f I remember correctly, T-Online is owned by Deutsche Telekom
Right.;)
While T-Online is profitable, Deutsche Telekom is not...
Wrong. Deutsche Telekom [which has the 4 divisions T-Online (Internet), T-Mobile (cell phone service), T-Com (fixed line service, basically the German fixed line network), and T-Systems (something like extended IT services)] is quite profitable right now. They still have huge amount of depths though from the times they purchased expensive 3G UMTS licenses and bought Voicestream for a huge load of money. But they are strongly reducing that depths, and the company is profitable. Actually, the just released their financial statement for the first 9 months of this year today (www.telekom3.de/en-p/inve/2-bu/cont/2003/thir/031 113-report-two-ar.html)
IMHO, much of the precision of those early predictions may actually come from strategically placed e-voting districts.
No, as far as I know the early predictions come from strategically chosen (non-e)voting destricts, where people are asked how they have voted. This information is collected all day and the result presented the minute the voting locations close.
... in the UK. I've managed to keep my mobile number for a couple of years now, but they did it by requiring every mobile number to start 07... That makes it impossible to have your home number on the phone:-(
Not necessarily. Here in Germany we also have special phone numbers for cell phones (015/016/017). But for example O2 provides a plan were you get an additional fixed line number which also goes to our mobile phone. If you are in your "home zone", which is indicated on your mobile and extends at least 500m around the place where you live (or your university, or the city center... whatever you prefer), you can make calls at prices which are more/less comparable to a fixed line connection.
For one thing, we're not going to run out of oil (say) all in one day. It's not like we're going to wake up one morning and world oil production is suddenly at zero, thus destroying civilization as we know it in some sort of Mad Max parody.
Nope, we won't, but at the same time we won't be able to just change our way of living and our economy from "highly oil dependent" to "what's that, oil?" mode. It will take some time. And are you really sure that, if we only accelerate our research on this other sources when oil energy really starts to become expensive, these replacements are developed fast enough (and become cheap fast enough) so that they just can replace oil like that? What about the third world countries? Will they be able to catch up, if we develop "just in time"?
Moving to those technologies now, while oil is still cheaper and the infrastructure is already well in place, would have an even bigger impact on the cost of living.
No, I think, the later we start(!), the more severe the impact on our lives will be when we finally HAVE to act. Getting away with the need for oil completely might proof a quite difficult task. Handling the limited ressources carefully already now means to be able to do the easier (and less intrusive) changes now and have more time later for the more difficult things.
Saving resources for future generations makes no sense. There's no reason to think they have any greater need for iron (say), than we do, or that they'll make better use of it than we are.
I'm sure they also won't have a better need for clean water than us (drinking), but I think it still would be fair to leave the some...;)
Because environmentalists want to change a lot more than power generation. The big sources of greenhouse gasses aren't power plants so much as factories, the ones that make the things than we use to maintain our standard of living.
The main problem I have with the US environment politics is that the US energy consumption (and green house gas emission) per citizen is really much higher then in almost all other countries, and that includes very developed countries like the ones in Western Europe, which have a very high standard of living (no, we don't sit in the dark in the evening...). Sure, you cannot just compare countries without being aware of geographical differences (if you have a very moderate climate you have obviously less need for energy intensive air-conditioning). But I still do believe that the US could do much better without seriously cutting into the general standard of living. And this is not just about possible dangers due to global warming, this is also about the fact that several of our most important energy sources ARE limited (oil, coal). Sure, according to forecasts decades ago we should run out of oil by now, and we don't. But still there is obviously a limited supply of these things, and it is generally a good idea to handle this resources sensible.
I can use mine in Linux as well... and now that I have it setup it's basically just as easy as it is in Windows.
More than a year ago, just out of curiosity, I plugged in my digital camera into the USB port and switched it on. To my amazement, with a soft *ding*, an icon appeared on my KDE desktop showing a digital camera, clicking on it opened a konqueror window and from there I could just copy the images by drag and drop onto my hard disk. For me it's little things like this which make up a good distribution. I think it was SuSE 8.0 or even 7.3 back then. And it has worked for me with any SuSE version ever since.
