The bean counters in the university aren't going to cough up whatever Zeiss wants for an unlimited use license, and Zeiss isn't going to expand the license without trying to squeeze even more cash from the university. In either case, demand for the microscope would be exactly the same, only now researchers are setting alarms for 3am just to export a damn file.
I love this analogy.
Also please let me pick a nit: It gets even worse when said foreign country isn't a federation!
In Hungarian, for example, we use kormány to mean a mix of government, administration and cabinet, but mostly cabinet. Still it's usually translated to and from "government". But in English government is a very broad word that basically means all the tax funded institutions, not just the ministers. We rather call that "the state". For example in Hungarian nobody would say we have "government-funded" education or healthcare, rather we have "state-funded" ones. But in English "state" is very overloaded with many senses, so "government" took its place. It used to be strange to my ear in American movies when I knew less about the system, e.g. really the government is trying to find you? Like ministers and stuff?
That said, I don't know about the UK. If a Londoner talks about the "national level", is that England or the UK?
Oh damn I'm wrong and starting to see your point. Eg in German, "land" refers specifically to the federal state and not the federation. You need to use bundessomethingsomething to address all of Germany. Weird stuff!
EDIT suddenly I realize how weird a name the UN has. There's not really any proper nation states left in the word. Bhutan maybe?
I have no idea, but I like to think that it would've been the United Countries but then Scotland would've wanted a seat.
The name of the United Nations is an artifact of WWII - that was the name chosen by the alliance on 1 January 1942, just after the US entered the war, to describe their now-common cause. Given the wide variety of regimes fighting on the same side [1] and the common ideological basis of the combatant countries, "nations" and "brotherhood of nations" style of nationalism were an umbrella everyone could get behind while still having an appropriate amount of emotional oomph.
[1] Mostly. The USSR wasn't fighting Japan.
I beg your pardon?
They were told that, that's why they mostly assimilated. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/SpeakFre...
Tell that to the Bretons, Alsatians, Occitans, Corses, Catalans; not to speak of the outre-mer colonies.
In English, the question then becomes "Where are we going to import this word from?"
We recently awarded some grants to people for them to work with an open source scientific package we've been developing.
One of the groups actually gave the money back because it was so hard to get their University to deal with them being awarded money, it wasn't worth it for the amount involved.
There are ways in which it makes sense. The company generally wants to interact with a legal entity, not a research group.
A hybrid approach, that happens occasionally at the University of Washington, is that a department negotiates a discounted license for a software license and then opens the license agreement to broader swaths of the university.
Google is familiar with that business model, at least when it comes to dealings that the Chinese government might take an interest in.