Here is Switzerland just out of curiosity, I checked the prices on the biggest company, Swisscom, and found the following for the most expensive package (International): Monthly charge CHF 45 GPRS CHF 0.19 / 10 kB (unlimited) Normal hours: CHF.040/minute Low hours: CHF 0.30/minute Night/Weekends CHF 0.20/minute GSM Roaming HSCSD (Data at 56kbps) Voicemail SMS (and MMS) Conferencing Call waiting
This is expensive for calling but it's very reliable (I've used my phone in Germany, South Africa, Australia, France and Holland with no problems)
GSM is simply the best in international terms. Very few countries use CDMA whether it's better or not and that number (apart from Iraq) is dropping. I expect that in the US most will eventually switch over to GSM eventually.
These new extras seem a little pointless, I think. The rest of.Mac, the mail, webspace, online volume and backup are useful and if someone is willing to pay $100 per year for that, all the power to them. But I think that as soon as one moves into a slightly more astute level, where one can implement many of those features oneself on a normal hosting service, the appeal of.Mac goes away.
Added to this, it seemed on the Mac forums that the service is often down, which would be irritating if one depends on it for some thing.
Replacing S with $ in a company name doesn't make you clever
No, but it stakes out one's position and feelings towards Microsoft quite well and points to the only thing that really does seem important to Microsoft when designing their software.
If IBM were to indemnify its customers as well, the FUCKS from sco would find some way to spin it in their direction as well: "IBM is acknowledging that our claims are vaild and should now pay us everything".
Christ, I hate those bastards at SCO. I wish that someone would just fucking hurry up and firebomb their fucking offices.
The amendments made make this law much improved compared to its original incarnation. It is way better than the US version. Software is not patentable in itself, nor are business methods.
I was going to mod you up in sympathy but I decided to reply instead when I saw the flamebait at the end of your post. I agree fully that the installation procedure for the airport card is not trivial, and is a blemish on Apple's otherwise very good hardware record. It could really have been made simpler or at leats be done for free at an Apple store. Technically challenged people (most computer users fit into this category) should not be made to do this.
But Apple has made these cards default in the newer Powerbooks AFAIK and you could have installed a wireless PC card with the same ease as you would have on a PC laptop. Apart from this I have never seen a PC laptop with an even close attention to detail and engineering quality of an Apple laptop, with the possible exception of IBM's Thinkpads, which are quite solid. Dell and Compaq's offerings are poorly engiineered in order to save money and it shows.
Anyway, who cares. If something drives you to rage, then I think you have other problems...
As someone who used an overly complex PHP "application server" for a project that was screaming "decent seperation of logic and presentation" I think the guy is on some nice drug.
PHP is fine for smaller applications. It is an utter desaster for large applications that need maintenance and the ability to be coded by many inidividuals. Every bit of templating done in PHP has to be done by hand or you have to have intimate understanding of the code for the "application server".
JSP allows you to use Java's strengths in that the logic can be done in servlets, beans etc and implemented as one line JSP tags. It's overhead heavy for small projects but excellent for larger ones where you will still be able to figure out what the code does if the original developer left or got fired. This is similar to ASP.Net I imagine.
His comparisons say nothing about the scope of the students applications or the tools used. Anyone doing a whole application in JSP is going to suffer, and this is because JSP is not meant for this, and a comparison of JSP and PHP on this basis alone will make PHP seem better than it is.
As someone else mentioned: Use the right tool for the job.
It is important in issues such as this that people not only complain here but also write letters to their Congressmen, Senators, MP's whatever, explaining their point of view. This is the only way that obviously crooked motions such as this can be dismissed.
Another way is to write to companies such as Symantec and inform them that you will no longer be purchasing their products.
