At the moment there is a EU directive in place that is contrary to the French proposal. This is not stopping the French government from going ahead with their proposal though. It can still become French law within a few short months.
Eventually it will be struck down through citizen's actions (suit to the European Court resulting in fines) or through a change of government. Governments can be very very stubborn.
The only hope in France is to convince a majority of French representatives that this is a bad proposal before it is voted in.
Actually yes it is. For instance nobody has yet figured out an efficient matrix class in C++ that uses operator overloading. This is basically an impossible task to write B=A*X*A^t efficiently, which occurs all the time in linear analysis, because in C++ the transpose would require a copy operator, whereas one ought to get the job done simply with a different iterator. C++ is not equipped for this yet.
Actually the HADOPI proposed law, which I think is the one you are referring to, has only gone through French Senate for a first reading, but this only means the deputies' Assembly can now vote on it, which is scheduled for early 2009. Then assuming it goes through it must go back to the senate, then to the constitutional council and finally be published for it to become law.
HADOPI is a broad permission and obligation for ISPs to cut off internet access for a set time if users are caught sharing "illegally".
Already there are problems with this proposed law as it is contrary to European rights, in particular rights to access to communications. According to European principles, people cannot have their internet access cut off without a proper trial.
In addition I think technically it will not work as expected, and the results will be unmitigated disasters for all parties involved. I can't wait until deputies and senators have their internet access cut off by some automated script.
Did you notice my mentionning of the work "emergency"?
Pharmacies are not like any old bread and butter business who sell what they want.
In the various countries where I've lived and worked, pharmacies have always been a regulated business. A pharmacist diploma is pretty much PhD level. You need to know your stuff, in particular the major and side effects of the drugs you sell, some of which are pretty dangerous. You need to be able to prepare on the spot some of them, to advise customers depending on their condition, age, etc. It's not something you can improvise.
It is expected they can fulfil a prescription and they can help in an emergency. If a pharmacist doesn't want to give away some kind of drugs for some kind of moral or religious reasons they are simply in the wrong business.
In many countries yes there is a right to a full-service pharmacy within convenient driving distance, mandated by law even. Perhaps not in the US, I don't know. And if you honestly think about it, it makes a lot of sense.
As for matters of conscience You can read these guidelines. Notice the obligations of the pharmacists.
package managers are not the answer. I've used EPM, which you mention in your blog, extensively. I've even patched it to the gills to suit my needs (relocatability for non-root installs and being able to go back in the wizard). EPM helps a little but the chuck of the work is being able to produce a mostly-static executable, otherwise you need a package for each distribution update, which is unmanageable. However, this is exactly where LSB comes in : provide a decent set of libraries I can rely on.
Source distribution works if you have a very good configure script, which is damn hard to do for any complicated application using more than a handfull of libs.
In my apps, the amount of work on the configure script is decidedly non-trivial. LSB still helps for source distribution because you can assume more of the destination platform.
It's not that simple. In small town or villages there aren't that many pharmacies to choose from, and often only a single one in turn is open during holidays and at week ends.
And the war in Iraq has cost the US 1 trillion or so at least. Some estimate 3 trillions. Ah, and 3k military deaths as well (+wounded, +civilian deaths, +breeding future terrorists, etc). Meanwhile OBL is still at large and the Talibans are winning again in Afghanistan.
Your response reads exactly is like "lalala, I'm not hearing, we did nothing wrong, killing them all will fix the problem". Yeah right. Too bad OBL and his ilk also think extermination of the American people will do perfectly fine.
The important thing is learning why OBL's ideas (if you can call them that) are having any traction at all in some foreign lands. The military bases are what he says to his troops. The real reason are the general involvement of the US in the Middle East, starting with the support of Israel.
Now with the invasion of Iraq, the US will face even more people to exterminate, according to your views. People who will also want to exterminate Americans. Is that smart?
