The problem with patent-law violation reasoning is that it seems to be without regard to the future. It's the same logic that leads to other poor policies (who cares about the environment! It's not messed up today).
The environment is not our construct. The market is. We can screw the market, people will not die (though Roche will get less money as long as the bird flu goes). We cannot simply abolish the environment because we screwed it.
Welcome to the Real World(TM), where any international law is respected by any country as long as it fits it. There is no such thing as an international police.
if this stands, and other countries follow, no more advances may be made in bird flu research since all private-sector motivation is removed.
Ah-ah. So, the threat of a global pandemia is surely not enough to make world governments spit out godzillions of dollars to avert it.
The Web was invented in Switzerland by a Belgian with a French name and a Londoner. Uninstall your browser and go back using Gopher and Archie.
Gunpowder was invented in China long ago and intended for recreational purpose only. The inventor could never envision its usage for anything else than making children happy, and uncivilised westerners use it today to maim them. Please return your firearms to the PRC. Do keep Charlton Heston.
Ships were invented in Greece to find a golden fleece. They were to be a means of transport and exploration, not military platforms. Please return the Nimitz to Athens.
The Latin alphabet was supposed to be used for Latin and derived languages exclusively. It was developed by legitimate scribes with Etrurian sublicenses, and never intended to be used by barbarians that cannot even write. ("write", for example, should be spelt "VRAJT"). Please send all your keyboards and typewriters back to Italy.
Bread was invended in Egypt as a tasty way of eating flour. It was never meant to be used in (bleargh) Big Macs. Send all your McDonalds to Cairo (though they will probably answer "thanks, but... let's just say like we took them, right?")
The Statue of Liberty was built in France to honour the values of Freedom, Equality and Fraternity, together with friendship between France and the US. It was not meant to symbolise a nation that claims to have saved France in the world wars (in the first the US entered only for one year, in the second they did not enter until attacked), calling the French "surrendering cheese-eating monkeys" (the "eating" remark, coming from an American, is really offensive) while never had a military occupation on their soil since the Brits left, and screwed all the statue was meant to represent by invading a defenseless country with bunches of black sticky liquid, and installing their puppet regime like Hapsburg Austria used to (ok, no sticky liquids back then). Unmount and shove it in a place the French will be all too happy to illustrate.
Cars were invented in Germany to visit the countryside in the weekend, not to be a penis supersizer. Please transfer of GM and Ford motor companies to Mannheim. Not sure whether they want the Humvees. Bikes go to Karlsruhe.
Circumcision was invented by people who had little water and lived in the desert. It was not meant as a way to prevent masturbation, and whoever thought for a second to cut a baby's willy because he might do "dirty things" with it in 15 years' time was a complete psycho. The idea was hygiene! Return to Israel your... oh never mind.
[European speaking]
The whole point with GTA|SA, in my view, is that a stupid interactive sex scene was considered highly outrageous and inappropriate in a game where shooting unprovoked at by-passers, policemen, other gang members with gory detail was the main theme. This was not a game about killing evil, white, shiny, cloned Stormtroopers, or some sort of nasty monster from hell. The people you can kill or carjack in that game look exacly like your neighbours.
Normal and decent people have sex (yes, I realize the irony of writing this on Slashdot), including your parents, psychopaths kill people at random (hope you don't have any in the family). In a videogame, it is legitimate to show people killed at random, and to encourage the player to do so, but if two people consensually have a shag, Hillary Clinton starts screaming "Will you please think of the children!".
In short, all countries have their mass histery. Iran has Islam, Norway has the usage of dialects, Denmark the usage of commas, Germany has the ß removal complex, and the USA have problems with sex.
Turned out, the tune getting the most money from SIAE in Italy is the background music of Onda Verde (traffic condition broadcast) on radio. If you never heard any music at all, that's because it's so low you cannot hear it. But you are paying for it, of course.
In Rome, there are some "musicians" who daily organise concerts where no one goes, only because they agree with SIAE that they are getting support for "cultural activities". It's basically your average white-collar mafia.
As a lot of things in Italy, thieves with the right contacts pull the strings and get rich doing nothing useful for society. This is the Italian development model after all. If you wondered, no, serious musicians don't get a penny. The 99 Posse said they never saw a penny coming from SIAE, even if they wrote a song,Curre curre guagliò, that is in the soundtrack of Gabriele Salvatores' Sud, that ran a few times on national TV. That might have to do with the fact that 99 are not exacly government-aligned.
