Here's more on this. There are thousands of Palestinians marching in celebration, some with Posters of Osama bin Landin, and the Palestinian police and security forces are orchestrating a coverup, confiscating video tape and camera equipment from reporters. They don't want the unpleasant truth to get out.
We need to keep this in perspective, they may be isolated incidents (how can we know), but we should not accept the cynical and self serving lie that these protests are a media fabrication. Threats from the PLO against journalists are unacceptable and do as much harm as the protests themselves.
That's right attack objectionable facts by shallow accusations of racism.
Disagreing with you does not constitute racism. You can try and stigmatize people do denegrate them but it's a cheap tactic and it won't wash here.
Explain why pointing out that the PLO is issuing death threats for keeping video tape footage unseen is racist. We are dealing with people here who parade as diplomats and issue death threats against cameramen. This is completely relevant to a discussion which accuses the press of fabricating footage of celebrations.
Put your monicker to accusations of racism.
I'd call anyone who threatens a cameraman with death for releasing his film a barbarian, it has nothing to do with race.
I said there are thousands of innocent civilians dead, I never asigned a number to those Palestinians dancing in the street. You took your preconceptions about me and applied them to your reading of my post and then accused ME of hypocrisy. I hate hypocrisy, but you're the one who is showing it in spades. I never even wrote the things you apparently most strongly object to. Here's an interesting article, not only on the celebrations in Nablus but on the general mood of the Palestinians and on the PLO's death threats to Associated Press cameraman & office if the video taped footage got transmitted. You can try and dismiss this because it doesn't fit your political view but this article appears ballanced to me.
Since you seem to have missed it the first time, here it is in a single sentence so you don't confuse it. There are thousands of innocent civilians dead. Here's another factual statement: Palestinians are celebrating in the streets and the PLO are issuing death threats against cameramen who dare to release film of it.
It's a sad day when the simple truth is so threatening to some, but truth has always been evil's biggest threat. Don't get sucked into this doublethink. We need honesty above all here. We need to quell the kneejerk hostility to disagreeable information and collectively fight against evil. That includes evil which seeks to blind us to the facts.
Remember this when the PLO tries to manipulate you by forcing a troop of schoolkids to wave American flags in front of the US embassy. Yesterday, their parents were betraying their true feelings by burning the same flag and celebrating the death of thousands of Americans.
Where's your cynicism for these naked propaganda stunts? Or do you reserve your cynicism exclusively for anti-US analysis of news reports?
Not only did the Palestinians in Nablus & elsewhere celebrate, they threatened an AP cameraman with death if the tape got out. This is who we're dealing with. Barbarians for whom diplomacy is as subtle as a bullet in the head. They don't want the truth to get out, they only want duplicitoius conduits like you to spout their doublethink. As they say, a lot of damage has been done, not just by the footage but by the actions of these monsters parading as diplomats. From a Washington Post article:
"Palestinian officials told an Associated Press video cameraman that tapes of the gleeful demonstrations in Nablus, a West Bank city about 40 miles north of here, could not be aired. Arafat's cabinet secretary, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, warned the Jerusalem office of the Associated Press that the Palestinian Authority could not "guarantee the life" of the cameraman if the footage was broadcast. Members of Fatah, the main faction of Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, issued statements holding the cameraman responsible for the tape.
But the public relations damage was done. Images of smiling demonstrators elsewhere were broadcast, horrifying Palestinian politicians who have pressed for a negotiated end to the conflict with Israel. "A lot of damage has been done," said Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian negotiator."
This kind of blatant misinformation is exactly what we need to guard against. It's an old trick, take the facts and distort them subtly to completely misrepresent reality. The US and other allies regularly bomb Iraqi military targets, they bomb Radar installations and command and control infrastructure Iraq uses to direct missile attacks on overflying jets. Your loyalties are betrayed by the bare faced lies in the text of the article you are promulgating. There are thousands of innocent civilians dead in America and Palestinians are dancing in the street. There is a clear distinctions to be drawn between right and wrong here. The Palestinians and other Arabs have been hell bent on the destruction of Israel as a state, they tried to destroy Israel and failed, now they want Israel to forget all that and concede the territory they were attacked from back to their attackers and just HOPE that the Arabs will be nice enough to not try the same thing again. Moreover they want the parts of Jerusalem originally offered when they collectively walked out of the UN decades ago and embarked on their antisemitic crusade. In the mean time just to underscore how insane that policy would be for Israel, Palestinian terrorists rocket and suicide bomb civilian targets while hiding in civilian centers like the refugee camps. Your two faced lies don't withstand scrutiny. The only deliberate and targeted murder of civilians is the terrorist attacks and we're all doomed if we forget that and listen to the lies and doublethink from the groups who condone murder. I no longer give a damn about Palestinians or their cause. Enough is enough, you can gloat over the death of innocent lives but that's the same mistake that the Palestinians made when celebrating Sadam's SCUD missile attacks on Israeli cities and American & Saudi targets. It's time for the Palestinians to drop the murderous and futile rhetoric and genuinely support peace. If there's a wrong side to be on they have an instinct for picking it. The only way they can ever hope to regain their territory is by earning the trust of their neighbours, that will take decades of concerted work towards peace. Every bomb and rocket moves them further away from their ultimate objectives. If they knew how far the attack on America had set back their cause they'd have been weeping not celebrating.
