This is ridiculous. The French _do_ teach their children about the holocausts, and _do_ show nazi artefacts. Don't worry for us, we're very well informed about the Nazi era. We don't burn or hide anything. And, quite franfly, coming from (I assume) an American, these comments are very ironic.
Here we've had an agressive association led by dumbasses who found a sympathetic judge. Period. Now get back to your kindergarten and stop teaching lessons on issues you have no clue about.
Bull. $1/min is for specific services that nobody is interested in (dating, for example). Services-related to commerce, phone books travels, banking, etc..., are much cheaper. (between 2c/min and 10c/min, basically).
And, being a dumb ascii termical, Minitel is very fast, 2400 bps or not. You never wait more than 3 or 4 seconds to have your page displayed. It is extremely easy to use. Another non-negligible thing is that it is immeidately ready to use when you turn it on, you don't wait for a system to boot, you don't have to look for the right icon, etc... Just turn it on, and you're ready.
Maybe if the native English speaking folks were slightly more courteous and did not consider that speaking English is something that the rest of the worlds OWES them, even when they are touring in foreign countries, and maybe if they also did not consider as "rude" or "nationalist bigotry" the fact that some non-native English speakers don't provide an English translation for everything, and maybe if they were showing some more good will and respect, then maybe they would deserve us to make some more efforts.
Now get out your head of your ass and try to learn, for example, a Roman language. It's extremely interesting and beautiful.
Actually healthcare is a very bad example when you wanna do capitalist evangelism. Turns out that the doctors in the Soviet Union were pretty good, as they were in Cuba before its massive empoverishment. In Russia, things got really bad when the USSR collapsed and the healthcare system was, say "privatised" (understand: it disappeared).
America, as the most market-oriented society, is pretty damn good at many things, but that their healthcare system is blatantly inefficient (go to Table 1, and look at the "Overall health system performance" index) for such a wealthy and well-equipped country.
Actually, it turns out that, if you add the British and French worldwide market shares, you have at least two thirds of the whole market. Americans are still quite big on "violent" video-games, doom-like and others, but very small in other areas. The French (Infogrammes and Ubisoft) are especially big on "nice" small kid-oriented video games, and North America accounts for one half of their sales.
Sorry if this sounds chauvinist or something, but, after reading most of my fellow/. contributors, I think I need to mention this: I've already noticed that Americans don't pay much attention about what is going on in Europe and prefer to think that the next big thing will come from an emerging country (typically India or China), or that, if it comes from a highly developped country (Japan), it will come from Asia anyway.
FYI, my American friends, India may be a serious threat, Japan may be a serious threat, but your most dangerous competitor is actually the old and boring world, aka "socialist" Western Europe, which is filled with excellent engineers and mighty investors, and where the quality standards are culturally higher than in the US. Ok, this is old news, but what recently changed is that Europeans made a pretty good job in learning from Americans a few things about business, while avoiding many of the bad ideas, and that the EU has progressively built a pretty well-designed economic zone, with a huge market and healthy competition between the different countries.
So, I know this doesn't sound as romantic, and I apologize for this, but please note that Cisco's most serious rival is probably Alcatel, Time-Warner's most serious rival is Vivendi-Universal, the cellular phones leaders are Scandinavian companies, the best performing car corporations these days are the Volkswagen and Renault groups, the leaders in video games are British and French, etc...
As far as "formalism" and bureaucracy are concerned, the experience of your friend is specific to a company. I'm currently in the US for 2 or 3 years (I love New York), and I as well as many of my friends were actually surprised to find out that their work in the US is more bureaucratic, more "procedural" should I say, than it was in France. I assume everything depends on the size of the company, its age and its culture.
> Much lower salaries. I can make about 4 or 5
> time my salary in the US.
You're in a very specific situation: you're a ph.d student. In France, you're scandalously underpaid (something that many associations are trying to change) because you suffer competition from engineers of Grandes Ecoles, and you also get paid by the academe. In other words: this is by far the very worst figure when you want to compare French and US salaries (actually, ph.d students in the US are also usually underpaid: in Columbia Univ., for example, it's 1300$/month approximately, ie roughly like in France, but in a place -New York- where life is much more expensive).