If you don't like the way it works, pack up and leave. Serious, I did and never looked back—it's a panacea for your liver. But I'll take a trip to Stockholm to vote for Tonino anyway.
I would like to know who pays for these investigations. There are all kinds of crimes that go uninvestigated but somehow they have time and resources to use James Bond tactics to track down someone that released a movie on the Internet.
Hi and welcome to planet Earth. Let me explain how things work here: crimes are prosecuted with priority ordered according to damage to the ruling class. Murder of a prostitute in a suburb is irrelevant, unless it stirs fear and malcontent in the voting population and threatens someone's chair. Jeopardizing the income of people who are highly represented in the ruling class (RIAA, MPAA, NRA, and so on) is prioritised, because if you don't lick the right asses you don't get money/promotions farting out of them.
So, until the population gets pissed off and the politicians get the cue that supporting certain lobbies makes them lose more votes than they gain through funding and consequent campaigning, things are going this way.
I'll add that in Mexico, using the form "Mejico" is highly controversial, as it is seen as "colonialism". Among the arguments for maintaining the "Mexico" form, the ludicrous one that foreigners would mispronounce "Mejico" (everybody mispronounces Mexico already...). Anyway, it's as controversial as gun control in the US or spelling in Norway, according to what I read.
China has a track record of honoring treaties and peace when they have larger goals in sight. Once they have achieved those goals...
Give credit where credit is due. No country ever respected treaties they could infringe without fear of punishment, if they had something to gain from it.
It's just a fact of history: the signature on a treaty is no stronger than the signing arm.
The name "Greenland" was pretty much an early form of advertising by Eirik Raude, to attract settlers. During the summer, you can still find green spots here and there on the West coast.
Mind you, the place Eirik was coming from was called Iceland, and it lies in the middle of the Gulf stream.
The Holy Roman Empire was called like that for a thousand years, even though it was not Holy (it was at war with the Pope most of the time), it was not Roman (it was—mostly—German, the name Roman suggested mostly an idea of heritage; it was actually the first Reich), and it was not an Empire, since it was mostly an honorific title with decreasing degrees of power through the centuries.
No, I'm saying precisely the opposite, and quite clearly, I thought. Maybe you can't read.
OTOH maybe you cannot write; from your first post:
If the previous uses of [insert your old P2P tech here] were valid[...]
It's quite obvious that you are implying that the uses of [insert your old P2P tech here] can be either legal or not legal. This is your fallacy, since there are both legal and illegal conceivable uses of any P2P technology.
Are you saying that because Jack the Ripper used a scalpel, my surgeon has to operate me with a spoon? That since crackers use Linux, we should forbid it (yay, forbid computers altogether!)? That since speeders use cars, we all have to walk only? That since Lucrezia Borgia poisoned people, we should ban chemistry?
Get the difference: there can be uses and abuses of the same thing.
If I understood this correctly, Red Hat is (could be) trademarked. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is "the Enterprise-oriented Linux of Red Hat(TM)", i.e. it's not a new trademark as a whole, only the "Red Hat" part is.
I'm no lawyer, but I think the whole issue is that, if you want to trademark something with "Linux" inside, you pay royalty. If you do not want to trademark, Linus does not give a shit.
Sorry that the facts do not correspond to your preferences, but KDE is widely more popular than Gnome. The "Useless-ability improvements", like the crippling of the Gnome file manager, made by self-appointed "usability experts", have resulted in a surge for KDE support.
Not that Gnome is dying, but it's clear which desktop is dominating.
However, it is true that this page (in the history of related article Boyd*Upp) was written by someone operating out of IP 132.185.240.121, corresponding to webgw1.thls.bbc.co.uk.
Lomborg has no qualification as a statistician. I assume Kåre Fog's website is credible as I have personally looked up some of the examples there presented and have personally checked that Fog's claims to Lomborg's dishonesty hold. I suggest you check it for yourself before spouting more corporate propaganda.
