French Government to Consider Moving to Open Source and Away from Proprietary Software. The French government is now seriously looking at implementing open source software in the public sector after a public debate for France’s Digital Republic bill (La République numérique).
European countries are moving towards open source, and that has become increasingly obvious in the past couple of years. It started with the adoption of open document formats, and it's slowly moving towards the adoption of open source solutions, for operating systems and office suites, mostly. The scientists encouraging online piracy with a secret codeword. Image copyright Shutterstock What if you're a scientist looking for the latest published research on a particular subject, but you can't afford to pay for it?
In many countries, it's against the law to download copyrighted material without paying for it - whether it's a music track, a movie, or an academic paper. Published research is protected by the same laws, and access is generally restricted to scientists - or institutions - who subscribe to journals. But some scientists argue that their need to access the latest knowledge justifies flouting the law, and they're using a Twitter hashtag to help pirate scientific papers. Andrea Kuszewski, a cognitive scientist and science writer, invented the tag, which uses a code phrase: "I can haz PDF" - a play on words combining a popular geeky phrase used widely online in a meme involving cat pictures, and a common online file format.
World Socialist Movement. The Elephant in the Room: Capitalism and Sustainable Development. The term “sustainable” has been used by so many people in so many different contexts that it has lost much of its meaning.
It has become a buzzword in political, economic and development circles. But it is not the excessive use of the word that has ultimately rendered it largely meaningless but the fact that too many efforts to achieve sustainable development do not seriously attempt to actually achieve sustainable development. It is too often suggested that we can simply incorporate more environmentally-friendly practices into our daily lives while only tinkering with our consumption habits in order to achieve sustainability. But this simply is not true. Each of us living in wealthy nations must massively, and I mean MASSIVELY, reduce our levels of material consumption if we are to achieve a sustainable ecological footprint. Snowden leaks reveal harmfulness of US monopoly on internet – Russian minister. The NSA’s mass surveillance would not be possible if the internet wasn’t controlled by just a few major US companies, Nikolay Nikiforov, Russia’s communications minister, told RT after the first BRICS ministerial meeting on the de-monopolization of IT.
“Snowden’s disclosures showed exactly the harmfulness of the monopoly because it would not be possible if the world IT sector should be structured in a more balanced way,” Nikiforov said, adding that, as things stand, US security agencies have the power to just “come to several companies and to force them… to actually provide absolutely illegal access to hundreds of millions records of private data of users globally.”
In 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked thousands of documents revealing the US National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, proving that Google, Facebook and other US tech giants have been passing information to the spy agency. “We don’t want to prohibit anything. DoJ to Apple: your software is licensed, not sold, so we can force you to decrypt. The DoJ is currently trying to force Apple to decrypt data stored on a defendant's Iphone, and Apple, to its great credit, is fighting back, arguing that on the one hand, it doesn't have the technical capability to do so; and on the other, should not be required to do so.
A new filing from the DoJ attacks this second point in a novel and far-reaching way. It's the 21st century – why are we working so much? If there's one thing practically all futurologists once agreed on, it's that in the 21st century there would be a lot less work.
What would they have thought, if they had known that in 2012, the 9-5 working day had in the UK become something more like 7am to 7pm? They would surely have looked around and seen technology take over in many professions which previously needed heavy manpower, they would have looked at the increase in automation and mass production, and wondered – why are they spending 12 hours a day on menial tasks?
'Capitalism Is The Cancer Of Mother Earth,' & Other Climate News. Time to imagine: From ‘Disaster Capitalism’ to a system of our own — RT Op-Edge. Since the founding of the United States, generations have been inculcated with the belief that capitalism is the only acceptable method of economic organization.
Isn't it time for a radical change of thinking? Critical analysts should have long recognized that the Unites States is a country steeped in cognitive dissonance. How else could the very Founding Fathers who were also holders of enslaved Africans write this in their Declaration of Independence from King George III of England: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This is what one should take as a clue that pathology lies ahead. READ MORE: Communist crucifix for Pope Francis who lashes out at capitalism on Bolivia tour. Farm to Car: The Next Frontier in Sustainability... - GabeTURBO. Datataffel / Sign in.