There is a provision in the bill that sets the gruesome precedence that it is in the power of Congress to prohibit juridical review. Since the latter is a cornerstone of the American republic this is a very big deal. You can learn more about it here.
Separately, a Hong Kong movie industry trade association said it plans to send letters to 100 BitTorrent users through their Internet service providers threatening legal action unless they stop using the software.
Apparently the Hong Kong movie industry does not bother to make the distinction either and the headline ins entirely justified.
The only other ways to achieve neutron flux (that I'm aware of) are to (1) use a particle accelerator collision to release neutrons (i.e.: spallation) or (2) to use a radioactive source (or running nuclear recator) and guide the flux of exiting neutrons. Both of these are quite large and not very portable.
1.00 Fish must remain in water to continue living.
What about flying fish?
And what about evolution? Does this mean your mindpixel mind will believe in creationism? So much effort and then we'll end up with an artificial fool!
For business users the price will almost not matter.
When I worked in Germany as an IT consultant we billed the time on the train to the customer because in 1st class you had ideal working conditions. I've got a lot of work done on trains. The only thing that impaired productivity was the fact that you were off-line.
Consultants will be able to pass on the price for WLAN on trains to their clients and business execs will also put a high price on the extra bit of productivity that online access will give them on a train.
It may take a while before this tickles down to the 2nd class but there is definitely a huge market there.
This makes sense for an individual, but not necessarilly for an enterprise.
Let me give you an example: Suppose you run a bank that offers credit cards. You spend a lot of money on sending ads out via mail, but you also have current customers that you can call and may want to make a special offer, especially if you have any indication that they may consider switching to another bank. But you really don't know exactly how to determine these customers or when it is better to send an ad in the mail or rather to call a customer.
Generally speaking, you have a customer retention and direct marketing problem. What you need is somebody who really understands the business issues and implications of this problem and offers a solution. Quite obviously this solution will be comprised of a software and a services part. Rather then going with a pure service shop that will be hard pressed to gobble together a solution on the go, shopping for a vendor that offers a real solution to your problem and also has a track record of succeeding at it may be the smarter choice.
DISCLAIMER: Yes, my employer does offer a bunch of solutions, and yes we can make much more money on those then tool sales. The latter only holds because we actually manage to get them much more bang for their bucks. The tools have reached a level of complexity and interdependence that our customers need the services in the equation to put them to profitable use quickly.
I doubt that this will be held up in a hogher court. I'd be very surprised if it did, but then again it is surprising that this case has gotten so far in the first place.
Maybe somebody who knows French laws and the Fremch constitution could comment on this? Is science and academic freedom protected in the French constition (as in the German)? If so shouldn't this trump any intellecual property rights?
I think the other way around makes much more sense, wealth is in the eye of the beholder and measured in a base currency. $, and gold can serve as such currencies, but if you take the amount of all wealth on earth and put it in relation to the amount of all $s, s or gold you will of course find that this relation will be different for all three. At all times the numerator will be the same but the denominator i.e. the volume of $s, s and even gold - due to mining - will change.
Wealth increase only plays a role in so far as accelerated wealth increase in the $ zone will allow for faster $ volume increase (foreigners have to buy $s to get in on the action).
Actually, I picked gold as example for the very reason that its volume is fairly fixed. The binding guidelines for the ECB that it inherited from the German Central Bank are very strict and only look at the currency volume (M1 etc.) and inflation rate. By design the ECB is not allowed to try to fight exchange rate fluctuations by rate changes. As such the Euro currency volume can only increase fairly slowly. I.e. you will never see an ECB rate greater than the average GDP growth rate in the Euro zone. This is radically different from the US dollar situation. Greenspan has the freedom to set the rates the way he sees fit i.e. he can and does fight recession with rates that dramatically increase the dollar volume in circulation. Euro volume increase in comparison is much more in line with the increase of gold volume (gold volume does after all increase due to mining).
I think you also underestimate that gold is still used as currency equivalent in many parts of the world e.g. India. Malaysia on the other hand actually adopted the gold standard for its own currency after the Asian currency melt-down in the 90s. Globally gold is still very much a real life currency.
