Well, yes, I think it's nice that both GNOME and KDE have got to the point where now the only reason one can give for a choice one way or the other is going to be along the lines of "it feels nicer" or "I prefer the icons" or "it has this one minor feature I really like".
Having played with GNOME on a fresh Debian set-up over the past week, I still prefer KDE, though only because I prefer the feel of it, and I've got my KIOSlaves working nicely for working on remote systems.
Re:The future is BRIGHT
on
The GNOME Roadmap
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
One area in which GNOME has lagged behind other desktop operating systems like Windows and Mac OS X is tight integration with hardware. GNOME is working with the freedesktop.org community to make plug-and-play hardware management just work.
For me this highlights that Gnome has moved well into position as the premier Linux desktop, and rather than concentrating on what KDE are doing, they are focusing on bigger fish:)
Personally, as KDE user I hope GNOME does this too, because where GNOME makes big improvements in areas like that, KDE generally follows, and vice versa, especially when freedesktop.org is involved:-) I also hope that GNOME doesn't approach it as a "let's get one up on the other desktop environments" exercise, as some users seem to advocate (and yes, the same can be said for some users of all desktop environments).
Handgun ownership in the UK. I only know two people who own guns, and they keep them at shooting ranges. Only criminals will carry handguns around with them on the streets. So handgun ownership cannot be linked to street crime in the way you suggest.
That's why your figures are fairly random and don't support your opinion.
As for your link between low gun control and low crime rates, you're again supposing that there's no other factors there. It'd plausible that the truth is the other way around: the states with the highest crime rates have had to implement the toughest gun controls to try to bring them down. I don't know, and you're not giving me any evidence to suggest otherwise. Your "theory" is an idea that so far has nothing to back it up but circumstance:-)
p.s. for someone who likes pointing out spelling errors in other people's posts, you'll appreciate me telling you that it's euphemism not euphamism.
And you say that because, in 1997, certain extra restrictions were put on handguns, the crime rates rose.
OK, well here's a crazy thought: maybe it was for some other reason? Why did crime rates fall between 1993 and 1997? Was it because gun ownership went up? No... so perhaps there's something else at work here. One leading theory tracks the figures better:
1991 - gulf war 1999 - kosovo 2001 - afghanistan 2003 - iraq
Violent crime falls in between the wars, and rises again in the period of two major conflicts (and continues to rise during the iraq war).
Not to mention that handgun ownership has never in recent history been widespread enough to have anything to do with the average person on the street being mugged.
The UK has enacted a total gun ban, and consequently, violent crime rates have gone up.
Aside from the general nuttiness of the rest of your post, this sentence really caught my attention.
Very few guns have been legal in the UK for a long time. The most recent change I can remember in my lifetime was just to cut down on light handarms that "hobbyists" use and have to keep in ranges. You imply that relatively recently we went from having lots of guns to not having very many, and that there is a parallel increase in violent crimes.
Not only has this phantom increase in violent crimes not occurred over the timescale that guns have been banned, but it's such a long time any link would be pretty difficult to make. Better reasons for increases in violent crime include such things as farcical "drug wars", real wars (afghanistan & iraq, for example) and a lack of attention on the problem.
Having been mugged at knifepoint barely two weeks ago, I can say that a crappy looking bag really helps. When asked what was in it, I just said "work!", which, given I said I was a student, satisfied him.
Also consider having a reasonable amount of cash on you if you've got other stuff more valuable to you (like your health!). I found that once he found 90 in my wallet (my bloody birthday money) he was happy enough and so wasn't so keen to start going through my bag (that happened to contain a laptop) or beating my up any more.
But then what journalist or researcher wouldn't have the phone number of a good local library? The article is written by a journalist in The Guardian, probably based in London, and probably calling one of the major libraries.
You don't need to take up a one man defence of the Internet, you know:-)
The article isn't saying that the Internet isn't that great for research. It's looking at how good it is compared with the telephone and a library for a journalist looking for the kind of information your average journalist wants, and concluding that (duh!) you need all three, and probably other sources.
It is very interesting that none of the questions included something likey what is the maximum sustainable speed in Mb/s of the alcatel 8100 series router
Thats the stuff where Google with kick everyones trash, not complete list of authorships
Except that the article was written by a journalist, for your average newspaper reader. I doubt anybody would imagine that a library would be better than Google for finding out nerdy information like that. It's simply not interesting to write an article that demonstrates something so obvious.
