You sir have too much time on your hands, I think. But I had already considered all of the humorous irony, even that of the misinformed or odd interpretations, and still thought it was a great way to make a point.
You mean things like the infamous "@todo" patent on the use of comments in source code to document future todo items??! Yes, they actually received a patent on that! And I received a tatoo in a special place for that, so they can go and try to license my you know what:).
Taken on it's own, one might choose to believe incompetence, or "lack of effort", rather than deliberate sabotage. The system as a whole looks rather large and clunky, and taken in isolation, it's not beyond belief that those asked to put together the media reduced version simply did not do a very good job of it. However, Microsoft on a number of other fronts has also been re-interpreting, generally frustrating, and overall sabotaging EU imposed relief as well, and so taken in this larger context, it seems much more part of an overall pattern.
First, we have the licensing of server protocols to competitors, which are licensed both in a manner to deliberately exclude oss/fs implimentations, and generally under terms that would be considered unreasonable to all but the largest of proprietary software vendors. This is NOT what the EU mandated.
Second, they have been directly interfering with the work of and trying to claim veto rights over what the EU appointed oversite trustee may be permitted to examine and do. This in particular strikes me as being like a criminal claiming to have the right to decide what his parole officer may say or do. Indeed, this latter issue is the one that seems to have most put a bug under the EU at the moment, as it directly flawnts their authority.
I fondly remember the Epson portable machine because I was given one when I was in the hospital right after having my appendix ripped out, so I could keep in touch with my community. The few who brought it by also helped disrupt the hospital routine in the process of securing my phone, and connecting the then needed analog modem. They were brand new back then, and it was, thinking back, quite ammusing writing from my hospital bed between spong baths while on morphine drip. Scrolling about the somewhat limited screen was the most challenging part.
What Microsoft wants is to change the fundimental nature of the software business to their benefit. While traditionally software has enjoyed copyright protection, Microsoft wishes to change this into one where it is normal for software, in fact all software industry-wide, to be protected by patents as well, and for protocols and other "standards" to be patent encumbered and hence "patent licensed" (like their XML document formats) in ways which control who can make or produce "standard compliant" products and services.
A software industry where patenting becomes common in the way copyright is today, even for software not made by Microsoft, is a software industry that is also fundimentally hostile to free and open source software. That medium and large companies can then cross-license means software would operate as a cartel, where those who make it can then choose who else could be permitted or denied the right to produce software.
For the small company, Microsoft's genorosity is a trojan horse. If it becomes easier for small software companies to gain a small patent of their own, then they will still need to negotiate cross licensing deals, for they would not be able to produce anything without access to patents others would then hold. Cross-licensing for patents for a small company under this new regime means surrendering it's patent to the big guys who can then choose to copy it and compete with you, in return for the basic right to even enter the market. Yes, it is also a good way for large and lazy companies to aquire and capture the benefits of R&D of smaller ones.
One thing Microsoft claims in patent reform is claimed to be about getting rid of the pesky underside of sharks, who use one patent wonders to hold larger companies hostage. But consider, after all, if one wishes to be able to be able to openly bully small companies into surrendering their few patents, one must also disarm their potential ability to retaliate, which can actually be possible today even with a tiny patent portfolio and a willingness to not produce products.
In short, this is not patent reform, but patent rape.
I have travelled on IC trains in Europe before. Most (non-high speed IC trains in Europe) are not all that different from the monster diesel powered "commuter trains" you find in the U.S. that run between cities, though the European ones have luggage racks, more often are electric, and are generally quieter and much newer. "Subway trains" in the U.S., on the other hand, are often for designed for standing and arranged in the horrible way you mention.
Of course it was pleasant. After being in Amsterdam for a while, doing anything is pleasant. You may also be hungry.
Unfortunately I did not get to visit Essen this trip, which I gather means "eating". Actually, it may also surprise some to learn that there are some coffee houses in Amsterdam that only do serve coffee.
I recently took one of those high speed trains, from Amsterdam to Frankfurt. It was very pleasant. There is also plenty of room to set and use a laptop, even one of those "big American SUV" laptops like I like to use, as each coach has table space in front of the seats. This is done with the rows of seats arranged opposite each other facing the table, in a very roomy arrangement.