Call me crazy, but for a democracy it would have been much more healthy, if Gore supporters would have raised as much hell as the Ukranian supporters for Jushchenko did, so that these votes would have been counted properly. No matter the final outcome.
Sorry if this may sound harsh, but I don't think you have a very realistic understanding of how consensus is "engineered" in parliamentarian democracies like France and Germany.
Since I am German I will focus on the latter. In the past we always looked to the US for leadership in non EU foreign affairs. In the case of Bosnia and the Kosovo crisis there was major media focus on the plight of the Albanians and the killing in Sarajevo. It also helped that we hosted a lot of refugees from there. Nevertheless without the US we would have never responded militarily. But under the leadership of the US, given the media attention and especially one consistent narrative in the media, our politicians were able to overcome cynicism, as well as the strong pacifistic gut sentiments of my people. In the end a majority supported a war effort against Serbia long before the first bomb fell. Milosevic at the time was certain that he could turn the public opinion in Europe, and had to find out the hard way that he could not. As soon as he realized that he couldn't he caved. The entire war was an extension of politics - a PR fight over the determination of the European NATO countries.
..but why did the US have to spell it out for everyone? Was it some big secret, known only to the US, that the sanctions were hurting the Iraqi people, and not Saddam? Was it some big secret that Saddam and his sons were running a killing machine?
Ever walked by a beggar on the street and looked the other way? That is how well informed people in Germany handle all the plight that's in the world. It is actually easier, because the plight is so much further away. Mrs. Albright was more honest when she outright contended that thousands of dead Iraqi children was a price she was willing to pay to contain Saddam.
If there would have been a concerted effort to bring the plight of Iraq's children and civilians to public attention many months before any talk of war, the ground work could have been laid to "sell" a humanitarian Iraq war to my people. This would have required that the US administration would have engaged their allies very early and brought them into the fault, by first building a consensus among the political leaders about the same time that fighting in Afghanistan started. Apparently this has not happened (if they would have tried we'd know by now). NATO would have offered the perfect platform to organize this kind of consensus building. It is a shame that the unity of the West has rather been shattered.
In the past EU countries like France and Germany could comfortably tell themselves that they are too small to take on all the problems in the world.
The EU is still very much work in progress, but we have to get our act together. Blind reliance on the US leadership does unfortunately not work anymore.
The links with the exception of the 9/11 comission findings are somewhat dated.
What you did not quote from the report is this part:
According to the reporting, Iraqi officials offered Bin Ladin a safe haven in Iraq. Bin Ladin declined, apparently judging that his circumstances in Afghanistan remained more favorable than the Iraqi alternative. The reports describe friendly contacts and indicate some common themes in both sides' hatred of the United States. But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.
The important word here is evidence. If Iraq actually would have hosted OBL at some point after the Afghanistan intervention, no ally to the US would have ever objected to taking on Iraq.
The 911 comission site contains some more interesting material. For instance this gem of wisdom from a hearing:
The perception of U.S. unilateralism over a military confrontation with Iraq may adversely affect international consensus and multilateral cooperation in the war against terrorism. As other issues rise to the top of the international political agenda, there is concern that multilateral cooperation may dissipate over time. There have been suggestions that it not only diverts attention away from the global war on terrorism but may lead to an overstretching of already stretched anti-terrorism and intelligence resources. The tendency to link Iraq with the issue of al-Qaeda remains unhelpful, as there exist limited credible evidence to suggest any active operational linkage exists or that it should constitute a real cause for immediate danger and concern. Mixing the two separate issues together have lead to confusion and divisions how to best respond and the likely consequences any U.S. military action may have in maintaining the quality of the global or regional coalition in the war against terrorism.
In my opinion the strategy to invade Iraq and especially the inept way this adimistration went about it, was a completly inadequat reaction to 911. Apparently you are still not willing to see this, so I suggest we just observe how the Iraq "adventure" plays out and chat about it again a year from now.
So, presuming I am correct, there would be very little the US could do to bring France onboard other than capitulate - and, given the outrage over the initial 9/11 attacks and the seeming opportunism by the French government, that was an impossibility.
Taking the lesson from the Bosnia conflict I think there would have been a way to garner public support in Germany for an Iraq war and hence leverage to bring France in line.