What the author of the article was interested in is: how good is the Internet compared to the telephone and the library for finding out the kind of trivia journalists, academics and bored people want. You might as well say that he should have tried to find out in which aisle of his local library a particular book is in. It's not relevant to his article.
Knoppix is great, until you start updating packages. It's not a normal clean Debian install, so you get all kinds of crazy dependency hell, with packages suddenly becoming horribly broken.
Add to that the time you have to spend after transferring Knoppix to disc cleaning it up, removing unwanted packages, installing needed packages, fixing configuration problems (especially, in my experience, with languages and gettext in the command line), and it's not worth it, given that it only takes an hour or so of time actually sitting at the keyboard to get a fully functional Debian system.
About 3 months after I did a Knoppix install on my parents' machine, I had to wipe it and do a from-scratch Debian install, because an apt-get update destroyed the init system.
Neither the article nor the/. summary said anything about patents.
Actually, the article says "Off the top of our heads, its mention of arithmetic coding is worrying, given how patent-encumbered that area is.".
And having talked to some of the Dirac developers, they did develop it with patents in mind, not only to avoid licensing issues in the US, but also in case we do become lumbered with software patents in Europe.
In fact, according to testimony at a recent conference in Brussels I attended, an awful lot of small software companies are now filing patents as a defensive measure, both against unsubstantiated threats in Europe (where even going to court to point out the patent is invalid is too expensive) and in case the EU takes the Commission's bait.
So while I agree with your sentiment that software patents are a bad thing, and that we should use our votes and letter paper to sort it out, it's misleading to suggest we're completely unharmed by them.
Even more impressive than the codec itself, in my opinion, is that they managed to develop a new video codec without infringing any patents! And given that it's the BBC, I assume they could go to court to defend themselves in prior art.
Very cool. But then all the engineers in their R&D dept. are apparently very anti software patents, and have been doing their bit writing letters to that effect:-)
Though FYI this was developed by their R&D team, which is, according to a bloke behind Dirac I spoke to at the recent Linux Expo in London, quite separate from other parts of BBC tech.
I asked him about their recent OGG trials, and he said that not only did he know nothing about it, his dept. didn't even play any part or have any influence. Crazy big corporations!
For those who want to flame that statement, keep in mind, that the information above is easier to find than some of the tuning suggestions I've heard for Linux. I've used Linux for 10 years, and only today heard about/proc/sys/vm/swappiness.
Nevermind the fact that the kernel with support for that has only been out in the/. mainstream for maybe half a year, how can you claim that making hacks in a registry like:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management\IoPageLockLimit. Little more complex: Set to 4096 if you've got more than 32M RAM
Is no more complicated than doing a quick grep on the kernel documentation, or in Google, and finding out about a file in/proc called/proc/sys/vm/swappiness, which has values between 0 and 100?
Yegads man, not to mention that nobody but the craziest geek or compulsive sysadmin is going to want to play with the swapping settings of their kernel, having an obvious, documented setting placed in an obvious, standard and well-named place must be more simple, surely?
Yes, yes, elected dictatorship, closer to the truth than "democracy" but still a little extreme.
Except that, according to opinion polls, the vast majority of British people are in favour of ID cards. Why? Probably because of the FUD whipped up about terrorism and asylum seekers.
The majority of the British people are also anti-the EU Constitution, and we're now having a referendum on it. Why? Probably because of all the lies, half-truths and other crap run by the "little England" right-wingers in the Daily Mail, and the anti-EU, pro-USA Murdoch press.
If all these screaming idiots on Slashdot would stop, step back, and give some thought to the way democracy is working at the moment, you could observe perhaps two key things:
It has always been like this, or even less democratic at times
There is a problem with giving power to a stupid, misled public vs. the problem with giving autocratic power to a Government; i.e. it is NOT as simple as the parent to this post suggests (nor even as simple as this point suggestins;)
Of course it can backfire when it comes to things like wars, "ethical" foreign policies and the like. And when you have a socialist party like New Labour doing everything it can to curry the favour of the corporate elite (who run the press and the expanding part of the economy), it really backfires sometimes.
But please, let's not be so melodramatic about ID cards for Gods' sakes. Yes, there are some privacy concerns, but I don't really see the big deal. They have them across the EU, they're not that different to something like a driving license, and though there are questions that need answering, they're hardly as big an issue as some of the other things Blunkett is ramming through.
