First of all, the "cadenas" (those national forced broadcasts) are not an invention of Chavez. They are old as the hills and a very old Venezuelan peculiarity.
Secondly, in many civilized countries (like, for example, Germany) the level of instigation of public unrest that was perpetuated by RCTV and Venevision during the Coup or during the Oil Stike would have landed the responsible parties in jail for years. No ifs or buts. In Venezuela? Nothing of the like. A few years later the do not renew their licences, that's all. Nothing else has happened to them!
Venezuela is the only country in the world where journalists write articles decrying the "facist dictatorship" imposed on them, year after year, all the time signing with their real name. And nothing happens to them. Strange, isn't it?
Look, Chavez is a disaster. But the opposition is so much worse that it beggars belief. They have painted themselves in a political corner where they will probably never recover, by being so obnoxiously stupid (including, like, handing Chavez a 99% victory by not participating in elections). I am sure things would be a *lot* worse if it where they who were in power.
Oh, and, civilized countries. Keep an eye on Germany and its upcoming censorship laws. Maybe Chavez is just being ahead of the game?
I heard somewhere that the Merlin engine was the first of this size to be build and designed from scratch in, like, 40 years. Is that not true either? (I don't want to take part in this heated debate - I am really just wondering:-) )
On another note, and since you actually seem to know this stuff: why is it so damn hard to build big rockets that work reliably?
One could just as well claim that it has made you excessively defensive. If you spend a lot of energy avoiding errors that are no longer as costly as they were in the past (for example, because nowadays you have all the memory management that is usual in a modern language) then I would say that's a waste.
Well, the community around Twiki has been terminally dysfunctional for a long, long time. Two years ago, the Twiki community were already having pretty much the same problems. It looked a lot like those codependent love-hate relationships but on a much larger scale. People got offended, left, came back, big reconciliations happened, along acts of valor and honor, and factions formed, meetings happened, and on and on and on. I guess it was/is pretty interesting for people who are into that kind of thing. It made me cringe. I followed the shit for about a month out of a mixture of pure morbid interest and actual disbelief.
Diagnosis: without that abusive guy on top, the whole thing would have stopped working years ago.
So if I may venture a prediction, they will again have some dramatic meetings, Thoeny will (pretend to?) have some epiphany, the community will try with some success to find again some trust in him (which all will be SO FUCKING IMPORTANT!), and for a while it will look like all things have finally changed for the better, so much so that Darfour and the banking crisis can be safely ignored, I guess. But god forbid, that would moot the point of the project, so let's start some infighting, etc, etc, etc, and on and on and on and on it will go. With a bit of luck, the participants in that mass sado-maso orgy will manage to avoid doing something stupid that may land them in jail. But any way this goes, Twiki will continue to be developed by the very same people.
Which is a pitty, because, well, Twiki sucks, actually.
indeed. And this without counting the rather bizarre programming model it uses for the Twiki Apps. It probably deserves an entry in the Turing tar pit. *shudder*.
If systems biology has something, it is unrealized potential. It is a field with a huge potential, but the only part of that potential that has been realized, and probably the only one that will ever be realized, is the part where you can get shiploads of grant money with it. Other than that, it is just bad maths applied by inexperienced PhD students to hopeless problems based on crappy data. The supervisors, in case anyone is interested, are way too busy writing grant applications.
Actually, the "experienced" folks are so busy writing grants, that they leave the refereeing to... inexperienced PhD students! That's why so much junk gets published, and why so many decent articles get rejected for outrageous reasons.
So all I can say is, I hope those eels give the systems biology PhD students a good "eelectric" shock. Maybe that helps them wisen up so they become Quants instead.
Yahoo lets you download way more than 20 years of stock history, with and without taking into account dividends. You can even download all that in a.csv.
Re:Excession and Look to Windward?
on
Matter
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· Score: 1
That depends on how you look at it. Consider Phlebas is a thrilling action & adventure novel that is almost always on full throttle. I liked it. It is sort of an extended rock'n'roll ode to the relentless pursuit of goals.