I just wanted to point out some errors in his post, concerning yast being closed source and the 100$/seat licence (where I got his point wrong).
I agree that calling Red Hat an "Evil empire" is stupid, and I also agree that SUSE's policy concerning not GPLing yast and not providing ISO downloads is somewhat more restrictive. It is beyond me to judge whether removing these restriction really would endanger their revenues so much that it would be dangerous (other companies have problems, see Mandrake). But I'm fine with what they are doing as long as they give back to the community, it's better than being completely open and then going out of business and fire the kernel/KDE/XWindows developers...
To summarize my point, "Red Hat==bad && SUSE==good" is surely wrong, but for me the reverse is just as wrong.;)
The last I heard, SuSE wasn't making YaST publically available.
Well, I might be wrong, but I think their policy was like this since I started to use SUSE in 1996. It is also true that the Yast license is not true OpenSource in the sense defined by the OSI. But still the source is available, and I just wanted to point that out, since there seems to be generally quite some confusion about this. SUSE seems to think that completely GPLing their distribution would endanger their revenues by others selling their distribution. This might or might not be true, but I personally don't have problems with this as long as they give back to the community by strongly contributing to projects like the kernel, KDE, XWindows, ReiserFS...
Oh, and I completely agree with you that calling Red Hat an "evil empire" is absurd and you are right with this part of your post.;)
Sorry, I wasn't reading your post carefully enough, I thought that you were asserting that you principally have to pay 100$/seat for SUSE Linux.
Yes, SUSE (just like Red Hat) offers distribution versions with a higher price tag, which includes additional (commercial) software and support. (SUSE Linux Desktop includes Code Weavers cross over office, which is 60$ per seat (70$ if you want a CD))
2. Go figure out why you can't download free SuSE.ISOs including YaST.
I'm quite sure that the Live Evaluation CD includes yast: ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/live-eval- 9.0/SuS E-9.0-LiveEval-i386-Int-RC1.iso
In any case, you can download yast (and all other SUSE packages from their FTP server: ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/8.2/suse /i586/yas t2-bootloader-2.7.20-2.i586.rpm (9.0 version will be there soon)
Or do you prefer the sources? ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/8.2/sus e/src/yast 2-2.7.30-38.src.rpm
- Yast is not closed source, you get the source with every SUSE distro, you can change it, you can even redistribute the changes, as long as you mark 'your' yast version as a modified version. The restrictions are, that you are not allowed sell(!) your modified program, while on the other hand SUSE is allowed to incorporate your changes into their next version (for reference, type 'yast license' into google, for me it was the 5th link)
- SUSE doesn't have a 100$ user licens (not even one you could put into quotations), because
(a) SUSE Professional is only $79.95
(b) you could also buy the update version for $49.95
(c) you can install for free (modulo your internet connection costs) over FTP
(d) you can legaly copy the CDs from somebody else The fact that the ISOs are not publically available from the net is something which I don't considere as positive, but it still doesn't make you assertions true
Voltage one is good though, however is it a government mandated voltage? Or just industry standard I don't know, but until 15 years ago countries in the EU (then EC) still had slightly different voltages (e.g. Germany 220V, UK 240V), in the last 15 years the EU was gradually moving to a common standarf of 230V. And I would be quite suprised if this wouldn't have happened in compliance with some EU law;). But I didn't find a link conforming this assumption.
"Is it right to command decisions that can be left to individual choice?" This last one IMO outweighs all other considerations in this particular case: e.g., I simply do not think it is right for the government to say, "Thou shalt use GSM!" to the exclusion of all other technologies.
