One reason is the better overall security in Linux. For example you actually need to mark a file executable before you can execute it on Linux.
Another reason is the diversity of Linux systems. Worms and virii thrive best in monocultures, and it is hard to write such a beast so it is able to thrive in a hundred different Linux variants.
Using Mersenne primes for public cryptography is way too easily attacked - just try to first N Mersenne primes, where the Nth prime is less than the composite number.
It they really cared about security they would have done one or more complete security audits of all their systems when they got hacked the first time.
Being a customer at a grossly insecure telecom company can expose you to all kinds of risk.
I can only recommend that people let their money speak and move away from them.
Your are not quite right when you claim that Folketinget or any of it's comittees can mandate the danish government how to vote in the European Council. Please read Article 19 in the danish constitution.
But in reality you are ignoring the effects of TCP queueing and retransmissions.
Your VoIP phone call may work fine as long as your phone call is the only traffic in the SSL tunnel. But other traffic in the tunnel (even another phone call) will cause extra latency and jitter that can disturb your phone call.
VoIP and other real-time applications is where the difference between IPSec and TCP-based VPN connections really become obvious.
Even allowing software patents with a reduced enforcable period of a year or two (which btw would be illegal according to the TRIPS treaty) would not help.
Either you would have to wait a year or two until you actually get out your software, or your will have to search all patents to see it any ideas you have used in your software have been patented. The latter will likely cost you more than actually developing your software.
In any case innovation would be set back compared to the current european situation where software patents are illegal.
Your idea of a register of prior art is fine, but there is a risk that the patent offices will begin searching only that register. Currently they are obliged to search all public sources.
If the software patent directive is adopted by the European Commission, couldn't a country's parliament simply refuse to adopt it for that nation?
In theory yes. But since a directive is binding on the member states, the only way to do this would be to completely leave the EU.
Or, if the European Parliament was antagonized enough, could it pass legislation invalidating the directive?
The European Parliament is not allowed to propose new legislation.
If the Commission and Parliament reached contradictory decisions on this issue, what happens?
If 2/3 of all parliamentary seats (not 2/3 of all parliamentary votes) vote against it, a directive by the Commission can be blocked.
I think the reason the the Commission is ignoring the requests of the Parliament to restart the software patent directive is that they hope that this will not happen.
Your comment is very insightful, and if I was a moderator I would have modded it up.
I do not want to guillotine our queen and have a president instead, as I prefer a non-political head of State over a president.
But I would prefer if decisions by our parliament would be binding to our government. If that was the case for all EU governments, the software patent directive would have been dead now. (And Denmark would not (for the first time since 1864) have gone to war (against Iraq), since there was a massive majority against it in our parliament. In the US at least the Congress has to approve going to war.)
I agree on your statements on the European Parliament, and I think it is time to give them more power.
The two requests that the European Parliament so far have sent out are without any real power. But they have some significance: The first request was from the parliamentary commitee of judicial matters, and the second request was from the Conference of Presidents (the leaders of the parties in the parliament).
If I understand EU law correctly, it takes a 2/3 majority vote from the parliament to actually force the European Comission to restart the directive.
This is one tactic that the pro software patent lobby has used with a lot of success.
But there is just as much opposition to software patents amongst the small and medium sized software companies as there is in the FOSS community.
I am an example.
Sure I use FOSS, and I have even from time to time developed FOSS when I wanted to learn more about something (the feedback you get is very educating). But the bulk of all programming I have done is closed source.
I used to own a small software development company, but out of fear that the directive to legalize software patents would become law I decided to merge with a larger software development company.
But even though I am now a partner in a medium sized software development company I fear that we are still too small to have a real change of surviving if software patents are legalized.
It is interesting, but: All economic research seems to indicate that allowing software patents is bad for the software industry.
There are really only three parties who get any advantage from software patents:
Very large software companies. They can use software patents defensively to stop new innovative software companies from entering the market and taking over market share.
Patent offices. They get extra income from the software patents.
Patent lawyers. They also get extra income from the software patents.
Empirical research of the US patent system has actually shown that software patents lead to less innovation.
Like I just wrote in another comment, most EU governments are not elected but appointed to have the best possible backing by their national parliament.
