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A while back, MozillaZine ran Mozilla being used at universities.

Houston, MIT, Durham, Cambridge and The Helsinki University of Technology all use Mozilla in one form or another.

The TCPA FAQ page, independent and unbiased of Wintel conglomerations and their media bedfellows.

Dasher lets you soft of "steer a course" through what you want to say, which is pretty handy when you need to create a long stream of text. In the current incarnation, it seems to be lc alphas and the space, only, but to blow out the bulk of your text, and insert punctuation and formatting later, it could be very handy. With use, it learns the statistical distribution of letter order, so that the easiest things to write are things you write a lot... when you pass through a "J", vowels are big and easy to hit, while consonants are tiny little slits. You'll see what I mean when you play with it. I don't use it myself, aside from seeing what it can do so I can help others use it if needed, but it's definitely what I would use if I needed to write a book and had only limited use of my hands.

I believe that it's important to hear all sides to any issue, so here are two Ogg Vorbis encoded recordings of Richard M. Stallman speaking about software patents and a percieved danger that they pose to software development. I know that this story isn't specifically about software patents, but you may find his ideas informative and extensible. (Disclaimer: Verbatim copying and distribution of the entire speech recording are permitted provided this notice is preserved.)

http://audio-video.gnu.org/audio/rms-speech-cambri dgeuni-england2002.ogg Transcript
http://audio-video.gnu.org/audio/rms-speech-patent s-lse2002.ogg

Here is a transcript of a non-recorded speech given by RMS in India also on the issue of software patents.

I hope some of you find these links useful. If anyone knows of any good links taking differing position on the issue of patent law, etc... than I would definitly encourage you to post those.

This is typically an example of why process patents and software patents are not worth a dime!! I hire a TV, and that is paied monthly. Does that mean they could patent that also? Why not stop there, why not with anything rented for a monthly period; phones, cars anything!! Read Richard Stallman's Talk on Patents

I hope this page doesn't go away. I hope it is updated to the current state of the relevant U.S. patents on the LZW algorithm held by IBM and Unisys.

I hope the page doesn't go away because it makes a number of other points which are still valid including:

• Patent infringement can be charged against users of programs, not just the developers or distributors.
• PNG is technically superior (even if support for it is less popular) and we should do what we can to encourage its use.
• The reason why the GNU.org web pages don't use GIFs should apply to other patented algorithms as well (I'd be surprised to see GNU.org distributing an MP3 right now, for instance)

And I'm sure there are plenty of other valid observations. I consider that page to be a concise summary of some level-headed thinking on the subject of (what has come to be known as) software patents. It's often easier to point to that page than to get someone to listen to the speech on software patents or to read the entire transcript of the speech simply because the GIF page is shorter (but less comprehensive).

Ross Anderson, professor at Cambridge University has some works on this including Programming Satan's Computer (PDF) which looks at cryptographic protocols being attacked by being deployed on hostile system. Such as Satellite TV decoders which rely on smartcards which are in the posession of the attacker / customer.

The Tamper Lab is pretty impressive too.

Making your system realible in the present of the hostile attacker or on a hostile system is very hard, well nearly impossible.

Ross Anderson, professor at Cambridge University has some works on this including Programming Satan's Computer (PDF) which looks at cryptographic protocols being attacked by being deployed on hostile system. Such as Satellite TV decoders which rely on smartcards which are in the posession of the attacker / customer.

The Tamper Lab is pretty impressive too.

Making your system realible in the present of the hostile attacker or on a hostile system is very hard, well nearly impossible.

Ross Anderson, professor at Cambridge University has some works on this including Programming Satan's Computer (PDF) which looks at cryptographic protocols being attacked by being deployed on hostile system. Such as Satellite TV decoders which rely on smartcards which are in the posession of the attacker / customer.

The Tamper Lab is pretty impressive too.

Making your system realible in the present of the hostile attacker or on a hostile system is very hard, well nearly impossible.

Can be made to work with "head-mouse or by eyetracker" as they say on the site, or via joystick/mouse etc. Also aimed where full sized keyboards are not really an option (eg palmtops).

Download versions exist for Windows, GNU/Linux, PocketPC and Mac - also a number of languages.

Can be made to work with "head-mouse or by eyetracker" as they say on the site, or via joystick/mouse etc. Also aimed where full sized keyboards are not really an option (eg palmtops).

