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John Barlow Pushes Open Source in Brazil
greysky writes "This story on Foxnews.com reports that as part of the larger World Social Forum, Barlow spoke on how open source software can help alleviate financial problems of developing countries: "Already, Brazil spends more in licensing fees on proprietary software than it spends on hunger"." NPR talks about how Brazil plans to switch 300,000 machines over.
Oh yeah, frost pist
MOD +1 Insightful!
Dammit, I can't stand these "governments think about switching to Linux" type things.
Governments SUCK. All of them. Always over budget, always behind scedual, always overhire, always fail in some consistant manner.
The US government does this. Germany governments do this. Russian governments do this, and probably brazilian governments are probably the same.
Always a beuacratic nightmare that can't do anything correctly or quickly.
These Linux stories dealing with governments always suck because it always makes linux look bad, even if they do a half-way decent job of migrating over.
Think about it. These are career beuacrats that are SPENDIND OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY. The more money they spend the bigger budget they get next year and the more important they get. It's the same for all those nasty busy bodies that try to run other people's lives.
hundreds of thousands of business use and depend on open source software on a daily basis. Intellegent people that do engineering, scientific research and have tight budgets depend on linux and open source software in a big way.
Anytime you get a group of technically minded people you get a much larger percentage using Linux, BSD, and OS X then anything you see with the imaginary (and completely bullshit, btw) "joe sixpack" person that the average slashdot wishes they weren't.
Fuck governments. Relying on them for good Linux examples is like relying on the chinese to defend democracy.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=
'If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits'
By Clare Chapman
(Filed: 30/01/2005)
A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.
Fantasy Six Nations
Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners - who must pay tax and employee health insurance - were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.
The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.
She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her "profile'' and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.
Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job - including in the sex industry - or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.
The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse.
When the waitress looked into suing the job centre, she found out that it had not broken the law. Job centres that refuse to penalise people who turn down a job by cutting their benefits face legal action from the potential employer.
"There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry," said Merchthild Garweg, a lawyer from Hamburg who specialises in such cases. "The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits."
Miss Garweg said that women who had worked in call centres had been offered jobs on telephone sex lines. At one job centre in the city of Gotha, a 23-year-old woman was told that she had to attend an interview as a "nude model", and should report back on the meeting. Employers in the sex industry can also advertise in job centres, a move that came into force this month. A job centre that refuses to accept the advertisement can be sued.
Tatiana Ulyanova, who owns a brothel in central Berlin, has been searching the online database of her local job centre for recruits.
"Why shouldn't I look for employees through the job centre when I pay my taxes just like anybody else?" said Miss Ulyanova.
Ulrich Kueperkoch wanted to open a brothel in Goerlitz, in former East Germany, but his local job centre withdrew his advertisement for 12 prostitutes, saying it would be impossible to find them.
Mr Kueperkoch said that he was confident of demand for a brothel in the area and planned to take a claim for compensation to the highest court. Prostitution was legalised in Germany in 2002 because the government believed that this would help to combat trafficking in women and cut links to organised crime.
Miss Garweg believes that pressure on job centres to meet employment targets will soon result in them using their powers to cut the benefits of women who refuse jobs providing sexual services.
"They are already prepared to push women into jobs related to sexual services, but which don't count as prostitution,'' she said.
"Now that prostitution is no longer considered by the law to be immoral, there is really nothing but the goodwill of the job centres to stop them from pushing women into jobs they don't want to do."
As an objectivist, I'd love to mod you up +1 Insightful - except you're anonymous and I don't have mod points right now.
For Microsoft.
An MS OS was found hiding out in a free software zone. The first hint was when it crashed in an obvious and spectacular fashion. The offending machine was then escorted out of the buliding, replaced with a more capable machine, no further software errors reported.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Towel un3er the