I believe that there are areas where it absolutely makes sense to define an official standard, especially when it comes to public infrastructure. I'm happy that basically all European countries agreed on a common standard for the electric power networks, so that I can use my phone charger/notebook/hair dryer/whatever almost all around Europe without having to worry about blowing up the power supply unit. It is good that most European countries use the same track width for their railroad lines, and the lack of such a standard for the electric power supply for electyric locomotives is quite unfortunate. GSM was developed in the end of the 80's by a joint effort of the European Community, the European telecom suppliers and(!) the European telecom companies, and I think the result is much better than it would have been without cooperation, escpecially for (and that is what I mostly care about) the consumer. CDMA might be more technologically advanced. In fact, since it was developed after GSM, it better should be. But at the time it came around, almost all European countries had their wirless networks up and running, and you don't want to change the technology after 3-4 years.
Basically almost everywhere in the US has a massive investment in landlines while many areas of the second and third world (France, Germany, China, etc.) have yet to develop nationwide telecommunications networks.
Huh? You do not seriously believe yourself what you just wrote, right? As far as I know, most western European countries have a very good land line network, and I can speak here from first hand experience in Germany. Actually, when digital wireless phone networks were introduced in Germany 1991/92 (shortly after unification), there was a big difference between east and west Germany, since the east German network was by far not as developed as the west German. AFAIK, in the old GDR people had to wait for years to get a phone at home, and it took Deutsche Telekom until about 1995 to rebuild a new all-digital fixed line network in the East. So in the beginning of the wirless digital area, there probably was some incentive in the East to go with a wireless phone (though they were quite expensive at that time) instead of waiting for a couple of months for a fixed line one, but these (rather special) circumstances are long gone. I surely don't believe that wired infrastructure in Germany is by any means worse than in the US.
As someone has already pointed out, the article is dated 24th October 2002. And indeed, we already had that story on/. on 25th October 2002 (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/25/05232 57) Does this qualify as the dupe story with the longest time gap inbetween?;)
OK, but even if your story is true, I don't think that it is typical that compamies base their decission of which flavour of Linux to use on the availability of the complete distro as ISO images. Usually other issues like stability,system maintance, support etc. become more important. But of course, not everybody has the same priorities.
We didn't. Our deals were with the FRENCH. THEY RUN THE OIL FOR FOOD PROGRAM. DUH.
It's a UN program. You might enlighten me further on what you mean "run by the French". And please don't tell me that it's just because the responsible guy for the program is French.
The US buys Iraqi oil, the money goes to the French, not anyone or anything in Iraq.
According to the UN (http://www.un.org/Depts/oip/background/inbrief.ht ml): DIVIDING THE MONEY: With the adoption of Security Council resolution 1330 (2000) on 5 December 2000, around 72 per cent of the oil revenue funds were allocated to the humanitarian programme in Iraq (59 per cent for the centre and south and 13 per cent for the three northern governorates); 25 percent to the Compensation Commission in Geneva; 2.2 per cent for United Nations operational costs; and 0.8 per cent for the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Of course, this is the official information from the UN. You might say that this is the official propaganda, and that the reality is quite different. If so, I'm sure you will provide me with some sources. But let's assume for the moment it is like you say: Why the hell did the US government by 60% of all Iraqi oil, if they are just filling French pockets? OK, maybe you knew more than the US government...
There is this thing we humans have developed.... It is called: News. Yep. Glad to hear you also know about it...
Aside from ethical considerations, of which the French, and Germans (particularly), are no experts,... Hmm, I think you completely underestimate the importance of ethics in German politics these days . I'm not claiming that it means Germany always does the right thing, but it is actually ethical considerations (based on German history) that makes it very hard to convince the German public that all possible peaceful measures have been taken and war is now the last option. Concluding from the fact that Germany had a very dark phase 60 years ago, that it is not able to think about the ethical consequences of its politics today is a very simplistic (and wrong) line of thinking, but maybe that's your style.
but he [George W. Bush] at least understood his goal, and how to get there.
To this I almost agree, I'm only not so sure if he really is where he hoped to be 9 months ago.
