That doesn't really make any sense. The cost of oil is a net loss to the US. The US would *love* to get rid of the oil dependency, because right now our economy is so tied to what OPEC decides to price oil at.
You're assuming the current government of the United States cares more about the interests of their country, than about their very own private interests. The very last thing an administration packed with oil executives wants, is their country's dependance on oil to vanish.
Old news. It was mentioned in the French mainstream press on September 24th. (my submission got rejected, though)
Back on topic, it'd strike me as odd to put our last resort for our energy future in a country renowned for its earthquakes. What if it got destroyed before it could be fully tested? It would be a disaster of epic proportions.
This said, it is a shame the US dropped the ball on this crucial issue. The way I see it, ITER will be done by the EU, Russia and China alone. If no agreement can be reached, America will not be a part of the project any more (can't really surrender to those pesky French, can we?;p). Which means that upon its completion, the US will have to play catch-up on fusion technology for the following 50 years.
Once upon a time, America was at the forefront of science and technology. How could we let this happen? I am appalled at this utter lack of foresight.
TFA mentioned a reason why CD sales were dropping is that CDs are competing for shelf space with other, higher-value forms of entertainment. Which is true (that the OST CD is worth almost as much as the full DVD is puzzling at best), but missed a more important point.
Two words: Cell phones.
Here in Europe most basic plans cost EUR 40 a month. That's a sizeable share of a teenager's allowance. That's at least 3 CDs a month they won't buy.
Indeed. A large chunk of the patients in hospitals in northern France have come from the UK for quite some time now. It is faster than the NHS, cheaper than private clinics, and closer/safer than India.
Since you're unlikely to use your iBook to play resource-intensive games or do any serious 3D rendering anyway, what use would you have for it?
Sustainable heat (it's called a LAPtop FFS!), massive battery life and very low weight matter much more to me, as far as laptops are concerned. Areas in which the iBook truly shines.
That said I would have loved a RAM and HD bump, 256MB is indeed a tad low for OSX.
GMX.net has had 1GB (file storage & e-mail) over WebDAV for free for a while now. If you have a German or Austrian bank account, you can bump that to 5GB for 3 EUR a month or 10GB for 5 EUR a month.
Btw the features of their email service just flat out rock. I'm quite sure they are unmatched worldwide. ('been a customer since 98 now;))
(I knew all those years learning German in high school weren't a waste of time;p... Now then, how about you guys give us back the English version you had earlier?)
Renault's strategy is to bring the fully-electronic car to the masses. Unfortunately for them, "bringing to the masses" and "redundancy" are not compatible.
No wonder that, while Renaults are now mechanically reliable and solidly built, they have been suffering terrible electronic problems. Renault pointing out that the brakes are absolutely fine is BS. They perfectly know the cause is electronic failure (provided the driver was not full of it of course).
In order to cut costs and yet be able to offer the latest gizmos, they used a new technology known as "multiplexing", where all electronic components are on one common network. This saves a lot of wiring and enabled them to offer a gazillion features at a very affordable price, even on much smaller models than the Vel Satis. The problem is that software bugs often snowball into a complete system failure.
Btw, the very same issue is plaguing the Mercedes E and SL, and it shows in the latest JD Powers ratings.
The only solution is to stop taxing long distance bills (read your phone bill some time), and make local communities fork over the cash - they will buy what they can afford or what they need, no more, no less.
I bet you didn't go to a public inner city school. By going this way, you make sure poor communities keep a substandard education because they won't be able to afford it.
While it is generally true that federal intervention brings unaccountability and graft, federal funding also reduces funding inequality.
It is a criminal organization that happens to control a territory and exploit starving slaves.
It routinely abducts Japanese and South Korean citizens just to keep NK spies trained (Kim, a movie buff, also had a director kidnapped so he could direct movies for his own enjoyment!). Moreover, NK is the world's largest counterfeit money manufacturer and a major drug manufacturer. Oh, and it's into exporting weapons and missiles, too.
It is not only into illegal exports. It's also into massive-scale blackmail. It's been into nuclear blackmail for quite some time. Turning to cyber-blackmail was only a logical step. When one is desperate for money, any buzzword-compliant threat will do.
