(PS: More seriously, the man seems to be called Alex Serge-Vieux. Never heard about him, but if his credentials are genuine, we can say two things: 1) He's probably not the most stupid manager on this planet (Paris-Dauphine and La Sorbonne means "good", especially if it's on the teaching side of the desk; same thing for Le Monde). 2) His political inclinations seem to lean on the center-left. He served as a top civil servant under Socialist governments only. In the French system, this speaks a lot.
Am I the only one here to think that maybe they're actually doing this for the very reasons they quote - i.e. they're scared to death at the idea of being associated with all these net-paedophiles stuff ?
Clueless journalists are just as dangerous for MS as they are for others (note: I'm talking from the UK, homeland of such some monuments of fair, objective et reliable reporting as The Sun). They've seen those stories about paedophiles "hunting" over the internet, and they know how 'sensitive' the public is about anything related to paedophilia (Britain is also the place were angry mobs assaulted a doctor's house because they confused the word 'Paediatrician' with 'Paedophile').
This may be a much more compelling reason than locking out a few thousands 3rd party clients.
The Dead always got it - they made far more money touring than by selling records.
Some artists like touring and giving concerts. Others don't. Not to mention music styles where concerts are just a bad idea (purely computer-based music comes to mind).
Not to mention the fact that for most musicians, making real money out of touring and concerts means giving 2/300 gigs a year. Even for artists who are impressive on stage, this is not always an option.
I don't think people like Bjork or even Radiohead (who explicitly accept song swapping - up to a point) would have been better off in a world without records/copyrights/labels at all.
You heard about his work "through the grapewine" (friends, press, TV, etc.), you couldn't bother to go to the bookstore, so you just downloaded one of his creations (book / song). You like it, you download the rest. You don't like it, you delete the file and it's over. In any case, the guy doesn't reap any money at all.
I'm sorry, but I tend to think that today, this is the most common use of p2p - at least for music. Maybe this is less true for books, because reading stuff on a screen (or even on an e-book) is still not as comfortable as the good old paper codex.
But as far as music is concerned, p2p makes things so much easier and more conveninent (and cheaper !), it's just obvious that the artist will see less money coming at the end. No one denies that, not even people in the article. What they say is that the RIAA are just making fools of themselves. The basic idea is: "We can't suppress it, so let's try to find a way to use it". This is what the RIAA doesn't seem to get.
We don't NEED publishers, record labels and their various executives anymore, do we? Self-publishing and self-recording is now simple and cheap to do.
Indeed. And yet musicians continue working with big corporations, and "being signed" on a major label is still regarded as something good for an artist. So what is the problem here ? Is it just that the artists are stupid ? Do big music companies hypnotize musicians into signing their contracts ?
The answer is that major labels do provide an invaluable service to musicians : exposure ! The bigger a company is, the more money it can use to advertise its "products" (in this case, the bands).
Of course it is possible to achive some degree of worldwide exposure without using the power of big labels (think Ani DiFranco). But this is more an exception than a rule (and even so, I doubt Ani DiFranco sold more than a few thousands albums out of the US).
Sure, P2P can be a very efficient promotional tool. But nothing can quite replace the deep pockets and professional know-how of EMI or Universal. If these companies didn't provide any valuable service, do you really think artists would give up the rights to their work so easily ?
Insanely rich universities offering bursaries for foreign graduate students made me move to Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK.
But for me the problem is reverse: These universities get their money by imposing (huge) fees on students, something that I could simply not accept in my country. In France money comes from the government, and it's allocated to the best students according to their rank at the end of their undergraduate studies (the good old French meritocracy). So when you're the 6th on the list, and only the 5 best get a grant, you're, well, stuck.
So I must admit I feel a bit guilty - but then again, Britain being a democracy, those people actually chose to pay for higher education so that their universities can hire lazy foreign students like me:-)
> and cute girls with British accents
Now I'd really like to know where you find those ("In a bar at 3am after 5 pints of Snakebite and Black" does not count).
