Juncker said he was opting for French because “slowly but surely English is losing importance in Europe and France has elections this Sunday and I want the French people to understand what I am saying about the importance of the EU.” The Commission president tackled the row that erupted over a private meeting he had […]

The minister states that he thinks (his vision is backed by a bunch of closed source software vendors [Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, KPN, CapGemini, Ordina, ATOS, CGI and IBM]) that not having to buy licenses is offset by the costs of having to manage and pay for the deployments of open source software (OSS). Which is […]

Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. […] When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average […]

The French have much stricter anti-hate speech laws than the US, so some Jewish students thought they would go after Twitter when users of their service posted anti-semitic content. Twitter removed the content, but didn’t identify the culprits. The students feel they have the right to personal retaliatiin or something and went crying to a […]

They’ve put him on the same status as Al Quaida, so who knows, will they try to assassinate him? And if US personell try to talk to Wikileaks employees, they’re spies and will be shot (I guess). US calls Assange 'enemy of state'.

A project sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund FWF has made a detailed investigation on what viewers understand and how they evaluate the statements of politicians during televised debates. To this effect, software-assisted conversation analysis established how the individual social knowledge of viewers nurtures the interpretations – and reinterpretations – of political statements. For the […]

A study of 61 million Facebook users finds that using online social networks to urge people to vote has a much stronger effect on their voting behavior than spamming them with information via television ads or phone calls. via 'Social Voting' Really Does Rock the Vote – ScienceNOW.

Adhocracy is a policy drafting tool for distributed groups. It allows members of organizations or the public to compose or vote documents that represent the policy of the group. In order to allow cooperation, Adhocracy uses LiquidDemocracy, a set of ideas that include delegating a user’s voting rights to another to enable both active and […]

From the start of March, the new Citizens’ Initiative Act will come into force. According to the new law, a required minimum of 50,000 citizens of voting age can launch a bill that Parliament then has to process. On the Open Ministry website, anyone can present an idea for a law initiative. If the idea […]

Some idiots think that the city of Amsterdam should do anything to set up a .amsterdam global top level domain to market the city (so you could have www.stupid.amsterdam as a web address). 'Gemeente moet topleveldomein .amsterdam claimen' | Webwereld. That, hoewever, costs $185,000 New gTLD Applicant guidebook, ch. 1.5 as well as having to […]

Basically the PVV, backed by Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, have a few sensationalist headlines from a religious magazine that no-one knows (Reformatiorich Dagblad) or reads and a few from a more serious newspaper (AD) that aren’t so sensationalist, and on the basis of this they’ve decided to open up a Hitlerite plan to […]

Aside from the fact that NL is a trading nation and thus has a disproportionate amount of people living and working outside of the Netherlands and thus having multiple nationalities, it makes it seem like having the Dutch nationality is like being a member of some kind of exclusive club. What nonsense! Being a member […]

PvdA zweert reparatie van netneutraliteit | Webwereld.

It looks like where copyright goons and the NL are failing by wanting to turn our society into a surveillance society, the unelected EU Court may come to citizens’ rescue: Advocate General Cruz Villalón considers that the installation of that filtering and blocking system is a restriction on the right to respect for the privacy […]

The law obliges a range of e-commerce sites, video and music services and webmail providers to keep a host of data on customers. This includes users’ full names, postal addresses, telephone numbers and passwords. The data must be handed over to the authorities if demanded. This means that the data which is handed over can […]

Like wikileaks for the Middle East, it shows concessions made by the Palestinians weren’t good enough for Israel and the US was running around showboating, not doing much constructive. The story behind the Palestine papers | World news | The Guardian.

Under the new law, a government-appointed media council will have the power to decide whether a publication has broken rules on what it calls balanced and ‘moral’ reporting, and can issue heavy fines. Print and Internet media can face fines of more than $100,000 and broadcasters nearly $1 million, if, for example, their coverage is […]

PrimariesForPalin.com aims to nominate Sarah Palin as the Republican presidential candidate by encouraging Democrats and Independents to purposefully vote for her in state primaries. In head-to-head polls with President Barack Obama, Palin consistently fares worse than other possible Republican candidates because of her divisiveness. If Palin is nominated, Obama has a much better chance of […]