The text from the Wikipedia entry you quote is from the Heidelberg Appeal Nederland, an highly biased source (of course you "forgot" to mention the Wikipedia page was quoting that). Lomborg's "exhoneration" came from a political body, not a scientific one. Furthermore, the main case for Lomborg was that his objective dishonesty was not sufficiently proven in the papers—i.e., it had not been excluded he was simply an ignorant fool. The incorrectness of his conclusions was never a topic in discussion.
Lomborg taught a course in statistics, but that does not amount being a statistician. Bunches of professors in school teach history, and are not historians for that. Quoting Lomborg's own website is plain useless, as the guy is just short of a compulsive liar.
Lomborg's field is rather "political science", and he has only one publication in a peer-reviewed journal (which, in the same link as above, is also reported being unlikely, other than unrelated to climatology).
The last figure I heard was that, at the time of the original colonies, the North American continent had something like 20-30% forest cover. Today it's closer to 40%.
Now that's an impressive talking out of one's ass. So:
What is the source of these numbers?
How could they make a survey of North America at the time of the 13 colonies, when they did not have any access to most of it? Satellites are a pretty recent thing.
Even if they could make a survey, what was their definition of "forest cover"? Any indication of density?
Even if the survey would have been possible, and the definition consistent with e.g. FAO's, what would lead us to conclude that an increase in the North American continent could compensate for the rest of the globe? Britain, for instance, has almost no more of its forests (there is no such thing as Sherwood forest anymore).
The link you provide, among other things, says that forest area is not decreasing, which is a blatant lie popularised by master jester Bjørn Lomborg (who by the way has no knowledge of climatology nor statistics) in his "skeptical environmentalist". The lie is originated by the plotting of forest area as published by FAO since the end of WW2, without correcting for the fact that countries were continuously joining the FAO and that first estimates were not precise, and had no conventional definiton of "forest area". The myth is well debunked here.
The author is a CS professor, not a climatologist. His credibility is quite low on this issue. The fact that he disagrees with pretty much any climatologist on the planet is also a pointer.
It's Celsius, Fahrenheit, sense, and the documentary is French.
The reporter, however, is American, and I expect the temperature to be in Fahrenheit. It's anyway damn cold (about -55 Celsius).
Maybe they should implement a big, friendly button to allow even the most clueless user to identify as Explorer, with some wizard to explain why it can be useful. This is an important functionality.
That's right, because you could never agree on one [language].
There was never such a discussion on the EU level (which would be beneficial IMHO, but has not been held).
Fact is still that Europe is full of terribly provincial little fiefdoms with a totally myopic view of their self importance [...]
I am afraid, fact is you are ranting, and I seriously doubt you have any information about Europe other than Fox channel. Try providing factual support for your claims. Which cities would be armed camps?
Your country is smaller than most US states. There are states in the US 5 times the size of Norway that also have greater internet penetration. The correct comparision accounts for scale, i.e. Europe vs. North America. Sorry..
in the US comparing anyone to a Nazi is deeply offensive.
Oh well, in Europe too. But it is kind of more offensive to act like a Nazi. I am sure most Americans are nowhere that nuts, but that particular celebration (veterans' day at Austin capitol) had a very creepy atmosphere to it, with militarism all over the place, glorification of wars like Vietnam, and also the very weird monument to the confederate army ("The spirit of 1776"? Fighting to maintain slavery is now "the spirit of 1776"?)
[...] it is clear that you are extremely lacking in what passes for civilized grace or behaviour by any reasonable standard.
I am afraid the moderators have already been the judges of that.
Yup. It's a troll, and full of factual errors too.
Sorry, no factual errors. These are my experiences. I might have had especially bad luck, though that would defy statistics.
My GSM cell phone doesn't work in Europe either. Must be something wrong with the European cell phone system.
In Europe, there is a 900/1800 MHz dual band, in North America 850/1900 MHz. My phone is a tri-band (900, 1800 and 1900), one of those you pay more for to be able to go to the US and use them.
What do expect from a bunch of Chemical Engineers?
<coupdegrace>Well, American chemical engineers. At ECOS2003 in Copenhagen we had a whole room with Debian machines. Eheh.
Big enough for a million people on New Years Eve. What more do you want?
