Installing Videolan ( http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ ) is the easiest solution : all the codecs are included, and it will work just as well on either Linux or Windows. Who wants to change his/her applications just because he/she changes the operating system running under ? No kidding ! This is 2006, folks, not 1996 anymore !
"Without such an evolutionary boost to intellectual traits, would we have arrived at such a tolerant society so quickly? I say tolerant because in a remarkably short span of time, racial prejudice has been outlawed and homosexuality has been brought into the main light of society as an acceptable way of life. If I'd lived 50 or 70 years ago, I'd never have been able to predict society would move forward so quickly".
These two points you mentioned are, as one might call, cultural evolution as opposed to biological evolution (just as it would be useless to develop special circuitry in a computer to do the very same thing that could be obtained more quickly and without much loss of performance by software).
Of course, software evolution is juste as volatile as computer software : it can come and go, and if concerning for instance homosexuality we are way off of what was thought 100 years ago in Great Britain, we are not that way off of what as thought 2500 years ago in Greece .
As far as size (in feet and inches) is concerned, there are probably some ups and downs as well. We are taller than our forefathers who worked during the industrial revolution, but they were themselves slightly shorter than their own forefathers who worked in the fields, bad or better alimentation being related to both.
Even concerning the life span of people who arrive alive at the age of 20, one may be puzzled. Diophantes lived 84 years. Cato learned greek ath the age of 80, if my memoty does not betray me. And concerning french writers of the XVIIth century, I was very surprised to see how many of them lived past 70 (of course, as many were aristocrats, they probably enjoyed correct food all theit life). One of them, Fontenelle (1657-1757)... well, lived up to the age of 100:-)
We should probably get rid of the notion of "average life span" obtained by mixing sometimes 2/3rds of children who died before they were 8 and 1/3 of adults who lived in ripe age (a necessity for evolution to occur, because you cannot really afford to die when your children sill need you to sustain thein own lives, so there was probably a very good chance that people reaching the age of marriage (17 ?) would themselves survive in sufficient health until their children would be able to work (14 ?)
Finally, it is worth to note that even if 2/3 of people died before reaching the age of having children none of our ancestors in the aeons of generations ever did, which means we are certainly not very representative of past humanity as a whole;-)
told scientists they should not study the beginning of the universe because it was the work of God
A likely story ! It would really be a scoop if the new trend in religions was now to discourage studying the work of God:-D
Beware also abouth the word "should" : it can as well mean a possibility ("as there are big clouds, it should rain) than a will to do mething ("I should clean my flat"). When Darwin says somewhere that "least adapted leafs of manking should disappear", he mentions a plausible possibility, not an exhortation, as far as I know, to kill them !
We do not know either howJP2 said that. Even a pope is allowed to joke from time to time, and he did more than once:-)
A virus has no organs, no circulation of anything within it - not even a flow of information - no energy regulation, no metabolism. It does not belong to the animal or mineral reign, but to the mineral one. You just cannot kill it, because there is in fact nothing to "kill". However it can probably be deactivated by one way or another, fo instance by inserting DNA in it that prevents it to duplicate properly.
What do they mean, "could lead" ?
on
Anatomy of a Virus
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This better knowledge of viruses which attack bacteria could lead to great advances in medicine, especially when antibiotics become inefficient because of bacteria resisting them."
As far as I know, the use of bacteriophages to fight bacterias has been mainstream for years in Russia. A recent article in Science et Vie explained this method and why it was possible to use it : there are so many different bacteriophages that they might outnumber the number of existing bacterias (a good thing, because that implies therefore a kind of competition between viruses, which means the most efficient will emerge in the long run:-) )
The article also explained that what wad actively sought was a bacteriophage attacking Koch bacillas, because some strains are now resistant to the two antibiotics used against them (named here P.A.S. and Rimifon). Once we have located the right bacteriophages killing them, we shall be able to forget antibiotics (viruses, however, might have their own side effects too... Wait and see)
Could be some Nobel prize in the air. I hope it will be granted to the people who deserve it, whoever they are, rather than to other teams just using the ideas of others and presenting them as their owns. The "Not invented here" policy has probaby killed enough people like that:-(
Racism is inherently inefficient because you end up with not the best person for the job, so the company suffers
I would like this to be true, but I fear it is not, except in some very technical jobs. For management positions, on the other hand, you are worth what your corporation invests in training you, so the idea "We chose a very good guy" becomes a self-realizing motto.
This is not to say that racism will not disappear in the long run; it has already begun to; however it is probably going to take more generations that expected 20 years ago. Just my two cents.