I suspect that MS is starting to test the waters with this DRM client, which will I assume be included in the next versions of almost all of MS' products. MS is not stupid. Their marketing department will push this as a plus for security ("If your app uses MS DRM it will be more secure", "Office documents can only be viewed by those you choose") and privately amongst RIAA and MPAA types they will push it as a money maker for digital content providers. The joke is that while you can bet your silly ass that the same people who think that the latest from MS is desirable now, will be accepting this junk then. But the only ones who stand to make any money off of this will be MS of course, because it is almost just as sure that no more music or videos will be sold online just because the RIAA and MPAA now think it's ok to do so.
This is very bad PR. Anytime a senior exec starts negatively dissing successful competing products it becomes painfully obvious that the company is hurting. The saddest thing of all is that Sun's hardware is of very good quality and if they made the strategic decision to support Linux on their servers they could have provided good competition to IBM. As it is they will continue to lose customers as more and more companies switch to Linux, which isn't very well supported on Sun hardware. What Sun hasn't noticed is that almost no one is really worried about SCO anymore.
The reason I want to get on my knees and send thanks to the almighty (bruce or whoever) is because I am sitting infront of my Mac Powerbook running OSX. I have been receiving on avergae one of these fucking Microshit fakes things every five minutes, which my Mac has been fortunately been a)immune to, and b)been able to filter into the trash can after a couple of iterations.
I think there must have been about 300 to 400 of these messages in my trash before I deleted it. I can imagine the fun I would have been having with if I'd still have had my PC with Outlook (ya ya, I know, can be patched yadda yadda yadda)
While everyone and their mothers are claiming fake (which it could be), this could revolutionise the SETL (life, not intelligence) because gas giants would be ideal for the source of life on this level, having both lots of gases and energy.
Would be damn interesting if living organisms of this sort were to be found on Jupiter, Saturn or even Titan, would be trying to communicate with them on a level which they would understand.
I read about this a while ago and at first thought Sun had gone the whole hog and turned out something like jDistro i.e. a completely Java based desktop environment, but then discovered it was YALD (Yet Another Linux Distro) albeit a clean one, from the same company that bashes Linux one day because they're pissed that it's taking customers away from the hallowed Solaris, and pushing it like crazy the next in an attempt to actually market StarOffice and grab a piece of the Linux pie.
The distro, because this is what it is, will certainly gather a few customers that want 24/7 desktop support and don't mind paying for it, but they're going to have an uphill battle against established players like RedHat and SuSE in the enterprise and Debian and Gentoo in the small space. There really isn't much room for YALD these days.
Sun would almost assuredly have preferred to have done all this on Solaris, but no one is interested anymore, given Sun's haphazard moves in Solarisx86 and the increasing popularity of Linux in governments and large businesses.
What is Sun's problem? Easy, they make excellent servers and a robust stable OS, but their pricing and their totally insane one day on next day off commitment to TotD (Trend of the Day) and comments by no less than McNealy and co. only serve to make potential customers even more wary. i.e. no clear long term goals!
What could Sun have done instead of this YALD? They should have taken an intelligent risk a while ago and comitted to making Linux robust, fast and scalable on their own good quality hardware. This is the route that IBM has gone and it is paying off bigtime for IBM. They should have realised that proprietry *nixes in the server room are on the way out, due to costs alone (OS, propritry support and application porting costs)
Instead Sun's McNealy likes to think like SCO's McBride one day (All your IP are belong to us) and like Steve Jobs the next (My desktop is better than yours)
What he hasn't noticed is that Apple has taken a very consistent long term approach to establishing OSX and Apple hardware as popular amongst consumers and design pros first and slowly amongst enterprise CEOs, CIOs etc second (Hey, WTF, Oracle runs on that snappy XServe?) with the byproduct of being immensely popular amongst *nix Sysadmins (The number of Linux and Solaris Sysadmins running around with Powerbooks and iBooks is amazing).
As for this YALD being more usable than WindowsXP, this must be a joke, right? Windows and Microsoft have a terrible security record and a bad image as wife and market abusers, but they have a huge marketshare, almost all of the desktop applications and an acceptable and responsive Desktop UI. For all its problems Windows is here to stay for a long time (and copy-paste actually works)
Sun should stick to what it does best, and avoid running off into uncharted waters every second day.