That's bullshit, no way a million people can fit in there. I was at a rally in September 2002 in Rome, and we were about 800,000 to one million. You have never seen one million people. They could never, ever fit in Times square. Not even 100,000 for that sake. I would expect it to be closer to 10,000 at maximum. Look at the pictures: this is St. John's square in Laterano: as a general rule, the square from the church on the west side all the way to the east limit of the picture can contain 300,000 people. Times square is nowhere that size.
An Europe is a bunch of little squabbling principalities that still haven't even adopted a common language
That might surprise you, but we are not aiming at one language. I for one am for Esperanto as a bridge language and everybody with his mother language, but the current policy is "translate everything". And for that sake half the advertisement in New York is in Spanish.
Typical Euro chavanism. I speak 3 languages, my wife 7.
Which ones, and with which certificates? Really, I'm curious. Chile has not exactly many borders with non-Spanish-speaking countries, are you counting argentinian as a language, che? That would not even be that incorrect.
These beasts are the sons and daughters of those who broke the Atlantic wall to help free Europe
I thought America used to be about deserving one's honours, and not inheriting them. GWB is not FDR. By the way, I did not say "they were Nazi", I said "the closest thing to a Nazi rally" I had experienced. At some point, the speaker said "We did a lot of good things in Vietnam! We built orphanages!", and my buddy Olaf started laughing. That's when I got scared. Olaf ikke le. Ikke nå, ikke her, for fandens skyld!
the cell phone was invented in the US by researchers at Bell Labs and Motorola
So what, the GSM standard (the one that did not work for me in the US) was invented in 1 km's radius from my workplace.
The penetration in the US is FAR higher than in Europe. The last published results show that the penetration in the North America is 67.4%. Europe 35.5%.
I almost feel bad, but in the link you provided my country is directly above yours. Sorry.
the most technologically advanced nation in the world
I thought too that the US were a long way ahead in technology. I came for a conference in Austin, TX last November, and on the way back I stayed for a week in NY. I was disappointed in some ways:
How comes that I can't bloody call Europe from a payphone in Chicago airport? And where are the credit-card phones? It's an international airport, not a café! It's not that I did not try, and I tried the week later too. Yes, I know you use 011 instead of 00. It finally worked on Broadway by the 50th street.
Why doesn't my damn GSM mobile work? What's the fuss with multiple standards over here? (Yes, my phone is a triple band and was supposed to work in NY and Chicago, though not Austin). Damn, these work in Thailand, why don't they work in the US?
The conference in Austin was AIChE 2004. Number of participants: about 5,000. Number of complimentary internet connections: 0. Luckily there was a nice café at 6th/Congress with free access to Macs.
My Diners stopped working for a couple of days, and the Visa was dead. It would work early in the morning.
(This one is getting flamed)The statue of Liberty is small!!! I can't believe it's taller than the one in my town.
Why are still stuck in the stone, pound and foot age?
Times square: it's not square to begin with, and it's ludicrously small. It looks so big in the images from new year's eve...
Ok, ok, I have to compensate with some positive points...
Ok, there are people who speak other language than English. I expected worse, on the plane to New York I was sitting beside a girl who completely by chance spoke Italian (and not bad either!).
Ellis Island more than compensated for Liberty Island. The museum there was cool, even if I did not find my grandfather's brother in the archives.
Food is nowhere near terrible as in England, and because of Mexico food in Austin was actually quite good. Que vivan los migrantes!
I happened to hear the Veteran's Day speech at the Texas capitol. Sorry for the people governed by these beasts, but for me it was an experience to see the closest thing to a Nazi rally I will ever witness (I hope).
Prospect park in NY rules!
Now, when I see "Venner for livet" (Friends) or "Sex og singelliv" (Sex and the city) I actually recognize the places!
Anyway, back to the point: the US are not as advanced as many, Americans and not, think they are. At least not in the level of technology the citizens are exposed to, I have definitely seen enough to deem it unlikely that I was victim of a long series of unlucky coincidences.
Slashdot Mirror
The environment is not our construct. The market is. We can screw the market, people will not die (though Roche will get less money as long as the bird flu goes). We cannot simply abolish the environment because we screwed it.
Welcome to the Real World(TM), where any international law is respected by any country as long as it fits it. There is no such thing as an international police.
Ah-ah. So, the threat of a global pandemia is surely not enough to make world governments spit out godzillions of dollars to avert it.
So, if the US invented it they "own" it?
