That's very true. And good luck to convince them. I don't remember a single occurence where the euro parliament has vetoed a directive. National governments can delay the application of the directives, but these stalling tactics are not viable.
Moreover, 80% of the European legislative corpus is now coming down under the form of directives, which were supposed to be only a very small percentage at the inception of the EU. The Commission is constantly enlarging its scope and reach at the detriment of the Parliament.
So the bottom line is: 80% of the EU regulations are directives. The directives are anonymous, undebatted, unchallenged, and almost impossible to undo. They are mostly prepared by lobbyist cabinets which number about as many employees as the EU itself (there were 22,000 EU functionaries in Brussels when it was composed of only 12 countries. God only knows what the count is now.)
This means the Commission is not a democratic institution anymore, but a lobbyist dream.
No wonder big corporations love it!
Byzantine... Your comparison is way too unflattering for Byzantium. I think the Basileus would spin in his tomb if we compared the EU even to besieged Byzantium.
The model for the EU would be a Byzantium which
is not only regulating the number of angels that are allowed to dance on a pinhead (while being provided adequate handicap parking space and health insurance for their undertermined-yet-same-sex partner), but it's also subsidizing a door-opening and moat-filling contest.
Not to mention that the Ottomans had to *fight* to turn Byzantium into Constantinople. The EU bureaucracy is fighting only against people who wants to slow down its crazy expansion. (As an amusing parallel, Turkey is a candidate to the Europen Union.)
That's the optimistic hypothesis. You'll note, though, that they already took care of avoiding the equivalent of the First Amendment in the EU "constitution" draft.
It's not a coincidence that the worst EULA and the most stringent DMCA-type laws are in the European Commission books, not even as laws voted by the EU parliament, but as "directives", which are meant to be executed without discussion.
How are you so sure I am a Yankee? Did it cross your mind I might not? Did it cross your mind I might have been one of these hopeful Europeans who, in the 70s, watched the very first European Parliament election and believed the BS about how it was going to make Europe a superpower and a nicer, gentler republic?
Of course, this is Slashdot, so click submit first and think later, right?
As for the reference to the Ottoman Empire, students of history know that it is the foremost model for an overwhelming administration that excelled in regulating trivial aspects of its subjects' lives while letting nepotism, corruption, crime and civil unrest run rampant. (If you flunked History, take a look at
this timeline, written by a very lenient source, the Office of Turkish Tourism!). This omnipresent yet powerless state depicts the evolution of EU quite accurately.
I am not aware of accusation of the EU being "islamist", do you have a source? And more precisely, a reason?
You, sir, should refrain from flinging needless accusations.
Civil liberties groups have sent a letter to EU urging that the proposal be rejected.
Fat chance. The EU is a huge bureaucracy. European don't even know the names of the EU commissars, and the Commission cultivates the virtue of secret and opacity with a success that would have made Beria jealous.
So public opinion has really no impact whatsoever on the bureaucrats. What matters is the lobbyists. According to the Wall Street Journal, there are about
10,000 lobbyists in Brussels. (I believe this doesn't include employees of the larger lobby cabinets).
Large companies are therefore overrepresented in Brussels. Contrary to what naive Americans can think, established companies love the thick layers of bureaucracy and the entanglements of redtape. Why? Because it allows them to:
1. Keep startup competitors out of their business by making it too difficult to enter the field,
2. Pass their pet legislations through
coatroom deals.
Europeans wanted a super-state, they've got it. Oh wait... Cancel that. Nobody told the poor schmucks that they would eventually end up in a remake of the Ottoman Empire.
BuyMusic.com is getting bad reviews from multiple sources. So it's pretty obvious it might well fail from its appalling user interface and its smothering restrictions.
Yet, you can bet that next year, all this will be summarized in a nice, Powerpoint presentation to RIAA execs:
BuyMusic.com opened July 2003
Huge choice: 300,000+ songs generously offered
Supported Windows (90% of PCs)
Service folded in [insert date not too far in future]
Accumulated losses of $[insert scary amount]
Conclusion: The Market Does Not Want Music Download.
"See", an RIAA exec will pontificate, "we pamper 'em ungrateful Internet pirates and they don't want to use legal downloads. Let's just go back to serving them lawsuit papers."
At which point Powerpoint will BSOD promptly, and the discussion will drift on to Britney's navel jewelry and its marketing tie-ins.
-- SysKoll
Unsurprising, considering their track record...
on
The Beast of Brussels
·
· Score: 1
I am not surprised, considering the EU track record of total disregard for citizens' privacy rights.
