This Danish goal, getting rid of coal plants by 2025, may not be hard to achieve, as they can import electricity, using sub-sea HVDC, from Norway, which has plenty of hydro, or by importing it from Sweden, which has plenty of nuclear and hydro. Running all of the country on wind power is a mirage. Where does the power come from when the wind doesn't blow, which may happen from time to time ?
It is true that the GDP per capita is higher in the USA than in most EU countries, but I think you should also point out that Americans, on average, work more hours than Europeans. I don't have the exact numbers at hand (they can be found on the OECD site), but if i recall correctly, the hours worked per capita is much higher in the USA than in e.g. France or Germany. If you translate the hours worked per capita into working weeks, Americans work on average 4 or 5 weeks more than the French and the Germans (they apparently prefer long vacations). Labour productivity per hour worked is not necessarily worse in France or Germany than in the US of A.
The 21 Century Network sounds very VDSL to me. I don't see why the 21CN is very special. The telecom operators in Belgium and the Netherlands already provide television service over their ADSL2 networks. Belgacom, the Belgian operator, already has VDSL in service and KPN, the Dutch operator, will roll-out VDSL at the end of this year or next year.
You're exactly right with your comment ! The U.S. Department of Defense spends $5 bn. every single month for having troops in Iraq. $3-4 bn. for Galileo doesn't seem that much when you put it in perspective.
I believe that Oracle is most often installed on Sun Solaris servers, so I am wondering whether Oracle should be worried by this announcement from Sun to offer extensive support for PostgreSQL. It seems that open source databases (Firebird, MySQL, PostgreSQL) are becoming greater threat to commercial ones like Oracle and DB2. Anyway, I think that PostgreSQL is great fit for Sun, because they will have relatively low development costs, but will nevertheless enable them to sell more hardware.
You're absolutely right. Microsoft will be sandwiched, with on the one hand customers who balk at paying huge fees to Microsoft (customers have better alternatives like OSS) and on the other hand Microsoft stockholders who like to see predictable earnings growth.
Well, I think I do and you dont. Productivity is output, measured in some monetary value, produced in a certain amount of time. So when a currency drops, the output that is produced in a certain country is worth less to people in other countries. Actually, productivity measured in output per hour is higher in countries such as France and Switzerland than in the US. But apparently you are an uneducated American bigot and wouldnt believe such a fact (www.ilo.org).
Oh really ? These productivity numbers are normally expressed in U.S. dollars and as far as I know that currency has been falling continuously in the past couple of months vis-a-vis (sorry for the French..) other currencies like the Yen, Euro, Pound Sterling and yes, even the Argentine Peso. So, who is actually further and further into the rear view mirrors ?
Yes, maybe it might be a good idea for Google to get these greedy American lawyers off their backs by reincorporating/relocating "offshore" to Canada or to Germany. It's an internet company, so it doesn't really matter where they are based. Don't forget that SCO got its ass kicked by a German court !
Largest lender ? The world's largest lender is Japan.You'd better check some statistics yourself before making such outrageous comments. Check out http://www.imf.org and http://www.oecd.org.
No wonder you posted this as an AC. Starved of US capital ? Ha ha, you must be a moron. May I remind you that the US runs a current account deficit in excess of 500 billion dollars annually (and thatit already is the world's largest DEBTOR nation). That means that the US needs to BORROW almost 2 billion DAILY from the Asians and these (old) Europeans. A deliberate devaluation of the US dollar would ultimately hurt the United States the most, because no one would invest in the US for many years to come.
Haha, this whole SCO saga is getting so funny. Almost as good as Monty Python: Darl McBride and his knights in search of the holy dollar in the most ludicrous ways imaginable.
I think the use of the word "liberal" is quite interesting. In many European countries, "liberals" (Germany: FDP, Netherlands: VVD, France: UDF, Austria: FPOe) are considered to be conservative and right-wing, whereas in the United States they are considered to be left-wing. Politics in America and Europe are really that far apart.
IANAL, but I was just wondering: how would a win in court for SCO (okay, that's very iffy....) affect Linux and the GPL in other countries ? Would people in Canada, Japan, Germany etc. have to pay a fee to SCO/Caldera as well ? I believe SCO had some troubles with a German court...
