And then Spirit would bounce into higher atmosphere, then fall back exactly one meter away from Beagle 2 - thus blowing off the memory of the probe and rearranging its bits into a completely random fashion... But wait, the newly rearranged bits would actually produce a valid program ! And all of a sudden Beagle 2 would start emitting again ! And somewhere in French Guyana, a scientist would receive the following signal:
SUSE and Mandrake are fighting for the same market. If it comes down to the survival of one I don't see that Mandrake's resources can match those of SUSE.
National division. Suse is German. Mandrake is French. Mandrake is sold in major bookshops in France (e.g. Gibert in Paris, Sauramps in Montpellier...), Suse is not. Now that Mandrake decided to go full steam towards French market domination, there's nothing to stop them. This will provide them with a large user base, from which they can spread their influence. The same thing could be said of Suse, but Novell's strategy may be different.
Besides, they do not exactly do the same thing as Suse. Mandrake built their reputation on the ease-of-use factor, and they're pretty good at it - long live DrakConf ! When you want to introduce Linux to someone completely new about it, I sincerely hope that Mandrake comes before Suse in your priority list.
I'm a computer scientist. I'm French, but that does not count because I live in Britain and my desktop is 100% UK English. I use Mandrake because I simply have neither the time nor the inclination to "fool around" and learn about hundreds of configuration files containing thousands of different options - which is the only way to reap maximal productivity from most other distros. My system "just works" and I can configure it about as easily as win98 - with a significantly lower crash ratio. Vive Mandrake !
"I'm always preparing for my next trip there by listening to the French language audio with English subtitles"
In which case you're not preparing for the Real Thing. French audio tracks on DVDs are usually performed by French actors, or French-speaking actors with no or little accent.
Quebec accent is as different from European French pronunciation as American can be from English (note: I live in Britain). I have actually seen a Quebec movie in which I could simply not understand anything the actors said, even though they were using standard French words - I knew because of the subtitles they had to put on the screen !
If you want to make yourself familiar with Quebec accent, get Quebec movies. Hint: you might want to check your favourite sources of Adult-oriented videos for BrunoB or Christine Young:-)
(I once saw a movie with Christine young, and I found it really hot... until I switched the audio on ! Now imagine the Empire state building suddenly turning into an overcooked spaghetti in exactly two seconds...)
Just after terrorism is stopped, Israeli colonies (or "settlements") in Palestine are dismantled, an agreement is reached over the holy sites, a stable democratic Palestinian state emerges sharing Jerusalem as a capital with Israel, free circulation between these two countries is instored and peace and collaboration treaties are signed between Israel and all Arab states, there'll be nothing to prevent Saudis from teaming up with Israelis.
Isn't it true that a vast majority of Americans are circumcised as well ?
I know that there may be health motives (I'm circumcised myself), but I wonder if that could be linked to the influence of Religion (in that case, judeo-christian) in the US.
First Post: "Al bust al-awwal" (I don't think there is an equivalent to the word "post", but I may be wrong).
Sorry, I don't have the unicode. Essentially: Alif -Lam Ba-Waw-Sod-Ta, Alif-Lam Alif(with hamza)-Waw(with shadda)-Lam, . The last letters for "bust" may differ (emphatic or not) depending on the original pronunciation.
Umm, American steel is of good quality, it's the price that is the problem.... Other countries can pay their labor less
I'm French. You know, the country of over-paid, whining, striking, snail-eating people. Not exactly a sweatshop nation.
My father, my grandfathers (both of them) and many of my ancestors work or worked in the steel industry in the North-East of France.
This industry was as old as the industrial revolution. Up to the early 80s, steel and coal were virtually synonymous to "industry" as a whole. They were a defining component of the working class in France and Germany. It is no accident if the first instance of a European structure (before the EEC and the EU) was a community based on agreements about coal and steel.
But in the 80s, something awful happened: we realized that our steeal and coal industries were simply not viable any more. Our coal was awfully expensive to extract, and costed several times the price of better quality coal that could be litteraly scrapped off the ground in south america. Our massive, overproductive steel industry was bloated and hampered with prohibitive costs.
The jewels of our industry, our national prides, had turned into dinosaurs.
The result was quite litteraly an onslaught. Hundreds of thousands of jobs disappeared in a matter of years. Whole regions were devastated and fell into massive poverty.
