I mostly agree but: Ben Laden became a terrorist leader without having experienced any western agression. In Fact, he becomes an extremist after living inside our "decadent" societies.
The same for the Egyptian terrorist who used to study in Germany before 11th september.
Or the extremists who blew themselves up in London. They were all born in the UK (IMHO). Or the Islamist who killed Theo van Gogh: Born in The Netherlands. I don't know for Madrid...But I bet that there is at least one Spanish Islamist.
None IMHO have lived under the situation you have described.
Sometimes you simply have to face it: They "hate" you because of what you are, they know you, they know you better than you know them. They received all the knowledge and wisdom the west could give them. They freely choose to reject all these values we cherish (freedom, reason above passion, science above dogma, rule of human laws against "God's laws", democracy, free speech, strict eguality between men an women, etc.). They choose something else.
It is far too simple to put all the blames on social/economic facts. A Violent ideology is often the root the problem (in the east and in the west). Never forget that they are intelligent being just like you and some of them are even smarter.
Same for me. I went back to a cheap two-blades razor with a standard fixation (Gilette II or something) I was tired to spend more > 12 Euro each time I needed new blades. It works like a charm. It me costs less than 2 Euro per 12 razor-blades pack if I remind well.
I'm not old... I'm 31. But well I've got already some experiences with OS "upgrades".
The only upgrades where I saw a real improvement was Windows 95 (a huge improvment over Windows 3.1) and Suse 9.1 (better US devices support, better printer support, etc). For the rest most of my upgrade weren't "rational" : Who cares if I really need it? Let's see how it works? Having OS X.XX will be cool! Such a beautiful interface, I want it! This irrationality costs me hours of tweaking, hacking, lamenting, trying. I'm tired of it:-). I prefer to do more useful stuffs.
I'm not American. One of my best friend is American. We know each other for 10 years. He lives here in Brussels. He is one of the niciest guy I've ever met. Extremely open, well mannered and funny. A good man.
You can critize as much as you want their government. But these pompeous over-generalizations over 200 millions human beings are nothing but stupid xenophoby.
The article says that Amazon is fighting unfairly against their competition with their One click patent. They are trying to close down other web sites. They just receive their own medicine. I'm sure these connoisseurs will appreciate it.
They do have ressources. North Korea is known to have deals with China to export Steels and other goods. The weather is "normal", actually it is quite rainy. There are forests and rich fertile fields. Well any capitalist minded government would make a fortune out of it.
Cost:
Here in Belgium We use electronic voting for about 10 years. A minister has caculated that it costs around 4 euro (+/- $5 US) per vote...While a paper solution costs only 1 euro per vote.
The reason: Computers for election are only used for...Elections. So you may use them twice in a decade. Try to find a P200 compatible motherboard, Serial port compatible electronic Pen, a 500MG hard disk...A company still supporting Windows 95...They still use "official" floppy disk to boot the system . Next election they will have a hard time to find new floppy disks.
Security:
We all know how "simple" it is to change thousands of votes with a single script, command line, program, virus or whatever, don't we?
Those who thinks that Google is defacto "good" are naive. Google is a company, and they do have to increase their market share and profits. Just take a look at recent decision in China. Shareholders have firmly remind them that China is a market they cannot loose.
There is strictly nothing wrong with that. They are a company..."but" it is just a private company, nothing more.
If they can profit from a monopoly (and currently they don't have any monopoly, competitions are one click away), they will surely do it...In fact they "must" do it. Their purpose is to make money. Shareholders, investors expect return on their investment.
One of their most remarquable achievment is their communication strategy. Extremely clever. I guess Yahoo and MSN are taking notes.:-)
They look like books reviewers. Some of them think they can do much better but they lack the knowledge, the will or simply the talent. They become jealous. Any critic is welcome but developers should stay careful: not all of them are worth listening. Particularly when it looks like an over-generalization.
I use Perl 5 mainly for quick and dirty scripts. Most of the time I find a good CPAN module to begin with. I won't use it for large scale projects. I find rather difficult for Object oriented programming. I tried it on a middle-size project. the Bless thing is difficult to understand. The syntax is too weird for me. This part of perl5 looks more like hack than an useful and an efficient tool. I find it extremely difficult to track bugs during the development process for example.
I know Larry wall doesn't like it. : I hope Perl 6 provides a better structural (and authoritarian) way to organize your object oriented code (I have never tested it so far). If the syntax looks less like a kaballistic incantation, it will surely help in my case too.