Yes, uncredible as it may seem, in my country, 50% of electricity came from renewable sources, that is from hydroelectric dams.
This was 1965. The country was - still is - called France. In fact the quantity of electricity made from renewable has not changes. But our needs did. A lot.
Strangely enough, I am not that sure that we live better now that in 1965. Well, I mean from a material standpoint, of course, it is obvious. We enjoy as spectators much more things. As actors of our lives, however, we have less and less opportunities to create anything. metro, boulot, dodo (commuting, working, sleeping), as one says here.
And strangely enough, this does not seem related to age. People I knew born around 1900 regretted the sixties. Those born around 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940 and 1950 too. What is more surprising, my son - born in 1980 - also tells he has a deep regret not to have known the sixties. Strange.
"that's because [data processing and computer science] are two different things"
Well, they have things in common (hence the french term informatique, that you probably translate by the locution information technology), and they have differences, hence the different words too in every language I know.
But what does the verb to be mean in operational terms, if any ?
Along every sentence (except of course a definition) saying that X is Y, you can write another sentence equally true saying that X is not Y ("man is an animal" is true as a given projection of reality; "man is not an animal" is also true in another projection of reality).
A is A, A is not non-A, I guess we all agree on that. As concerns the verb "to be", let us be cautious with any other king of usage - except of course definitions:-)
It is because the Academie française exist that we can read La Fontaine and Molière exactly as they wrote, while our british cousins have trouble understanding Shakespeare as he wrote. C'est la vie:-)
Greeks also took the evolution of their own language in hand. Homere's greek, while perfectly undestandable by Pericles citizens, is not Pericles' greek, the latter being much more rich in verbal forms as in vocabulary. Of course, I expect only people who would not say "It's Greek for me" to understand that:-D
Evolution of a language, whether a computer or natural one, should always be backwards-compatible for user-friendliness reasons. Because many other countries have already understood this, they grinded their own version of this institution. Oh, also we dropped the use of inches and feed a little more than 200 years ago. You might be interested... in some future; like all the rest of the planet, though with a little slowness, as usual;-)
(Baladeur is a perfect word for french pronunciation, as well as informatique, télématique and logiciel. As far as I know, English has no word for informatique, as it seems to consider that data processing and computer science refer to very different disciplines; one of the reasons why Dassault's CATIA replaced Boeing's CADAM... including at Boeing!)
since you object to the term that you obviously recognize, is clear and concise, what is the alternative you would suggest?
I cannot give any suggestion concerning new English words. That is a need that has to be solved internally by the english-speaking community. In France, the neologism étatsunien has been created and is widely used in the Wikipedia.
I am sure you would be surprised if Ukrainian people decided that from now one they would call themselves - and deny to anybody else - the europeans:-)
Dream on, no major economy in the world, the US included, can decide to just "not do business" with another major economy.
I am sure you have a demonstration at hand, so I shall wait for it. As a european, I have grown accustomed to people telling us that free trade was the solution for us, while taking severe protectionist measures from their own side, Japan and USA included. "Do what I say, not what I do !" ?
Both would come crashing down. I'll assume you're European, so let me ask, why do you get off so hard fantasizing about screwing the US?
Who cares about that ? We are just looking to protect our own interests. Dosn't everybody ?
You can't do it, just as much as we can't do it to you.
Well, that has been done with steel and foie gras, just to qote these two examples. Don't you agree ?
Now let me point out your rampant unemployment, over 8% is it?
Yes. Which is what you has, as far as I remember, at the beginning of the Reagan era. Unemployment rate come and go, and buying things elsewhere while selling one's capital (and/or making a huge debt, which is not very different) rather than employing one's own people can hardly be described as a good solution, or even as a solution at all.
So much for planned economies, huh?
I spent 25 years in a multinational corporation, and while I hate to deprive peoiple of their illusions, I have to inform you that none of them works withour not one, but two plans : a short-term (2 years sliding) plan and a strategic (5-year sliding) plan. As theses corporations are slightly taking the world over (I guess you saw the movie "The corporation"), we shoud assume that planned economy is efficient, when it occurs in a strongly darwinian world.
I'm an American
I guess you mean that you are a US citizen. "American" would refer as well to Canadians, Mexicans, Bresilian, people from Argentina and so on)
and have nothing against the EU nor its citizens, and I think that's the sentiment of most of our population here (I even invest in your markets!)
