I don't run IE for the same reason I don't run Flash.
You may say that I suffer from paranoia, as I think that vira, worms, crackers, ad-ware and other mal-ware is trying to attack me.
But fact is that I have learned - both from my own mistakes and from the experiences of others.
I may be a bit atypical as I have been on the Internet since 1987, and has administered hosts directly connected to the net since 1992.
But I have only been infected by virus once (in 1990). Worms and mal-ware has never entered any of my systems. And no crackers have penetrated my systems - the worst I have experienced is two cases of succesful DOS attacks.
If you know of just a single court case in Europe where somebody has been convicted of infringement of a software patent, I am very interested. Even if you cannot give precise information I would be interested in which court in which country, the approximate time of the judgement, and what the case was about.
To the best of my knowledge the only court decisions saying that some software patents may be legal are a few cases in Germany and England, and these cases have not been infringement cases.
It drives the market forward, forcing all parties to innovate.
But take a moment to think about the current software patent madness, and what would have happened if this had been the case with semiconductor patents in 1980. In this scenario we would be lucky if Intel announced that the 486 would hit the market next year.
If a company has a monopoly there is no incentive to innovate. Patents are monopolies, but they have to be balanced so the incentive to innovate is not taken away.
Yeah, it was fun playing around with sector editing back then.
Strange that nobody thinks so today, since it is still possible on all kinds of filesystems today with the right privileges. Probably our data have become too valuable to us.
Disclaimer: I never trusted Flash enough to install it, so I may not know that I am talking about here.
Flash is successful. There is no real need for Macromedia to bundle the Yahoo toolbar with it, at least not from a technical viewpoint.
Probably some Macromedia executives don't like that they just give Flash away for free. When approached by Yahoo executives who would like their toolbar installed on more computers, these Macromedia executives were happy to learn that they could generate extra revenue from Yahoo by bundling the toolbar.
Unfortunately the executives of neither company had enough insight to predict that the whole thing would blow up in their faces.
I am not a physicist, but it looks to me that this experiment shows that entanglement does not only occur with particles separated by space, but also with particles separated by time.
I guess this is another indication that both Einsteins macroscopic theory of relatively and the microscopic theory of quantum mechanics are true.
No, their experiment rather suggests that time is just another dimension like Einstein said.
The experiment is the same as a known one, with a single difference:
In the traditional experiment the slits are separated by a difference in the normal 3d space, But in this experiement the slices are at the same place in the normal 3d space but separated by a difference in time.
I am not a physicist, but a bit interested in stuff like this.
Looks to be that they have redone the classic double-slit experiment in a new variation.
Instead of having the two slits existing at the same time but in different 3d space, they made the slits in different time, but in same 3d space.
Probably we have the same quantum effect as in the traditional double-slit experiment: When trying to determine which slit the particle passes through the interference pattern goes away, as the waves change change to particles.
It doesn't look to me like they have seen that experimentally yet. Their setup that did not produce the interference pattern looks more like a single-slit to me.
But I think that an attempt to find out at which of the two maxima are ionizing an argon atom should make the interference pattern go away.
When I say EPO are issuing illegal patents, I mean that they are grossly violating the text of the European Patent Convention, in particular Article 52.
The software patents that they are issuing are illegal according to the patent laws of all countries who have signed the European Patent Convention. Nonetheless these patents are made valid - but still illegal - national patents by the national patent offices without any further examination.
Even closed source developers will get problems with this.
For example, tabs are patented in Europe, and they are useless unless displayed in the user interface.
And a shopping basket cannot be hidden in closed source either.
Legalizing software patents in Europe would not only be bad for Linux and other FOSS projects, it would be bad for the traditional closed source software industry too.
The EPO has already illegally granted over 30,000 software patents in Europe. Because these patents are illegal they cannot be enforced in court. But this means that the european software industry doesn't care about these illegal patents.
If software patents are legalized, these illegal patents suddenly can be enforced in court.
It is likely that the european software industry will come to a standstill for years after software patents have been legalized, as they have to spend their resources fighting in court instead of doing research and innovation.
TFA states that total server revenue in 2004 was US$49 billion, and that 9% of this was Linux servers. This amounts to US$4.41 billion.
M$-Windows server revenue was US$4.6 billion in 2004.
First of all, software patents are not currently prohibited in the EU.
Software patents are illegal according to the national laws of all the EU member countries.
