browse more easily than the code itself looking for bugs or designing extensions and additionnal feature. They would then intervene directly on the code itself.
Sort of a souped up version of Knuth's literate programming, only with a much more radical transformation of the code for its vizualisation, bringing up the essential and critical aspects.
Think of how a reasonably complicated mathematical proof, say within the formal set theory, would look like in a math paper or book meant to be read. Compare with how it would be coded in a theorem prover. Different. Yet the former can be automatically generated from the later.
The Commission is similar to the executive branch of the "government", while the council is similar to the upper house of a bi-cameral legislative branch (like the US Senate or the UK House of Lords). The Commission is supposedly accountable to the Parliement, and that has been leveraged a couple of times in the past, including recently when a overly conservative Italian candidate was barred from being the Justice Commissionner by the liberally minded Parliement.
Of course the euro-Parliement has no sway in who sits in the Council since this is determined by the democratic process in each country.
I think the majority rule for the Council in the future constitution is "a majority of countries representing 60% of the EU population" or something like that. The over-representation of smaller countries is a standard characteristic of upper-houses in bi-cameral legislative systems. For example the US Senate has two senators per state, regardless of the size of the state. Upper houses are supposed to act as an element of moderation to the rule of the plurality.
EU Parliement:
Directly elected by the people, all at the same time. The number of representatives per country is correlated to the population of the country, but the smallest countries are overrepresented. Euro-MPs are grouped by political affiliation, rather than by nationality, even though the major political groups, don't have much political coherence across the members from different countries.
EU Commission:
Civil servants designated by the national governments and approved by the Euro-parliement. One commissionner per country (the total number of commissionners will be capped by the future constitution, and a rotating system will be used). Commissionners are each assigned an domain of regulation (fishing, scientific research, external relations, trade, etc).
EU Council:
Made of the ministers from each national government. Ministers of a given domain sit together to discuss and vote on regulation related to that domain. There is a special group called the euro-group of the finance ministers from the 12 countries that use the euro currency. Ministers in the council vote with a certain weight correlated to the country's size, which over-represents smaller countries even more than the parliement seat assignment.
Legilative process:
It varies according to the domain. There is a "non-democratic" process that requires unanimity in the council and gives only a advisory role to the parliement, that is applied to domains such as defence, taxes, immigration, when national governments want to keep full sovereignty . There is a more democratic, "co-decision" process for matters of trade, to which the patents issue belong. In this process, the parliement and council act approximately like a bi-cameral parliementary system, trying to agree on a version of the bill.
This would amount to replacing the metric system by the Planck unit system. The metric system would be in effect to the new system what the imperial system if, for Americans, to the metric system nowadays.
And that would be a good thing.
A New Hope opened Cannes in 77. It seems like a proper closure to me, that the last Star Wars to be shot opens Cannes. And by the way, the opening movie is not part of the competition. It is often a popular movie, often from Hollywood, and has nothing to do with the artsy offering that acutally runs for the prizes.
For shareholders, this cash is only a few cents to the dollar. So they would not allow the MS management to spend it in vain. Plus I understand that they have distributed much of it as an exceptionnal dividend anyway. When and if the MS business model, which consists in Windows and Office, collapses, MS will disappear as we know it. They can always re-invest their cash in building mice and keyboards and putting the MS brand on it, it won't make a difference. Shareholders will not allow them to develop their OS if nobody will use it. And people will stop using it the second they don't have to.
Here's how it works : China manufactures a huge amount of shoes, electronics, cloths, etc, while much of their own popultion leves with no electricity at home and one pair of shoes for the whole family. How come ? Low standard of living is accepted in the same way that it was accepted by pioneers in the Wild West : they know and are conviced that the future of their children is bright, that they will themselves be better off the next year. Throw in an oppressive central government and you have 1.3 bn+ people sticking together on the path of industrialization and toward being the most powerful single nation economy in the world.
The bank's problem, as you say ? Currency is just paper, or at least it has been since the USD stopped being pegged to gold in the 70s, and the effective ultimate world currency became oil. What will happen is that China will gradually keep more and more of the shoes and DVD players that they make for their own population, trigering inflation in those countries that depend too much on imports for the comfort of their citizens.
