Wal-Mart is already shipping Linux systems with what seems to be a pretty consumer-friendly desktop.
So, I don't believe this is a good development. Sun may be destroying Lindows here. And what is Sun pushing? A Gnome desktop integrated with Sun proprietary software.
Even if you can't decode wavelet-encoded HDTV, it's certainly still going to be identifiable as a signal that didn't happen by accident.
Not at all. New ultra wide band radio (UWB) is low power and looks like noise, at least to the analysis methods SETI is employing. We probably wouldn't be able to distinguish it from natural background noise.
First of all, there is no indication that nanotechnology is even feasible. People thought for centuries that they could turn lead into gold by chemical means and yet they never succeeded. Nanotechnology is the new alchemy, hyped by startups starving for money and a few people trying to make a name for themselves with unscientific mumbo-jumbo.
Second, virus sized or not, those probes still need to get from one star to the next. That's a considerable problem even for very tiny probes. You might be able to propel them with a ground laser, but braking would be tricky and if someone were shining a high-intensity laser in our direction for the many years it takes to travel interstellar distances, we'd notice it.
Third, if there were nanoprobes zipping around in any significant numbers, we'd notice. We conduct a lot of sensitive experiments and have a lot of sensitive equipment. Nanoprobes would have some sort of effect on that.
Kurzweil has always been doing nice PR for himself. Too bad he rarely delivers much.
That just can't happen without a significant change to the driver interfaces. Those driver developers already have those rights under the existing license to derive from the current version of the kernel. As long as the drivers are binary compatible, they're alright regardless of what other derived works have whatever other licenses applied to them.
I don't think the interfaces have to change.
A new license could say something like: "If you hold the copyright on a module and you ever link it against this kernel and you distribute it, then you must distribute it under the same license as this kernel. If you do not hold copyright on a module and it does not fall under the same license as the kernel, you may not link it with the kernel."
That way, kernel module developers cannot test binary-only modules against the new kernel without coming under the open source license. Furthermore, even if they did release a binary only driver and claim that it was only developed using the old kernels, it would be useless to users of recent kernels.
Logistically, it would still be hard to change the license on the Linux kernel, because that involves getting permission from lots of kernel developers. But if the license is changed, it could be changed to achieve the desired goal.
With most binary modules this part is done by the user, not by the distributor, and this is clearly your right - you just cannot distribute the binary.
That is a correct observation. The current GPL basically tries to avoid telling users what to do.
However, the Linux kernel license could be changed to prohibit binary-only drivers. Either it could require driver developers to put any drivers developed using the Linux kernel under the same license as the rest of the kernel, or it could explicitly prohibit end users from linking closed-source modules into the kernel.
But i don't think it is helpful to take a extreme shaky legal position (and downright confusing the users by making legal statements which simply do not apply here) to achieve this goal.
Yes, I agree that Linus's reasoning is shaky. If he wants to prohibit binary-only drivers, he probably has to change the license.
Although i dislike binary-only drivers in general, i came to the understanding that sometimes this might be the best you can get.
I have tried to cope with binary-only drivers and I think the price is too high. It's better to do without a piece of hardware in the short term and get something well-supported with open source drivers in the long term.
By permitting binary-only drivers, we are holding up the move of the industry to open source drivers, and that is bad.
This is not parasitic; if they want, they can just not bother, and you can just not use that hardware in Linux.
Yes, it is "parasitic". And the kernel license should be updated to put a stop to this. If we believe in free software, we want to support companies that support free software.
When the manufacturer in question is a leading producer of video boards, such fanaticism is extremely foolish.
No, it's not. It will give other companies a chance to get into the market, with Linux-friendly products with open source drivers.
You see, leading or not, nVidia doesn't really have anything that is so unique. Dozens of companies can put together decent 3D graphics cards. Maybe they aren't quite as fast or quite as cheap, but they are plenty good.
Yes. If nVidia faced the choice of creating open source drivers or not shipping for Linux at all, they would choose to create some form of open source drivers, even if they are less powerful than their closed source versions. The open source community could then improve them.
And if nVidia doesn't figure it out, sooner or later some smaller, hungry hardware company will, and they'll make a tidy profit in the Linux market.
By giving nVidia the option of shipping binary-only drivers, they can just keep going on in their proprietary ways.
So, no, I don't want nVidia to make closed-source Linux drivers.
Basically:
- anything that was written with Linux in mind (whether it then _also_
works on other operating systems or not) is clearly partially a derived
work.
