It would be nice to share some interesting links and opinions.

>> People who smoke "Gitanes"... You need to brush up your French studies, smoking "gitanes" was mostly done during my father youth and I am 56 years old ;-)

I think it's the X25 network that will be unplugged.
It's a lot of years there is no Minitel (the terminal) in use in France: Most terminals were built in the 80' or at the latest in the 90'. There was an emulator for PC on Internet mostly for for B2B users.
The sad thing is that France still uses pay per use on Internet even on Broadband. There are some websites that provide content only if the user agrees to pay a premium on it's Telco operator bill. And the is an opt-out option so many users are scared when they are told they "made Minitel" when in fact they didn't. A link in French (sorry, but it's just to prove my point) http://assistance.orange.fr/des-connexions-minitel-sur-votre-facture-3217.php

I am sorry to have no moderator points at the moment. I completly agree with you about /. being now mostly a place were people push their agenda, I can bear corporate or even Web site's submissions (discovery, universetoday) in need of click flow but political agenda against other countries is very ugly. LIke you I came here for science discussion not for stupid submissions that have nothing to do with the /. motto "stuff that matters".

I am really sorry to not have any mode points, I would have give you "insightful"

[humour]
Why not the hammer, or the screwdriver instead of the PC as a democratic tool for everyone, for experimentation, self-expression, learning?
[/humour]
[seriously]
I don't understand what you mean.
[/seriously]

Why posting as AC? This attitude toward users and needs seems to me very healthy. And it may have much more in your reflection that is visible on the surface, such as the reference to IT instead to PC. IT may be dying as a mass industry that users never found very satisfying. I doubt that PC will ever die at least because we need PC for spreadshhets, word processors and industrial computing appliance.

There is no such tax at all at the moment. President Sarkozy told to the press that this kind of tax could exist in the future. This means the government has to propose a law which it hadn't, that the parliament vote for it (there are at least two turns between the two houses if every PM agrees which is highly unlikely, and otherwise many turns until an agreement is reached) and finally that the government fund the law which means the chance that such a law would be implemented in very low.

Seriously, some people would also have some problems with the test you propose. Perhaps what you depict is (1) an intelligence test (2) for people that work in university, not real life people. I think we now have another more urgent problem than defining when a machine is quite human like, namely what is an human exactly? If you define being a human as being sociable with concrete contributions then perhaps the Turing test is not the best one but it's a starting point.

I don't know for Danish but I find Norwegian or Icelandic souding incredibly beautiful. Some kind of bird language. Unfortunately I don't understand either language.

Are you sure the USSR saw it as a competition to go to the moon? If there was a competition, they never made that kind of statement to my knowledge. And there was not one single organisation in USSR to manage the Space business, and it was not supervised by the army or some similar extraordinary agency. Perhaps they were completly baffled by the NASA Space program as were many US scientists at that time: "Lee A. DuBridge, Presidential Science Advisor, expressed the scientists' viewpoint in congressional testimony on the FY 1970 NASA budget: "Nothing can do more harm to support for the space program than to have a series of missions for which there are no clear objectives"

It's true that we need doctors and engineers (I am an R&D engineer) but I am constantly astonished by the number of persons working in R&D or simply sitting behind a computer at large companies, banks or administrations. By first hand in my company I know that many computerized workplaces are pure joke where there are workflows but people still print orders and send them to colleagues by the internal snail mail. I also saw many times scientist writing scientific paper during a meeting on another subject. There are even shops that can write a paper for you if your ideas are not clear, you just have to send them an hugly canvas and they write a paper that will be accepted in most conferences on the topic. So I wonder if someone can kindly point out me academic papers showing that education higher improves the wealth of a nation. In fact I would be happy if someone could find a paper schowing that having a very high percentage of "knowledge workers" actually slow down the economy ;-)