No we have virtually no coal industry, and our (much sleeker) steel industry is essentially based on value-added, quality steels (my father was lucky and young enough to escape the slaughter and was relocated in the south by his company, which is now the Fos-sur-Mer branch of the Arcelor group).
When it comes to steel, the difference between the US and other countries is not necessarily about wages; it is about the painful reforms that other countries carried out, while the US didn't !
A final thing about tariff: there's nothing inherently wrong with them, even for us europeans. We can't sell anything to the US, but the expensive, over-priced US steel cannot be selled anywhere else in the world. Besides, US steel-based products are more expensive than ours, which is good for us. I don't understand why the EU decided to go after the US after all in that case. I suppose that the enormous size of the US market made it more important than other considerations. Would such a thing happen in, say, Canada, I don't think the outcome would be the same.
Palestinian officials respond by rejecting Mandrake in favor of *BSD.
About an hour later, the Hamas and the Islamic Djihad made a joint statement in which they condemned the Palestinian Autority's decision on the ground that *BSD was "wholly anti-Islamic". The Hamas spokesman commented that "people who put pictures of smiling devils all over their software should be stoned to death - twice !"
Twenty minutes later, the Palestinian Authority cancelled the previous announcement and made public a million-dollar contract with a major French company specializing in the production and the commercialization of Abacuses. "In order to leverage our most abundant resources, the PA finance minister said, we will investigate the possibility to use vast quantities of stones and rubble to build abacuses. If massive Beowulf clusters of abacuses are feasible, we may eventually outpower the computational capacities of the occupying forces by several orders of magnitude !"
Thomas Miconi BTW, Mandrake is French, isn't it ? BTW2, There was a story on The Onion some time ago. I only managed to find shortened versions of it, e.g. here. I just love the last paragraph. Long live the 'nion.
It's a cultural difference in roughly the same sense that the difference between turning on a CD player and playing a musical instrument is a "cultural difference".
Does that mean that Darl McBrag is the reincarnation of John Cage ?
Look at the French "no head scarves" ban, as an example.
No head scarves in State schools. No religion whatsoever in the Republic's schools. The French do not really have the same approach as the US when it comes to religion, or to schools - and even less so when it pertains to both ! Essentially, France initiated free, mandatory, secular education in part to counter the influence of the Catholic church, which used to be the major educational institution at the time (i.e. end of the 19th century).
The debate about head scarves is part of a larger debate about the fragmentation of the French society into communities - or, more precisely, into ghettoes.
You may want to have a look at the report of the Stasi inquiry on that subject. This inquiry was set up precisely to decide whether or not scarves should be banned by law in schools, but it revealed much deeper tensions all over society - mostly caused by the economic exclusion of Moslem minorities.
The EU keeps Turkey out of the EU, in large part because Turkey is a Muslim country, and therefore not European enough (despite removing all references to Christianity from the now failed EU Constitution).
You are confusing religion and identity. This is a common error. Rejecting Turkey membership has nothing to do with Islam: Albany and Bosna, even though they are moslim countries, will eventually join the EU, because they are European countries. It's just a question of time (and development).
The problem with Turkey is the following: about 1/3rd of it is, for any practical purpose, European. Ethnically, culturally, intellectually. A western Turkish city cannot be distinguished from a Greek or Sicilian city.
But on the other hand, about 1/3rd of the country is, from any viewpoint, deeply middle-eastern. Of course, this includes the Kurds (a bad word in Turkey: what the rest of the world calls Turkish Kurdistan, they call it "the South-East"), but also ethnic Turks of the region. Go to a town in the east of Turkey, and just look around : you are not in Europe. You are in the middle-east. Nothing distinguishes these people from their Syrian (!) neighbours.
If Turkey was a small country on the marches of Europe, this problem could be neglected, and there could be an attempt to assimilate the whole country into Europe. But Turkey's population will soon be higher than that of any country in the EU, including Germany. Admitting Turkey in the EU would be the end of Europe as a political project. Possibly a reason why the English (and the US) support it so much.
Europe is about identity. European people suddenly realizing (after a few millenia of wars) that, languages aside, they are essentially one single people. What makes things so difficult with Turkey is that the border of what can be called "Europe" goes straigt through Anatolia. Hence lots of confusion, misunderstandings, and eventually disdain and defiance.