The Web was invented in Switzerland by a Belgian with a French name and a Londoner. Uninstall your browser and go back using Gopher and Archie.
Gunpowder was invented in China long ago and intended for recreational purpose only. The inventor could never envision its usage for anything else than making children happy, and uncivilised westerners use it today to maim them. Please return your firearms to the PRC. Do keep Charlton Heston.
Ships were invented in Greece to find a golden fleece. They were to be a means of transport and exploration, not military platforms. Please return the Nimitz to Athens.
The Latin alphabet was supposed to be used for Latin and derived languages exclusively. It was developed by legitimate scribes with Etrurian sublicenses, and never intended to be used by barbarians that cannot even write. ("write", for example, should be spelt "VRAJT"). Please send all your keyboards and typewriters back to Italy.
Bread was invended in Egypt as a tasty way of eating flour. It was never meant to be used in (bleargh) Big Macs. Send all your McDonalds to Cairo (though they will probably answer "thanks, but... let's just say like we took them, right?")
The Statue of Liberty was built in France to honour the values of Freedom, Equality and Fraternity, together with friendship between France and the US. It was not meant to symbolise a nation that claims to have saved France in the world wars (in the first the US entered only for one year, in the second they did not enter until attacked), calling the French "surrendering cheese-eating monkeys" (the "eating" remark, coming from an American, is really offensive) while never had a military occupation on their soil since the Brits left, and screwed all the statue was meant to represent by invading a defenseless country with bunches of black sticky liquid, and installing their puppet regime like Hapsburg Austria used to (ok, no sticky liquids back then). Unmount and shove it in a place the French will be all too happy to illustrate.
Cars were invented in Germany to visit the countryside in the weekend, not to be a penis supersizer. Please transfer of GM and Ford motor companies to Mannheim. Not sure whether they want the Humvees. Bikes go to Karlsruhe.
Circumcision was invented by people who had little water and lived in the desert. It was not meant as a way to prevent masturbation, and whoever thought for a second to cut a baby's willy because he might do "dirty things" with it in 15 years' time was a complete psycho. The idea was hygiene! Return to Israel your... oh never mind.
[European speaking]
The whole point with GTA|SA, in my view, is that a stupid interactive sex scene was considered highly outrageous and inappropriate in a game where shooting unprovoked at by-passers, policemen, other gang members with gory detail was the main theme. This was not a game about killing evil, white, shiny, cloned Stormtroopers, or some sort of nasty monster from hell. The people you can kill or carjack in that game look exacly like your neighbours.
Normal and decent people have sex (yes, I realize the irony of writing this on Slashdot), including your parents, psychopaths kill people at random (hope you don't have any in the family). In a videogame, it is legitimate to show people killed at random, and to encourage the player to do so, but if two people consensually have a shag, Hillary Clinton starts screaming "Will you please think of the children!".
In short, all countries have their mass histery. Iran has Islam, Norway has the usage of dialects, Denmark the usage of commas, Germany has the ß removal complex, and the USA have problems with sex.
Milena Gabanelli's Report on Rai3 (one of those transmissions so good you wonder how much time before they get censored) once had 2 hours about SIAE.
Turned out, the tune getting the most money from SIAE in Italy is the background music of Onda Verde (traffic condition broadcast) on radio. If you never heard any music at all, that's because it's so low you cannot hear it. But you are paying for it, of course.
In Rome, there are some "musicians" who daily organise concerts where no one goes, only because they agree with SIAE that they are getting support for "cultural activities". It's basically your average white-collar mafia.
As a lot of things in Italy, thieves with the right contacts pull the strings and get rich doing nothing useful for society. This is the Italian development model after all. If you wondered, no, serious musicians don't get a penny. The 99 Posse said they never saw a penny coming from SIAE, even if they wrote a song,Curre curre guagliò, that is in the soundtrack of Gabriele Salvatores' Sud, that ran a few times on national TV. That might have to do with the fact that 99 are not exacly government-aligned.
If you don't like the way it works, pack up and leave. Serious, I did and never looked back—it's a panacea for your liver. But I'll take a trip to Stockholm to vote for Tonino anyway.
I think this is the place in Norway you meant.
Hi and welcome to planet Earth. Let me explain how things work here: crimes are prosecuted with priority ordered according to damage to the ruling class. Murder of a prostitute in a suburb is irrelevant, unless it stirs fear and malcontent in the voting population and threatens someone's chair.
