tttp

France had an unfortunate history of self censorship from the media and active control of the public media from the president(de Gaulle that controlled the only TV channel, Mitterand ordering illegal wiretapping of journalists)

The actual french President is a control freak. Sarkozy has strong relationship with most of the private media owners and is using it.

He has since the start of his mandate tried to control the internet eg.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/may/13/france...

He is (ab)using a common view in France that speech should be controlled and freedom of speech isn't absolute. For instance, it is illegal to make xenophobic or racists comments. La quandrature du net is doing a good job of exposing the latest of his attacks and, hopefully public pressure can shame him out of his willingness to control everything.

He likes the French motto of "Liberty, equality fraternity". If enough people see him trying to replace the first one by censorship, he might be less aggressively trying.

Fortunately, his approval rate is record low, part of this is likely due to his abuse of power and willingness to control everything. Unfortunately, the best opposant is currently accused of sexual abuse.

Then, another member of the G8 is Italy, with Berlusconi as the president....

Interesting countries, all in all.

And go for the ones with real pages on real paper.

The ones you can lend to your friends after having read them. The ones that your parents have read, kept and that you took in their bookshelf when you were a kid.

The ones that your friends gave back to you and that will wait in your bookshelf for your children to take and read. The ones their friends will borrow and that will probably giggle a bit, because they will have difficulties deciphering the notes your father wrote on a margin.

Because if content has a price, knowledge ought to be free.

Can anyone shed light on this: "share the vision of bringing software innovation and products to our customers"

Are they the only one sharing that vision? Are they software companies with a vision of dumping obsolete software and products to their customers ?

Big fan of stuffing fluffy meaningless statements into each PR. This one is a keeper.

What's the size of your organization? Having a core team used to work together, and that doesn't need to find a huge amount every month is quite a different beast, and probably much easier to redirect following a different path than a big(er) and with more inertia.

Are you using/working with open source libaries/platform? Surely if you are active in a big community (say django), finding some gig to cover the salaries and buy you some time shouldn't be too difficult.

Btw, there is nothing to be ashamed of to work on others' ideas and projects, and 'mercenary coding' sounds a bit like you feel you are prostituting yourself, probably neither good for the ones in your team that will end up selling their services to keep the company afloat, nor for your customers.

What about your market ? if you think it's really dying, don't die with it. You should consider open source your product. Might bring more visibility, new customers and new "mercenary coding" ;)

If your market isn't dying and is small only if you focus on a national context, selling your team/product to someone having more connections to your market abroad could be an option, but will likely have an impact on your team, and on your product. Is this worthwhile ?

Bonne chance.

Durkheim published more than a century ago a book that "invented" sociology about suicide. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(book)

One of the common findings in that field is that you don't do stuff based on absolute measurement, but always relative. One of the good examples studied are revolutions: you don't do revolutions because what you have is intolerable, but because you can see, either near you or in a theoretical model a better solution.

To come back to suicide, one of the reason he provided as a lesser suicide rate among the catholics and jews is the social pressure: you just don't do that. With a weaker social link (that isn't incompatible with more happy society), committing suicide is even more accepted.

Ie. I'm surrounded by happy people that don't care about me, that's quite an incentive to look for a final solution.

Beside, might be that these countries as a all are more happy because the less happy persons are no more because they committed suicide ?

Read durkheim, still a enlightening author.