The Chunnel between England and France is 31 miles long, 23 of which are underwater
And the idea was first brought at the time of Napoleon...
Besides, when you consider the degree of nervousness in Spain (and Europe) over immigration concerns, I don't think anything serious will be undertaken before at least a few decades.
Which stem cells? The ones that are gathered at the abortion clinics? The abortion clinics that preform the abortions that YOU'RE TOTALLY OPPOSED TO AND WANT TO SEE MADE ILLEGAL? Stupid fucking government.
Congratulations. You just managed to be even more stupid than them. No small feat, I reckon.
Embryos are not gathered at abortion clinics (Hell not !). They come from in-vitro fertilization, mostly. When you fertilize eggs in a tube, you end up with more embryos than needed. Excess eggs are often stored in liquid nitrogen. Sometimes these eggs are simply abandoned (because the parents part, or one of them dies, or they simply don't want any more children). These eggs are stem cells (indeed a "real" stem cell is equivalent to an egg). Bush & Co. say that they should be the only source for stem cells.
Their opposition to human cloning, including for stem cell research, has the same origin as their opposition to abortion: they consider eggs and embryos as living, human beings.
Artists can make a living through live performance, patronage, and teaching.
Copyright: each consumer pays a little amount of money when he buys the work of someone he likes. Artists are rewarded according to the number of poeple who enjoy their music (government money can encourage more "independent" forms of art, at least in Europe).
Patronage: Artists depend on a few wealthy people, or maybe the government, to earn a living
The Slashdot mob opinion: the second way is sooo much more democratic and productive than the first.
DAMN !
Thomas Miconi
PS: Please, please stop whining about "performance" ! Could you tell me of ONE single classical composer who ever made his living by performing his own music, without any kind of patronage, church/state sponsorhip, or copyright ? Of course I'm not talking about those who were rich enough not to care about money in the first place !!
for musicians the standard copy protection method was: never let the scores out of your sight!
And remain an obscure local musician till the end of your life.
You know, not even Bach or Haendel could remember a whole Sonata by listening to it just once (though Haendel was said to compose even faster than the musician could play). Scores were published and did travel massively all over Europe. Indeed, in a time when sound could not be recorded, scores were simply the equivalent of modern records: a practical way to store music into a tangible, transportable form.
It was current custom for a musician to transcribe by himself the works of others, which gave him an occasion to study the style of their colleagues. E.g. Bach transcribed hectometers of Buxtehude before writing his own Passacaglia.
Still, as you mentioned, Bach and other musicians of his time, made their living either by working for the Church (which got its revenue from taxation, so today Bach would be called a civil servant), or through "Mecenat" (sponsoring by individuals).
So now you have a choice : 1) Copyrights 2) Sponsoring artists through government or the good will of a few very rich people.
Which (in French) gives: "Eecks-Oovaire" - or something like that.
(I don't know why the xouvert people say that it should be "zoovaire". You don't pronounce "zwindow" or "zeleven", or even "kswindow" or "kseleven", do you ?)
Good thing ESR is not associated with this project though - before you know he would have renamed it "Freedom X".
Im not trying to make a bid for Ethnocentrist of the decade, but do the Canadian musicians and movie industry people really believe their properties make up that large of a percentage of what is being downloaded?
*So* *Fscking* *What* ?
Canadian people download. They pay a small tax for downloading. This money is redistributed to Canadian artists. This means that Joni Mitchell and Lynda Lemay get money from Britney downloads. So damn what ?
Hell, the French do the same with movies. A small tax is levied on each ticket, and the money is given back to French film companies (usually small, independant companies). Since foreign (read: US) movies represent 30 to 60% of entries at any given time, this is an indirect form of mild protectionism as well as a way to support local cultural/entertainment industries (what the French call "culture" often corresponds to what Americans would call "entertainment").
Now you free-trade fundamentalists may bitch at that, whining how it "prevents competition" and "lowers standards" blah blah blah. I'll hear that kind of stuff the day I see more than 2% foreign movies in the US film distribution circuit, which happens to be the most recklessly protectionist oligopoly in the western world ("Americans don't like foreign movies" - yeah, right. Oh, guess who owns most theatres in the US, directly or not ? What ? US studios ? Man, I'm shocked !)
Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against American movies/singers in general (I just have too much US-made stuff on my hard drive) , I just fail to see what's wrong with trying to limit the potentially destructive tendencies of market economies.
