Sunday, June 12, 2005

On Sunday and Monday, Italians will vote on a referendum that would the abolish certain rules of the law about medically assisted fertility treatment.

Italian Law 40 of February 19, 2004 ruled on some aspects of assisted fertility treatment and established some rigid limits. The law was approved by the majority of Parliament with the encouragement of the government. The opposition protested because there was no agreement among Parliament for such a law and there was also disagreement among the majority. The law was approved using an urgent mechanism of the parliament, an apparatus used only if there is an urgent need for a law.

A Committee against the law has formed and asked for the Referendum.

There will be 4 different votes about 4 different aspects of the law.

The first of them is asking to remove the prohibition of doing scientific studies with embryonic cells. The second is the ban on donor sperm and eggs; the third is a ban on embryo screening for couples with hereditary diseases; and the fourth, the rule that only three embryos per treatment can be created, all of which have to be implanted at the same time.

The referendum is of abrogate type, the only type of referendum permitted by Italian law.

According to the Italian Law, in order for a law (or part of a law) to be abolished by a referendum, there must not only be a majority vote in favor of the abolishment, but also that the valid vote must be more than the majority of the people that have the right to vote.

Since it’s easier for the referendum not to be approved due to lack of presence of voters rather than for the presence of the majority of the “no” vote, the party who wants to keep the law as it is currently, has now asked citizens “not to go vote” rather than to vote “no”.

Even the Catholic Church asked its members to “not go to vote”; the Pope himself asked for that in an indirect way. The president of the Senate and other people in charge of important official positions took this position.

The opposition contested this behavior.

Wednesday, June 6, 2018

On Monday, United States technology giant Microsoft announced their plans to acquire GitHub, a San Francisco, California-based web-based hosting service for software version control using Git, for 7.5 billion US Dollars (USD).

In the official announcement at the Microsoft News web site, the company said they are to reach agreement with GitHub by the end of the year. They said the agreement would allow them to deliver Microsoft development services to GitHub users, and “accelerate enterprise use of GitHub”. GitHub had been financially struggling recently and is expected to get a new CEO.

In 2016, according to financial news and media company Bloomberg L.P., through three quarters GitHub lost USD 66 million, while in nine months of that year GitHub had revenue of USD 98 million. In August 2017 GitHub said they were seeking a new CEO. According to the announcements by GitHub and Microsoft, the Microsoft Corporate Vice President Nat Friedman would become the new CEO of GitHub. He had created app creation platform company Xamarin and was “an open-source veteran”, Microsoft said.

GitHub confirmed the acquisition plans on its blog. In this announcement they alluded to concerns about past friction between Microsoft and open-source software, however they said “things are different. […] Microsoft is the most active organization on GitHub in the world”, mentioning VS Code as an example. In the announcement, GitHub also referred to its several years of collaboration with Microsoft on Git LFS and Electron. GitHub also mentioned the Azure development platform run by Microsoft.