The EU does not yet have a position on them, and the EU patent office grants them; they are valid in some countries and not in others, and they are effectively valid in some where they are not strictly valid, due to allowing patents on which don't specify what they apply to to apply to software, despite it not being allowed to specifically apply them to software. Obviously, the current situation is a complete mess, and the EU Commission has called for a directive to resolve it, since that's the Commission's job.
Like another reply stated, there is no EU patent office. The European Patent Office (EPO) is not (oficially) in any way related to the EU. Their taks is to administer the European Patent Convention (EPC). Both EU member countries and non-EU member countries have signed the EPC.
The big problem is that EPO - illegally - has issued a huge number of software patents. Most estimate about 30-40,000 software patents.
These patents are illegal. To this date not a single case of software patent infringement has been won in any court within the EU. People who start infringement cases risk having their software patents invalidated by the court, as they are illegal according to the law.
The EU directive is meant to force the EU member countries to change their laws to legalize software patents, and the political pressure from the owners of the illegal software patents is huge.
The process started with a directive that would permit software patents.
Actually the process started a lot earlier. The EPO - who is outside political and judicial control - started issuing software patents even though they are not allowed to do so according to EPC article 52. Then EPO called for a diplomatic conference to have the EPC changed to legalize their conduct, but their request was denied. Later they called for another diplomatic conference with the same purpose, and once again their request was denied.
It was not until after the second diplomatic conference that the EU commission proposed the directive.
So the current status is: the legality of SW patents in Europe is current ambiguous and nobody wants to leave it this way; the resolution currently on the table permits SW patents; the Council is refusing requests from the Parliament to restart the process from scratch, which would permit an anti-SW-patent result.
No. That is what the pro software patent lobby and the European Commission would like us to believe, but it is simply not true.
Fact is that the law is perfectly clear: Software patents are illegal in all EU member countries, and most (all?) european countries that are not EU members.
The fact that every song has almost the same price in every shop is a clear indication that the free market forces are not working. And it is even more clear when you see the prices that the retailers pay - they are exactly the same.
If the free market forces were in effect, more popular songs would have a higher price than less popular songs. And the almost zero price of producing extra copies of mp3 files would have caused the prices of digitally distributed music to be significantly lower than music distributed on CDs.
The interesting point he is making here is that FOSS people not only write software - they also make obscure technical information available and accessible.
Censorship is never good, and this looks to be nothing than "voluntary" censorship.
If the content filtered out from the search results is really illegal, the authorities should go after those who put the contents online.
And if the german authorities cannot stop the contents because it is located in other contries, this kind of censorship is no better than the censorship done by countries like Iran and China. The only difference is that it is called "voluntary". Please note that Germany has a history of banning both extreme rigth-wing and extreme left-wing political speech.
Slashdot Mirror
You may say that I suffer from paranoia, as I think that vira, worms, crackers, ad-ware and other mal-ware is trying to attack me.
But fact is that I have learned - both from my own mistakes and from the experiences of others.
I may be a bit atypical as I have been on the Internet since 1987, and has administered hosts directly connected to the net since 1992.
But I have only been infected by virus once (in 1990). Worms and mal-ware has never entered any of my systems. And no crackers have penetrated my systems - the worst I have experienced is two cases of succesful DOS attacks.
But fortunately the players in this market have chosen to compete instead of cooperating to keep development costs down.
To the best of my knowledge the only court decisions saying that some software patents may be legal are a few cases in Germany and England, and these cases have not been infringement cases.
But take a moment to think about the current software patent madness, and what would have happened if this had been the case with semiconductor patents in 1980. In this scenario we would be lucky if Intel announced that the 486 would hit the market next year.
If a company has a monopoly there is no incentive to innovate. Patents are monopolies, but they have to be balanced so the incentive to innovate is not taken away.
Strange that nobody thinks so today, since it is still possible on all kinds of filesystems today with the right privileges. Probably our data have become too valuable to us.
If my memory serves me right, CP/M was for the 8080 processor. The Z80 processor was 8080-compatible, so it could run CP/M too.
A Java applet can be at least as restricted when run locally. Your problem is that you don't run it in a sandbox like it does by default in a browser.
Flash is successful. There is no real need for Macromedia to bundle the Yahoo toolbar with it, at least not from a technical viewpoint.
Probably some Macromedia executives don't like that they just give Flash away for free. When approached by Yahoo executives who would like their toolbar installed on more computers, these Macromedia executives were happy to learn that they could generate extra revenue from Yahoo by bundling the toolbar.
