There's a net neutrality conference organised by french regulators with people from google and FTC, video stream is available RIGHT NOW with real time english translation here:
http://video.arcep.fr/arcep_13042010_en.html
""" Our Promise with Respect to Software Patents We Hold... Our Promise:
Subject to any qualifications or limitations stated herein, to the extent any party exercises a Patent Right with respect to Open Source/Free Software which reads on any claim of any patent held by Red Hat, Red Hat agrees to refrain from enforcing the infringed patent against such party for such exercise ("Our Promise"). Our Promise does not extend to any software which is not Open Source/Free Software, and any party exercising a Patent Right with respect to non-Open Source/Free Software which reads on any claims of any patent held by Red Hat must obtain a license for the exercise of such rights from Red Hat. Our Promise does not extend to any party who institutes patent litigation against Red Hat with respect to a patent applicable to software (including a cross-claim or counterclaim to a lawsuit). No hardware per se is licensed hereunder.
Each party relying on Our Promise acknowledges that Our Promise is not an assurance that Red Hat's patents are enforceable or that the exercise of rights under Red Hat's patents does not infringe the patent or other intellectual property rights of any other entity. Red Hat disclaims any liability to any party relying on Our Promise for claims brought by any other entity based on infringement of intellectual property rights or otherwise. As a condition to exercising the Patent Rights permitted by Our Promise hereunder, each relying party hereby assumes sole responsibility to secure any other intellectual property rights needed, if any. """
They promise not to sue you just like Microsoft. I guess it's perfectly standard legalese then if two companies as far away as MS and RH use the same wording.
Now the RH promise is limited to software with a limited set of licence (they can add to it) while MS one is limited to some implementations of a standard.
I'd say that if a patent troll buys MS we're safe, but if a patent troll buy RH and the FSF needs to publish GPL 3.1 or 4.0 we're screwed since RH promise does not cover future licence.
"""
Cancer survival rates are based on the time from diagnosis to future point in time - say, 1 year, 5 years or 10 years, etc. Because of this, they are subject to what researchers call "lead time bias." Wikipedia
has a much better explanation here than I can ever give, but in short it means that advances in cancer screening can artificially inflate the "cancer survival time."
Here's an example, involving prostate cancer. U.S. male patients usually get screened for prostate cancer starting at around age 50. Many European countries don't bother screening for prostate cancer at all, since many studies don't show any survival benefit (meaning people's lives aren't extended) to screening. A hypothetical American male may find out at age 52 that he has prostate cancer - which is often a slow growing cancer. Say he lives for another 20 years - which is not uncommon - before dying of something else, such as a heart attack. His "cancer survival time" is now 20 years. A hypothetical European man isn't screened for prostate cancer, but it is discovered when he is 65 during routine lab work. He lives another 7 years before dying of a heart attack. His "cancer survival time" is now only 7 years. And so on, and so on.
As you can see, cancer survival rates can be inaccurate for measuring the quality of health care.
"""
That's pathetic to point out those rates to support USA health care system...
Disinformation and selective quotation at work. Do you work for the USA private health insurers?
Let's check:
To really inform slashdot readers you might add that more than 80% of private health insurance is done by... not for profit, and that the share of not for profit vs for profit has increased by 10% over the past years. It might help USA citizens understand a few things about how private "for profit" is really working.
"private" health insurance covers less than 25% of costs, 75% comes from the mandatory public system.
And in the special case of France, the private not for profit insurance has nothing to do with government efficiency as always there's some ideology and creative accounting at work ("chronic deficits" is a political choice). Administrative costs of health insurance are 6% in France vs 15% in the USA, if you want to increase waste you know what to do.
For reference I cannot choose my private complementary health insurance provider which is the one of my employer by law (private market ? eh eh), I pay around 30 euros per month for it.
This is unfortunately not a first, the canadian site "Classiques des Sciences Sociale" collecting social science texts was threatened in 2003 by a french editor
over works public domain for 50 but not in 70:
the story is here (in french).
After a big fuss, the editor went away, but copyright owners never learn...