- anything that has knowledge of and plays with fundamental internal
Linux behaviour is clearly a derived work. If you need to muck around
with core code, you're derived, no question about it.
I think arguing what is a "derived work" is both dangerous and unnecessary.
It's dangerous because if Linus's argument actually holds, than Microsoft can legitimately claim that Mono is a "derived work" from.NET and SCO can legitimately claim that Linux is derived from UNIX. Fortunately, courts, so far, do not seem to have agreed.
It is also unnecessary because the kernel falls under a license. A license can state under what conditions something can be used. Whether or not the GPL has enough teeth, you could certainly write an open source license under which any module developed using the Linux kernel must itself have an open source license. Or you could write an open source license that explicitly prohibits the linking of closed source modules into the kernel. That makes the question of whether something is a "derived work" or not irrelevant and still enforces the intent.
Now, we only need to figure out what the intent should be. Do we actually want closed source kernel modules?
Often, once a cell actually becomes cancerous and is growing out of control, it's too late for the body to do anything.
No, that's just wrong. Surgery and chemotherapy result in much improved rates of survival for many cancers, yet they clearly leave many viable cancerous cells behind. If your statement were correct, such treatments wouldn't help at all because those surviving cells would just go on to create new tumors immediately.
Biologists have a good idea of what causes cancer in general, but not necessarily for a given individual. There are many causes to cancer - carcinogens, genetic predisposition, etc. - and often several of these factors will combine before someone gets cancer.
Cancers are caused by failure to regulate cell growth and differentiation. What chemical or physical insult originally caused the abnormality makes no difference. What does make a difference is the nature of the regulatory defect. There are many such defects, many of which are not understood. But for some cancers, the defects are quite well understood, yet that is generally not sufficient to develop good treatments for them.
biometric data is not stored as a simple image. It's not stored as a compressed image, or a md5 of the image. It is most often stored as a series one-way-hash values, each of which is derived from some characteristic inherint in the scan. Someone could steal this data, but creating the original image is near impossible, like breaking a 100 kilobyte rsa key.
You don't have to create the original image, you just have to create a physical token that regenerates the same key. And we know that that isn't very hard because biometric systems have significant rates of false positives.
After all, I can get your fingerprint just by setting up my own print scanner at a store.
Yes, and with a little gelatin, you can then produce something that can be used to fool other fingerprint scanners.
If you scan in your finger and the fingerprint matches the one on file, the store is reasonably certain that you are the person who you claim to be.
That just means that someone pressed some object with roughly the right pattern against the scanner.
Human beings weren't designed to be difficult to forge and they make poor keys as a result. Furthermore, current biometric systems don't even perform a lot of verification on the physical tokens they are presented with.
Now I know coders aren't rocket scientists, but less advanced than project managers? Ouch.
A lot of programming work is basically unskilled labor these days: people with a few years of experience in one language and one platform only. People who use "visual development tools", "wizards", and all that. With those kinds of programmers, it is, of course, the project managers and architects that do all the thinking. You get similar organizational structures in construction (architect does the thinking, increasingly unskilled laborers put together the structure) and other areas. And, of course, that can be outsourced.
But how are you going to be able to purchase the necessary commodities of life? Food/shelter/clothing and all that? It's not like the people who have these robots are going to donate the fruits of their labour for free.
We already have an example of a product that costs nothing to mass produce once it's been designed: free software. You can download it from the Internet and share it with your friends. Presumably, the same principle will apply to other goods and services that can be replicated for free. If most of your needs can be satisfied by free products, then you won't have to work much anymore to pay for the rest.
How long before innovation that can take the role of a worker in a labor-shortage environment ends up being used to replace real people in a labor-glutted environment?
That's not a technical problem, it's a societal problem: the notion that you are a bad person if you don't work needs to change. A large fraction of the population will simply have to get money from "the government" and "other people's taxes" since they will have no useful skills that other people would be willing to pay them for.
I mean, what's the alternative? Smash all machines in an attempt to create work artificially? You might as well go to work crushing rocks or do something similarly meaningless. Or do you propose that everybody who doesn't have a useful skill just starve to death?
The submitter gives the ridiculous and extreme example of one of those stupid video phones which don't have the bandwidth or anything to make a even half decent copy anyhow.
Quite right, and that's exactly why it is a stupid law: the law outlaws devices that are clearly completely unsuitable for making recordings, devices that many people would furthermore be carrying around with them.
Does the US constitution ever say that an individual can't do something? If so, I would like to know how...