Join the club;-) So do I (and in fact it does not mean much to say that a Corporation belong to one continent or another. Sooner or later, it will flee where the taxes are smallest, anyway). I am rather gald at the way Air Liquide has been performing in the last 30 years.
The anti-American attitude coming out of Europe, though, is sickening.
I shall not enter this arrière-garde fight. Please read "The Economist" of this week (Christmas special), and everything you could say and I could answer is already in it, pages 41-43. Thank you.
You need us as much as we need you
But you just do NOT need us. When there was no much cross-border trade between continental Europe and the USA, not only did the USA survive, but they got finally out of their crisis, remember. The only thing that is needed is international cooperation to achieve the right momentum for big investment, no matter with whom. Presently, the cash is in China, and the only reason we are not dealing only with them is their poor management, to say the least, of human rights. On this point, I a pretty sure you will agree this is a valuable reason.
I wonder what would happen if (if!) Pdt Bush decided this satellite set were a menace, and had it destroyed, the same ways Israel destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor. I doubt whether it would be considered as a casus belli in Europe. On the other hand, they could decide to do business with just Asia from that moment on, as the only thing still built in the USA seem to be microprocessors, and they can easily make the move to any new (compatible or not) architecture now that Open Source software is mature.
The very same KDE - and that is probably the same for GNOME if you use the beautiful Nautilus system - can be the best and the worst of things according to its response time (depending on both the hardware and the nice look & feel options you select). I would say that no matter which one you use, you should use a version of it giving you sub-200ms response time. Any feature that you add taking you over that range is liable to produce human errors, increased blood pressure, nervosity, in other words to kill your productivity rather than boost it.
Why ? I just do not know for sure, but my guess it that the brain begins to think about a lot of things from 300ms on (this is the average duration of a Tex Avery gag : just about 7 or 8 cells) and that you therefore get deconcentrated by a lot of parasitical ideas.
And conversely, anything that gives you sub-200ms response time, you are going to get accustomed too rather fast, because probably only the low-level functions of the brain (or mind, whatever you please) will be neeeded to coordinate between what sou see and what you do. Just my two cents.
I happen to have the text somewhere in my basement, but I would need some time to find it. However these dispositions are taught in the intellectual property course in the Ecole Centrale. If really needed, I can also contact two friends, one of them an inventor who used that clause, the other who works in a french IP lawyer cabinet (and who incidentally sent me the papers I have on the subject).
Feel free to send me a note at mailto:armingaud@noos.fr with SLASHDOT in the subject line so you do not get deleted by the antispam.
Notice that this disposition is not seen favourably by US firms who are probably lobbying a lot to have it removed with a pretext of EU law uniformization. Michel Rocard (European Parliament) is certainly aware about that.
Some of you may be interested in two peculiarities of the French patent law :
If you work for a company, what you may invent belongs to your company IF AND ONLY IF you have an "invention mission" and therefore submitting patents is part of your full-time work. In any other case, you are the owner of what you invent, though your company DOES have a preemption on buying it if you want to sell it.
Whenever an individual or company buys the rights of an invention, he or it has a delay of TWO YEARS to give it a start of industrial application. If nothing is done by that time, the owner is granted back all his/her rights (the legislator considered that burying a good idea in a drawer did not serve public interest at all)
Terminals in mainframe culture (CMS, TSO, CICS...) were mostly used in full-screen mode. You could do whatever you wanted on your screeen using its local possibilities (insert, replace, jump to next field, etc.), it was strictly a local action, and you could be sure that nothing would be transmitted to the mainframe until you pressed either ENTER or a PF/PA key. The 3270 interacted with its control unit.
When the screen was ready, all the page was transmitted to the computer. This scheme allowed to have sometimes 8000 terminals and over on a 8MB (yes!) machine.
Incidentally, terminals did have lowercase letters and dead keys for national languages from 1978 on with the 3278 line. This was not hard to implement : just an extended ROM to display the characters on the 3278, and a slight change in microcode to handle the dead keys on the 3274 or 3174 control unit.
A French law (applying only in France, of course, but that may give ideas to other countries as well) forbids any employer to use the same mechanisms for access control and for work presence control. In other words, whenever you are badging for something, you should be warned about what you are doing, and that being said, nobody can use a work presence control system to track your coffee breaks or the way you organize your own work (I have been told a SNECMA human resources director got fired for having installed this kind of thing).
However, I guess that with RFID this law has to be completed in one way or another. For instance by having the RFID sensors signalled, and their purposes indicated by separate colors.
As far as I know, the energy spent when travelling in a fluid is proportional to the square of speed in that fluid.
