European Council Approves Software Patents

A. S. Bradbury writes "ZDNet reports that the EU Council has voted to pass changes to European patent law that will allow the patentability of software. See the FFII for more coverage. Currently, the FFII states 'The Irish Presidency's proposal was passed, with support from Germany, France and most of the other countries whose ministers had publicly promised to oppose or at least abstain. The only no vote came from Spain (to be confirmed), Italy and a few others abstained.' As you may remember, Germany had previously promised to vote against software patents. The FFII news page seems to have been showing growing support in European countries for the FFII and other organisations fighting against software patents, but unfortunately that wasn't enough. So, what now? The European elections are approaching, which means MEPs might be more willing to listen to our views than normal. Slashdot has covered software patents in Europe before."

Comments

Re:software patent can make happy all.

[milsim]

> One time Chiang throw rock at duck and it hit tree and bounce and hit Chiang in face! hahaha! I miss Chiang.

Your friend killed himself with a rock and you just laugh at that?

My eyes hurt...

[MS]

If the FFII wants to be taken seriously, they should start by face-lifting their website. A more serious layout with less pastel colors would give them a lot more credibility:

• bourdeaux-title, which gets poison-green on a mouse-over
• pink, sky-blue and cyan colored links on the left
• hundreds of lines of text on the first page
• page renders chaoticly when browser (MSIE) is less than 1024 pixels width (bad use of CSS?)
• font-size: xx-large for the link "Unterstützen" (i refer to the german page)
• lots of other no-no!

:-(

Re:Americans are Der Juden

[scoy13]

You're a piece of shit. I wish I were in the same room as you when you spit out those words. Your ass beating would be "Politically correct" where I come from, America.

"I hate Americans." - wannabe
"I am happy an American got beheaded." - watch your back, seriously.
"I wish more Americans had died on Sep. 11." - sounds like you were involved
"I hate George Bush." - nobody else had the balls to make any moves on terrorism.
"I hate white men, even if I am a white man." - ?
"I hate Israelis." - why cause they're trying to defend themselves?
"I beleive that people that blow up Jewish children are justified and moral heros." - you're a horrible human being

you're not worth any more effort.

Europe is dying

[cptgrudge]

New statistics state that there are 379 million people in Europe, with a growth rate of 0.3%.

How many people in North America are there? Let's see. The number of North America versus European posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 379x5 = 1.895 billion North American users. Asian posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of North American posts.

Therefore there are about 900 million people in Asia. A recent article put Australia at about 80 percent of the Usenet market. Therefore there are (1895+379+900)x4 = 12.6 billion worldwide Usenet users. This is consistent with the number of worldwide Usenet posts.

Due to population growth in other countries around the world, such as:

North America at 5.1%
Asia at 60.8%
Australia at 32.1%
Africa at 58.3%

Compare this with the 0.3% annual population increase of Europe, and it becomes clear that all too soon, it will become statistically insignificant.

All major surveys show that Europe has steadily declined in global population share. Europe is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Europe is to survive at all it will be among government hobbyists, dabblers, and dilettantes. Europe continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Europe is dead.

All the proof you'll need.