Over here in Europe this was 'big news' a few months ago (I live in Belgium).
The problem over here was that Swift provided the CIA with access to the banking transactions and allegedly personal data from all EU citizens. They could do this because Swift also has a datacentre in the USA (because this data is very precious it has to be duplicated in geographically different areas).
At least that's how I remember it to be reported.
One of the things also mentioned was that the EU could not/would not do the same against American citizens, perhaps out of fear?
To my knowledge, the last report about it stated that the data-transaction to the American government had not stopped, since then the (small) mediastorm has passed over and nobody cares anymore.
I'm sorry if my post seemed as if I was trying to be an expert on economics. I am obviously not(never had any in my life), I just know the things I read sometimes on wikipedia and in articles (hah, what a credible source I got there).
Also, I didn't mean to argue any living standards, which can be debated endlessly. I hope it is clear to everyone that both unions have advantages and disadvantages but that in the end it's pretty much equal. I guess I forgot about that because the parent of my original post argued population power and the likes.
I hope that next time I can resist the urge to post about something I don't know anything about:)
Dispite all this, the U.S. economy does appear to be growing at a faster rate than Europe's, and has been for some time. And the innovation thing is just guessing away, in my humble opinion, the US is still a world leader concerning research.
Asia _is_ growing at a fierce rate, maybe more than the western nations combined (haven't checked the numbers)
(btw, I'm from Europe, no bias there)
One step forward!
on
Photosynth Demo
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· Score: 4, Interesting
At least now someone at Microsoft seems to know _what_ to buy, this is some pretty amazing technology. I just hope that someday it will be available to other OS'es too.
Heh, as stated in the summary, Windows has been able to take advantage of multiple cores
for quite some time now. This is best seen by the fact that if you have more than one core and you look at the Task Manager, both cores will usually be doing something.
I also believe some of it's subprocesses are able to take advantage of a multi-core system. But perhaps not _all_ subsystems. Maybe that's what they want to do now?
Or perhaps you weren't being serious, in that case the joke was lost on me. Sorry for that, then.
I'm pretty sure he meant the creationist types, who surely are still an (albeit influential) minority. For instance, I'm a christian, because my parents were and I'm not particulary attracted to atheïsm, as are many of my friends. As long as there is no scientifical evidence that something other than an inexplainable force was responsible for the creation of our universe, I'll stick where I am.
(I don't live in the US though, more like the other side of the pond, and then just a tad further)
Mod parent up,
I know for a fact that many universities over here (Belgium) employ protocol scanning methods to stop any p2p sharing methods right in their tracks. It's a royal pain in the ass to download just about anything interesting over here, yet I still seem to reach my 5 Gb limit with no problem...
(Yes, I know about torrent encoded streams etc, but 95% of the student body does not, and I'm not pulling that one nearly as much out of my ass)
Actually, the Russians are with 142,400,000 people. You must be thinking of the former Soviet Union, which had nearly 300 million (293,047,571). Also, the population of Russia is steadily declining.
Conversion of heat into any other type of energy achieves it's maximum at 33% (the other 66% heats up the environment, according to the Laws of Thermodynamics). Arguably, these laws have not been proven, and they can't ever be proven. But they have been unchanged for quite some time now. A breakthrough like this would not go unnoticed and thanks to my thermodynamics professor I would be the first one to hear about it (he's a nut about engines). So I think that part of the article is something someone tried to spike in to give the engine more of a wow-factor
Slashdot Mirror
Over here in Europe this was 'big news' a few months ago (I live in Belgium).
The problem over here was that Swift provided the CIA with access to the banking transactions and allegedly personal data from all EU citizens. They could do this because Swift also has a datacentre in the USA (because this data is very precious it has to be duplicated in geographically different areas).
At least that's how I remember it to be reported.
One of the things also mentioned was that the EU could not/would not do the same against American citizens, perhaps out of fear?
To my knowledge, the last report about it stated that the data-transaction to the American government had not stopped, since then the (small) mediastorm has passed over and nobody cares anymore.
I'm sorry if my post seemed as if I was trying to be an expert on economics. I am obviously not(never had any in my life), I just know the things I read sometimes on wikipedia and in articles (hah, what a credible source I got there).
:)
Also, I didn't mean to argue any living standards, which can be debated endlessly. I hope it is clear to everyone that both unions have advantages and disadvantages but that in the end it's pretty much equal. I guess I forgot about that because the parent of my original post argued population power and the likes.
I hope that next time I can resist the urge to post about something I don't know anything about
Dispite all this, the U.S. economy does appear to be growing at a faster rate than Europe's, and has been for some time. And the innovation thing is just guessing away, in my humble opinion, the US is still a world leader concerning research. Asia _is_ growing at a fierce rate, maybe more than the western nations combined (haven't checked the numbers) (btw, I'm from Europe, no bias there)
At least now someone at Microsoft seems to know _what_ to buy, this is some pretty amazing technology. I just hope that someday it will be available to other OS'es too.
Heh, as stated in the summary, Windows has been able to take advantage of multiple cores for quite some time now. This is best seen by the fact that if you have more than one core and you look at the Task Manager, both cores will usually be doing something. I also believe some of it's subprocesses are able to take advantage of a multi-core system. But perhaps not _all_ subsystems. Maybe that's what they want to do now? Or perhaps you weren't being serious, in that case the joke was lost on me. Sorry for that, then.
I'm pretty sure he meant the creationist types, who surely are still an (albeit influential) minority. For instance, I'm a christian, because my parents were and I'm not particulary attracted to atheïsm, as are many of my friends. As long as there is no scientifical evidence that something other than an inexplainable force was responsible for the creation of our universe, I'll stick where I am. (I don't live in the US though, more like the other side of the pond, and then just a tad further)
Mod parent up, I know for a fact that many universities over here (Belgium) employ protocol scanning methods to stop any p2p sharing methods right in their tracks. It's a royal pain in the ass to download just about anything interesting over here, yet I still seem to reach my 5 Gb limit with no problem... (Yes, I know about torrent encoded streams etc, but 95% of the student body does not, and I'm not pulling that one nearly as much out of my ass)
Actually, the Russians are with 142,400,000 people. You must be thinking of the former Soviet Union, which had nearly 300 million (293,047,571). Also, the population of Russia is steadily declining.
It stills doesn't make any sense (admittedly, I am an European).
Conversion of heat into any other type of energy achieves it's maximum at 33% (the other 66% heats up the environment, according to the Laws of Thermodynamics). Arguably, these laws have not been proven, and they can't ever be proven. But they have been unchanged for quite some time now. A breakthrough like this would not go unnoticed and thanks to my thermodynamics professor I would be the first one to hear about it (he's a nut about engines). So I think that part of the article is something someone tried to spike in to give the engine more of a wow-factor