In other words, if you go 10% faster, there will be no miracle : your gas consuption will roughly clim up by 21% (1.1^2 = 1.21).
I fail to see how the fact that your capital investment will rotate roughly 10% faster too can help much about these two figures : spending 21% more to make a 10% economy seems a queer idea when one thinks about it.
Of course, the argument was right when the idea was to switch from transatlantic cruises to transatlantic flights, but this time it was because the viscosity of water is quite higher than the viscosity of air, an element that is not to be considered here (and, in fact, was stated by Airbus when the A380 was still named A3XX, a long time ago).
I would just say that nazi germany was under attack and as any country under attack attempted to retaliate. Even if it had not been a nazi country at that time, it would have acted the same. Any country would have acted the same. And in fact the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more civilians than V2s ever did, all off them being anyway much less destructive than todays' biggest bombs, though there is no nazi rationale behing their construction this time.
That being said, a little-known fact is that the V2 project killed twice more prisoners of war in Germany for their construction than English people. This was because of unfair treatment of POW by nazi Germany, and a more rational reason to blame nazi Germany than the mere fact of organizing its ripost to bombings.
I do not know about US laws, but in France a non-compete clause would be considered invalid unless the employer *pays* the employee each month as long as the non-compete clause applies. This is the principle "you cannot get from somebody something that you do not pay for". Some of my friends having non-compete clauses have contracts specifying that they will get 30% of their former salary for the two years following their resignation as a compensation for that clause, which is a real handicap in finding a new job.
Slashdot Mirror
(Just my two cents)
Was it the Gartner group or another firm specialized in IT which, in 1987, announced that OS/2 would be present on 70% of all PCs ? :-)
At least for alpha and beta radioactivity. Gamma does not yield these kinds of problems (but, of course, some others. Nothing is perfect)
Installing Videolan ( http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ ) is the easiest solution : all the codecs are included, and it will work just as well on either Linux or Windows. Who wants to change his/her applications just because he/she changes the operating system running under ? No kidding ! This is 2006, folks, not 1996 anymore !
These two points you mentioned are, as one might call, cultural evolution as opposed to biological evolution (just as it would be useless to develop special circuitry in a computer to do the very same thing that could be obtained more quickly and without much loss of performance by software).
Of course, software evolution is juste as volatile as computer software : it can come and go, and if concerning for instance homosexuality we are way off of what was thought 100 years ago in Great Britain, we are not that way off of what as thought 2500 years ago in Greece .
As far as size (in feet and inches) is concerned, there are probably some ups and downs as well. We are taller than our forefathers who worked during the industrial revolution, but they were themselves slightly shorter than their own forefathers who worked in the fields, bad or better alimentation being related to both.
Even concerning the life span of people who arrive alive at the age of 20, one may be puzzled. Diophantes lived 84 years. Cato learned greek ath the age of 80, if my memoty does not betray me. And concerning french writers of the XVIIth century, I was very surprised to see how many of them lived past 70 (of course, as many were aristocrats, they probably enjoyed correct food all theit life). One of them, Fontenelle (1657-1757)... well, lived up to the age of 100 :-)
We should probably get rid of the notion of "average life span" obtained by mixing sometimes 2/3rds of children who died before they were 8 and 1/3 of adults who lived in ripe age (a necessity for evolution to occur, because you cannot really afford to die when your children sill need you to sustain thein own lives, so there was probably a very good chance that people reaching the age of marriage (17 ?) would themselves survive in sufficient health until their children would be able to work (14 ?)
Finally, it is worth to note that even if 2/3 of people died before reaching the age of having children none of our ancestors in the aeons of generations ever did, which means we are certainly not very representative of past humanity as a whole ;-)
A likely story ! It would really be a scoop if the new trend in religions was now to discourage studying the work of God :-D
Beware also abouth the word "should" : it can as well mean a possibility ("as there are big clouds, it should rain) than a will to do mething ("I should clean my flat"). When Darwin says somewhere that "least adapted leafs of manking should disappear", he mentions a plausible possibility, not an exhortation, as far as I know, to kill them !