This indeed was far more civilized than any train I had been in the U.S., and also was much nicer than the horror of ever more cramped planes. All it was missing was wifi. If they change that, it will indeed be very cool.
I was once a technology officer for a thriving privately held D.C. area federal communications contractor earning over $40 million annually, and this was in part through the use of GNU/Linux enabled products.
Unfortunately, we were aquired by a much larger public company, which eventually became "A to Z" technology partners (formerly aztec for the stock symbol). The people running this combined entity, with over $300 million in annual revenue choose to "re-engineer" the whole operation and shutdown the parts that did not meet with their new "mission" to raise additional funds. Of course they were at the time also thinking of buying the redskins stadium, ah bold what dreams they had...
This "mission" they chose, and bet the entire company on, was to become "the" e-commerce company, and they believed Microsoft iis was the way to do this! I disagreed, and left.
For those already laughing, indeed, it gets better; this was in 1999! Incidently, they IPO'd at 14, immediately to close by the end of the day at 11. It did not take them all that long to turn a company with a billion in assets and $300 million in revenue into one barely able to earn a few million with all their assets owned by banks! Eventually they went under a dollar a share and were delisted, before finally declaring bankruptcy a year or so after that.
A "absolute" majority is required to prevent the directive being enacted in the first reading. That happened with the patent directive in it's first reading, and the EP added some changes. If the council decides to then ignore the wishes of parliament after this has happened, they can submit the directive for a second reading, then a "super" majority is needed to prevent it from being enaced. Is that clearer?
Someone above said an absolute majority (%50 of all the votes, plus one) was required to override the council. You are saying it is a super majority. Which is it? It can't be both.
As I recall, in the first reading of the directive, the parliament can object or modify with a standard majority (or of course simply accept the directive as is). Assuming the EP doesn't accept the directive, the council can then either choose to drop the directive, accept the modifications if Parliament made any, or simply choose to resubmit the directive again unchanged (or possibly changed differently). If they simply choose to re-submit the same directive again for a second reading against the original objections of the European Parliament, then a super majority is required to effect a veto (2/3).
I wonder how long it will take before the parliament drives a revolution, kicking out dangerously corruptible, interest-conflicted and unaccountable council and commission.
I don't know, but I don't think it is soon enough since I think it's long overdue. "Power to the Parliament", now that is a great slogan!
Please correct me if I have this wrong, but the Council doesn't legislate directly....The Council issues a directive, but all that the individual countries are required to do is enact their own laws to implement that directive.
I believe you are correct that many EU directives do further require enabling legilsation in individual countries under the present system, thankfully, but this is not always the case. In the case of Software Patenting, for example, the council directive would make legal existing and future EPO issued software patents. I gather this would not require any further enabling legislation at all since the individual governments are already treaty bound to recognize legally issued EPO patents, however the EU chooses to define them. I imagine there are other areas where this is true as well.
"The European Parliament has no ability to propose legislation - it's always the Council of Ministers that does this..."
And this is precisely why the EU is the least democratically accountable institution in Europe today. In every sitting national government on the European continent today, legislation is created and passed by a (presumably) democratically elected parliament, or that house of a bicamel parliament that is directly elected. In many cases, European governments are formed either directly out of the elected body of parliament itself (as in the British model) or out of some more complex relationship that certainly includes the directly elected house of parliament and a democratically elected executive (such as the French system).
By contrast, the European Concil is a body appointed by national governments, that has the authority to directly legislate. While the EU Parliament can approve or "rubber stamp" an act of the EU Council much like the "soviet" era parliament, if it chooses to reject a council law, the Council is given the power to override Parlaiment unless a super majority (66%) chooses to oppose it.
Indeed, the EU transational governance is not very different in functional arrangements and democratic principles to that that of the old Soviet Union. And they wish to further ratify this defective system through a constitution that retains this principle undemocratic form of governance as well as expanding the power of the EU into a true European Government.
As noted, the original council draft on European patents was rejected by the European parliament. In a democratically functional society and government this would in effect have been a veto. It is to the shame of Europe and to the very principles of democratic governmance that this alone was not enough to kill the council directive, and that the will of the elected parlaiment, and most importantly of all, the ONLY democratically "legitimate" and accountable institution in the entire EU, can so easily be rejected.