California, the third-largest market for solar on Earth, has over 30,000 home and small-business systems installed, and in 2006 put in place a 10-year, $3.3 billion program termed "Million Solar Roofs" that should add a whopping 4,000-10,000 MW of solar over the coming decade.
Kenya, not a place that comes readily to mind as a PV leader is, in fact, just that. With roughly 30,000 small (truly small, 20-100 watts, not kilowatts, per household) systems sold per year, has the world's highest household solar ownership rate.
That says something about the potential uses, isn't it?
Well, the day you'll get a disease outbreak or bio-terrorism you'll revisit this totally dumb statement. Of course you need spare capacity, and no private system will not provide it in real life (except for the 0.01% top wealthy).
"Government does NOT allocate resources well at all."
Nonsense. When government people are elected in pluralist elections (ie not USSR), if they screw up they have market feedback even if it's not through a price based system. Price based market do fail sometimes, and health care should be an eye-opener, but well...
Average before Chavez military spending: 1.619 billions USD, average 1.6% of GDP
Average Chavez military spending: 1.445 billions USD, average 1.2% of GDP
Yes, in absolute dollar terms military spending as increased since the 2002 USA-backed coups (but who wouldn't do that?) but relative to GDP it has decreased, and by all measure it's less than previous kleptocrats did.
Of course poverty has decreased and social spending increased, really bad bad bad.
Most important for slashdot readers: Nicolas Sarkozy is a lawyer and has a very strong pro-software patent stance and was behind the hardline DADVSI copyright law (our local DMCA). He was also behind the introduction of voting machines without paper trail requirements, and of the "secret" report about their validity (no citizen could get the report.
More in the PDF with his answers to the "candidats.fr" initiative here
Hard time for free software in France. There are still the parliament election next month, but last time french voters put the majority behind the president.
Here what I wrote on wikipedia regarding the unemployment statistics:
The limits of the unemployment definition
For the fourth quarter of 2004, according to OECD, (source Employment Outlook 2005 ISBN 92-64-01045-9), normalized unemployment for men aged 25 to 54 was 4.6% in the USA and 7.4% in France. At the same time and for the same population the employment rate (number of workers divided by population) was 86.3% in the USA and 86.7% in France.
This example shows that the unemployment rate is 60% higher in France than in the USA, yet more people in this demographic are working in France than in the USA, which is counterintuitive if it is expected that the unemployment rate reflects the health of the labor market.
This is because the definition of unemployment relies on the distinction between inactive and unemployed, a quite subjective measure which can be easily manipulated by policies that do not change the situation of the labor market, but decrease unemployment by shifting people from unemployed to inactive status.
Unemployment as currently measured is completely meaningless.
I believe the right term is "abusing monopoly power".
One smart thing China (and other countries) could do is limiting its action to "foreign software produced by locally convincted monopolist". US would not mind getting a bit of foreign help taming its local law offender:).
For now rates are the same in the whole country
where DSL is available, some of the cheap offers
are available only in the big cities. Everyone
has to pay 13 euros/month for the phone line
in addition to DSL costs, which are as follow:
128/64: 15-20 euros/month
512/128: 20-30 euros/month
1024-2048/128-256: 30-60 euros/month
Cable is roughly the same price as DSL when available (very big cities only)
No real offer above 2048
One operator sells TV on the same DSL line too.
Euro is around 1.27 USD these days: historical high, going up, historical low is 0.82 USD IIRC.
The great thing about DSL in France is the Grenouille site where users report download/upload/ping per city per provider all the time (plus their
horror stories), all french providers are covered it helps a lot when choosing a provider!
For 5 euros one time payment you get five 25MB POP3 boxes with various security features, 3 different webmails access. If you pay one time 29 euros, you get unlimited POP3 boxes and mailing lists handling (ezlm). For 8.9 additional euros per year you get your com/org/net domain with full web DNS configuration and DynHost. They've answered all my stupid questions in less than a day.
For 5 euros one time payment you get 5 25MB POP3 boxes with various security features, 3 different webmails access. If you pay one time 29 euros,
you get unlimited POP3 boxes and mailing lists handling. For 8.9 additional euros per year you get
your com/org/net domain with full web DNS
configuration and DynHost. They've answered
all my stupid questions in less than
a day.
