(why are you posting as anonymous coward BTW? Don't you have the courage of your opinions?)
> They represent their governments. That is how it works with court appointments the world over: even if they are supposed to be independent, they end up representing the ones who appoint them.
s,the world over,in the US, please (and I DO hope it's not true in the US - someone prove me wrong, please, with evidences). Sorry, but this is not the case in Europe at all. For one, the Mani Pulite operation in Italy could never have happened if your claim held true (No URL - I'll let you find by yourself what this was all about). Neither would have the lawsuits concerning many politicians in France or other EU countries. Real lawmen are impartial. They judge on facts. Which invalidates your other "argument":
> There is every reason: the US could get reproached for something that is not wrong at all
So, in your opinion, who is able to judge what is wrong or right? The US alone? Is *this* your conception of international justice? Does the *word* "international" mean something to you, apart from "American"?
Hint: accused != guilty. Prove yourself right and you're out of trouble. Simple.
Wrap-up 1: world != US, justice != "Bush says it's OK". Reconsider either point and you're doomed as a "global citizen", to quote your words. Now, as to the Kyoto treaty, you say:
> Who cares what the officials say
Well, you, apparently, because you blindly rephrased your country's officials arguments as to the validity of the Kyoto treaty. Oh, and you say that:
> Regardless, Kyoto is founded on assumptions that have no proof or evidence (the whole manmade global warming thing)
There is evidence that human activities are involved in global warming, so again you don't know what you're talking about. And given that the US is responsible for 25% of WORLDWIDE greenhouse gas emissions, it's just woefully stupid from the part of Mr Bush to refuse the Kyoto treaty, all that because it would hurt the *US* economy by raising gas cost by 35-80%? Hah! May I remember you how much we pay for gas here in Europe?
You also claim that:
> It is also mostly political: major pollutors like China are let off the hook
*BEEP* Wrong answer: FYI, China has accepted and conforms to the Kyoto treaty. And even though I'm not really fond of China's way of governing the fifth of total Earth population, I have to agree with their officials who qualify Mr Bush's decision as irresponsible.
Game not quite over. I've quite another rant against you when you say this:
> there is a current anti-semitic tone running in Europe; not hard to imagine them indicting Israeli officials for daring to fight back against the aggressors that attack their country
First point, the same way there is an anti-semitic trend in Europe (and I don't deny it, event though things have curiously calmed down since Le Pen was defeated at the 2nd turn of French presidential elections), I can say that there's an anti-arabic trend in the US. And unfortunately the average US citizen (which a/. reader is not, fortunately) assumes Arabic == muslim. This is totally wrong headed. You have catholic people in Afghanistan, please you or not.
As to "the aggressors that attack their country", you prove yourself to be TOTALLY UNAWARE OF MIDDLE EAST RECENT HISTORY. I shall remind you that all the current trouble between Israel and the Palestine began when Yitzhak Rabin got murdered. This guy, and his successor, Shimon Perez, did great to bring peace in the region. Some sucker with a gun led to the situation we know today. The problem nowadays in Middle East are not the Palestinians. The problem in Middle East today lies in two words: Ariel Sharon. Anyone who has even loosely observed the situation in these last 7 years (Rabin was assassinated in 1995) knows that this is true.
Wrap-up 2: really, you need to shape up. And please next time don't post anonymously.
> Marketing is not a "disease". It makes media more accountable
Thanks for filling my argumentation. Read again what you said.
Media doesn't need marketing to be accountable. Media is supposed to inform people. A good newspaper needs no marketing to sell. A good information Web site (slashdot, for example...) needs no marketing to score hits. Let the marketing side to the ad makers. Keep it out of the media content.
(way offtopic, I know, but I cannot let ignorance go through - ignorance is NOT bliss when it comes to such serious matters)
> Because Bush is wise enough to know that this body, without reforms, will be based too much on politics, not crime.
Uhm, so you haven't even read their Web site, where it says:
The International Court of Justice is the principal judicial organ of the
United Nations
(which country wanted UN? Eh?)