All that said, I am not so naive to think that countries (especially those with influence) only base their politics on ethical considerations, common sense and the goal to achieve justice and happiness for all. Not the French (i know their governments lack of common sense when it comes to EU politics), not the Germans, not the Russians ('we don't blame you politics, you don't mention Chechenya') and not the USA. The USA was happy to support Hussein as long as it was in their interest, they did not really care what he was doing to his people.
But the fact remains that the majority of the Europeans, be it the Germans, the French, the Spanisg or even (if I remeber correctly) the British were opposing the war, and no, we didn't do this because we were happy about some alleged nice deals of some oil or weapon companies, but because most people did not believe the reasons the US government was officialy giving, and it didn't help that they changed the reasons from time to time. There were (and are) many worries that this might lead to a further destabilization of the region, and to further support of radical forces in the Arab world (which wouldn't really mean progress in the quest to fight terrorism). For the German government, opposing the war was about the only decission which brought them sympathy by the people, so for them it was also part of the political survival to decide as 70-80% of the people expected them to.
One time, a long time ago, the U.S. provided some intelligence regarding Iran.
If you look at who actually did supply most of Saddam's weapons, it suddenly becomes very clear (not in any order): France, Germany, Russia, China.
This is, of course, neglecting that 24 US companies were listed in an Iraq dossier to the UN (http://www.thememoryhole.org/corp/iraq-suppli ers. htm), which, by just counting the number of companies, puts the US seconf after Germany. This doesn't tell us anything about the relative importance of the contributions of different countries, but nevertheless saying that the US just provided some intelligence "long,long ago" seems to be a bit... untrue.
France was right. There was nothing in it for them. I mean aside from *ahem* managing the 40 billion dollars that was stolen from the Iraqi people, and their vastly below market value deals for Iraqi oil that they made with Hussein, known butcher.
Yeah, right: CIA World Factbook about Iraq (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/iz.html):
Exports - commodities: crude oil
Exports - partners: US 60.6%, France 8.5%, Netherlands 7.4%, Italy 5.8% (2001)
Nice to see that at least the US didn't make any deals with Hussein, known butcher.
Asshat, France and Germany could have stopped the war. Know how? Call the US's bluff. Give in to a hard line for invasive UN inspections backed up by military ultimatum.
There were inspections. And just because they didn't find any evidence doesn't mean they were not invasive enough. I might remind you that a more than 1000 people strong inspection team by the US didn't find any evidence of WMDs in Iraq in the last months. And inspections couldn't possibly become more invasive than they are now. But meanwhile, of course, it's not about WMDs any more, we could have saved us all the trouble with inspections anyway. Because know the US government found out that the fact that Hussein was an evil dictator was actually reason enough.
Doesn't seem like anyone is selling it yet and it's not available for download. Where did you find yours.
At least the German version is officially out since yesterday and sold in Germany,Austria,Switzerland. www.suse.com says Oct. 24th for the English version... The FTP install version will make it to the servers with some delay, as usual.
Yes, but I still don't see you point. The Holy Roman Empire existed for about 900 years, being ruled by different german aristocratic families over the time, the Habsburg family being the last one. After the empire was split the Habsburg family continued to rule the Austrian(-Hungarian) part, while the various other parts (Bavaria, Prussia...) were ruled by other aristocratic families, before they reunited again in 1871, where for several reasons the Austrians stayed outside. So the HRE is the predecessor of both.
Hmm, but this still doesn't explain much, since landlines in (at least Western) Europe also don't suck. How comes that I hear that myth about the allegedly bad european land line system always when people are trying to explain that mobile phones are more in use in Europe than in the US?
It might be appropriate to put emphasis on the most important word in the headline of heise.de.
"European Parliament turns down pure software patents."
In Walters defence I have to say that Heise changed the title. First the word "pure" ("reinen") was not there. Maybe it deemed them too be a to strong statement without it...;)
Slashdot Mirror
f I remember correctly, T-Online is owned by Deutsche Telekom
;)
1 113-report-two-ar.html)
Right.
While T-Online is profitable, Deutsche Telekom is not...