And no, decisions by the Council does not have to be unanimous in most political areas. Unanimous decisions were required years ago, but that has changed.
Since the vote and all discussions in the Council is secret, it is easy for a minister to vote yes and then come home and say "Sorry, there way nothing I could do to prevent it."
In most (all?) european countries the governments are not elected but appointed to have the largest possible power-base in their national parliament.
Here in Denmark, for example, the government is appointed by our Queen. Our queen is the only danish citizen that is not allowed to have a political opinion (at least not publicly), so she is supposed to select the government that is best for Denmark, regardless of politics. Our democratically elected parliament can at any time sack our government with a simple majority vote. The result is that the government our queen appoints has the best possible backing from our parliament.
But there is another problems with the government in Denmark and most (all?) other european countries: Although the government risk being sacked by the parliament, they are not bound by decisions of the parliament on questions of EU policy.
This is why we have this strange situation in Europe where most national parliaments are against software patents, while the EU Council (really the club of governments of the EU countries) is pushing for legalization of software patents.
They only vetoed the decision that the directive should be adopted by the European Council without any discussion at a meeting between the agriculture and fishery ministers of the national EU governments.
I think is is quite positive that Poland recognized that something fishy was going on.
Not as new as my id indicates. I have been posting anonymously for years.
It was pretty obvious that they were going to go down when they sued IBM.
But this is an indication that they may actually go down before IBM wins the court case. Not being able to file 10-K indicates that they cannot get their auditors to approve the numbers.
I think this is one of the worst cases showing the democratic problems in the EU.
Nobody wanted this in the first place - except patent lawyers, patent offices and a few large software companies.
Before the directive was proposed by the European Commission, software patents were rejected twice by governments at international diplomat conferences on the change of the European Patent Convention.
Before the directive was proposed the European Commission held a public hearing. 91% of those responding were against software patents. 47% of the rest were patent lawyers and patent offices.
When the European Commission proposed the directive they sent out a press release saying the directive was to make software less patentable (liars!).
The only elected institution in EU is the European Parliament. Here the proposed directive was amended to not allowing unlimited patentability of all software and business metods.
Later the European Counsil amended the directive again, undoing most of the amendments the the Parliament did.
And now the European Commission and the Counsil (both non-elected, but appointed) are pressing to go through with the directive, completely ignoring the rights of the European Parliament.
You are right, but:
The end users who have their communications blocked like this are generally using UDP for the bulk of their VoIP communications.
Using SSL will not help against a blocking ISP.
Slashdot Mirror
I am really looking forward to emulating an Opteron at near native speed on my good old 386sx processor...
Of course Microsoft is more secure than Microsoft. Anything is more secure than Microsoft...
One reason is the better overall security in Linux. For example you actually need to mark a file executable before you can execute it on Linux.
Another reason is the diversity of Linux systems. Worms and virii thrive best in monocultures, and it is hard to write such a beast so it is able to thrive in a hundred different Linux variants.
Using Mersenne primes for public cryptography is way too easily attacked - just try to first N Mersenne primes, where the Nth prime is less than the composite number.
The theory is that there is an infinite number of these numbers, but they are unlikely to prove the theory by finding them all...
Being a customer at a grossly insecure telecom company can expose you to all kinds of risk.
I can only recommend that people let their money speak and move away from them.
Your are not quite right when you claim that Folketinget or any of it's comittees can mandate the danish government how to vote in the European Council. Please read Article 19 in the danish constitution.
But in reality you are ignoring the effects of TCP queueing and retransmissions.
Your VoIP phone call may work fine as long as your phone call is the only traffic in the SSL tunnel. But other traffic in the tunnel (even another phone call) will cause extra latency and jitter that can disturb your phone call.
VoIP and other real-time applications is where the difference between IPSec and TCP-based VPN connections really become obvious.
Either you would have to wait a year or two until you actually get out your software, or your will have to search all patents to see it any ideas you have used in your software have been patented. The latter will likely cost you more than actually developing your software.
In any case innovation would be set back compared to the current european situation where software patents are illegal.
Your idea of a register of prior art is fine, but there is a risk that the patent offices will begin searching only that register. Currently they are obliged to search all public sources.