Download versions exist for Windows, GNU/Linux, PocketPC and Mac - also a number of languages.

I think that Dasher could be used as an alternative to handwriting recognition on these.

On a related note, anti-virus programs is one place where I can actually see a potential useful application of "trusted computing" (no, not necessarily Palladium). If there could be some way to to tell the OS "Look, I don't care if you're the administrator or not: the only programs that are allowed to terminate the anti-virus scanner process are the scanner itself, and, say, Task Manager".

You seem to have no idea about trusted computing, and still you get moderated as Score:5, Interesting... Now, this is really interesting, indeed. *sigh* Please do us a favor and read at least Ross Anderson's Trusted Computing Frequently Asked Questions for God's sake...

It's actually pretty cool, probably almost as fast as a keyboard with practice too.

I am not sure why we americans use our silly middle-endian format.

Perhaps for continuity, you could write decimal numbers in the same way

So 243 would be three hundred and twenty four...

ISO standard is quite usual nowadays... It can get quite strange sometimes listening to americans talking about 9/11 and wondering what's special about the 9th of November.

I use year/month/day. It makes sense logically, and is understood by Americans.

It's also the ISO standard ordering, and is useful in filenames since sorting by name also sorts by date.

But... (drum roll)

what is wrong with HSTCP (High Speed TCP) of which seems to have been much better thought out, is on its way to being an IETF draft (do a google search for HSTCP) and seems to work both for the average normal user and the power user. There is also another TCP varient called Scalable TCP which also seems to have quite a bit of theory behind it!

Is there an Anti-palladium/TCPA initiative, either technical or polictical ? By this I mean ..

1)Can we still have programs that would be untouched by Palladium/TCPA ? I hope there are.. and I hope Palladium/TCPA is made to look like a magnanimous waste of time and money. I have half a mind to start a website to brainstorm these ideas.

2) Arent there any polictical people opposed to Palladium ? I really dont trust the politicians, as their political campaigns are funded by these companies.

Here is a good article about how secure palladium/TCPA is and will be. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

I like it. No it's not as configurable as sendmail.

Of course it does not have the rewriting magic that sendmail is so feared for

I'm not sure that I want an MTA in which it is easy to solve the Towers of Hanoi, but still a pain to fully qualify unqualified domain names.

Sendmail's second greatest advantage (milters) is a consequence of its greatest weakness (some natural things one might want to do being difficult). (The greatest advantage is its enormous user base.)

Anyway, I install exim when I will be running or maintaining the system, but I install sendmail when I know that the client may have to call in someone else down the road to help with the system. That is, an exotic system that is easy to maintain can be harder to maintain than a common system which is difficult to maintain.

Hmmm.....DOJ *does not* break up MSFT. They plan to build-in DRM and other measures in to the next iteration of the OS -- which makes *me* a bit paranoid due to their monopoly on desktop computing -- but I guess I'm not alone.

Since there are so many advantages to trusted computing (yes...the sarcasm is intended) that governments outside the U.S. (vs. the U.S. Government itself) are obviously extremely distrustful of any moves by MSFT and MSFT is extremely concerned about Linux since it so obviously provides an alternative that is growing increasingly viable.

So aligning with SCO makes perfect sense for MSFT...what a perfect way to spew FUD! When my buddies and I sit around talking about MSFT, the DOJ and the scary possibilities of such things as media consolidation, DRM, shrinkage of ISP's (which, BTW, makes government surveillance *much* easier)...this MSFT/SCO connection is just one more glaring example of the fact that our pals in Redmond asked us a long time ago to bend over...and are trying really hard to hand us that jar of Vaseline they're holding to make total insertion all that much easier.

Is it just me...or are MSFT's moves to kill Linux laughingly obvious to you too? Are you gonna grab *your* ankles and lube up?

Note: the first link above has more information and additional material. The research was sponsored by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Finland.

Your suspicion of secret back doors are not off the mark. If you familiarize yourself with the upcoming security technology from Microsoft, called Palladium or more recently NGSCB, you will find that backdoors are likely to be mandatory in it. Furthermore, such backdoors in crypto-processors are already patented, see for example the patents ep1059578 Secure backdoor access for a computer or us5970246 Data processing system having a trace mechanism and method therefor.