In a completely free market, distributors will simply shun anything that looks risky or even not profitable enough, and gladly cling to "sure bets" and reliably profitable things. This is how the Italian movie industry simply died out in a single decade (admittedly, they received significant help from the man who recently bought up the whole country and became prime minister thanks to his media empire). Since Arnold Schwarzenneger's films make more money that Fellini's or Visconti's (or their successors), without any correction, the former will simply suffocate the latter till they eventually go down the drain. Which they did !
Same thing goes with music. Canadians who can make it big on the worldwide scene will go to America anyway (e.g. C-e-accent-aigu-line Dion). So why not take a few bucks from Christina Aguilera to help Diane Tell finish her next album ?
but I've never had the need to type French accents on the computer,
Be warned that it may make your prose somewhat difficult to read.
so never have learned how to input them (any my keyboard sure isn't French).
The most important accented letter in French is "E with acute accent". Windows allows you to produce it by typing Ctrl-Alt-e (at least with UK layout).
(SUBLIMINAL MESSAGE TO LINUX CODERS)And it would be damn nice if I could do the same, not necessarily in any linux app, but at least with KDE/Gnome
Too bad world leaders ignore a 2-millenia old teaching in favor of killing, greed and jealousy.
Indeed, the "2-millenia old teaching" I assume you're referring to (i.e. the collection of oral traditions collectively known as "The Bible", which was actually a continuous work from the 2nd millenium BC to the 5th century AD) does favor killing, greed and jealousy. Oh, and sexism and racial hatred too !
I just can't get where Christians got their "loving God" stuff from, but it's certainly not from the Old Testament. The Bible is a long compendium of slaughters, most of them being comitted ad majorem Dei gloriam. Ever read the Books of Kings ?
The Arabs did not invent anything. Waging Djihad and stoning blasphemers and adulteres comes directly from good old Moses. The difference between the East and the West right now simply comes from the fact that the West managed to break the bounds of Religion. The East didn't.
I never quite managed to grasp how exactly shipping a web browser or a media player was a problem. I mean, should we prevent them from bundling Wordpad and Calc as well ?! Or even the whole graphical interface, because it prevents competition with other window managers ? "We thereby require the defendant to only ship single system disks !"
Microsoft uses its monopoly position in the OS market to push their products ? Sure, but then the Right Thing would be to address their OS monopoly in the first place !
Slapping them on the hand for shipping Explorer or WMP is like addressing pollution by forcing industrial plants to give away gas masks to the population !
Property rights essentially appeared at the same time as the Agricultural Revolution about twelve to fifteen thousand years ago.
Property rights appeared at the same time as the animal brain.
Ever tried to nick a chunk of meat from a dog that's eating it ?
Not to mention the way most animals defend their territory (including insects)
And as far as superior mammals go, the first appearance of abstract property rights (i.e. an entity that is defended even though it's not immediately being used) came up with social clans and dominating males - the "property" being females.
Not that it has changed much, btw, if you consider how most "cultures" of the world treat women.
To oust him out of office, the conservative party launched an all-out media attack on insecurity, immigration, the usual populist far-right stuff. Result : Chirac won, the local fascist puppet came second, Jospin third. Wow, big surprise.
Now after having applied their recipes (lower taxes for the rich, higher indirect taxes for the poor) for a year and half, they found that France, once the economic locomotive of Europe, has become a laggard.
The 35 hour work week (which never made it to most small businesses anyway) is an ideal scapegoat.
Slashdot Mirror
And then Spirit would bounce into higher atmosphere, then fall back exactly one meter away from Beagle 2 - thus blowing off the memory of the probe and rearranging its bits into a completely random fashion...
But wait, the newly rearranged bits would actually produce a valid program ! And all of a sudden Beagle 2 would start emitting again ! And somewhere in French Guyana, a scientist would receive the following signal:
"BGL2 SCO UnixWare Login:_"
Thomas Miconi
SUSE and Mandrake are fighting for the same market. If it comes down to the survival of one I don't see that Mandrake's resources can match those of SUSE.
National division. Suse is German. Mandrake is French. Mandrake is sold in major bookshops in France (e.g. Gibert in Paris, Sauramps in Montpellier...), Suse is not. Now that Mandrake decided to go full steam towards French market domination, there's nothing to stop them. This will provide them with a large user base, from which they can spread their influence. The same thing could be said of Suse, but Novell's strategy may be different.
