Greece sell-out Proposal
,----[ Quote ]
| Microsoft Hellas proposes a contract that will take over control of the
| sovereign European state. Greece would lose the right to speak about other
| products its government uses and gain the right to support the business
| interests of the vendor and its policy goals.
|
| [...]
|
| Nice proposal, Microsoft will help Greece to spy on its ICT infrastructure in
| order to weaken the procurement power of Greece for the benefit of the
| supplier. Win-Win, right?
`----
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-35281/greece-sell-out-proposal
On the more positive side, open access seems to have just received a little
boost in Europe.
ERC Goes Big on OA
,----[ Quote ]
| Here's an impressively strong commitment to open access from the European
| Research Council
|
| The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded
| research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research
| repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv or an
| institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months
| of publication.
`----
http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2008/01/erc-goes-big-on-oa.html
Related:
France set to experience a revolution in public broadcast television
,----[ Quote ]
| French president Nicolas Sarkozy wants to ban advertising on public
| television and replace the income stream with a tax on mobile phones and
| Internet accounts. "Our national television must provide quality and access
| to culture; it must not be shaped solely by commercial considerations," said
| Sarkozy in Paris on Tuesday.
`----
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/101533/from/rss09
Mark Cuban to ISPs: block all P2P traffic; Ars to Cuban: um, no
,----[ Quote ]
| Of course, there are many legitimate uses for P2P that Google Video can't
| replace, like distributing Linux ISOs. Furthermore, the notion that the only
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
| people who benefit from P2P technology are the distributors is wrong. If I
| have the option of grabbing a download from a distant single server or from a
| torrent with hundreds of users, I'm going to opt for the torrent. Why? It's
| almost guaranteed to be faster, and let's face it: most BitTorrent software
| is quite adept at managing large downloads. Perhaps I want to throttle it
| while playing a game; perhaps I want to encrypt my transfers. If I'm
| distributing video or audio, perhaps I don't wish to be bound by the terms of
| Google Video.
`----
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071122-mark-cuban-to-isps-block-all-p2p-traffic.html