On average, in high-tech jobs, you can safely say that the US salary will be twice the French salary. But most of the good US IT jobs are in places (Valley, SF, NYC, Boston, Chicago...) where life is insanely expensive, especially housing: remember, for example, that an appartment in Manhattan is 3 times the price of an appartement of the same size in Paris.
Before distrusting the French so quickly because of the usual francophobic enumeration (made in part of facts, in part of damn lies, and in part of a very questionable way of interpreting things), did you ever had a chance to have a look at your own place and wonder if, by any chance, you might not want to open your own closets before trying to find some bad guys out there? I will be happy to do the enumeration for you, if you wish, but it will take long.
I know that most British tabloids seem to have nothing better to do than bashing the French in a way that is not very different than what could be found about jews in the antisemitic press and "litterature" across Europe in the beginning of the 20th century. I'm happy to report that there is no such equivalent in France. I would also like to remind you that the French system, as opposed to the British one, is not designed to have only two strong political parties, both very secure for the establishment. Which means that "protest votes" can express themselves, as opposed to the UK and the US where people in distrust with politics just don't vote. As a consequence, a populist party can end up with a strong score from time to time, just like the National Front. Note also that the National Front is currently declining very fast; it was, during the last elections, the 7th political formation, which makes it very weak. Interpreting its (former) strength as a symptom of the fact that the French are most nationalistic than others is unfair, and you know it. With Le Pen and the National Front, the difference between France and (for example) the UK is that French racist and nationalist voters have found a way to express their disgusting hatred. I'm sure you also know that, since WWII, no government leaders in France have come close to Mrs Thatcher's rhetoric when it comes to nationalist, and complex of superiority.
I'm also sorry to remind you that France faces its history, even its most shameful parts. Being an avid reader of the British press (I love British newspapers, at least the serious ones), I can safely claim that the same is not true in the UK. I can also safely claim that the UK suffers from a strange francophobic obsession that distorts the way they interpret almost everything happening on the international scene. This is the kind of attitute that he French, Germans, Italians, Dutch, etc... left behind them decades ago.
I don't know about healthcare in Italy but healthcare in France kicks ass. Coverage is universal, you'll get the best drugs, the best equipment, the best exams, without having to call a silly insurance company to ask them to allow you to get an operation for that fuckin' brain tumor that isn't included in the HMO plan.
I actually don't like Perl too (well, it can be very useful for the very specific tasks for which it was initially intended, but that's it), and I'm not surprised that you now favour Java. But Python and OCaml are a very different matter.
You're right, but this is a good reason to USE Java. Not to like it. Java is a good choice as fas a realpolitik is concerned. Not a morally, technically satisfying one.
Functional programming is of course one of the important issues (although I don't use much of it in Python, only in Caml), but there are many others. For example, the simple fact that you can use Python and Caml via a command-line interpreter makes programming much more comfortable.
Also, a very important quality of Python and Caml, as opposed to Java, is that they don't enforce a specific paradigm: you wanna do fully procedural, go for it, you wanna do fully OO, go for it, you wanna do imperative, you wanna do functional, you wanna combine everything, go for it.
Last, as far as the OO/procedural choice is concerned, the difference with other so-called flexible" languages (such as Perl and C++ which also let you choose), is that, in the case of Python of OCaml, this does not come at the cost of a compromise and, more specifically, a flawed object model. I actually think the the OO models in Python and OCaml are both amazing and better than the Java counterpart.
Well, yes, there is a connection: the problem here is that every quality one can find in Java (the usual ones: portability, decent object model, garbage collection, etc...) are also available in the two competitors I mentioned, which also turn out to have many other advantages, some of them crucial, that one doesn't have in Java. My preference for Python and OCaml are simply based on a long checklist comparison.
My, this really sounds stupid to consider coding and testing/debugging as two distinct tasks.
As fas a I'm conderned, I'm gonna spend the next 365 days writing code non-stop, adding functionnalities each time I think of any, and I won't even try to compile or run the software untill these 365 days are over. Then I'll send my code on the Internet so that other "less productive" developers test and debug it, and because it will obviously turn out that all this code is an awful mess that can't be debugged, I'll claim that the rest of th world is outrageously improductive. Deal?
