My first experiments in computing were done using a Sinclair ZX81. Just 1K of RAM and a terrible keyboard -- but it was the start of the revolution! I ended up adding a 16K RAM pack {the original upright one -- soon to be replaced with a better-shaped one that actually stayed in contact with the motherboard}, and even that infernal printer that seemed to spend more time jammed than printing {which it did by burning a coating off the paper, thereby producing some disagreeable fumes..... and all my mates thought I was weird for refusing the Evo Stik.....} Eventually upgraded it with a proper keyboard, and soldered the memory expansion in place while I was at it.
When I had exhausted the potential of the ZX81, I upgraded to a BBC model B. Now that really was truly a classic machine..... think what I could have done with it, if only electronics had not been so expensive in those days!
It's not surprising, as KDE was designed as a highly modular system. Konqueror is little more than a framework for accepting files via protocols {KIOslaves} and passing them to viewers/editors {KParts}. If anybody ever invents a new type of file, then Konqueror will be able to display it as soon as a viewer exists and has been made into a KPart; likewise, if they invent a new protocol, then Konqueror -- and in fact all KDE applications -- will be able to speak it as soon as a KIOslave exists.
When you think about it, it's really only like/dev -- but at the next level.
The important difference between Konqueror/KDE and IE/Windows is that Konqueror and KDE are released under the GPL; therefore, any person concerned about the implications of tight integration between the browser and the underlying layer, need only refer themself to the source code in order to confirm or assuage their worst fears, and has the option to modify the code to suit their circumstances. Windows and IE are closed-source and you have to take Microsoft's word for it.
No, it will work, as long as the emulator properly emulates the Trust chip. Remember, software running in the emulated environment is never accessing the hardware directly: it is only accessing whatever the emulation layer will let it access, or pretend to let it access.
Also, it would be against the law in most countries to remotely disable already-sold hardware..... since you are not allowed to damage or destroy other people's property. In some countries, it is against the law to destroy even your own property!
I was just thinking that this might be the place to listen out for a signal, is all.
Who is actually going to notice High Definition anyway? I mean, most people use an RF connection to connect their VCR to their TV set. To save bandwidth, the colour composite video signal {already a nasty bodge} is modulated using Vestigial Sideband, which does introduce distortion, onto a UHF carrier with other signals and harmonics, and transmitted up a piece of cheap co-ax. This used to be necessary before TV sets had SCART sockets fitted, since there was often no way to get analogue video and audio signals into the set {except for some very expensive sets which had DIN or phono sockets}. On most TV sets, AV1 is wired as RGB-capable and AV2 and higher are composite-only. The SCART standard uses the same pin for RGB timing signal or composite picture signal {just ignoring all the video content and responding only to the negative-going timing pulses}, so even a composite-only monitor will display a picture if fed from an RGB source. I wonder how many people have their VCR {which almost certainly outputs only composite video} connected to AV1 and their DVD player connected to AV2?
CGA used RGB with an extra "brightness" line giving 16 possibilities {and with the help of a bit of 74LS TTL and some resistors to generate the brightness effect and create a composite sync signal, could be bodged straight into the SCART input of a TV set since it ran at low enough frequencies}. EGA had separate brightness lines for each of the red, green and blue signals, giving 64 possibilities but was running at too high a frequency for TV sets. VGA used analogue signals. Again, it ran at too high a frequency for TV sets.
The thing is, a program running on an emulator has no way to know that it is running on an emulator. That is from the definition of an emulator. You can emulate the trusted chip in software; and the software running under emulation will be blissfully unaware of any of it.
And since it's digital, it doesn't even have to work in real time! As long as every frame gets decoded eventually, they can be stitched back together later; even if it takes a fortnight to do an average length film.
It may be called "Remote Attestation" where you come from; but around these parts, when the manufacturer of a piece of equipment does something to it which prevents the rightful owner from using it properly, we refer to it as "Criminal damage".