Instead of going through the Security Council at all, the public should have repeatedly reminded that the sanctions on Iraq brought terrible suffering to the Iraqi people especially children. The world could not trust Saddam any longer, but you could not go on punishing the Iraqi people for it. Hence Saddam had to be removed. That was the line of reasoning that Denmark followed. I think if the whole WMD mumbo-jumbo would have been foregone in favor of this approach, the US could have won a broad support across all countries in Europe.
Observing how inept this war was sold , and the poor post war management, is not suited to inspire any trust in the leadership abilities of the current administration.
As a result the overarching leadership position of the US as a leader of the West is now in jeopardy. It was this opening that Chirac saw and seized on.
Stagnation and recession does not equal inflation. You are correct in your assumption that a quickly inflating dollar will trigger a world economic crises, but the ECB is by law only concerned with keeping inflation low and the euro volume is tightly controlled. A world recession will affect different currencies differently. An easy way to immediately understand this is to think of gold as another form of currency - one that can not be artificially inflated like a fiat currency. Studying historic market data will show you that the gold price always tends to go up during times of economic hardship no matter what base currency you use to express it.
As a European and somebody who certainly does not love the Bush administration I just wished that the American left would get of this the "US bought the Ukraine election result" meme.
It is simply not true. To me it seems almost like a denial neurosis born from the fact that the Ukrainians managed what the American Left could not bring itself to do in 2000.
Although as a Europena I do take slight offense at the 2nd paragraph and do not aggree with the poster, I do not think that this should be moderated as troll.
I wished moderators would reserve this for posts that are clearly so hatefull that they are obviously only meant as provocation and insult.
The parent is clearly not hatespeech and I urge the moderators to therefore tolerate zors' opinion.
It always astounds me how Americans no matter on what political side they are on, always manage to see everything through there bi-partisan, ethnocentric funnel vision.
From a European perspective I find it rather ironic that the US seems once seemed to have picked the correct i.e. democratic side in the Ukraine. While being majorly challenged to conduct a decent and fair democratic election at home.
If there is anything a American liberal can and should learn from the Ukraine election, is that an election can not be stolen if the people care.
That is what liberal Americans should have done in 2000. If only the Democratic voters would have bothered to get off their asses in 2000 and raise hell, the world would be a much better place. Unfortunately, it seems Americans are foremost couch potatoes no matter where they stand politically.
Indiscriminate murder... is a crime in any country even Iran. Relentless internationally coordinated criminal prosecution was all it took after 9/11. (With the notable exception of Afghanistan not having a legitimate government.)
Where you got it wrong was in assuming that Saddam backed Radical Islamic terrorism. That where the rubber hits the road. The current administration could not imagine that their Arab enemies would not follow the logic that your enemy's enemy is your friend. Just goes to show that Condi by studying the Soviet Union really didn't learn anything about the Middle East. The devout followers of Osama hate secular tyrants as much as the US. As such Saddam would have never risked nurturing such sworn enemies.
The current administration got all their facts about Iraq plain wrong. My country (Germany) and France tried to communicate this on all channels before the war. Alas to no avail.
France could have been brought into line if the US would have made a more compelling case for the war.
You missed one more and I think very important motivation for Chirac.
If you would have been in Germany as I was at the time you would have noticed that it was actually Germany and the German population that was most opposed to the war. I am talking millions of people on the street protesting the build-up to war.
Chirac being the one with a permanent security seat in the security council noticed that he could make himself a hero in the eyes of Germans as well as French by putting on a show in the security council. At the same time there was joint session of the German and French parliaments (the first in our history) and politicians start talking about having a joint Franco-German citizenship.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a provision in the bill that sets the gruesome precedence that it is in the power of Congress to prohibit juridical review. Since the latter is a cornerstone of the American republic this is a very big deal. You can learn more about it here.
Moderating and then posting to the same threat seems somewhat silly.
The article says:
Separately, a Hong Kong movie industry trade association said it plans to send letters to 100 BitTorrent users through their Internet service providers threatening legal action unless they stop using the software.
Apparently the Hong Kong movie industry does not bother to make the distinction either and the headline ins entirely justified.