I forgot: the fact that you only choose to remember, in the very dense 25 years that followed the French revolution, the 10 months of the "terror", is typical of a certain Anglo-Saxon propaganda that comes from an establishment who doesn't like the idea that their people might have the guts to fight the establishment when they're getting screwed. The anti-revolution propaganda started in the UK immediately in 1789, and it's still part, in a different shape, of the narrative. As minimizing its very deep impact on the whole Europe is also an obligatory attitude.
Ok, you're just ridiculizing yourself. You haven't demonstrated anything, and you know it.
You obviously know nothing about the revolution, nor about the European coalitions that immediately started fighting it (oh, I know, it's always much more comfortable to make the French responsible of anything that goes wrong).
As far as the change of republic goes, you're also ignorant. The constitution was changed peacefully, because it was time for important reforms. On the contrary, America, just like Italy or the UK, whose systems actually also need radical changes as the one that were necessary with the 4th republic, have always been blatantly impotent to change archaic and cumbersome institutions. The American experts in American policy know how this system has become inefficient in the way it distributes power, but nothing can be done. As long as business goes on... Even the electoral system sucks, and nothing happens until an election turns into an hilarious turkey (happy Thanksgiving!).
Last, the constitution in France does not have the same role as in the US. It specifies the way institutions work, not the values, which are specified by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which hasn't changed still 1789. It's OK to replace the constituion when the institutions have become unadapted. Under this approach, the American constitution would have been changed at least 3 times since the birth of the US. The only reason why it didn't is that is is considered untouchable, just (and after tremendous efforts) "amendable". The irrational ones are not the ones you think.
This decision is actually only temporary. The EU is waiting for the end of a large consultation which should end december, 15. As such, the EU decided not to precipitate. But the issue is not solved yet.
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This is ridiculous. The French _do_ teach their children about the holocausts, and _do_ show nazi artefacts. Don't worry for us, we're very well informed about the Nazi era. We don't burn or hide anything. And, quite franfly, coming from (I assume) an American, these comments are very ironic.
Here we've had an agressive association led by dumbasses who found a sympathetic judge. Period. Now get back to your kindergarten and stop teaching lessons on issues you have no clue about.
Bull. $1/min is for specific services that nobody is interested in (dating, for example). Services-related to commerce, phone books travels, banking, etc..., are much cheaper. (between 2c/min and 10c/min, basically).
And, being a dumb ascii termical, Minitel is very fast, 2400 bps or not. You never wait more than 3 or 4 seconds to have your page displayed. It is extremely easy to use. Another non-negligible thing is that it is immeidately ready to use when you turn it on, you don't wait for a system to boot, you don't have to look for the right icon, etc... Just turn it on, and you're ready.
Maybe if the native English speaking folks were slightly more courteous and did not consider that speaking English is something that the rest of the worlds OWES them, even when they are touring in foreign countries, and maybe if they also did not consider as "rude" or "nationalist bigotry" the fact that some non-native English speakers don't provide an English translation for everything, and maybe if they were showing some more good will and respect, then maybe they would deserve us to make some more efforts.
Now get out your head of your ass and try to learn, for example, a Roman language. It's extremely interesting and beautiful.
America, as the most market-oriented society, is pretty damn good at many things, but that their healthcare system is blatantly inefficient (go to Table 1, and look at the "Overall health system performance" index) for such a wealthy and well-equipped country.
At least, nowhere else than in James Bond's movies have I seen such twisted/fucked up/unnecessarily expensive sweet homes.
Maybe Larry Ellison is part of SPECTER, after all (he already has the right temper, apparently). Which number? I bet on #6.
Actually, it turns out that, if you add the British and French worldwide market shares, you have at least two thirds of the whole market. Americans are still quite big on "violent" video-games, doom-like and others, but very small in other areas. The French (Infogrammes and Ubisoft) are especially big on "nice" small kid-oriented video games, and North America accounts for one half of their sales.
Sorry if this sounds chauvinist or something, but, after reading most of my fellow /. contributors, I think I need to mention this: I've already noticed that Americans don't pay much attention about what is going on in Europe and prefer to think that the next big thing will come from an emerging country (typically India or China), or that, if it comes from a highly developped country (Japan), it will come from Asia anyway.