Once a key has been cracked, then it's possible to make unlimited numbers of unencrypted copies of anything ever encrypted against that key.
Of course, if any of these fancy-pants monitors use cathode ray tube displays, then no amount of copy-protection is ever going to work; for reasons which I have already explained extensively elsewhere. If they use LCDs then it will take a little longer, is all. But it ought still to be possible to pick up on the pixel drive signals; it will mean much more spaghetti than the fake CRT method, but if it's necessary then someone will do it.
You do realise that the people who work in the labs designing these monitors and players are ordinary people who like movies, but find them overpriced? They will build in cheats to defeat the protection. eg. to make a Philips or Daewoo DVD recorder record a Macrovision-protected signal without protest, you just need a SCART switch box and a source of "clean" video {no macrovision}; start recording with the unprotected signal, then switch to the protected one, and fix the ugly jump-cut by inserting a chapter marker afterward.
It can never be a violation of copyright for you to watch the movie recorded on a disc you own, alone in private. If you bought the disc then you have certain common-law property rights in respect of the disc -- including the right to watch the movie recorded thereupon, by any means necessary.
Well, when you post a traditional letter, it has the recipient's address on the outside of the envelope and a postmark from the sender's town. There's your header information. Encrypting the message body is just a way of making sure the header information is all they're going to see, like envelopes being opaque.
This reminds me of a segment on Graham Torrington's radio show, "Late Night Love". The theme for a phone-in slot was "which is more important - looks or personality?" Anyway, one of the callers was a right mouthy southern wanker -- and even on the wireless, you could just tell his face was covered in pimples. He was bragging about how he didn't care about personality, it had to be looks everytime for him; he slagged off "ugly birds" and basically acted like the lesbo-femi-nazi poster child. As I said, the caller was a wanker; it was a pity his dad wasn't. GT had the ultimate put-down, though. "Do you think you're good-looking?" he asked politely. "Yeah, I fink I'm pre'y good-lookin'," responded the git. "That's good," said GT, "because you've got sod-all personality!" as he clapped the phone down and segue'd into another record.
That moment was the radio equivalent of Phil Jupitus doing the intro to Beyoncé's Crazy In Love on Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Priceless.
The solution is obvious. Install GNU Privacy Guard or a similar OpenPGP implementation, and use it all the time for even the most innocuous of messages. Make encryption the rule rather than the exception. Distributors may want to think about having key generation done as a standard part of installation, with public keys being uploaded to a central server as soon as an internet connection becomes available, and enabling GPG by default.
While it is not the be-all-and-end-all of personal security, encryption - if used properly - is an important step. And it becomes easier to identify your friends; any message which is not encrypted is obviously spam. It will also make everything a lot harder for the authorities.
And I suppose the source code for your favourite closed, proprietary accounting package is pure and clean?
The thought that your work might potentially be seen by millions of pairs of eyes worldwide has a definite effect on the way you program. If I'm writing a piece of disposable code, which need be neither portable nor pretty, then I might use all manner of nasty tricks with for loops [the construct for (initialisation; test_condition; recycle) { is highly suitable for creative application, especially with the aid of the , operator] and hard-coding in constants. OTOH if I'm writing something that I think other people might conceivably see, then I'll use a while loop {with the initialisation outside and the recycle term inside the loop} and the proper use statements to import the proper constants -- and comment the code.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I have noticed that people do tend to behave differently depending on whether or not they think they are being observed. And a piece of closed-source software need not be portable {"we'll tell you what you can and can't run it on" *slap* *slap*} nor pretty {"it's not for the likes of you to look at" *slap* *slap*}.
Ugly hacks in Open Source projects have a habit of getting cleaned up in a later version, because some programmer will eventually find a prettier way of doing the same thing. Of course, if the only person who actually understands what the hell it was meant to do is the original author, then by definition it's not ugly -- it's elegant!