Hmm, this makes the UK law look good, until you consider that the cabinet just has to sign a D list and the suspect is up the swannee. Just look at the Iran supergun affair. The cabinet was ready to sell an honest businessman's life & reputation down the Swanee, and only Michael Hesseltine saved him from going to jail, because the other corrupt scumbags in the cabinet REFUSED to release evidence that proved he was working in full cooperation with the government and not trying to smuggle arms to Iran.
Take your glorious British laws and your RIP bill and shove them, instead of waving them around here.
If software were a bridge you'd use it to cross an otherwise unpassable gap between two points, and NOTHING else. There would be 2 or three basic designs which nobody deviated from and nobody would have seen much innovation in decades if not centuries.
Software is in better shape than this dumb article suggests. You can get better software, but you have to pay for it and folks don't want to. Pay in open source terms means have less software around than you need with developers concentrating their efforts on fewer projects.
Ahh, you want NeWS. That's been done and was torpedoed by X years ago. It was a PostScript desktop with native PostScript rendering. Major UNIX workstation vendors had it as standard on their desktop, folks like SGI and IBM pushed it but in the end they caved in to the prevailing trend and moved over to X. If X had lost that little war then we'd all have embedded PostScript rendering in EVERYTHING on the desktop. Now you want to wind the clock back. You have to lie in the bed all those old fuddy duddy IT managers made for you. The only way to get even now is to inflict some misery on future generations.
You're both right, ignore the flamefesters. AA is important it is misleading to say only hinting is needed. Hinting helps improve the frequency response, particularly on vertical and horizontal edges even with AA, Nyquist states that you can only reconstruct information at half the frequency of screen samples. Hinting lets you cheat by aligning edges to the grid when you antialias(it's really a nasty hack but it works), but AA is still very important. Hinting without AA stops things looking horribly distorted, hinting WITH AA improves the frequency response and avoids blurry edges on vertical and horizontal features. Can't we all just get along?
Free in this context means freedom, software which is free from monopoly control and which creates users who are free from that control AND free from being locked into the software they use. That is a significant threat to M$.
Perhaps you can use this to detect scatter and locate an aircraft, but this inferred position information is not the kind of thing you will be able to use on a seeking missile for example. Maybe you can use it to target some more sophisticated system to down the plane.
This is the outrageous lie propagated by NASA.
Tito was well away from the American module. If NASA was on a go slow that is THEIR choice and THEIR responsibility. They claimed it was unsafe but that's political B.S. It was also NASA who refused to train Tito when he showed up as a Russian delegate (as if it was their right). Safety is a relative thing, there is no such thing as complete safety, and NASA contrived to make the station less safe by refusing Tito training in a failed gambit to keep him away, while hypocritically claiming that Tito lacked the training to visit the station. If you can't see this beaurocratic double-think for what it is then you probably REALLY believe that the ISS is worth all that cash for the science that get's done on board. Tito's visit to space is a valuable and pioneering event. Did you bitch when NASA sent US politicians into space (no not just John Glenn)? Did you call them idiots with cash to burn (PUBLIC cash this time not their own)?
Re:How can they sue the large companies?
on
Magnet Patent Suits
·
· Score: 2
Dude, they can sue YOU if you have their magnet technology in your PC drive which isn't licensed somewhere in it's provenance. That's the reality of patent law. Fortunately the return on investment doesn't appeal to their lawyers in your case.
If age research was interesting why didn't NASA do similar research on Tito? I don't doubt for a second that he'd have been up for it. Instead NASA wasted the opportunity by insisting on acting like King Canute.