My prefernce would be to have the exit condition specified by a while statement. If there were many exit conditions I might set a flag, but I would strongly consider refactoring around it if pos. In certain situations I would even use a break, but I would consider the alternatives first.

I mentioned Dijkstras famous paper because a break can be thought of as being like a goto because it interrupts the flow of control inside loops. See: here

But really - this is all standard stuff.

Another option for ML-ish languages is the Standard ML compiler for .NET CLR: SML.NET. It implements SML 97 with similar language interoperability.

Actually, I read all definitions, including the two by the jargon file which were obviously the source for grinberg.net's definition of a hacker. However, if you think that much of the world is going to go by the Jargon files, you're sadly mistaken. Do you go in to a resturaunt and ask "soup-p(see section on 'Jargon Construction')?" or do you think any sane waiter/waitress will respond to this, even if they know what it means? The Jargon files, although included in dictionary.com, is not really authoritive. The Jargon files are, in definition, a dictionary of slang, and slang is considered 'informal' English because of lack of popularity vs. authority.

Actually, I read all definitions, including the two by the jargon file which were obviously the source for grinberg.net's definition of a hacker. However, if you think that much of the world is going to go by the Jargon files, you're sadly mistaken. Do you go in to a resturaunt and ask "soup-p(see section on 'Jargon Construction')?" or do you think any sane waiter/waitress will respond to this, even if they know what it means? The Jargon files, although included in dictionary.com, is not really authoritive. The Jargon files are, in definition, a dictionary of slang, and slang is considered 'informal' English because of lack of popularity vs. authority.

Damn, child. Learn some html.

Link 1

Link 2

Mod parent down for gratuitous karma whoring without even bothering to make clickable links.

The same notion of trust that you can find in TCPA:

Check points 24 and 25 of the TCPA FAQ:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

"Researchers at Holloman AFB have broken their own 6.49 x 10^8 seconds old land speed record for rail vehicles. The rocket powered sled covered the 4.8 x 10^3 meter track in roughly 6 seconds. Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at Mach 8.6 or about 2.86 x 10^3 meters per second - it covered the last 2.9 x 10^3 meters in just 1.3 seconds. The previous record of 2.74 x 10^3 meters per second was set at 1982-10-05 . Other accounts are at the Alamogordo 8.64 x 10^4 secondly News, the Denver Post, and CNN."

There, that's much better, right?

Check Dasher. According to users, it takes just half an hour or so to learn to write quite fast.

(mentioned here before)

BCPL springs to mind; it was developed (by one of my old supervisors!) specifically to avoid platform lockin. At the time, the university was about to acquire a second computer - but it wasn't compatible with the first. To make matters easier for the users, Martin Richards designed BCPL and an accompanying bytecode language called cintcode. Despite its age - it's an indirect ancestor of C! - it is still in use today in a few applications; apparently Ford have a custom-built setup running in BCPL on a pair of Vaxes to manage each factory outside the US. (For some reason, the US factories use a different system.) With the demise of the Vax, Ford have been supporting Martin's work in porting the whole BCPL/cintcode/Tripos (a cintcode OS) to run on Linux/x86 systems.

For that matter, I seem to recall most of the early computer languages were intended to reduce the need to be tied to a specific platform; Fortran, Pascal, C (derived from B, itself a cut-down version of BCPL), as well as the original Unix concept.

The provided binary would include a signature, produced with the manufacturer's private key, that applies only to that binary. The hardware verifies the signature with the manufacturer's public key. If one bit of the kernel binary has been changed, the signature will not verify, and only the manufacturer can produce one that will.

For background, see the Palladium FAQ

It could be argued that the source of a signed binary, which in the language of the GPL is "the preferred form for modification", must include the private key used to create the signature. However, as Linus points out, he and others have been signing GPL'd releases for years without anyone demanding copies of their private signing keys, so I don't really think that argument is valid.

The principal investigator of the grant is Prof. Jonathan Smith at U. Penn. This guy has been DEEP in bed with the spooks and with DARPA for years now. You may remember him as the guy who invented TCPA ("Palladium").

He's also a millionaire and he has his own company called iPrivacy. , which makes technology that claims to give online consumers privacy from web retailers (but at the same time allows the feds to monitor the transactions). Quoting from their website:

Both the FBI and the Department of Justice have reviewed the service and concluded that iPrivacy would not impede their investigations. iPrivacy's platform would support the Bush administration's initiative to monitor/ interpret/track certain suspects' Internet activities.