Slashdot Mirror
"the drug was a painkiller containing cannabinoids" the french ministry of health says no cannabinoids was involved:
http://www.liberation.fr/franc...
The drug is about treating anxiety.
Available every 6 monthes : http://www.hardware.fr/article...
http://musescore.org/ Curiously missing in the article
There's a net neutrality conference organised by french regulators with people from google and FTC, video stream is available RIGHT NOW with real time english translation here: http://video.arcep.fr/arcep_13042010_en.html
Red Hat also has patents and the wording of the promise is nearly identical to the one of MS, I'm quoting RH:
http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html
""" ...
Our Promise with Respect to Software Patents We Hold
Our Promise:
Subject to any qualifications or limitations stated herein, to the extent any party exercises a Patent Right with respect to Open Source/Free Software which reads on any claim of any patent held by Red Hat, Red Hat agrees to refrain from enforcing the infringed patent against such party for such exercise ("Our Promise"). Our Promise does not extend to any software which is not Open Source/Free Software, and any party exercising a Patent Right with respect to non-Open Source/Free Software which reads on any claims of any patent held by Red Hat must obtain a license for the exercise of such rights from Red Hat. Our Promise does not extend to any party who institutes patent litigation against Red Hat with respect to a patent applicable to software (including a cross-claim or counterclaim to a lawsuit). No hardware per se is licensed hereunder.
Each party relying on Our Promise acknowledges that Our Promise is not an assurance that Red Hat's patents are enforceable or that the exercise of rights under Red Hat's patents does not infringe the patent or other intellectual property rights of any other entity. Red Hat disclaims any liability to any party relying on Our Promise for claims brought by any other entity based on infringement of intellectual property rights or otherwise. As a condition to exercising the Patent Rights permitted by Our Promise hereunder, each relying party hereby assumes sole responsibility to secure any other intellectual property rights needed, if any.
"""
They promise not to sue you just like Microsoft. I guess it's perfectly standard legalese then if two companies as far away as MS and RH use the same wording.
Now the RH promise is limited to software with a limited set of licence (they can add to it) while MS one is limited to some implementations of a standard.
I'd say that if a patent troll buys MS we're safe, but if a patent troll buy RH and the FSF needs to publish GPL 3.1 or 4.0 we're screwed since RH promise does not cover future licence.
IANAL
5 years cancer survival rate is well-known to be biased:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/08/dissent-of-th-1.html
"""
Cancer survival rates are based on the time from diagnosis to future point in time - say, 1 year, 5 years or 10 years, etc. Because of this, they are subject to what researchers call "lead time bias." Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_time_bias
has a much better explanation here than I can ever give, but in short it means that advances in cancer screening can artificially inflate the "cancer survival time."
Here's an example, involving prostate cancer. U.S. male patients usually get screened for prostate cancer starting at around age 50. Many European countries don't bother screening for prostate cancer at all, since many studies don't show any survival benefit (meaning people's lives aren't extended) to screening. A hypothetical American male may find out at age 52 that he has prostate cancer - which is often a slow growing cancer. Say he lives for another 20 years - which is not uncommon - before dying of something else, such as a heart attack. His "cancer survival time" is now 20 years. A hypothetical European man isn't screened for prostate cancer, but it is discovered when he is 65 during routine lab work. He lives another 7 years before dying of a heart attack. His "cancer survival time" is now only 7 years. And so on, and so on.
As you can see, cancer survival rates can be inaccurate for measuring the quality of health care.
"""
That's pathetic to point out those rates to support USA health care system ...
Disinformation and selective quotation at work. Do you work for the USA private health insurers?
Let's check:
To really inform slashdot readers you might add that more than 80% of private health insurance is done by ... not for profit, and that the share of not for profit vs for profit has increased by 10% over the past years. It might help USA citizens understand a few things about how private "for profit" is really working.
"private" health insurance covers less than 25% of costs, 75% comes from the mandatory public system.
And in the special case of France, the private not for profit insurance has nothing to do with government efficiency as always there's some ideology and creative accounting at work ("chronic deficits" is a political choice). Administrative costs of health insurance are 6% in France vs 15% in the USA, if you want to increase waste you know what to do.