Would someone please remind the federal government that DOS attacks are illegal? Anyone want to encourage them to take action against these people? Can they stop playing golf long enough to do their job?
Would someone please remind the federal government that ^H^H^Hdownloading copyrighted stuff without permission from the copyright owner is illegal? Anyone want to encourage them to take action against these people? Can they stop playing golf long enough to do their job?
(Uh, for some reason I'm not sure this one will make it to +4 insightful. Funny, that)
This isn't the first time Japan is doing one of these long term plans. I watched a program a few years back explaining that japan had several plans like this
In fact this seems to be a reccurrent fad in Japan. A long time ago (somewhere in the 80s I think) they had decided to build a "real" AI system, or more precisely (?) a "5th generation computer" - think "HAL9000".
As usual with Japan, the objective was to take up bits and pieces from everywhere in the world (MIT and Stanford's AI concepts, the French language PROLOG, etc..), and to improve on them through sheer investment and massive human work.
It is quite possible that this 5th generation computer was the biggest piece of vaporware in history.
It's not a mutant. They inserted human chromosomes into a rabbit *egg* cell. Only the mitochondrial DNA (the one that is provided by the egg, comes from the mother, and has little to do with heredity as a whole) came from the rabbit.
Why is this important ? Well, because the ability to make valid human stem-cells from animal egg cells would remove one of the most troubling objections to human stem cell research : right now, the only valid egg cells for human cloning are human eggs - aka ovules. These must be obtained from real women, which leads to technical and ethical problems (I know that in the US selling ovules is already common practice but in Europe things are quite different). At any rate, a woman can only produce one egg per month, so this is a poorly productive method.
(The other solution for obtaining stem cells is to suppress the cloning phase and to directly take existing human stem cells out of embryos - there again, moral problems arise if commercial forces are ever allowed in this game).
Making human stem cells with animal eggs suppress most of these problems. The only big problem that remains is simply that so far, it didn't work. Now these people claim that they have made "mostly human" stem cells with rabbit eggs, but will they have the same capacitie as purely human stem cells ? Could the mitochondrial (rabbit) DNA interfere with the functioning of the cell ? These are the important questions now. According to this article, the paper seems to address none of them.
If a fetus isn't a human, then point to any human alive or ever lived, and tell me if it was ever a fetus, then try and explain to me how a fetus is not a human.
Point to any living human that never was a given amount of various carbon compounds and minerals, plus gases and a lot of water (which were put together both by the process of human reproduction and by lifetime development).
Does this mean that any sufficient mix of carbon compounds, minerals, gases and water should be called a human ?
BTW, don't know about the US, but the maximal abortion delay is 12 weeks in France, 22 in the Netherlands and the UK.
Similarly with gay marriages quite a number of officials from the Catholic church said that any politicians who allowed gay marriages would burn in hell. Prime Minister Cretien said that his first duty was as Prime Minister and is in the process of allowing them
His name is actually "Chretien" (with an accent on the e but/. doesn't like that), which means, guess what ? "Christian".
Something has to get the US off it's fat ass, and if it won't, someone else needs to carry the torch of science and progress into space.
It won't be us.
European space activity is essentially 50% France and 30% Germany (not because they're smarter, just because the French have more experience with aeronautics and the Germans represent 1/3 of European economy).
Both of these countries are simply out of money. Broke. Nothing, nada, niente, rien, nichts.
So they're cutting out. France recently announced an unprecedented cut in science credits (they call it a "freeze" - yeah sure !)
I'm afraid the first man on mars will probably not speak my language.:-)
The huge glaring flow in the US system is the fact that it is done in one single turn.
When it comes to naming individuals (e.g. presidents), most countries use a 2-turns system. Usually, you can have as many runners as you want for the first round (16 at the last French election), then only the 2 highest scores are selected for the second round.
This means that all ideas can be represented at the election, and influence the big parties, without hindering their chances.In a 2-turn election, Ralph Nader would have been ejected at the first round, and the world's future would not depend on a man that watches Korea through closed binoculars !