Yes..If you are a foreigner you can easily bypass the menace (with Internet and if your home country doesn't recognize the patent (ex: software in Europe)). All you have to do is to base your all your business on non-American services (or on American companies with foreign sister companies) and servers.
US Patents holders will have no way to catch you... Especially if you sell non-physical goods (ie: Software) in the US.
Instead of trying to force foreign countries to complain with their demand. the US should apply a VISA application for European visitors.
It won't force any European airlines to complain with a demand that is illegal in their country. The administrative burden will be supported by US civil servants in their embassies. So the US taxpayers will finance this, instead of European Airlines customers.
It will surely hurt the US businesses...But well it looks like it isn't a real concern for President Bush and his administration.
As an European I think Europe should stay wide open for US visitors. Within few months Europe should see the positive feedback of such a policy. More and more international meetings will happen in Europe.
I think the US lobby is perfectly legitimate. The EU fine is huge. a US company will lose a significant share of its profits. The US government will lose a significant share of taxes.
A government must protect its interest abroad. They aren't elected to protect foreign interests.
"But" the EU answer should be a diplomatically variant of the F. word. I expect them to defend my interest not yours.
It looks like his family had to fight hard to get a proper living standard. He simply does not want to face financial problems. I perfectly understand his motivation.
On the other hand such kind of jobs leaves you a lot of time to do whatever you want to. Einstein managed to write his theory while working for a Swiss patent office.
It looks like he is extremely good at Math. You don't need big lab, dozens of collaborators, huge investments for such a science....And maybe we are all wrong...Maybe he just want to build a happy family and to live a cosy and stable life. Why not? There are already enough people on the planet who are addicted to work and who secretly dream having their names in the encyclopedia.
Scientists like: de Duve (Biology) Prigogine (physic) Zenobe Gramme (Electricity) Lemaître (Big bang theory) Vesalius (modern anatomy)
Entrepreneurs: Leo Baekeland (bakelite, pre-plastic popular material) Ernest Solvay (sodium carbonate, industrial process) Jules Delhaize (Delhaize group, US Food Lion is part of it)
Emperor/kings: Charles-Quint (born in Gent) Charlemagne (born in Herstal) Leopold II (it was a butcher, but a famous one...) Godfrey of Bouillon (First catholic King of Jerusalem)
Artists: Flemish primitive/masters (like Van Eyck) Magritte Horta (art-nouveau/modern style) Léon Spilliaert (not famous but I love his work:-))
Explorers: - Peter/Pierre Minuit (purchased New York from the indians...In the name of the Dutch, but he was walloon (from the southern part of belgium)) - de Gerlache (don't know if he is famous outside of Belgium, but he led the first scientific mission to the Antartic.)
Inventor: Adolphe Saxe (inventor of the Saxophone)
Few foreigners who have lived (temporarly) in Belgium. - Karl Marx (Brussels) - Van goth (Hainaut as a protestant priest) - Victor Hugo (Brussels) - Verlaine (Brussels)
Voilà.
Anyway beeing a Frenchspeaking Belgian: I rarely browse Belgian Newspapers in French. Most of the interesting stuffs are only available to paid subscribers...Things that interest me (foreign affairs, economy and high technologies) are better covered in France (le monde diplomatique, courrier international, le figaro, etc.) or in the Englishspeaking world (BBC, NY times, the Economist, etc.). I won't miss them. Most of the time news are Ad nauseum over the boring "communautaire" (friction between the Frenchspeaking and Dutchspeaking communities).
Well teach Pluto is a planet in US schools. Pluto seems to be extremely popular in the US for historical reason I guess. So if you like it so much, simply keep it. What do you fear? UN resolutions?
You simply have to connect an external HD to your computer (USB). You push the big button on the Maxtor OneTouche External HD front.
An incremental backup is automatically launched in the background.
And voilà!
The only thing I had to change is to place my thunderbird mail folder under the c:\documents and settings\myusername\ directory. Most of the time I'm on the road. the Maxtor HD is in the office. So the backup hardware and the computer are rarely in the same place. When I arrive in the office. I push the button automatically.
This is by far the most intuitive backup solution I've ever used.
I live in Belgium. it is also considered as a "English friendly" country, probably less than Norway because Dutch and French are still primary languages for education and entertainment (not music). What most speak over here is a simplified version of English. But well, it is still a "foreign language" and you can usually notice regularly simple grammar mistakes.
