You can't generalize about "Continental Europe". The Netherlands, for example, is very different from Greece when it comes to regulation and business climate. The EU has tried to reduce the differences, but they're still there and still pretty noticeable.

And these conditions in Greece are affordable and can continue indefinitely? Or is it just that you only care about yourself and not future generations?

There's no problem. If another company wishes to fight the bureaucracy of France and get bogged down, I'm fine with that. Let our competitors waste their resources while we do well in sane markets. All's good.

Well, you know, there isn't a balance. It doesn't have to be US-style slave-driving exploitation and it doesn't have to be Greek-style corruption, laziness and entitlement which can only end horribly.

I live and work in Canada. I own a small software company; I work about 40 hours a week as do my employees. We have a great work-life balance and we also live in a country where the economy is robust and not being driven into the ground by whinging whiners bleating about entitlement all the time.

The only fair way to do things? You mean the only way to run your economy into the ground. That attitude will turn France into another Greece and I'm not sure that's what you really want.

It's not just startups. Trying to do business in France is insane. The bureaucracy is nightmarish and I really suspect bidding processes are rigged. The labour laws are far too skewed towards workers and away from companies. I certainly don't believe in exploitation, but you need balance.

I run a small software company with customers all over the world, including North America, Europe, Australia and South Africa. We do very well in Europe except in France; that's a desert for us. We've basically given up because it's just too difficult to do business there, and we're happy enough to work with more business-friendly countries like the UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, etc.

Deaf and blind dogs lacking a sense of smell will most certainly have trouble catching a ball. And that's the situation we find ourselves in with respect to earthquakes: All the interesting activity takes place far beyond our ability to measure or even sense.

You don't have to completely understand the physics to make predictions, but when it comes to earthquakes we cannot even observe the important parts of the system that are precursors to earthquakes. In fact, understanding the physics is most likely not the problem... it's the inability to measure any useful variables that stymies us.

If you want a longer response, then I suggest you read a few books on geology and seismology. Earthquakes are far too poorly understood to be predictable and all the interesting events are happening tens or hundreds of kilometres underground with no feasible way to observe or measure them.

If you want a scientific paper, read this.

I was simply trying to save everybody time.

Heisenberg says that you may never be able to get enough of the right type of information.

Quantum Mechanics says some things cannot be predicted.

Betteridge's law.

I own a software business. Anything written during working hours, for which the author is compensated by me, belongs to me. End of story.

Now, I did sign a contract with one of my employees who had his own open-source project from before he joined the company. it basically said that whatever he worked on on his own time was his, as long as it didn't compete with any of our products.

Gah! /. should let you edit comments. s/crated/crater/ of course.

14000 km/h = 3889 m/s, so a 513kg craft crashing at that speed into a planet would need to dissipate 0.5 * 513 * 3889 * 3889 = 3.8 GJ of energy, or just under a ton of TNT. So yeah... the crated would probably be fairly impressive from close up.

Google is on to something, but the implementation is wrong. First of all, this facility should be built in to browsers, not added as an extension. Secondly, it needs to be generalized: Just as browsers currently ask "Would you like to save this username/password for www.somesite.example", they should also ask "Would you like to lock this username/password combination to www.somesite.example?" and offer the usual "Yes / No / Not now" choices.

If you say "Yes", then the browser should alert you every time it sees that password on a different site.