Thank god, someone with a little perspective here. Basically to sum this up - follow the money. It's not only Vivendi though, but also LVMH, PPR, Hermes etc. In case anyone actually knows what ACTA stands for (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), then for France it's even more important from physical and luxury goods standpoint as ACTA regulates protection for those as well in addition to copyright. As France is one of the world's premier luxury goods exporter, then naturally it has a lot of vested interests in ACTA and a reason for its being the most vocal supporter of the piece of legislature in Europe. In short - do not expect any changes to the policy because of the elections on France's part. The aforementioned companies are too big for any party to ignore if they want to do well in years to come.
What can I say, once I thought that there actually are intelligent Russians still around, but now it seems that that fear was groundless. Thanks for clarifying it for me. Another bright spot in all this is that you guys are dying out as a nation anyways and in a long run there will be "SinoRussia" across our borders. The new and improved/expanded China will be much preferred to the xenophobic and totalitarian sorry excuse for a state Russia is. Good luck using everything at hand fighting us instead of dealing with your real problems like alcoholism, poverty, xenophobia, nazism/nashism, corruption and so on. Hope it works, but be sure - the Baltic states nor the rest of the Eastern Europe is not yours to loot and rape any more. Times have changed and even the ethnic Russians within the reasons do not want back to Russia.
Latinos born in the US are US citizens no matter what language they speak Thanks for the FUD, but same applies for children born in Estonia - they have the citizenship. By the way, the all Russian-speaking non-citizens have all the rights as citizens within the Estonia (they have the so-called "gray passport"), with the only difference being that they can not vote at national elections. Everybody is free to vote in local though - does US grant its non-citizens the same rights? Nobody is "forced" to undergo anything. As long as you do not want to become a citizen, you can keep your gray passport.
And since when is Estonia an independent country? It has never been independent in its history. Wow, Estonia is just an artificial country? Haven't seen this one before. By the way - just for you to remember, the way Estonia became independent in 1918 after 700 years of oppression was by beating Russia in a war. Go back and read your history - yes, a country with a population of around 1 million actually beat the hell out of a country with a population of 100 times that of Estonia (read more on it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_Liberation_W ar).
Yes Stalin sent people to Siberia but it was to staff the industries which had been packed up and moved beyond the Urals to protect them from the Germans. And why did he need to send my family to Siberia 4 years after the war was over? Of my grandparents and their 5 children only my grandma, my father and his 2 brothers returned years later. Especially vividly I remember a story that my grandma told me when she was still alive about Siberian winter when the camp's Russian guards would feed the pigs first and only if anything was left, they would give some of the grain to the people imprisoned there. To me Stalin is just as bad a war criminal as Hitler was, if not even worse. Hope you like your new dictator though, he seems quite promising.
>the trigger for them is that statue that estonia got rid of in tallinn, which russians probably view as thousands of dead
>soldiers in the defense of estonia from the nazis, and estonia being ungrateful, and estonians viewing as an example of
>soviet domination, and a symbol of the past cold war era, and russians trying to retain their dominance
Thanks a lot for the unneeded spin on the news. I would have to make a couple of corrections to your comment, so your point about the attacks being official or not will not be influenced by anything else.
1) Estonia did not "get rid of" the statue - it was simply removed to another location, that is a war cemetery in Tallinn. As of late, the statue had been used for political platform and Russian nationalistic propaganda, which any independent country would not tolerate in the heart of their capital. There is a better place for war heroes and having a couple of hundred ex-Russian Army vets with red flags coming out and chanting pro-Russian slogans is not helping neither the Estonians or ethnic Russians living in Estonia.
2) Estonia has not been "ungrateful" in any sense of the meaning - in 1940 our country was first occupied by Russians under Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which divided up the Eastern Europe, just to be "relieved" by Germans a couple of years later and finally re-occupied by Red Army until we re-gained our independence in 1992. So our countrymen saw 3 conscriptions (non-voluntary, mind you) during the WWII and some even had even members within the same family fighting each other. So the country's policy as of late is that we denounce both Nazism and Communism as the cause of the death of tens of thousands within the country and we want to de-politicize anything relating to that. So mind you, there were Estonians as well on the Red Army side and we nobody is being ungrateful. If you do not understand the background, then please do not use strong terms like that.
FYI, Siemens is really not even in cell phone business any more. They now have only a 10% stake in their former subsidiary (Siemens Mobile division) which produces cell phones, the rest of which they sold to Taiwan based BenQ a couple of years ago.
They might want to think about what happens when ex-Soviet free states reaches a technology level that either surpasses India, or become cheap enough labor wise to be worth the loss of quality.