FYI, my American friends, India may be a serious threat, Japan may be a serious threat, but your most dangerous competitor is actually the old and boring world, aka "socialist" Western Europe, which is filled with excellent engineers and mighty investors, and where the quality standards are culturally higher than in the US. Ok, this is old news, but what recently changed is that Europeans made a pretty good job in learning from Americans a few things about business, while avoiding many of the bad ideas, and that the EU has progressively built a pretty well-designed economic zone, with a huge market and healthy competition between the different countries.
So, I know this doesn't sound as romantic, and I apologize for this, but please note that Cisco's most serious rival is probably Alcatel, Time-Warner's most serious rival is Vivendi-Universal, the cellular phones leaders are Scandinavian companies, the best performing car corporations these days are the Volkswagen and Renault groups, the leaders in video games are British and French, etc...
As far as "formalism" and bureaucracy are concerned, the experience of your friend is specific to a company. I'm currently in the US for 2 or 3 years (I love New York), and I as well as many of my friends were actually surprised to find out that their work in the US is more bureaucratic, more "procedural" should I say, than it was in France. I assume everything depends on the size of the company, its age and its culture.
> Much lower salaries. I can make about 4 or 5
> time my salary in the US.
You're in a very specific situation: you're a ph.d student. In France, you're scandalously underpaid (something that many associations are trying to change) because you suffer competition from engineers of Grandes Ecoles, and you also get paid by the academe. In other words: this is by far the very worst figure when you want to compare French and US salaries (actually, ph.d students in the US are also usually underpaid: in Columbia Univ., for example, it's 1300$/month approximately, ie roughly like in France, but in a place -New York- where life is much more expensive).
On average, in high-tech jobs, you can safely say that the US salary will be twice the French salary. But most of the good US IT jobs are in places (Valley, SF, NYC, Boston, Chicago...) where life is insanely expensive, especially housing: remember, for example, that an appartment in Manhattan is 3 times the price of an appartement of the same size in Paris.
Before distrusting the French so quickly because of the usual francophobic enumeration (made in part of facts, in part of damn lies, and in part of a very questionable way of interpreting things), did you ever had a chance to have a look at your own place and wonder if, by any chance, you might not want to open your own closets before trying to find some bad guys out there? I will be happy to do the enumeration for you, if you wish, but it will take long.
I know that most British tabloids seem to have nothing better to do than bashing the French in a way that is not very different than what could be found about jews in the antisemitic press and "litterature" across Europe in the beginning of the 20th century. I'm happy to report that there is no such equivalent in France. I would also like to remind you that the French system, as opposed to the British one, is not designed to have only two strong political parties, both very secure for the establishment. Which means that "protest votes" can express themselves, as opposed to the UK and the US where people in distrust with politics just don't vote. As a consequence, a populist party can end up with a strong score from time to time, just like the National Front. Note also that the National Front is currently declining very fast; it was, during the last elections, the 7th political formation, which makes it very weak. Interpreting its (former) strength as a symptom of the fact that the French are most nationalistic than others is unfair, and you know it. With Le Pen and the National Front, the difference between France and (for example) the UK is that French racist and nationalist voters have found a way to express their disgusting hatred. I'm sure you also know that, since WWII, no government leaders in France have come close to Mrs Thatcher's rhetoric when it comes to nationalist, and complex of superiority.
I'm also sorry to remind you that France faces its history, even its most shameful parts. Being an avid reader of the British press (I love British newspapers, at least the serious ones), I can safely claim that the same is not true in the UK. I can also safely claim that the UK suffers from a strange francophobic obsession that distorts the way they interpret almost everything happening on the international scene. This is the kind of attitute that he French, Germans, Italians, Dutch, etc... left behind them decades ago.
Sir,
You're not funny.
Nope. German.
"The Eurotunnel was almost destroyed by French farmers."
"The French National Front is the third largest political organization."
"If the conditions of France and Germany had been reversed, after WW I, Europe would have been in a lot worse mess."
Man, could you please STOP LYING AND WRITING SUCH UTTERLY NONSENSE SILLY CRAP? Thanks in advance.
Even if you've been through the obligatory lip service ("pleasant people..."), you really have a problem with the French, don't you?