Yet Nader's score would have prompted Al Gore to make small changes in his program in order to reap some of Nader's voters. Everyone would be happy: the most popular candidate wins, but the minority candidates can still express their views and actually influence government.
This system has one big default, however: it is so efficient that people tend to rely too much on it. E.g. in the French election, 99% of voters were absolutely certain that the 2nd round would bring the good old traditional Center-Left vs Center-Right showdown (Jospin-Chirac in that case), so many people didn't even care to vote. This is even more true for center-left voters, because their candidate (Lionel Jospin) was leading in the polls for the 2nd round.
And then they (we) saw Jean-Marie Le Pen's face on TV that night...
Ever heard about those people who buy highly sophisticated cars with all security options and then start driving like devils out of their boxes, thinking that with such a safe car you don't need to be careful anymore ? One day or another, they end up bumping into a tree or a wall. The 2-turns direct voting system is a very safe car. But the French are notorious for being awful drivers.
As their names indicate, a server is something that provides a service, while a client is something that requests this service. It has nothing to do with physical location of the process.
In a GUI system, the client is the X program, because it requests services (displaying, transmitting keystrokes and mouse clicks, etc..) from the X11 server.
Obviously the X Server will almost always be running on your machine, because its goal is to display things in front of your eyes (unless you're trying to mess up with someone else's display - xlocking a friend's screen is fun:o), but the client (i.e. the program that requests displaying service from your server) can be running on anything anywhere as long as it has an internet connection.
You know, anyone can make mistakes, but please, next time you'll accuse guys who wrote such a thing as the X-Window system (most of them being MIT grads btw) of being confused about computing concepts, please, please check your facts.
The reason is simple: Moby's music would be considered by many "alternative" and consequently
it doesn't get a lot (any) air play.
Man, I don't know in your country, but here Moby's music has been shoved down everybody's ears more than anything from Britney Spears or Celine Dion (and that's saying a lot). Almost all tracks on "Play" have been chosen as musical backgrounds for TV ads or shows.
Everybody here know at least two or three tunes by Moby - even those who never heard about Moby at all.
Say what you want about his analysis, what he says sounds highly plausible - and this is only the beginning. The future looks pretty dim: either you make songs for middle-class people with internet access and knowledge, and you're shafted because they use P2P, or you make songs for th third world (a la Manu Chao) and you still get shafted because they just use the ancestor of filesharing - good old tape copy. We are going full steam ahead towards a world in which merchandising will be the only way you can make any money at all as a mainstream artist.
(Yeah, I know, I'm somewhat exaggerating. People will always buy music on physical supports. But they'll sure as hell buy way less than they do today.)
Thomas Miconi Slashdot Grade: a military-like rank in the geek community, estimated fter the number of digits on one's Slashdot ID number (ranging from6: Peon to 1: God).
The same problem (including the front14.org site, who got more publicity than it could ever dream of thanks to these affairs - but that's another matter) was brought to court recently in France.
The judge decided not to decide anything; basically, he chose to let the ISPs decide for themselves, what they should do with these sites. "Block it or not, you decide." Quite sensible, IMHO.
The disciple of Solomon who made that non-decision was judge Gomez, the same guy who orderd Yahoo to block access to Nazi-related auctions from French machines.
All in all, that doesn't change much, and the recent moves by the EU on that subject don't help either. At the end of the day, the only truth is that since the 1st amendment exists in the US, it now de facto exists everywhere in the world, and that the only thing that can go against it is financial threat (e.g. Yahoo who removed Nazi auctions altogether for fear that their assets in France could be at risk).
Oh strange new World, with such an Internet in't !
That's simply not true. The US has a smaller population than the EU (285M [census.gov] and 376M [www.scb.se]) and a proportionally smaller public sector (the EU tax burden is 41.5%, US 29% [umanitoba.ca]).
The real root of the matter is that the EU has far too many politicians, bureaucrats and civil servants, too much money, and too little idea or inclination to do anything other than expand their role.
The real root of the matter is that you don't know what you're talking about.