And:
The Court is composed of 15 judges elected to nine-year terms of office by the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council sitting independently of each other. It may not include more than one judge of any nationality. Elections are held every three years for one-third of the seats, and retiring judges may be re-elected. The Members of the Court do not represent their governments but are
independent magistrates
So long for the political bias you are claiming this court has.
There is NO REASON for the US to reject this Court. Except if they have something to get reproached for. Oh, a certain marriage... Well even not, because this court only judges matters happening after its initial opening (which is July 1st, 2002). Don't speak of what you don't know, please.
As to "the US knows what's going on, not the others", that's once again a wrong headed claim. The difference is that until recently, the US were trusted to do the good thing and they had the means to act. But after this overly stupid decision (which is going to break the UN ultimately if Mr Bush continues to act childish), they won't be trusted anymore.
I'll let you ponder on the fact that the "no scientific basis for Kyoto" argument was emitted by Washington officials. They have no... scientific basis (note, I said "basis", not "bias") to back this claim.
Read the press. Learn what happens. Shape up or ship out.
Just to speak about Open Source, it has gained media coverage in France in two of the main newspapers (Libération and Le Monde - the latter raising the subject again today).
Europe is also lucky enough that the vast majority of press agencies/newspapers/etc are not owned by big greedy conglomerates and are therefore marketing independent. Economy biased media exist, but they are the minority here. The Diana hype has occured here too (hey, it happened in Paris, how could this be ignored), but the death of Mother Theresa, OTOH, hasn't gone unnoticed.
Marketing disease in the media is of particular worry because medias are a political force today. See the pedophilia "trend" (again in Europe), for example, which all started with the case of Marc Dutrou, in Belgium, several years ago. Raising this case led to 1. politicians looking at the problem and 2. people, aware or victims, starting to speak on public whereas they would remain silent prior to that. The media can influence people in the good way, like in this case, but the other way around is also true.
I just hope that this disease doesn't infect us, honestly. I just don't want to see presidential campaigns turning into commercials just like they are in the US.
I've just read this link... Excuse me but this is hilarious. Just because a car weighs two tons and reaches the height of a man would mean that it's safe?
The two persons who wrote this article obviously don't know about Euro NCAP, which destroys their argumentation altogether. FYI, the best performing car at Euro NCAP tests until now is a sedan. And if you browse a little through test results, you'll see that what they call "knee-scraping subcompacts" perform equally well than any other categories on average. So long for "the bigger the safer".
Oh, and said sedan consumes less than the hypermodified truck which is the subject of this article... which destroys their argumentation even further. It consumes less than what US lawmakers want to impose for 2013, even. In fact, most cars sold in Europe these days improve on these limits. Hey, we pay nearly 5 times as much as you for the precious liquid!
Really, the US have LOTS to learn from Europe when it comes to cars.
Sorry, but this heavily transformed Ford doesn't impress me at all, especially since a certain Ford Focus TDCi on sale here in Europe (maybe in the US too?) does 50mpg at the same pace and performs likewise (top speed) or better (accelerations).
However, I must admit that 29mpg is quite impressive for a car which shares its aerodynamics with an average skyscraper and weighs nearly twice the Focus - but then again, why not buy a Focus? As an added bonus it hangs on the road far better than any SUV (except maybe the BMW X5)...
Although I agree that aerodynamics are prevalent in aeronautics, there's MUCH room for improvements in engines as well. I don't buy the claim of 30+% less energy consumption with only a new design. I bet the engines they intend to use are part of these 30+% as well.
Just look at cars... In less than 5 years, at least in Europe, gas engines have seen their consumption reduced by more than 40% at equivalent power, with close to no progress at all in aerodynamics. Progress has been even more spectacular with fuel engines. Worse, the friction car engines have to face is higher than in the past (higher total weight, larger width of tires, and recently greater height of cars - see the new Honda Civic). Nowadays, all of these improvements are barely applied to aeronautics. They would help at least on non jet thrust powered airplanes, and that means the vast majority of planes out there. But I'm confident that at least part of these improvements (stratified load for example) could be applied to jet-thrust engines as well.