What's so wrong with having to compile a package in order to install it, anyway? Most distros -- except gentoo -- have precompiled packages. But CPU time and disk space are cheap enough today that there is almost nothing to be gained out of not compiling locally.
NB, what I didn't quantify above was the ratio of good guys : bad guys. I have a gut feeling that a person's estimate of this ratio might provide a valuable insight into their personality.
The problem is that it would put accountants -- and the assistants they employ to copy and paste figures out of one Windows application into another Windows application, under the misapprehension that this somehow constitutes doing something clever with computers -- out of business. Accountants, since as a matter of definition no money ever moves anywhere without their noticing, have got their hooks very deep into the system; and consequently can exert a lot of power.
With Open Source, every blackhat and cracker has instant access to the source code; and can spot potential vulnerabilities and find ways to exploit them. And a bad guy who finds an exploit might choose to sit on it for a long time, milking it gently without wider discovery; after all, the act of revealing an exploit carries the very real threat that it -- and the exploiter -- will be dealt with. At the same time, every whitehat and Concerned Citizen also has instant access to the source code; and can spot potential vulnerabilities, alert the world to their existence and have them patched. {Sometimes the fix is obvious enough so as a patch can be deployed within a matter of minutes, but hours is more likely.}
The probability of an exploit being discovered by a good guy is greater than the probability of the same exploit being discovered by a bad guy, by the same ratio by which good guys outnumber bad guys.
With closed source software, all the bad guys are looking for exploits -- but most of the good guys aren't. And if the proportion of good guys who are actively probing for exploits is less than the ratio of good guys to each bad guy, then the probability of an exploit being discovered by a bad guy actually becomes greater than the probability of it being discovered by a good guy.
What do you believe is legally questionable about DeCSS? It allows the rightful owner of a DVD upon which is recorded a film, that they have bought and paid for with their own money earned by hand or by brain, to exercise their common-law rights in respect of their own property. Just the fact of ownership of a DVD confers a licence to view the content recorded thereupon. The content on the DVD is encrypted, but precisely because the owner of the DVD has the required licence to view it, that makes them the rightful recipient of an encrypted message and so authorises them to decrypt it. There is no breach of copyright involved, because any copy of the disc content being made is deemed a necessary act. {Besides which, one might well argue that the copied portion which exists at any one moment is trivial enough to qualify as fair dealing.}
DeCSS could also be used for other purposes, some of which might well be illegal; but that's irrelevant, because it has a legitimate application. Otherwise you wouldn't be allowed, amongst many other things, to keep knives in your kitchen lest they be used for stabbing people.
Because Muslims believe there is only one God, and that anybody who says any different must be put to death. The Qur'an {Muslim mythology} refers to Allah as "the most merciful" in one sentence, then dispenses a Painful Doom to almost everybody in the next; so raising the question of what a less-merciful being might do.
Jews also believe there is only one God. We've all seen images of the atrocities carried out by Israel {the country where anybody without a machine gun is a tourist}. Judaism is characterised by petulance. They acted like gits for years, pretended all surprised when Germany over-reacted, and won't accept that they are not the only people who have ever suffered attempted genocide. {Native Americans? Australian Aborigines? Witches in Europe? Aboriginal Britons?}
Roman Catholics believe that there is only one God {or maybe three, but they're all the same one really}. Some of them like to pretend that they follow Jesus's teachings; however, the older priests are full of hatred, fire and brimestone. The Roman Catholic Church forbids contraception and abortion, making it responsible for millions of preventable deaths from AIDS and countless unwanted pregnancies every year.
And then we have the Protestants. Although one often thinks of the Church of England as being a Protestant church, it is actually the closest to Catholicism of all the "reformed" churches. They like to parade around Catholic neighbourhoods banging a drum and playing a fife out-of-tune; supposedly in celebration of a fight they once won, and only because they cheated.