Glenn's response is nothing short of disgusting in light of his thinly veiled boondoggle on the shuttle. He was an all American hero, but I'd have thought posterity would have taught him a lesson about speaking on who should be allowed in space. Remember that it's John Glenn who, during the space race, testified before congress that the trained female astronauts shouldn't be allowed to fly, keeping space an all male club for decades when NASA had ALREADY trained a contingent of women. Now Glenn is even more hypocritical saying Tito shouldn't have flown. Tito will go down in history as a pioneer, and Glenn's comments will be yet another tawdry footnote.
NASA should hang it's head in shame, they opposed Tito's flight saying he was untrained, yet THEY are the ones who refused to train him with utterly inappropriate arrogance. Now Dan Goldin is implying Tito is unpatriotic for not buckling under to NASA's unreasonable demands, which ignored the RIGHTS of the other ISS operators. The more control of space we wrest from the paranoid beaurocratic nightmare that NASA has become the better off we'll all be. NASA's real concern here is that more people might realize what a state they are in. It's clear that NASA has been much too risk averse since the Challenger disaster. Thousands die on the roads each year, people die climbing Mount Everest each year, yet NASA is under the delusion that we must have virtually no risk exploring space. This is crippling manned flight and costing a fortune (which is spent elsewhere would save hundreds if not thousands of lives, if that asuages your conciense).
This is coercion, to the point of forcing individual States to pass laws favourable to Microsoft.
Given their Monopoly position this cannot be allowed to go on. States should be free to pass the laws their legislature deems appropriate without this kind of threat from a corporation. If Microsoft weren't a monopoly, then I'd say "Fine, it's their choice." but a monopoly cannot be allowed to withdraw it's services in this way.
I have read the GPL, I don't need someone to tell me what it says. The developers who contribute also read the GPL and contribute on that basis. Libranet also explicitly state that they are NOT charging for their service on the basis you and others claim for them. They are charging based on physical media costs, which is a totaly bogus approach. As I already stated I would have less of an objection if their fees were reasonably derived from (and limited to) their costs of distribution, and ONLY their costs of distribution.
Paid for who's work? They are selling the work of others who licensed it to them on the condition that they could not charge for it like this. Even the basis for the charge is completely bogus. They charge based on a physical media cost, under the assumption that only broadband users can download which is supposed to garner sympathy. What the heck kind of philosophy is this? They are in clear breach of the GPL. At best I could see them being allowed to charge IF the charge was based on the admin & network costs for their server. Anyone who contributed to any part of their distro could have serious objections to this abuse of their copyright works.
The bolding was unintentional, I was trying to insert a break. Unfortunately the usual vitriolic imbecilic childish response characteristic of slashdot is provoked. I don't bolding it improved my point but it didn't diminish it either. Grow up.
This is a sensible document and gets back to the basics of WHY we have patents. Patents are an unnatural mechanism designed to encourage investment in innovation. When that mechanism offers unfair competitive advantages for minimal investment then it is bad.
Nobody believes that the one click invention would not have been invented without Amazon. A dozen companies would have come up with the same idea by now (and some have independently). So giving Amazon a 20 year monopoly on the idea unfairly enriches them and stifles innovation. In other words it has the opposite effect from that intended. Software engineers close to these issues know this. Companies out there are filing for patents on inventions they never intend to use, they are merely trying to set up road blocks for their competition. It is common practice to try and broaden the scope of a patent beyond the original invention to create as big a minefield as possible for companies who might infringe in future. Patents are no longer about protecting inventions, they have become a system of patronage to wield as a business weapon against unwary competitors. It is no accident that large corporations support them and independent operations do not. Does anyone really think that large corporations are more innovative than the thousands of individual developers out there? Of course not, but patents give them the legal clout they need to tax the rest of the industry and sustain their revenues.
The letter posted was remarkably well informed for a government agency IMHO. Well done U.K.
Not that I'm advocating this for Linux but this is the main reason for all that COM groat.
One alternative is to number the dynamic shared objects and have the linker automatically resolve to the right dso version. For compatibility you just install multiple versions of the same dso in the lib directory and each app should resolve to the version they were compiled against on the development system.
Slashdot Mirror
Ooh ooh.. I have an idea, why don't you call it Precision Insight.
All of this makes me wonder why the heck VA bought PI in the first place. Is it fair to say that VA have done nothing but damage 3D on Linux?