As a side note, sound is energy as well... The noise generated by aircraft engines is awfully high, especially with jet thrust engines, but the vast majority of this noise is due to frictions in the engine itself... Instead of adding isolating material into the plane (which brings in more weight, hence more energy to move that weight), a better way to solve the problem is just to reduce the friction into the engine itself...
Parent of this modded as 0? Excuse me but the guy is so right that his comment deserved a 3+. Government certification AFAIK doesn't guarantee your privacy in any way.
Come on, think a little... When it comes to security *of network communications*, any agency, whether it be private funded or State funded, cannot be trusted, EXCEPT if they prove MATHEMATICALLY that what you transmit cannot be deciphered, if at all, at least for a very long period of time. The good thing with maths is that demonstrations can be trusted. No such thing can be said from any other science.
I've yet to see any "certification agency" giving mathemaitcal proof that what it "certifies" is secure at all. RSA has lived long enough because it has been proven MATHEMATICALLY that breaking it would require YEARS of computer crunching to break at the highest levels (who uses <=1024bit RSA keys today?).
Of course, maths are still (always, for that matter) a work in progress, and what is true with RSA today may not be true anymore tomorrow (Bernstein's hypothetical prime-number-breaking machine has not been implemented yet AFAIK, and even if it were... well, let's just wait and see).
Encrypted VPNs are certainly a good choice, apart from any certification wahwah. But then be sure to choose an encryption scheme which is MATHEMATICALLY PROVEN to be strong enough for your needs. And if part of your scheme is based on public cryptography, ensure that private keys never travel "through the air", but that's pretty obvious.
non-productivity, you mean... Buy this to the average Linux geek and he will spend hours (more probably days) trying to get that 2nd screen to display something...
Advice to bosses, don't buy this to your linux geeks. Oh, you have done so already... You know, TCO is not only about servers...
GNU/Linux, BSD et al will simply never make it to the desktop. Both KDE and GNOME have constantly failed in designing a good GUI (in case you'd wonder, yes I've used them both, alongside with Win9x and MacOS 9 - the latter got the lead in usability, but that shouldn't be a surprise). Keep in mind that the guy who wrote this review is not even an average user. A real Joe user wouldn't even have bothered to write a review given the poor shape of the thing.
Designing a good GUI requires everything that a geek doesn't have: notions of ergonomy (this goes for graphics too - GNOME icons may look very cool, but their ergonomy is disastrous) and psychology, the ability to sit on behalf of the user, and most of all, not the slightest care about how it works behind the hood.
Before KDE/GNOME can reach the "usable" qualification, both need a team of GUI designers whom the programmers will *listen to*. The rare persons who have some qualifications in this respect are constantly being bashed by coders who say "That's not how it's supposed to work [in the code]". Said coders therefore don't understand that even if their code is well written and would deserve some note in software engineering courses, it fails at its primary mission: meeting the users' needs.
The second biggest problem is the existence of GNOME itself. While it was kind of justified given the licensing problems with Qt at first, it has been obsolete from the day when Qt got GPLed. But geeks have their pride. Too much pride. Result: code duplication, well designed toolkits of all sorts but still no consistent GUI on either side.
In 5 years, Microsoft went from the somewhat clunky but usable win3.x series to the very usable (even apart from the "but-it-comes-preloaded-everywhere" argument - that's one I don't buy, sorry) Win9x series. In 5 years, the MacOS GUI has evolved very little - an evidence that it was built from the ground up with usability in mind (MacOS X is another matter, but I bet the guy who made it is certainly not the one who did the Mac0S 9- GUI). In 5 years, what has most evolved in our two main contenders are the toolkits. Who cares?
Slashdot Mirror
(OT again)
(why are you posting as anonymous coward BTW? Don't you have the courage of your opinions?)