The Central European Bank, you'll remember, is
planning to insert radioID tag chips in every euro banknote. The cover story is that it would make counterfeiting harder. The swiped-under-the-rug consequence is that cash would become as traceable as wiring transfers or credit card transactions, a paramount consideration in EU where the high taxation level (60% of the GNP avg) are driving a lot of people to take jobs "on the side".
In France, a country which has very strict laws against cross-indexing personal data files, the French IRS bought new IBM RS/6000 in the 90s and bought the subscriber list of a very popular encrypted TV channel, Canal Plus. Then it checked the subscriber list for people who were not paying the TV tax (about $130/year for owning a color TV). That kind of Big-Brotherish tax enforcement gave little trust in the privacy reassurances uttered by the bureaucrats.
Good point. Note that another competitor, IBM, seem reluctant to shake the Windows yoke as far as PCs are concerned (porting Lotus Notes to Linux? Nope, never). And yet it is a bitter rival of MS. My best guess is that the PC hand ignores what the right hand does.
Your observation about Sony using MS Windows is very true. It is the result of a long-term OEM agreement. But their PC division might as well live on another planet. The same is true for the PC division of many other large companies such as, say, IBM, who competes very bitterly against MS and yet is trapped by an OEM agreement that prevents them from supplying non-Windows consumer PCs.
The Windows-on-PC situation can only compound the resentment of Sony and IBM against MS.
Moreover, PC manufacturers know that the future of the industry is bleak for name brands, because PCs are now a completely uniformized commodity, thanks largely to Intel and Microsoft standardization efforts. Margins are razor-thin, and the largest volume will doubtlessly go very soon to Burmese outfits who have unpaid political prisoners assemble components made by Chinese underpaid workers using Japanese robots. Or something like that. Doesn't look too good for margins.
So it's unlikely that consumer electronics giants would jeopardize their high-margin markets (new digital widgets) in order to please a supplier of their declining PC division. The strategic imperatives of the CE market therefore trump the tactical needs of the PC operations. Even if harsh market share realities make them release digital gizmos that only work with Windows, they'll still be an MS foe. The day FreeBSD has 95% of the market (hah!), they'll release FreeBSD-only gizmos.
In plain English: "MS is helping us lose money with PCs and wants to compete against our PDAs, cell phones, games and TV decoders? This means war!"
However, if you think this analysis is flawed, feel free to share yours.
I agree that software patents are a pain and are unethical.
But it's interesting to note who is attacking MS here and in what context. Philips and Sony are two of the greatest consumer electronics companies on the planet. Sony is an archfoe of Microsoft since Redmond released the XBox. Several large Japanese companies recently made a lot of noise about standardizing on Linux for consumer electronics, which is pretty bad for WindowsCE. Some observers wondered if the goal of that publicity wasn't just to score a marketing point against WinCE.
So this is the next episode in this war. This patent lawsuit is a single battle in a larger fight.
Watch for more blows exchanged between MS and consumer electronics companies.
Thanks for answering. Nobody would contest that the Chinese are quite a staggering bureaucracy. However, their goal is reportedly to send a manned mission to Mars. China isn't a low-tech country anymore so it shouldn't be scoffed at. Therefore, if NASA still wants to tackle such high-prestige missions, it better start planning now.
Read every word before you post and don't assume.
You bet it does. Many an engineer cried tears of rage when they saw the DC-X burn and not being replaced because hey, a new copy of DC-X would cost 10% of the cost of a Shuttle launch, NASA can't find that kind of money anywhere.
A few outraged people muttered accusations of sabotage, but somehow, an investigation was never started.
The lesson: A human system, especially a bureaucracy, will do whatever it takes to insure its survival and expension. The only way to avoid that is to build permanent controls, complete with terribly severe punishments, right into the system. But you have to accept the 30% oerhead and the occasional noise of the firing squad.
The reason that private companies won't build a space shuttle is that they haven't been contracted to do so.
Actually, whenever NASA puts a private sattelite into orbit, it bills the customer a mere fraction of its actual launch cost, typically less than $200 million. The rest (another $300-$500 million depending on how you count) is paid by the taxpayer. Which is how NASA can afford to send a manned vessel to do the job of a cargo rocket.
If NASA stopped operating as a federal-subsidized competitor of the private space launch industry, a much bigger market would instantly open. But NASA needs the launches to justify its Shuttle programs...
Keep NASA for launching Mars probes and doing research, but don't allow it to compete against the private space launcher industry.
