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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tsigprofit who wrote (16415)	4/10/2005 2:50:58 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

You have just begun to see us get really ugly. Soon, our political leaders will launch a trade war with China. This will encounter steep business resistance here, since the Chinese producers that sell to Wal-Mart are American joint-venture companies exploiting the cheap Chinese labor. Eventually, all we'll have for our politicians to use as a tool is our military. Disgruntled Americans will easily be frightened into supporting military adventures against the economic winners. My hope is we'll be too poor to afford it.

To: tsigprofit who wrote (16415)	4/11/2005 9:38:26 AM
From: Bucky Katt	Respond to of 20773

From the LOL file> France Detects a Cultural Threat in Google By ALAN RIDING ARIS, April 9 - As president of the French National Library, Jean-Noël Jeanneney has good reason to feel safe from the frequent incursions of American popular culture into contemporary French life. With its collection of 13 million books, the library is a reassuring symbol of the durability of French literature and thought. Yet Mr. Jeanneney is not one to lower his guard. He grew alarmed last December when he read that Google planned to scan 15 million English-language books and make them available as digital files on the Web. In his view, the move would further strengthen American power to set a global cultural agenda. "I am not anti-American, far from it," Mr. Jeanneney, 62, said in an interview in his office in the library's new headquarters overlooking the Seine river. "But what I don't want is everything reflected in an American mirror. When it comes to presenting digitized books on the Web, we want to make our choice with our own criteria." So, when Google's initial announcement went unnoticed here, Mr. Jeanneney raised his voice. In a Jan. 23 article in the newspaper, Le Monde, entitled "When Google Challenges Europe," he warned of "the risk of a crushing domination by America in the definition of the idea that future generations will have of the world." Europe, he said, should counterattack by converting its own books into digital files and by controlling the page rankings of responses to searches. His one-man campaign bore fruit. At a meeting on March 16, President Jacques Chirac of France asked Mr. Jeanneney and the culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, to study how French and European library collections could be rapidly made available on the Web. But where there is a will, is there a way? Mr. Jeanneney is the first to acknowledge that he has a clearer idea of where he wants to go than how he will get there. On the technology required, for instance, he said that Europe had the choice of trying to develop its own search engine or of reaching agreement with Google, the world's most popular Internet search service, or perhaps with other Internet search providers, like Amazon.com, Microsoft and Yahoo. Money, too, is a variable. Newly rich from its stock offering last summer, Google expects to spend $150 million to $200 million over a decade to digitize 15 million books from the collections of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, Oxford University and the New York Public Library. In contrast, the French National Library's current book scanning program is modest. With an annual budget of only $1.35 million, it has so far placed online some 80,000 books and 70,000 drawings and will soon add part of its collection of 19th-century newspapers. The rest of the story> nytimes.com