Wrong. Deutsche Telekom [which has the 4 divisions T-Online (Internet), T-Mobile (cell phone service), T-Com (fixed line service, basically the German fixed line network), and T-Systems (something like extended IT services)] is quite profitable right now. They still have huge amount of depths though from the times they purchased expensive 3G UMTS licenses and bought Voicestream for a huge load of money. But they are strongly reducing that depths, and the company is profitable. Actually, the just released their financial statement for the first 9 months of this year today (www.telekom3.de/en-p/inve/2-bu/cont/2003/thir/03
IMHO, much of the precision of those early predictions may actually come from strategically placed e-voting districts.
No, as far as I know the early predictions come from strategically chosen (non-e)voting destricts, where people are asked how they have voted. This information is collected all day and the result presented the minute the voting locations close.
... in the UK. I've managed to keep my mobile number for a couple of years now, but they did it by requiring every mobile number to start 07... That makes it impossible to have your home number on the phone :-(
Not necessarily. Here in Germany we also have special phone numbers for cell phones (015/016/017). But for example O2 provides a plan were you get an additional fixed line number which also goes to our mobile phone. If you are in your "home zone", which is indicated on your mobile and extends at least 500m around the place where you live (or your university, or the city center... whatever you prefer), you can make calls at prices which are more/less comparable to a fixed line connection.
For one thing, we're not going to run out of oil (say) all in one day. It's not like we're going to wake up one morning and world oil production is suddenly at zero, thus destroying civilization as we know it in some sort of Mad Max parody.
;)
Nope, we won't, but at the same time we won't be able to just change our way of living and our economy from "highly oil dependent" to "what's that, oil?" mode. It will take some time. And are you really sure that, if we only accelerate our research on this other sources when oil energy really starts to become expensive, these replacements are developed fast enough (and become cheap fast enough) so that they just can replace oil like that? What about the third world countries? Will they be able to catch up, if we develop "just in time"?
Moving to those technologies now, while oil is still cheaper and the infrastructure is already well in place, would have an even bigger impact on the cost of living.
No, I think, the later we start(!), the more severe the impact on our lives will be when we finally HAVE to act. Getting away with the need for oil completely might proof a quite difficult task. Handling the limited ressources carefully already now means to be able to do the easier (and less intrusive) changes now and have more time later for the more difficult things.
Saving resources for future generations makes no sense. There's no reason to think they have any greater need for iron (say), than we do, or that they'll make better use of it than we are.
I'm sure they also won't have a better need for clean water than us (drinking), but I think it still would be fair to leave the some...
Because environmentalists want to change a lot more than power generation. The big sources of greenhouse gasses aren't power plants so much as factories, the ones that make the things than we use to maintain our standard of living.
The main problem I have with the US environment politics is that the US energy consumption (and green house gas emission) per citizen is really much higher then in almost all other countries, and that includes very developed countries like the ones in Western Europe, which have a very high standard of living (no, we don't sit in the dark in the evening...). Sure, you cannot just compare countries without being aware of geographical differences (if you have a very moderate climate you have obviously less need for energy intensive air-conditioning). But I still do believe that the US could do much better without seriously cutting into the general standard of living. And this is not just about possible dangers due to global warming, this is also about the fact that several of our most important energy sources ARE limited (oil, coal). Sure, according to forecasts decades ago we should run out of oil by now, and we don't. But still there is obviously a limited supply of these things, and it is generally a good idea to handle this resources sensible.
I can use mine in Linux as well ... and now that I have it setup it's basically just as easy as it is in Windows.
More than a year ago, just out of curiosity, I plugged in my digital camera into the USB port and switched it on. To my amazement, with a soft *ding*, an icon appeared on my KDE desktop showing a digital camera, clicking on it opened a konqueror window and from there I could just copy the images by drag and drop onto my hard disk. For me it's little things like this which make up a good distribution. I think it was SuSE 8.0 or even 7.3 back then. And it has worked for me with any SuSE version ever since.
I just wanted to point out some errors in his post, concerning yast being closed source and the 100$/seat licence (where I got his point wrong).