I don't know about healthcare in Italy but healthcare in France kicks ass. Coverage is universal, you'll get the best drugs, the best equipment, the best exams, without having to call a silly insurance company to ask them to allow you to get an operation for that fuckin' brain tumor that isn't included in the HMO plan.
Actually, a very recent poll show that it is exactly the opposite. France is the #1 country in which Europeans want to live.
I actually don't like Perl too (well, it can be very useful for the very specific tasks for which it was initially intended, but that's it), and I'm not surprised that you now favour Java. But Python and OCaml are a very different matter.
You're right, but this is a good reason to USE Java. Not to like it. Java is a good choice as fas a realpolitik is concerned. Not a morally, technically satisfying one.
Functional programming is of course one of the important issues (although I don't use much of it in Python, only in Caml), but there are many others. For example, the simple fact that you can use Python and Caml via a command-line interpreter makes programming much more comfortable.
Also, a very important quality of Python and Caml, as opposed to Java, is that they don't enforce a specific paradigm: you wanna do fully procedural, go for it, you wanna do fully OO, go for it, you wanna do imperative, you wanna do functional, you wanna combine everything, go for it.
Last, as far as the OO/procedural choice is concerned, the difference with other so-called flexible" languages (such as Perl and C++ which also let you choose), is that, in the case of Python of OCaml, this does not come at the cost of a compromise and, more specifically, a flawed object model. I actually think the the OO models in Python and OCaml are both amazing and better than the Java counterpart.
Well, yes, there is a connection: the problem here is that every quality one can find in Java (the usual ones: portability, decent object model, garbage collection, etc...) are also available in the two competitors I mentioned, which also turn out to have many other advantages, some of them crucial, that one doesn't have in Java. My preference for Python and OCaml are simply based on a long checklist comparison.
I personally dislike Java 'cause I happen to know and use Python and Objective Caml. Enough said.
My, this really sounds stupid to consider coding and testing/debugging as two distinct tasks.
As fas a I'm conderned, I'm gonna spend the next 365 days writing code non-stop, adding functionnalities each time I think of any, and I won't even try to compile or run the software untill these 365 days are over. Then I'll send my code on the Internet so that other "less productive" developers test and debug it, and because it will obviously turn out that all this code is an awful mess that can't be debugged, I'll claim that the rest of th world is outrageously improductive. Deal?
I forgot: the fact that you only choose to remember, in the very dense 25 years that followed the French revolution, the 10 months of the "terror", is typical of a certain Anglo-Saxon propaganda that comes from an establishment who doesn't like the idea that their people might have the guts to fight the establishment when they're getting screwed. The anti-revolution propaganda started in the UK immediately in 1789, and it's still part, in a different shape, of the narrative. As minimizing its very deep impact on the whole Europe is also an obligatory attitude.
Ok, you're just ridiculizing yourself. You haven't demonstrated anything, and you know it.
You obviously know nothing about the revolution, nor about the European coalitions that immediately started fighting it (oh, I know, it's always much more comfortable to make the French responsible of anything that goes wrong).
As far as the change of republic goes, you're also ignorant. The constitution was changed peacefully, because it was time for important reforms. On the contrary, America, just like Italy or the UK, whose systems actually also need radical changes as the one that were necessary with the 4th republic, have always been blatantly impotent to change archaic and cumbersome institutions. The American experts in American policy know how this system has become inefficient in the way it distributes power, but nothing can be done. As long as business goes on... Even the electoral system sucks, and nothing happens until an election turns into an hilarious turkey (happy Thanksgiving!).
Last, the constitution in France does not have the same role as in the US. It specifies the way institutions work, not the values, which are specified by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which hasn't changed still 1789. It's OK to replace the constituion when the institutions have become unadapted. Under this approach, the American constitution would have been changed at least 3 times since the birth of the US. The only reason why it didn't is that is is considered untouchable, just (and after tremendous efforts) "amendable". The irrational ones are not the ones you think.
This decision is actually only temporary. The EU is waiting for the end of a large consultation which should end december, 15. As such, the EU decided not to precipitate. But the issue is not solved yet.
If you think the food in SF better than in NYC, I can only see two options:
1- You don't know NYC.
2- You're insanely biased.