Captain Loser, you have to remember that NASA is a bureaucratic organization. The purpose of a bureaucratic organization is to extract money from the taxpayers to hire more bureaucrats.
It's the reason why NASA deceived Congress and underestimated the cost and reliability of the Shuttle. Not a concious conspiracy, just your regular bureaucratic tendency.
Nowadays, the Shuttle is keeping tens of thousands of plushy jobs at NASA. Many of them aren't paper pushers, there are really good engineers working on this program. However, the real top dogs are the bureaucrats. And they know that the Shuttle should be replaced by something that does not require an army to operate, but they'd be out of a job.
Each time the crazy engineers rock the boat and create a potential cheaper competitor for the Shuttle, it magically gets killed. Look at the X-33. Look at the DC-X: This demonstrator was taking off and landing on its jet, vertically. It was perfectly working when it was given to NASA, and somehow, NASA
killed it on its first NASA flight. And somehow, the budget to build a new DC-X was consumed by, why, the Shuttle of course. So this perfectly good project was dropped.
See how it works? Tons of examples can be found in the history of the various X-projects that got mysteriously mismanaged and killed since the Shuttle program started.
NASA outlived its utility and became the worst enemy of cheap space access.
You want space access? You want to get to Mars before the Chinese? Keep the JPL and the researchers, get rid of the rest of NASA.
From the article: Israeli companies, spies, and gangsters have hacked CALEA for fun and profit, as have the Russians and probably others, too. They have used our own system of electronic wiretaps to wiretap US, because you see that's the problem: CALEA works for anyone who knows how to run it.
And not just CALEA, either. There are other pieces of telecom software and equipment that have been hacked in the past. Some of this
eavesdropping by foreign spooks acquired
a lot of notoriety due to its interception of highly sensitive traffic.
But it's safe to assume that there was much more eavesdropping that wasn't reported or even discovered.
If this goes on, it will be faster to call the Mossad or the FSB to fix a phone problem in DC than to call the local phone company.
Coincidence? I think not. Congrats, you found yet another hoofprint of the ugly beast, complete with assorted droppings of unmistakable stench.
Now the question is, does the DoJ (who convicted MS for abuse of monopolistic position) mandate the use of the MS products, or do they just subcontract their high-volume web sites to monkeys who use Win2000 because it runs the only language they know, Visual Basic?
Reason no. 167 why big business loves big government: with enough tax money flowing into enough appropriation committees, even the worst kludges are bound to be purchased massively if they are advertized on glossy paper.
Sometimes, SEVIS crashed under the stress and expunged the day's work. The delays and headaches led some schools to close their student offices and ask employees to work nights and weekends, when traffic was lighter.
That's as good as putting a logo on it. So I went to Netcraft and checked the SAVIS web site,
egov.immigration.gov. And sure enough:
The site egov.immigration.gov is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
I bet that the database is also running on Win2K...
Oh golly, you mean that when you put a high-volume site under Windows, you get (gasp) crashes and data losses? No way! Who would have thought that? Obviously, the poor Dept of Justice was a victim of an unheard-of, unexpected problem.
It ain't no stinkin' argooment. It's a freekin' grammur rule and yo bet yo cain't sound like a learned person if you don't know it. Compris?
I want to destroy these shitty car stereos...
on
dB Drag Racing
·
· Score: 3, Informative
...and fortunately, I am not the only one to think that a car stereo you can hear from within your home should be destroyed with extreme prejudice (preferable with the pricky driver).
That's where David Shriner's Klingon zapper comes in. Wait until a traffic light, point and zap, I mean *ZZZZAPP*, and enjoy the silence. Plus, it destroys the electronic ignition of the prick's car, allowing you to drive away without fearing a pursuit.
Now if only RadioShack carried them...
I am going to market them to retirees and quiet-loving coders under the brand Rap-B-Gone (TM). Any takers?
Hopefully this will make companies realize that the Internet isn't comprised of just IE users.
Thats composed of.
Repeat after me: A set is composed of elements
A set is comprising elements
And people who say "comprised of" are sounding like dorks.
C'mon, be nice to your latinate words, or they'll swim back to France and you'll only have Anglo-Saxon monosyllabic expletives left to express all your ideas. Imagine having to grunt your way through a technical paper using only 4-letter words -- isn't it just horrible?
Awww, c'mon, that would be dumb, even coming from the FAA. Look, the average Business Class galley of a 747 already stores enough booze to refuel the plane twice over.