Jeopardizing the income of people who are highly represented in the ruling class (RIAA, MPAA, NRA, and so on) is prioritised, because if you don't lick the right asses you don't get money/promotions farting out of them.
So, until the population gets pissed off and the politicians get the cue that supporting certain lobbies makes them lose more votes than they gain through funding and consequent campaigning, things are going this way.
I suppose you have bunches and bunches of evidence of Chávez rigging the election... or maybe you are talking out of your ass.
I'll add that in Mexico, using the form "Mejico" is highly controversial, as it is seen as "colonialism". Among the arguments for maintaining the "Mexico" form, the ludicrous one that foreigners would mispronounce "Mejico" (everybody mispronounces Mexico already...). Anyway, it's as controversial as gun control in the US or spelling in Norway, according to what I read.
Give credit where credit is due. No country ever respected treaties they could infringe without fear of punishment, if they had something to gain from it.
It's just a fact of history: the signature on a treaty is no stronger than the signing arm.
The name "Greenland" was pretty much an early form of advertising by Eirik Raude, to attract settlers. During the summer, you can still find green spots here and there on the West coast.
Mind you, the place Eirik was coming from was called Iceland, and it lies in the middle of the Gulf stream.
The Holy Roman Empire had no legions. The vanilla Roman Empire had.
The Holy Roman Empire was called like that for a thousand years, even though it was not Holy (it was at war with the Pope most of the time), it was not Roman (it was—mostly—German, the name Roman suggested mostly an idea of heritage; it was actually the first Reich), and it was not an Empire, since it was mostly an honorific title with decreasing degrees of power through the centuries.
OTOH maybe you cannot write; from your first post:
It's quite obvious that you are implying that the uses of [insert your old P2P tech here] can be either legal or not legal. This is your fallacy, since there are both legal and illegal conceivable uses of any P2P technology.
Are you saying that because Jack the Ripper used a scalpel, my surgeon has to operate me with a spoon? That since crackers use Linux, we should forbid it (yay, forbid computers altogether!)? That since speeders use cars, we all have to walk only? That since Lucrezia Borgia poisoned people, we should ban chemistry?
Get the difference: there can be uses and abuses of the same thing.
If I understood this correctly, Red Hat is (could be) trademarked. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is "the Enterprise-oriented Linux of Red Hat(TM)", i.e. it's not a new trademark as a whole, only the "Red Hat" part is.
I'm no lawyer, but I think the whole issue is that, if you want to trademark something with "Linux" inside, you pay royalty. If you do not want to trademark, Linus does not give a shit.
Sorry that the facts do not correspond to your preferences, but KDE is widely more popular than Gnome. The "Useless-ability improvements", like the crippling of the Gnome file manager, made by self-appointed "usability experts", have resulted in a surge for KDE support.
Not that Gnome is dying, but it's clear which desktop is dominating.
Looking at the page history, one finds that the original author is a certain Jon Hawk, who claims not to be a BBC employee, and with quite a few spelling mistakes too. He has also a few other contributions to Wikipedia, so maybe this page is all work of a fan and not of the BBC.
However, it is true that this page (in the history of related article Boyd*Upp) was written by someone operating out of IP 132.185.240.121, corresponding to webgw1.thls.bbc.co.uk.
Lomborg has no qualification as a statistician. I assume Kåre Fog's website is credible as I have personally looked up some of the examples there presented and have personally checked that Fog's claims to Lomborg's dishonesty hold. I suggest you check it for yourself before spouting more corporate propaganda.
The text from the Wikipedia entry you quote is from the Heidelberg Appeal Nederland, an highly biased source (of course you "forgot" to mention the Wikipedia page was quoting that). Lomborg's "exhoneration" came from a political body, not a scientific one. Furthermore, the main case for Lomborg was that his objective dishonesty was not sufficiently proven in the papers—i.e., it had not been excluded he was simply an ignorant fool. The incorrectness of his conclusions was never a topic in discussion.
Lomborg taught a course in statistics, but that does not amount being a statistician. Bunches of professors in school teach history, and are not historians for that. Quoting Lomborg's own website is plain useless, as the guy is just short of a compulsive liar.