> They represent their governments. That is how it works with court appointments the world over: even if they are supposed to be independent, they end up representing the ones who appoint them.
s,the world over,in the US, please (and I DO hope it's not true in the US - someone prove me wrong, please, with evidences). Sorry, but this is not the case in Europe at all. For one, the Mani Pulite operation in Italy could never have happened if your claim held true (No URL - I'll let you find by yourself what this was all about). Neither would have the lawsuits concerning many politicians in France or other EU countries. Real lawmen are impartial. They judge on facts. Which invalidates your other "argument":
> There is every reason: the US could get reproached for something that is not wrong at all
So, in your opinion, who is able to judge what is wrong or right? The US alone? Is *this* your conception of international justice? Does the *word* "international" mean something to you, apart from "American"?
Hint: accused != guilty. Prove yourself right and you're out of trouble. Simple.
Wrap-up 1: world != US, justice != "Bush says it's OK". Reconsider either point and you're doomed as a "global citizen", to quote your words. Now, as to the Kyoto treaty, you say:
> Who cares what the officials say
Well, you, apparently, because you blindly rephrased your country's officials arguments as to the validity of the Kyoto treaty. Oh, and you say that:
> Regardless, Kyoto is founded on assumptions that have no proof or evidence (the whole manmade global warming thing)
There is evidence that human activities are involved in global warming, so again you don't know what you're talking about. And given that the US is responsible for 25% of WORLDWIDE greenhouse gas emissions, it's just woefully stupid from the part of Mr Bush to refuse the Kyoto treaty, all that because it would hurt the *US* economy by raising gas cost by 35-80%? Hah! May I remember you how much we pay for gas here in Europe?
You also claim that:
> It is also mostly political: major pollutors like China are let off the hook
*BEEP* Wrong answer: FYI, China has accepted and conforms to the Kyoto treaty. And even though I'm not really fond of China's way of governing the fifth of total Earth population, I have to agree with their officials who qualify Mr Bush's decision as irresponsible.
Game not quite over. I've quite another rant against you when you say this:
> there is a current anti-semitic tone running in Europe; not hard to imagine them indicting Israeli officials for daring to fight back against the aggressors that attack their country
First point, the same way there is an anti-semitic trend in Europe (and I don't deny it, event though things have curiously calmed down since Le Pen was defeated at the 2nd turn of French presidential elections), I can say that there's an anti-arabic trend in the US. And unfortunately the average US citizen (which a /. reader is not, fortunately) assumes Arabic == muslim. This is totally wrong headed. You have catholic people in Afghanistan, please you or not.
As to "the aggressors that attack their country", you prove yourself to be TOTALLY UNAWARE OF MIDDLE EAST RECENT HISTORY. I shall remind you that all the current trouble between Israel and the Palestine began when Yitzhak Rabin got murdered. This guy, and his successor, Shimon Perez, did great to bring peace in the region. Some sucker with a gun led to the situation we know today. The problem nowadays in Middle East are not the Palestinians. The problem in Middle East today lies in two words: Ariel Sharon. Anyone who has even loosely observed the situation in these last 7 years (Rabin was assassinated in 1995) knows that this is true.
Wrap-up 2: really, you need to shape up. And please next time don't post anonymously.
> Marketing is not a "disease". It makes media more accountable
Thanks for filling my argumentation. Read again what you said.
Media doesn't need marketing to be accountable. Media is supposed to inform people. A good newspaper needs no marketing to sell. A good information Web site (slashdot, for example...) needs no marketing to score hits. Let the marketing side to the ad makers. Keep it out of the media content.
(way offtopic, I know, but I cannot let ignorance go through - ignorance is NOT bliss when it comes to such serious matters)
> Because Bush is wise enough to know that this body, without reforms, will be based too much on politics, not crime.
Uhm, so you haven't even read their Web site, where it says:
(which country wanted UN? Eh?)
And:
So long for the political bias you are claiming this court has.