Well, sort of. The Constitution grants rights to individuals, but when other people attempt to violate those rights (keep people from having abortions, violate people's privacy, etc.), the Constitution effectively tells them that they can't do that. And that prohibition does apply to individuals and private citizens.
So, if McBride argues that he has a Constitutional right to use other people's copyrighted code, then, yes, he could argue that the Constitution stops the FSF from trying to enforce the FSF's copyright. If McBride actually wants to try to make such a Constitutional argument, I'm sure the FSF would actually be supportive of that:-)
The latter sounds very neat and targeted. But none address the fundamental problem -- why do cells turn cancerous.
Biologists have a pretty good understanding of how cells turn cancerous, but that doesn't result in clear and obvious treatments.
In fact, the body has the ability to kill cancer cells if it recognizes that there is a problem and if the cancer hasn't become too large or encapsulated. All those crude methods help shift the balance back in the body's favor.
Think of it this way: if there is a 100000 men strong army on your borders, if you drop a huge bomb on them and manage to kill 99% of them, the remaining 1000 invaders are much less of a problem; perhaps even your regular police force can take care of them.
The half life of methane in the atmosphere is seven years; it has never been a serious problem as far as global warming is concerned because if we produce too much of it, we can stop whatever is causing it and things will return to normal fairly quickly. The same is true for particulates.
The problem with atmospheric CO2 is that its half life is nearly 200 years. Whatever we emit now, we are going to be stuck with for a long time. Once the concentration of atmospheric CO2 causes dangerous increases in global temperature (and we will reach that point sooner or later), there is absolutely nothing we can do: we will have to live with increased temperatures for decades.
That letter can't have been written by a lawyer: it just makes no sense whatsoever. Even someone who ordered his law degree by mail would know better.
The letter argues that because the FSF takes a certain political view of copyrights, its copyright-related contracts are invalid and violate the US constitution. That's roughly like saying that you would lose your drivers license because you have stated that cars are bad for the environment.
Fortunately, we live in a country where one's political views don't generally affect the validity of the contracts we enter in.
Europe has always had wars and political upheaval--it's part of the continent, and it may even be necessary for that kind of development. In contrast, unified nations like China were stagnant for centuries. Historically, European wars have also not been very bloody--that's a 20th century phenomenon resulting from the new technologies.
The 50 year hiatus for Europe spanning WWI and WWII is really pretty short by historical standards. And it has brought spectacular advances in its own right: political and social unification, a pan-European commitment to human rights, and a very high standard of living throughout Western Europe.
And the notion that conflict is a necessary evil is hardly particularly European. US libertarians and conservatives defend the right to bear arms based on the notion that an armed uprising is a threat that keeps government in check. And I think it was Jefferson who thought that the US should have a revolution every century or so.
The real question is: what is the world going to do now that wars have become so bloody that people can't really rise up against their governments anymore or fight neighboring countries. Are we going to find other ways of renewing our governments, social systems, and infrastructure? Or are we doomed to become as stagnant and bureaucratic like China was historically?
As you can see, NTFS is a very advanced filesystem, supporting many features that Linux filesystems are now beginning to have.
You are confusing feature bloat with being advanced. NTFS is a feature-bloated file system, but none of the features they crammed into that file system are anything new, and many of them will never make it into mainstream UNIX file systems because they are just not a good engineering tradeoff.
Compare this to traditional Unix file systems (UFS, FFS, ext2).
Your comments imply an incorrect timeline. By the time NTFS came out, there were already several UNIX file systems with a comparable feature set. Furthermore, a number of key NTFS features existed in name only for several years, until Microsoft finally got around to implementing them.
While Microsoft's patents on something as broken and trivial as FAT are silly, they are presumably valid. The more serious problem here isn't Microsoft, it's other companies that didn't do their homework before choosing a Microsoft "standard". Maybe once it costs them significant amounts of money, they'll start paying more attention. But $250k may not be enough.
And there are a few open alternatives that even Windows understands out of the box: ISO9660 and UDF come to mind (although Windows may not apply them to flash devices by default).
Europe's issues are the same as they have been for the last thousand years, and Europe is destined to screw it up again.
Yeah, the last 1000 years of European history have been one big screwup: humanism, Shakespeare, democracy, the Enlightenment, capitalism, communism, quantum mechanics, navigation, cartography, modern agriculture, the age of exploration, Reformation, the industrial revolution, electromagnetism, jet propulsion, electric light, the telegraph, radio, to name just some of the many things that came out of Europe.