The language as it has been in most of it's 4.x.x iteration has been just about fine. Good for quick slap em together websites and small applications. But...
I have seen huge cumbersome application servers built around PHP that are a nightmare to maintain without having intimate familiarity with the code of the application server, such as Ampoliros or Ariadne, something which defeats the purpose of using such a large system in the first place. Such things really do work better with a OO by design language such as Java or ASP.Net (I assume, don't know.Net) where you can rely on the functionality of the objects without having to second guess the original developers.
My guess is that PHP needs a better OO design (and no, PHP5 is not it, yet) and better seperation of logic and presentation for larger systems.
But for smaller stuff, well it's hard to beat in terms of price and speed.
Europe is going to have to make a decision which side it's on
Your post seems to imply that Europe is either on the side of "them" (the terrorists, anyone who opposes any US policy, the commies, the nazis, the Arabs, the Chinese --you'll have to decide which side you mean exactly) or on the side of the US.
You seem to have this idea that China is the bad bogey and that the EU is an insignificant player in this deal which must decide between the camps of the US or the Chinese.
I think you'll be surprised to discover that the EU is on its own side, as it has its own interests at heart just as the US and China have their own interests at heart.
And you can be sure that if it ever becomes public that the US has specific weapons aimed at these satellites for the next time the US decides to invade a country it doesn't like and actually uses them when say, Iran's number is up, it would firstly be an act of war and secondly that would be it for European US relations, for good probably.
So it's probably a good thing that Linux is gaining popularity here and that we won't have to depend on Microsoft in bad times.
Name one war between two stable capitalist democracies in the last 100 years
Peru vs. Ecuador in 1995 for example. Both democracies with elected governments.
To take that to a more extreme level: Germany elected Hitler and his thugs in 1933, who went on to start WWII. It wasn't a coup.
I don't think that there is any guarantee that a "stable capitalist democracy" will not go to war with another if the stakes are high enough, or are seen to be such. The tensions between the US and the EU are complex and are not, as posted by your post's parent likely to lead to war any time soon. This is because the US has good relations with a lot of single countries in the EU, but also because the economic gains in trade far outweigh any idea of a military campaign against an EU country.
However, the EU is the world's largest economic bloc, and is set to become even larger in the coming years. The Euro is gaining credibility as a good alternative to the Dollar as international tender and there are strong signs that the EU will with time form its own defence force (growing with a typical EU glacial pace). There is definitely a current in Europe that is seeking to take Europe out of the American sphere of influence into its own hands. US-EU trade disputes are but a part of this and the Gallileo system is another.
Where this will lead in the future is debatable, but you might realise that the US attempts to split the EU in the run up to the war in Iraq (Rumsfeld's Old Europe) will leave lasting impressions just as the heavy US opposition to the forming of a seperate EU defence force will, and verging on paranoid ideas such as yours that the US should aim weapons to destroy Gallileo (which I am sure that some in your Pentagon agree with) will only highten fears in the EU that the US is only a fairweather friend that would only call those nations friends that are willing to unconditionally do US bidding but is willing to undermine those nations that have their own voice when it is not in line with that of the US.
I look at the rather extreme polarisation that GW is causing in the USA and I think that if the good man carries on with his present course of favouring and protecting large dodgy corporations such as Enron and Halliburton, giving the ultra rich even more money while cutting spending on the ultra poor who used to be the middle class, pushing satanically large defecits through the budget and spending American blood and money on only vaguely understood wars in far off countries and still goes on to win the next election, I think you Americans will have your own version of the Russian revolution in the not so far off future.
So, what do you think of the idea of calling everyone Tovarishch?
I posted a long time ago (before the Iraq war brought it to a point) that I think that the EU and the US are diverging and drifting further and further from one another. I've read enough political discussion forums to note that the level of animosity between the rest of the world and the US is definitely high, and rising.