He's also on the board of advisors for other companies including Pinpoint Inc., which according to their page:

owns patented and patent pending technology solutions worldwide related to profiling and targeting, customer relationship management, personalization, data mining, user data privacy, data pre-caching, location aware wireless devices and other solutions relevant to electronic content delivery

Ultimately, a professor who brings millions and millions of dollars of DoD grants into the U. Penn CIS department can pretty much do what he wants there, including using the money in his own private enterprises, as long as the technology he sells can be circumvented by the feds.

I've used Dasher on the PC and Pocket PC. On the PC it rocks, although not very handy. It takes up half of my precious screen realty. Its deffinetly one of the cooler concept programs I've tried.

As for dasher on the Pocket PC: it sucks. It is a demo so you can't use it for application input unless you want to cut and paste a lot. That can be easily solved (perhaps a horizontal layout like the keyboard inputs?). The problem is the PDA lacks the screen size to efficiently use it. You can hardly see the letters as they come towards your stylus. I end up squinting an inch or two away. Even then I don't know what I'm aiming for.

Unfortunately, I have a Palm-type Palm, but if I had PocketPC-type palm, I'd jump at this app.

-T

Easter is basically Passover with a new focus. Instead of (or in addition to) celebrating the rescue of God's people from the slavery of Egypt, it celebrates the rescue of God's people from the bondage of sin.

Matthew 26:26 tells us that Messiah Jesus, at His last Passover feast, took a piece of matzah, made the b'rakhah, broke it, gave it to the talmidim and said, "Take, eat; this is My body." The Seder matzah represents the crucified and now-risen Messiah.

Just as you celebrate God's grace exhibited through the Passover lambs whose blood saved the believers in Egypt from certain death, believers today celebrate the Lamb whose redeeming blood saves them from a certain death. Just as God raised up the water of the Red Sea to part and provide the way to refuge for His people on the third day after the Passover lambs were slain, God raised up The Way to salvation for the world on the third day after His Passover Lamb was slain. The angel of death passed over the believers in Egypt, and death passes over believers today.

All Jews and Gentiles who trust in the blood of the Passover Lamb should celebrate on Easter. Death has passed over them! The One Who died for us said, "I AM the Resurrection and the Life. Whoever puts his trust in Me will live, even if he dies; and everyone living and trusting in Me will never die." (John 11:25-26) Then He asks the gravest, most substantial, eternally-consequential question a person will confront in his entire life, "Do you believe this?"

This sounds like a tool for control freaks to find patterns and reinforce those patterns in themselves over and over. Patterns breed stagnation. This is the whole problem with commercial radio.

I say embrace randomness. That's why I prefer to listen to streams instead of local mp3s anyway. In fact I would like to see a tool which mixed hundreds of streams into a single stream. When a song ended on one stream, it would find another stream where a song was just beginning and switch to it.

Besides, consciousness interacts with random physical systems. How can you be sure you didn't really want to hear that song?

You obviously didn't read my earlier comment...understandable, since I am a lowly Anonymous Coward. I'll repost an excerpt; please read it and tell me if you still don't understand why leap seconds were introduced. Seconds may be in an arbitrary unit of time, but what they are measuring (namely the length of a solar day and the length of a solar year) is not arbitrary at all.

Here's an excerpt from a previously posted article:

"The primary reason for introducing the concept of the leap second was to meet the requirement of celestial navigation to keep the difference between solar time and atomic time small. However, the motivation for the leap second has diminished because of the wide availability of satellite navigation systems, such as GPS, while the operational complexities of maintaining precise timekeeping systems have made the insertion of leap second adjustments increasingly difficult and costly."

There you have it: leap seconds were introduced so that those who navigate using the stars would have access to a clock that doesn't deviate too greatly from solar time.

You mean, nothing significant enough that your naive little mind can think of. However, scientists, engineers, governments, etc. have plenty of topics that do require sub-second precision (not to mention sub-microsecond precision, as is currently offered by GPS). I suggest you personally ignore this article, but don't attempt to judge what everone else is going to think of it.

You didn't even get your comment about days right. According to this paper, a study of eclipse records kept by Ptolemy from 136BC shows a 3 hour time difference (and if we regressed current astronomical motions without corrections like this it wouldn't even have been a total eclipse). Studies of coral fossils show that a year lasted for about 400 days, in prehistoric times. Oh, wait - you probably believe the Earth was created 6000 years ago..

