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Comment Re:Oh, how surprising! (Score 1) 145

by CaptSolo (#25723515) Attached to: EU Council Refuses To Release ACTA Documents

That's why we need to promote transparency (which is the subject on this article). We need to make EU closer to people. "Media pay no attention" ? Well, euronews speaks about it. Other media don't ? Well let's watch the good media then. Also we have to promote actions like La quadrature. Laquadrature watches EU when they vote something concerning freedom and internet.

Completely agree. We need more transparency and it is good to know what organisations and news services pay attention to what is happening re. privacy and freedom on the Net.

Thanks for the link to La quadrature!

Comment Re:Simple solution to this problem (Score 1) 145

by CaptSolo (#25723039) Attached to: EU Council Refuses To Release ACTA Documents

If it actually starts down the path to ratification, it will not be secret. For example, in the EU, it will have to be submitted to the legislative bodies for approval. In the US, it has to be submitted to the Senate and receive a 2/3 vote and then be signed by the President. I don't know offhand how other counties deal with ratifying treaties--I'm sure you can find out if you look.

At the moment when it gets down to ratification then the content of the treaty is probably not gonna change much. Maybe some countries will delay ratification but if the interests of the recording, etc. industry are involved then they will probably find a way.

If people want to have any say in what the treaty will look like then we need to be informed about it now. And not when it is up for just a "yes or no" vote.
Privacy

Submission + - EU Council refuses to release ACTA documents (ffii.org)

Submitted by
CaptSolo
CaptSolo writes: "The EU Council refuses to release secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) documents stating that disclosure of this information could impede the proper conduct of the negotiations, would weaken the position of the European Union in these negotiations and might affect relations with the third parties concerned [10-Nov-2008].

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) requested these documents last week.

FFII's response questions ACTA's secrecy saying: "The argument that public transparency regarding 'trade negotiations' can be ignored if it would weaken the EU's negotiation position is particularly painful. At which point exactly do negotiations over trade issues become more important than democratic law making? At 200 million euro? At 500 million euro? At 1 billion euro? What is the price of our democracy?""
Space

Submission + - Liftoff of Space Shuttle Atlantis (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
CaptSolo
CaptSolo writes: "Today at 2:45pm EST there was a successful launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis. Among other tasks the orbiter is taking Europe's Columbus science laboratory to the International Space Station (ISS). NASA Space Shuttle page has more information, podcasts and videos. The mission can also be followed NASA online TV.

Atlantis is due to dock with the ISS on Saturday. Its return to Earth is planned for Monday, 18 February."
Social Networks

Submission + - Setting oneself apart from in social networking? (yuniti.com)

Submitted by
Marcos
Marcos writes: "My brother and I started a social networking site, YUNiTi, back in late 2005 (from scratch). After MySpace sold for $580 million, everyone and their mother started their own social networking site. By the time we launched in 2006, the competition was insane.

How does one set oneself apart from all the competition? We've tried tackling it from a features perspective, but we've discovered that having the most features isn't what brings in the users.

After working on the site for almost 3 years, we're on the brink of giving up. It seems that nothing we do makes any difference. Where have we gone wrong?"
The Internet

Submission + - SPARQL query language published by W3C

Submitted by
CaptSolo
CaptSolo writes: "SPARQL (pronounced "sparkle"), the query language for data integration on the Web and one of the foundations of the Semantic Web, has just been published as a W3C Recommendation.

Quoting Tim Berners-Lee: "Trying to use the Semantic Web without SPARQL is like trying to use a relational database without SQL".
There are at least 14 implementations of the standard, most of them free and open source software.

A significant amount of data is already available to run SPARQL queries on, such as the DBpedia (from the Linking Open Data project) with structured data extracted from the Wikipedia; SIOC exporter tools represent your blog data in RDF for query in SPARQL; data residing in RDBMS can also be exposed to SPARQL queries. Info for further exploration:

What makes SPARQL interesting is the ability to integrate data from a number of different sources in one query — so that we combine data from blogs, DBPedia and RDBMSs all together."
Programming

Submission + - SPARQL is a W3C Recommendation

Submitted by
KjetilK
KjetilK writes: "The W3C just gave SPARQL the stamp of approval. SPARQL is a query language for the Semantic Web, and differs from othe query languages in that is usable across different data sources. There are allready 14 implementations of the spec, which is a lot. Most of them are free software. There are also billions of relations out there that are queryable, thanks to the Linking Open Data project. The structured data of Wikipedia are now queryable at DBpedia. Also, have a look at Ivan Herman's presentations.

Lets have an example: You could do this on dbpedia.org (with the standard prefixes you find there) and it will return computer scientists born before 1945: SELECT ?name ?birth ?death ?person WHERE { ?person skos:subject <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Computer_scientists> . ?person dbpedia2:birth ?birth . ?person foaf:name ?name . OPTIONAL { ?person dbpedia2:death ?death } FILTER (?birth < "1945-01-01"^^xsd:date) . } ORDER BY ?name"
User Journal

Journal Journal: 1st Journal Post

Journal by CaptSolo
My first Slashdot post. Decided to register at last so that I can participate in the discussions on /.

About me:

I am a Semantic Web researcher in DERI Galway, interested in new technologies, photography, cinema and science fiction. From time to time I write articles on CaptSolo Weblog.

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