I know that every time when a slashdot article is posted on some European, Chinese or Indian project of technical prowess, that quite a number of highly racist, xenophobic posts will be made, a number of people will pound their fists on the table as to why the USA system is superior and that the US military could take 'em all on and win.
And make no mistake, the US military could definitely beat any other military on earth in a conventional war. There are no nations with the American ability to project force all around the globe. The US economy is the key to the world's economy as is evidenced that other economies reel when the US economy takes a hit, and the US certainly does its best to strong arm other nations into accepting US economic terms, and is often successful.
But if there is one big mistake that the USA makes, it is in thinking that the rest of the world is incapable of learning from past failures. The EU wouldn't be there if Europe were incapable of learning from its own past failures. It's inefficient and clumsy but it is the best way for Europe to avoid going to war with itself again, and for European nations to get stronger economically.
Likewise, many countries are very wary of an America that acts alone and starts large unilateral wars for very dodgy reasons. Many countries are beginning to see that the USA is willing to use combiinations of military force and economic power to achieve its goals. These are the reaons that the EU has finally started to act on the idea of a European defense force. These are the reasons that the Euro is becoming popular tender in international commerce. These are the reasons that the Gallileo system is being built to avoid the loss of the GPS system in times of crisis.These are the reasons that China is slowly but surely edging into space, modernising its army and plowing money into indigenous IT.
All these things are happening because all those countries are worried about being dominated by the US in times of crisis.
And all this talk about nuking them (all those horrid countries who would dare to oppose the US) is plain rubbish. The US could certainly "win" a nuclear war, in that it has more missiles than anyone else, but at least some missiles from any opponent would hit the USA, and I don't know about you, but living in a world after a major nuclear war is not something I like to think about.
Got around 5 of these in the last hour. I am luckily on a Mac, so I'm not worried about the Virus, but I tried to mail a couple of the senders to tell them about their comps and their mail quotas were already full...
The io2 device does not seem to be a fog screen, in spite or perhaps because of thousands of/. ravers ranting "fog screen, fog screen, fog screen".
The site claims modfication of air and photons by a proprietry device, whatever thay may be. I have an idea that it's either similar to the fog screen but uses a heated column of air or else uses some kind of electrostatic principle.
Does "collaborative space" mean directory services "application space" meaning server side applications? With yuppy speak i.e. the "space" word, it's sometime hard to tell.
I wonder if the origins of this trend aren't in the terrible spelling and bad grammar that many internet age children employ, having gone through a school system that accepts MS Word's spelling correction as normal?
This is not an anti-US rant. I've known a few Americans and liked and disliked them just as much as someone from any other country.
Frankly, however, I am scared shitless of the USA. I will not visit there for any reason as long as the current government is in power and as long as those draconian laws are in place, which is a pity, as there's lots to see there.
I don't know why the current US government is so hell bent on alienating all its friends in the world, and alienating them it is, and it will have more enemies when the UK's Blair finally steps down at the latest after the next UK elections. Even the Aussies are puzzled by Howards towing the line and misleading the public. I fully expect thta the rift between "Old Europe" and the USA will only grow with time as the US continues to seek military engagements and fealty from countries that have no wish to give up their independance.
The only thing I can see as to why these governments (Bush,Blair and Howard) have remained high popularity ratings is because they all appeal to the need for security and patriotic hearts of their countrymen. The almost incessant warnings of terror acts in the last couple of years has well served to make the population scared as hell and to believe that their government is looking after them. Its become almost a Pavlovian response:Poll ratings down, sound the terror warning bells again!
As for the bugger facing life in prison for making speed, why the hell has the FBI still not found the culprit responsable for the 2001 Anthrax attacks, two years ago?
Unless that was part of the Plan(TM), so to speak?