Granted, for all pratical purposes you will need an accelerator as muon source. Trying this with cosmic muons will not get you very far.
I mainly brought this up because it annoys me that this existing and well understood cold fusion process always tends to get overlooked.
The only other ways to achieve neutron flux (that I'm aware of) are to (1) use a particle accelerator collision to release neutrons (i.e.: spallation) or (2) to use a radioactive source (or running nuclear recator) and guide the flux of exiting neutrons. Both of these are quite large and not very portable.
You forgot Muon-catalyzed fusion.
1.00 Fish must remain in water to continue living.
What about flying fish?
And what about evolution? Does this mean your mindpixel mind will believe in creationism? So much effort and then we'll end up with an artificial fool!
For business users the price will almost not matter.
When I worked in Germany as an IT consultant we billed the time on the train to the customer because in 1st class you had ideal working conditions. I've got a lot of work done on trains. The only thing that impaired productivity was the fact that you were off-line.
Consultants will be able to pass on the price for WLAN on trains to their clients and business execs will also put a high price on the extra bit of productivity that online access will give them on a train.
It may take a while before this tickles down to the 2nd class but there is definitely a huge market there.
He has his finger exactly on the sweet spot were this story falls apart.
Recommended reading to illustrate this, his latest interview with Spiegel
This makes sense for an individual, but not necessarilly for an enterprise.
Let me give you an example: Suppose you run a bank that offers credit cards. You spend a lot of money on sending ads out via mail, but you also have current customers that you can call and may want to make a special offer, especially if you have any indication that they may consider switching to another bank. But you really don't know exactly how to determine these customers or when it is better to send an ad in the mail or rather to call a customer.
Generally speaking, you have a customer retention and direct marketing problem. What you need is somebody who really understands the business issues and implications of this problem and offers a solution. Quite obviously this solution will be comprised of a software and a services part. Rather then going with a pure service shop that will be hard pressed to gobble together a solution on the go, shopping for a vendor that offers a real solution to your problem and also has a track record of succeeding at it may be the smarter choice.
DISCLAIMER: Yes, my employer does offer a bunch of solutions, and yes we can make much more money on those then tool sales. The latter only holds because we actually manage to get them much more bang for their bucks. The tools have reached a level of complexity and interdependence that our customers need the services in the equation to put them to profitable use quickly.
... find out if a sales guy pushing a "solution" actually has only vapor or something real to offer.
Just ask him what his "solution" solves for your business.
Sometimes buzzwords actually work in the customers favor.
I doubt that this will be held up in a hogher court. I'd be very surprised if it did, but then again it is surprising that this case has gotten so far in the first place.
Maybe somebody who knows French laws and the Fremch constitution could comment on this? Is science and academic freedom protected in the French constition (as in the German)? If so shouldn't this trump any intellecual property rights?
The amount of gold is fixed, while wealth is not.
I think the other way around makes much more sense, wealth is in the eye of the beholder and measured in a base currency. $, and gold can serve as such currencies, but if you take the amount of all wealth on earth and put it in relation to the amount of all $s, s or gold you will of course find that this relation will be different for all three. At all times the numerator will be the same but the denominator i.e. the volume of $s, s and even gold - due to mining - will change.
Wealth increase only plays a role in so far as accelerated wealth increase in the $ zone will allow for faster $ volume increase (foreigners have to buy $s to get in on the action).
Actually, I picked gold as example for the very reason that its volume is fairly fixed. The binding guidelines for the ECB that it inherited from the German Central Bank are very strict and only look at the currency volume (M1 etc.) and inflation rate. By design the ECB is not allowed to try to fight exchange rate fluctuations by rate changes. As such the Euro currency volume can only increase fairly slowly. I.e. you will never see an ECB rate greater than the average GDP growth rate in the Euro zone. This is radically different from the US dollar situation. Greenspan has the freedom to set the rates the way he sees fit i.e. he can and does fight recession with rates that dramatically increase the dollar volume in circulation. Euro volume increase in comparison is much more in line with the increase of gold volume (gold volume does after all increase due to mining).
I think you also underestimate that gold is still used as currency equivalent in many parts of the world e.g. India. Malaysia on the other hand actually adopted the gold standard for its own currency after the Asian currency melt-down in the 90s. Globally gold is still very much a real life currency.