The US govt bet is that this process will be too slow and that the Chinese population will grow impatient, spoiled and greedy, undermining the central authority and breaking up the country into a myriad of third world, submissive entities.
Funny thing : it was PRECISELY the topic of an engineer degree internship that I've made in the summer of 1997. Making a universal C++ template lib for SIMD programming, with application to the IA-32 MMX system. At the time there was already similar work all around, with the introduction of the MMX and the popular Alpha architecture that had a similar system. All that to say that it does not sound really new to me.
Does this mean that in a few years you will be able to charge $2000 for a transistor audio amplifier to a dorky audiophile who claims that "crossbar amps does not sound as good as old technology" ?
I don't know but the two potential explanations offered by the poster are pretty smart. Congrats.
The Linux community is fighting for more sensible intelectual property laws, which would make life-saving drugs much more accessible to developing countries than money would.
This is disgusting. How much of that money will go directly back into big pharma ? How much stock of big pharma companies does Gates hold, directly or indirectly ? Is this legal in the first place since the money is coming from his foundation (presumably tax-free ?)
.... oh yeah of course it's LISP.
I'll try to avoid being modded down as redundant by adding that programming language designers should start tackling the difficult issues rather than ever discussing how to abstract the programming of van Neuman machine and being anal about re-use, B.S. "elegance" and useless concepts such as OO or whatnot-Oriented-programming. Do you keep changing the grammar of your native spoken language just because it's not optimal for expressing certain things ? Do you speak in 10 different languages according to which is best for what you have to say.
While many posters here rightly argue that early work on LISP, Scheme and ML essentially invented everything that had to be invented on programming sequential machines, my opinion is that people should settle on a simple, extremely mature, accessible standard such as C.
It's not that language design work is useless. It actually is my job. However, there are really useful problems out there in programming certain parterns of concurrency and synchronicity/asynchronycity, for example programming hardware behavior, systolic arrays, reconfigurable logic, multi-core processors, stream processors, grids, etc.
Because your cleaner will have the opportunity to get well-paid business from well-paid aerospace engineers if the aircraft are designed in the country where she lives.
This has to be one of the most insightful posts ever on Slashdot about EU/US disputes, especially the last sentence about adapting to a world where China will be the biggest economic power by far, where India will be at lest much more important than it is now, and even when Russia will have made a significant comeback.
Decision-makers in the US have since the end of the cold war have seen the world as a "new world" on the rise, including the western hemisphere, the other smaller English-speaking nations, the small Asian economic tigers such as S. Korea and Singapore, and Eastern Europe, as opposed to a declining "old world", made of Continental Europe and Russia, the rest making up a hopeless "third world", including China, the non-industrial SE Asia and Africa.
This view mainly stems from two ideological mistakes. One is to oversee China based on the fact that they read in the National Review that it is a "communist country". The other is to stay in a world view based on the sovereignty of nation-states, while this view is undermined by globalization and increased economic co-dependence. The result of this shift is their inability to understand that what the "old world" lacks in internal growth, they make up by the external growth of patterns of cooperation, the most significant one being the enlargement of the EU and China's new membership in the WTO, soon to be followed by Russia's. This growth severely limits the US's ability to individually arm-twist nations based on the bilateral balance of power.
By knowing how to cooperate and how to live with relatively limited resources, most rich nations of the world are much better prepared than the US to cope with the arrival of new giant players in the clu.
From a Frenchman living in the US, who just bought a house here after extensive research on alternatively buying an investment property/comeback place in his native country:
Rates are actually a bit lower over there currently, about 4% for 20 years.
Downpayments are about the same, that is, 20% is considered normal, but from that point the banks will do whatever it takes to sell a loan to a solvent candidate, and in practice there are ways to buy with 10% or less, or even with next to nothing except for the high closing costs and taxes which can represent between 5 and 10%
However the loan durations are typically shorter. 10 to 20 years used to be standard, in the last few years it has been extended to 25 years, usually not more. 40 years or interest-only loans are unheard of. Like here there is a choice betwen fixed-rate and adjustable.