Slashdot Mirror
Here is Switzerland just out of curiosity, I checked the prices on the biggest company, Swisscom, and found the following for the most expensive package (International): .040/minute
Monthly charge CHF 45
GPRS CHF 0.19 / 10 kB (unlimited)
Normal hours: CHF
Low hours: CHF 0.30/minute
Night/Weekends CHF 0.20/minute
GSM Roaming
HSCSD (Data at 56kbps)
Voicemail
SMS (and MMS)
Conferencing
Call waiting
This is expensive for calling but it's very reliable (I've used my phone in Germany, South Africa, Australia, France and Holland with no problems)
GSM is simply the best in international terms. Very few countries use CDMA whether it's better or not and that number (apart from Iraq) is dropping. I expect that in the US most will eventually switch over to GSM eventually.
These new extras seem a little pointless, I think. The rest of .Mac, the mail, webspace, online volume and backup are useful and if someone is willing to pay $100 per year for that, all the power to them. But I think that as soon as one moves into a slightly more astute level, where one can implement many of those features oneself on a normal hosting service, the appeal of .Mac goes away.
Added to this, it seemed on the Mac forums that the service is often down, which would be irritating if one depends on it for some thing.
Replacing S with $ in a company name doesn't make you clever
No, but it stakes out one's position and feelings towards Microsoft quite well and points to the only thing that really does seem important to Microsoft when designing their software.
If IBM were to indemnify its customers as well, the FUCKS from sco would find some way to spin it in their direction as well: "IBM is acknowledging that our claims are vaild and should now pay us everything".
Christ, I hate those bastards at SCO. I wish that someone would just fucking hurry up and firebomb their fucking offices.
The amendments made make this law much improved compared to its original incarnation. It is way better than the US version. Software is not patentable in itself, nor are business methods.
Yeah!!!!
I was going to mod you up in sympathy but I decided to reply instead when I saw the flamebait at the end of your post. I agree fully that the installation procedure for the airport card is not trivial, and is a blemish on Apple's otherwise very good hardware record. It could really have been made simpler or at leats be done for free at an Apple store. Technically challenged people (most computer users fit into this category) should not be made to do this.
But Apple has made these cards default in the newer Powerbooks AFAIK and you could have installed a wireless PC card with the same ease as you would have on a PC laptop. Apart from this I have never seen a PC laptop with an even close attention to detail and engineering quality of an Apple laptop, with the possible exception of IBM's Thinkpads, which are quite solid. Dell and Compaq's offerings are poorly engiineered in order to save money and it shows.
Anyway, who cares. If something drives you to rage, then I think you have other problems...
As someone who used an overly complex PHP "application server" for a project that was screaming "decent seperation of logic and presentation" I think the guy is on some nice drug.
PHP is fine for smaller applications. It is an utter desaster for large applications that need maintenance and the ability to be coded by many inidividuals. Every bit of templating done in PHP has to be done by hand or you have to have intimate understanding of the code for the "application server".
JSP allows you to use Java's strengths in that the logic can be done in servlets, beans etc and implemented as one line JSP tags. It's overhead heavy for small projects but excellent for larger ones where you will still be able to figure out what the code does if the original developer left or got fired. This is similar to ASP.Net I imagine.
His comparisons say nothing about the scope of the students applications or the tools used. Anyone doing a whole application in JSP is going to suffer, and this is because JSP is not meant for this, and a comparison of JSP and PHP on this basis alone will make PHP seem better than it is.
As someone else mentioned: Use the right tool for the job.
It is important in issues such as this that people not only complain here but also write letters to their Congressmen, Senators, MP's whatever, explaining their point of view. This is the only way that obviously crooked motions such as this can be dismissed.
Another way is to write to companies such as Symantec and inform them that you will no longer be purchasing their products.
Do it. Complaining here won't stop any laws.