It's like CCTV cameras. Though there are problems associated with mistaken identities, have yours or anyone elses' lives been made substantially worse because of their introduction? Privacy, in my opinion, is only a matter of your home and your private life, and violating other aspects of your privacy is only a problem if you are affected adversely, the invasion of privacy aside.
I would rather get an e-mail address that I can be sure I'll still have in five years time. When I first migrated from web-based mail to a POP3 service, I went through about three providers until I hit on one (GMX) that was stable, but then they stopped translating the pages into English, and after a year of guessing how to use the spam tools in German, I got fed up.
Now I just have my own egomaniacal domain name, and no matter what happens, short of a change in the domain name system, I'm guaranteed I can keep my e-mail and web addresses.
I could trust Yahoo! or Google, but it's an unfortunate fact of the lovely web that, when it comes to something like e-mail, with someone like Spymac I'd always be waiting for them to close shop, or charge some silly fee, or relocate to Uganda and only run their web site in a few obscure tribal dialects.
Is there any GNU/Linux distribution worth it's salt that doesn't provide some automated upgrade system, other than those that target the kind of geek who would be doing it themselves anyway?
And given that, on my parents' machine for example, they don't even have root in the list of users when they login, I'm not sure how they'd ever be running anything as root anyway.
There has to be a fairly small set of people manually doing security updates, and who are ever running things as root without realising it.
Telex4 goes back to feeding the ducks... less demanding than Windows trolls
But part of the point is that accuracy in reporting is far more subtle than true or false. Of course saying you have little regard for trying to establish truth in what you write is appauling, but then don't most high-brow publications claim they print the truth, even when they differ so much.
Ask yourself this: how can (to take UK examples I know about) The Telegraph and The Guardian differ so much, if both are telling the truth? By choosing focus, angle and interpretation, you can dramatically change what the reader comes away with. Just look at the distortions in reporting between US and UK newspapers when the US is involved militarily somewhere and the UK isn't to get an idea of how different they can be (there you have two countries that are at least relatively close in foreign policy and ideology).
So part of the problem with the web is that these problems can become magnified. When reading an established newspaper, you should know the angle, editorial policies etc. and adjust your brain accordingly. But when reading an article on the web, it can require a lot more thought and research to ascertain what angle, scope and interpretation the author is employing. Given that few people even manage this with the established corporate media, imagine the scope for misleading people on the web!
That's not to say that the web is worse (in fact, it's better exactly because you get more variety than you get with the corporate media), but that it's far more intellectually challenging.
Our protesting does absolutely nothing to sway them.
Absolute nonsense. Over the past few years, we've been protesting and lobbying and last September the European Parliament put through a decent piece of legislation that did exactly what we asked for.
Not it's the European Commission and the European Council who are causing trouble, after lobbying from industry (Nokia in particular), but so long as we keep the Parliament convinced, we're OK.
So no, every EU citizen reading this should lobby their MEPs immediately, because they do care.
1) The European Parliament voted last September to exclude pure software in the legislation, so it couldn't be patented. The FFII isn't campaigning against legislation, it's campaigning with the Parliament to stop the Council and Commission from bodging the legislation and hoodwinking MEPs who don't understand the issues.
2) Software has been patented in the EU for decades, but software patents have not contributed to the development of the software industry
3) Patents are harmful. They have been one of the key tools employed by companies like Microsoft and Apple in buying up and demolishing competition.
4) Patents are not needed if you want proprietary software. Copyright it, license it under a proprietary license, and you're protected. For someone to duplicate your work legally, they'd have to do all the code again, which is far from nontrivial.
You don't really give any reasons why they are needed, why they're desirable. But you do mention various technologies ("the swathe of open source software and internet protocols/technology") that aren't patented, or haven't had patents used to control their use. Did they need patents to innovate? No, so why have them?
Imagine, on the other hand, if the inventors of HTTP, TCP/IP and other technologies had patented them and restricted their use. Imagine if every implementation of TCP/IP had to pay royalties. Imagine if every web site owner had to agree to a list of terms and conditions of use, and pay a cut of any profits to Berners Lee.
The reason we can't think of lots of examples of harmful patents off the top of our heads, and why we rely on the good research of the FFII, and a lot of studies by economists, is that those patents have kept us in the dark.
Society needs technology protocols and standards to be in the public domain, whether you're a card-carrying member of the Free Software Foundation or a long-time Microsoft user. Patents aren't going to bring us this.