Do you know how many vodkas per hour a sexy female attendant must pour into an obnoxious Business Class male passenger to keep him from groping her, these days? Multiply by a whole planeload. There, that's quite a lot of booze, eh?
So you can see that the teeny little alcohol cartridge of the obnoxious passenger's laptop is an infinitesimal addition. Why, by the time the plane lands, the breath of the guy is an explosion hazard by itself.
Then again, your argument, dumb as it is, might actually be considered. The Transportation Safety Authority has shown a preference for hiring people rejected as unsuitable by the fast-food retail industry, and God knows what these idiots will invent to keep us "safe".
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Moreover, 80% of the European legislative corpus is now coming down under the form of directives, which were supposed to be only a very small percentage at the inception of the EU. The Commission is constantly enlarging its scope and reach at the detriment of the Parliament.
So the bottom line is: 80% of the EU regulations are directives. The directives are anonymous, undebatted, unchallenged, and almost impossible to undo. They are mostly prepared by lobbyist cabinets which number about as many employees as the EU itself (there were 22,000 EU functionaries in Brussels when it was composed of only 12 countries. God only knows what the count is now.)
This means the Commission is not a democratic institution anymore, but a lobbyist dream. No wonder big corporations love it!
Byzantine... Your comparison is way too unflattering for Byzantium. I think the Basileus would spin in his tomb if we compared the EU even to besieged Byzantium.
The model for the EU would be a Byzantium which is not only regulating the number of angels that are allowed to dance on a pinhead (while being provided adequate handicap parking space and health insurance for their undertermined-yet-same-sex partner), but it's also subsidizing a door-opening and moat-filling contest.
Not to mention that the Ottomans had to *fight* to turn Byzantium into Constantinople. The EU bureaucracy is fighting only against people who wants to slow down its crazy expansion. (As an amusing parallel, Turkey is a candidate to the Europen Union.)
That's the optimistic hypothesis. You'll note, though, that they already took care of avoiding the equivalent of the First Amendment in the EU "constitution" draft.
It's not a coincidence that the worst EULA and the most stringent DMCA-type laws are in the European Commission books, not even as laws voted by the EU parliament, but as "directives", which are meant to be executed without discussion.
Of course, this is Slashdot, so click submit first and think later, right?
As for the reference to the Ottoman Empire, students of history know that it is the foremost model for an overwhelming administration that excelled in regulating trivial aspects of its subjects' lives while letting nepotism, corruption, crime and civil unrest run rampant. (If you flunked History, take a look at this timeline, written by a very lenient source, the Office of Turkish Tourism!). This omnipresent yet powerless state depicts the evolution of EU quite accurately.
I am not aware of accusation of the EU being "islamist", do you have a source? And more precisely, a reason?
You, sir, should refrain from flinging needless accusations.
...suspense roll...
... DECREASE accountability further and compound the cause of the problem.
Please tell me you are joking. PLEASE.
Fat chance. The EU is a huge bureaucracy. European don't even know the names of the EU commissars, and the Commission cultivates the virtue of secret and opacity with a success that would have made Beria jealous.
So public opinion has really no impact whatsoever on the bureaucrats. What matters is the lobbyists. According to the Wall Street Journal, there are about 10,000 lobbyists in Brussels. (I believe this doesn't include employees of the larger lobby cabinets).
Large companies are therefore overrepresented in Brussels. Contrary to what naive Americans can think, established companies love the thick layers of bureaucracy and the entanglements of redtape. Why? Because it allows them to:
1. Keep startup competitors out of their business by making it too difficult to enter the field,
2. Pass their pet legislations through coatroom deals.
Europeans wanted a super-state, they've got it. Oh wait... Cancel that. Nobody told the poor schmucks that they would eventually end up in a remake of the Ottoman Empire.
BuyMusic.com is getting bad reviews from multiple sources. So it's pretty obvious it might well fail from its appalling user interface and its smothering restrictions.
Yet, you can bet that next year, all this will be summarized in a nice, Powerpoint presentation to RIAA execs:
"See", an RIAA exec will pontificate, "we pamper 'em ungrateful Internet pirates and they don't want to use legal downloads. Let's just go back to serving them lawsuit papers."
At which point Powerpoint will BSOD promptly, and the discussion will drift on to Britney's navel jewelry and its marketing tie-ins.
I am not surprised, considering the EU track record of total disregard for citizens' privacy rights.