If the US were simply sluts, they would flaunt their money everywhere and that would not be an excuse to attack them, I agree.
However the US do a lot more than that. They meddle a lot. They topple democratically elected regimes, they prop up dictators, they bomb various targets on various countries because they can, etc. The CIA has a generic term for bad things that happen to US interests due to these things, and it's called blowback. Read about it.
What's the big deal feeling all that defensive against the UN all the time? The UN is just a forum for all the nations. As long as there are dictators in power somewhere, sure, they will speak up at the UN, so what?
If democracies are not happy about the composition of the UN, they should perhaps start taking down dictators instead of perhaps propping them?
With all due respect, you are comparing a few exceptional people from the 18th century, who have withstood the test of time, to the commoners of today. Better choose a few more modern heroes on either side of the Atlantic. My favourite current Frenchman is Dr. Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Medecins sans Frontieres (doctors without borders). He is a socialist (ok), but he is right now the health minister of France, the equivalent to the surgeon general, in a right-wing government ! It is as if GWB had employed Al Gore to be his environment deputy. His aura is huge.
Income tax is not a proxy for service. The rich pay way more than the poor, but the rich have a lot more control over the whole of society in return. You will never see a poor president of the USA. Obama spent close to a billion dollars in his current campain.
What the rich get as immediate benefit of their financial contribution to society is a much more peaceful society. In past centuries selfish oligarchies mostly ended up in revolutions.
Just look up the paper on the web, especially through Google Scholar. a good 50% of the time the paper or a report version of it will be available on the author's web site. If not email them and they will send you a copy for sure.
It may be that this 1992 decision caused an upsurge of bad mortgages, I would agree with you on that.
However the real kicker was when these bad mortgages became financial products. This is a decision the banks made on their own and magnified the product a hundred times at least.
Actually the prefered metric is moving to the number of citations (not including your own) your work is generating. Soon one won't be able to get tenure without at least one *heavily* cited article or book.
The people running a real racket are now those who analyse journals and scientists' output like ISI. One needs to pay to access ranking and statistics like the h-index. This metric is rewarding popular, synthetic, easy to understand papers. This is only good up to a degree.
The trouble with that approach is that truly new innovative research might litteraly take decades to catch on. It also encourages the building of cliques who just cite each other to defeat the system. In physics and applied mathematics there are many such cliques that are very closed off, say like string theory. One pretty much only gets in via doing ones' PhD with someone from the clique as one's supervisor.
Research is becoming more and more like a media circus.
I think that's what the P meant by "naturally", i.e. due to the rise of new tech & methodologies.
Personnally I think cartels & such die by overadministration. It takes a long time though, and the result is a new cartel, only different. I don't think a Google-like cartel would be any better than a Microsoft, say.
Eye of the beholder. I can't believe how much stupid bad press the Gimp is getting. It's a Free application, no one is forcing you to even look at it !
Pixelmator's site is horribly commercial to my eyes, full of needless animations, of superlative words like "breathtaking" and full of icons all pointing to the link "Buy".
The Gimp's site is lightweight and points to the documentation in 15 languages and the source code. Definitely does not look like crap to me, but each to their own.
BTW Pixelmator is an open-source success story, since it's core techology is ImageMagick and Cairo.
What has changed is that it is very hard to get a loan now, even backed up to the gills. Consequently people cannot invest, either you and me or big companies. This will be causing a lot of people to lose their jobs and the economy to contract in real terms.
What has been lost is *confidence* that loans can be repaid in time.
Given that the trade of real goods only represented 2% of the financial economy up to the crash, the magnitude of the problem cannot be exaggerated.
Slashdot Mirror
At the moment there is a EU directive in place that is contrary to the French proposal. This is not stopping the French government from going ahead with their proposal though. It can still become French law within a few short months.
Eventually it will be struck down through citizen's actions (suit to the European Court resulting in fines) or through a change of government. Governments can be very very stubborn.
