You may be right about innovation. But the FA is not about innovation. Compare MS to IBM, the former 'empire'. It's all about market cap and profits, and in that area MS certainly has been falling behind.

There was a time when technology companies were all about innovation, but we are now seeing the commodization of computing, where it doesn't matter how advanced you are as long as you have the largest market share, which may be gained by innovation but might as well be achieved by fashion sense or plain marketing.

MS lost the internet wave, they lost the mobile wave, they certainly have lost the walled garden wave. The new 'empire' is Apple like it or not, and it's not about innovation now, but profits and market share. Nothing wrong with being the new 'new IBM', but they are no longer at the forefront of technology companies when measured in $$$, they may be behind even Google now.

Ooops, I've found the real announcement too:

GOG.com goes Mac

As usual, the summary is a bit misleading. The Mac support includes only 50 games none of which are part of the interplay "pay what you want" offering. The two announcements were conflated into one. The real Mac promo is here:
Mac promo

It's only stupid if you think it was about upholding the law to take down an illegal enterprise, which it wasn't. It was to send a message to all other sites: 'you could be next'.
And now the message is complete: we did this, it was illegal and your business is over and even the local government admits it, an yet there will be no consequences for those who did it.
So, it's a nice little service you have here, would be a shame if something happened to it.

In China, take them to court in China. Seriously?

How is this science? A slate article siting the economist?

Bingo!, that should be a dead giveaway, the author is not trying to publish some paper. Wonder what exactly is he trying to do?...

All this stuff about toxo changing the development of society is entertaining speculation but no data is presented here to make it more than that.

Oh, I see.

I think a brief look at the context should indicate that this article is aimed at entertaining with some speculation, wouldn't you think? I would save the scientific criticism until it appears on Science or Nature

But the thing is, this tournament is for football players, not the population in general. Furthermore, one would think that nowadays it is aimed at professional football players.

But regardless, your analysis has not considered the additional complication of national football federations; each one has a certain number of affiliates, which may or may not reflect the total population of a nation.

why? because there is no linguistic authority that allows people to use words in only proscribed ways

Oh I get it, that's why you use the word proscribed to mean prescribed; very clever, specially when one is the opposite of the other. If you are looking for people supporting this new meaning count me in ;-)

Yes, there will be talks with representatives of all divisions. We're just in the process of gathering the necessary information to at least have something concrete to talk about.
Another factor to consider is the fact that the IT department at the central offices is not as undermanned, although they have their hands full. So I need to cooperate with them if a solution is eventually adopted.

Thank you for your kind offer. I think I will hold it until I have a more specific request to make, or at least until I know exactly what kind of system will adopt.

I want to thank all the answers so far, in spite of the blurry account of the problem I have. I now have better understanding of what kind of project I'm facing.

As I have mentioned in a previous post; currently, a "document" is a printed paper that has a signature written with a pen on it. Oversimplifying, the proposal boils down to converting these to (probably) pdf files with an equivalent method of "signing" them and confirming to auditors that the stored files have not been tampered with after signing.

I think Domino is a good option, specially because there are some people within the company (not me) that have some experience with it. But there is still the matter of costs and personnel and even before that the question of how much it is an improvement over the current situation.

Yeah, worry was my initial reaction. But still I need to describe the size and implications of such an undertaking if I am to convince the managers that it is not practical to implement this system at this time. Or who knows, maybe talking things through with all the divisions we can reach more specific requirements and bring the project down to a practical size.

Hi, original poster here.

Yes, I am aware there are too many details left hanging, that's why I need to hear from someone that has worked with a similar system to at least have an idea what kind of project are we dealing with. From listening to the managers, we need some serious talking to do before a formal proposal is made.

For starters, there's not much money available for the hypothetical system, so that will probably be a showstopper. When i say "documents" I mean anything that when printed on paper has to have a signature (as in "written with a pen") that identifies who wrote it/approved it, most likely a PDF file when talking about an electronic document.

I share your bafflement about the purpose of all this, presumably they want to eliminate all the time needed to move paper around four different locations, and it can't be done by e-mail due to the signature requirements (internal rules, legal implications among other things, lets not delve too much into that just now). But I think they really have not thought through all the added costs.