The Central European Bank, you'll remember, is planning to insert radioID tag chips in every euro banknote. The cover story is that it would make counterfeiting harder. The swiped-under-the-rug consequence is that cash would become as traceable as wiring transfers or credit card transactions, a paramount consideration in EU where the high taxation level (60% of the GNP avg) are driving a lot of people to take jobs "on the side".
In France, a country which has very strict laws against cross-indexing personal data files, the French IRS bought new IBM RS/6000 in the 90s and bought the subscriber list of a very popular encrypted TV channel, Canal Plus. Then it checked the subscriber list for people who were not paying the TV tax (about $130/year for owning a color TV). That kind of Big-Brotherish tax enforcement gave little trust in the privacy reassurances uttered by the bureaucrats.
Good point. Note that another competitor, IBM, seem reluctant to shake the Windows yoke as far as PCs are concerned (porting Lotus Notes to Linux? Nope, never). And yet it is a bitter rival of MS. My best guess is that the PC hand ignores what the right hand does.
I can see the reaction of some bean counters now:
"Freakin' Communist hippies! Yoga? Zen? I'll give you yoga and zen! I'm gonna send your jobs to India and China! You'll Yoga and Zen all you want!"
Your observation about Sony using MS Windows is very true. It is the result of a long-term OEM agreement. But their PC division might as well live on another planet. The same is true for the PC division of many other large companies such as, say, IBM, who competes very bitterly against MS and yet is trapped by an OEM agreement that prevents them from supplying non-Windows consumer PCs.
The Windows-on-PC situation can only compound the resentment of Sony and IBM against MS.
Moreover, PC manufacturers know that the future of the industry is bleak for name brands, because PCs are now a completely uniformized commodity, thanks largely to Intel and Microsoft standardization efforts. Margins are razor-thin, and the largest volume will doubtlessly go very soon to Burmese outfits who have unpaid political prisoners assemble components made by Chinese underpaid workers using Japanese robots. Or something like that. Doesn't look too good for margins.
So it's unlikely that consumer electronics giants would jeopardize their high-margin markets (new digital widgets) in order to please a supplier of their declining PC division. The strategic imperatives of the CE market therefore trump the tactical needs of the PC operations. Even if harsh market share realities make them release digital gizmos that only work with Windows, they'll still be an MS foe. The day FreeBSD has 95% of the market (hah!), they'll release FreeBSD-only gizmos.
In plain English: "MS is helping us lose money with PCs and wants to compete against our PDAs, cell phones, games and TV decoders? This means war!"
However, if you think this analysis is flawed, feel free to share yours.
Thanks again for responding,
I agree that software patents are a pain and are unethical.
But it's interesting to note who is attacking MS here and in what context. Philips and Sony are two of the greatest consumer electronics companies on the planet. Sony is an archfoe of Microsoft since Redmond released the XBox. Several large Japanese companies recently made a lot of noise about standardizing on Linux for consumer electronics, which is pretty bad for WindowsCE. Some observers wondered if the goal of that publicity wasn't just to score a marketing point against WinCE.
So this is the next episode in this war. This patent lawsuit is a single battle in a larger fight.
Watch for more blows exchanged between MS and consumer electronics companies.
Thanks for answering. Nobody would contest that the Chinese are quite a staggering bureaucracy. However, their goal is reportedly to send a manned mission to Mars. China isn't a low-tech country anymore so it shouldn't be scoffed at. Therefore, if NASA still wants to tackle such high-prestige missions, it better start planning now. Read every word before you post and don't assume.
You bet it does. Many an engineer cried tears of rage when they saw the DC-X burn and not being replaced because hey, a new copy of DC-X would cost 10% of the cost of a Shuttle launch, NASA can't find that kind of money anywhere.
A few outraged people muttered accusations of sabotage, but somehow, an investigation was never started.
The lesson: A human system, especially a bureaucracy, will do whatever it takes to insure its survival and expension. The only way to avoid that is to build permanent controls, complete with terribly severe punishments, right into the system. But you have to accept the 30% oerhead and the occasional noise of the firing squad.
Democracy is not for squirmish people.
Actually, whenever NASA puts a private sattelite into orbit, it bills the customer a mere fraction of its actual launch cost, typically less than $200 million. The rest (another $300-$500 million depending on how you count) is paid by the taxpayer. Which is how NASA can afford to send a manned vessel to do the job of a cargo rocket.
If NASA stopped operating as a federal-subsidized competitor of the private space launch industry, a much bigger market would instantly open. But NASA needs the launches to justify its Shuttle programs...
Keep NASA for launching Mars probes and doing research, but don't allow it to compete against the private space launcher industry.