Call me crazy, but for a democracy it would have been much more healthy, if Gore supporters would have raised as much hell as the Ukranian supporters for Jushchenko did, so that these votes would have been counted properly. No matter the final outcome.
Sorry if this may sound harsh, but I don't think you have a very realistic understanding of how consensus is "engineered" in parliamentarian democracies like France and Germany.
..but why did the US have to spell it out for everyone? Was it some big secret, known only to the US, that the sanctions were hurting the Iraqi people, and not Saddam? Was it some big secret that Saddam and his sons were running a killing machine?
Since I am German I will focus on the latter. In the past we always looked to the US for leadership in non EU foreign affairs. In the case of Bosnia and the Kosovo crisis there was major media focus on the plight of the Albanians and the killing in Sarajevo. It also helped that we hosted a lot of refugees from there. Nevertheless without the US we would have never responded militarily. But under the leadership of the US, given the media attention and especially one consistent narrative in the media, our politicians were able to overcome cynicism, as well as the strong pacifistic gut sentiments of my people. In the end a majority supported a war effort against Serbia long before the first bomb fell. Milosevic at the time was certain that he could turn the public opinion in Europe, and had to find out the hard way that he could not. As soon as he realized that he couldn't he caved. The entire war was an extension of politics - a PR fight over the determination of the European NATO countries.
Ever walked by a beggar on the street and looked the other way? That is how well informed people in Germany handle all the plight that's in the world. It is actually easier, because the plight is so much further away. Mrs. Albright was more honest when she outright contended that thousands of dead Iraqi children was a price she was willing to pay to contain Saddam.
If there would have been a concerted effort to bring the plight of Iraq's children and civilians to public attention many months before any talk of war, the ground work could have been laid to "sell" a humanitarian Iraq war to my people. This would have required that the US administration would have engaged their allies very early and brought them into the fault, by first building a consensus among the political leaders about the same time that fighting in Afghanistan started. Apparently this has not happened (if they would have tried we'd know by now). NATO would have offered the perfect platform to organize this kind of consensus building. It is a shame that the unity of the West has rather been shattered.
In the past EU countries like France and Germany could comfortably tell themselves that they are too small to take on all the problems in the world.
The EU is still very much work in progress, but we have to get our act together. Blind reliance on the US leadership does unfortunately not work anymore.
The links with the exception of the 9/11 comission findings are somewhat dated.
What you did not quote from the report is this part:
According to the reporting, Iraqi officials offered Bin Ladin a safe haven in Iraq. Bin Ladin declined, apparently judging that his circumstances in Afghanistan remained more favorable than the Iraqi alternative. The reports describe friendly contacts and indicate some common themes in both sides' hatred of the United States. But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.
Same location Chapter 2 (Paragraph 76)
The important word here is evidence. If Iraq actually would have hosted OBL at some point after the Afghanistan intervention, no ally to the US would have ever objected to taking on Iraq.
The 911 comission site contains some more interesting material. For instance this gem of wisdom from a hearing:
The perception of U.S. unilateralism over a military confrontation with Iraq may adversely affect international consensus and multilateral cooperation in the war against terrorism. As other issues rise to the top of the international political agenda, there is concern that multilateral cooperation may dissipate over time. There have been suggestions that it not only diverts attention away from the global war on terrorism but may lead to an overstretching of already stretched anti-terrorism and intelligence resources. The tendency to link Iraq with the issue of al-Qaeda remains unhelpful, as there exist limited credible evidence to suggest any active operational linkage exists or that it should constitute a real cause for immediate danger and concern. Mixing the two separate issues together have lead to confusion and divisions how to best respond and the likely consequences any U.S. military action may have in maintaining the quality of the global or regional coalition in the war against terrorism.
"The Problems Ahead in Forging An Effective Global Anti-Terrorism Strategy" Bullet point #9)
In my opinion the strategy to invade Iraq and especially the inept way this adimistration went about it, was a completly inadequat reaction to 911. Apparently you are still not willing to see this, so I suggest we just observe how the Iraq "adventure" plays out and chat about it again a year from now.
Links please to back up your opinion that Bush won 2000 after all votes were counted?