Personally I do not believe Europe is ready for transational Governance. There is no true transational political expression today, perhaps with the exception of the "Greens". By contrast, when American federalization occured, there was already well established and popular trans-state political movements and proto-parties, such as Federalists, etc. By contrast, when we look at the EU parliament, it is composed of people elected from strickly individual national political parties. There are no "European Socialists", for example, though there are members of the French socialists, Finland national party, German Social Democrats, etc. This lack of true transational European political expression I believe is why Federalising Europe is impractical at this time, and certainly helps to explain why some believe they could bully through an undemocratic and defective institution onto European nations like the EU system of today.
It's called copyright. Software was and remained subject to copyright even with the very recent addition of software patenting. In fact, while copyright deals principly with the dissemination of a work, patents deal with the legal right to use or perform. Since the two represent different and somewhat complimentary exclusive restrictions, most every other technical field that uses patents does not permit or use copyright as well, since both together are especially oppressive.
Furthermore, patent filings, which express the "ideas" of a patent, are themselves neither patented nor even allowed to be copyrighted. After all, patents were intended to give incentive to disseminate information, and restricting patent filings in effect would undermine their claimed purpose. Similarly, source code expresses the "ideas" of a given software work and certainly should not be subject to patents in part for this very same goal.
Finally, since patents are about use, when they are applied to non-tangible things where use is expression, they in effect are a legal barrier to the very right to think. Hence, for thinking about, or using an idea, even in private, is at least theoretically a patent infingement. Certainly we do not patent books, and for many of the very same reasons we should not patent software.
All in all, I would love to see an active software patent repeal movement in this country.
Is it region coded? In 2367 can one finally get a region free dvd?! And, finally, what everyone wants to know is, did the copyright on mickey finally expire?!
I believe this very question was seriously studied back in the late 60's and early 70's in project Icarus. I think their conclusion at the time was that the best option was to load up a Saturn V with as many nukes as possible, aim carefully, and just hope for the best...
I have visited Brazil in years past. Certainly it is true that like many nations today, it has it's challenges, especially in regards both to wealth distribution, and problems with corruption and poverty that result from this. However, Brazil is a country that I also think has great hope and potential, in part because of the way ordinary Brazilians treat each other.
While Brazil is in large part a nation of immigrents, what I find wonderful about Brazil is that anyone who becomes a citizen is Brazilian; you don't have African-Brazilians or Japanese-Brazilians, everyone is simply Brazilian; nor are Brazilians of different heritages treated differently or segregated, whether in public or secretly in private, in contrast to what happens in the U.S.
They clearly sued the wrong person over publishing an article comparing their business practices to drug dealers since after all, we have this prior statement published in the July 20th 1998 edition of Fortune "Although about three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll someday figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." from Mr. Gates.
"understand that under current copyright law, copyright holders must make a "reasonable effort" to protect their copyrights to receive protection" -- This is untrue. In fact, even further, under current copyright law, since 1989, all published work is automatically presumed to be copyrighted by default without any effort on anyones part unless specifically stated otherwise.
It is true that depending on what level of effort is made to "protect" a copyright does impact the kinds of damages one can collect from someone infringing, but copyright itself is presumed valid even if no apparent action whatsoever is taken, and even if no actual copyright notice is present; it is implicitly implied unless stated otherwise.
This is one of the problems with digital restriction management; it can/is often used to artificially enforce restrictions that copyright holders do not have actually have a legal privilege under copyright law to apply. Fair use is certainly a part of this, but so is both 1st and 4th amendment protections. Also copyright law fundamentally has nothing to do with actual "use" of material one possesses itself, but only with copying and distribution, at least until some federal judge decides that the act of viewing a copyrighted work is in effect "copying content to local neural storage". This is also why the GNU GPL is only relevant when distributing a work to others rather than when using it yourself.
I have always felt that, rather than having a single mass community site, like a master sourceforge or Savannah site, where most projects congregate, it would be much better to have a lot of little "xforge" sites scattered about and that can then be more specialized to the needs of different groups and projects over time; that individual universities, companies, and even individual project maintainers, could easily setup and deploy locally or through common hosting services; and then to have specialized master search or index sites that could locate and aggregate projects easily from remote xforge's...
The problem of the single Sourceforge site or Savannah site is that it is a single point of failure. Many projects will be down if sourceforge or Savannah, for example, are down for extended periods of time. Having smaller project sites will at least mean failures will be far more localized and far less disruptive to the community as a whole.