Go to Germany, Italy, France, Spain and the situation is even worst. Young peoples can align enough words to be understood, but don't ask them to write a long text in plain English. The result will be catastrophic usually (with the exceptions described in my previous message).
Small countries like ours are still "exceptions" in Western Europe.
English is the same than Latin in the middle age or French in the renaissance. It is known by a small fraction of the population: By a wealthy elite or by those who need it for their jobs.
Even in industrialized countries. A small fraction of the population can read English. What I mean by "reading" is to understand the meaning of a book, a letter, etc.
I learnt English because I needed it for computing. My brother, a lawyer, doesn't need it. He can speak a basic English but he can't read a novel without a dictionary for example. We both had 6 hours of English lesson per week at the college.
For most of us English is merely a communication tool, a small set of words that you use occasionally abroad.
Never forget than you had to spend years in school to master it, you were surrounded by an Englishspeaking culture and probably from a middle-class (read very weathly background compared to them). I read English information daily, but I won't say I master it. I "understand" it. It's a big difference.
African countries should promote their local languages instead. I'm sure it would be far more easy for their children to learn a language so deeply rooted in their culture. They would start their intellectual journey with such strong roots. European countries are a good example IMHO.
I love English but I seriously doubt that English can be the lingua franca for the whole world. Not in its current form (too complex) at least.
Well,
I'm working on my own software for approximatly one year or so. It should be done in 5 months...And you litteraly gave me my shareware business model =:-).
Thanks for the great idea.
Take a look at their support forum. And you will see the problem. It looks like transgaming needs to tweak its engine for every video games. When the game receives a patch, some of them stop to work and gamers have to wait another tweak from transgaming. It looks like a lot of users are frustrated.
Transgaming may dramatically reduce the time you need to port a Windows based video game to Linux and MacOSX but it isn't such a clean way yet. They do not provide a 100% compatible DirectX 9.0 framework.
Slashdot Mirror
I mostly agree but:
Ben Laden became a terrorist leader without having experienced any western agression. In Fact, he becomes an extremist after living inside our "decadent" societies.
The same for the Egyptian terrorist who used to study in Germany before 11th september.
Or the extremists who blew themselves up in London. They were all born in the UK (IMHO).
Or the Islamist who killed Theo van Gogh: Born in The Netherlands.
I don't know for Madrid...But I bet that there is at least one Spanish Islamist.
None IMHO have lived under the situation you have described.
Sometimes you simply have to face it: They "hate" you because of what you are, they know you, they know you better than you know them. They received all the knowledge and wisdom the west could give them. They freely choose to reject all these values we cherish (freedom, reason above passion, science above dogma, rule of human laws against "God's laws", democracy, free speech, strict eguality between men an women, etc.). They choose something else.
It is far too simple to put all the blames on social/economic facts. A Violent ideology is often the root the problem (in the east and in the west). Never forget that they are intelligent being just like you and some of them are even smarter.
Same for me. I went back to a cheap two-blades razor with a standard fixation (Gilette II or something) I was tired to spend more > 12 Euro each time I needed new blades. It works like a charm.
It me costs less than 2 Euro per 12 razor-blades pack if I remind well.
I'm not old... I'm 31. But well I've got already some experiences with OS "upgrades".
:-). I prefer to do more useful stuffs.
The only upgrades where I saw a real improvement was Windows 95 (a huge improvment over Windows 3.1) and Suse 9.1 (better US devices support, better printer support, etc). For the rest most of my upgrade weren't "rational" : Who cares if I really need it? Let's see how it works? Having OS X.XX will be cool! Such a beautiful interface, I want it!
This irrationality costs me hours of tweaking, hacking, lamenting, trying. I'm tired of it
So if ain't broke, don't fix it.
Concerning point 11:
I'm not American.
One of my best friend is American. We know each other for 10 years. He lives here in Brussels. He is one of the niciest guy I've ever met. Extremely open, well mannered and funny. A good man.
You can critize as much as you want their government. But these pompeous over-generalizations over 200 millions human beings are nothing but stupid xenophoby.
The article says that Amazon is fighting unfairly against their competition with their One click patent. They are trying to close down other web sites. They just receive their own medicine. I'm sure these connoisseurs will appreciate it.
They do have ressources. North Korea is known to have deals with China to export Steels and other goods. The weather is "normal", actually it is quite rainy. There are forests and rich fertile fields. Well any capitalist minded government would make a fortune out of it.
IMHO
Copyrights is private property. There isn't any form of private property in communism. Communism is collectivism. Private properties are forbidden.