Thus the stage is set, with four groups of people; each of whom believe there is only one God. Unfortunately, the four opinions as to the nature of this single God are mutually irreconcilable; so at most one group may be correct, and at least three -- and quite probably all four -- are wrong, and are carrying out their own particular brands of righteousness {if you're a believer} or atrocity {if you're not} in the name of a big, fat, whopping lie.
NOTE: If you feel I have offended any group of monotheists slightly less than the others, please let me know so that I can attend to the matter. I actually hate all monotheists with equal force. I wouldn't pee on a monotheist if they were on fire and my bladder full to bursting.
OpenOffice.org began life as StarOffice, a closed-source product. The closed-source heritage becomes obvious when you study the code: there are things in there that whoever wrote them, was evidently banking on nobody ever seeing them. OO.o 1.x would not even compile at all on 64-bit, and even on 32-bit the make output is riddled with warnings.
What's really required is for somebody to sit down and start afresh in reimplementing the whole of OpenOffice.org from scratch. Whilst it's nice to talk of code reusability, the reality in this case is that the nice, reusable bits are buried too deeply in nasty, gicky stuff to be retrievable. I say ditch the bathwater, the baby and all; go back to square one, and do it properly this time.
{And if the new OpenOffice.org doesn't contain significant amounts of old OO.o code, then it won't be a derivative work, but a new work in its own right; and so can be placed under a different licence. BSD if the team are prepared to fight tooth and nail against proprietary forks, GPL if they aren't.}
But however meticulous these records may be, they are still falsifiable; the important records are all internal to the company. Whereas, the date of filing at the Town Hall is not falsifiable: both interacting parties {the inventor and the clerk with whom they deal} have separate, independent records of the event. That's why the "first-to-file" system is preferred in the civilised world.
The US Civil War was not what brought about the end of slavery. The end of slavery was brought about by nothing more or less than the invention, and widespread adoption, of the electric motor. Civil war or no civil war, by the beginning of the 20th century there would have been no slaves in the USA; machines would have been doing all their old jobs. Even if it had been legal to own slaves, it would not have been economically viable to do so.
Software patents -- in fact, closed-source software in general -- will similarly be brought to an end by the release and widespread adoption of a general-purpose decompiler. This will take a compiled binary as its input; and emit something resembling source code which, when compiled, will produce a binary identical to the original input. The net result of the existence of a decompiler is that all software will be de facto Open Source. Freedoms Zero and Two are already being asserted, despite vendors' best efforts to stop them. Freedoms One and Three, which depend for their exercise on access to the source code, are next.
The output of a decompiler may not be identical to the initial source code -- in fact, it may not even be in the same programming language! However, as long as the output of its compilation is identical to the original binary, we can deem it to be equivalent. {This has profound implications for the field of collaborative development, since it effectively means that two people need not know the same programming language in order to work on the same project.}
The slogan of the Direct Action movements of the late 20th Century was "No harm to life, only property". The slogan of the Software Liberation movement is going to be "No harm to tangible property, only false 'intellectual property'".
If you think all this sounds like an unlikely proposition, ask yourself honestly: is it really any less likely than the idea that a flattened-out coil of wire spinning between the poles of two magnets could somehow lead to the destruction of the slave trade?
The original and valid purpose of a patent is to enable people who make investments in research to be compensated for the risk they take.
NO.
The original purpose of a patent is to encourage people to invent things which better society as a whole, by offering them a temporary monopoly over their invention in return for its eventual release to the Public Domain for the benefit of everyone. If an invention is any good, it will recoup its development costs and maybe make a little profit but that is a side-effect of the means, and not part of the end.
All means to the same end are equally valid. So maybe we need to look seriously at alternatives to the patent system: we still want to encourage people to invent things which better society as a whole, but is a temporary monopoly really the best way to achieve this?
