That's GPL-compatible licenses. I still cannot take GPL'd code and release it under another license. For instance, the GPL isn't BSD-compatible.
The other poster is correct. You don't understand this. I'll try to be more helpful and actually explain it though.
The GPL is BSD compatible in the same sense as the BSD license is GPL compatible. You can combine code under both licenses.
You cannot take GPL code and release it under a BSD license, no. You also can't take BSD code and put it under the GPL. You can combine the two, both licenses allow it, but the actual code remains under their respective licenses.
But until the dust settles on this, I don't think anyone should link the new Apache code.
Which no one was doing anyway, since all the of the earlier Apache licenses were clearly and uncontroversially non-GPL-compatible.
I'm waiting to see if this turns ugly. I hope it doesn't, because it doesn't need to. The last thing the GPL needs is to have it's primary defender fighting it's most well-known user.
The Apache Foundation does not and has never used the GPL on any of their work.
I'm rolling on the floor laughing at the mods that fell for this.
Can't see it giving you any advantages, but it sure does a lot for them. If you buy one, you have a contract with them so they can still sue you after the courts rule they don't own squat.
Well let me first say I'm not a specialist in those languages, and I don't speak any of them, so all I can say is what I've heard and read. Furthermore, it's an issue of some debate among those who are specialists in it, it seems.
So, my understanding is that there isn't much direct evidence for it, but that most of those who focus on it think they are probably very distantly related. Let me explain how we get to that conclusion with very little direct evidence.
It's not established beyond controversy that the Uralic family (Finno-Ugric and Samoyed languages) are related to the Altaic group, first off. The majority of folks that have studied the problem enough to really have an opinion on it seem to think that they are, but it's not at all beyond controversy. There are a number of common features, for instance vowel harmony systems, and some reconstructed root words in each family seem to be related. On the other hand, bring it up with a group of linguists who specialise in one group or the other and I'm sure you'll find some that will argue vociferously that there is no connection and that these similarities are just coincidence.
The second point of contention here is whether Korean really belongs in the Altaic group. If it does, and if the Uralic-Altaic hypothesis is correct, then Korean is very distantly related to the Uralic languages, even though it's so distant there's little to no apparent sign of such a relation, but both of those propositions are controversial.
The non-controversial members of the Altaic family include the Turkic family (Turkish, Kazakh, Uzbek, etc.) the Mongolic family (a number of languages spoken in and around Mongolia and obviously related) and the Tungus (another group spoken now in part of Siberia, and once in a much wider area, including Manchuria.) There are quite a few signs that this family might well be related to the Uralic family -
Now, Korean from what I've read is a very difficult case. So is Japanese. Although it's controversial, a number of people do think that they are related to each other, and to the Tungus languages, moreso than any other group. If so then they're Altaic languages, and then if the Uralic-Altaic hypothesis is correct - voila, there's your link to the Ugric languages, albeit a very distant one.
To give you an idea of how distant, Uralic and Altaic are each roughly at the same level of abstraction as Indo-European, which includes every major European language except Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and Basque (a few other Finno-ugric languages exist in Europe but usually aren't considered 'major', Saami for instance) PLUS Persian and many of the languages of India, and that's just the living languages. That's a language family, and the ancestor language here probably split into separate groups roughly 8-10,000 years ago. That's about the limit to the non-controversial use of Historical linguistics - in fact if we hadn't deciphered some dead languages like Hittite that conformed to what the Indo-European hypothesis lead us to believe should be there that family relationship might still be controversial today. When you talk about linking Korean to Ugric, basically you're talking about linking languages last spoken somewhere in the same neighborhood of time, with the common ancestor perhaps last spoken 20,000 years or so, and no decipherable links like Hittite available at the moment to confirm it.
I believe that there are a number of similar common nouns between the Finno-Ugyric languages (including Finnish, Ugyric and Hungarian)
That would be Ugric or Ugrian you are referring to I believe. Wouldn't be 'Ugyric and Hungarian' however, because Hungarian is Ugric, that is Ugric isn't a language, but a language family, one which includes Hungarian along with a couple of West Siberian languages.
Anyway, I'm not sure if this is a vague recollection of something serious or if you've just been reading something from the tin-hat brigade, I've seen a bit from both on the subject. There are actually very few possible cognates between the two groups that can be taken seriously - (remember that we expect a few by sheer chance even if they aren't related) - but it's not entirely an unserious idea that there might be some relationship. Not with Finno-Ugric per se, but with the larger Ural-Altaic family which includes them. If there is a link, it's an incredibly ancient (and thus obscure) one, something like the proposed linkage between Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic languages, which is still nothing more than an interesting theory at best after many years of work by its proponents.
proto-Tamil (which most probably has Mesopotamian and Harappan links).
A lot of people assume that the Harrapans spoke some sort of proto-Dravidian, but their is really no evidence to back it up, it's just an assumption, and I think in many cases it springs from the visions brought to peoples minds by the (long since discredited) Aryan invasion theory. It's possible they did, it's possible their language was completely unrelated. At least until and unless someone deciphers those seals, their is just no way to know.
My first thought on reading the article, was another, more sinister, purpose for obfuscating client-side apps, and I can't believe no one else thought of this but I haven't seen a comment mention it.
The sort of morphing obfuscation routines he mentions would make virus detection a hell of a lot harder, don't you think?