;)
I agree that calling Red Hat an "Evil empire" is stupid, and I also agree that SUSE's policy concerning not GPLing yast and not providing ISO downloads is somewhat more restrictive. It is beyond me to judge whether removing these restriction really would endanger their revenues so much that it would be dangerous (other companies have problems, see Mandrake). But I'm fine with what they are doing as long as they give back to the community, it's better than being completely open and then going out of business and fire the kernel/KDE/XWindows developers...
To summarize my point, "Red Hat==bad && SUSE==good" is surely wrong, but for me the reverse is just as wrong.
The last I heard, SuSE wasn't making YaST publically available.
;)
Well, I might be wrong, but I think their policy was like this since I started to use SUSE in 1996. It is also true that the Yast license is not true OpenSource in the sense defined by the OSI. But still the source is available, and I just wanted to point that out, since there seems to be generally quite some confusion about this. SUSE seems to think that completely GPLing their distribution would endanger their revenues by others selling their distribution. This might or might not be true, but I personally don't have problems with this as long as they give back to the community by strongly contributing to projects like the kernel, KDE, XWindows, ReiserFS...
Oh, and I completely agree with you that calling Red Hat an "evil empire" is absurd and you are right with this part of your post.
Sorry, I wasn't reading your post carefully enough, I thought that you were asserting that you principally have to pay 100$/seat for SUSE Linux.
Yes, SUSE (just like Red Hat) offers distribution versions with a higher price tag, which includes additional (commercial) software and support.
(SUSE Linux Desktop includes Code Weavers cross over office, which is 60$ per seat (70$ if you want a CD))
2. Go figure out why you can't download free SuSE .ISOs including YaST.
- 9.0/SuS E-9.0-LiveEval-i386-Int-RC1.iso
e /i586/yas t2-bootloader-2.7.20-2.i586.rpm
s e/src/yast 2-2.7.30-38.src.rpm
I'm quite sure that the Live Evaluation CD includes yast:
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/live-eval
In any case, you can download yast (and all other SUSE packages from their FTP server:
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/8.2/sus
(9.0 version will be there soon)
Or do you prefer the sources?
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/8.2/su
Sorry, I also wish I had my mod points:
- Yast is not closed source, you get the source with every SUSE distro, you can change it, you can even redistribute the changes, as long as you mark 'your' yast version as a modified version. The restrictions are, that you are not allowed sell(!) your modified program, while on the other hand SUSE is allowed to incorporate your changes into their next version
(for reference, type 'yast license' into google, for me it was the 5th link)
- SUSE doesn't have a 100$ user licens (not even one you could put into quotations), because
(a) SUSE Professional is only $79.95
(b) you could also buy the update version for $49.95
(c) you can install for free (modulo your internet connection costs) over FTP
(d) you can legaly copy the CDs from somebody else
The fact that the ISOs are not publically available from the net is something which I don't considere as positive, but it still doesn't make you assertions true
Voltage one is good though, however is it a government mandated voltage? Or just industry standard ;). But I didn't find a link conforming this assumption.
I don't know, but until 15 years ago countries in the EU (then EC) still had slightly different voltages (e.g. Germany 220V, UK 240V), in the last 15 years the EU was gradually moving to a common standarf of 230V. And I would be quite suprised if this wouldn't have happened in compliance with some EU law
"Is it right to command decisions that can be left to individual choice?"
This last one IMO outweighs all other considerations in this particular case: e.g., I simply do not think it is right for the government to say, "Thou shalt use GSM!" to the exclusion of all other technologies.
I believe that there are areas where it absolutely makes sense to define an official standard, especially when it comes to public infrastructure.
I'm happy that basically all European countries agreed on a common standard for the electric power networks, so that I can use my phone charger/notebook/hair dryer/whatever almost all around Europe without having to worry about blowing up the power supply unit. It is good that most European countries use the same track width for their railroad lines, and the lack of such a standard for the electric power supply for electyric locomotives is quite unfortunate.