Really, before launching in and accusing the FFII of FUD, you should at least read their material, read some of the many independent studies they mention, and get your facts about the history of patents in the EU correct.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes, I think it's nice that both GNOME and KDE have got to the point where now the only reason one can give for a choice one way or the other is going to be along the lines of "it feels nicer" or "I prefer the icons" or "it has this one minor feature I really like".
Having played with GNOME on a fresh Debian set-up over the past week, I still prefer KDE, though only because I prefer the feel of it, and I've got my KIOSlaves working nicely for working on remote systems.
For me this highlights that Gnome has moved well into position as the premier Linux desktop, and rather than concentrating on what KDE are doing, they are focusing on bigger fish
Personally, as KDE user I hope GNOME does this too, because where GNOME makes big improvements in areas like that, KDE generally follows, and vice versa, especially when freedesktop.org is involved
Handgun ownership in the UK. I only know two people who own guns, and they keep them at shooting ranges. Only criminals will carry handguns around with them on the streets. So handgun ownership cannot be linked to street crime in the way you suggest.
:-)
That's why your figures are fairly random and don't support your opinion.
As for your link between low gun control and low crime rates, you're again supposing that there's no other factors there. It'd plausible that the truth is the other way around: the states with the highest crime rates have had to implement the toughest gun controls to try to bring them down. I don't know, and you're not giving me any evidence to suggest otherwise. Your "theory" is an idea that so far has nothing to back it up but circumstance
p.s. for someone who likes pointing out spelling errors in other people's posts, you'll appreciate me telling you that it's euphemism not euphamism.
I did. In another post, you cite some random figures that still don't back up your case. They show:
1993 - 1997: violent crimes fall
1997 - 2002: violent crimes rise
And you say that because, in 1997, certain extra restrictions were put on handguns, the crime rates rose.
OK, well here's a crazy thought: maybe it was for some other reason? Why did crime rates fall between 1993 and 1997? Was it because gun ownership went up? No... so perhaps there's something else at work here. One leading theory tracks the figures better:
1991 - gulf war
1999 - kosovo
2001 - afghanistan
2003 - iraq
Violent crime falls in between the wars, and rises again in the period of two major conflicts (and continues to rise during the iraq war).
Not to mention that handgun ownership has never in recent history been widespread enough to have anything to do with the average person on the street being mugged.
The UK has enacted a total gun ban, and consequently, violent crime rates have gone up.
Aside from the general nuttiness of the rest of your post, this sentence really caught my attention.
Very few guns have been legal in the UK for a long time. The most recent change I can remember in my lifetime was just to cut down on light handarms that "hobbyists" use and have to keep in ranges. You imply that relatively recently we went from having lots of guns to not having very many, and that there is a parallel increase in violent crimes.
Not only has this phantom increase in violent crimes not occurred over the timescale that guns have been banned, but it's such a long time any link would be pretty difficult to make. Better reasons for increases in violent crime include such things as farcical "drug wars", real wars (afghanistan & iraq, for example) and a lack of attention on the problem.
Having been mugged at knifepoint barely two weeks ago, I can say that a crappy looking bag really helps. When asked what was in it, I just said "work!", which, given I said I was a student, satisfied him.
Also consider having a reasonable amount of cash on you if you've got other stuff more valuable to you (like your health!). I found that once he found 90 in my wallet (my bloody birthday money) he was happy enough and so wasn't so keen to start going through my bag (that happened to contain a laptop) or beating my up any more.
But then what journalist or researcher wouldn't have the phone number of a good local library? The article is written by a journalist in The Guardian, probably based in London, and probably calling one of the major libraries.
You don't need to take up a one man defence of the Internet, you know :-)
The article isn't saying that the Internet isn't that great for research. It's looking at how good it is compared with the telephone and a library for a journalist looking for the kind of information your average journalist wants, and concluding that (duh!) you need all three, and probably other sources.
That's true for most slashdotters, but remember than an awful lot of people rely on libraries for Internet connections ;-)
It is very interesting that none of the questions included something likey what is the maximum sustainable speed in Mb/s of the alcatel 8100 series router
Thats the stuff where Google with kick everyones trash, not complete list of authorships
Except that the article was written by a journalist, for your average newspaper reader. I doubt anybody would imagine that a library would be better than Google for finding out nerdy information like that. It's simply not interesting to write an article that demonstrates something so obvious.
What the author of the article was interested in is: how good is the Internet compared to the telephone and the library for finding out the kind of trivia journalists, academics and bored people want. You might as well say that he should have tried to find out in which aisle of his local library a particular book is in. It's not relevant to his article.