This is not a country. This is SPECTRE. Maybe the CIA should start training killer angora cats;p
... is to add an iTMS backup storage feature to the iDisk.
Right now if you happen to lose your hard disk (and didn't make a CD/DVD backup earlier), you'll lose your iTMS-purchased songs. Which sucks, since you have to buy them again.
If Apple were to offer an iTunes backup feature, it'd definitely be a killer feature. This would be one of the last things that still make me reluctant to ditch CDs for good.
Besides, they'd save on storage and bandwidth, as they would only need to keep on the iDisk the key used to generate the end user's file from the original file. Whenever the user wants to retrieve their files, the.Mac server would recreate it on the fly from the iTMS servers.
They could advertise "back up 20GB of iTMS songs" while it'd actually eat up only a couple MB.
By the way, if you're living in Germany or Austria, make sure you check out GMX.net, a free e-mail service that is offering 1GB (combined) for free for e-mail and file storage, or 5GB for 3 EUR/month, 10GB for 5 EUR/month. They also have a WebDAV client and their features are unmatched worldwide. (not affiliated in any way, just a happy customer since 1998;))
Apple had to serve hundreds of millions of songs before economies of scale started kicking in, before they could even make a small profit.
Now replace 4 MB songs with 600 MB movies. Even if MPAA fees were less outrageously high than RIAA fees, how can they expect to turn a profit? If they want to be a serious competition to Blockbuster, they'll have to have a pretty large product range. This means storing and serving petabytes of movies: huge costs - even when storage and bandwidth costs going down - which I'm pretty sure they can't cover charging $5 a movie.
The RIAA wanted to replace p2p flows through unidirectional flows (e.g. iTMS to customer only) in order to keep tight control of what is being downloaded on the net. However, this is materially impossible for movies. The only cost-effective way of distributing large files is over p2p.
Which brings to mind, why are the irish so powerful? Are they what, the president of the EU or something?
They were last year, when they brought this up. The EU is (for now) using a rotating presidency: every 6 months, presidency goes to another member country.
Besides, such issues that are not seen as big ticket issues by the general public are commonly used as bargaining chips to get support for other proposals. Add to this either incompetence or malice/corruption of some of the representatives of member countries, and a small country can manage to pass such a nonsensical law.
Looks like online music downloads are the new gold rush, the new.com: every major player from past revolutions has missed the boat, and wants some slice of the action.
I'd be lucky if even one of them survives.
(well, except MS, but it's because they don't care if they lose a couple billions a year, and because 95% of desktops come with WMP installed anyway)
... is a 17" LCD with DVI-D and S-Video inputs, and =16 ms response time, for under 600 EUR.
I'm a student and rarely stay more than a year at the same place. I'm considering ditching my PC laptop for a 12" Powerbook + PS2 combo (unless you can find a GTA:SA and a Gran Turismo 4 Mac port), but I've failed to find a suitable monitor for both the PB and the PS2.
What I don't want: having to carry an extra TV set just for the PS2. having to bow to the TV licensing fee racket just to play a PS2 game. having to use a VGA adapter for the PS2 - unless you know one that does not suck.
What I want: a 17" LCD. Size matters, especially in dorms and when you're moving often. a decent response time to play. DVI input. price tag in the 500-600 EUR range.
I have found LCDs with an S-Video input, but no DVI-D input. And their response times sucked more often than not. Am I stuck to the PC? I bet the first manufacturer to solve this problem would attract a lot of students.;) Or do you know about an alternative that I might have missed?
French copyright law is slightly different from UK/US copyright law. Its basis is not "copyright" (the right to copy), but "droits d'auteur" ("author rights"). It does not revolve about control of the work, but rather around making sure authors get fair compensation.
Under French copyright law, sound techs (in post-production), dancers, clip directors are considered as co-authors, as much as the songwriter, musicians or the main performer, and thus get a cut from sales.
What French (and other mainland European) artistic-technical support staff are complaining about is that the labels are using this change in the medium as a Trojan horse to deprive them of the rights they used to benefit from under the traditional copyright system.