GSM was developed in the end of the 80's by a joint effort of the European Community, the European telecom suppliers and(!) the European telecom companies, and I think the result is much better than it would have been without cooperation, escpecially for (and that is what I mostly care about) the consumer.
CDMA might be more technologically advanced. In fact, since it was developed after GSM, it better should be. But at the time it came around, almost all European countries had their wirless networks up and running, and you don't want to change the technology after 3-4 years.
Basically almost everywhere in the US has a massive investment in landlines while many areas of the second and third world (France, Germany, China, etc.) have yet to develop nationwide telecommunications networks.
Huh? You do not seriously believe yourself what you just wrote, right? As far as I know, most western European countries have a very good land line network, and I can speak here from first hand experience in Germany.
Actually, when digital wireless phone networks were introduced in Germany 1991/92 (shortly after unification), there was a big difference between east and west Germany, since the east German network was by far not as developed as the west German. AFAIK, in the old GDR people had to wait for years to get a phone at home, and it took Deutsche Telekom until about 1995 to rebuild a new all-digital fixed line network in the East. So in the beginning of the wirless digital area, there probably was some incentive in the East to go with a wireless phone (though they were quite expensive at that time) instead of waiting for a couple of months for a fixed line one, but these (rather special) circumstances are long gone. I surely don't believe that wired infrastructure in Germany is by any means worse than in the US.
As someone has already pointed out, the article is dated 24th October 2002. And indeed, we already had that story on /. on 25th October 2002 (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/25/05232 57) ;)
Does this qualify as the dupe story with the longest time gap inbetween?
OK, but even if your story is true, I don't think that it is typical that compamies base their decission of which flavour of Linux to use on the availability of the complete distro as ISO images. Usually other issues like stability,system maintance, support etc. become more important. But of course, not everybody has the same priorities.
We didn't. Our deals were with the FRENCH. THEY RUN THE OIL FOR FOOD PROGRAM. DUH.
t ml):
It's a UN program. You might enlighten me further on what you mean "run by the French". And please don't tell me that it's just because the responsible guy for the program is French.
The US buys Iraqi oil, the money goes to the French, not anyone or anything in Iraq.
According to the UN (http://www.un.org/Depts/oip/background/inbrief.h
DIVIDING THE MONEY: With the adoption of Security Council resolution 1330 (2000) on 5 December 2000, around 72 per cent of the oil revenue funds were allocated to the humanitarian programme in Iraq (59 per cent for the centre and south and 13 per cent for the three northern governorates); 25 percent to the Compensation Commission in Geneva; 2.2 per cent for United Nations operational costs; and 0.8 per cent for the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Of course, this is the official information from the UN. You might say that this is the official propaganda, and that the reality is quite different. If so, I'm sure you will provide me with some sources. But let's assume for the moment it is like you say: Why the hell did the US government by 60% of all Iraqi oil, if they are just filling French pockets? OK, maybe you knew more than the US government...
There is this thing we humans have developed.... It is called: News.
Yep. Glad to hear you also know about it...
Aside from ethical considerations, of which the French, and Germans (particularly), are no experts,...
Hmm, I think you completely underestimate the importance of ethics in German politics these days . I'm not claiming that it means Germany always does the right thing, but it is actually ethical considerations (based on German history) that makes it very hard to convince the German public that all possible peaceful measures have been taken and war is now the last option. Concluding from the fact that Germany had a very dark phase 60 years ago, that it is not able to think about the ethical consequences of its politics today is a very simplistic (and wrong) line of thinking, but maybe that's your style.
but he [George W. Bush] at least understood his goal, and how to get there.
To this I almost agree, I'm only not so sure if he really is where he hoped to be 9 months ago.
All that said, I am not so naive to think that countries (especially those with influence) only base their politics on ethical considerations, common sense and the goal to achieve justice and happiness for all. Not the French (i know their governments lack of common sense when it comes to EU politics), not the Germans, not the Russians ('we don't blame you politics, you don't mention Chechenya') and not the USA. The USA was happy to support Hussein as long as it was in their interest, they did not really care what he was doing to his people.