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My first experiments in computing were done using a Sinclair ZX81. Just 1K of RAM and a terrible keyboard -- but it was the start of the revolution! I ended up adding a 16K RAM pack {the original upright one -- soon to be replaced with a better-shaped one that actually stayed in contact with the motherboard}, and even that infernal printer that seemed to spend more time jammed than printing {which it did by burning a coating off the paper, thereby producing some disagreeable fumes ..... and all my mates thought I was weird for refusing the Evo Stik .....} Eventually upgraded it with a proper keyboard, and soldered the memory expansion in place while I was at it.
..... think what I could have done with it, if only electronics had not been so expensive in those days!
When I had exhausted the potential of the ZX81, I upgraded to a BBC model B. Now that really was truly a classic machine
Hello, is that the vet? My pet is sick.
Further information is required. Please go back to bed and continue sleeping until you have the required information. Thank you for your co-operation.
It's not surprising, as KDE was designed as a highly modular system. Konqueror is little more than a framework for accepting files via protocols {KIOslaves} and passing them to viewers/editors {KParts}. If anybody ever invents a new type of file, then Konqueror will be able to display it as soon as a viewer exists and has been made into a KPart; likewise, if they invent a new protocol, then Konqueror -- and in fact all KDE applications -- will be able to speak it as soon as a KIOslave exists.
/dev -- but at the next level.
When you think about it, it's really only like
The important difference between Konqueror/KDE and IE/Windows is that Konqueror and KDE are released under the GPL; therefore, any person concerned about the implications of tight integration between the browser and the underlying layer, need only refer themself to the source code in order to confirm or assuage their worst fears, and has the option to modify the code to suit their circumstances. Windows and IE are closed-source and you have to take Microsoft's word for it.
No, it will work, as long as the emulator properly emulates the Trust chip. Remember, software running in the emulated environment is never accessing the hardware directly: it is only accessing whatever the emulation layer will let it access, or pretend to let it access.
..... since you are not allowed to damage or destroy other people's property. In some countries, it is against the law to destroy even your own property!
Also, it would be against the law in most countries to remotely disable already-sold hardware
I was just thinking that this might be the place to listen out for a signal, is all.
Who is actually going to notice High Definition anyway? I mean, most people use an RF connection to connect their VCR to their TV set. To save bandwidth, the colour composite video signal {already a nasty bodge} is modulated using Vestigial Sideband, which does introduce distortion, onto a UHF carrier with other signals and harmonics, and transmitted up a piece of cheap co-ax. This used to be necessary before TV sets had SCART sockets fitted, since there was often no way to get analogue video and audio signals into the set {except for some very expensive sets which had DIN or phono sockets}. On most TV sets, AV1 is wired as RGB-capable and AV2 and higher are composite-only. The SCART standard uses the same pin for RGB timing signal or composite picture signal {just ignoring all the video content and responding only to the negative-going timing pulses}, so even a composite-only monitor will display a picture if fed from an RGB source. I wonder how many people have their VCR {which almost certainly outputs only composite video} connected to AV1 and their DVD player connected to AV2?
CGA used RGB with an extra "brightness" line giving 16 possibilities {and with the help of a bit of 74LS TTL and some resistors to generate the brightness effect and create a composite sync signal, could be bodged straight into the SCART input of a TV set since it ran at low enough frequencies}. EGA had separate brightness lines for each of the red, green and blue signals, giving 64 possibilities but was running at too high a frequency for TV sets. VGA used analogue signals. Again, it ran at too high a frequency for TV sets.
The thing is, a program running on an emulator has no way to know that it is running on an emulator. That is from the definition of an emulator. You can emulate the trusted chip in software; and the software running under emulation will be blissfully unaware of any of it.
And since it's digital, it doesn't even have to work in real time! As long as every frame gets decoded eventually, they can be stitched back together later; even if it takes a fortnight to do an average length film.
