Tag: FRANCE

Google's been busy with its pedal-powered Street View trike, going where no Street View car can reach, bringing us some of the most impressive virtual tours of significant landmarks across the globe. Now Google has made available Street View imagery of some of the most historic and impressive places in both Italy and France. Have you ever wanted to take a look round the Colosseum in Rome ...

France, which already has a tax on blank CDs, DVDs, and hard drives, is looking to extend the private copying levy to tablets -- but only on tablets that don't run Windows. This little gem, which actually passed through the French government back in December, could increase the cost of tablets with 64GB of storage by up to 12 euros, or $16. The money, incidentally, goes to copyright ...

In what must surely be the least surprising news of 2010, a study by a French university found that piracy increased after France's enactment of a 'Three Strikes Law'. Under the bill, which went into power in July 2009, repeat offenders can be cut off from the Internet. If being cut off is deemed not suitable for the villain's heinous crimes, the judge can instead levy a 300,000 Euro fine or send ...

Next Tuesday French lawmakers will vote on a bill dubbed 'Loppsi 2' that will give the authorities the power to force ISPs to block access to any web address. The intention of the bill is to allow French authorities to block sites in order to prevent the distribution of child pornography, but ultimately gives the government unilateral control to filter the internet. Amendments to the bill ...

Ever wonder how long it takes to get from here to there? About 7 hours and 51 minutes according to Google Maps. It turns out both here and there are in France. If you're still confused, there are two cities in France with the convenient names of Héré and Théré. So if you type "here" and "there" into the directions fields of Google Maps, what you get are directions ...

A few months back we realized that we don't know Kentucky from Kansas thanks to Statetris, an online game that combines geography with Tetris. At the time, all we could do is bungle the placement of US states. But now that Statetris has gone international, we realize just how little we know about world geography. There are new versions of Statetris for Africa, Europe, France, Japan, the ...

One thing that tends to take a while in the Web 2.0 market is the expansion to non-English speaking markets. Even Google is guilty of waiting a while to open up services for non-English speaking residents of the world. Piczo, the social network that specializes in the teen market, has finally expanded to include other languages. The second place superstar in the social space for teens now has ...

French authorities plan on passing out open-source software to incoming high school freshman next year. The software expected to include Firefox and Thunderbird as well as an office suite; instant messaging software and an audio video player will be put on a USB flash drive and passed out to students at the beginning of the school year. The USB drive will give students the ability to check email ...

Microsoft is doing some connecting with leading edge suppliers in Europe to boost its Live service. Soon 375 millions people are going to be able to IM each other using mobiles or PC's though a deal with Orange in France. The new service will be called Orange Messenger by Windows Live. The application will essentially allow Orange customers to either use the IM tool online, or on their mobile ...

In his 2006 New Year's address, French President Jacques Chirac apparently focused on Quaero, a new search engine being built by "some of the top tech labs in France and Germany." The project is ambitious, to say the least, reportedly providing "an array of multimedia tools for identifying and indexing images, sound and text," including "a powerful translating tool which ...