The B2 has IR reducing measures as part of its design.
True. Nut how much are these measures worth? They can't cool the exhaust down to nothing, and in the featureless void where they fly, a single spot of moderate heat is visible. All you have to do is to get close enough to see them. What I am saying is, these planes aren't invisible nor anything like that, just a little more dificult to see. This is an advantage, sure, but it doesn't make them really invulnerable.
I think it is a neat idea. I can't believe it is new, among other things because I've had it. Never done anything about it, but there, I thought about it before.
Beyond that I think it is far too simple to warrant a 20 years monopoly.
Do you know how deep people will drill for oil? Do you know how many kilograms of battery you need to substitute a kilogram of gasoline? No? Thought so:-)
We are not addicted to oil just because we are lazy. We are addicted to oil because it is so god-damn good. We will be badly screwed if it runs out, and no amount of innovation will bring such a wonderfully convenient energy source back. In comparison, and, come to think of it, not even in comparison, IP6 is a complete and total triviality.
It's not the government's job to protect you from your own stupidity.
Where from did you get that crazy idea? Of course it is the job of the government to protect people from their own lack of knowledge or experience (that what you so arrogantly call "stupidity"). That is why there are so many regulations and safety laws. Without them, you would have to be a chemist and a microbiologist to avoid getting sick from your food. You would have to be a mechanic not to get killed by a random malfunction of your car, and you would have an accident the minute your concentration drops below 103.7%. Since through the net you can lose lots of money and more unless you are really careful and knowledgeable, and sometimes even without doing anything wrong, it follows as an inevitable fact of life that it will be thoroughly regulated within a few decades.
It is completely crazy to believe that the deeds of vandals and criminals have to be accepted in the name of freedom. The fact that the community clings to such an idea is part of the reason that really bad laws happen. Each time there is a problem, each time, the only answer you get from the netizens is, "well, tough. Learn to cope with freedom" or something on those lines. This has harmed us every time, because we missed the opportunity to find compromises that make sense to everyone. Instead, we got the DMCA, and other similar laws.
Personally, I think banning online gambling is ok. If not banned, then the maximum you can lose a day should be capped to something ridiculous like 10$. The reason is that people go home drunk and lose a couple of K stupidly, or kids get hold of dady's credit card and ruin him. Worse, many of the professional gamblers at such websites sit there and wait for some drunk fool, or some stupid kid, to come around so they can take away his money. This is inmoral and can't be accepted. Yes, I do think that people should be protected from harming themselves. Serious gambler? Please go to a Casino (there are enough problems with that already).
That said, I hope the US Government learns something from this. Forcing unpopular legislation to people in other countries via International Treaty is something they do routinely, so it serves them well to have a taste of their own medicine.
Such stunts just divert attention from the fact that the RIAA, and their colleagues in other countries, are winning this fight. They are actually marching through, encountering very little resistance. That someone actually up to this and wins his suit, or even manages to make the RIAA change some technicality in how it prosecutes (because if this woman wins, that is what will happen: they'll just change a technicality) is a complete distraction and matters zip in the grand scheme of things. A whole industry is emerging around the task of tracking, finding, and extorting file sharers. It works fantastically well.
It just isn't being said often enough: if you are sharing copyrighted files using standard networks (bittorrent, emule, etc), you are playing with fire. Sorry, but everything else is wishful thinking.
You know, I write all my stuff in LaTeX, and it always strikes me as one of the big failures of computer science that after all these years, LaTeX is really the best we have. It might suck less than all the rest, and it does, as far as I can tell, but it still sucks rather badly.
I remember hearing from someone that works with antenna installation that this is actually standard procedure. Install an antenna, and have an official registrar record that it is turned off, and subsequently install a seal. The antenna is turned on a few months later, but most of the electrosmog complaints have already arrived, which proves that folks that complain after the antenna was turned on already had the simptoms before. He said that this worked very well.