Knoppix is great, until you start updating packages. It's not a normal clean Debian install, so you get all kinds of crazy dependency hell, with packages suddenly becoming horribly broken.
Add to that the time you have to spend after transferring Knoppix to disc cleaning it up, removing unwanted packages, installing needed packages, fixing configuration problems (especially, in my experience, with languages and gettext in the command line), and it's not worth it, given that it only takes an hour or so of time actually sitting at the keyboard to get a fully functional Debian system.
About 3 months after I did a Knoppix install on my parents' machine, I had to wipe it and do a from-scratch Debian install, because an apt-get update destroyed the init system.
Neither the article nor the /. summary said anything about patents.
Actually, the article says "Off the top of our heads, its mention of arithmetic coding is worrying, given how patent-encumbered that area is.".
And having talked to some of the Dirac developers, they did develop it with patents in mind, not only to avoid licensing issues in the US, but also in case we do become lumbered with software patents in Europe.
In fact, according to testimony at a recent conference in Brussels I attended, an awful lot of small software companies are now filing patents as a defensive measure, both against unsubstantiated threats in Europe (where even going to court to point out the patent is invalid is too expensive) and in case the EU takes the Commission's bait.
So while I agree with your sentiment that software patents are a bad thing, and that we should use our votes and letter paper to sort it out, it's misleading to suggest we're completely unharmed by them.
Not to mention that it'd compress far more heavily to save the bandwidth pennies!
Even more impressive than the codec itself, in my opinion, is that they managed to develop a new video codec without infringing any patents! And given that it's the BBC, I assume they could go to court to defend themselves in prior art.
:-)
Very cool. But then all the engineers in their R&D dept. are apparently very anti software patents, and have been doing their bit writing letters to that effect
We can only hope!
Though FYI this was developed by their R&D team, which is, according to a bloke behind Dirac I spoke to at the recent Linux Expo in London, quite separate from other parts of BBC tech.
I asked him about their recent OGG trials, and he said that not only did he know nothing about it, his dept. didn't even play any part or have any influence. Crazy big corporations!
For those who want to flame that statement, keep in mind, that the information above is easier to find than some of the tuning suggestions I've heard for Linux. I've used Linux for 10 years, and only today heard about /proc/sys/vm/swappiness.
/. mainstream for maybe half a year, how can you claim that making hacks in a registry like:
o l\Session Manager\Memory Management\IoPageLockLimit. Little more complex: Set to 4096 if you've got more than 32M RAM
/proc called /proc/sys/vm/swappiness, which has values between 0 and 100?
Nevermind the fact that the kernel with support for that has only been out in the
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Contr
Is no more complicated than doing a quick grep on the kernel documentation, or in Google, and finding out about a file in
Yegads man, not to mention that nobody but the craziest geek or compulsive sysadmin is going to want to play with the swapping settings of their kernel, having an obvious, documented setting placed in an obvious, standard and well-named place must be more simple, surely?
Except that, according to opinion polls, the vast majority of British people are in favour of ID cards. Why? Probably because of the FUD whipped up about terrorism and asylum seekers.
The majority of the British people are also anti-the EU Constitution, and we're now having a referendum on it. Why? Probably because of all the lies, half-truths and other crap run by the "little England" right-wingers in the Daily Mail, and the anti-EU, pro-USA Murdoch press.
If all these screaming idiots on Slashdot would stop, step back, and give some thought to the way democracy is working at the moment, you could observe perhaps two key things:
Of course it can backfire when it comes to things like wars, "ethical" foreign policies and the like. And when you have a socialist party like New Labour doing everything it can to curry the favour of the corporate elite (who run the press and the expanding part of the economy), it really backfires sometimes.
But please, let's not be so melodramatic about ID cards for Gods' sakes. Yes, there are some privacy concerns, but I don't really see the big deal. They have them across the EU, they're not that different to something like a driving license, and though there are questions that need answering, they're hardly as big an issue as some of the other things Blunkett is ramming through.
It's like CCTV cameras. Though there are problems associated with mistaken identities, have yours or anyone elses' lives been made substantially worse because of their introduction? Privacy, in my opinion, is only a matter of your home and your private life, and violating other aspects of your privacy is only a problem if you are affected adversely, the invasion of privacy aside.