The EU is trying very hard to push freer markets (including diminishing the public service's wheight) down national government's throats. National governments and national populations are the real obstacle to massive deregulation (Britain being, unsurprisingly, an exception).
Simple answer: Because we're an order of magnitude bigger.
About 4.5 times bigger, more precisely (60 million inhbts).
BTW, isn't this a reason why you kept the federal model instead of becoming a big nation-state ?
What I mean is this: this e-government stuff should really happen at the state level. France is famous for being an embodiment of the good old nation-state, but the federal nature of the United States of America seems to lend itself pretty well to e-government, state by state.
Think about it: of all the bureaucratic stuff you must deal with as an American, how much has to do with local institutions (state, county or city), and how much is related to the federal government ?
Actually this would make it much more manageable in the US than in France. The population of South Dakota is two full orders of magnitude lower than that of France, isn't it ? (It is; I checked)
Thomas Miconi,
French.
PS: BTW, this has nothing to do with a gigantic web-database. The French are extremely sensitive when it comes to data privacy. The idea is more about replacing the counter than the data storage itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't find the "-1 Too Intelligent, Please Go Away" button !
Thomas Miconi-
A big net of connected nodes. Inputs coming from plants. Switches. Hmmm.
You don't need much more to make a universal computer (i.e. somthing equivalent to a Turing machine).
Just be sure that a correctly guided surge of power can operate switch, i.e. change the direction of other another electric stream.
The input being plants, to perform a computation, you'd just have to blow up a few of them in order to provide the desired input.
Then just watch the cities of northern america twinkle like a biiiig game of Life !
Thomas Miconi
Damn ! He's at it again ! Jean Marie, won't you ever learn ???
Thomas Miconi-
(PS: More seriously, the man seems to be called Alex Serge-Vieux. Never heard about him, but if his credentials are genuine, we can say two things:
1) He's probably not the most stupid manager on this planet (Paris-Dauphine and La Sorbonne means "good", especially if it's on the teaching side of the desk; same thing for Le Monde).
2) His political inclinations seem to lean on the center-left. He served as a top civil servant under Socialist governments only. In the French system, this speaks a lot.
Am I the only one here to think that maybe they're actually doing this for the very reasons they quote - i.e. they're scared to death at the idea of being associated with all these net-paedophiles stuff ?
Clueless journalists are just as dangerous for MS as they are for others (note: I'm talking from the UK, homeland of such some monuments of fair, objective et reliable reporting as The Sun). They've seen those stories about paedophiles "hunting" over the internet, and they know how 'sensitive' the public is about anything related to paedophilia (Britain is also the place were angry mobs assaulted a doctor's house because they confused the word 'Paediatrician' with 'Paedophile').
This may be a much more compelling reason than locking out a few thousands 3rd party clients.
Thomas Miconi-
Open, Save, Bold, Italic, Print and Spell check
:-)
I suppose the funny part was that he forgot "Close" ?
Thomas Miconi-
The Dead always got it - they made far more money touring than by selling records.
Some artists like touring and giving concerts. Others don't. Not to mention music styles where concerts are just a bad idea (purely computer-based music comes to mind).
Not to mention the fact that for most musicians, making real money out of touring and concerts means giving 2/300 gigs a year. Even for artists who are impressive on stage, this is not always an option.
I don't think people like Bjork or even Radiohead (who explicitly accept song swapping - up to a point) would have been better off in a world without records/copyrights/labels at all.
Thomas Miconi
=============
Strangely, you forgot the last option:
You heard about his work "through the grapewine" (friends, press, TV, etc.), you couldn't bother to go to the bookstore, so you just downloaded one of his creations (book / song). You like it, you download the rest. You don't like it, you delete the file and it's over. In any case, the guy doesn't reap any money at all.
I'm sorry, but I tend to think that today, this is the most common use of p2p - at least for music. Maybe this is less true for books, because reading stuff on a screen (or even on an e-book) is still not as comfortable as the good old paper codex.
