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this was too good to pass up searching for; thanks for the hint!

http://www.cabalamat.org/weblog/art_217.html
http://www.speedcam.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/index2.ht m

and a little news article on the topic
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,690 3,1037031,00.html

That sounds like a loophole. However I am not in favor of automated law enforcement, I like to face my accuser.

I can't stand speed cameras. I think they should all be destroyed, like they do in the UK. Fortunately, nearly all of the cameras in Australia are well-marked, with signs announcing the presence of a camera half a kilometer up the road.

It's easy enough to speed like a bat out of hell until you see one of the warning signs.

The only shitty camera setups are on the big multilane highways around the major cities, which, unfortunately, are set up in arrays several kilometers apart and take notice of the amount of time it takes you to travel between the two points. These are impossible to avoid.

- A.P.

There's more detail here or here.

By and large, Europeans don't have the same obsession with the Free Market that Americans do. We don't consider it a panacea for all economic ills, and we quite like the idea of governments that put the common good above the health of its corporations. In fact, one of the major reasons why France rejected the EU Constitution was fear that it would enforce "Anglo-Saxon" laissez-faire capitalism on them.

Of course, even in the US unabashed Free Marketeering is contigent upon political expediency. Even the most laissez-faire US President will adopt illegal trade tarriffs if he thinks there's votes in it.

Remember, these are the guys who tried to sell you deliberately non-working kit.

I don't buy from Belkin. I hope you choose not to, too.

The USA will have to get used to the EU: its economy now surpasses the USA's, it continues its Borg-like growth, and it's starting to find its feet internationally.

Remember Belkin's routers that hijacked http connections? They seem to be doing the same thing as this so-called "invention".

The patent is dated 24 October 2003, however Belkin's hijack software is earlier - it dates from 15 September 2003 or earlier, so it is presumably prior art.

(IANA patent laywer).

Copyright lasts 50 years, or 25 years if the author is dead. There are no provisions against circumvention of TPMs.

This is a pretty sensible law, IMO, so they'd be stupid to change it.

Is there any formal way of protesting against someone being given an honour? Obviously I can write to my MP, but are there any other routes I can take?

What facilities are there on the Internet for setting up a petition against this?

Can anyone suggest any other things to do? -- if so, please email me at zen19725 at zen.co.uk, or add a comment to this article on my blog.

When you measure active sites only, Microsoft's market share is 19% and falling.

The figures you've quoted from my site are accurate, but the situation for Microsoft is actually worse than that. When considering that Microsoft got 19% of new websites in 2003, it's worthwhile to consider that up to the end of 2002, Microsoft had a total of 24.74% of active sites.

This means that not only is Microsoft's share only 19%, Microsoft's market share is going down and Apache's is going up. Although Apache can run on MS Windows, it is nearly always run on Unix systems. The most popular Unix is Linux, which is busily replacing the proprietary Unices. So if Apache's share is going up (which it is) Linux's share is going up even faster:

Thus, for web servers at least, MS Windows is losing market share, and Linux is massively increasing its market share.

This analysis includes all sites, but the more realistic and "telling", if you will, analysis would be to look at ACTIVE sites ONLY.

That analysis has been done, and the results were that during 2003, considering new sites, Apache was chosen four times more often than IIS.

You can see the actual figures at http://www.cabalamat.org/weblog/art_182.html.

Apache has 77.54% marketshare, and IIS only has 19.06%.

OPEN YOUR FUCKING EARS, MICROSOFT - Apache was over three times more popular than all other web servers put together.

The NHS asked Microsoft for a discount. At this point it's appropriate to recall that the NHS is Europe's biggest employer with 800,000 desktops, and oughtr to merit a big discount. MS would only offer a discount of "a few percentage points" which annoyed the NHS, who then decided to go for the Sun/Linux trial.

See NHS considers moving to Linux for details.

I expect the NHS will go with Linux if MS doesn't offer big discounts; they might go with Linux even if MS do offer big discounts - like Munich did.

I wonder if this merits a visit from Ballmer?

The NHS IT director, Richard Granger, has a reputation for getting value for money, and not accepting bullshit from suppliers, so I doubt if he'd go for anything involving vendor lock-in to Sun. Granger has said:

The cost of software is going to become several orders of magnitude lower than it is now. I don't value the IP in the same way they do.

Actually, yesterday's NTK included quotes of the Guardian article, and a link to this weblog entry, which is a further comment on the article and does include a link. The NTK issue does not have a direct link, that's true, but the original poster certainly is right in saying that the situation was "covered" in the current NTK.
In my experience, he's also correct in saying that NTK stories often get reported here on Slashdot the next day - although I'm not saying the author of the story got his inspiration there (and if he did, so what, it is news for nerds after all).

In her article, she says that:

this directive will not have any adverse effects on open source software development

So I've written her a letter, suggesting that open source software explicitly be made exempt from patent enforcement. If what she says in her article is true, this would have no effect, so she's got no legitimate reason to oppose it.

My weblog has an article that goes into this in more detail.

If you want to contact Arlene McCarthy, and politely tell her your views, she has a website.

In her article, she says that:

this directive will not have any adverse effects on open source software development

So I've written her a letter, suggesting that open source software explicitly be made exempt from patent enforcement. If what she says in her article is true, this would have no effect, so she's got no legitimate reason to oppose it.

My weblog has an article that goes into this in more detail.

If you want to contact Arlene McCarthy, and politely tell her your views, she has a website.