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Wal-Mart is already shipping Linux systems with what seems to be a pretty consumer-friendly desktop.
So, I don't believe this is a good development. Sun may be destroying Lindows here. And what is Sun pushing? A Gnome desktop integrated with Sun proprietary software.
Even if you can't decode wavelet-encoded HDTV, it's certainly still going to be identifiable as a signal that didn't happen by accident.
Not at all. New ultra wide band radio (UWB) is low power and looks like noise, at least to the analysis methods SETI is employing. We probably wouldn't be able to distinguish it from natural background noise.
First of all, there is no indication that nanotechnology is even feasible. People thought for centuries that they could turn lead into gold by chemical means and yet they never succeeded. Nanotechnology is the new alchemy, hyped by startups starving for money and a few people trying to make a name for themselves with unscientific mumbo-jumbo.
Second, virus sized or not, those probes still need to get from one star to the next. That's a considerable problem even for very tiny probes. You might be able to propel them with a ground laser, but braking would be tricky and if someone were shining a high-intensity laser in our direction for the many years it takes to travel interstellar distances, we'd notice it.
Third, if there were nanoprobes zipping around in any significant numbers, we'd notice. We conduct a lot of sensitive experiments and have a lot of sensitive equipment. Nanoprobes would have some sort of effect on that.
Kurzweil has always been doing nice PR for himself. Too bad he rarely delivers much.
That just can't happen without a significant change to the driver interfaces. Those driver developers already have those rights under the existing license to derive from the current version of the kernel. As long as the drivers are binary compatible, they're alright regardless of what other derived works have whatever other licenses applied to them.
I don't think the interfaces have to change.
A new license could say something like: "If you hold the copyright on a module and you ever link it against this kernel and you distribute it, then you must distribute it under the same license as this kernel. If you do not hold copyright on a module and it does not fall under the same license as the kernel, you may not link it with the kernel."
That way, kernel module developers cannot test binary-only modules against the new kernel without coming under the open source license. Furthermore, even if they did release a binary only driver and claim that it was only developed using the old kernels, it would be useless to users of recent kernels.
Logistically, it would still be hard to change the license on the Linux kernel, because that involves getting permission from lots of kernel developers. But if the license is changed, it could be changed to achieve the desired goal.
Where are these "plenty good" video cards?
They are waiting for an opportunity to jump into the market as soon as there is a market niche where nVidia and ATI can't crush them.
If nVidia and ATI abandon the Linux market because they can't deal with the license, that would provide just the niche they need.
With most binary modules this part is done by the user, not by the distributor, and this is clearly your right - you just cannot distribute the binary.
That is a correct observation. The current GPL basically tries to avoid telling users what to do.
However, the Linux kernel license could be changed to prohibit binary-only drivers. Either it could require driver developers to put any drivers developed using the Linux kernel under the same license as the rest of the kernel, or it could explicitly prohibit end users from linking closed-source modules into the kernel.
But i don't think it is helpful to take a extreme shaky legal position (and downright confusing the users by making legal statements which simply do not apply here) to achieve this goal.
Yes, I agree that Linus's reasoning is shaky. If he wants to prohibit binary-only drivers, he probably has to change the license.
Although i dislike binary-only drivers in general, i came to the understanding that sometimes this might be the best you can get.
I have tried to cope with binary-only drivers and I think the price is too high. It's better to do without a piece of hardware in the short term and get something well-supported with open source drivers in the long term.
By permitting binary-only drivers, we are holding up the move of the industry to open source drivers, and that is bad.
This is not parasitic; if they want, they can just not bother, and you can just not use that hardware in Linux.
Yes, it is "parasitic". And the kernel license should be updated to put a stop to this. If we believe in free software, we want to support companies that support free software.
When the manufacturer in question is a leading producer of video boards, such fanaticism is extremely foolish.
No, it's not. It will give other companies a chance to get into the market, with Linux-friendly products with open source drivers.
You see, leading or not, nVidia doesn't really have anything that is so unique. Dozens of companies can put together decent 3D graphics cards. Maybe they aren't quite as fast or quite as cheap, but they are plenty good.
Yes. If nVidia faced the choice of creating open source drivers or not shipping for Linux at all, they would choose to create some form of open source drivers, even if they are less powerful than their closed source versions. The open source community could then improve them.
And if nVidia doesn't figure it out, sooner or later some smaller, hungry hardware company will, and they'll make a tidy profit in the Linux market.
By giving nVidia the option of shipping binary-only drivers, they can just keep going on in their proprietary ways.