Okay, here's some explaining:
The US dollar is the world's reserve currency: The US dollar is the reference currency for many export-import transactions (oil, gold and other commodities). Furthermore, the US dollar is the most widely held reserve currency by foreign central banks. 70%-80% of their foreign currency holdings are Dollars (the rest consists of Euros, Yen, Sterling, Swiss Francs etc.). By "owning" the central bank, the Federal Reserve System, that can print dollars at will, the US is in the position of having the so-called "seignorage" privilege. This is a very precious privilege as the US is able to borrow from foreigners by issuing debt in its own currency. Basically, it gives the US an unlimited line of credit with the rest of the world. It must be said that the US have been using of this line of credit to the full in the past two decades, by running (huge) current account deficits (US imports exceeding exports). The difference in imports over exports is made up by borrowing from foreigners, who are normally willing to hold debt denominated in US dollars. A real life example could be like this: US consumers buy Japanese goods like cars or television sets with dollars and the Japanese buy US assets like Treasury bills and bonds (=US federal debt) with these dollars (it's a merry go round of dollars) The question for the future will be the willingness of foreigners to hold US dollar assets and coupled with this the willingness to sustain the US dollar reserve currency standard. If they would decide to ditch the US dollar it would have very serious consequences: skyrocketing interest rates and inflation in the United States. The conclusion of all this is that the US is merely a superpower at the mercy of foreigners.
For a more eloquent explanation (by Stanford economics professor Ronald McKinnon):
http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/workp/swp0101 3.pdf
OpenOffice already is a good office suite! It has all the features that the great majority of MS-Office users require and that makes OpenOffice a good replacement for MS-Office at home computers. The only thing that may keep business users from using OO is the lack of a database and macros (VB scripts).
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Yes, you're right. Maryland actually has more people than Denmark. Maryland gets a lot of power from nuclear, though (Calvert Cliffs).
This Danish goal, getting rid of coal plants by 2025, may not be hard to achieve, as they can import electricity, using sub-sea HVDC, from Norway, which has plenty of hydro, or by importing it from Sweden, which has plenty of nuclear and hydro. Running all of the country on wind power is a mirage. Where does the power come from when the wind doesn't blow, which may happen from time to time ?
It is true that the GDP per capita is higher in the USA than in most EU countries, but I think you should also point out that Americans, on average, work more hours than Europeans. I don't have the exact numbers at hand (they can be found on the OECD site), but if i recall correctly, the hours worked per capita is much higher in the USA than in e.g. France or Germany. If you translate the hours worked per capita into working weeks, Americans work on average 4 or 5 weeks more than the French and the Germans (they apparently prefer long vacations). Labour productivity per hour worked is not necessarily worse in France or Germany than in the US of A.
The 21 Century Network sounds very VDSL to me. I don't see why the 21CN is very special. The telecom operators in Belgium and the Netherlands already provide television service over their ADSL2 networks. Belgacom, the Belgian operator, already has VDSL in service and KPN, the Dutch operator, will roll-out VDSL at the end of this year or next year.
You're exactly right with your comment ! The U.S. Department of Defense spends $5 bn. every single month for having troops in Iraq. $3-4 bn. for Galileo doesn't seem that much when you put it in perspective.
I believe that Oracle is most often installed on Sun Solaris servers, so I am wondering whether Oracle should be worried by this announcement from Sun to offer extensive support for PostgreSQL. It seems that open source databases (Firebird, MySQL, PostgreSQL) are becoming greater threat to commercial ones like Oracle and DB2. Anyway, I think that PostgreSQL is great fit for Sun, because they will have relatively low development costs, but will nevertheless enable them to sell more hardware.
You're absolutely right. Microsoft will be sandwiched, with on the one hand customers who balk at paying huge fees to Microsoft (customers have better alternatives like OSS) and on the other hand Microsoft stockholders who like to see predictable earnings growth.