I suspect that MS is starting to test the waters with this DRM client, which will I assume be included in the next versions of almost all of MS' products. MS is not stupid. Their marketing department will push this as a plus for security ("If your app uses MS DRM it will be more secure", "Office documents can only be viewed by those you choose") and privately amongst RIAA and MPAA types they will push it as a money maker for digital content providers. The joke is that while you can bet your silly ass that the same people who think that the latest from MS is desirable now, will be accepting this junk then. But the only ones who stand to make any money off of this will be MS of course, because it is almost just as sure that no more music or videos will be sold online just because the RIAA and MPAA now think it's ok to do so.
If I had $40 billion, I would give away $168 million as well, but it wouldn't change the fact that I'm an asshole ;)
This is very bad PR. Anytime a senior exec starts negatively dissing successful competing products it becomes painfully obvious that the company is hurting. The saddest thing of all is that Sun's hardware is of very good quality and if they made the strategic decision to support Linux on their servers they could have provided good competition to IBM. As it is they will continue to lose customers as more and more companies switch to Linux, which isn't very well supported on Sun hardware. What Sun hasn't noticed is that almost no one is really worried about SCO anymore.
You mean Intel is incapable of planning a little Astroturfing ahead of time?
The reason I want to get on my knees and send thanks to the almighty (bruce or whoever) is because I am sitting infront of my Mac Powerbook running OSX. I have been receiving on avergae one of these fucking Microshit fakes things every five minutes, which my Mac has been fortunately been a)immune to, and b)been able to filter into the trash can after a couple of iterations.
I think there must have been about 300 to 400 of these messages in my trash before I deleted it. I can imagine the fun I would have been having with if I'd still have had my PC with Outlook (ya ya, I know, can be patched yadda yadda yadda)
While everyone and their mothers are claiming fake (which it could be), this could revolutionise the SETL (life, not intelligence) because gas giants would be ideal for the source of life on this level, having both lots of gases and energy.
Would be damn interesting if living organisms of this sort were to be found on Jupiter, Saturn or even Titan, would be trying to communicate with them on a level which they would understand.
I read about this a while ago and at first thought Sun had gone the whole hog and turned out something like jDistro i.e. a completely Java based desktop environment, but then discovered it was YALD (Yet Another Linux Distro) albeit a clean one, from the same company that bashes Linux one day because they're pissed that it's taking customers away from the hallowed Solaris, and pushing it like crazy the next in an attempt to actually market StarOffice and grab a piece of the Linux pie.
The distro, because this is what it is, will certainly gather a few customers that want 24/7 desktop support and don't mind paying for it, but they're going to have an uphill battle against established players like RedHat and SuSE in the enterprise and Debian and Gentoo in the small space. There really isn't much room for YALD these days.
Sun would almost assuredly have preferred to have done all this on Solaris, but no one is interested anymore, given Sun's haphazard moves in Solarisx86 and the increasing popularity of Linux in governments and large businesses.
What is Sun's problem? Easy, they make excellent servers and a robust stable OS, but their pricing and their totally insane one day on next day off commitment to TotD (Trend of the Day) and comments by no less than McNealy and co. only serve to make potential customers even more wary. i.e. no clear long term goals!
What could Sun have done instead of this YALD? They should have taken an intelligent risk a while ago and comitted to making Linux robust, fast and scalable on their own good quality hardware. This is the route that IBM has gone and it is paying off bigtime for IBM. They should have realised that proprietry *nixes in the server room are on the way out, due to costs alone (OS, propritry support and application porting costs)
Instead Sun's McNealy likes to think like SCO's McBride one day (All your IP are belong to us) and like Steve Jobs the next (My desktop is better than yours)
What he hasn't noticed is that Apple has taken a very consistent long term approach to establishing OSX and Apple hardware as popular amongst consumers and design pros first and slowly amongst enterprise CEOs, CIOs etc second (Hey, WTF, Oracle runs on that snappy XServe?) with the byproduct of being immensely popular amongst *nix Sysadmins (The number of Linux and Solaris Sysadmins running around with Powerbooks and iBooks is amazing).