There is NO REASON for the US to reject this Court. Except if they have something to get reproached for. Oh, a certain marriage... Well even not, because this court only judges matters happening after its initial opening (which is July 1st, 2002). Don't speak of what you don't know, please.
As to "the US knows what's going on, not the others", that's once again a wrong headed claim. The difference is that until recently, the US were trusted to do the good thing and they had the means to act. But after this overly stupid decision (which is going to break the UN ultimately if Mr Bush continues to act childish), they won't be trusted anymore.
I'll let you ponder on the fact that the "no scientific basis for Kyoto" argument was emitted by Washington officials. They have no... scientific basis (note, I said "basis", not "bias") to back this claim.
Read the press. Learn what happens. Shape up or ship out.
Just to speak about Open Source, it has gained media coverage in France in two of the main newspapers (Libération and Le Monde - the latter raising the subject again today).
Europe is also lucky enough that the vast majority of press agencies/newspapers/etc are not owned by big greedy conglomerates and are therefore marketing independent. Economy biased media exist, but they are the minority here. The Diana hype has occured here too (hey, it happened in Paris, how could this be ignored), but the death of Mother Theresa, OTOH, hasn't gone unnoticed.
Marketing disease in the media is of particular worry because medias are a political force today. See the pedophilia "trend" (again in Europe), for example, which all started with the case of Marc Dutrou, in Belgium, several years ago. Raising this case led to 1. politicians looking at the problem and 2. people, aware or victims, starting to speak on public whereas they would remain silent prior to that. The media can influence people in the good way, like in this case, but the other way around is also true.
I just hope that this disease doesn't infect us, honestly. I just don't want to see presidential campaigns turning into commercials just like they are in the US.
<rant>
Speaking of news, I hope you US citizens know that Mr Bush refuses to adhere to the Global Court because he doesn't want his soldiers to be subject to its juridiction. Crimes are crimes, period. FYI the two other countries refusing to adhere are Russia and China. Nice refereces. This is a blatant insult to the rest of the world, as was his rebuttal of the Kyoto Treaty (need I say which country emits the more pollution in the world?). If not, then the rot in your media is not only about marketing.
</rant>
I've just read this link... Excuse me but this is hilarious. Just because a car weighs two tons and reaches the height of a man would mean that it's safe?
The two persons who wrote this article obviously don't know about Euro NCAP, which destroys their argumentation altogether. FYI, the best performing car at Euro NCAP tests until now is a sedan. And if you browse a little through test results, you'll see that what they call "knee-scraping subcompacts" perform equally well than any other categories on average. So long for "the bigger the safer".
Oh, and said sedan consumes less than the hypermodified truck which is the subject of this article... which destroys their argumentation even further. It consumes less than what US lawmakers want to impose for 2013, even. In fact, most cars sold in Europe these days improve on these limits. Hey, we pay nearly 5 times as much as you for the precious liquid!
Really, the US have LOTS to learn from Europe when it comes to cars.
Sorry, but this heavily transformed Ford doesn't impress me at all, especially since a certain Ford Focus TDCi on sale here in Europe (maybe in the US too?) does 50mpg at the same pace and performs likewise (top speed) or better (accelerations).
However, I must admit that 29mpg is quite impressive for a car which shares its aerodynamics with an average skyscraper and weighs nearly twice the Focus - but then again, why not buy a Focus? As an added bonus it hangs on the road far better than any SUV (except maybe the BMW X5)...
Although I agree that aerodynamics are prevalent in aeronautics, there's MUCH room for improvements in engines as well. I don't buy the claim of 30+% less energy consumption with only a new design. I bet the engines they intend to use are part of these 30+% as well.