The biggest difference is that pre-payment is usually heavily penalized, and that refinancing is rare.
Life, disability and unemployment insurances are usually mandatory. The loan security system is complicated, and since setting up an individual mortgage is complicated and costly, most of people buy security from specialized loan insurance firms which mutualize risks. These firms will still sue you for your house if you default though.
Yes, the brits spent a lot of PR resources insisting on how Beagle 2 was a pure product of "British ingenuity" and how the whole mission was a continuation of "daring British explorers" etc.
They should have spent these resource on better design because Beagle 2 crashed without leaving any trace or signal.
Huygens is the ESA part of the NASA/ESA Cassini/Huygens mission. The probe's main contractor is Alcatel Space of France.
It has landed successfully.
This article is just an indeological blurb recycling for the millionth time Americans' usual excuse for their telecom backwardness -- their land mass -- and adding some free-markedroid mantra to boot (the part about "wacky govt regulations").
About govt regulations : European countries _regulate_ their former monopoly telcos into offering to host their competitors' routers into their own last-mile hubs for _regulated_ fees, allowing customers to subscribe directly to a competitor's DSL offering bypassing the telco completely. So in this case gvt regulations _enable_ competition and the effect on prices and qos is dramatic. I will leave the most ideologically blindsided anti-gvt drones think about the paradoxical situation.
As for landmass, well, it brings obvious benefits to US residents, here are the drawbacks. You don't here from Japan that they are the #1 nation in agriculture because they make do with their small space. They just say ok, we depend on imports to eat, let's make up to that on smthg else.
Korea is more connected than the US, and that's a fact. The same way that Finland will nevercompte with spain for the tourism euros of the Germans seeking sun during their vacation, the US will have to cope with a huge overhead to keep up in the world of connected societies.
Maybe they should throw a little bit of gvt regulation into it.
-grames is the French version of a common (latin?) suffix indicating something written, or a record. Program, Sonogram, Grammar, (Deutsch) Grammophon, etc.
They haven't changed the name under which they are incorporated in France, but after they acquired the Atari brand name, they started using it for their communication and marketing.
There is no mention anywhere of subsidizing Infogrames. Anyway each and every government on earth "subsidizes" various economic sectors and corporations as they see fit. Direct subsidies are outlawed by various trade pacts and international treaties, but there are many holes in those and many other indirect ways for a government to weight in on an economic sector if it think this is strategically useful.
The US federal government does a lot of this, sometimes directly through subsidies (for example, the agriculture), through pork barrel programs, often of military nature (how many billions have the useless NMD poured into Boeing's and Lockheed's R&D depts ?), often through corporate wellfare, such as the Foreign Sales tax breaks that have been recently outlawed by the WTO, sometimes through tarriffs, for example on steel, which were also outlawed by the WTO, but lasted just enough for the American mills to restructure and survive until the explosion of Asian demand for steel, or the on Canadian lumber. The tax deduction of mortgage interest and the "soft sponsoring" of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac correspond to an effective subsidizing of the residential real-estate sector, etc...
Your US Airways example is bad, because the US has precisely massively, if indirectly, subsidized airlines after 9/11, in a manner that has drawn numerous complaints from Europe.
There is always a real doctor in EMR ambulances
What of the most unexpected pieces of happiness that came with becoming a father a few months ago was for me to return to toy stores. I had left the "Toy scene" twenty years ago when all my attention was diverted to getting and upgrading home computers for myself. European toys rule : Lego, Playmobil, Smurf figures were here for me, are still here.
Oh yeah how about this : in the US, interest on mortgage is tax-deductible. This effectively means a subsidy from the federal gvt to the housebuilding industry corresponding to billions of dollars a year. So the house builders, those toolbelt wearing, ford 450 riding, W'04 bumper sticker showing heroes of entrepreneurship, individualism and self-sufficiency are a vastly subsidized industry.
(in France, interest on mortgage is tax deductible only for investment property that is put on the rental market).
"You cannot put a price on American lives."
Then how come the US govt does not pay for the health insurance of the 45 millions Americans who currently don't have any ? These people are much more at risk of dying from not getting the prescription drugs and medical attention they need then they are from a incoming ICBM.