Unfortunately the executives of neither company had enough insight to predict that the whole thing would blow up in their faces.
It's main purpose was to be as compatible as possible to CP/M to faciliate fast porting of CP/M applications to QDOS.
Well, I think this comment is the best description outside the article, and that it needs to be modded up more than my comment.
I guess this is another indication that both Einsteins macroscopic theory of relatively and the microscopic theory of quantum mechanics are true.
The experiment is the same as a known one, with a single difference: In the traditional experiment the slits are separated by a difference in the normal 3d space, But in this experiement the slices are at the same place in the normal 3d space but separated by a difference in time.
Looks to be that they have redone the classic double-slit experiment in a new variation.
Instead of having the two slits existing at the same time but in different 3d space, they made the slits in different time, but in same 3d space.
Probably we have the same quantum effect as in the traditional double-slit experiment: When trying to determine which slit the particle passes through the interference pattern goes away, as the waves change change to particles.
It doesn't look to me like they have seen that experimentally yet. Their setup that did not produce the interference pattern looks more like a single-slit to me.
But I think that an attempt to find out at which of the two maxima are ionizing an argon atom should make the interference pattern go away.
It is a 404 - user-friendly, but only to people who read danish.
I wonder why some US people still say that they live in the land of the Free with all the regulation that their government is imposing on them...
When I say EPO are issuing illegal patents, I mean that they are grossly violating the text of the European Patent Convention, in particular Article 52.
The software patents that they are issuing are illegal according to the patent laws of all countries who have signed the European Patent Convention. Nonetheless these patents are made valid - but still illegal - national patents by the national patent offices without any further examination.
For example, tabs are patented in Europe, and they are useless unless displayed in the user interface. And a shopping basket cannot be hidden in closed source either.
Yeah, tens of thousands of software engineers will probably lose their jobs.
But who cares about sleazy people like them? They only research and innovate instead of doing something productive.
The good thing is that we will get a lot of new jobs because of this. Thousands of fine patent lawyers will get new jobs.
</SARCASM>
There is a reason that 47% of the swpat-positive replies to the hearing that the European Commission held were from patent lawyers and patent offices.
The EPO has already illegally granted over 30,000 software patents in Europe. Because these patents are illegal they cannot be enforced in court. But this means that the european software industry doesn't care about these illegal patents.
If software patents are legalized, these illegal patents suddenly can be enforced in court.
It is likely that the european software industry will come to a standstill for years after software patents have been legalized, as they have to spend their resources fighting in court instead of doing research and innovation.
Looks like Linux is catching up on M$-Windows.
The big problem is that EPO - illegally - has issued a huge number of software patents. Most estimate about 30-40,000 software patents.
These patents are illegal. To this date not a single case of software patent infringement has been won in any court within the EU. People who start infringement cases risk having their software patents invalidated by the court, as they are illegal according to the law.
The EU directive is meant to force the EU member countries to change their laws to legalize software patents, and the political pressure from the owners of the illegal software patents is huge.
Actually the process started a lot earlier. The EPO - who is outside political and judicial control - started issuing software patents even though they are not allowed to do so according to EPC article 52. Then EPO called for a diplomatic conference to have the EPC changed to legalize their conduct, but their request was denied. Later they called for another diplomatic conference with the same purpose, and once again their request was denied.It was not until after the second diplomatic conference that the EU commission proposed the directive.
No. That is what the pro software patent lobby and the European Commission would like us to believe, but it is simply not true.Fact is that the law is perfectly clear: Software patents are illegal in all EU member countries, and most (all?) european countries that are not EU members.
The fact that every song has almost the same price in every shop is a clear indication that the free market forces are not working. And it is even more clear when you see the prices that the retailers pay - they are exactly the same.
If the free market forces were in effect, more popular songs would have a higher price than less popular songs. And the almost zero price of producing extra copies of mp3 files would have caused the prices of digitally distributed music to be significantly lower than music distributed on CDs.
The interesting point he is making here is that FOSS people not only write software - they also make obscure technical information available and accessible.
They pay with their own stock, not in cash.
If the content filtered out from the search results is really illegal, the authorities should go after those who put the contents online.
And if the german authorities cannot stop the contents because it is located in other contries, this kind of censorship is no better than the censorship done by countries like Iran and China. The only difference is that it is called "voluntary". Please note that Germany has a history of banning both extreme rigth-wing and extreme left-wing political speech.