Since all labels are using this trick, and since artistic-technical staff have no have no say in choosing the label they are contracted with (the main performer's manager does), they are basically shafted.
Slightly offtopic since this is not mentioned in the article at all, but since we're talking about recording deals...
Don't buy music from sites like the iTMS or Napster. Ever. According to this article French Apple enthusiast site Mac Bidouille, support personel (eg dancers, clip director, sound techs etc) are not getting their cut from legal online sales.
The reason? Record labels are unwilling to change their contracts, which ties royalties to the sales of physical media, not the song itself. That's outrageous. That's outright theft, pure and simple.
Go to any large supermarket in Calais, France (closest city to England, ferry and Channel tunnel terminal) on any given Saturday, and you'll see about 2 cars out of 3 are from England.
If you go shopping every 2nd week, you'll easily make those 100 pounds back.
The iTMS isn't especially expensive when compared to other goods in England. It's just that about everything is outrageously expensive there.
The Night of the Long Knives took place in 1934... ie AFTER Hitler came to power.
In many ways, the Weimar Republic (as the first democratic German Republic was called, 1919-1933) biggest flaw was that is was too democratic. There were so many political parties that it was pretty difficult to keep a stable ruling coalition.
This was a major factor in the German government's inability to solve the 1930's crisis, which naturally tarnished its credibility. Moreover, the government also proved ineffective at preventing riots between nazi and communist supporters.
With an economy in shambles, a discredited government and police, and a diminished international clout since the widely-resented Versailles Treaty, it should be no surprise that many were waiting for a strongman to "clean the stables".
Be afraid. The same cocktail might be recreated anywhere. In the United States, too.
GMX has been offering 1 GB of storage for email and files for free for some time now.
Expand this to 5 GB for 3 EUR / month or 10 GB for 5 EUR / month.
You can also share your uploaded files with other GMX members, and mount your GMX account as a network drive using a WebDAV client (they provide a pre-configured Windows client but you may use another one).
By the way, their e-mail features totally 0wn any other e-mail service: automated e-mail retrieval from all your other POP-enabled mailboxes, custom filters for automatic redirection, SMS/MMS alerts, up to 15 aliases...
I knew all that time spent learning German at school would come in handy some day!;p
You are mistaken. This would be similar to saying that the Republican Party had lost the White House and the House of Representatives because the Democrats had won most State legislatures.
Earlier this year France held its regional (State) elections, in which the ruling coalition indeed did very poorly (Elections to the European Parliament were also held on the same day, with the same results). However this does not change the fact that the right-wing parties still hold the 2/3 of the Assemblée Nationale and the Presidency that they won 2 years ago, and thus remain in control of the national government. The next national elections are due in 2007.
The current election calendar is set in such a way that regional and European elections are a mid-term election, in which the opposition traditionally fares well. However, as with many mid-term elections, popular dissent has little effect on actual government policies.
This said, it is indeed true European politics is globally more on the left than American politics. Most members of the French ruling party would qualify as moderate Democrats in the US. (actually, being a "liberal" in Europe means you're pro-market, and that puts you on the right of the political spectrum)
On a final note, the rising acts of anti-judaism are mostly due to the large Muslim immigrant population, which sees them as payback for the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, a kind of exported (and obviously out-of-context) Intifada. Those acts are not related at all to the old-school fascist nostalgics from the National Front. Whoever mentions those acts in a discussion related to Nazis is completely offtopic.
Weird... works perfectly here. The From: field must contain an @gmx.net addresse though, and their authentication scheme requires you to provide your customer number (just log in using the webmail to get it if you don't remember it).
Or could it be that your ISP is anal about their customer using other smtp servers?
If you're using another WebDAV client that the one they provide, host is https://mediacenter.gmx.net (login is your e-mail address).
Slashdot Mirror
You're assuming the current government of the United States cares more about the interests of their country, than about their very own private interests.
The very last thing an administration packed with oil executives wants, is their country's dependance on oil to vanish.
Old news. It was mentioned in the French mainstream press on September 24th. (my submission got rejected, though)
;p). Which means that upon its completion, the US will have to play catch-up on fusion technology for the following 50 years.