So, no, I don't want nVidia to make closed-source Linux drivers.
It's dangerous because if Linus's argument actually holds, than Microsoft can legitimately claim that Mono is a "derived work" from
It is also unnecessary because the kernel falls under a license. A license can state under what conditions something can be used. Whether or not the GPL has enough teeth, you could certainly write an open source license under which any module developed using the Linux kernel must itself have an open source license. Or you could write an open source license that explicitly prohibits the linking of closed source modules into the kernel. That makes the question of whether something is a "derived work" or not irrelevant and still enforces the intent.
Now, we only need to figure out what the intent should be. Do we actually want closed source kernel modules?
Often, once a cell actually becomes cancerous and is growing out of control, it's too late for the body to do anything.
No, that's just wrong. Surgery and chemotherapy result in much improved rates of survival for many cancers, yet they clearly leave many viable cancerous cells behind. If your statement were correct, such treatments wouldn't help at all because those surviving cells would just go on to create new tumors immediately.
Biologists have a good idea of what causes cancer in general, but not necessarily for a given individual. There are many causes to cancer - carcinogens, genetic predisposition, etc. - and often several of these factors will combine before someone gets cancer.
Cancers are caused by failure to regulate cell growth and differentiation. What chemical or physical insult originally caused the abnormality makes no difference. What does make a difference is the nature of the regulatory defect. There are many such defects, many of which are not understood. But for some cancers, the defects are quite well understood, yet that is generally not sufficient to develop good treatments for them.
biometric data is not stored as a simple image. It's not stored as a compressed image, or a md5 of the image. It is most often stored as a series one-way-hash values, each of which is derived from some characteristic inherint in the scan. Someone could steal this data, but creating the original image is near impossible, like breaking a 100 kilobyte rsa key.
You don't have to create the original image, you just have to create a physical token that regenerates the same key. And we know that that isn't very hard because biometric systems have significant rates of false positives.
After all, I can get your fingerprint just by setting up my own print scanner at a store.
Yes, and with a little gelatin, you can then produce something that can be used to fool other fingerprint scanners.
If you scan in your finger and the fingerprint matches the one on file, the store is reasonably certain that you are the person who you claim to be.
That just means that someone pressed some object with roughly the right pattern against the scanner.
Human beings weren't designed to be difficult to forge and they make poor keys as a result. Furthermore, current biometric systems don't even perform a lot of verification on the physical tokens they are presented with.
Now I know coders aren't rocket scientists, but less advanced than project managers? Ouch.
A lot of programming work is basically unskilled labor these days: people with a few years of experience in one language and one platform only. People who use "visual development tools", "wizards", and all that. With those kinds of programmers, it is, of course, the project managers and architects that do all the thinking. You get similar organizational structures in construction (architect does the thinking, increasingly unskilled laborers put together the structure) and other areas. And, of course, that can be outsourced.
But how are you going to be able to purchase the necessary commodities of life? Food/shelter/clothing and all that? It's not like the people who have these robots are going to donate the fruits of their labour for free.
We already have an example of a product that costs nothing to mass produce once it's been designed: free software. You can download it from the Internet and share it with your friends. Presumably, the same principle will apply to other goods and services that can be replicated for free. If most of your needs can be satisfied by free products, then you won't have to work much anymore to pay for the rest.
How long before innovation that can take the role of a worker in a labor-shortage environment ends up being used to replace real people in a labor-glutted environment?
That's not a technical problem, it's a societal problem: the notion that you are a bad person if you don't work needs to change. A large fraction of the population will simply have to get money from "the government" and "other people's taxes" since they will have no useful skills that other people would be willing to pay them for.
I mean, what's the alternative? Smash all machines in an attempt to create work artificially? You might as well go to work crushing rocks or do something similarly meaningless. Or do you propose that everybody who doesn't have a useful skill just starve to death?
One thing I do when I go to a movie is to read on my PDA before it starts.
If you are not watching the ads at the beginning of the move YOU ARE STEALING. We'll just have to strap you down and tape your eyes open.
The submitter gives the ridiculous and extreme example of one of those stupid video phones which don't have the bandwidth or anything to make a even half decent copy anyhow.
Quite right, and that's exactly why it is a stupid law: the law outlaws devices that are clearly completely unsuitable for making recordings, devices that many people would furthermore be carrying around with them.
Does the US constitution ever say that an individual can't do something? If so, I would like to know how...