The problem in the original sourceforge code is that it was impossible to easily customize or deploy, and this remained fairly true even after the heavy hacking done on the Savannah branch. If gforge has finally solved this problem, and makes it relatively easy to deploy xforge-like sites, then I see this as a very promising development indeed.
One hallmark of a true monoply is price descrimination and market segmentation. This is where a monopoly charges different prices to different classes of users for reasons that do not reflect actual cost differences and often where the same product is sold in different forms to create artifical price points and artificial or arbitrary market seperations. The key to price discrimination is to exploit the fact that different users have a different willingness and ability to pay for essentially the same goods and services. As such I simply view this as further evidence of monopolistic behavior, as if further evidence is even nessisary.
Some may recall that Microsoft had already offered a "royalty free license" for use of their XML schema's which claimed "field of use" restrictions that specifically claim to permit Microsoft to specifically state the terms of software that could access their file formats and that was specifically incompatible with free software, as well as requiring the user to disclaim certain legal rights.
Some may recall, for example, this past article on this topic here, or the specific license terms offered here, the key points of which are specifically GPL incompatible.
When national governments choose to build and distribute information, such as the Danish national government has, on patent license encumbered document formats, whether or not royalty bearing, possessing field of use scope, disclaiming of certain legal rights such as to bring suit, or other specific restrictions, or even composed of terms permitting unlimited modifications to the license by the license holder, as this one also does, such governments are creating restricted markets in the public's own goods. This is of course fundimentally improper and certainly is also illegal restraint of trade in the European Union.
There are many implications in having patent encumbered XML schemas, all of them negative for the schema so encumbered. I had long ago considered this specific possibility and considered what actions I would find nessisary to take when that day arrived. One option I think might be useful is for those in Europe to file a brief with Mario's office (European Competition Minister), and note how this issue relates to their current anti-trust case.
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First, we have the licensing of server protocols to competitors, which are licensed both in a manner to deliberately exclude oss/fs implimentations, and generally under terms that would be considered unreasonable to all but the largest of proprietary software vendors. This is NOT what the EU mandated.
Second, they have been directly interfering with the work of and trying to claim veto rights over what the EU appointed oversite trustee may be permitted to examine and do. This in particular strikes me as being like a criminal claiming to have the right to decide what his parole officer may say or do. Indeed, this latter issue is the one that seems to have most put a bug under the EU at the moment, as it directly flawnts their authority.
A software industry where patenting becomes common in the way copyright is today, even for software not made by Microsoft, is a software industry that is also fundimentally hostile to free and open source software. That medium and large companies can then cross-license means software would operate as a cartel, where those who make it can then choose who else could be permitted or denied the right to produce software.
For the small company, Microsoft's genorosity is a trojan horse. If it becomes easier for small software companies to gain a small patent of their own, then they will still need to negotiate cross licensing deals, for they would not be able to produce anything without access to patents others would then hold. Cross-licensing for patents for a small company under this new regime means surrendering it's patent to the big guys who can then choose to copy it and compete with you, in return for the basic right to even enter the market. Yes, it is also a good way for large and lazy companies to aquire and capture the benefits of R&D of smaller ones.
One thing Microsoft claims in patent reform is claimed to be about getting rid of the pesky underside of sharks, who use one patent wonders to hold larger companies hostage. But consider, after all, if one wishes to be able to be able to openly bully small companies into surrendering their few patents, one must also disarm their potential ability to retaliate, which can actually be possible today even with a tiny patent portfolio and a willingness to not produce products.
In short, this is not patent reform, but patent rape.
Unfortunately I did not get to visit Essen this trip, which I gather means "eating". Actually, it may also surprise some to learn that there are some coffee houses in Amsterdam that only do serve coffee.
This indeed was far more civilized than any train I had been in the U.S., and also was much nicer than the horror of ever more cramped planes. All it was missing was wifi. If they change that, it will indeed be very cool.
Unfortunately, we were aquired by a much larger public company, which eventually became "A to Z" technology partners (formerly aztec for the stock symbol). The people running this combined entity, with over $300 million in annual revenue choose to "re-engineer" the whole operation and shutdown the parts that did not meet with their new "mission" to raise additional funds. Of course they were at the time also thinking of buying the redskins stadium, ah bold what dreams they had...
