Nope, in France, employees get covered first. In fact, if there isn't enough money left in the coffers to pay everything they are owed, the unemployment department covers it. Basically, an employ gets paid the notice period, usually 1 to 3 months, plus a varying amount based on how long they were employed and if they were fired for fault or not. This amount is usually equal to anywhere from zero to 12 months of salary. Usually it is around to a 2-3 months of salary.

If a project like the LHC were really producing useful results, the free market would jump to fund it.

Actually, businesses rarely looks farther than 5 years in a business plan.
If a research project can't make a profit in that time, they don't pursue it.
The LHC took 10 years to build, from 1998 to 2008. Therefore nearly all of the physics research that has been performed and its resulting discoveries and breakthroughs would never have happened if it was left to the "free market".

Science and understanding can not progress through simple theory. The ideas must be tested and validated. That's the reason for facilities like this.

No, they didn't.

The law suit was against Apple iTunes.
There was never a problem until Apple decided to get into the music business.

I sure wouldn't. OpenOffice fails from the very beginning in comparison to MS Office. Just look at the lame spell checker ! It can't even correct "qick" ! It can't tell you that the friggin U is missing. It really isn't any better than the spell checker in Firefox !

And then the grammar check ?! Absolute waste. MS Office, even an ancient Office 2000 does far, far better.

Then try to mail merge with a database. Not gonna happen.
I can go one for 20 paragraphs of all the places it fails to replace MS Office for our office, but ...

Really, in our business, it is not a contender in the least.

Pando ( the tree) is estimated at 80,000 years old, it's root system that is.
Located at the western edge of the Colorado Plateau in South-central Utah.

Ring World reference! Now we're taking!

What you may not have thought of is what happens when the phone dies.

When my phone went dead and I sent it out to be fixed, I removed my sd card, so that when it came back from repair with the internal memory reformated and the OS completely reinstalled, I didn't loose all my data.
Also, I can put the sd card in a reader and recover all the family photos and videos on my PC even if the phone has died.
And that my friends IS important.

woops, of course if the code is JAVA, then ...

Right, because most Windows machines have a C compiler installed ...

Now they'll be trying to get the French propeller tech. The Le Triomphant class SSBN

is probably the quiets nuclear sub out there now.

Quite right, America would be in a world of hurt if we even tried to steamroll the surrender monkey French. With their brand new Triomphant class missile carrying nuclear subs, each carrying 16 supersonic 3 stage missiles, each missile carries six to ten independently targetable TN 75 thermonuclear warheads. Trying to steamroll France wont be like taking a country like North Korea, these missiles actually work.

"On 27 January 2010, at 9h25, a missile was launched underwater by the Terrible, from Audierne Bay. The missile reached its target 2000 kilometres off South Carolina; the 4500 kilometre flight took less than 20 minutes."

More importantly, those subs are estimated to be 1000 times quieter than the American Trident (Ohio class) subs.

How do you take a country that possesses those kinds of toys.

Short answer, you can't. Can you imagine if even ONE of those missiles hit their target in NY or Washington? That would hurt.

IICV posted this quote over in the B52 thread, but it is even more valid here.
"It's the same reason why big software re-writes never work the old software is old and convoluted because it's had to solve problems you'd never think of the first time around."

Gnome 2 is successful and pleasantly usable thanks to years of input and refinement as a GUI.

A huge effort was put into it to understand what its intended use was and how to make something people wanted.

They should not have replaced Gnome 2 with Gnome 3, it should have been a whole new project. Gnome 3 has nothing to do with the original objective that was Gnome 2.

The summary of that test ends with this sentence:
"The noise of the CD-quality loop was audible only at very elevated levels."

So how do you get "They found no perceptible degradation caused by a 16-bit/44.1kHz A/D/A." ?

Remember that many double blind tests have errors in the setup that can remove the possibility of a positive result. For instance, if the switching system degrades the signal significantly, the possible further degradation of the ADA can be masked.

Having said that, I have done my own tests with SACDs.
When I compare the sound of the red book (CD) layer to the SACD layer, I rarely hear a difference. But when I do, It may be that the red book layer is not really a direct down sample of the DSD encoding, so inconclusive, but it showed to me that red book is better than I thought.

That's pretty funny considering the the EU is a larger economy than the US, that would probably hurt a bit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)#Lists Ask Google if they're ready to give up all of their business in a $15.8 trillion economy.

It seems that the megaupload guys may not have been rounded up because of illegal copyright infringement, but because they were trying to go ligit. I haven't seen anything in English, but this article in a French paper explains that megaupload was starting a new product called megabox and had signed up dozens of artists directly to distribute their music legally; many big name artists too.

http://www.letelegramme.com/ig/loisirs/multimedia/megaupload-pourquoi-le-site-a-t-il-vraiment-ete-ferme-25-01-2012-1578204.php?xtmc=kim%20dotcom&xtcr=3

Megaupload supposedly already had over a million users of their MegaKey software that provided the music with adverts, and the artists receive as much as 90% of the proceeds.