Just look at cars... In less than 5 years, at least in Europe, gas engines have seen their consumption reduced by more than 40% at equivalent power, with close to no progress at all in aerodynamics. Progress has been even more spectacular with fuel engines. Worse, the friction car engines have to face is higher than in the past (higher total weight, larger width of tires, and recently greater height of cars - see the new Honda Civic). Nowadays, all of these improvements are barely applied to aeronautics. They would help at least on non jet thrust powered airplanes, and that means the vast majority of planes out there. But I'm confident that at least part of these improvements (stratified load for example) could be applied to jet-thrust engines as well.
As a side note, sound is energy as well... The noise generated by aircraft engines is awfully high, especially with jet thrust engines, but the vast majority of this noise is due to frictions in the engine itself... Instead of adding isolating material into the plane (which brings in more weight, hence more energy to move that weight), a better way to solve the problem is just to reduce the friction into the engine itself...
Parent of this modded as 0? Excuse me but the guy is so right that his comment deserved a 3+. Government certification AFAIK doesn't guarantee your privacy in any way.
Come on, think a little... When it comes to security *of network communications*, any agency, whether it be private funded or State funded, cannot be trusted, EXCEPT if they prove MATHEMATICALLY that what you transmit cannot be deciphered, if at all, at least for a very long period of time. The good thing with maths is that demonstrations can be trusted. No such thing can be said from any other science.
I've yet to see any "certification agency" giving mathemaitcal proof that what it "certifies" is secure at all. RSA has lived long enough because it has been proven MATHEMATICALLY that breaking it would require YEARS of computer crunching to break at the highest levels (who uses <=1024bit RSA keys today?).
Of course, maths are still (always, for that matter) a work in progress, and what is true with RSA today may not be true anymore tomorrow (Bernstein's hypothetical prime-number-breaking machine has not been implemented yet AFAIK, and even if it were... well, let's just wait and see).
Encrypted VPNs are certainly a good choice, apart from any certification wahwah. But then be sure to choose an encryption scheme which is MATHEMATICALLY PROVEN to be strong enough for your needs. And if part of your scheme is based on public cryptography, ensure that private keys never travel "through the air", but that's pretty obvious.
non-productivity, you mean... Buy this to the average Linux geek and he will spend hours (more probably days) trying to get that 2nd screen to display something...
Advice to bosses, don't buy this to your linux geeks. Oh, you have done so already... You know, TCO is not only about servers...
GNU/Linux, BSD et al will simply never make it to the desktop. Both KDE and GNOME have constantly failed in designing a good GUI (in case you'd wonder, yes I've used them both, alongside with Win9x and MacOS 9 - the latter got the lead in usability, but that shouldn't be a surprise). Keep in mind that the guy who wrote this review is not even an average user. A real Joe user wouldn't even have bothered to write a review given the poor shape of the thing.
Designing a good GUI requires everything that a geek doesn't have: notions of ergonomy (this goes for graphics too - GNOME icons may look very cool, but their ergonomy is disastrous) and psychology, the ability to sit on behalf of the user, and most of all, not the slightest care about how it works behind the hood.
Before KDE/GNOME can reach the "usable" qualification, both need a team of GUI designers whom the programmers will *listen to*. The rare persons who have some qualifications in this respect are constantly being bashed by coders who say "That's not how it's supposed to work [in the code]". Said coders therefore don't understand that even if their code is well written and would deserve some note in software engineering courses, it fails at its primary mission: meeting the users' needs.
The second biggest problem is the existence of GNOME itself. While it was kind of justified given the licensing problems with Qt at first, it has been obsolete from the day when Qt got GPLed. But geeks have their pride. Too much pride. Result: code duplication, well designed toolkits of all sorts but still no consistent GUI on either side.
In 5 years, Microsoft went from the somewhat clunky but usable win3.x series to the very usable (even apart from the "but-it-comes-preloaded-everywhere" argument - that's one I don't buy, sorry) Win9x series. In 5 years, the MacOS GUI has evolved very little - an evidence that it was built from the ground up with usability in mind (MacOS X is another matter, but I bet the guy who made it is certainly not the one who did the Mac0S 9- GUI). In 5 years, what has most evolved in our two main contenders are the toolkits. Who cares?