Back on topic, it'd strike me as odd to put our last resort for our energy future in a country renowned for its earthquakes.
What if it got destroyed before it could be fully tested? It would be a disaster of epic proportions.
This said, it is a shame the US dropped the ball on this crucial issue. The way I see it, ITER will be done by the EU, Russia and China alone. If no agreement can be reached, America will not be a part of the project any more (can't really surrender to those pesky French, can we?
Once upon a time, America was at the forefront of science and technology. How could we let this happen? I am appalled at this utter lack of foresight.
TFA mentioned a reason why CD sales were dropping is that CDs are competing for shelf space with other, higher-value forms of entertainment.
Which is true (that the OST CD is worth almost as much as the full DVD is puzzling at best), but missed a more important point.
Two words: Cell phones.
Here in Europe most basic plans cost EUR 40 a month. That's a sizeable share of a teenager's allowance. That's at least 3 CDs a month they won't buy.
Indeed. A large chunk of the patients in hospitals in northern France have come from the UK for quite some time now.
It is faster than the NHS, cheaper than private clinics, and closer/safer than India.
They do sell a C4 though...
;p
The Citroen range starts with the 3,60m C2 and tops at the 4,90m C8 minivan and (upcoming) C6 sedan. Pretty original naming scheme, isn't it?
Since you're unlikely to use your iBook to play resource-intensive games or do any serious 3D rendering anyway, what use would you have for it?
Sustainable heat (it's called a LAPtop FFS!), massive battery life and very low weight matter much more to me, as far as laptops are concerned. Areas in which the iBook truly shines.
That said I would have loved a RAM and HD bump, 256MB is indeed a tad low for OSX.
GMX.net has had 1GB (file storage & e-mail) over WebDAV for free for a while now.
;))
;p... Now then, how about you guys give us back the English version you had earlier?)
If you have a German or Austrian bank account, you can bump that to 5GB for 3 EUR a month or 10GB for 5 EUR a month.
Btw the features of their email service just flat out rock. I'm quite sure they are unmatched worldwide. ('been a customer since 98 now
(I knew all those years learning German in high school weren't a waste of time
For our American readers:
Renault's strategy is to bring the fully-electronic car to the masses.
Unfortunately for them, "bringing to the masses" and "redundancy" are not compatible.
No wonder that, while Renaults are now mechanically reliable and solidly built, they have been suffering terrible electronic problems.
Renault pointing out that the brakes are absolutely fine is BS. They perfectly know the cause is electronic failure (provided the driver was not full of it of course).
In order to cut costs and yet be able to offer the latest gizmos, they used a new technology known as "multiplexing", where all electronic components are on one common network. This saves a lot of wiring and enabled them to offer a gazillion features at a very affordable price, even on much smaller models than the Vel Satis.
The problem is that software bugs often snowball into a complete system failure.
Btw, the very same issue is plaguing the Mercedes E and SL, and it shows in the latest JD Powers ratings.
I bet you didn't go to a public inner city school. By going this way, you make sure poor communities keep a substandard education because they won't be able to afford it.
While it is generally true that federal intervention brings unaccountability and graft, federal funding also reduces funding inequality.
It is a criminal organization that happens to control a territory and exploit starving slaves.
;p
It routinely abducts Japanese and South Korean citizens just to keep NK spies trained (Kim, a movie buff, also had a director kidnapped so he could direct movies for his own enjoyment!).
Moreover, NK is the world's largest counterfeit money manufacturer and a major drug manufacturer. Oh, and it's into exporting weapons and missiles, too.
It is not only into illegal exports. It's also into massive-scale blackmail. It's been into nuclear blackmail for quite some time. Turning to cyber-blackmail was only a logical step.
When one is desperate for money, any buzzword-compliant threat will do.
This is not a country. This is SPECTRE.
Maybe the CIA should start training killer angora cats
In Europe, red = left, blue = right.
In the US, the other way round.
On the other hand, you could argue US Democrats belong to the center-right by EU standards...
... is to add an iTMS backup storage feature to the iDisk.