I would rather get an e-mail address that I can be sure I'll still have in five years time. When I first migrated from web-based mail to a POP3 service, I went through about three providers until I hit on one (GMX) that was stable, but then they stopped translating the pages into English, and after a year of guessing how to use the spam tools in German, I got fed up.
Now I just have my own egomaniacal domain name, and no matter what happens, short of a change in the domain name system, I'm guaranteed I can keep my e-mail and web addresses.
I could trust Yahoo! or Google, but it's an unfortunate fact of the lovely web that, when it comes to something like e-mail, with someone like Spymac I'd always be waiting for them to close shop, or charge some silly fee, or relocate to Uganda and only run their web site in a few obscure tribal dialects.
Is there any GNU/Linux distribution worth it's salt that doesn't provide some automated upgrade system, other than those that target the kind of geek who would be doing it themselves anyway?
And given that, on my parents' machine for example, they don't even have root in the list of users when they login, I'm not sure how they'd ever be running anything as root anyway.
There has to be a fairly small set of people manually doing security updates, and who are ever running things as root without realising it.
Telex4 goes back to feeding the ducks... less demanding than Windows trolls
But part of the point is that accuracy in reporting is far more subtle than true or false. Of course saying you have little regard for trying to establish truth in what you write is appauling, but then don't most high-brow publications claim they print the truth, even when they differ so much.
Ask yourself this: how can (to take UK examples I know about) The Telegraph and The Guardian differ so much, if both are telling the truth? By choosing focus, angle and interpretation, you can dramatically change what the reader comes away with. Just look at the distortions in reporting between US and UK newspapers when the US is involved militarily somewhere and the UK isn't to get an idea of how different they can be (there you have two countries that are at least relatively close in foreign policy and ideology).
So part of the problem with the web is that these problems can become magnified. When reading an established newspaper, you should know the angle, editorial policies etc. and adjust your brain accordingly. But when reading an article on the web, it can require a lot more thought and research to ascertain what angle, scope and interpretation the author is employing. Given that few people even manage this with the established corporate media, imagine the scope for misleading people on the web!
That's not to say that the web is worse (in fact, it's better exactly because you get more variety than you get with the corporate media), but that it's far more intellectually challenging.
Time to look into getting 4Mbps internet and upgrade the 120G hard disk to make room for the War and Peace mp3.
Pff, real men download James Joyce's Ulysses.
Our protesting does absolutely nothing to sway them.
Absolute nonsense. Over the past few years, we've been protesting and lobbying and last September the European Parliament put through a decent piece of legislation that did exactly what we asked for.
Not it's the European Commission and the European Council who are causing trouble, after lobbying from industry (Nokia in particular), but so long as we keep the Parliament convinced, we're OK.
So no, every EU citizen reading this should lobby their MEPs immediately, because they do care.
You forgot to use a strange analogy.
To counter your own FUD...
1) The European Parliament voted last September to exclude pure software in the legislation, so it couldn't be patented. The FFII isn't campaigning against legislation, it's campaigning with the Parliament to stop the Council and Commission from bodging the legislation and hoodwinking MEPs who don't understand the issues.
2) Software has been patented in the EU for decades, but software patents have not contributed to the development of the software industry
3) Patents are harmful. They have been one of the key tools employed by companies like Microsoft and Apple in buying up and demolishing competition.
4) Patents are not needed if you want proprietary software. Copyright it, license it under a proprietary license, and you're protected. For someone to duplicate your work legally, they'd have to do all the code again, which is far from nontrivial.
You don't really give any reasons why they are needed, why they're desirable. But you do mention various technologies ("the swathe of open source software and internet protocols/technology") that aren't patented, or haven't had patents used to control their use. Did they need patents to innovate? No, so why have them?
Imagine, on the other hand, if the inventors of HTTP, TCP/IP and other technologies had patented them and restricted their use. Imagine if every implementation of TCP/IP had to pay royalties. Imagine if every web site owner had to agree to a list of terms and conditions of use, and pay a cut of any profits to Berners Lee.
The reason we can't think of lots of examples of harmful patents off the top of our heads, and why we rely on the good research of the FFII, and a lot of studies by economists, is that those patents have kept us in the dark.
Society needs technology protocols and standards to be in the public domain, whether you're a card-carrying member of the Free Software Foundation or a long-time Microsoft user. Patents aren't going to bring us this.
Really, before launching in and accusing the FFII of FUD, you should at least read their material, read some of the many independent studies they mention, and get your facts about the history of patents in the EU correct.
With that many "fuck"s in your post, you must be right!