Lomborg's field is rather "political science", and he has only one publication in a peer-reviewed journal (which, in the same link as above, is also reported being unlikely, other than unrelated to climatology).
Now that's an impressive talking out of one's ass. So:
The link you provide, among other things, says that forest area is not decreasing, which is a blatant lie popularised by master jester Bjørn Lomborg (who by the way has no knowledge of climatology nor statistics) in his "skeptical environmentalist". The lie is originated by the plotting of forest area as published by FAO since the end of WW2, without correcting for the fact that countries were continuously joining the FAO and that first estimates were not precise, and had no conventional definiton of "forest area". The myth is well debunked here.
The author is a CS professor, not a climatologist. His credibility is quite low on this issue. The fact that he disagrees with pretty much any climatologist on the planet is also a pointer.
It's Celsius, Fahrenheit, sense, and the documentary is French.
The reporter, however, is American, and I expect the temperature to be in Fahrenheit. It's anyway damn cold (about -55 Celsius).
Maybe they should implement a big, friendly button to allow even the most clueless user to identify as Explorer, with some wizard to explain why it can be useful. This is an important functionality.
There was never such a discussion on the EU level (which would be beneficial IMHO, but has not been held).
I am afraid, fact is you are ranting, and I seriously doubt you have any information about Europe other than Fox channel. Try providing factual support for your claims. Which cities would be armed camps?
Fine, then size does matter. Then, according to the statistics of your site, the US have 201 million Internet users, and Europe as a whole has 260 million, of which the EU has 216. You are not getting anywhere, I am afraid.
I take this is your way to admit misquoting me.
Oh well, in Europe too. But it is kind of more offensive to act like a Nazi. I am sure most Americans are nowhere that nuts, but that particular celebration (veterans' day at Austin capitol) had a very creepy atmosphere to it, with militarism all over the place, glorification of wars like Vietnam, and also the very weird monument to the confederate army ("The spirit of 1776"? Fighting to maintain slavery is now "the spirit of 1776"?)
I am afraid the moderators have already been the judges of that.
Sorry, no factual errors. These are my experiences. I might have had especially bad luck, though that would defy statistics.
In Europe, there is a 900/1800 MHz dual band, in North America 850/1900 MHz. My phone is a tri-band (900, 1800 and 1900), one of those you pay more for to be able to go to the US and use them.
<coupdegrace>Well, American chemical engineers. At ECOS2003 in Copenhagen we had a whole room with Debian machines. Eheh.
That's bullshit, no way a million people can fit in there. I was at a rally in September 2002 in Rome, and we were about 800,000 to one million. You have never seen one million people. They could never, ever fit in Times square. Not even 100,000 for that sake. I would expect it to be closer to 10,000 at maximum. Look at the pictures: this is St. John's square in Laterano: as a general rule, the square from the church on the west side all the way to the east limit of the picture can contain 300,000 people. Times square is nowhere that size.
That might surprise you, but we are not aiming at one language. I for one am for Esperanto as a bridge language and everybody with his mother language, but the current policy is "translate everything". And for that sake half the advertisement in New York is in Spanish.
Which ones, and with which certificates? Really, I'm curious. Chile has not exactly many borders with non-Spanish-speaking countries, are you counting argentinian as a language, che? That would not even be that incorrect.
I thought America used to be about deserving one's honours, and not inheriting them. GWB is not FDR. By the way, I did not say "they were Nazi", I said "the closest thing to a Nazi rally" I had experienced. At some point, the speaker said "We did a lot of good things in Vietnam! We built orphanages!", and my buddy Olaf started laughing. That's when I got scared. Olaf ikke le. Ikke nå, ikke her, for fandens skyld!
So what, the GSM standard (the one that did not work for me in the US) was invented in 1 km's radius from my workplace.
I almost feel bad, but in the link you provided my country is directly above yours. Sorry.
I thought too that the US were a long way ahead in technology. I came for a conference in Austin, TX last November, and on the way back I stayed for a week in NY. I was disappointed in some ways:
Ok, ok, I have to compensate with some positive points...
Anyway, back to the point: the US are not as advanced as many, Americans and not, think they are. At least not in the level of technology the citizens are exposed to, I have definitely seen enough to deem it unlikely that I was victim of a long series of unlucky coincidences.