We do not know either howJP2 said that. Even a pope is allowed to joke from time to time, and he did more than once :-)
A virus has no organs, no circulation of anything within it - not even a flow of information - no energy regulation, no metabolism. It does not belong to the animal or mineral reign, but to the mineral one. You just cannot kill it, because there is in fact nothing to "kill". However it can probably be deactivated by one way or another, fo instance by inserting DNA in it that prevents it to duplicate properly.
http://www.google.fr/search?num=30&hl=la&safe=off& q=th%C3%A9rapie+bact%C3%A9riophages+russie&btnG=Qu aere
As far as I know, the use of bacteriophages to fight bacterias has been mainstream for years in Russia. A recent article in Science et Vie explained this method and why it was possible to use it : there are so many different bacteriophages that they might outnumber the number of existing bacterias (a good thing, because that implies therefore a kind of competition between viruses, which means the most efficient will emerge in the long run :-) )
The article also explained that what wad actively sought was a bacteriophage attacking Koch bacillas, because some strains are now resistant to the two antibiotics used against them (named here P.A.S. and Rimifon). Once we have located the right bacteriophages killing them, we shall be able to forget antibiotics (viruses, however, might have their own side effects too... Wait and see)
Could be some Nobel prize in the air. I hope it will be granted to the people who deserve it, whoever they are, rather than to other teams just using the ideas of others and presenting them as their owns. The "Not invented here" policy has probaby killed enough people like that :-(
I would like this to be true, but I fear it is not, except in some very technical jobs. For management positions, on the other hand, you are worth what your corporation invests in training you, so the idea "We chose a very good guy" becomes a self-realizing motto.
This is not to say that racism will not disappear in the long run; it has already begun to; however it is probably going to take more generations that expected 20 years ago. Just my two cents.
The old pop band, or the still older war ?
This was 1965. The country was - still is - called France. In fact the quantity of electricity made from renewable has not changes. But our needs did. A lot.
Strangely enough, I am not that sure that we live better now that in 1965. Well, I mean from a material standpoint, of course, it is obvious. We enjoy as spectators much more things. As actors of our lives, however, we have less and less opportunities to create anything. metro, boulot, dodo (commuting, working, sleeping), as one says here.
And strangely enough, this does not seem related to age. People I knew born around 1900 regretted the sixties. Those born around 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940 and 1950 too. What is more surprising, my son - born in 1980 - also tells he has a deep regret not to have known the sixties. Strange.
Well, they have things in common (hence the french term informatique, that you probably translate by the locution information technology), and they have differences, hence the different words too in every language I know.
But what does the verb to be mean in operational terms, if any ?
Along every sentence (except of course a definition) saying that X is Y, you can write another sentence equally true saying that X is not Y ("man is an animal" is true as a given projection of reality; "man is not an animal" is also true in another projection of reality).
A is A, A is not non-A, I guess we all agree on that. As concerns the verb "to be", let us be cautious with any other king of usage - except of course definitions :-)
Greeks also took the evolution of their own language in hand. Homere's greek, while perfectly undestandable by Pericles citizens, is not Pericles' greek, the latter being much more rich in verbal forms as in vocabulary. Of course, I expect only people who would not say "It's Greek for me" to understand that :-D
Evolution of a language, whether a computer or natural one, should always be backwards-compatible for user-friendliness reasons. Because many other countries have already understood this, they grinded their own version of this institution. Oh, also we dropped the use of inches and feed a little more than 200 years ago. You might be interested... in some future; like all the rest of the planet, though with a little slowness, as usual ;-)
(Baladeur is a perfect word for french pronunciation, as well as informatique, télématique and logiciel. As far as I know, English has no word for informatique, as it seems to consider that data processing and computer science refer to very different disciplines; one of the reasons why Dassault's CATIA replaced Boeing's CADAM... including at Boeing!)
I cannot give any suggestion concerning new English words. That is a need that has to be solved internally by the english-speaking community. In France, the neologism étatsunien has been created and is widely used in the Wikipedia.
I am sure you would be surprised if Ukrainian people decided that from now one they would call themselves - and deny to anybody else - the europeans :-)
I am sure you have a demonstration at hand, so I shall wait for it. As a european, I have grown accustomed to people telling us that free trade was the solution for us, while taking severe protectionist measures from their own side, Japan and USA included. "Do what I say, not what I do !" ?
Both would come crashing down. I'll assume you're European, so let me ask, why do you get off so hard fantasizing about screwing the US?
Who cares about that ? We are just looking to protect our own interests. Dosn't everybody ?
You can't do it, just as much as we can't do it to you.
Well, that has been done with steel and foie gras, just to qote these two examples. Don't you agree ?
Now let me point out your rampant unemployment, over 8% is it?
Yes. Which is what you has, as far as I remember, at the beginning of the Reagan era. Unemployment rate come and go, and buying things elsewhere while selling one's capital (and/or making a huge debt, which is not very different) rather than employing one's own people can hardly be described as a good solution, or even as a solution at all.