Go to a startbucks. The little cardboard ring that you use to keep your fingers from burning is protected by two patents. A piece of cardboard and a bit of glue, and you are a patent infringer. Now that I told you, you would be liable for trebble damages.
And if you need a further wake-up, read how patent litigation really works here.
according to current practice in the EU (with some divergence in the UK), and rulings by the BGH, etc., they are legal.
Only in the most technical of senses. The current practice, and those rulings by the BGH you mention, are in error. The rules the EPO is supposed to abide by say:
The following in particular shall not be regarded as inventions within the meaning of paragraph 1:
[...]
3. schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers;
That word-twisting lawyers and corrupt, ignorant or stupid judges hold these words to be meaningless now (they weren't until about the end of the eighties - something must have changed in the rules of "logic") does not change anything.
Democracy is based on the rule of law, as carried out by elected governments and the courts. A system in which private individuals are allowed to ignore or overrule the law, as interpreted by the courts, is certainly not democracy.
The legitimacy of courts and governments is not independent of their actions. When courts turn rogue, interpreting laws in whatever way they wish, it is the responsibility of the citizens in a democracy to ignore their rulings and to stop them. Because, who else could do it?
Reactonary people like you would rather have it that if the courts decide X although the laws say Y, well, tough. Everybody go home. It's the courts, so there is no point fretting about it. Their authority in interpreting the law is godlike, and thus they are the truth; the laws always said X, it just was we were all reading them wrongly. That is the way you would love it to be, wouldn't you? You are truly beyond repair.
If you're still referring to the CII directive, the EPO didn't want to change the law because there is no EU law covering patents. Patents are dealt with via the EPC (a treaty unrelated to the EU), including the European Patent Organisation established by that treaty, and by national law, as interpreted by national courts, in the individual states that are parties to the EPC.
It is the text that they are supposed to abide to, and it clearly excludes patents on software. BTW, it seems the UK has seen the light on this.
I assume you are referring to Michael Hermann's patent. It was invalidated by the German Federal Patent Court (Bundespatentgericht) not because it involved software, but because, amongst other things, it was not actually inventive, which is a requirement for any patent.
Yet it was granted nonetheless. Did they do damage by granting it? Yes, a lot, actually. And they grant lots and lots of patents like these. Does the EPO care? No. Are they accountable for that? No! The reality is that the EPO, and similar organizations that grant patents on software, are run by thugs that trade in licences to harrass and extort honest people for no good reason whatsoever.
Indeed, the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) has upheld patents on computer implemented inventions where there is a technical contribution.
They should be ashamed of themselves.
The suggestion that national courts and the EPO are somehow irrelevant, and that (mis)interpretation of the EPC by private individuals is somehow binding is simply ridiculous. Anti-software-patent activists can complain about the rulings of the national courts all they like, but at the end of the day, the opinions of those activists carry no weight, and it is the opinions of the courts that matter.
The opinions of the courts are not written in stone, because laws and policies change. Their opinions are not relevant for me as opinions on software patents being right or wrong; I could as well recognize the opinions of old stalinist courts on what is right or wrong. I disagree with all of them, and with regards to the EPO, I will continue to spend effort to make sure that the situation changes.
Your disdain of the opinions of private individuals sugests that you have never heard of things like democracy. You seem to have this idea that a group of "experts" can decide what is right or wrong, and that this is then not open to discussion, not even by people who are afected by these decissions. This is the unfortunate mindset of most, if not all, EU institutions. A mindset which will get it, and all of us, in bad and bloody trouble. The sooner that mindset changes, the better.
Yes, we are talking about Europe. The current practice of the European Patent Office holds that an invention that provides a technical contribution is patentable, whether it is implemented in hardware or software.
