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Letter To Abolish Software Patents In Australia
Ben Sturmfels writes "Over 500 members of the Australian software industry have have signed an open letter urging their government to abolish software patents. Signatories include free software luminaries Andrew Tridgell and Jonathan Oxer. In 2008 the Australian government began a Review of Patentable Subject Matter. While we missed the 2009 public consultation period, we hope to influence the government's response to the Review, due in February 2011. The letter will be presented to Minister Kim Carr in early August."
If you're in QLD, vote for the Greens above the line: https://www.belowtheline.org.au/qld/group_r.html
Here's why:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhd1I7adhzM
I expect this will be the best year for the Greens in a long time.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You're right! America never prospered until Bush came into office! And whenever people think of oil, they think TEXAS, not that other place (somewhere in the Middle East, I forget, it's not important...or is the Middle East a county in Texas?). The reason America is "rich" is not because "it had the world's currency." I think you have it the other way around. America is "the world's currency" (whatever that means) because America is "rich"
re generate a great consumer market, yes Ford got that too, sell to workers and export to world, real products with an endless supply of raw materials, cheap energy, paid labor.
Cheap oil via client states in need of US protection helped too.
Now its just mercs and bankers feeding back into the political system that keeps the wars going as the M3 presses run.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The US economy is heavily dependant on exploiting undeveloped countries in this very day. To say that slavery never contributed to US economy, while in the same time your own corporations suck the very life out of countries with questionable humanitarian values doesn't do you must justice.
To translate that into a simple English: US thrives because it had given the opportunity to plunder the lands that were not plundered and after the WW1 most of the world was in debt to US.
Do you really think that the British empire was rich due to something else other than plundering the rest of the world? US is not much different in that respect.
>Slavery never contributed much to Americas industrial success.
That is only true in the narrowest possible reading of the concept. Those industries relied on farming to supply food for their workers for example. If that food was mostly imported - workers would have had a much higher cost of living, meaning they HAD to be paid more (because dead workers aren't productive), which would have slowed down industry growth. Among the most profitable of slavery-run farms were the cotton farmers, cotton isn't sold to the public- it's sold as a source material for the textile industry. If the cotton farms were PAYING their workers, their costs would have been higher - the cotton more expensive and one of America's most successful early industries would have been a GREAT deal smaller.
Even so you made a strawman attack - the disrespect for copyright and patents were the GP's point and did indeed have a massive positive impact on America's wealth and you ignored that to focus only on the point about slavery (an example given and not even part of the GP's main point) - and what's worse your strawman attack was rather pathetic as your argument is easily debunked with just 5 seconds of logic.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Jeez, if there ever was an example of unfair moderation. My post has so many replies, and is still considered "Redundant".