Even in the space, A human beeing needs to piss around his territory.
Anyway...
The sun is mine! I saw it first!
Cost: Here in Belgium We use electronic voting for about 10 years. A minister has caculated that it costs around 4 euro (+/- $5 US) per vote...While a paper solution costs only 1 euro per vote. The reason: Computers for election are only used for...Elections. So you may use them twice in a decade. Try to find a P200 compatible motherboard, Serial port compatible electronic Pen, a 500MG hard disk...A company still supporting Windows 95 ...They still use "official" floppy disk to boot the system . Next election they will have a hard time to find new floppy disks.
Security:
We all know how "simple" it is to change thousands of votes with a single script, command line, program, virus or whatever, don't we?
Agreed,
Those who thinks that Google is defacto "good" are naive. Google is a company, and they do have to increase their market share and profits. Just take a look at recent decision in China. Shareholders have firmly remind them that China is a market they cannot loose.
There is strictly nothing wrong with that. They are a company..."but" it is just a private company, nothing more.
If they can profit from a monopoly (and currently they don't have any monopoly, competitions are one click away), they will surely do it...In fact they "must" do it. Their purpose is to make money. Shareholders, investors expect return on their investment.
One of their most remarquable achievment is their communication strategy. Extremely clever. I guess Yahoo and MSN are taking notes.
They look like books reviewers. Some of them think they can do much better but they lack the knowledge, the will or simply the talent. They become jealous.
Any critic is welcome but developers should stay careful: not all of them are worth listening. Particularly when it looks like an over-generalization.
Me too, :-)
I use Perl 5 mainly for quick and dirty scripts. Most of the time I find a good CPAN module to begin with. I won't use it for large scale projects. I find rather difficult for Object oriented programming. I tried it on a middle-size project. the Bless thing is difficult to understand. The syntax is too weird for me. This part of perl5 looks more like hack than an useful and an efficient tool. I find it extremely difficult to track bugs during the development process for example.
I know Larry wall doesn't like it. : I hope Perl 6 provides a better structural (and authoritarian) way to organize your object oriented code (I have never tested it so far). If the syntax looks less like a kaballistic incantation, it will surely help in my case too.
Yes..If you are a foreigner you can easily bypass the menace (with Internet and if your home country doesn't recognize the patent (ex: software in Europe)).
All you have to do is to base your all your business on non-American services (or on American companies with foreign sister companies) and servers.
US Patents holders will have no way to catch you... Especially if you sell non-physical goods (ie: Software) in the US.
So in this case, it is just "annoying".
Exactly...
Instead of trying to force foreign countries to complain with their demand. the US should apply a VISA application for European visitors.
It won't force any European airlines to complain with a demand that is illegal in their country. The administrative burden will be supported by US civil servants in their embassies. So the US taxpayers will finance this, instead of European Airlines customers.
It will surely hurt the US businesses...But well it looks like it isn't a real concern for President Bush and his administration.
As an European I think Europe should stay wide open for US visitors. Within few months Europe should see the positive feedback of such a policy. More and more international meetings will happen in Europe.
I'm an European.
I think the US lobby is perfectly legitimate. The EU fine is huge. a US company will lose a significant share of its profits. The US government will lose a significant share of taxes.
A government must protect its interest abroad. They aren't elected to protect foreign interests.
"But" the EU answer should be a diplomatically variant of the F. word. I expect them to defend my interest not yours.
It looks like his family had to fight hard to get a proper living standard. He simply does not want to face financial problems. I perfectly understand his motivation.
...And maybe we are all wrong...Maybe he just want to build a happy family and to live a cosy and stable life. Why not? There are already enough people on the planet who are addicted to work and who secretly dream having their names in the encyclopedia.
On the other hand such kind of jobs leaves you a lot of time to do whatever you want to. Einstein managed to write his theory while working for a Swiss patent office.
It looks like he is extremely good at Math. You don't need big lab, dozens of collaborators, huge investments for such a science.
Scientists like:
:-))
de Duve (Biology)
Prigogine (physic)
Zenobe Gramme (Electricity)
Lemaître (Big bang theory)
Vesalius (modern anatomy)
Entrepreneurs:
Leo Baekeland (bakelite, pre-plastic popular material)
Ernest Solvay (sodium carbonate, industrial process)
Jules Delhaize (Delhaize group, US Food Lion is part of it)
Emperor/kings:
Charles-Quint (born in Gent)
Charlemagne (born in Herstal)
Leopold II (it was a butcher, but a famous one...)