.Mac server would recreate it on the fly from the iTMS servers.
;))
Right now if you happen to lose your hard disk (and didn't make a CD/DVD backup earlier), you'll lose your iTMS-purchased songs.
Which sucks, since you have to buy them again.
If Apple were to offer an iTunes backup feature, it'd definitely be a killer feature. This would be one of the last things that still make me reluctant to ditch CDs for good.
Besides, they'd save on storage and bandwidth, as they would only need to keep on the iDisk the key used to generate the end user's file from the original file. Whenever the user wants to retrieve their files, the
They could advertise "back up 20GB of iTMS songs" while it'd actually eat up only a couple MB.
By the way, if you're living in Germany or Austria, make sure you check out GMX.net, a free e-mail service that is offering 1GB (combined) for free for e-mail and file storage, or 5GB for 3 EUR/month, 10GB for 5 EUR/month.
They also have a WebDAV client and their features are unmatched worldwide.
(not affiliated in any way, just a happy customer since 1998
Apple had to serve hundreds of millions of songs before economies of scale started kicking in, before they could even make a small profit.
Now replace 4 MB songs with 600 MB movies. Even if MPAA fees were less outrageously high than RIAA fees, how can they expect to turn a profit?
If they want to be a serious competition to Blockbuster, they'll have to have a pretty large product range. This means storing and serving petabytes of movies: huge costs - even when storage and bandwidth costs going down - which I'm pretty sure they can't cover charging $5 a movie.
The RIAA wanted to replace p2p flows through unidirectional flows (e.g. iTMS to customer only) in order to keep tight control of what is being downloaded on the net. However, this is materially impossible for movies. The only cost-effective way of distributing large files is over p2p.
run L^H^H^H^H^Hprevent a site from being /.ed?
/. junkies like me ;p
anything else is uselees to
(hint to Taco: how about a script replacing any link in a submission with the Coral cache link?)
Which brings to mind, why are the irish so powerful? Are they what, the president of the EU or something?
They were last year, when they brought this up. The EU is (for now) using a rotating presidency: every 6 months, presidency goes to another member country.
Besides, such issues that are not seen as big ticket issues by the general public are commonly used as bargaining chips to get support for other proposals. Add to this either incompetence or malice/corruption of some of the representatives of member countries, and a small country can manage to pass such a nonsensical law.
Looks like online music downloads are the new gold rush, the new .com: every major player from past revolutions has missed the boat, and wants some slice of the action.
I'd be lucky if even one of them survives.
(well, except MS, but it's because they don't care if they lose a couple billions a year, and because 95% of desktops come with WMP installed anyway)
Thanks for the reply... the price tag of the video scaling ones is pretty hefty, though. :(
;p
Off to sell a liver so I can afford them!
... is a 17" LCD with DVI-D and S-Video inputs, and =16 ms response time, for under 600 EUR.
;)
I'm a student and rarely stay more than a year at the same place. I'm considering ditching my PC laptop for a 12" Powerbook + PS2 combo (unless you can find a GTA:SA and a Gran Turismo 4 Mac port), but I've failed to find a suitable monitor for both the PB and the PS2.
What I don't want:
having to carry an extra TV set just for the PS2.
having to bow to the TV licensing fee racket just to play a PS2 game.
having to use a VGA adapter for the PS2 - unless you know one that does not suck.
What I want:
a 17" LCD. Size matters, especially in dorms and when you're moving often.
a decent response time to play.
DVI input.
price tag in the 500-600 EUR range.
I have found LCDs with an S-Video input, but no DVI-D input. And their response times sucked more often than not. Am I stuck to the PC? I bet the first manufacturer to solve this problem would attract a lot of students.
Or do you know about an alternative that I might have missed?
Just to clarify... in France they do.
French copyright law is slightly different from UK/US copyright law. Its basis is not "copyright" (the right to copy), but "droits d'auteur" ("author rights"). It does not revolve about control of the work, but rather around making sure authors get fair compensation.
Under French copyright law, sound techs (in post-production), dancers, clip directors are considered as co-authors, as much as the songwriter, musicians or the main performer, and thus get a cut from sales.