Here's more on this. There are thousands of Palestinians marching in celebration, some with Posters of Osama bin Landin, and the Palestinian police and security forces are orchestrating a coverup, confiscating video tape and camera equipment from reporters. They don't want the unpleasant truth to get out.
0 01 0914/aponline180932_000.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/2
We need to keep this in perspective, they may be isolated incidents (how can we know), but we should not accept the cynical and self serving lie that these protests are a media fabrication. Threats from the PLO against journalists are unacceptable and do as much harm as the protests themselves.
That's right attack objectionable facts by shallow accusations of racism.
Disagreing with you does not constitute racism. You can try and stigmatize people do denegrate them but it's a cheap tactic and it won't wash here.
Explain why pointing out that the PLO is issuing death threats for keeping video tape footage unseen is racist. We are dealing with people here who parade as diplomats and issue death threats against cameramen. This is completely relevant to a discussion which accuses the press of fabricating footage of celebrations.
Put your monicker to accusations of racism.
I'd call anyone who threatens a cameraman with death for releasing his film a barbarian, it has nothing to do with race.
I said there are thousands of innocent civilians dead, I never asigned a number to those Palestinians dancing in the street. You took your preconceptions about me and applied them to your reading of my post and then accused ME of hypocrisy. I hate hypocrisy, but you're the one who is showing it in spades. I never even wrote the things you apparently most strongly object to. Here's an interesting article, not only on the celebrations in Nablus but on the general mood of the Palestinians and on the PLO's death threats to Associated Press cameraman & office if the video taped footage got transmitted. You can try and dismiss this because it doesn't fit your political view but this article appears ballanced to me.
0 9- 2001Sep13.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/world/A280
Since you seem to have missed it the first time, here it is in a single sentence so you don't confuse it. There are thousands of innocent civilians dead. Here's another factual statement: Palestinians are celebrating in the streets and the PLO are issuing death threats against cameramen who dare to release film of it.
It's a sad day when the simple truth is so threatening to some, but truth has always been evil's biggest threat. Don't get sucked into this doublethink. We need honesty above all here. We need to quell the kneejerk hostility to disagreeable information and collectively fight against evil. That includes evil which seeks to blind us to the facts.
P.S.
Remember this when the PLO tries to manipulate you by forcing a troop of schoolkids to wave American flags in front of the US embassy. Yesterday, their parents were betraying their true feelings by burning the same flag and celebrating the death of thousands of Americans.
Where's your cynicism for these naked propaganda stunts? Or do you reserve your cynicism exclusively for anti-US analysis of news reports?
Not only did the Palestinians in Nablus & elsewhere celebrate, they threatened an AP cameraman with death if the tape got out. This is who we're dealing with. Barbarians for whom diplomacy is as subtle as a bullet in the head. They don't want the truth to get out, they only want duplicitoius conduits like you to spout their doublethink. As they say, a lot of damage has been done, not just by the footage but by the actions of these monsters parading as diplomats. From a Washington Post article:
"Palestinian officials told an Associated Press video cameraman that tapes of the gleeful demonstrations in Nablus, a West Bank city about 40 miles north of here, could not be aired. Arafat's cabinet secretary, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, warned the Jerusalem office of the Associated Press that the Palestinian Authority could not "guarantee the life" of the cameraman if the footage was broadcast. Members of Fatah, the main faction of Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, issued statements holding the cameraman responsible for the tape.
But the public relations damage was done. Images of smiling demonstrators elsewhere were broadcast, horrifying Palestinian politicians who have pressed for a negotiated end to the conflict with Israel. "A lot of damage has been done," said Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian negotiator."