Besides, they do not exactly do the same thing as Suse. Mandrake built their reputation on the ease-of-use factor, and they're pretty good at it - long live DrakConf ! When you want to introduce Linux to someone completely new about it, I sincerely hope that Mandrake comes before Suse in your priority list.
I'm a computer scientist. I'm French, but that does not count because I live in Britain and my desktop is 100% UK English. I use Mandrake because I simply have neither the time nor the inclination to "fool around" and learn about hundreds of configuration files containing thousands of different options - which is the only way to reap maximal productivity from most other distros. My system "just works" and I can configure it about as easily as win98 - with a significantly lower crash ratio. Vive Mandrake !
Thomas Miconi
"I'm always preparing for my next trip there by listening to the French language audio with English subtitles"
:-)
In which case you're not preparing for the Real Thing. French audio tracks on DVDs are usually performed by French actors, or French-speaking actors with no or little accent.
Quebec accent is as different from European French pronunciation as American can be from English (note: I live in Britain). I have actually seen a Quebec movie in which I could simply not understand anything the actors said, even though they were using standard French words - I knew because of the subtitles they had to put on the screen !
If you want to make yourself familiar with Quebec accent, get Quebec movies. Hint: you might want to check your favourite sources of Adult-oriented videos for BrunoB or Christine Young
(I once saw a movie with Christine young, and I found it really hot... until I switched the audio on ! Now imagine the Empire state building suddenly turning into an overcooked spaghetti in exactly two seconds...)
Thomas Miconi
Just after terrorism is stopped, Israeli colonies (or "settlements") in Palestine are dismantled, an agreement is reached over the holy sites, a stable democratic Palestinian state emerges sharing Jerusalem as a capital with Israel, free circulation between these two countries is instored and peace and collaboration treaties are signed between Israel and all Arab states, there'll be nothing to prevent Saudis from teaming up with Israelis.
Breath holding is not recommended.
Thomas Miconi
Isn't it true that a vast majority of Americans are circumcised as well ?
I know that there may be health motives (I'm circumcised myself), but I wonder if that could be linked to the influence of Religion (in that case, judeo-christian) in the US.
Thomas Miconi
First Post: "Al bust al-awwal" (I don't think there is an equivalent to the word "post", but I may be wrong).
Sorry, I don't have the unicode. Essentially: Alif -Lam Ba-Waw-Sod-Ta, Alif-Lam Alif(with hamza)-Waw(with shadda)-Lam, . The last letters for "bust" may differ (emphatic or not) depending on the original pronunciation.
Thomas Miconi
Umm, American steel is of good quality, it's the price that is the problem.... Other countries can pay their labor less
I'm French. You know, the country of over-paid, whining, striking, snail-eating people. Not exactly a sweatshop nation.
My father, my grandfathers (both of them) and many of my ancestors work or worked in the steel industry in the North-East of France.
This industry was as old as the industrial revolution. Up to the early 80s, steel and coal were virtually synonymous to "industry" as a whole. They were a defining component of the working class in France and Germany. It is no accident if the first instance of a European structure (before the EEC and the EU) was a community based on agreements about coal and steel.
But in the 80s, something awful happened: we realized that our steeal and coal industries were simply not viable any more. Our coal was awfully expensive to extract, and costed several times the price of better quality coal that could be litteraly scrapped off the ground in south america. Our massive, overproductive steel industry was bloated and hampered with prohibitive costs.
The jewels of our industry, our national prides, had turned into dinosaurs.
The result was quite litteraly an onslaught. Hundreds of thousands of jobs disappeared in a matter of years. Whole regions were devastated and fell into massive poverty.
No we have virtually no coal industry, and our (much sleeker) steel industry is essentially based on value-added, quality steels (my father was lucky and young enough to escape the slaughter and was relocated in the south by his company, which is now the Fos-sur-Mer branch of the Arcelor group).
When it comes to steel, the difference between the US and other countries is not necessarily about wages; it is about the painful reforms that other countries carried out, while the US didn't !
A final thing about tariff: there's nothing inherently wrong with them, even for us europeans. We can't sell anything to the US, but the expensive, over-priced US steel cannot be selled anywhere else in the world. Besides, US steel-based
products are more expensive than ours, which is good for us. I don't understand why the EU decided to go after the US after all in that case. I suppose that the enormous size of the US market made it more important than other considerations. Would such a thing happen in, say, Canada, I don't think the outcome would be the same.