Godfrey of Bouillon (First catholic King of Jerusalem)
Artists:
Flemish primitive/masters (like Van Eyck)
Magritte
Horta (art-nouveau/modern style)
Léon Spilliaert (not famous but I love his work
Explorers:
- Peter/Pierre Minuit (purchased New York from the indians...In the name of the Dutch, but he was walloon (from the southern part of belgium))
- de Gerlache (don't know if he is famous outside of Belgium, but he led the first scientific mission to the Antartic.)
Inventor:
Adolphe Saxe (inventor of the Saxophone)
Few foreigners who have lived (temporarly) in Belgium.
- Karl Marx (Brussels)
- Van goth (Hainaut as a protestant priest)
- Victor Hugo (Brussels)
- Verlaine (Brussels)
Voilà.
Anyway beeing a Frenchspeaking Belgian: I rarely browse Belgian Newspapers in French. Most of the interesting stuffs are only available to paid subscribers...Things that interest me (foreign affairs, economy and high technologies) are better covered in France (le monde diplomatique, courrier international, le figaro, etc.) or in the Englishspeaking world (BBC, NY times, the Economist, etc.). I won't miss them. Most of the time news are Ad nauseum over the boring "communautaire" (friction between the Frenchspeaking and Dutchspeaking communities).
These CPUs are already used in low-cost routers.
:-). So you get a pretty box for $150 and then? I guess the real price is around $200 at least.
Anyway I've read the spec. But there aren't any screen
Olivier
Well teach Pluto is a planet in US schools. Pluto seems to be extremely popular in the US for historical reason I guess. So if you like it so much, simply keep it. What do you fear? UN resolutions?
I'm using Maxtor OneTouch HD. I've got a laptop.
If you don't know it:
You simply have to connect an external HD to your computer (USB).
You push the big button on the Maxtor OneTouche External HD front.
An incremental backup is automatically launched in the background.
And voilà!
The only thing I had to change is to place my thunderbird mail folder under the c:\documents and settings\myusername\ directory.
Most of the time I'm on the road. the Maxtor HD is in the office. So the backup hardware and the computer are rarely in the same place.
When I arrive in the office. I push the button automatically.
This is by far the most intuitive backup solution I've ever used.
I love it.
Well,
I live in Belgium. it is also considered as a "English friendly" country, probably less than Norway because Dutch and French are still primary languages for education and entertainment (not music). What most speak over here is a simplified version of English. But well, it is still a "foreign language" and you can usually notice regularly simple grammar mistakes.
Go to Germany, Italy, France, Spain and the situation is even worst. Young peoples can align enough words to be understood, but don't ask them to write a long text in plain English. The result will be catastrophic usually (with the exceptions described in my previous message).
Small countries like ours are still "exceptions" in Western Europe.
That's precisly the point. Africa is a continent, not a country. There are millenium old cultures.
English is the same than Latin in the middle age or French in the renaissance. It is known by a small fraction of the population: By a wealthy elite or by those who need it for their jobs.
Even in industrialized countries. A small fraction of the population can read English. What I mean by "reading" is to understand the meaning of a book, a letter, etc.
I learnt English because I needed it for computing. My brother, a lawyer, doesn't need it. He can speak a basic English but he can't read a novel without a dictionary for example. We both had 6 hours of English lesson per week at the college.
For most of us English is merely a communication tool, a small set of words that you use occasionally abroad.
Never forget than you had to spend years in school to master it, you were surrounded by an Englishspeaking culture and probably from a middle-class (read very weathly background compared to them). I read English information daily, but I won't say I master it. I "understand" it. It's a big difference.
African countries should promote their local languages instead. I'm sure it would be far more easy for their children to learn a language so deeply rooted in their culture. They would start their intellectual journey with such strong roots. European countries are a good example IMHO.
I love English but I seriously doubt that English can be the lingua franca for the whole world. Not in its current form (too complex) at least.
Olivier
Well, I'm working on my own software for approximatly one year or so. It should be done in 5 months...And you litteraly gave me my shareware business model =:-). Thanks for the great idea.
Take a look at their support forum. And you will see the problem.
It looks like transgaming needs to tweak its engine for every video games. When the game receives a patch, some of them stop to work and gamers have to wait another tweak from transgaming. It looks like a lot of users are frustrated.
Transgaming may dramatically reduce the time you need to port a Windows based video game to Linux and MacOSX but it isn't such a clean way yet. They do not provide a 100% compatible DirectX 9.0 framework.