European legal committee member Brian Crowley has publicly supported an Irish investment by Intel – which was recently fined €1 million for market abuse
An Irish MEP who sits on the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs has made statements publicly supporting Intel despite the European authority’s decision to fine the chip-maker £953m for abusing its market position.
The comments from Brian Crowley, MEP for The South, one of four European constituencies in Ireland, appear in a press release issued by Intel this week discussing the launch of a new Innovation Open Lab at the Intel Ireland campus in Leixlip, County Kildare.
The launch of the lab was also attended by Conor Lenihan, Ireland’s Minister for Science, Technology & Innovation as well as Dr. Martin Curley, global director, Intel IT Innovation and director, Intel Labs Europe. In a press release issued by Intel, Crowley praised Intel for its contribution to research and development in Ireland.
A senior lawyer at Microsoft is calling for the creation of a global patent system to make it easier and faster for corporations to enforce their intellectual property rights around the world.
In a blog posting on Tuesday, Microsoft’s Deputy General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez said that a backlog of patent applications internationally was needed to tackle the 3.5 million pending patent applications around the world — including around 750,000 in the US.
“In today’s world of universal connectivity, global business and collaborative innovation, it is time for a world patent that is derived from a single patent application, examined and prosecuted by a single examining authority and litigated before a single judicial body,” said Guiterrez. “A harmonized, global patent system would resolve many of the criticisms leveled at national patent systems over unmanageable backlogs and interminable pendency periods.”
Guiterrez went on to praise efforts to harmonise international patent systems through projects such ad the Patent Prosecution Highway and the “IP5” partnership but said more needed to be done to allow corporations to protect their intellectual property.
The UK government has taken Internet copyright-protection out of Ofcom’s hands, and is rushing through measures that could cut off everyone at an address
File sharers in the UK could have internet access for their whole household suspended. New government proposals would bypass a planned Ofcom consultation and enact swift retribution for those persistent copyright-infringers.
Privacy advocates have criticised a government announcement that called for feedback on a swifter, tougher regime than that originally proposed in the Digital Britain report. Tthe forthcoming Digital Economy Bill could allow more drastic action against file-sharers including suspending their internet access.
The government said that it was considering actions that would include forcing ISPs to take action against “repeat infringers” which could include blocking access to download sites, reducing broadband speeds or even “temporarily” suspending an individual’s internet access.
Technical progress has spurred some wasteful use of resources; but it’s also key to green thinking, argues Andrew Donoghue.
Switching PCs off at night and sensible recycling are just some of the ways to tackle climate change, we are told. But if, as a society, we are really concerned about global warming, surely some more radical action is called for?
For example, why not just ban progress? I mean we’ve got garlic crushers, iPods, electric cars and SuBo on Britain’s Got Talent – how much more progress do we really need?
We could simply decide that all the current designs for cars, washing machines, medical endoscopes and wind turbines actually work pretty well thank you very much; so let’s just stop developing any new ones.
If your toaster breaks down, don’t buy the latest Toast-amatic 3000 with self-levelling Bagel cradle; just fix the one you have. Or if you really must consume, order exactly the same model again.
Sweat those assets
A ban on all thing new would go down well with environmentalists, who are very keen on the idea of using things for as long as possible, otherwise known as “sweating assets”. Their reasoning is that everything comes with an in-built carbon debt accrued during its production.
Companies appear to be changing the way they operate vehicle fleets in response to the recession and climate change but if the economy improves, will the trend towards greener fleets go into reverse? By Andrew Donoghue.
Life was simpler in the 1980s. Greed was good and the company car was all about status. But a gradual increase in pollution legislation, combined with rising fuel prices and fears about climate change, have chipped away at these attitudes. And against this long-term background of environmental/social change, the recession and lack of funds are wreaking further short-term havoc. So what is the future for the fleet sector? While turning to cheaper and more energy-efficient vehicles makes sense in a recession, if good times return will the high-end company car return to its position as the ultimate perk, or has the tide of public opinion changed the status of the company car irrevocably?
Trying to ascertain whether UK plc is falling out of love with the company car is not easy. According to the Energy Saving Trust (EST), there are three million company cars on the UK’s roads emitting an estimated seven million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) every year. According to John Lewis, chief executive of the British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association (BVRLA), research carried out among its members shows the average mileage of company cars was significantly down in 2008 to 19,617 miles, compared with 21, 643 miles in 2007. Isolating the exact cause of this drop is difficult, to say the least, but, according to Lewis, financial and environmental factors are certainly at play. “Motivated by a desire to cut costs and reduce their carbon footprint, fleet managers have been looking to monitor unnecessary business mileage and make sure that any essential travel is completed in the most environmentally-friendly way,” he says.It is not just the BVRLA that has recorded a drop in car mileage. Figures released by the Department of Transport revealed the country’s motorists travelled some 3.1 billion fewer miles last year. “The focus on cost reduction is no mystery,” says Nigel Underdown, head of transport advice at the EST. “Most companies are looking very hard at their fleets because they are a big spend.”
Clearly, environmental, financial and, to some degree, health and safety issues are combining to change companies’ behaviour when it comes to fleets. But trying to separate the long-term impact of environmental considerations from the effects of the recession is less clearcut. For a lot of companies going green is basically a watchword for greater efficiency that translates directly into cost savings. True, some models of car may have higher upfront costs (see above), but these are often a trade-off for better fuel efficiency over the vehicle’s lifetime. The ESG, for example, recently claimed that British business could save around £3 billion a year by moving to greener fleets.