But the fact remains that the majority of the Europeans, be it the Germans, the French, the Spanisg or even (if I remeber correctly) the British were opposing the war, and no, we didn't do this because we were happy about some alleged nice deals of some oil or weapon companies, but because most people did not believe the reasons the US government was officialy giving, and it didn't help that they changed the reasons from time to time. There were (and are) many worries that this might lead to a further destabilization of the region, and to further support of radical forces in the Arab world (which wouldn't really mean progress in the quest to fight terrorism). For the German government, opposing the war was about the only decission which brought them sympathy by the people, so for them it was also part of the political survival to decide as 70-80% of the people expected them to.
One time, a long time ago, the U.S. provided some intelligence regarding Iran.
i ers. htm), which, by just counting the number of companies, puts the US seconf after Germany. This doesn't tell us anything about the relative importance of the contributions of different countries, but nevertheless saying that the US just provided some intelligence "long,long ago" seems to be a bit... untrue.
If you look at who actually did supply most of Saddam's weapons, it suddenly becomes very clear (not in any order): France, Germany, Russia, China.
This is, of course, neglecting that 24 US companies were listed in an Iraq dossier to the UN
(http://www.thememoryhole.org/corp/iraq-suppl
France was right. There was nothing in it for them. I mean aside from *ahem* managing the 40 billion dollars that was stolen from the Iraqi people, and their vastly below market value deals for Iraqi oil that they made with Hussein, known butcher.
s /iz.html):
Yeah, right:
CIA World Factbook about Iraq (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geo
Exports - commodities:
crude oil
Exports - partners:
US 60.6%, France 8.5%, Netherlands 7.4%, Italy 5.8% (2001)
Nice to see that at least the US didn't make any deals with Hussein, known butcher.
Asshat, France and Germany could have stopped the war. Know how? Call the US's bluff. Give in to a hard line for invasive UN inspections backed up by military ultimatum.
There were inspections. And just because they didn't find any evidence doesn't mean they were not invasive enough. I might remind you that a more than 1000 people strong inspection team by the US didn't find any evidence of WMDs in Iraq in the last months. And inspections couldn't possibly become more invasive than they are now.
But meanwhile, of course, it's not about WMDs any more, we could have saved us all the trouble with inspections anyway. Because know the US government found out that the fact that Hussein was an evil dictator was actually reason enough.
The only thing I dislike about TrollTech's license is that their windows and mac implementations are not offered under their open license. :-(
m l
Not true for the Mac:
http://www.trolltech.com/download/qt/mac.ht
Doesn't seem like anyone is selling it yet and it's not available for download. Where did you find yours.
At least the German version is officially out since yesterday and sold in Germany,Austria,Switzerland. www.suse.com says Oct. 24th for the English version... The FTP install version will make it to the servers with some delay, as usual.
Suse Linux 9 hit the streets yesterday
No. It's 15th Oct. in Germany and 24th elsewhere (or at least in the US, according to suse.com)
The unification of Germany occurred later.
Yes, but I still don't see you point.
The Holy Roman Empire existed for about 900 years, being ruled by different german aristocratic families over the time, the Habsburg family being the last one. After the empire was split the Habsburg family continued to rule the Austrian(-Hungarian) part, while the various other parts (Bavaria, Prussia...) were ruled by other aristocratic families, before they reunited again in 1871, where for several reasons the Austrians stayed outside. So the HRE is the predecessor of both.
Yeah, our land lines don't suck.
Hmm, but this still doesn't explain much, since landlines in (at least Western) Europe also don't suck. How comes that I hear that myth about the allegedly bad european land line system always when people are trying to explain that mobile phones are more in use in Europe than in the US?
It might be appropriate to put emphasis on the most important word in the headline of heise.de.
;)
"European Parliament turns down pure software patents."
In Walters defence I have to say that Heise changed the title. First the word "pure" ("reinen") was not there. Maybe it deemed them too be a to strong statement without it...