As for this YALD being more usable than WindowsXP, this must be a joke, right? Windows and Microsoft have a terrible security record and a bad image as wife and market abusers, but they have a huge marketshare, almost all of the desktop applications and an acceptable and responsive Desktop UI. For all its problems Windows is here to stay for a long time (and copy-paste actually works)
Sun should stick to what it does best, and avoid running off into uncharted waters every second day.
The language as it has been in most of it's 4.x.x iteration has been just about fine. Good for quick slap em together websites and small applications. But...
.Net) where you can rely on the functionality of the objects without having to second guess the original developers.
I have seen huge cumbersome application servers built around PHP that are a nightmare to maintain without having intimate familiarity with the code of the application server, such as Ampoliros or Ariadne, something which defeats the purpose of using such a large system in the first place. Such things really do work better with a OO by design language such as Java or ASP.Net (I assume, don't know
My guess is that PHP needs a better OO design (and no, PHP5 is not it, yet) and better seperation of logic and presentation for larger systems.
But for smaller stuff, well it's hard to beat in terms of price and speed.
Europe is going to have to make a decision which side it's on
Your post seems to imply that Europe is either on the side of "them" (the terrorists, anyone who opposes any US policy, the commies, the nazis, the Arabs, the Chinese --you'll have to decide which side you mean exactly) or on the side of the US.
You seem to have this idea that China is the bad bogey and that the EU is an insignificant player in this deal which must decide between the camps of the US or the Chinese.
I think you'll be surprised to discover that the EU is on its own side, as it has its own interests at heart just as the US and China have their own interests at heart.
And you can be sure that if it ever becomes public that the US has specific weapons aimed at these satellites for the next time the US decides to invade a country it doesn't like and actually uses them when say, Iran's number is up, it would firstly be an act of war and secondly that would be it for European US relations, for good probably.
So it's probably a good thing that Linux is gaining popularity here and that we won't have to depend on Microsoft in bad times.
Name one war between two stable capitalist democracies in the last 100 years
Peru vs. Ecuador in 1995 for example. Both democracies with elected governments.
To take that to a more extreme level: Germany elected Hitler and his thugs in 1933, who went on to start WWII. It wasn't a coup.
I don't think that there is any guarantee that a "stable capitalist democracy" will not go to war with another if the stakes are high enough, or are seen to be such. The tensions between the US and the EU are complex and are not, as posted by your post's parent likely to lead to war any time soon. This is because the US has good relations with a lot of single countries in the EU, but also because the economic gains in trade far outweigh any idea of a military campaign against an EU country.
However, the EU is the world's largest economic bloc, and is set to become even larger in the coming years. The Euro is gaining credibility as a good alternative to the Dollar as international tender and there are strong signs that the EU will with time form its own defence force (growing with a typical EU glacial pace). There is definitely a current in Europe that is seeking to take Europe out of the American sphere of influence into its own hands. US-EU trade disputes are but a part of this and the Gallileo system is another.
Where this will lead in the future is debatable, but you might realise that the US attempts to split the EU in the run up to the war in Iraq (Rumsfeld's Old Europe) will leave lasting impressions just as the heavy US opposition to the forming of a seperate EU defence force will, and verging on paranoid ideas such as yours that the US should aim weapons to destroy Gallileo (which I am sure that some in your Pentagon agree with) will only highten fears in the EU that the US is only a fairweather friend that would only call those nations friends that are willing to unconditionally do US bidding but is willing to undermine those nations that have their own voice when it is not in line with that of the US.
I look at the rather extreme polarisation that GW is causing in the USA and I think that if the good man carries on with his present course of favouring and protecting large dodgy corporations such as Enron and Halliburton, giving the ultra rich even more money while cutting spending on the ultra poor who used to be the middle class, pushing satanically large defecits through the budget and spending American blood and money on only vaguely understood wars in far off countries and still goes on to win the next election, I think you Americans will have your own version of the Russian revolution in the not so far off future.
So, what do you think of the idea of calling everyone Tovarishch?