But as far as music is concerned, p2p makes things so much easier and more conveninent (and cheaper !), it's just obvious that the artist will see less money coming at the end. No one denies that, not even people in the article. What they say is that the RIAA are just making fools of themselves. The basic idea is: "We can't suppress it, so let's try to find a way to use it". This is what the RIAA doesn't seem to get.
Thomas Miconi
=============
We don't NEED publishers, record labels and their various executives anymore, do we? Self-publishing and self-recording is now simple and cheap to do.
Indeed. And yet musicians continue working with big corporations, and "being signed" on a major label is still regarded as something good for an artist. So what is the problem here ? Is it just that the artists are stupid ? Do big music companies hypnotize musicians into signing their contracts ?
The answer is that major labels do provide an invaluable service to musicians : exposure ! The bigger a company is, the more money it can use to advertise its "products" (in this case, the bands).
Of course it is possible to achive some degree of worldwide exposure without using the power of big labels (think Ani DiFranco). But this is more an exception than a rule (and even so, I doubt Ani DiFranco sold more than a few thousands albums out of the US).
Sure, P2P can be a very efficient promotional tool. But nothing can quite replace the deep pockets and professional know-how of EMI or Universal. If these companies didn't provide any valuable service, do you really think artists would give up the rights to their work so easily ?
Thomas Miconi
=============
No need to wonder about who will reap the next IGNobel prize in biology... :-)
Thomas Miconi
=============
The only thing missing is that it was on FOX instead of The Onion.
I agree. This would have made the thing much more credible.
Thomas Miconi
=============
Insanely rich universities offering bursaries for foreign graduate students made me move to Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK.
:-)
But for me the problem is reverse: These universities get their money by imposing (huge) fees on students, something that I could simply not accept in my country. In France money comes from the government, and it's allocated to the best students according to their rank at the end of their undergraduate studies (the good old French meritocracy). So when you're the 6th on the list, and only the 5 best get a grant, you're, well, stuck.
So I must admit I feel a bit guilty - but then again, Britain being a democracy, those people actually chose to pay for higher education so that their universities can hire lazy foreign students like me
> and cute girls with British accents
Now I'd really like to know where you find those ("In a bar at 3am after 5 pints of Snakebite and Black" does not count).
Thomas Miconi
=============
Would someone please remind the federal government that DOS attacks are illegal? Anyone want to encourage them to take action against these people? Can they stop playing golf long enough to do their job?
Would someone please remind the federal government that ^H^H^Hdownloading copyrighted stuff without permission from the copyright owner is illegal? Anyone want to encourage them to take action against these people? Can they stop playing golf long enough to do their job?
(Uh, for some reason I'm not sure this one will make it to +4 insightful. Funny, that)
Thomas Miconi
=============
This isn't the first time Japan is doing one of these long term plans. I watched a program a few years back explaining that japan had several plans like this
In fact this seems to be a reccurrent fad in Japan. A long time ago (somewhere in the 80s I think) they had decided to build a "real" AI system, or more precisely (?) a "5th generation computer" - think "HAL9000".
As usual with Japan, the objective was to take up bits and pieces from everywhere in the world (MIT and Stanford's AI concepts, the French language PROLOG, etc..), and to improve on them through sheer investment and massive human work.
It is quite possible that this 5th generation computer was the biggest piece of vaporware in history.
Thomas Miconi
=============
It's not a mutant. They inserted human chromosomes into a rabbit *egg* cell. Only the mitochondrial DNA (the one that is provided by the egg, comes from the mother, and has little to do with heredity as a whole) came from the rabbit.
Why is this important ? Well, because the ability to make valid human stem-cells from animal egg cells would remove one of the most troubling objections to human stem cell research : right now, the only valid egg cells for human cloning are human eggs - aka ovules. These must be obtained from real women, which leads to technical and ethical problems (I know that in the US selling ovules is already common practice but in Europe things are quite different). At any rate, a woman can only produce one egg per month, so this is a poorly productive method.