They wanted to change the law to cover precisely this "current practice", which gives away the fact that they know full well that this practice is illegal, and that they know the distinction between software and hardware. Note that they failed in their attempt to change the law. It turned out that the law had an enormous and vocal public support who also know the difference.
The EPO has granted patents on all sorts of things, including things like embedding car license plate numbers into domain names, and have hold such patents up in their appeals court. Their opinion on this matter does not have any merit.
If you implement an algorithm in terms of pulleys and levers, you can patent your contraption, sure. But you cannot patent the algorithm, nor can you patent the use of pulleys and levers to implement it. You can only patent the implementation. If you implement the same algorithm in a general purpose computer, you get protection to the implementation via copyright, but exactly as before, you shouldn't be able to claim protection for the algorithm. I know that in the US it is different, but we are talking about europe.
In any case, I take issue with your idiotic idea that this is a matter of logic. It is a matter of policy and consequences. Please grow up.
The position of the EPO would seem to be that a computer program is not itself patentable, but that an otherwise patentable invention does not cease to be patentable simply because it is implemented in software. I think this is a reasonable and consistent approach.
If it is "implementable in software", then it is software, period. I don't think you can implement, say, a water turbine in software. Conversely, how else would you implement a word processor other than in software? If you can make a wooden word processor, then go ahead, patent it.
But right now I am wondering where you got your patently crazy and absurd idea. Are you paid by the EPO?
shouldn't we really hold off until the point of no return?
Due to the analog hole, the thing is dead in the water. There is no need to show much strategy.
Suppose someone sends you a PGP encrypted message. Unbreakable. But you have the key, so you decrypt (!!) it. You need to have the key, because without it, you wouldn't be able to read it. And voila, there it is, the message in clear text. It is precisely the same with DRM. At some point, the content has to flow in clear, otherwise there is no point to it. And once it flows in clear, you just press REC.
In fact, I think it might be a good thing if they, for once, got a working DRM. It might finally show them how pointless that really is.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, the "cadenas" (those national forced broadcasts) are not an invention of Chavez. They are old as the hills and a very old Venezuelan peculiarity.
Secondly, in many civilized countries (like, for example, Germany) the level of instigation of public unrest that was perpetuated by RCTV and Venevision during the Coup or during the Oil Stike would have landed the responsible parties in jail for years. No ifs or buts. In Venezuela? Nothing of the like. A few years later the do not renew their licences, that's all. Nothing else has happened to them!
Venezuela is the only country in the world where journalists write articles decrying the "facist dictatorship" imposed on them, year after year, all the time signing with their real name. And nothing happens to them. Strange, isn't it?
Look, Chavez is a disaster. But the opposition is so much worse that it beggars belief. They have painted themselves in a political corner where they will probably never recover, by being so obnoxiously stupid (including, like, handing Chavez a 99% victory by not participating in elections). I am sure things would be a *lot* worse if it where they who were in power.
Oh, and, civilized countries. Keep an eye on Germany and its upcoming censorship laws. Maybe Chavez is just being ahead of the game?
I heard somewhere that the Merlin engine was the first of this size to be build and designed from scratch in, like, 40 years. Is that not true either? (I don't want to take part in this heated debate - I am really just wondering :-) )
On another note, and since you actually seem to know this stuff: why is it so damn hard to build big rockets that work reliably?
One could just as well claim that it has made you excessively defensive. If you spend a lot of energy avoiding errors that are no longer as costly as they were in the past (for example, because nowadays you have all the memory management that is usual in a modern language) then I would say that's a waste.
Well, the community around Twiki has been terminally dysfunctional for a long, long time. Two years ago, the Twiki community were already having pretty much the same problems. It looked a lot like those codependent love-hate relationships but on a much larger scale. People got offended, left, came back, big reconciliations happened, along acts of valor and honor, and factions formed, meetings happened, and on and on and on. I guess it was/is pretty interesting for people who are into that kind of thing. It made me cringe. I followed the shit for about a month out of a mixture of pure morbid interest and actual disbelief.