Does anyone know or care what second the WTC disaster, or Pearl Harbour, or Moon Landing happened at? No. Days matter for history and calculations, seconds do not. There is nothing significant enough to deserve an exact keeping of seconds, when humanity won't span long enough to have those extra seconds turn into days.

Who said anything about pinpointing historical events to the last second? And how can you possibly say that seconds don't matter in calculations? Have you ever done a physics experiment in your life? Do you realize that the frequency of your computer's CPU likely ranges from hundreds of millions to billions of cycles per second? (BTW, when I say billion, I mean 10 to the power of 9, since billion has multiple definitions.)

Off the top of my head, I can see how precise timekeeping would be important for physics, astronomy, celestial navigation and computation.

Here's an excerpt from a previously posted article:

"The primary reason for introducing the concept of the leap second was to meet the requirement of celestial navigation to keep the difference between solar time and atomic time small. However, the motivation for the leap second has diminished because of the wide availability of satellite navigation systems, such as GPS, while the operational complexities of maintaining precise timekeeping systems have made the insertion of leap second adjustments increasingly difficult and costly."

There you have it: leap seconds were introduced so that those who navigate using the stars would have access to a clock that doesn't deviate too greatly from solar time. Okay? Satisfied?

If you're still confused, in 1820, there were about 86400 seconds in a solar day, which agrees with the social definition that a day equals (24 hours per day) times (60 minutes per hour) times (60 seconds per minute). Since 1820, the Earth's rotation has slowed such that a solar day is about 2.5 milliseconds longer, which works out to about 1 extra second per year.

Any more questions?

Fixed link: Here.

Sadly lacking are the ships from Iain M. Banks' Culture universe. These not only have great names but are much more realistic than in most scifi. Even a small General Systems Vehicle (GSV) would be up there with a Super Star Destroyer sizewise (and has millions of inhabitants) and a Torturer Class Rapid Offensive Unit (ROU) would kick the shit out of any other scifi warship (couple of hundred metres long, over 90% engine, the rest weapons, controled by an AI, 0 crew).

It is actually fairly easy to estimate what what warships in space would be like, from a little physics and common sense. Most scifi fails miserably in this regard. The most obvious fact that has a bearing on space warships is that space is empty or nearly so. There is no where to hide and therefore it is very easy to guess what colour a warship would be, black. For the same reason it can also be guessed that the temperature of a warships hull will be 2.73 K (2.73 degrees above absolute zero), to match the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Any hotter and its thermal emission will give away its presense, any cooler and it will stand out as a shadow against the CMB.

Of course there is still many effects (such as passing in front of a star) that could give you away. A critical parameter which determines how battles would play out is at what distance, on average warships could detect each other. Since the speed of light is around 300,000 km/s, if ships can only be detected at less than a million kilometers battles are likely to very short, few second affairs, where the first ship to detect the other and fire a laser (or similar) wins. In this case the sophistication of sensors and camoflage technology will be the deciding factor.

However if the average detection distance is much greater than a million kilometers then the travel time of the fastest weapon will many seconds or even minutes. Even ships moving at only a few kilometers per second could move a considerable distance in such time. Using laser like weapons would have much of the quality of contempory battleships shelling each other. With significant light travel times you would need to accurately predict the motion of the target to stand any chance of hitting it and evasive action by the target would be possible (although they would not be able to see a laser pulse coming).

At short ranges lasers or the like would be the weapon of choice but if you are engaging ships at distances of a hundred million kilometres guided missiles, if they could move at a significant fraction of the speed of light, might be of use as well, since at such a distance the light travel time would be many minutes and you are unlikely to hit something at that range with a laser if it is doing any manouvring.

It should be noted that engagements at very small distances such as those portrayed in Star Wars, B5 etc. would be rather unlikely. Not only is it unlikely that ships would be undetectable down to distances of a few kilometres but if this was the case ship combat would be virtually impossible. Considering just the inner solar system and confining oneself to the within a million kilometres of the plane you are faced with a volume of the order of 10^22 cubic kilometres. Thousands of ships could wander around in such a volume for ever without meeting if they needed to pass within a few kilometres in order to see each other.