(The other solution for obtaining stem cells is to suppress the cloning phase and to directly take existing human stem cells out of embryos - there again, moral problems arise if commercial forces are ever allowed in this game).
Making human stem cells with animal eggs suppress most of these problems. The only big problem that remains is simply that so far, it didn't work. Now these people claim that they have made "mostly human" stem cells with rabbit eggs, but will they have the same capacitie as purely human stem cells ? Could the mitochondrial (rabbit) DNA interfere with the functioning of the cell ? These are the important questions now. According to this article, the paper seems to address none of them.
Thomas Miconi
=============
If a fetus isn't a human, then point to any human alive or ever lived, and tell me if it was ever a fetus, then try and explain to me how a fetus is not a human.
Point to any living human that never was a given amount of various carbon compounds and minerals, plus gases and a lot of water (which were put together both by the process of human reproduction and by lifetime development).
Does this mean that any sufficient mix of carbon compounds, minerals, gases and water should be called a human ?
BTW, don't know about the US, but the maximal abortion delay is 12 weeks in France, 22 in the Netherlands and the UK.
Thomas Miconi
=============
Similarly with gay marriages quite a number of officials from the Catholic church said that any politicians who allowed gay marriages would burn in hell. Prime Minister Cretien said that his first duty was as Prime Minister and is in the process of allowing them
/. doesn't like that), which means, guess what ? "Christian".
His name is actually "Chretien" (with an accent on the e but
Thomas Miconi
Something has to get the US off it's fat ass, and if it won't, someone else needs to carry the torch of science and progress into space.
:-)
It won't be us.
European space activity is essentially 50% France and 30% Germany (not because they're smarter, just because the French have more experience with aeronautics and the Germans represent 1/3 of European economy).
Both of these countries are simply out of money. Broke. Nothing, nada, niente, rien, nichts.
So they're cutting out. France recently announced an unprecedented cut in science credits (they call it a "freeze" - yeah sure !)
I'm afraid the first man on mars will probably not speak my language.
Thomas Miconi
The huge glaring flow in the US system is the fact that it is done in one single turn.
...
When it comes to naming individuals (e.g. presidents), most countries use a 2-turns system.
Usually, you can have as many runners as you want for the first round (16 at the last French election), then only the 2 highest scores are selected for the second round.
This means that all ideas can be represented at the election, and influence the big parties, without hindering their chances.In a 2-turn election, Ralph Nader would have been ejected at the first round, and the world's future would not depend on a man that watches Korea through closed binoculars !
Yet Nader's score would have prompted Al Gore to make small changes in his program in order to reap some of Nader's voters. Everyone would be happy: the most popular candidate wins, but the minority candidates can still express their views and actually influence government.
This system has one big default, however: it is so efficient that people tend to rely too much on it. E.g. in the French election, 99% of voters were absolutely certain that the 2nd round would bring the good old traditional Center-Left vs Center-Right showdown (Jospin-Chirac in that case), so many people didn't even care to vote. This is even more true for center-left voters, because their candidate (Lionel Jospin) was leading in the polls for the 2nd round.
And then they (we) saw Jean-Marie Le Pen's face on TV that night
Ever heard about those people who buy highly sophisticated cars with all security options and then start driving like devils out of their boxes, thinking that with such a safe car you don't need to be careful anymore ? One day or another, they end up bumping into a tree or a wall. The 2-turns direct voting system is a very safe car. But the French are notorious for being awful drivers.
Thomas Miconi
Tssk tssk tssk tssk.
:o), but the client (i.e. the program that requests displaying service from your server) can be running on anything anywhere as long as it has an internet connection.
As their names indicate, a server is something that provides a service, while a client is something that requests this service. It has nothing to do with physical location of the process.
In a GUI system, the client is the X program, because it requests services (displaying, transmitting keystrokes and mouse clicks, etc..) from the X11 server.
Obviously the X Server will almost always be running on your machine, because its goal is to display things in front of your eyes (unless you're trying to mess up with someone else's display - xlocking a friend's screen is fun
You know, anyone can make mistakes, but please, next time you'll accuse guys who wrote such a thing as the X-Window system (most of them being MIT grads btw) of being confused about computing concepts, please, please check your facts.