Diagnosis: without that abusive guy on top, the whole thing would have stopped working years ago.
So if I may venture a prediction, they will again have some dramatic meetings, Thoeny will (pretend to?) have some epiphany, the community will try with some success to find again some trust in him (which all will be SO FUCKING IMPORTANT!), and for a while it will look like all things have finally changed for the better, so much so that Darfour and the banking crisis can be safely ignored, I guess. But god forbid, that would moot the point of the project, so let's start some infighting, etc, etc, etc, and on and on and on and on it will go. With a bit of luck, the participants in that mass sado-maso orgy will manage to avoid doing something stupid that may land them in jail. But any way this goes, Twiki will continue to be developed by the very same people.
Which is a pitty, because, well, Twiki sucks, actually.
indeed. And this without counting the rather bizarre programming model it uses for the Twiki Apps. It probably deserves an entry in the Turing tar pit. *shudder*.
If systems biology has something, it is unrealized potential. It is a field with a huge potential, but the only part of that potential that has been realized, and probably the only one that will ever be realized, is the part where you can get shiploads of grant money with it. Other than that, it is just bad maths applied by inexperienced PhD students to hopeless problems based on crappy data. The supervisors, in case anyone is interested, are way too busy writing grant applications.
Actually, the "experienced" folks are so busy writing grants, that they leave the refereeing to ... inexperienced PhD students! That's why so much junk gets published, and why so many decent articles get rejected for outrageous reasons.
So all I can say is, I hope those eels give the systems biology PhD students a good "eelectric" shock. Maybe that helps them wisen up so they become Quants instead.
Greetings from the systems biology trenches,
-- rmstar.
Yahoo lets you download way more than 20 years of stock history, with and without taking into account dividends. You can even download all that in a .csv.
F. ex: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=IBM shows IBM quotes going back to 1962.
That depends on how you look at it. Consider Phlebas is a thrilling action & adventure novel that is almost always on full throttle. I liked it. It is sort of an extended rock'n'roll ode to the relentless pursuit of goals.
The B2 has IR reducing measures as part of its design.
True. Nut how much are these measures worth? They can't cool the exhaust down to nothing, and in the featureless void where they fly, a single spot of moderate heat is visible. All you have to do is to get close enough to see them. What I am saying is, these planes aren't invisible nor anything like that, just a little more dificult to see. This is an advantage, sure, but it doesn't make them really invulnerable.
I think it is a neat idea. I can't believe it is new, among other things because I've had it. Never done anything about it, but there, I thought about it before.
Beyond that I think it is far too simple to warrant a 20 years monopoly.
Do you know how deep people will drill for oil? Do you know how many kilograms of battery you need to substitute a kilogram of gasoline? No? Thought so :-)
We are not addicted to oil just because we are lazy. We are addicted to oil because it is so god-damn good. We will be badly screwed if it runs out, and no amount of innovation will bring such a wonderfully convenient energy source back. In comparison, and, come to think of it, not even in comparison, IP6 is a complete and total triviality.
It's not the government's job to protect you from your own stupidity.
Where from did you get that crazy idea? Of course it is the job of the government to protect people from their own lack of knowledge or experience (that what you so arrogantly call "stupidity"). That is why there are so many regulations and safety laws. Without them, you would have to be a chemist and a microbiologist to avoid getting sick from your food. You would have to be a mechanic not to get killed by a random malfunction of your car, and you would have an accident the minute your concentration drops below 103.7%. Since through the net you can lose lots of money and more unless you are really careful and knowledgeable, and sometimes even without doing anything wrong, it follows as an inevitable fact of life that it will be thoroughly regulated within a few decades.
It is completely crazy to believe that the deeds of vandals and criminals have to be accepted in the name of freedom. The fact that the community clings to such an idea is part of the reason that really bad laws happen. Each time there is a problem, each time, the only answer you get from the netizens is, "well, tough. Learn to cope with freedom" or something on those lines. This has harmed us every time, because we missed the opportunity to find compromises that make sense to everyone. Instead, we got the DMCA, and other similar laws.
