Recently in Politicians Category

So what did you do on Wednesday to celebrate International Right to Know Day? Well the European Ombudsman Professor  Nikiforos Diamandouros, called on the EU administration to be more transparent.

The British Computer Society - BCS  - 'The Chartered Institute for IT' has got a post on its web-site calling for contributions to  "EC Public Consultation on Cloud Computing."

Philips and STMicroelectronics want to see Europe prioritise the implementation of healthcare technology.

Good for Andy Grove. The co-founder and former chairman and CEO of Intel has pointed out to the Americans what should be obvious to them: they need more manufacturing jobs.

You'd think the last people to object to Google photographing their streets would be the Swiss, because the Swiss never get up to anything interesting on their streets.

It seems a bit weird for Intel to be urging its Irish staff, all 4,200 of them, to vote for the Lisbon Treaty when it's put before the Irish people for the second time in October.

Carlo Bozotti, CEO, seems to be getting the hang of this semiconductor thing. In a stroke worthy of his illustrious predecessor, he has got the French government to stump up a good chunk of change to support ST's process R&D and most advanced production facility.

If the US government parlays its anti-trust investigations against Google into legal proceedings, it will be one of the youngest-ever companies to be subjected to a US government anti-trust case.

Google was only founded in 1998. A ten year gap between founding and first anti-trust proceeding would be a US record.

After all it took 44 years after the founding of Standard Oil by John D Rockefeller in 1863 for the US government to initiate anti-trust proceedings in 1911.

It took a massive 89 years after the founding of AT&T in 1885 for the US government to split the company up into the Baby Bells in 1974 after anti-trust proceedings.

IBM went for 60 years after its founding in 1896 before anti-trust action by the US government forced it to operate under the Consent Decree of 1956 which obliged IBM to disclose technical information which allowed other computer companies to compete.

For Microsoft, founded in 1975, it was 23 years before the US government first initiated anti-trust proceedings in 1998.

So the ten year-old Google has been something of a phenomenon. Presumably it's happened quickly for Google because the Internet allows companies to grow to enormous size by very quickly tapping into global markets.

It's typical of the Europeans to devise a political structure which produces sillier and sillier results with each election it holds.

With Japan, Korea and Europe finding that Intel breached anti-trust law, who will be next? The EU sent its report on the Intel case to the anti-trust authorities in 27 countries. The US FTC, which has been investigating Intel for a year, received a copy of the report and could be the next country to bring an action.

President Barack Obama's appointment this week of the members of the USA's Science and Technology Council looks as if it has fallen into exactly the same trap as the UK does in these matters: it has too many scientists and not enough technologists.

'Inflation, extravagance, bankruptcy' were, according to Gordon Brown speaking at the Davos World Economic Forum , the three words which condemned Britain to the Great Depression of the 1930s. They were scrawled by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer  in response to a stimulus plan proposed by John Maynard Keynes.

Proof, if further proof were needed, that the USA is turning towards socialism, comes with the news that an alliance of companies is looking for $2 billion of government funds to get into batteries for electric cars.

Another day, another proposed bail-out. Interesting to hear the European arm of SEMI, the US-based trade body for the semiconductor materials and manufacturing equipment industry, calling on the EU to put money to supporting the European chip industry.

Is Intel trying to stall the EC's anti-trust investigation? You bet. Back in the summer we learnt that the EC had reviewed the evidence in the case and decided, like the Japanese and Korean governments, that Intel had acted in an anticompetitive way.

Quite clearly the financial authorities in the UK and US haven't got a clue. Both the Governor of the Bank of England, Lord Mervyn King, and the Secretary of the US Treasury, Henry Paulson, are useless at sorting out the financial mess.

One of the benefits, or tribulations, of being elected a head of state seems to be that every one and their dog lines up to tell you what to do.

Who will be the Chief Technology Officer of the USA? US President-elect Barack Obama has said he's going to create such an office and there is intense speculation in the US technology industry about who will be appointed to fill it.