:-)
Well, sort of. The Constitution grants rights to individuals, but when other people attempt to violate those rights (keep people from having abortions, violate people's privacy, etc.), the Constitution effectively tells them that they can't do that. And that prohibition does apply to individuals and private citizens.
So, if McBride argues that he has a Constitutional right to use other people's copyrighted code, then, yes, he could argue that the Constitution stops the FSF from trying to enforce the FSF's copyright. If McBride actually wants to try to make such a Constitutional argument, I'm sure the FSF would actually be supportive of that
The latter sounds very neat and targeted. But none address the fundamental problem -- why do cells turn cancerous.
Biologists have a pretty good understanding of how cells turn cancerous, but that doesn't result in clear and obvious treatments.
In fact, the body has the ability to kill cancer cells if it recognizes that there is a problem and if the cancer hasn't become too large or encapsulated. All those crude methods help shift the balance back in the body's favor.
Think of it this way: if there is a 100000 men strong army on your borders, if you drop a huge bomb on them and manage to kill 99% of them, the remaining 1000 invaders are much less of a problem; perhaps even your regular police force can take care of them.
The half life of methane in the atmosphere is seven years; it has never been a serious problem as far as global warming is concerned because if we produce too much of it, we can stop whatever is causing it and things will return to normal fairly quickly. The same is true for particulates.
The problem with atmospheric CO2 is that its half life is nearly 200 years. Whatever we emit now, we are going to be stuck with for a long time. Once the concentration of atmospheric CO2 causes dangerous increases in global temperature (and we will reach that point sooner or later), there is absolutely nothing we can do: we will have to live with increased temperatures for decades.
You can clearly tell the lawyers wrote it
That letter can't have been written by a lawyer: it just makes no sense whatsoever. Even someone who ordered his law degree by mail would know better.
The letter argues that because the FSF takes a certain political view of copyrights, its copyright-related contracts are invalid and violate the US constitution. That's roughly like saying that you would lose your drivers license because you have stated that cars are bad for the environment.
Fortunately, we live in a country where one's political views don't generally affect the validity of the contracts we enter in.
Europe has always had wars and political upheaval--it's part of the continent, and it may even be necessary for that kind of development. In contrast, unified nations like China were stagnant for centuries. Historically, European wars have also not been very bloody--that's a 20th century phenomenon resulting from the new technologies.
The 50 year hiatus for Europe spanning WWI and WWII is really pretty short by historical standards. And it has brought spectacular advances in its own right: political and social unification, a pan-European commitment to human rights, and a very high standard of living throughout Western Europe.
And the notion that conflict is a necessary evil is hardly particularly European. US libertarians and conservatives defend the right to bear arms based on the notion that an armed uprising is a threat that keeps government in check. And I think it was Jefferson who thought that the US should have a revolution every century or so.
The real question is: what is the world going to do now that wars have become so bloody that people can't really rise up against their governments anymore or fight neighboring countries. Are we going to find other ways of renewing our governments, social systems, and infrastructure? Or are we doomed to become as stagnant and bureaucratic like China was historically?
As you can see, NTFS is a very advanced filesystem, supporting many features that Linux filesystems are now beginning to have.
You are confusing feature bloat with being advanced. NTFS is a feature-bloated file system, but none of the features they crammed into that file system are anything new, and many of them will never make it into mainstream UNIX file systems because they are just not a good engineering tradeoff.
Compare this to traditional Unix file systems (UFS, FFS, ext2).
Your comments imply an incorrect timeline. By the time NTFS came out, there were already several UNIX file systems with a comparable feature set. Furthermore, a number of key NTFS features existed in name only for several years, until Microsoft finally got around to implementing them.
While Microsoft's patents on something as broken and trivial as FAT are silly, they are presumably valid. The more serious problem here isn't Microsoft, it's other companies that didn't do their homework before choosing a Microsoft "standard". Maybe once it costs them significant amounts of money, they'll start paying more attention. But $250k may not be enough.
And there are a few open alternatives that even Windows understands out of the box: ISO9660 and UDF come to mind (although Windows may not apply them to flash devices by default).
Europe's issues are the same as they have been for the last thousand years, and Europe is destined to screw it up again.
Yeah, the last 1000 years of European history have been one big screwup: humanism, Shakespeare, democracy, the Enlightenment, capitalism, communism, quantum mechanics, navigation, cartography, modern agriculture, the age of exploration, Reformation, the industrial revolution, electromagnetism, jet propulsion, electric light, the telegraph, radio, to name just some of the many things that came out of Europe.