Thomas Miconi
The reason is simple: Moby's music would be considered by many "alternative" and consequently it doesn't get a lot (any) air play.
Man, I don't know in your country, but here Moby's music has been shoved down everybody's ears more than anything from Britney Spears or Celine Dion (and that's saying a lot). Almost all tracks on "Play" have been chosen as musical backgrounds for TV ads or shows.
Everybody here know at least two or three tunes by Moby - even those who never heard about Moby at all.
Say what you want about his analysis, what he says sounds highly plausible - and this is only the beginning. The future looks pretty dim: either you make songs for middle-class people with internet access and knowledge, and you're shafted because they use P2P, or you make songs for th third world (a la Manu Chao) and you still get shafted because they just use the ancestor of filesharing - good old tape copy. We are going full steam ahead towards a world in which merchandising will be the only way you can make any money at all as a mainstream artist.
(Yeah, I know, I'm somewhat exaggerating. People will always buy music on physical supports. But they'll sure as hell buy way less than they do today.)
Thomas Miconi
Slashdot Grade: a military-like rank in the geek community, estimated fter the number of digits on one's Slashdot ID number (ranging from6: Peon to 1: God).
At this rate it's well on its way to becoming the Emacs of the browser world...
:o)
Oh boy, now that's some mozilla-bashing !
Thomas Miconi
The same problem (including the front14.org site, who got more publicity than it could ever dream of thanks to these affairs - but that's another matter) was brought to court recently in France.
The judge decided not to decide anything; basically, he chose to let the ISPs decide for themselves, what they should do with these sites. "Block it or not, you decide." Quite sensible, IMHO.
The disciple of Solomon who made that non-decision was judge Gomez, the same guy who orderd Yahoo to block access to Nazi-related auctions from French machines.
All in all, that doesn't change much, and the recent moves by the EU on that subject don't help either. At the end of the day, the only truth is that since the 1st amendment exists in the US, it now de facto exists everywhere in the world, and that the only thing that can go against it is financial threat (e.g. Yahoo who removed Nazi auctions altogether for fear that their assets in France could be at risk).
Oh strange new World, with such an Internet in't !
Thomas Miconi
That's simply not true. The US has a smaller population than the EU (285M [census.gov] and 376M [www.scb.se]) and a proportionally smaller public sector (the EU tax burden is 41.5%, US 29% [umanitoba.ca]).
The real root of the matter is that the EU has far too many politicians, bureaucrats and civil servants, too much money, and too little idea or inclination to do anything other than expand their role.
The real root of the matter is that you don't know what you're talking about.
The EU is trying very hard to push freer markets (including diminishing the public service's wheight) down national government's throats. National governments and national populations are the real obstacle to massive deregulation (Britain being, unsurprisingly, an exception).
And, guess what ? We're pretty happy with that.
Thomas Miconi
Simple answer: Because we're an order of magnitude bigger.
About 4.5 times bigger, more precisely (60 million inhbts).
BTW, isn't this a reason why you kept the federal model instead of becoming a big nation-state ?
What I mean is this: this e-government stuff should really happen at the state level. France is famous for being an embodiment of the good old nation-state, but the federal nature of the United States of America seems to lend itself pretty well to e-government, state by state.
Think about it: of all the bureaucratic stuff you must deal with as an American, how much has to do with local institutions (state, county or city), and how much is related to the federal government ?
Actually this would make it much more manageable in the US than in France. The population of South Dakota is two full orders of magnitude lower than that of France, isn't it ? (It is; I checked)
Thomas Miconi,
French.
PS: BTW, this has nothing to do with a gigantic web-database. The French are extremely sensitive when it comes to data privacy. The idea is more about replacing the counter than the data storage itself.
"Whoaaa, your new ultra-fast shoot'em up game really kicks ass !"
"Well, er, actually it's a port of Super Mario Bros I"
Thomas Miconi