I do not want to guillotine our queen and have a president instead, as I prefer a non-political head of State over a president.
But I would prefer if decisions by our parliament would be binding to our government. If that was the case for all EU governments, the software patent directive would have been dead now. (And Denmark would not (for the first time since 1864) have gone to war (against Iraq), since there was a massive majority against it in our parliament. In the US at least the Congress has to approve going to war.)
I agree on your statements on the European Parliament, and I think it is time to give them more power.
If I understand EU law correctly, it takes a 2/3 majority vote from the parliament to actually force the European Comission to restart the directive.
But there is just as much opposition to software patents amongst the small and medium sized software companies as there is in the FOSS community.
I am an example.
Sure I use FOSS, and I have even from time to time developed FOSS when I wanted to learn more about something (the feedback you get is very educating). But the bulk of all programming I have done is closed source.
I used to own a small software development company, but out of fear that the directive to legalize software patents would become law I decided to merge with a larger software development company.
But even though I am now a partner in a medium sized software development company I fear that we are still too small to have a real change of surviving if software patents are legalized.
There are really only three parties who get any advantage from software patents:
Empirical research of the US patent system has actually shown that software patents lead to less innovation.
And no, decisions by the Council does not have to be unanimous in most political areas. Unanimous decisions were required years ago, but that has changed.
Since the vote and all discussions in the Council is secret, it is easy for a minister to vote yes and then come home and say "Sorry, there way nothing I could do to prevent it."
Here in Denmark, for example, the government is appointed by our Queen. Our queen is the only danish citizen that is not allowed to have a political opinion (at least not publicly), so she is supposed to select the government that is best for Denmark, regardless of politics. Our democratically elected parliament can at any time sack our government with a simple majority vote. The result is that the government our queen appoints has the best possible backing from our parliament.
But there is another problems with the government in Denmark and most (all?) other european countries: Although the government risk being sacked by the parliament, they are not bound by decisions of the parliament on questions of EU policy.
This is why we have this strange situation in Europe where most national parliaments are against software patents, while the EU Council (really the club of governments of the EU countries) is pushing for legalization of software patents.
They only vetoed the decision that the directive should be adopted by the European Council without any discussion at a meeting between the agriculture and fishery ministers of the national EU governments.
I think is is quite positive that Poland recognized that something fishy was going on.
But coming from within the EU system itself, it does not mention any of the problems with this system.
Not as new as my id indicates. I have been posting anonymously for years.
It was pretty obvious that they were going to go down when they sued IBM.
But this is an indication that they may actually go down before IBM wins the court case. Not being able to file 10-K indicates that they cannot get their auditors to approve the numbers.
Nobody wanted this in the first place - except patent lawyers, patent offices and a few large software companies.
Before the directive was proposed by the European Commission, software patents were rejected twice by governments at international diplomat conferences on the change of the European Patent Convention.
Before the directive was proposed the European Commission held a public hearing. 91% of those responding were against software patents. 47% of the rest were patent lawyers and patent offices.
When the European Commission proposed the directive they sent out a press release saying the directive was to make software less patentable (liars!).
The only elected institution in EU is the European Parliament. Here the proposed directive was amended to not allowing unlimited patentability of all software and business metods.
Later the European Counsil amended the directive again, undoing most of the amendments the the Parliament did.
And now the European Commission and the Counsil (both non-elected, but appointed) are pressing to go through with the directive, completely ignoring the rights of the European Parliament.
Maybe this is the first sign that they are going down?
Unfortunately after DMCA it is illegal to demonstrate that this is not the case.
The music industry should sue Microsoft for misleading them to publish millions of songs in a basically unprotected format.
It is a mistake to say that patents and copyrights are facets of capitalism.
On the contrary. Patents and copyrights are government-issued monopolies, and thus fit better in a communist world than in a free-trade world.
You are right, but: The end users who have their communications blocked like this are generally using UDP for the bulk of their VoIP communications. Using SSL will not help against a blocking ISP.
But the ISP has to pay for the traffic. They want their customers to use the net as little as possible while still being retained as customers.
This is why we often see customers being dropped due to "excessive usage" of "unlimited access".