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Poland Blocks European Software Patent Vote, For Now
Anonymous Brave Guy writes "Thanks to the Polish Minister of Science and Information Technology, Wlodzimierz Marcinski, Europe has dropped the current proposal for software patents. He made a special journey to Brussels to withdraw the proposal, basically in protest at the way the patents were being pushed through by the back door. Since the European presidency is about to pass to Luxembourg, this has effectively killed the idea, at least for the immediate future." More at FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure). This means that the promised move to delay actually worked.
This may be only a temporary reprieve, but it could also, quite possibly, be a sign that the tides may be changing in the Council. Let's all hope for the best, and do what we can to make it happen.
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
They build upon what they got from poland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine
Freedom or George Bush
They did break the first version, it was later upgraded with an additional wheel, and that upgraded one was cracked by Turing at Bletchley. A few links: http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp/poles/ poles.htm, http://www.armyradio.com/publish/Articles/The_Enig ma_Code_Breach/The_Enigma_Code_Breach.htm, http://www.enigmahistory.org/enigma.html.
This and other Polish contributions to WWII were kept quiet at the end of the war to avoid annoying Stalin, and it was carried into history writing (especially in the UK) for a long time. Too many exaples to mention, the Enigma is but one...
For me this is the first really good thing coming out of the bigger EU. If you'd like to comment to the party of Brinkhorst, contact D66 (Dutch, but you probably will understand it), his party, or mail them: international@d66.nl. Here's a quote from their site:
Or (as I just did) thank the man himself
CO2 metric tons/capita in 1996
Germany = 10,51
France = 6,20
USA = 19,99
In other words, the US has almost twice the CO2 output per person when compared to Germany.
As a side note: I can kind of agree that the Kyoto treaty is "designed to hurt the US economy" as some say. With pollution numbers like that, of course the US economy will be hurt! "Made your own bed..." and all that.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
This is actually the back door that the FFII is talking about. They tried to take software patents the "Should we restrict fishery of endangered species, and by the way, patents on intellectual property should be allowed as proposed two months ago, right?" way.
\begin{rant}
That my friends, is NOT democracy as it should be done. In Sweden there is at least a law demanding that documents treated by court and parliament should be (as long as they are not threating personal integrity (and some other corner cases (they have lawyers/legal council/paralegal/whatever it's called in english, y'know))) made public so that anyone and everyone can se what their representative is doing. That is the main thing I lack in the overly bureaucratic EU.
\end{rant}
Geek rants since like... 2000 or something.
It wasn't always like that. Like many countries that just started developing democracy after 45 years of communism, we had, still have and will probably still have problems with our politicians.
The thing is, Poles were always good at throwing away government that didn't satisfy the citizens, and because of that we have one of most "mature" democratic systems amongst countries east of Iron Curtain.
There was quite big initiative of Open-Source activists (grouped mainly around linux site 7thguard.net) to inform and press Polish politics to use all means possible to stop software patents. While our diplomats screwed some occasions up, this time they've shown (at least, one of ministers of science and informatics) they deserve the payment and power.