Well, it is Hydroptère, and have a look at images from 2009 when they broke the 100 km/h barrier over 500m. Here is the "records" page of the official site. They plan to dash through the Pacific Ocean with that boat...

Not just the far right.

He strangely but really generates fanacism among his supporters, suppress their brain and have them vote for him. Very strange to witness first handedly. And quite frightening.

The heavy use of so called "sondages qualitatifs" (quality-driven polls ?) has surely something to do with it. Never has a president so much relied on them: he just chooses a somewhat homegeneous audience and delivers a targetted message to them, one that will suit them very well. After that, he can nearly say what he wants on other matters, they will vote for him.

#1 target group: old people, do not really know anything about the Internet, feel frightened, think the young guys of their time were better. They vote for him much more than the average Frenchman. To put it another way: it just work.

Not all French politic personnel is equal. Mitterand, or Jospin, of even Chirac, independently of what you think of them, have not spent all their time in power to create or amend a law each time someting nasty occured. And many current opponents to Sarkozy would not do that either. I bet even tightwing députés are fed up with so many laws. Most of Sarkozy's laws have never been enacted, by the way: neither French administration nor even Sarko's own governement can cope with such an amount of baddly written (and badly thought) laws.

Do not put all politicians in the same bag please.

... and I really get accustomed to it.

It is the firt time I find the multi-virtual-desktop thing usable : it becomes very practical to setup multiple virtual desktops for so many different tasks, and it is nice.

I had to customise it a little though, with the folowing extensions, right out from the https://extensions.gnome.org/ website :
- Coverflow Alt-Tab : Replacement of Alt-Tab, iterates through windows in a cover-flow manner.
- Dash Click Fix : Fix the dash's behavior when you click on an already running icon. The default behaviour is to switch to it, this extension changes that to lanch a new instance instead
- Places Status Indicator : Add a systems status menu for quickly navigating places in the system
- Power Options : Show Suspend, Hibernate (if available) and Power Off options in user menu.
- Remove Accesibility : Remove the accesibility button from the top panel.
- System Monitor : Add a system monitor to the left side of the message tray.

Hardware / software base : Debian "Wheezy" (testing) on a high end full HD laptop with an external monitor attached to it sometimes.
Usage : web / email / some games / office work / platform prototyping with virtual machines, modelling.

The external display behaves like a charm (with really minor glitches : le login screen will somtimes not appear properly if the monitor gets plugged off before one unlocks the screen, but it still work).
I miss the cube. I miss a screensaver, I miss the capacity to change windows themes and colours and the "control pannel" lacks several usefull features, but overall, it is very usable and properly translated in French.

And they are especially put at use when winter bites, so the net CO2 emission scheme may not be as brilliant as die Grünen would like to put it. Meanwhile, France can only blame herself: EDF (Electricité de France) has promoted electric heating so much that peak demand cannot be provided by EDF... Similarly, we have seen a huge push for electric cooling systems in the last years (you will not feel warm nor cold with the Electricity Fairy !) wich also induces high peak demand when the Nuclear Plants are providing less electricity (many are closed for maintenance, and the rivers are warm and low, so the plants must tread light on water supply). Strange to see how brilliant polytechnicians can make stupid blunders.

The Monge is an big scientific vessel from the French navy, conceived to track ICBM missiles during their re-entry phase and provide precise telemetry for validation purposes. Have a look there (in French) : http://www.meretmarine.com/article.cfm?id=117220

I think this one at least has been already put forward, and the answer is "not possible" because hull pressure wasn't engineered to be the same as the ISS and furthermore, the shuttle leaks air too fast (by design) compared to the ISS. It isn't a problem for 2 weeks missions, but it's a liability for becoming part of a station designed to spend years up there as air tight as possible.

Yes, you're absolutely right. My comment was written to answer all previous people who wrote along the line "no problem, KSplice is GPL anyway, RedHat can pickup where Oracle left". Well, no, it's not that simple. It may happen, but the human factor tops by a large margin the software factor. At this rate, it's also possible Linus includes self-healing capabilities in the kernel someday - it may happen. But right now, all the people depending on KSplice are in the situation of TV sets owners when the cable company goes under : whatever your make and model of TV, no broadcast equals no image.

This case highlights very well the limits of GPL, and at large, Open source. The value of K-Splice isn't in the code - once you know what it does, it's not really complicated to duplicate its behavior. The value of Ksplice is in the commitment from the parent company to provide the patches to the kernel K Splice will apply. This suppose to have a team to track security advisories, study patches, test how they perform, sometimes write a bit of wrapping code around and release those patches as Kernel modules KSplice can then insmod in the kernel. In short, KSplice is more a full time security response team than a GPL software. By itself, KSplice does nothing. RedHat can fork the software, but it then needs to provide the people to feed it.

Still a beta of course, I said the world was "coming" to an end, not that the universe had divided by zero.

Then Linux 64 bits native Adobe Flash Reader

And Finally the HURD...

The world is coming to an end !

... please voluntarily surrender your geek card immediately. Failure to comply will result in termination of your account with extreme prejudice.

TIA