After all, there are many reports that indicate the opposite, the BBC and Guardian even produced a documentary about voting fraud in Florida 2000
So, presuming I am correct, there would be very little the US could do to bring France onboard other than capitulate - and, given the outrage over the initial 9/11 attacks and the seeming opportunism by the French government, that was an impossibility.
Taking the lesson from the Bosnia conflict I think there would have been a way to garner public support in Germany for an Iraq war and hence leverage to bring France in line.
Instead of going through the Security Council at all, the public should have repeatedly reminded that the sanctions on Iraq brought terrible suffering to the Iraqi people especially children. The world could not trust Saddam any longer, but you could not go on punishing the Iraqi people for it. Hence Saddam had to be removed. That was the line of reasoning that Denmark followed. I think if the whole WMD mumbo-jumbo would have been foregone in favor of this approach, the US could have won a broad support across all countries in Europe.
Observing how inept this war was sold , and the poor post war management, is not suited to inspire any trust in the leadership abilities of the current administration.
As a result the overarching leadership position of the US as a leader of the West is now in jeopardy. It was this opening that Chirac saw and seized on.
Stagnation and recession does not equal inflation. You are correct in your assumption that a quickly inflating dollar will trigger a world economic crises, but the ECB is by law only concerned with keeping inflation low and the euro volume is tightly controlled. A world recession will affect different currencies differently. An easy way to immediately understand this is to think of gold as another form of currency - one that can not be artificially inflated like a fiat currency. Studying historic market data will show you that the gold price always tends to go up during times of economic hardship no matter what base currency you use to express it.
As a European and somebody who certainly does not love the Bush administration I just wished that the American left would get of this the "US bought the Ukraine election result" meme.
It is simply not true. To me it seems almost like a denial neurosis born from the fact that the Ukrainians managed what the American Left could not bring itself to do in 2000.
Although as a Europena I do take slight offense at the 2nd paragraph and do not aggree with the poster, I do not think that this should be moderated as troll.
I wished moderators would reserve this for posts that are clearly so hatefull that they are obviously only meant as provocation and insult.
The parent is clearly not hatespeech and I urge the moderators to therefore tolerate zors' opinion.
Hola, an AC that makes sense. The world truley must soon end now.
It always astounds me how Americans no matter on what political side they are on, always manage to see everything through there bi-partisan, ethnocentric funnel vision.
From a European perspective I find it rather ironic that the US seems once seemed to have picked the correct i.e. democratic side in the Ukraine. While being majorly challenged to conduct a decent and fair democratic election at home.
If there is anything a American liberal can and should learn from the Ukraine election, is that an election can not be stolen if the people care.
That is what liberal Americans should have done in 2000. If only the Democratic voters would have bothered to get off their asses in 2000 and raise hell, the world would be a much better place. Unfortunately, it seems Americans are foremost couch potatoes no matter where they stand politically.
Indiscriminate murder ... is a crime in any country even Iran. Relentless internationally coordinated criminal prosecution was all it took after 9/11. (With the notable exception of Afghanistan not having a legitimate government.)
Where you got it wrong was in assuming that Saddam backed Radical Islamic terrorism. That where the rubber hits the road. The current administration could not imagine that their Arab enemies would not follow the logic that your enemy's enemy is your friend. Just goes to show that Condi by studying the Soviet Union really didn't learn anything about the Middle East. The devout followers of Osama hate secular tyrants as much as the US. As such Saddam would have never risked nurturing such sworn enemies.
The current administration got all their facts about Iraq plain wrong. My country (Germany) and France tried to communicate this on all channels before the war. Alas to no avail.
France could have been brought into line if the US would have made a more compelling case for the war.
You missed one more and I think very important motivation for Chirac.
If you would have been in Germany as I was at the time you would have noticed that it was actually Germany and the German population that was most opposed to the war. I am talking millions of people on the street protesting the build-up to war.
Chirac being the one with a permanent security seat in the security council noticed that he could make himself a hero in the eyes of Germans as well as French by putting on a show in the security council. At the same time there was joint session of the German and French parliaments (the first in our history) and politicians start talking about having a joint Franco-German citizenship.
DISCLAIMER: I am not French but German.