This kind of blatant misinformation is exactly what we need to guard against. It's an old trick, take the facts and distort them subtly to completely misrepresent reality. The US and other allies regularly bomb Iraqi military targets, they bomb Radar installations and command and control infrastructure Iraq uses to direct missile attacks on overflying jets. Your loyalties are betrayed by the bare faced lies in the text of the article you are promulgating. There are thousands of innocent civilians dead in America and Palestinians are dancing in the street. There is a clear distinctions to be drawn between right and wrong here. The Palestinians and other Arabs have been hell bent on the destruction of Israel as a state, they tried to destroy Israel and failed, now they want Israel to forget all that and concede the territory they were attacked from back to their attackers and just HOPE that the Arabs will be nice enough to not try the same thing again. Moreover they want the parts of Jerusalem originally offered when they collectively walked out of the UN decades ago and embarked on their antisemitic crusade. In the mean time just to underscore how insane that policy would be for Israel, Palestinian terrorists rocket and suicide bomb civilian targets while hiding in civilian centers like the refugee camps. Your two faced lies don't withstand scrutiny. The only deliberate and targeted murder of civilians is the terrorist attacks and we're all doomed if we forget that and listen to the lies and doublethink from the groups who condone murder. I no longer give a damn about Palestinians or their cause. Enough is enough, you can gloat over the death of innocent lives but that's the same mistake that the Palestinians made when celebrating Sadam's SCUD missile attacks on Israeli cities and American & Saudi targets. It's time for the Palestinians to drop the murderous and futile rhetoric and genuinely support peace. If there's a wrong side to be on they have an instinct for picking it. The only way they can ever hope to regain their territory is by earning the trust of their neighbours, that will take decades of concerted work towards peace. Every bomb and rocket moves them further away from their ultimate objectives. If they knew how far the attack on America had set back their cause they'd have been weeping not celebrating.
Hmm, this makes the UK law look good, until you consider that the cabinet just has to sign a D list and the suspect is up the swannee. Just look at the Iran supergun affair. The cabinet was ready to sell an honest businessman's life & reputation down the Swanee, and only Michael Hesseltine saved him from going to jail, because the other corrupt scumbags in the cabinet REFUSED to release evidence that proved he was working in full cooperation with the government and not trying to smuggle arms to Iran.
Take your glorious British laws and your RIP bill and shove them, instead of waving them around here.
If software were a bridge you'd use it to cross an otherwise unpassable gap between two points, and NOTHING else. There would be 2 or three basic designs which nobody deviated from and nobody would have seen much innovation in decades if not centuries.
Software is in better shape than this dumb article suggests. You can get better software, but you have to pay for it and folks don't want to. Pay in open source terms means have less software around than you need with developers concentrating their efforts on fewer projects.
Ahh, you want NeWS. That's been done and was torpedoed by X years ago. It was a PostScript desktop with native PostScript rendering. Major UNIX workstation vendors had it as standard on their desktop, folks like SGI and IBM pushed it but in the end they caved in to the prevailing trend and moved over to X. If X had lost that little war then we'd all have embedded PostScript rendering in EVERYTHING on the desktop. Now you want to wind the clock back. You have to lie in the bed all those old fuddy duddy IT managers made for you. The only way to get even now is to inflict some misery on future generations.
You're both right, ignore the flamefesters. AA is important it is misleading to say only hinting is needed. Hinting helps improve the frequency response, particularly on vertical and horizontal edges even with AA, Nyquist states that you can only reconstruct information at half the frequency of screen samples. Hinting lets you cheat by aligning edges to the grid when you antialias(it's really a nasty hack but it works), but AA is still very important. Hinting without AA stops things looking horribly distorted, hinting WITH AA improves the frequency response and avoids blurry edges on vertical and horizontal features. Can't we all just get along?
Free as in speech NOT as in beer.
Free in this context means freedom, software which is free from monopoly control and which creates users who are free from that control AND free from being locked into the software they use. That is a significant threat to M$.
Besides most animal are probably underage.
Perhaps you can use this to detect scatter and locate an aircraft, but this inferred position information is not the kind of thing you will be able to use on a seeking missile for example. Maybe you can use it to target some more sophisticated system to down the plane.
This is the outrageous lie propagated by NASA.
Tito was well away from the American module. If NASA was on a go slow that is THEIR choice and THEIR responsibility. They claimed it was unsafe but that's political B.S. It was also NASA who refused to train Tito when he showed up as a Russian delegate (as if it was their right). Safety is a relative thing, there is no such thing as complete safety, and NASA contrived to make the station less safe by refusing Tito training in a failed gambit to keep him away, while hypocritically claiming that Tito lacked the training to visit the station. If you can't see this beaurocratic double-think for what it is then you probably REALLY believe that the ISS is worth all that cash for the science that get's done on board. Tito's visit to space is a valuable and pioneering event. Did you bitch when NASA sent US politicians into space (no not just John Glenn)? Did you call them idiots with cash to burn (PUBLIC cash this time not their own)?
Dude, they can sue YOU if you have their magnet technology in your PC drive which isn't licensed somewhere in it's provenance. That's the reality of patent law. Fortunately the return on investment doesn't appeal to their lawyers in your case.
Glenn deserves to be insulted for this.