It's the reason why NASA deceived Congress and underestimated the cost and reliability of the Shuttle. Not a concious conspiracy, just your regular bureaucratic tendency.
Nowadays, the Shuttle is keeping tens of thousands of plushy jobs at NASA. Many of them aren't paper pushers, there are really good engineers working on this program. However, the real top dogs are the bureaucrats. And they know that the Shuttle should be replaced by something that does not require an army to operate, but they'd be out of a job.
Each time the crazy engineers rock the boat and create a potential cheaper competitor for the Shuttle, it magically gets killed. Look at the X-33. Look at the DC-X: This demonstrator was taking off and landing on its jet, vertically. It was perfectly working when it was given to NASA, and somehow, NASA killed it on its first NASA flight. And somehow, the budget to build a new DC-X was consumed by, why, the Shuttle of course. So this perfectly good project was dropped.
See how it works? Tons of examples can be found in the history of the various X-projects that got mysteriously mismanaged and killed since the Shuttle program started.
NASA outlived its utility and became the worst enemy of cheap space access.
You want space access? You want to get to Mars before the Chinese? Keep the JPL and the researchers, get rid of the rest of NASA.
And not just CALEA, either. There are other pieces of telecom software and equipment that have been hacked in the past. Some of this eavesdropping by foreign spooks acquired a lot of notoriety due to its interception of highly sensitive traffic.
But it's safe to assume that there was much more eavesdropping that wasn't reported or even discovered.
If this goes on, it will be faster to call the Mossad or the FSB to fix a phone problem in DC than to call the local phone company.
Now the question is, does the DoJ (who convicted MS for abuse of monopolistic position) mandate the use of the MS products, or do they just subcontract their high-volume web sites to monkeys who use Win2000 because it runs the only language they know, Visual Basic?
Reason no. 167 why big business loves big government: with enough tax money flowing into enough appropriation committees, even the worst kludges are bound to be purchased massively if they are advertized on glossy paper.
Sometimes, SEVIS crashed under the stress and expunged the day's work. The delays and headaches led some schools to close their student offices and ask employees to work nights and weekends, when traffic was lighter.
That's as good as putting a logo on it. So I went to Netcraft and checked the SAVIS web site, egov.immigration.gov. And sure enough: The site egov.immigration.gov is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
I bet that the database is also running on Win2K...
Oh golly, you mean that when you put a high-volume site under Windows, you get (gasp) crashes and data losses? No way! Who would have thought that? Obviously, the poor Dept of Justice was a victim of an unheard-of, unexpected problem.
Not.
It ain't no stinkin' argooment. It's a freekin' grammur rule and yo bet yo cain't sound like a learned person if you don't know it. Compris?
That's where David Shriner's Klingon zapper comes in. Wait until a traffic light, point and zap, I mean *ZZZZAPP*, and enjoy the silence. Plus, it destroys the electronic ignition of the prick's car, allowing you to drive away without fearing a pursuit. Now if only RadioShack carried them...
I am going to market them to retirees and quiet-loving coders under the brand Rap-B-Gone (TM). Any takers?
Thats composed of.
Repeat after me:
A set is composed of elements
A set is comprising elements
And people who say "comprised of" are sounding like dorks.
C'mon, be nice to your latinate words, or they'll swim back to France and you'll only have Anglo-Saxon monosyllabic expletives left to express all your ideas. Imagine having to grunt your way through a technical paper using only 4-letter words -- isn't it just horrible?
The solar sail is not a thermal engine. It does not attempt to absorb heat and transfer it to a heat sink. To the contrary, it reflects photons.
So Carnot's laws are not involved here, much less violated. Therefore, the whole article is bull.
"New Scientist" is reaching a new low of bad editorial control. How can such a huge mistake go unnoticed? I am very disappointed.
"There is no B3 bomber!"
"I know that, I just said that!"
Shoot. Leave it to the Pentagon to ruin a perfectly good movie...
Do you know how many vodkas per hour a sexy female attendant must pour into an obnoxious Business Class male passenger to keep him from groping her, these days? Multiply by a whole planeload. There, that's quite a lot of booze, eh?
So you can see that the teeny little alcohol cartridge of the obnoxious passenger's laptop is an infinitesimal addition. Why, by the time the plane lands, the breath of the guy is an explosion hazard by itself.
Then again, your argument, dumb as it is, might actually be considered. The Transportation Safety Authority has shown a preference for hiring people rejected as unsuitable by the fast-food retail industry, and God knows what these idiots will invent to keep us "safe".