Microsoft roundtable on ‘EU Spectrum Policy’

An invitation to a spectrum roundtable:

We would like to remind you about the roundtable discussion on recent developments in spectrum policy and their impact on the ICT industry. The event will take place on Wednesday April 13th at the Microsoft Executive Briefing Centre, Avenue de Nerviens 85, 1040, Brussels. The event will start at 10:30 and will be followed by a walking lunch and a guided tour in our new Cloud and Interoperability Centre. The roundtable discussion will feature presentations from key experts in the field, whose different viewpoints should ensure a lively discussion.

Agenda:
10:30 Registration
11:00 Welcome and introduction
11:10 Challenges in Europe and the Radio Spectrum Policy Programme
Pearse O’Donohue, Head of Unit, “Radio Spectrum Policy”, DG Information Society and Media, European Commission
11:25 Microsoft’s view on spectrum policy – challenges and opportunities
Paul Mitchell, General Manager Interoperability and Standards, Microsoft
11:40 Industry perspectives on TV White Spaces

This session will feature presentations from industry representatives, including:

Andrew Hudson, Head of Spectrum Policy, Vodafone
Fraser Edwards, Group Head, RF Systems, Cambridge Consultants
Luis Lucatero, Director of Public Affairs, Alcatel-Lucent

12:20 Q&A
12:50 Concluding remarks
13:00 Buffet lunch and guided tour of the new Cloud & Interoperability Center

….

Kind regards,

Microsoft

The greeting phrase seems odd but the event appears genuine. APCO consultants. I edited the formatting a bit.

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ODF 1.2 out

Forgot to blog about that: OASIS Open Document Format 1.2 is out.

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Large displays

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China, China, China

The yellow perils still in action:

Shai Agassi… spoke of the opportunities of electric cars. Referring to the car fleet he said that “Europe will work without oil in less than 10 years, between 2015 and 2020. It is inevitable. We won’t change due to global warming…but because oil will become too expensive”.

He went on to point out that “oil was 10 dollars a barrel at the beginning of the decade…it is almost 100 dollars a barrel now and if China doesn’t stop producing cars it will be 230 dollars a barrel in a few years”.

Turing to the emergence of China he said that it had already started to invest in electric cars. “Europe has two choices: to seize the opportunity to be the first to change, defending its role as first global car producer with 30% of the global market or to wait for China to overcome her in the market.”

I bet against it. STOA was once a European Parliament conference series for the scientific community but deteriorated ever since.

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Das Anti-Interview des Jahres

Ich bin begeistert, Wolfgang Hetzer von der Betrugsbekämpfung OLAF bei Jörg Thadeusz im RBB:

Bei THADEUSZ erläutert Wolfgang Hetzer, warum das Bakschisch-System kein arabisches Problem ist, und er analysiert die Fehler im deutschen Finanzsystem sowie die Hybris einiger Banker.

Das klingt erst mal sehr aufgebauscht und reißerisch. Der Gast Wolfgang Hetzer verweigert sich systematisch der Interview-Situation und allen Zuordnungen, einschließlich der Plakativität seines Buchtitels.

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Packet switching inventor Baran dead

Saturday night, Paul Baran (aged 84) passed away, an inventor of packet switching in computer networks.

Wired Interview from 2001

Update: Huffington Post: Paul Baran, Internet Pioneer, Dies At 84

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Hotmail does not offer https for authoritarian nations

According to an EFF deeplink Hotmail apparently disabled the https default option for its users who set their location to the following nations: Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Congo, Myanmar, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.

That means that Hotmail provides a cloud mail solution easier to be spied upon in these nations.

Update: Register about the official explanaition, a “bug” that prevents access.

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GCC adds Bionic C support on Android

The GCC 4.6 (released 25 March) adds support for the bionic c lib:

Android
GCC now supports the Bionic C library and provides a convenient way of building native libraries and applications for the Android platform. Refer to the documentation of the -mandroid and -mbionic options for details on building native code. At the moment, Android support is enabled only for ARM.

The developers on the bionic c library objectives.

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Radio Spectrum amendments

For the report of Hökmar on the 1st Radio Spectrum policy programme more than 402 amendments were tabled.

Draft report 1- 52 by the rapporteur

Package 53 – 206

Package2 207-402

– of course the proposals from the other Committees also have to be considered.

The amendments demonstrate a high degree of awareness in Parliament and great interest of members in spectrum issues. Members seem to be  better experts in spectrum than the draftpersons of the Commission, MEPs know very wekk where to stick. I didn’t find any particular objectionable proposal among their amendments. In fact they were all quite good to stress the crucial elements of spectrum governance.

What I am a quite a bit dissatisfied with, that is the legalistic quality of the original European Commission proposal. To give you an example, a “de minimis” rule should be applied to the list of general principles in Article 2. If principles are phrases in a complicated way they become ineffective as means of principled governance. Lasting principles have to be simple. You often wish an ockham’s razor procedure in the drafting process, in particular in telecommunications.

Another great example, the Commission’s proposal:

(c) applying the least onerous authorisation system possible in such a way as to maximise flexibility and efficiency in spectrum usage;

As a native speaker of English you wonder why for this harmless provision amendments were proposed in the Opinions and suspect an agenda. But the actual reason is the use of the phrase “onerous”
a) It catches the eye. You don’t find that in a standard “Europaish” vocabulary.
b) It is worded in a negative way.
So what did MEPs come up with? Alternative phrasings attempts and compromises. From a “linguistic clarification” it transforms into amendment pingpong e.g.

(c) applying the most appropriate authorisation system (188 Audy) (words it positive)
(c) applying in a non-discriminatory manner the least onerous authorisation system (183)
(c) applying the most appropriate, nondiscriminatory and least onerous authorisation system (186/185)
(c) applying the least onerous nondiscriminatory authorisation system (189 Koch-Mehrin)
(c) applying the most appropriate, least onerous and non-discriminatory authorisation system (187)
(c) applying the most appropriate, transparent and flexible authorisation system (184)

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Firefox 4

Firefox 4 is now available. It is the latest incarnation of the popular web browseer.

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