This "mission" they chose, and bet the entire company on, was to become "the" e-commerce company, and they believed Microsoft iis was the way to do this! I disagreed, and left.
For those already laughing, indeed, it gets better; this was in 1999! Incidently, they IPO'd at 14, immediately to close by the end of the day at 11. It did not take them all that long to turn a company with a billion in assets and $300 million in revenue into one barely able to earn a few million with all their assets owned by banks! Eventually they went under a dollar a share and were delisted, before finally declaring bankruptcy a year or so after that.
As I recall, in the first reading of the directive, the parliament can object or modify with a standard majority (or of course simply accept the directive as is). Assuming the EP doesn't accept the directive, the council can then either choose to drop the directive, accept the modifications if Parliament made any, or simply choose to resubmit the directive again unchanged (or possibly changed differently). If they simply choose to re-submit the same directive again for a second reading against the original objections of the European Parliament, then a super majority is required to effect a veto (2/3).
I don't know, but I don't think it is soon enough since I think it's long overdue. "Power to the Parliament", now that is a great slogan!
I believe you are correct that many EU directives do further require enabling legilsation in individual countries under the present system, thankfully, but this is not always the case. In the case of Software Patenting, for example, the council directive would make legal existing and future EPO issued software patents. I gather this would not require any further enabling legislation at all since the individual governments are already treaty bound to recognize legally issued EPO patents, however the EU chooses to define them. I imagine there are other areas where this is true as well.
And this is precisely why the EU is the least democratically accountable institution in Europe today. In every sitting national government on the European continent today, legislation is created and passed by a (presumably) democratically elected parliament, or that house of a bicamel parliament that is directly elected. In many cases, European governments are formed either directly out of the elected body of parliament itself (as in the British model) or out of some more complex relationship that certainly includes the directly elected house of parliament and a democratically elected executive (such as the French system).
By contrast, the European Concil is a body appointed by national governments, that has the authority to directly legislate. While the EU Parliament can approve or "rubber stamp" an act of the EU Council much like the "soviet" era parliament, if it chooses to reject a council law, the Council is given the power to override Parlaiment unless a super majority (66%) chooses to oppose it.
Indeed, the EU transational governance is not very different in functional arrangements and democratic principles to that that of the old Soviet Union. And they wish to further ratify this defective system through a constitution that retains this principle undemocratic form of governance as well as expanding the power of the EU into a true European Government.
As noted, the original council draft on European patents was rejected by the European parliament. In a democratically functional society and government this would in effect have been a veto. It is to the shame of Europe and to the very principles of democratic governmance that this alone was not enough to kill the council directive, and that the will of the elected parlaiment, and most importantly of all, the ONLY democratically "legitimate" and accountable institution in the entire EU, can so easily be rejected.
Personally I do not believe Europe is ready for transational Governance. There is no true transational political expression today, perhaps with the exception of the "Greens". By contrast, when American federalization occured, there was already well established and popular trans-state political movements and proto-parties, such as Federalists, etc. By contrast, when we look at the EU parliament, it is composed of people elected from strickly individual national political parties. There are no "European Socialists", for example, though there are members of the French socialists, Finland national party, German Social Democrats, etc. This lack of true transational European political expression I believe is why Federalising Europe is impractical at this time, and certainly helps to explain why some believe they could bully through an undemocratic and defective institution onto European nations like the EU system of today.
But alas there isn't. Actually, projects, like simh (or the hercules 360 emulator) do offer a chance to give new life to historic operating systems.
Furthermore, patent filings, which express the "ideas" of a patent, are themselves neither patented nor even allowed to be copyrighted. After all, patents were intended to give incentive to disseminate information, and restricting patent filings in effect would undermine their claimed purpose. Similarly, source code expresses the "ideas" of a given software work and certainly should not be subject to patents in part for this very same goal.
Finally, since patents are about use, when they are applied to non-tangible things where use is expression, they in effect are a legal barrier to the very right to think. Hence, for thinking about, or using an idea, even in private, is at least theoretically a patent infingement. Certainly we do not patent books, and for many of the very same reasons we should not patent software.
All in all, I would love to see an active software patent repeal movement in this country.
Is it region coded? In 2367 can one finally get a region free dvd?! And, finally, what everyone wants to know is, did the copyright on mickey finally expire?!