When you consider the whole galaxy it quickly becomes clear that conventional war loses all meaning. I think it is unlikely that ships would detectable at even lightdays if they were trying to be inconspicuous, given the huge amount of gas, ice, dust and rocks that is floating around and reflecting starlight. But even if you could seeing where a ship was days ago is not a great step forward in fighting it (a lightday is very roughly the size of the solar system). The volume of the galaxy

Real Programmers (TM) use INTERCAL.

All other computer languages, including, but not limited to, C, C++, or any other computer language, now known or later developed, is for lusers.

From TCPA / Palladium / NGCSB / TCG Frequently Asked Questions:

TCPA stands for the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, an initiative led by Intel. Their stated goal is `a new computing platform for the next century that will provide for improved trust in the PC platform.' Palladium is software that Microsoft says it plans to incorporate in future versions of Windows; it will build on the TCPA hardware, and will add some extra features.

This means that this whole Palladium/TCPA monstrosity requires support from both hardware and software. It is entirely up to the end-user whether or not he wants this. However, senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina is working on getting a law that will make TCPA mandatory, see here. Until such time that this bill becomes the law:

1. Don't buy the hardware. Unless there is a compelling reason to do so. Well if you are working for the military then go knock yourself out.

2. Don't buy^H^H^H lease/rent/license/WTF the software. There is no compelling reason to do so.

It will only be compelling to use Palladium/TCPA software and hardware only if it becomes illegal not to use it.

Secure computing is not the aim of Palladium/TCPA. Its aim is to provide a way for software peddlers like Microsoft and content pushers like Disney to monitor what you run on your computer and assert control over your computer. In the long run, it will provide them a way to assert control over you.

Secure computing can be achieved through a combination of secure computing practices, secure operating systems running secure applications, and plain-old common sense.

If Intel, Microsoft and their cohorts push through with this stupidity it could spell the end for them. Just think, why in the hell would I want to run this sort of crap? Unless it's mandated by law, there's no reason for me to do so. With the recent slew of news about stupid laws being implemented in the U.S. it's a real possibility.

0xB00F, stands in front of Bill Gates, raises hand, extends middle finger.

It is well worth a read giving an insightful historical perspective and with translations to a number of other languages available.

I think the ROUs or one of the Affront ships might fare better.

Though the GSVs are REALLY fucking big if I remember correctly

Listing of Culture/Iain M. Banks ships

This is far from an original idea. The Pope and Roman Inquisition did the same thing back in the 1700's and 1800's. The Church published the "Index librorum prohibitorum" or "List of Prohibited Books".

Once the list got out, nearly every book on it became a best seller and eventually the list itself was put on the "Index librorum prohibitorum". So the Catholics arrived at the same point. The Catholics maintained a secret list of prohibited books but wouldn't disclose what was on the list for fear of promoting that which was prohibited.

Either this guy knows his history or it's a clear case of "There is nothing new under the Sun." I wonder if he also knows that in 1966 the Index was abolished. I suspect the list was abolished because the Catholics could no longer keep up with the volume of books being released and they had probably had their fill of p0rn too. So, if history does repeat itself, this list will fade away too. I just hope he doesn't start making claims that "heavy bodies fall faster than lighter bodies."

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

you would need the Trojan Room Coffee Pot Cam to make sure that no one is stealing your fresh coffee...

When looking around the Cambridge Machine Vision URL noted above, I came upon this little site which looks like an interesting project in Hidden Markov Models; so, take a look at current 'owner' of site and related software license.

Now idn't that funny?

People might want to check out these cool pictures and videos from Cambridge University

Patents are a critical part of the foundation of successful free markets. Why would anyone want to innovate if not to profit from his innovations?

Some people forget that computing is one industry that did not always have to deal with patents as it does now. Computing was moving along perfectly well without them, so patents don't come off as necessary to spur innovation, but weapons to needlessly hobble competitors. Patents are being awarded for ridiculous and obvious ideas that stifle the development of software and hardware for all but the richest participants. The consumer does not benefit from this reduction in competition. Furthermore, your point suggests you think that if one industry has patents they all should have them. I suggest you examine the details on how patenting works in each field and you throw out such broad sweeping conclusions.

For a far more prescient, detailed, and learned view of patents specifically talking about patenting algorithms used in the production of computer software (sometimes inaccurately called "software patents"), listen to or read RMS' talk on patents.