Wow the ignorance. Ex-Soviet free states already have the technical level and expertise of India and from that region come some of the best programmers in the world. And they already are more expensive than Indian programmers. For example, take my homecountry Estonia - GDP per capita righ now around 40% of EU level, 70% of my highschool classmates (class of '98, math and physics oriented) working in high-tech industries (mainly in IT) earning more than 4 times national average (some $24'000 vs $6000 a year) and working for companies like MS, Skype, Playtech (online casinos), Elcoteq (supplier for Nokia, Ericsson etc) and so on. They have very good language skills both in English and at least one other European language. If you want to outsource India, look elsewere.
I like more subtle statistics - for example because there is a large community of Turks in Germany, they always get at least 10 points from Germany. The same goes for Spain and Romania. Then my home country Estonia - alhotugh we didn't make it to the finals, our group represented the Swiss this year and guess what? We (i.e. Swistonia) got 12 points from (our neighbour) Latvia! Ain't that a surprise. Btw, I know a lot of Estonians who called in just because of this reason from Latvia. People do crazy stuff.
The minorities play a big role in the countries decisions. I guess that's their way to pledge allegiance to their real motherland or something like that. You would never get the top score from an ethnic Estonian or Latvian for Russia because of the historic background if there weren't a lot of Russians in our countries voting for them.
Oh well - it's always nice to see which countries are "in" at the moment and which are not.
But what if they added a TV out capability to one of those phones. That in essence would give you cable where you want it and when you want it. Basically a replacement for a cable box and when you're in the middle of a show and you need to go somewhere, just pick up your phone from the cradle and continue watching it on the road.
Although I believe that it won't happen with the wireless dataspeeds or number of channels we have right now, but I could see something like this happening in a couple of years. _Then_ I might be interested in the service, not before that.
Re:Once a spyware co always a spyware co...
on
John Dvorak Hypes Skype
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Oh, give them a break. Both Kazaa and Skype were developed by a couple of Estonians (4 to be exact), the first without _any_ embedded spyware at first. Kazaa was simply their hobby until a couple of Swedes saw a business model in it and bought it. After they sold Kazaa (yes, the spyware was included by the financers order), the team itself (Swedes the financers + Estonians the programmers) stayed together and went on with another pet project of theirs - Skype. Skype had some additional finance from Silicon Valley based risk capitalist Jurgenson (an Estonian too) and has been developing very rapidly since. Now all the marketing + business relations are handled from London and all the programming from Estonia. Don't blame the programmers, blame the business models.
In case you wondered, I am an Estonian too and proud of our most successful international project to date.
Re:The morality of the story:
on
Tracking Your Taxes
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I guess size matters. I live in Estonia (pop. of approx 1.4 mio) and we have a very good e-tax office, they first introduced it like 3 years ago. Now it took a whole 15(!) minutes to complete my whole tax application and I got my refund in 2(!) days. The key is that our tax office owns and runs the software and all private enterprises are encouraged to e-file their tax info too + all government agencies use the same platform.
For example, my tax-application was pre-filled with information about:
- my incomes (info from my employer)
- my loans (info from my bank, which I have agreed to enclose)
- my stipends (infro from my school, which I have agreed to enclose)
So I just parse through the information, accept it and submit my tax-form.
And yes, it helps to have a simple legislation - no progressive taxations, no tax brackets, not too many write-offs. PS. The e-delarations reached more than 50% of the whole number this year.
I see that Google is more likely to use Yahoo! services since Yahoo! has got couple of pretty specific ones. For example I use http://finance.yahoo.com/ quite a lot, but prefer to do so via Google search. It wasn't even more than a couple of months ago when Google upgraded it's interface for stock quote search and now mirrors a lot more information from Yahoo!
I guess it's a good thing since I've got the uncluttered interface of Google and the in-depth finance service of Yahoo! both in the same package.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank god, someone with a little perspective here. Basically to sum this up - follow the money. It's not only Vivendi though, but also LVMH, PPR, Hermes etc. In case anyone actually knows what ACTA stands for (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), then for France it's even more important from physical and luxury goods standpoint as ACTA regulates protection for those as well in addition to copyright. As France is one of the world's premier luxury goods exporter, then naturally it has a lot of vested interests in ACTA and a reason for its being the most vocal supporter of the piece of legislature in Europe. In short - do not expect any changes to the policy because of the elections on France's part. The aforementioned companies are too big for any party to ignore if they want to do well in years to come.
What can I say, once I thought that there actually are intelligent Russians still around, but now it seems that that fear was groundless. Thanks for clarifying it for me. Another bright spot in all this is that you guys are dying out as a nation anyways and in a long run there will be "SinoRussia" across our borders. The new and improved/expanded China will be much preferred to the xenophobic and totalitarian sorry excuse for a state Russia is. Good luck using everything at hand fighting us instead of dealing with your real problems like alcoholism, poverty, xenophobia, nazism/nashism, corruption and so on. Hope it works, but be sure - the Baltic states nor the rest of the Eastern Europe is not yours to loot and rape any more. Times have changed and even the ethnic Russians within the reasons do not want back to Russia.