It may be called "Remote Attestation" where you come from; but around these parts, when the manufacturer of a piece of equipment does something to it which prevents the rightful owner from using it properly, we refer to it as "Criminal damage".
Once a key has been cracked, then it's possible to make unlimited numbers of unencrypted copies of anything ever encrypted against that key.
Of course, if any of these fancy-pants monitors use cathode ray tube displays, then no amount of copy-protection is ever going to work; for reasons which I have already explained extensively elsewhere. If they use LCDs then it will take a little longer, is all. But it ought still to be possible to pick up on the pixel drive signals; it will mean much more spaghetti than the fake CRT method, but if it's necessary then someone will do it.
You do realise that the people who work in the labs designing these monitors and players are ordinary people who like movies, but find them overpriced? They will build in cheats to defeat the protection. eg. to make a Philips or Daewoo DVD recorder record a Macrovision-protected signal without protest, you just need a SCART switch box and a source of "clean" video {no macrovision}; start recording with the unprotected signal, then switch to the protected one, and fix the ugly jump-cut by inserting a chapter marker afterward.
It can never be a violation of copyright for you to watch the movie recorded on a disc you own, alone in private. If you bought the disc then you have certain common-law property rights in respect of the disc -- including the right to watch the movie recorded thereupon, by any means necessary.
Well, when you post a traditional letter, it has the recipient's address on the outside of the envelope and a postmark from the sender's town. There's your header information. Encrypting the message body is just a way of making sure the header information is all they're going to see, like envelopes being opaque.
This reminds me of a segment on Graham Torrington's radio show, "Late Night Love". The theme for a phone-in slot was "which is more important - looks or personality?" Anyway, one of the callers was a right mouthy southern wanker -- and even on the wireless, you could just tell his face was covered in pimples. He was bragging about how he didn't care about personality, it had to be looks everytime for him; he slagged off "ugly birds" and basically acted like the lesbo-femi-nazi poster child. As I said, the caller was a wanker; it was a pity his dad wasn't. GT had the ultimate put-down, though. "Do you think you're good-looking?" he asked politely. "Yeah, I fink I'm pre'y good-lookin'," responded the git. "That's good," said GT, "because you've got sod-all personality!" as he clapped the phone down and segue'd into another record.
That moment was the radio equivalent of Phil Jupitus doing the intro to Beyoncé's Crazy In Love on Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Priceless.
The solution is obvious. Install GNU Privacy Guard or a similar OpenPGP implementation, and use it all the time for even the most innocuous of messages. Make encryption the rule rather than the exception. Distributors may want to think about having key generation done as a standard part of installation, with public keys being uploaded to a central server as soon as an internet connection becomes available, and enabling GPG by default.
While it is not the be-all-and-end-all of personal security, encryption - if used properly - is an important step. And it becomes easier to identify your friends; any message which is not encrypted is obviously spam. It will also make everything a lot harder for the authorities.
And I suppose the source code for your favourite closed, proprietary accounting package is pure and clean?
, operator] and hard-coding in constants. OTOH if I'm writing something that I think other people might conceivably see, then I'll use a while loop {with the initialisation outside and the recycle term inside the loop} and the proper use statements to import the proper constants -- and comment the code.
The thought that your work might potentially be seen by millions of pairs of eyes worldwide has a definite effect on the way you program. If I'm writing a piece of disposable code, which need be neither portable nor pretty, then I might use all manner of nasty tricks with for loops [the construct for (initialisation; test_condition; recycle) { is highly suitable for creative application, especially with the aid of the
I can't speak for anyone else, but I have noticed that people do tend to behave differently depending on whether or not they think they are being observed. And a piece of closed-source software need not be portable {"we'll tell you what you can and can't run it on" *slap* *slap*} nor pretty {"it's not for the likes of you to look at" *slap* *slap*}.
Ugly hacks in Open Source projects have a habit of getting cleaned up in a later version, because some programmer will eventually find a prettier way of doing the same thing. Of course, if the only person who actually understands what the hell it was meant to do is the original author, then by definition it's not ugly -- it's elegant!