Thomas Miconi
Palestinian officials respond by rejecting Mandrake in favor of *BSD.
About an hour later, the Hamas and the Islamic Djihad made a joint statement in which they condemned the Palestinian Autority's decision on the ground that *BSD was "wholly anti-Islamic". The Hamas spokesman commented that "people who put pictures of smiling devils all over their software should be stoned to death - twice !"
Twenty minutes later, the Palestinian Authority cancelled the previous announcement and made public a million-dollar contract with a major French company specializing in the production and the commercialization of Abacuses. "In order to leverage our most abundant resources, the PA finance minister said, we will investigate the possibility to use vast quantities of stones and rubble to build abacuses. If massive Beowulf clusters of abacuses are feasible, we may eventually outpower the computational capacities of the occupying forces by several orders of magnitude !"
Thomas Miconi
BTW, Mandrake is French, isn't it ?
BTW2, There was a story on The Onion some time ago. I only managed to find shortened versions of it, e.g. here. I just love the last paragraph. Long live the 'nion.
It's a cultural difference in roughly the same sense that the difference between turning on a CD player and playing a musical instrument is a "cultural difference".
Does that mean that Darl McBrag is the reincarnation of John Cage ?
Thomas Miconi
Look at the French "no head scarves" ban, as an example.
No head scarves in State schools. No religion whatsoever in the Republic's schools. The French do not really have the same approach as the US when it comes to religion, or to schools - and even less so when it pertains to both ! Essentially, France initiated free, mandatory, secular education in part to counter the influence of the Catholic church, which used to be the major educational institution at the time (i.e. end of the 19th century).
The debate about head scarves is part of a larger debate about the fragmentation of the French society into communities - or, more precisely, into ghettoes.
You may want to have a look at the report of the Stasi inquiry on that subject. This inquiry was set up precisely to decide whether or not scarves should be banned by law in schools, but it revealed much deeper tensions all over society - mostly caused by the economic exclusion of Moslem minorities.
The EU keeps Turkey out of the EU, in large part because Turkey is a Muslim country, and therefore not European enough (despite removing all references to Christianity from the now failed EU Constitution).
You are confusing religion and identity. This is a common error. Rejecting Turkey membership has nothing to do with Islam: Albany and Bosna, even though they are moslim countries, will eventually join the EU, because they are European countries. It's just a question of time (and development).
The problem with Turkey is the following: about 1/3rd of it is, for any practical purpose, European. Ethnically, culturally, intellectually. A western Turkish city cannot be distinguished from a Greek or Sicilian city.
But on the other hand, about 1/3rd of the country is, from any viewpoint, deeply middle-eastern. Of course, this includes the Kurds (a bad word in Turkey: what the rest of the world calls Turkish Kurdistan, they call it "the South-East"), but also ethnic Turks of the region. Go to a town in the east of Turkey, and just look around : you are not in Europe. You are in the middle-east. Nothing distinguishes these people from their Syrian (!) neighbours.
If Turkey was a small country on the marches of Europe, this problem could be neglected, and there could be an attempt to assimilate the whole country into Europe. But Turkey's population will soon be higher than that of any country in the EU, including Germany. Admitting Turkey in the EU would be the end of Europe as a political project. Possibly a reason why the English (and the US) support it so much.
Europe is about identity. European people suddenly realizing (after a few millenia of wars) that, languages aside, they are essentially one single people. What makes things so difficult with Turkey is that the border of what can be called "Europe" goes straigt through Anatolia. Hence lots of confusion, misunderstandings, and eventually disdain and defiance.
Thomas Miconi
The Chunnel between England and France is 31 miles long, 23 of which are underwater
And the idea was first brought at the time of Napoleon...
Besides, when you consider the degree of nervousness in Spain (and Europe) over immigration concerns, I don't think anything serious will be undertaken before at least a few decades.
Thomas Miconi
Which stem cells? The ones that are gathered at the abortion clinics? The abortion clinics that preform the abortions that YOU'RE TOTALLY OPPOSED TO AND WANT TO SEE MADE ILLEGAL? Stupid fucking government.