The Home Office is now talking less about counter-terrorism and more about easing travel in Europe
ID Card Final Version Released
The UK government appears to have changed tactics when it comes to the roll-out of its controversial ID Card with the idea that it will make it easier for Brits to travel in Europe without having to lug about a bulky passport and will simply be another plastic card for people to carry about.
Mock-ups of the card have been made public before, but this week the government announced the final look of the plastic card at events in London and Manchester this week. The card design includes “the Royal Coat of Arms on the front and features a floral pattern representing the four floral emblems of the UK: the shamrock, daffodil, thistle and rose”, the Home Office revealed.
But in a rather downplayed statement on the benefits of the card, Home Secretary Alan Johnson opted to avoid the rhetoric about preventing acts of terrorism which have previously been attributed to the ID Card and instead appeared to argue that citizens already carry around plenty of pieces of plastic already and the ID Card was just another, albeit important, addition.
“Given the growing problem of identity fraud and the inconvenience of having to carry passports, coupled with gas bills or six months worth of bank statements to prove identity, I believe the ID card will be welcomed as an important addition to the many plastic cards that most people already carry,” he said.
On a visit to the US shortly after the civil war, Oscar Wilde was asked why he thought the country was so violent. “I can tell you why America is so violent,” Wilde replied, “it is because your wallpaper is so ugly.”
That might sound like a typical Wildean witticism, and it is, but what Wilde was really expressing was the importance that he and others in the aesthetic movement attributed to beauty and good craftsmanship and its impact on how people behave. To be surrounded by ugliness, the Irish writer believed, led to ugly thoughts and ugly actions.
It might sound like a stretch to apply this philosophy to the current popularity of devices such as the iPhone, but there is a link between good design and productivity, according to some experts. “Although it would be difficult to quantify through a cost-benefit analysis, a happier user is generally considered to be more productive,” analyst group Gartner claimed in a 2008 report on employee-owned technology schemes.
At least some of the momentum driving staff to want to use consumer technology in the workplace is that on the whole it not only looks better but, crucially, is a lot more user-friendly than the “good enough” approach taken by many business-technology makers.
The idea of being outside of the system – not part of the establishment – must be high on the list of reasons why the open source movement attracts so many devoted, often fanatical, followers. Rebelling against the perceived control that proprietary software (most notably Microsoft) and closed standards yield is exciting and just a little bit dangerous.
It’s not hard to understand, then, why a country such as France, whose national identity is so closely tied to rebellion and revolution, would find a natural affinity for this community-developed software. Open source embodies the idea of people uniting around a shared belief to achieve a goal.
While creating an open source database might not be quite as dramatic as beheading aristocrats with the guillotine, there is at least some common ground with the French revolutionary motto of liberté, égalité, fraternité.
With a zeal that could almost be described as revolutionary, France’s public sector has taken to open source and open standards like few other governments around the world. From the Ministry of Finance to the military, free software and open standards have not only been accepted, they are actually stipulated.
Although the European Commission might be proud of its record of hitting Microsoft with fines that dig deep into Redmond’s seemingly bottomless coffers, the fact is that for many European countries, Microsoft is still the first and sometimes only choice when it comes to government tenders.
As last week’s Switzerland example showed, some government’s operate on the basis that IT is basically another word for Microsoft. That means tenders that specifically call for Microsoft products as if no other alternatives exist. Hungary – where I am currently based – only a month ago agreed to put open source options on the tender list for government tech projects. Previously, government tenders would simply state, “Microsoft or equivalent products”. Microsoft has splashed its cash around the country both in terms of marketing and lobbying that it has much of the public sector sown-up, as open source guru Richard Stallman remarked on a recent visit to Budapest.
And let’s not forget that the UK only just agreed to “level the playing field for open source” software – basically admitting that up till now the game has been firmly rigged against non-proprietary software. That said – that doesn’t meant that all UK government projects are considering open source all of a sudden. The head of IT for the Olympics told me at a recent green IT conference that he had more or less ruled out open source because it was “high risk” in terms of issues such as application compatibility.
Yep – it seems that while the Olympics might carry lofty ideals of international cooperation and openness – that doesn’t actually carry to the software running the event. And it’s not like the Olympics has money to burn – the event is way over budget already by billions of pounds – you’d think that the organising committee would be looking for the most cost-effective options available. Time’s are tough it seems but not tough enough for some
Former FBI officer Ed Gibson now works for Microsoft
Piece I did for CIO Magazine has just gone live online:
Planning for a server outage, a power cut or half your staff being taken ill from a rogue batch of sushi at the company party are all probably within the ability range of most competent managers. But if things escalate, it’s time to call in the professionals.
The comfort and confidence that knowing the police, ambulance or even military are there to help if things take a real turn for the worse is just as vital to oiling the wheels of commerce as an effective regulatory or financial system. Luckily, as recent history has shown, the systems underpinning the police and military are more robust than those found in some areas of the City or Wall Street. A global financial crisis has been punishing enough, but imagine a similar meltdown in health provision, law enforcement or even the army.
The perception that law-enforcement agencies and the military adhere to more rigorous standards than the average citizen goes a long way to explaining the swathes of ex-army and law-enforcement types in the upper echelons of business. In the IT sector, companies including Microsoft, Unisys, Verizon and Xerox have all hired former military, intelligence or law-enforcement personnel. Tracking down exact numbers for how many IT professionals have come from law enforcement or the army is not easy but, for those personnel with technical experience, the computer industry is a natural progression. However, it’s not only technical skills that make these individuals attractive; the abilities to stay calm in a crisis and deal with pressure are also highly valued.
EARTHED TECH 
You must be logged in to post a comment.