What French (and other mainland European) artistic-technical support staff are complaining about is that the labels are using this change in the medium as a Trojan horse to deprive them of the rights they used to benefit from under the traditional copyright system.
Since all labels are using this trick, and since artistic-technical staff have no have no say in choosing the label they are contracted with (the main performer's manager does), they are basically shafted.
Slightly offtopic since this is not mentioned in the article at all, but since we're talking about recording deals...
;p
Don't buy music from sites like the iTMS or Napster. Ever. According to this article French Apple enthusiast site Mac Bidouille, support personel (eg dancers, clip director, sound techs etc) are not getting their cut from legal online sales.
The reason? Record labels are unwilling to change their contracts, which ties royalties to the sales of physical media, not the song itself. That's outrageous. That's outright theft, pure and simple.
(Article is in French. Grab a translation here.)
Support the little guys. Download your albums off Suprnova NOW!
Amen to that.
Go to any large supermarket in Calais, France (closest city to England, ferry and Channel tunnel terminal) on any given Saturday, and you'll see about 2 cars out of 3 are from England.
If you go shopping every 2nd week, you'll easily make those 100 pounds back.
The iTMS isn't especially expensive when compared to other goods in England. It's just that about everything is outrageously expensive there.
The Night of the Long Knives took place in 1934... ie AFTER Hitler came to power.
In many ways, the Weimar Republic (as the first democratic German Republic was called, 1919-1933) biggest flaw was that is was too democratic. There were so many political parties that it was pretty difficult to keep a stable ruling coalition.
This was a major factor in the German government's inability to solve the 1930's crisis, which naturally tarnished its credibility. Moreover, the government also proved ineffective at preventing riots between nazi and communist supporters.
With an economy in shambles, a discredited government and police, and a diminished international clout since the widely-resented Versailles Treaty, it should be no surprise that many were waiting for a strongman to "clean the stables".
Be afraid. The same cocktail might be recreated anywhere. In the United States, too.
GMX has been offering 1 GB of storage for email and files for free for some time now.
.
;p
Expand this to 5 GB for 3 EUR / month or 10 GB for 5 EUR / month.
You can also share your uploaded files with other GMX members, and mount your GMX account as a network drive using a WebDAV client (they provide a pre-configured Windows client but you may use another one)
By the way, their e-mail features totally 0wn any other e-mail service: automated e-mail retrieval from all your other POP-enabled mailboxes, custom filters for automatic redirection, SMS/MMS alerts, up to 15 aliases...
I knew all that time spent learning German at school would come in handy some day!
You are mistaken. This would be similar to saying that the Republican Party had lost the White House and the House of Representatives because the Democrats had won most State legislatures.
Earlier this year France held its regional (State) elections, in which the ruling coalition indeed did very poorly (Elections to the European Parliament were also held on the same day, with the same results).
However this does not change the fact that the right-wing parties still hold the 2/3 of the Assemblée Nationale and the Presidency that they won 2 years ago, and thus remain in control of the national government. The next national elections are due in 2007.
The current election calendar is set in such a way that regional and European elections are a mid-term election, in which the opposition traditionally fares well. However, as with many mid-term elections, popular dissent has little effect on actual government policies.
This said, it is indeed true European politics is globally more on the left than American politics. Most members of the French ruling party would qualify as moderate Democrats in the US.
(actually, being a "liberal" in Europe means you're pro-market, and that puts you on the right of the political spectrum)
On a final note, the rising acts of anti-judaism are mostly due to the large Muslim immigrant population, which sees them as payback for the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, a kind of exported (and obviously out-of-context) Intifada.
Those acts are not related at all to the old-school fascist nostalgics from the National Front. Whoever mentions those acts in a discussion related to Nazis is completely offtopic.
Weird... works perfectly here.
The From: field must contain an @gmx.net addresse though, and their authentication scheme requires you to provide your customer number (just log in using the webmail to get it if you don't remember it).
Or could it be that your ISP is anal about their customer using other smtp servers?
If you're using another WebDAV client that the one they provide, host is https://mediacenter.gmx.net (login is your e-mail address).