The only hope in France is to convince a majority of French representatives that this is a bad proposal before it is voted in.
Actually yes it is. For instance nobody has yet figured out an efficient matrix class in C++ that uses operator overloading. This is basically an impossible task to write B=A*X*A^t efficiently, which occurs all the time in linear analysis, because in C++ the transpose would require a copy operator, whereas one ought to get the job done simply with a different iterator. C++ is not equipped for this yet.
Hello,
Actually the HADOPI proposed law, which I think is the one you are referring to, has only gone through French Senate for a first reading, but this only means the deputies' Assembly can now vote on it, which is scheduled for early 2009. Then assuming it goes through it must go back to the senate, then to the constitutional council and finally be published for it to become law.
HADOPI is a broad permission and obligation for ISPs to cut off internet access for a set time if users are caught sharing "illegally".
Already there are problems with this proposed law as it is contrary to European rights, in particular rights to access to communications. According to European principles, people cannot have their internet access cut off without a proper trial.
In addition I think technically it will not work as expected, and the results will be unmitigated disasters for all parties involved. I can't wait until deputies and senators have their internet access cut off by some automated script.
Thanks, very informative
This is not realistic
1- Go to another town
May be far away. In an emergency this is not good
2- Petition a chain
Right. Emergency ?
3- Open your own pharmacy
Did you notice my mentionning of the work "emergency"?
Pharmacies are not like any old bread and butter business who sell what they want.
In the various countries where I've lived and worked, pharmacies have always been a regulated business. A pharmacist diploma is pretty much PhD level. You need to know your stuff, in particular the major and side effects of the drugs you sell, some of which are pretty dangerous. You need to be able to prepare on the spot some of them, to advise customers depending on their condition, age, etc. It's not something you can improvise.
It is expected they can fulfil a prescription and they can help in an emergency. If a pharmacist doesn't want to give away some kind of drugs for some kind of moral or religious reasons they are simply in the wrong business.
In many countries yes there is a right to a full-service pharmacy within convenient driving distance, mandated by law even. Perhaps not in the US, I don't know. And if you honestly think about it, it makes a lot of sense.
As for matters of conscience You can read these guidelines. Notice the obligations of the pharmacists.
Retina patterns are like this as well, but might be more of a hassle to go through.
package managers are not the answer. I've used EPM, which you mention in your blog, extensively. I've even patched it to the gills to suit my needs (relocatability for non-root installs and being able to go back in the wizard). EPM helps a little but the chuck of the work is being able to produce a mostly-static executable, otherwise you need a package for each distribution update, which is unmanageable. However, this is exactly where LSB comes in : provide a decent set of libraries I can rely on.
Source distribution works if you have a very good configure script, which is damn hard to do for any complicated application using more than a handfull of libs.
In my apps, the amount of work on the configure script is decidedly non-trivial. LSB still helps for source distribution because you can assume more of the destination platform.
It's not that simple. In small town or villages there aren't that many pharmacies to choose from, and often only a single one in turn is open during holidays and at week ends.
Pharmacies perform a public service.
And the war in Iraq has cost the US 1 trillion or so at least. Some estimate 3 trillions. Ah, and 3k military deaths as well (+wounded, +civilian deaths, +breeding future terrorists, etc). Meanwhile OBL is still at large and the Talibans are winning again in Afghanistan.
Your response reads exactly is like "lalala, I'm not hearing, we did nothing wrong, killing them all will fix the problem". Yeah right. Too bad OBL and his ilk also think extermination of the American people will do perfectly fine.
The important thing is learning why OBL's ideas (if you can call them that) are having any traction at all in some foreign lands. The military bases are what he says to his troops. The real reason are the general involvement of the US in the Middle East, starting with the support of Israel.
Now with the invasion of Iraq, the US will face even more people to exterminate, according to your views. People who will also want to exterminate Americans. Is that smart?