I posted a long time ago (before the Iraq war brought it to a point) that I think that the EU and the US are diverging and drifting further and further from one another. I've read enough political discussion forums to note that the level of animosity between the rest of the world and the US is definitely high, and rising.
I know that every time when a slashdot article is posted on some European, Chinese or Indian project of technical prowess, that quite a number of highly racist, xenophobic posts will be made, a number of people will pound their fists on the table as to why the USA system is superior and that the US military could take 'em all on and win.
And make no mistake, the US military could definitely beat any other military on earth in a conventional war. There are no nations with the American ability to project force all around the globe. The US economy is the key to the world's economy as is evidenced that other economies reel when the US economy takes a hit, and the US certainly does its best to strong arm other nations into accepting US economic terms, and is often successful.
But if there is one big mistake that the USA makes, it is in thinking that the rest of the world is incapable of learning from past failures. The EU wouldn't be there if Europe were incapable of learning from its own past failures. It's inefficient and clumsy but it is the best way for Europe to avoid going to war with itself again, and for European nations to get stronger economically.
Likewise, many countries are very wary of an America that acts alone and starts large unilateral wars for very dodgy reasons. Many countries are beginning to see that the USA is willing to use combiinations of military force and economic power to achieve its goals. These are the reaons that the EU has finally started to act on the idea of a European defense force. These are the reasons that the Euro is becoming popular tender in international commerce. These are the reasons that the Gallileo system is being built to avoid the loss of the GPS system in times of crisis.These are the reasons that China is slowly but surely edging into space, modernising its army and plowing money into indigenous IT.
All these things are happening because all those countries are worried about being dominated by the US in times of crisis.
And all this talk about nuking them (all those horrid countries who would dare to oppose the US) is plain rubbish. The US could certainly "win" a nuclear war, in that it has more missiles than anyone else, but at least some missiles from any opponent would hit the USA, and I don't know about you, but living in a world after a major nuclear war is not something I like to think about.
Got around 5 of these in the last hour. I am luckily on a Mac, so I'm not worried about the Virus, but I tried to mail a couple of the senders to tell them about their comps and their mail quotas were already full...
The io2 device does not seem to be a fog screen, in spite or perhaps because of thousands of /. ravers ranting "fog screen, fog screen, fog screen".
The site claims modfication of air and photons by a proprietry device, whatever thay may be. I have an idea that it's either similar to the fog screen but uses a heated column of air or else uses some kind of electrostatic principle.
Does "collaborative space" mean directory services "application space" meaning server side applications? With yuppy speak i.e. the "space" word, it's sometime hard to tell.
I wonder if the origins of this trend aren't in the terrible spelling and bad grammar that many internet age children employ, having gone through a school system that accepts MS Word's spelling correction as normal?
This is not an anti-US rant. I've known a few Americans and liked and disliked them just as much as someone from any other country.
Frankly, however, I am scared shitless of the USA. I will not visit there for any reason as long as the current government is in power and as long as those draconian laws are in place, which is a pity, as there's lots to see there.
I don't know why the current US government is so hell bent on alienating all its friends in the world, and alienating them it is, and it will have more enemies when the UK's Blair finally steps down at the latest after the next UK elections. Even the Aussies are puzzled by Howards towing the line and misleading the public. I fully expect thta the rift between "Old Europe" and the USA will only grow with time as the US continues to seek military engagements and fealty from countries that have no wish to give up their independance.
The only thing I can see as to why these governments (Bush,Blair and Howard) have remained high popularity ratings is because they all appeal to the need for security and patriotic hearts of their countrymen. The almost incessant warnings of terror acts in the last couple of years has well served to make the population scared as hell and to believe that their government is looking after them. Its become almost a Pavlovian response:Poll ratings down, sound the terror warning bells again!
As for the bugger facing life in prison for making speed, why the hell has the FBI still not found the culprit responsable for the 2001 Anthrax attacks, two years ago?
Unless that was part of the Plan(TM), so to speak?