Congratulations. You just managed to be even more stupid than them. No small feat, I reckon.
Embryos are not gathered at abortion clinics (Hell not !). They come from in-vitro fertilization, mostly. When you fertilize eggs in a tube, you end up with more embryos than needed. Excess eggs are often stored in liquid nitrogen. Sometimes these eggs are simply abandoned (because the parents part, or one of them dies, or they simply don't want any more children). These eggs are stem cells (indeed a "real" stem cell is equivalent to an egg). Bush & Co. say that they should be the only source for stem cells.
Their opposition to human cloning, including for stem cell research, has the same origin as their opposition to abortion: they consider eggs and embryos as living, human beings.
Thomas Miconi
Artists can make a living through live performance, patronage, and teaching.
Copyright: each consumer pays a little amount of money when he buys the work of someone he likes. Artists are rewarded according to the number of poeple who enjoy their music (government money can encourage more "independent" forms of art, at least in Europe).
Patronage: Artists depend on a few wealthy people, or maybe the government, to earn a living
The Slashdot mob opinion: the second way is sooo much more democratic and productive than the first.
DAMN !
Thomas Miconi
PS: Please, please stop whining about "performance" ! Could you tell me of ONE single classical composer who ever made his living by performing his own music, without any kind of patronage, church/state sponsorhip, or copyright ? Of course I'm not talking about those who were rich enough not to care about money in the first place !!
for musicians the standard copy protection method was: never let the scores out of your sight!
And remain an obscure local musician till the end of your life.
You know, not even Bach or Haendel could remember a whole Sonata by listening to it just once (though Haendel was said to compose even faster than the musician could play). Scores were published and did travel massively all over Europe. Indeed, in a time when sound could not be recorded, scores were simply the equivalent of modern records: a practical way to store music into a tangible, transportable form.
It was current custom for a musician to transcribe by himself the works of others, which gave him an occasion to study the style of their colleagues. E.g. Bach transcribed hectometers of Buxtehude before writing his own Passacaglia.
Still, as you mentioned, Bach and other musicians of his time, made their living either by working for the Church (which got its revenue from taxation, so today Bach would be called a civil servant), or through "Mecenat" (sponsoring by individuals).
So now you have a choice : 1) Copyrights 2) Sponsoring artists through government or the good will of a few very rich people.
Personally, I choose 1).
Thomas Miconi
And it's supposed to be pronounced "X-ouvert".
Which (in French) gives: "Eecks-Oovaire" - or something like that.
(I don't know why the xouvert people say that it should be "zoovaire". You don't pronounce "zwindow" or "zeleven", or even "kswindow" or "kseleven", do you ?)
Good thing ESR is not associated with this project though - before you know he would have renamed it "Freedom X".
Thomas Miconi
Reading it a second time, I finally get it.
:-)
Hmmm... Would you perchance be a redhead ?
I'd rather see him pay a la King Louis XIV.
Hmmm... Louis XIV (Fouteenth) died in his bed.
The one who got "shortened" was Louis XVI (Sixteenth).
But personally, I'd better see them pay a la Joan of Arc.
Thomas Miconi
Im not trying to make a bid for Ethnocentrist of the decade, but do the Canadian musicians and movie industry people really believe their properties make up that large of a percentage of what is being downloaded?
*So* *Fscking* *What* ?
Canadian people download. They pay a small tax for downloading. This money is redistributed to Canadian artists. This means that Joni Mitchell and Lynda Lemay get money from Britney downloads. So damn what ?
Hell, the French do the same with movies. A small tax is levied on each ticket, and the money is given back to French film companies (usually small, independant companies). Since foreign (read: US) movies represent 30 to 60% of entries at any given time, this is an indirect form of mild protectionism as well as a way to support local cultural/entertainment industries (what the French call "culture" often corresponds to what Americans would call "entertainment").
Now you free-trade fundamentalists may bitch at that, whining how it "prevents competition" and "lowers standards" blah blah blah. I'll hear that kind of stuff the day I see more than 2% foreign movies in the US film distribution circuit, which happens to be the most recklessly protectionist oligopoly in the western world ("Americans don't like foreign movies" - yeah, right. Oh, guess who owns most theatres in the US, directly or not ? What ? US studios ? Man, I'm shocked !)
Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against American movies/singers in general (I just have too much US-made stuff on my hard drive) , I just fail to see what's wrong with trying to limit the potentially destructive tendencies of market economies.