For reference I cannot choose my private complementary health insurance provider which is the one of my employer by law (private market ? eh eh), I pay around 30 euros per month for it.
This is unfortunately not a first, the canadian site "Classiques des Sciences Sociale" collecting social science texts was threatened in 2003 by a french editor over works public domain for 50 but not in 70: the story is here (in french). After a big fuss, the editor went away, but copyright owners never learn...
"having excess treatment capacity"
Well, the day you'll get a disease outbreak or bio-terrorism you'll revisit this totally dumb statement. Of course you need spare capacity, and no private system will not provide it in real life (except for the 0.01% top wealthy).
"Government does NOT allocate resources well at all."
Nonsense. When government people are elected in pluralist elections (ie not USSR), if they screw up they have market feedback even if it's not through a price based system. Price based market do fail sometimes, and health care should be an eye-opener, but well...
Right wing propaganda again, see some real data here.
Average before Chavez military spending: 1.619 billions USD, average 1.6% of GDP
Average Chavez military spending: 1.445 billions USD, average 1.2% of GDP
Yes, in absolute dollar terms military spending as increased since the 2002 USA-backed coups (but who wouldn't do that?) but relative to GDP it has decreased, and by all measure it's less than previous kleptocrats did.
Of course poverty has decreased and social spending increased, really bad bad bad.
Just display something different, that is hide malware) when googlebot comes on your website.
Most important for slashdot readers: Nicolas Sarkozy is a lawyer and has a very strong pro-software patent stance and was behind the hardline DADVSI copyright law (our local DMCA). He was also behind the introduction of voting machines without paper trail requirements, and of the "secret" report about their validity (no citizen could get the report.
More in the PDF with his answers to the "candidats.fr" initiative here
Hard time for free software in France. There are still the parliament election next month, but last time french voters put the majority behind the president.
If you want to test your free (as in speech) software with recent GCC, there's a little farm (9 bi Pentium 3 1GHz) I help maintain:
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/CompileFarm
See "How to get involved" chapter to get an account.
Make a phone call to those guyes http://www.archive.org/
...is Ximian/NOVELL GNOME Desktop for SuSE 9.1. Laurent
The first GPL required US government funded project I know of is the NYU GNAT project which is an Ada GCC front-end, see History in Wikipedia
This was back in 1994 or some such.
Laurent
laurent@guerby.net
So we're looking at Linux with its pile of out of the box working dev tools.
Laurent
PS: I'll never see the MaxOS GUI, all boxes are accessed through an xterm under ssh :)
One smart thing China (and other countries) could do is limiting its action to "foreign software produced by locally convincted monopolist". US would not mind getting a bit of foreign help taming its local law offender :).
Laurent
For now rates are the same in the whole country where DSL is available, some of the cheap offers are available only in the big cities. Everyone has to pay 13 euros/month for the phone line in addition to DSL costs, which are as follow:
Euro is around 1.27 USD these days: historical high, going up, historical low is 0.82 USD IIRC.
The great thing about DSL in France is the Grenouille site where users report download/upload/ping per city per provider all the time (plus their horror stories), all french providers are covered it helps a lot when choosing a provider!
Laurent
All prices excluding VAT, 1 euro ~= 1.17 USD
Disclaimer: I'm an happy paying customer and switched all my email and DNS to OVH a month ago. No other relationship with OVH or OVH people.
Disclaimer 2: already posted in another /. discussion about webmail.
Laurent
For 5 euros one time payment you get 5 25MB POP3 boxes with various security features, 3 different webmails access. If you pay one time 29 euros, you get unlimited POP3 boxes and mailing lists handling. For 8.9 additional euros per year you get your com/org/net domain with full web DNS configuration and DynHost. They've answered all my stupid questions in less than a day.
Disclaimer: I'm an happy paying customer and switched all my email and DNS to OVH a few weeks ago. No other relation to OVH or OVH people.
All prices excluding VAT, 1 euro ~= 1.17 USD
Laurent
First of all, a great many thanks to O'Reilly for this bold move. I'll express my support shortly by buying a few O'Reilly books :).
Will O'Reilly try to make available an electronic version of the books contributed to the public domain wherever possible?