I believe this very question was seriously studied back in the late 60's and early 70's in project Icarus. I think their conclusion at the time was that the best option was to load up a Saturn V with as many nukes as possible, aim carefully, and just hope for the best...
I have visited Brazil in years past. Certainly it is true that like many nations today, it has it's challenges, especially in regards both to wealth distribution, and problems with corruption and poverty that result from this. However, Brazil is a country that I also think has great hope and potential, in part because of the way ordinary Brazilians treat each other.
While Brazil is in large part a nation of immigrents, what I find wonderful about Brazil is that anyone who becomes a citizen is Brazilian; you don't have African-Brazilians or Japanese-Brazilians, everyone is simply Brazilian; nor are Brazilians of different heritages treated differently or segregated, whether in public or secretly in private, in contrast to what happens in the U.S.
They clearly sued the wrong person over publishing an article comparing their business practices to drug dealers since after all, we have this prior statement published in the July 20th 1998 edition of Fortune "Although about three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll someday figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." from Mr. Gates.
"understand that under current copyright law, copyright holders must make a "reasonable effort" to protect their copyrights to receive protection"
--
This is untrue. In fact, even further, under current copyright law, since 1989, all published work is automatically presumed to be copyrighted by default without any effort on anyones part unless specifically stated otherwise.
It is true that depending on what level of effort is made to "protect" a copyright does impact the kinds of damages one can collect from someone infringing, but copyright itself is presumed valid even if no apparent action whatsoever is taken, and even if no actual copyright notice is present; it is implicitly implied unless stated otherwise.
This is one of the problems with digital restriction management; it can/is often used to artificially enforce restrictions that copyright holders do not have actually have a legal privilege under copyright law to apply. Fair use
is certainly a part of this, but so is both 1st and 4th amendment protections. Also copyright law fundamentally has nothing to do with actual "use" of material one possesses itself, but only with copying and distribution, at least until some federal judge decides that the act of viewing a copyrighted work is in effect "copying content to local neural storage". This is also why the GNU GPL is only relevant when distributing a work to others rather than when using it yourself.
I have always felt that, rather than having a single mass community site, like a master sourceforge or Savannah site, where most projects congregate, it would be much better to have a lot of little "xforge" sites scattered about and that can then be more specialized to the needs of different groups and projects over time; that individual universities, companies, and even individual project maintainers, could easily setup and deploy locally or through common hosting services; and then to have specialized master search or index sites that could locate and aggregate projects easily from remote xforge's...
The problem of the single Sourceforge site or Savannah site is that it is a single point of failure. Many projects will be down if sourceforge or Savannah, for example, are down for extended periods of time. Having smaller project sites will at least mean failures will be far more localized and far less disruptive to the community as a whole.
The problem in the original sourceforge code is that it was impossible to easily customize or deploy, and this remained fairly true even after the heavy hacking done on the Savannah branch. If gforge has finally solved this problem, and makes it relatively easy to deploy xforge-like sites, then I see this as a very promising development indeed.
One hallmark of a true monoply is price descrimination and market segmentation. This is where a monopoly charges different prices to different classes of users for reasons that do not reflect actual cost differences and often where the same product is sold in different forms to create artifical price points and artificial or arbitrary market seperations. The key to price discrimination is to exploit the fact that different users have a different willingness and ability to pay for essentially the same goods and services. As such I simply view this as further evidence of monopolistic behavior, as if further evidence is even nessisary.
Some may recall, for example, this past article on this topic here, or the specific license terms offered here, the key points of which are specifically GPL incompatible.
When national governments choose to build and distribute information, such as the Danish national government has, on patent license encumbered document formats, whether or not royalty bearing, possessing field of use scope, disclaiming of certain legal rights such as to bring suit, or other specific restrictions, or even composed of terms permitting unlimited modifications to the license by the license holder, as this one also does, such governments are creating restricted markets in the public's own goods. This is of course fundimentally improper and certainly is also illegal restraint of trade in the European Union.
There are many implications in having patent encumbered XML schemas, all of them negative for the schema so encumbered. I had long ago considered this specific possibility and considered what actions I would find nessisary to take when that day arrived. One option I think might be useful is for those in Europe to file a brief with Mario's office (European Competition Minister), and note how this issue relates to their current anti-trust case.