The European Parliament narrowly adopted a nonbinding but nonetheless forceful resolution on Thursday urging the 28 nations of the European Union to recognize Edward J. Snowden as a “whistle-blower and international human rights defender” and shield him from prosecution.On Twitter, Mr. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked millions of documents about electronic surveillance by the United States government, called the vote a “game-changer.” But the resolution has no legal force and limited practical effect for Mr. Snowden, who is living in Russia on a three-year residency permit.Whether to grant Mr. Snowden asylum remains a decision for the individual European governments, and none have done so thus far.
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Still, the resolution was the strongest statement of support seen for Mr. Snowden from the European Parliament. At the same time, the close vote — 285 to 281 — suggested the extent to which some European lawmakers are wary of alienating the United States.
Gary Edwards on 29 Apr 11Well, not quite. More IBM happy talk about interoperability and easy document interchange. While i agree with the static versus interactive - collaborative document perspective, it's far more complicated. Today we have a world of "native" docs and "visual" docs. Native docs are bound to their authoring productivity environment, and are stubbornly NOT interchangeable. Even for ODF and OOXML formats. Visual documents are spun from natives, and they are highly interchangeable, but interactively limited. They lack the direct interaction of native authoring environments. The Visual document phenomenon starts with PDF and the virtual print driver. Any authoring application(s) in a productivity environment can print a PDF using the magic of the virtual print driver. In 2008, when ISO stamped PDF with "accessibility tags", a new, highly interactive version of PDF was offically recognized. We know this as "Tagged PDF". And it has led the sweeping revolution of wide implementation of the paperless transaction process. The Visual Document phenomenon doesn't stop there. The highly mobile WebKit revolution ushered in by the 2008 iPhone phenomenon led to wide acceptance of highly interactive and collaborative, but richly visual versions of SVG and HTML5-CSS3-JSON-JavaScript documents. Today we have SVG-HTML+ type visually immersive documents spun out of Server side publication presses such as FlipBoard, Cognito cComics, QWiki, Needle, Sports Illustrated, Push Pop Press, and TreeSaver to name but a few. Clearly the visually immersive category of documents is exploding, but not for business - productivity documents. Adobe has proposed a "CSS Regions" standard for richly immersive layout that might change that. But mostly i think the problem for business documents, reports and forms is that they are "compound documents" bound to desktop productivity environments and workgroups. The great transition from desktop/workgroup productivity environme