Well, I think I do and you dont. Productivity is output, measured in some monetary value, produced in a certain amount of time. So when a currency drops, the output that is produced in a certain country is worth less to people in other countries. Actually, productivity measured in output per hour is higher in countries such as France and Switzerland than in the US. But apparently you are an uneducated American bigot and wouldnt believe such a fact (www.ilo.org).
Oh really ? These productivity numbers are normally expressed in U.S. dollars and as far as I know that currency has been falling continuously in the past couple of months vis-a-vis (sorry for the French..) other currencies like the Yen, Euro, Pound Sterling and yes, even the Argentine Peso. So, who is actually further and further into the rear view mirrors ?
Yes, maybe it might be a good idea for Google to get these greedy American lawyers off their backs by reincorporating/relocating "offshore" to Canada or to Germany. It's an internet company, so it doesn't really matter where they are based. Don't forget that SCO got its ass kicked by a German court !
There is also a M$-Winblows version of Abiword.
Largest lender ? The world's largest lender is Japan.You'd better check some statistics yourself before making such outrageous comments. Check out http://www.imf.org and http://www.oecd.org.
Man, you have no clue about economics. Stop waffling.
No wonder you posted this as an AC. Starved of US capital ? Ha ha, you must be a moron. May I remind you that the US runs a current account deficit in excess of 500 billion dollars annually (and thatit already is the world's largest DEBTOR nation). That means that the US needs to BORROW almost 2 billion DAILY from the Asians and these (old) Europeans. A deliberate devaluation of the US dollar would ultimately hurt the United States the most, because no one would invest in the US for many years to come.
Haha, this whole SCO saga is getting so funny. Almost as good as Monty Python: Darl McBride and his knights in search of the holy dollar in the most ludicrous ways imaginable.
I think the use of the word "liberal" is quite interesting. In many European countries, "liberals" (Germany: FDP, Netherlands: VVD, France: UDF, Austria: FPOe) are considered to be conservative and right-wing, whereas in the United States they are considered to be left-wing. Politics in America and Europe are really that far apart.
Good heavens, it's an impressive document indeed. These German taxpayers get value for money from their government.
Oops, the PBMR site requires a secure connection.
This Toshiba design looks a bit like the South African pebble bed modular reactor and the General Atomics GT-MHR, so the idea is not really new.
IANAL, but I was just wondering: how would a win in court for SCO (okay, that's very iffy....) affect Linux and the GPL in other countries ? Would people in Canada, Japan, Germany etc. have to pay a fee to SCO/Caldera as well ? I believe SCO had some troubles with a German court...
Okay, here's some explaining: The US dollar is the world's reserve currency: The US dollar is the reference currency for many export-import transactions (oil, gold and other commodities). Furthermore, the US dollar is the most widely held reserve currency by foreign central banks. 70%-80% of their foreign currency holdings are Dollars (the rest consists of Euros, Yen, Sterling, Swiss Francs etc.). By "owning" the central bank, the Federal Reserve System, that can print dollars at will, the US is in the position of having the so-called "seignorage" privilege. This is a very precious privilege as the US is able to borrow from foreigners by issuing debt in its own currency. Basically, it gives the US an unlimited line of credit with the rest of the world. It must be said that the US have been using of this line of credit to the full in the past two decades, by running (huge) current account deficits (US imports exceeding exports). The difference in imports over exports is made up by borrowing from foreigners, who are normally willing to hold debt denominated in US dollars. A real life example could be like this: US consumers buy Japanese goods like cars or television sets with dollars and the Japanese buy US assets like Treasury bills and bonds (=US federal debt) with these dollars (it's a merry go round of dollars) The question for the future will be the willingness of foreigners to hold US dollar assets and coupled with this the willingness to sustain the US dollar reserve currency standard. If they would decide to ditch the US dollar it would have very serious consequences: skyrocketing interest rates and inflation in the United States. The conclusion of all this is that the US is merely a superpower at the mercy of foreigners. For a more eloquent explanation (by Stanford economics professor Ronald McKinnon): http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/workp/swp0101 3.pdf
OpenOffice already is a good office suite! It has all the features that the great majority of MS-Office users require and that makes OpenOffice a good replacement for MS-Office at home computers. The only thing that may keep business users from using OO is the lack of a database and macros (VB scripts).