What's so wrong with having to compile a package in order to install it, anyway? Most distros -- except gentoo -- have precompiled packages. But CPU time and disk space are cheap enough today that there is almost nothing to be gained out of not compiling locally.
NB, what I didn't quantify above was the ratio of good guys : bad guys. I have a gut feeling that a person's estimate of this ratio might provide a valuable insight into their personality.
The problem is that it would put accountants -- and the assistants they employ to copy and paste figures out of one Windows application into another Windows application, under the misapprehension that this somehow constitutes doing something clever with computers -- out of business. Accountants, since as a matter of definition no money ever moves anywhere without their noticing, have got their hooks very deep into the system; and consequently can exert a lot of power.
With Open Source, every blackhat and cracker has instant access to the source code; and can spot potential vulnerabilities and find ways to exploit them. And a bad guy who finds an exploit might choose to sit on it for a long time, milking it gently without wider discovery; after all, the act of revealing an exploit carries the very real threat that it -- and the exploiter -- will be dealt with. At the same time, every whitehat and Concerned Citizen also has instant access to the source code; and can spot potential vulnerabilities, alert the world to their existence and have them patched. {Sometimes the fix is obvious enough so as a patch can be deployed within a matter of minutes, but hours is more likely.}
The probability of an exploit being discovered by a good guy is greater than the probability of the same exploit being discovered by a bad guy, by the same ratio by which good guys outnumber bad guys.
With closed source software, all the bad guys are looking for exploits -- but most of the good guys aren't. And if the proportion of good guys who are actively probing for exploits is less than the ratio of good guys to each bad guy, then the probability of an exploit being discovered by a bad guy actually becomes greater than the probability of it being discovered by a good guy.
What do you believe is legally questionable about DeCSS? It allows the rightful owner of a DVD upon which is recorded a film, that they have bought and paid for with their own money earned by hand or by brain, to exercise their common-law rights in respect of their own property. Just the fact of ownership of a DVD confers a licence to view the content recorded thereupon. The content on the DVD is encrypted, but precisely because the owner of the DVD has the required licence to view it, that makes them the rightful recipient of an encrypted message and so authorises them to decrypt it. There is no breach of copyright involved, because any copy of the disc content being made is deemed a necessary act. {Besides which, one might well argue that the copied portion which exists at any one moment is trivial enough to qualify as fair dealing.}
DeCSS could also be used for other purposes, some of which might well be illegal; but that's irrelevant, because it has a legitimate application. Otherwise you wouldn't be allowed, amongst many other things, to keep knives in your kitchen lest they be used for stabbing people.
Because Muslims believe there is only one God, and that anybody who says any different must be put to death. The Qur'an {Muslim mythology} refers to Allah as "the most merciful" in one sentence, then dispenses a Painful Doom to almost everybody in the next; so raising the question of what a less-merciful being might do.
Jews also believe there is only one God. We've all seen images of the atrocities carried out by Israel {the country where anybody without a machine gun is a tourist}. Judaism is characterised by petulance. They acted like gits for years, pretended all surprised when Germany over-reacted, and won't accept that they are not the only people who have ever suffered attempted genocide. {Native Americans? Australian Aborigines? Witches in Europe? Aboriginal Britons?}
Roman Catholics believe that there is only one God {or maybe three, but they're all the same one really}. Some of them like to pretend that they follow Jesus's teachings; however, the older priests are full of hatred, fire and brimestone. The Roman Catholic Church forbids contraception and abortion, making it responsible for millions of preventable deaths from AIDS and countless unwanted pregnancies every year.
And then we have the Protestants. Although one often thinks of the Church of England as being a Protestant church, it is actually the closest to Catholicism of all the "reformed" churches. They like to parade around Catholic neighbourhoods banging a drum and playing a fife out-of-tune; supposedly in celebration of a fight they once won, and only because they cheated.