If age research was interesting why didn't NASA do similar research on Tito? I don't doubt for a second that he'd have been up for it. Instead NASA wasted the opportunity by insisting on acting like King Canute.
Glenn's response is nothing short of disgusting in light of his thinly veiled boondoggle on the shuttle. He was an all American hero, but I'd have thought posterity would have taught him a lesson about speaking on who should be allowed in space. Remember that it's John Glenn who, during the space race, testified before congress that the trained female astronauts shouldn't be allowed to fly, keeping space an all male club for decades when NASA had ALREADY trained a contingent of women. Now Glenn is even more hypocritical saying Tito shouldn't have flown. Tito will go down in history as a pioneer, and Glenn's comments will be yet another tawdry footnote.
NASA should hang it's head in shame, they opposed Tito's flight saying he was untrained, yet THEY are the ones who refused to train him with utterly inappropriate arrogance. Now Dan Goldin is implying Tito is unpatriotic for not buckling under to NASA's unreasonable demands, which ignored the RIGHTS of the other ISS operators. The more control of space we wrest from the paranoid beaurocratic nightmare that NASA has become the better off we'll all be. NASA's real concern here is that more people might realize what a state they are in. It's clear that NASA has been much too risk averse since the Challenger disaster. Thousands die on the roads each year, people die climbing Mount Everest each year, yet NASA is under the delusion that we must have virtually no risk exploring space. This is crippling manned flight and costing a fortune (which is spent elsewhere would save hundreds if not thousands of lives, if that asuages your conciense).
This is coercion, to the point of forcing individual States to pass laws favourable to Microsoft.
Given their Monopoly position this cannot be allowed to go on. States should be free to pass the laws their legislature deems appropriate without this kind of threat from a corporation. If Microsoft weren't a monopoly, then I'd say "Fine, it's their choice." but a monopoly cannot be allowed to withdraw it's services in this way.
No, I think it's Tim who fell for the prank.
Let's wait to hear what excuses are offered.
Looks like we have our first fool.
I have read the GPL, I don't need someone to tell me what it says. The developers who contribute also read the GPL and contribute on that basis. Libranet also explicitly state that they are NOT charging for their service on the basis you and others claim for them. They are charging based on physical media costs, which is a totaly bogus approach. As I already stated I would have less of an objection if their fees were reasonably derived from (and limited to) their costs of distribution, and ONLY their costs of distribution.
Paid for who's work? They are selling the work of others who licensed it to them on the condition that they could not charge for it like this. Even the basis for the charge is completely bogus. They charge based on a physical media cost, under the assumption that only broadband users can download which is supposed to garner sympathy. What the heck kind of philosophy is this? They are in clear breach of the GPL. At best I could see them being allowed to charge IF the charge was based on the admin & network costs for their server. Anyone who contributed to any part of their distro could have serious objections to this abuse of their copyright works.
The bolding was unintentional, I was trying to insert a break. Unfortunately the usual vitriolic imbecilic childish response characteristic of slashdot is provoked. I don't bolding it improved my point but it didn't diminish it either. Grow up.
This is a sensible document and gets back to the basics of WHY we have patents. Patents are an unnatural mechanism designed to encourage investment in innovation. When that mechanism offers unfair competitive advantages for minimal investment then it is bad. Nobody believes that the one click invention would not have been invented without Amazon. A dozen companies would have come up with the same idea by now (and some have independently). So giving Amazon a 20 year monopoly on the idea unfairly enriches them and stifles innovation. In other words it has the opposite effect from that intended. Software engineers close to these issues know this. Companies out there are filing for patents on inventions they never intend to use, they are merely trying to set up road blocks for their competition. It is common practice to try and broaden the scope of a patent beyond the original invention to create as big a minefield as possible for companies who might infringe in future. Patents are no longer about protecting inventions, they have become a system of patronage to wield as a business weapon against unwary competitors. It is no accident that large corporations support them and independent operations do not. Does anyone really think that large corporations are more innovative than the thousands of individual developers out there? Of course not, but patents give them the legal clout they need to tax the rest of the industry and sustain their revenues. The letter posted was remarkably well informed for a government agency IMHO. Well done U.K.
Not that I'm advocating this for Linux but this is the main reason for all that COM groat.
One alternative is to number the dynamic shared objects and have the linker automatically resolve to the right dso version. For compatibility you just install multiple versions of the same dso in the lib directory and each app should resolve to the version they were compiled against on the development system.