If the US were simply sluts, they would flaunt their money everywhere and that would not be an excuse to attack them, I agree.
However the US do a lot more than that. They meddle a lot. They topple democratically elected regimes, they prop up dictators, they bomb various targets on various countries because they can, etc. The CIA has a generic term for bad things that happen to US interests due to these things, and it's called blowback. Read about it.
What's the big deal feeling all that defensive against the UN all the time? The UN is just a forum for all the nations. As long as there are dictators in power somewhere, sure, they will speak up at the UN, so what?
If democracies are not happy about the composition of the UN, they should perhaps start taking down dictators instead of perhaps propping them?
With all due respect, you are comparing a few exceptional people from the 18th century, who have withstood the test of time, to the commoners of today. Better choose a few more modern heroes on either side of the Atlantic. My favourite current Frenchman is Dr. Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Medecins sans Frontieres (doctors without borders). He is a socialist (ok), but he is right now the health minister of France, the equivalent to the surgeon general, in a right-wing government ! It is as if GWB had employed Al Gore to be his environment deputy. His aura is huge.
On paper targets or on real people? there is more to gun use than just accuracy.
Income tax is not a proxy for service. The rich pay way more than the poor, but the rich have a lot more control over the whole of society in return. You will never see a poor president of the USA. Obama spent close to a billion dollars in his current campain.
What the rich get as immediate benefit of their financial contribution to society is a much more peaceful society. In past centuries selfish oligarchies mostly ended up in revolutions.
Well, they're not in academia, you know.
The technology does not work. Yet.
Way to go moderators, yet again completely off the mark. Noticed how Chrome is full of bugs?
Woosh...
Just look up the paper on the web, especially through Google Scholar. a good 50% of the time the paper or a report version of it will be available on the author's web site. If not email them and they will send you a copy for sure.
It may be that this 1992 decision caused an upsurge of bad mortgages, I would agree with you on that.
However the real kicker was when these bad mortgages became financial products. This is a decision the banks made on their own and magnified the product a hundred times at least.
Actually the prefered metric is moving to the number of citations (not including your own) your work is generating. Soon one won't be able to get tenure without at least one *heavily* cited article or book.
The people running a real racket are now those who analyse journals and scientists' output like ISI. One needs to pay to access ranking and statistics like the h-index. This metric is rewarding popular, synthetic, easy to understand papers. This is only good up to a degree.
The trouble with that approach is that truly new innovative research might litteraly take decades to catch on. It also encourages the building of cliques who just cite each other to defeat the system. In physics and applied mathematics there are many such cliques that are very closed off, say like string theory. One pretty much only gets in via doing ones' PhD with someone from the clique as one's supervisor.
Research is becoming more and more like a media circus.
I think that's what the P meant by "naturally", i.e. due to the rise of new tech & methodologies.
Personnally I think cartels & such die by overadministration. It takes a long time though, and the result is a new cartel, only different. I don't think a Google-like cartel would be any better than a Microsoft, say.
Posting anonymously from within Google's Chrome development team to protect the guilty ?
Eye of the beholder. I can't believe how much stupid bad press the Gimp is getting. It's a Free application, no one is forcing you to even look at it !
Pixelmator's site is horribly commercial to my eyes, full of needless animations, of superlative words like "breathtaking" and full of icons all pointing to the link "Buy".
The Gimp's site is lightweight and points to the documentation in 15 languages and the source code. Definitely does not look like crap to me, but each to their own.
BTW Pixelmator is an open-source success story, since it's core techology is ImageMagick and Cairo.
What has changed is that it is very hard to get a loan now, even backed up to the gills. Consequently people cannot invest, either you and me or big companies. This will be causing a lot of people to lose their jobs and the economy to contract in real terms.
What has been lost is *confidence* that loans can be repaid in time.
Given that the trade of real goods only represented 2% of the financial economy up to the crash, the magnitude of the problem cannot be exaggerated.