Thus the stage is set, with four groups of people; each of whom believe there is only one God. Unfortunately, the four opinions as to the nature of this single God are mutually irreconcilable; so at most one group may be correct, and at least three -- and quite probably all four -- are wrong, and are carrying out their own particular brands of righteousness {if you're a believer} or atrocity {if you're not} in the name of a big, fat, whopping lie.
NOTE: If you feel I have offended any group of monotheists slightly less than the others, please let me know so that I can attend to the matter. I actually hate all monotheists with equal force. I wouldn't pee on a monotheist if they were on fire and my bladder full to bursting.
OpenOffice.org began life as StarOffice, a closed-source product. The closed-source heritage becomes obvious when you study the code: there are things in there that whoever wrote them, was evidently banking on nobody ever seeing them. OO.o 1.x would not even compile at all on 64-bit, and even on 32-bit the make output is riddled with warnings.
What's really required is for somebody to sit down and start afresh in reimplementing the whole of OpenOffice.org from scratch. Whilst it's nice to talk of code reusability, the reality in this case is that the nice, reusable bits are buried too deeply in nasty, gicky stuff to be retrievable. I say ditch the bathwater, the baby and all; go back to square one, and do it properly this time.
{And if the new OpenOffice.org doesn't contain significant amounts of old OO.o code, then it won't be a derivative work, but a new work in its own right; and so can be placed under a different licence. BSD if the team are prepared to fight tooth and nail against proprietary forks, GPL if they aren't.}
But however meticulous these records may be, they are still falsifiable; the important records are all internal to the company. Whereas, the date of filing at the Town Hall is not falsifiable: both interacting parties {the inventor and the clerk with whom they deal} have separate, independent records of the event. That's why the "first-to-file" system is preferred in the civilised world.
The US Civil War was not what brought about the end of slavery. The end of slavery was brought about by nothing more or less than the invention, and widespread adoption, of the electric motor. Civil war or no civil war, by the beginning of the 20th century there would have been no slaves in the USA; machines would have been doing all their old jobs. Even if it had been legal to own slaves, it would not have been economically viable to do so.
Software patents -- in fact, closed-source software in general -- will similarly be brought to an end by the release and widespread adoption of a general-purpose decompiler. This will take a compiled binary as its input; and emit something resembling source code which, when compiled, will produce a binary identical to the original input. The net result of the existence of a decompiler is that all software will be de facto Open Source. Freedoms Zero and Two are already being asserted, despite vendors' best efforts to stop them. Freedoms One and Three, which depend for their exercise on access to the source code, are next.
The output of a decompiler may not be identical to the initial source code -- in fact, it may not even be in the same programming language! However, as long as the output of its compilation is identical to the original binary, we can deem it to be equivalent. {This has profound implications for the field of collaborative development, since it effectively means that two people need not know the same programming language in order to work on the same project.}
The slogan of the Direct Action movements of the late 20th Century was "No harm to life, only property". The slogan of the Software Liberation movement is going to be "No harm to tangible property, only false 'intellectual property'".
If you think all this sounds like an unlikely proposition, ask yourself honestly: is it really any less likely than the idea that a flattened-out coil of wire spinning between the poles of two magnets could somehow lead to the destruction of the slave trade?
If you had a real working model of a nuclear weapon, I do not think you would have to worry too much about patent infringers!
The original purpose of a patent is to encourage people to invent things which better society as a whole, by offering them a temporary monopoly over their invention in return for its eventual release to the Public Domain for the benefit of everyone. If an invention is any good, it will recoup its development costs and maybe make a little profit but that is a side-effect of the means, and not part of the end.
All means to the same end are equally valid. So maybe we need to look seriously at alternatives to the patent system: we still want to encourage people to invent things which better society as a whole, but is a temporary monopoly really the best way to achieve this?