So much for planned economies, huh?
I spent 25 years in a multinational corporation, and while I hate to deprive peoiple of their illusions, I have to inform you that none of them works withour not one, but two plans : a short-term (2 years sliding) plan and a strategic (5-year sliding) plan. As theses corporations are slightly taking the world over (I guess you saw the movie "The corporation"), we shoud assume that planned economy is efficient, when it occurs in a strongly darwinian world.
I'm an American
I guess you mean that you are a US citizen. "American" would refer as well to Canadians, Mexicans, Bresilian, people from Argentina and so on)
and have nothing against the EU nor its citizens, and I think that's the sentiment of most of our population here (I even invest in your markets!)
Join the club ;-) So do I (and in fact it does not mean much to say that a Corporation belong to one continent or another. Sooner or later, it will flee where the taxes are smallest, anyway). I am rather gald at the way Air Liquide has been performing in the last 30 years.
The anti-American attitude coming out of Europe, though, is sickening.
I shall not enter this arrière-garde fight. Please read "The Economist" of this week (Christmas special), and everything you could say and I could answer is already in it, pages 41-43. Thank you.
You need us as much as we need you
But you just do NOT need us. When there was no much cross-border trade between continental Europe and the USA, not only did the USA survive, but they got finally out of their crisis, remember. The only thing that is needed is international cooperation to achieve the right momentum for big investment, no matter with whom. Presently, the cash is in China, and the only reason we are not dealing only with them is their poor management, to say the least, of human rights. On this point, I a pretty sure you will agree this is a valuable reason.
I wonder what would happen if (if!) Pdt Bush decided this satellite set were a menace, and had it destroyed, the same ways Israel destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor. I doubt whether it would be considered as a casus belli in Europe. On the other hand, they could decide to do business with just Asia from that moment on, as the only thing still built in the USA seem to be microprocessors, and they can easily make the move to any new (compatible or not) architecture now that Open Source software is mature.
Why ? I just do not know for sure, but my guess it that the brain begins to think about a lot of things from 300ms on (this is the average duration of a Tex Avery gag : just about 7 or 8 cells) and that you therefore get deconcentrated by a lot of parasitical ideas.
And conversely, anything that gives you sub-200ms response time, you are going to get accustomed too rather fast, because probably only the low-level functions of the brain (or mind, whatever you please) will be neeeded to coordinate between what sou see and what you do. Just my two cents.
Feel free to send me a note at mailto:armingaud@noos.fr with SLASHDOT in the subject line so you do not get deleted by the antispam.
Notice that this disposition is not seen favourably by US firms who are probably lobbying a lot to have it removed with a pretext of EU law uniformization. Michel Rocard (European Parliament) is certainly aware about that.
When the screen was ready, all the page was transmitted to the computer. This scheme allowed to have sometimes 8000 terminals and over on a 8MB (yes!) machine.
Incidentally, terminals did have lowercase letters and dead keys for national languages from 1978 on with the 3278 line. This was not hard to implement : just an extended ROM to display the characters on the 3278, and a slight change in microcode to handle the dead keys on the 3274 or 3174 control unit.
However, I guess that with RFID this law has to be completed in one way or another. For instance by having the RFID sensors signalled, and their purposes indicated by separate colors.
In other words, if you go 10% faster, there will be no miracle : your gas consuption will roughly clim up by 21% (1.1^2 = 1.21).
I fail to see how the fact that your capital investment will rotate roughly 10% faster too can help much about these two figures : spending 21% more to make a 10% economy seems a queer idea when one thinks about it.
Of course, the argument was right when the idea was to switch from transatlantic cruises to transatlantic flights, but this time it was because the viscosity of water is quite higher than the viscosity of air, an element that is not to be considered here (and, in fact, was stated by Airbus when the A380 was still named A3XX, a long time ago).
That being said, a little-known fact is that the V2 project killed twice more prisoners of war in Germany for their construction than English people. This was because of unfair treatment of POW by nazi Germany, and a more rational reason to blame nazi Germany than the mere fact of organizing its ripost to bombings.
I do not know about US laws, but in France a non-compete clause would be considered invalid unless the employer *pays* the employee each month as long as the non-compete clause applies. This is the principle "you cannot get from somebody something that you do not pay for". Some of my friends having non-compete clauses have contracts specifying that they will get 30% of their former salary for the two years following their resignation as a compensation for that clause, which is a real handicap in finding a new job.