In a completely free market, distributors will simply shun anything that looks risky or even not profitable enough, and gladly cling to "sure bets" and reliably profitable things. This is how the Italian movie industry simply died out in a single decade (admittedly, they received significant help from the man who recently bought up the whole country and became prime minister thanks to his media empire). Since Arnold Schwarzenneger's films make more money that Fellini's or Visconti's (or their successors), without any correction, the former will simply suffocate the latter till they eventually go down the drain. Which they did !
Same thing goes with music. Canadians who can make it big on the worldwide scene will go to America anyway (e.g. C-e-accent-aigu-line Dion). So why not take a few bucks from Christina Aguilera to help Diane Tell finish her next album ?
Thomas Miconi
I read French fluently,
:-)
Congratulations. Ever tried Marcel Proust ?
but I've never had the need to type French accents on the computer,
Be warned that it may make your prose somewhat difficult to read.
so never have learned how to input them (any my keyboard sure isn't French).
The most important accented letter in French is "E with acute accent". Windows allows you to produce it by typing Ctrl-Alt-e (at least with UK layout).
(SUBLIMINAL MESSAGE TO LINUX CODERS)And it would be damn nice if I could do the same, not necessarily in any linux app, but at least with KDE/Gnome
Thomas Miconi
Too bad world leaders ignore a 2-millenia old teaching in favor of killing, greed and jealousy.
Indeed, the "2-millenia old teaching" I assume you're referring to (i.e. the collection of oral traditions collectively known as "The Bible", which was actually a continuous work from the 2nd millenium BC to the 5th century AD) does favor killing, greed and jealousy. Oh, and sexism and racial hatred too !
I just can't get where Christians got their "loving God" stuff from, but it's certainly not from the Old Testament. The Bible is a long compendium of slaughters, most of them being comitted ad majorem Dei gloriam. Ever read the Books of Kings ?
The Arabs did not invent anything. Waging Djihad and stoning blasphemers and adulteres comes directly from good old Moses. The difference between the East and the West right now simply comes from the fact that the West managed to break the bounds of Religion. The East didn't.
Thomas Miconi
Ask Slashdot: "How should I raise my children ?"
After I saw that I just can't wait for the "Ask Slashdot : How can I date more ?" story...
(Now back to my pr0n dl... what, only 653 megs retrieved ?)
Thomas Miconi
I never quite managed to grasp how exactly shipping a web browser or a media player was a problem. I mean, should we prevent them from bundling Wordpad and Calc as well ?! Or even the whole graphical interface, because it prevents competition with other window managers ? "We thereby require the defendant to only ship single system disks !"
Microsoft uses its monopoly position in the OS market to push their products ? Sure, but then the Right Thing would be to address their OS monopoly in the first place !
Slapping them on the hand for shipping Explorer or WMP is like addressing pollution by forcing industrial plants to give away gas masks to the population !
Thomas Miconi
Property rights essentially appeared at the same time as the Agricultural Revolution about twelve to fifteen thousand years ago.
Property rights appeared at the same time as the animal brain.
Ever tried to nick a chunk of meat from a dog that's eating it ?
Not to mention the way most animals defend their territory (including insects)
And as far as superior mammals go, the first appearance of abstract property rights (i.e. an entity that is defended even though it's not immediately being used) came up with social clans and dominating males - the "property" being females.
Not that it has changed much, btw, if you consider how most "cultures" of the world treat women.
Thomas Miconi
Noooooo - btw I really think we should restore death penalty for abortion, homosexuality and blasphemy.
Thomas Miconi
Say what you want about Bush killing jobs, it doesn't even compare with the French enforcing a 35-hour max workweek
The 35h work week was the first significant reform by Lionel Jospin.
Under his 5 years government, unemployment fell down 35%.
To oust him out of office, the conservative party launched an all-out media attack on insecurity, immigration, the usual populist far-right stuff. Result : Chirac won, the local fascist puppet came second, Jospin third. Wow, big surprise.
Now after having applied their recipes (lower taxes for the rich, higher indirect taxes for the poor) for a year and half, they found that France, once the economic locomotive of Europe, has become a laggard.
The 35 hour work week (which never made it to most small businesses anyway) is an ideal scapegoat.
Guess what : Economy is not an exact science.
Thomas Miconi