Personally, I think banning online gambling is ok. If not banned, then the maximum you can lose a day should be capped to something ridiculous like 10$. The reason is that people go home drunk and lose a couple of K stupidly, or kids get hold of dady's credit card and ruin him. Worse, many of the professional gamblers at such websites sit there and wait for some drunk fool, or some stupid kid, to come around so they can take away his money. This is inmoral and can't be accepted. Yes, I do think that people should be protected from harming themselves. Serious gambler? Please go to a Casino (there are enough problems with that already).
That said, I hope the US Government learns something from this. Forcing unpopular legislation to people in other countries via International Treaty is something they do routinely, so it serves them well to have a taste of their own medicine.
Actually, what they do is to take control of the DNS. No big deal, really, as most of that is managed through web interfaces nowadays.
"90-95%" self-sufficient is probably a pointless task
Not to mention that it is an absolutely ridiculous and meaningless figure. What the hell does it mean to be 90-95% self sufficient?
Such stunts just divert attention from the fact that the RIAA, and their colleagues in other countries, are winning this fight. They are actually marching through, encountering very little resistance. That someone actually up to this and wins his suit, or even manages to make the RIAA change some technicality in how it prosecutes (because if this woman wins, that is what will happen: they'll just change a technicality) is a complete distraction and matters zip in the grand scheme of things. A whole industry is emerging around the task of tracking, finding, and extorting file sharers. It works fantastically well.
It just isn't being said often enough: if you are sharing copyrighted files using standard networks (bittorrent, emule, etc), you are playing with fire. Sorry, but everything else is wishful thinking.
You know, I write all my stuff in LaTeX, and it always strikes me as one of the big failures of computer science that after all these years, LaTeX is really the best we have. It might suck less than all the rest, and it does, as far as I can tell, but it still sucks rather badly.
I remember hearing from someone that works with antenna installation that this is actually standard procedure. Install an antenna, and have an official registrar record that it is turned off, and subsequently install a seal. The antenna is turned on a few months later, but most of the electrosmog complaints have already arrived, which proves that folks that complain after the antenna was turned on already had the simptoms before. He said that this worked very well.
Go to a startbucks. The little cardboard ring that you use to keep your fingers from burning is protected by two patents. A piece of cardboard and a bit of glue, and you are a patent infringer. Now that I told you, you would be liable for trebble damages.
And if you need a further wake-up, read how patent litigation really works here.
according to current practice in the EU (with some divergence in the UK), and rulings by the BGH, etc., they are legal.
Only in the most technical of senses. The current practice, and those rulings by the BGH you mention, are in error. The rules the EPO is supposed to abide by say:
That word-twisting lawyers and corrupt, ignorant or stupid judges hold these words to be meaningless now (they weren't until about the end of the eighties - something must have changed in the rules of "logic") does not change anything.
Democracy is based on the rule of law, as carried out by elected governments and the courts. A system in which private individuals are allowed to ignore or overrule the law, as interpreted by the courts, is certainly not democracy.
The legitimacy of courts and governments is not independent of their actions. When courts turn rogue, interpreting laws in whatever way they wish, it is the responsibility of the citizens in a democracy to ignore their rulings and to stop them. Because, who else could do it?
Reactonary people like you would rather have it that if the courts decide X although the laws say Y, well, tough. Everybody go home. It's the courts, so there is no point fretting about it. Their authority in interpreting the law is godlike, and thus they are the truth; the laws always said X, it just was we were all reading them wrongly. That is the way you would love it to be, wouldn't you? You are truly beyond repair.
If you're still referring to the CII directive, the EPO didn't want to change the law because there is no EU law covering patents. Patents are dealt with via the EPC (a treaty unrelated to the EU), including the European Patent Organisation established by that treaty, and by national law, as interpreted by national courts, in the individual states that are parties to the EPC.