And since when is Estonia an independent country? It has never been independent in its history. Wow, Estonia is just an artificial country? Haven't seen this one before. By the way - just for you to remember, the way Estonia became independent in 1918 after 700 years of oppression was by beating Russia in a war. Go back and read your history - yes, a country with a population of around 1 million actually beat the hell out of a country with a population of 100 times that of Estonia (read more on it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_Liberation_
>the trigger for them is that statue that estonia got rid of in tallinn, which russians probably view as thousands of dead
>soldiers in the defense of estonia from the nazis, and estonia being ungrateful, and estonians viewing as an example of
>soviet domination, and a symbol of the past cold war era, and russians trying to retain their dominance
Thanks a lot for the unneeded spin on the news. I would have to make a couple of corrections to your comment, so your point about the attacks being official or not will not be influenced by anything else.
1) Estonia did not "get rid of" the statue - it was simply removed to another location, that is a war cemetery in Tallinn. As of late, the statue had been used for political platform and Russian nationalistic propaganda, which any independent country would not tolerate in the heart of their capital. There is a better place for war heroes and having a couple of hundred ex-Russian Army vets with red flags coming out and chanting pro-Russian slogans is not helping neither the Estonians or ethnic Russians living in Estonia.
2) Estonia has not been "ungrateful" in any sense of the meaning - in 1940 our country was first occupied by Russians under Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which divided up the Eastern Europe, just to be "relieved" by Germans a couple of years later and finally re-occupied by Red Army until we re-gained our independence in 1992. So our countrymen saw 3 conscriptions (non-voluntary, mind you) during the WWII and some even had even members within the same family fighting each other. So the country's policy as of late is that we denounce both Nazism and Communism as the cause of the death of tens of thousands within the country and we want to de-politicize anything relating to that. So mind you, there were Estonians as well on the Red Army side and we nobody is being ungrateful. If you do not understand the background, then please do not use strong terms like that.
FYI, Siemens is really not even in cell phone business any more. They now have only a 10% stake in their former subsidiary (Siemens Mobile division) which produces cell phones, the rest of which they sold to Taiwan based BenQ a couple of years ago.
Wow the ignorance. Ex-Soviet free states already have the technical level and expertise of India and from that region come some of the best programmers in the world. And they already are more expensive than Indian programmers. For example, take my homecountry Estonia - GDP per capita righ now around 40% of EU level, 70% of my highschool classmates (class of '98, math and physics oriented) working in high-tech industries (mainly in IT) earning more than 4 times national average (some $24'000 vs $6000 a year) and working for companies like MS, Skype, Playtech (online casinos), Elcoteq (supplier for Nokia, Ericsson etc) and so on. They have very good language skills both in English and at least one other European language. If you want to outsource India, look elsewere.
The minorities play a big role in the countries decisions. I guess that's their way to pledge allegiance to their real motherland or something like that. You would never get the top score from an ethnic Estonian or Latvian for Russia because of the historic background if there weren't a lot of Russians in our countries voting for them.
Oh well - it's always nice to see which countries are "in" at the moment and which are not.
Here you can find the official scoreboard for this years contest in Ukraine.
But what if they added a TV out capability to one of those phones. That in essence would give you cable where you want it and when you want it. Basically a replacement for a cable box and when you're in the middle of a show and you need to go somewhere, just pick up your phone from the cradle and continue watching it on the road.
Although I believe that it won't happen with the wireless dataspeeds or number of channels we have right now, but I could see something like this happening in a couple of years. _Then_ I might be interested in the service, not before that.
In case you wondered, I am an Estonian too and proud of our most successful international project to date.
I guess size matters. I live in Estonia (pop. of approx 1.4 mio) and we have a very good e-tax office, they first introduced it like 3 years ago. Now it took a whole 15(!) minutes to complete my whole tax application and I got my refund in 2(!) days. The key is that our tax office owns and runs the software and all private enterprises are encouraged to e-file their tax info too + all government agencies use the same platform. For example, my tax-application was pre-filled with information about: - my incomes (info from my employer) - my loans (info from my bank, which I have agreed to enclose) - my stipends (infro from my school, which I have agreed to enclose) So I just parse through the information, accept it and submit my tax-form. And yes, it helps to have a simple legislation - no progressive taxations, no tax brackets, not too many write-offs. PS. The e-delarations reached more than 50% of the whole number this year.
I see that Google is more likely to use Yahoo! services since Yahoo! has got couple of pretty specific ones. For example I use http://finance.yahoo.com/ quite a lot, but prefer to do so via Google search. It wasn't even more than a couple of months ago when Google upgraded it's interface for stock quote search and now mirrors a lot more information from Yahoo! I guess it's a good thing since I've got the uncluttered interface of Google and the in-depth finance service of Yahoo! both in the same package.