It is the text that they are supposed to abide to, and it clearly excludes patents on software. BTW, it seems the UK has seen the light on this.
I assume you are referring to Michael Hermann's patent. It was invalidated by the German Federal Patent Court (Bundespatentgericht) not because it involved software, but because, amongst other things, it was not actually inventive, which is a requirement for any patent.
Yet it was granted nonetheless. Did they do damage by granting it? Yes, a lot, actually. And they grant lots and lots of patents like these. Does the EPO care? No. Are they accountable for that? No! The reality is that the EPO, and similar organizations that grant patents on software, are run by thugs that trade in licences to harrass and extort honest people for no good reason whatsoever.
Indeed, the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) has upheld patents on computer implemented inventions where there is a technical contribution.
They should be ashamed of themselves.
The suggestion that national courts and the EPO are somehow irrelevant, and that (mis)interpretation of the EPC by private individuals is somehow binding is simply ridiculous. Anti-software-patent activists can complain about the rulings of the national courts all they like, but at the end of the day, the opinions of those activists carry no weight, and it is the opinions of the courts that matter.
The opinions of the courts are not written in stone, because laws and policies change. Their opinions are not relevant for me as opinions on software patents being right or wrong; I could as well recognize the opinions of old stalinist courts on what is right or wrong. I disagree with all of them, and with regards to the EPO, I will continue to spend effort to make sure that the situation changes.
Your disdain of the opinions of private individuals sugests that you have never heard of things like democracy. You seem to have this idea that a group of "experts" can decide what is right or wrong, and that this is then not open to discussion, not even by people who are afected by these decissions. This is the unfortunate mindset of most, if not all, EU institutions. A mindset which will get it, and all of us, in bad and bloody trouble. The sooner that mindset changes, the better.
Yes, we are talking about Europe. The current practice of the European Patent Office holds that an invention that provides a technical contribution is patentable, whether it is implemented in hardware or software.
They wanted to change the law to cover precisely this "current practice", which gives away the fact that they know full well that this practice is illegal, and that they know the distinction between software and hardware. Note that they failed in their attempt to change the law. It turned out that the law had an enormous and vocal public support who also know the difference.
The EPO has granted patents on all sorts of things, including things like embedding car license plate numbers into domain names, and have hold such patents up in their appeals court. Their opinion on this matter does not have any merit.
If you implement an algorithm in terms of pulleys and levers, you can patent your contraption, sure. But you cannot patent the algorithm, nor can you patent the use of pulleys and levers to implement it. You can only patent the implementation. If you implement the same algorithm in a general purpose computer, you get protection to the implementation via copyright, but exactly as before, you shouldn't be able to claim protection for the algorithm. I know that in the US it is different, but we are talking about europe.
In any case, I take issue with your idiotic idea that this is a matter of logic. It is a matter of policy and consequences. Please grow up.
The position of the EPO would seem to be that a computer program is not itself patentable, but that an otherwise patentable invention does not cease to be patentable simply because it is implemented in software. I think this is a reasonable and consistent approach.
If it is "implementable in software", then it is software, period. I don't think you can implement, say, a water turbine in software. Conversely, how else would you implement a word processor other than in software? If you can make a wooden word processor, then go ahead, patent it.
But right now I am wondering where you got your patently crazy and absurd idea. Are you paid by the EPO?
shouldn't we really hold off until the point of no return?
Due to the analog hole, the thing is dead in the water. There is no need to show much strategy.
Suppose someone sends you a PGP encrypted message. Unbreakable. But you have the key, so you decrypt (!!) it. You need to have the key, because without it, you wouldn't be able to read it. And voila, there it is, the message in clear text. It is precisely the same with DRM. At some point, the content has to flow in clear, otherwise there is no point to it. And once it flows in clear, you just press REC.
In fact, I think it might be a good thing if they, for once, got a working DRM. It might finally show them how pointless that really is.