You are aware that hungarian and finnish are closely related languages, right? And that basically no other language is closely related to either of them? (IIRC, basque is, but its chances to become an official UNO language are pretty slim either)
Umm no. You're way off, sorry.
Finnish and Hungarian are related, but not very closely. They're both Finno-Ugric languages, but the relation is roughly as distant as that between, say, German and Greek for instance. And probably less apparent, since German has quite a few Greek loan-words, particularly in scientific fields, but Hungarian and Finnish don't borrow from each other noticeably.
Other Finno-Ugric languages include Mansi, Khanty, Udmurts, and Mordvin, the balto-finnic languages (or dialects, depending on who you ask) which includes Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, Izhora, Veps, Vod, and Liv; and the closely related Saami languages spoken in the far north of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and northwest Russia.
This group is in turn more distantly related to the Samoyedic languages spoken in parts of Siberia.
Basque isn't closely enough related to any of these for linguists to have established any relationship, although many have suspected there was one and put a lot of time and energy into trying to find evidence of one.
Therefore, in NV it is illegal not to identify yourself when asked by a peace officer.
The argument then is that this law violates the US Constitution.
Well I think it's clear that it does indeed violate the US Constitution, which in line with very long and well-established caselaw means that it is not, in fact, "illegal not to identify yourself..." in Nevada or any other State in the US. A statute which conflicts with a higher law, such as the Constitution of the State or the US Constitution, is null and void, completely as if it were never passed to begin with.
The crucial point seems to be that the officer had a report of a crime which provided all the probable cause needed to do whatever he felt necessary to investigate that reported crime.
Umm no. There was no "probable cause." Again, not even the State is claiming that there was.
There was "reasonable suspicion." These are quite distinct, legally defined terms.
Neither of them gives an officer authority to "do whatever he feels necessary" - only to do investigate within the paramaters the law allows. The police enforce the law, they don't make it up on the spot - or at least, when they do, they are no longer police, but criminals.
No he didn't. The state isn't even claiming he did.
I don't know US law, but in my opinion it's not enough for an arrest but it's certainly enough to ask for an ID.
To ask for an ID? Don't need any reason at all. I can ask you for your ID anytime I want, without even being a cop.
The point is that refusing to supply ID is not a crime, nor is it probable cause. Anyone can ask you for ID, but you are not under any obligation to supply it. This guy was arrested on a thinly veiled charge of failing to supply ID, and failing to supply ID is not a crime - in fact it's a constitutionally protected right.
Hippies?
What does hippies have to do with anything?
I work for a living. I get 14 channels of TV for free with my apartment (and in this part of the world, that's a lot) but I haven't turned the thing on for 2 days now anyway. I have, you may have heard of the thing, a life. That means things to do besides sit in front of the box and live my life vicariously through some stupid sitcom.
TV of any kind is not a necessity, and in fact it's a pretty sorry excuse for a luxury as well.
Oh yeah, so multiple TV channels are a necessity of life now are they?
Please. TV is shit anyway. You are willing to compromise your principles and support such evil with your own money to get... TV?
Come on. You're the one that needs to think before you get on your soapbox.
In the old days that was all true. It's less so now. Particularly with models like this one. Linux and *BSD have progressed to the point they're better for most purposes than Solaris. And the new low end Suns give up most of the advantages Sun machines traditionally hold. This one, for example, has less I/O bandwidth than many Intel boxes, can't take huge amounts of memory, uses a cheap IDE hard drive, doesn't support multiple processors, etc. I wouldn't bet on it lasting forever like old Sun boxes do either, though that's just a guess. But if you look at Suns low end offerings, they definately seem to be cheap.
There are still good reasons to go with something besides x86 architecture, to be sure. But I'd have to say that IBM and Apple look like better bets than Sun these days.
I doubt that IBM would have just turned over source to AIX as part of the trial, much less an old version, so how did they get it?
Actually they did just that. There's a protective order on it, of course, and IBM simultaneously told the court that they didn't think they should have to do this, but they did anyway to make it clear that they're approaching discovery in good faith. TSG of course immediately complained that what was produced wasn't sufficient because they wanted every development version, released or not.
Obviously we've been trolled. However the troller is better than I thought. I checked up on it, and the 'standard' norwegian word for now is n*oa* with the *oa* being replaced of course with the proper 'a with an o on top' character that for some reason slashdot won't print whether I enter it directly or use html escape codes for. One of the fairly rare cases where Norwegian disagrees with both Danish and Swedish usage.
Nonetheless, the line about there being no such language as Scandinavian is clearly crud. I've been to two linguistics conferences up here, and I haven't met a single linguist that would disagree that Swedish/Danish/Norwegian are dialects of Scandinavian, in scientific terms if not political ones. People from all three countries converse in their native languages and understand each other fine (although there are the occasional jokes, particularly about the Danes with their glottalisations.) Even I, with my limited Swedish, can and have communicated with Danes and Norwegians just fine without resorting to English. The differences between spoken Swedish Danish and Norwegian don't seem to be any more drastic than between many dialects of spoken English - but of course the written forms tend to converge in English and diverge in Scandinavia.
BTW, the 'reconstructed and now dead language' would be Old Norse, and it's so close to modern Icelandic that I know a few linguists would argue it's not, in fact, dead. But it is significantly different from the language(s) spoken in Scandinavia today, in particular it preserves a rich inflectional system that's almost completely extinct in modern Swedish/Norwegian/Danish.
That sounds more to me like they understand the license and don't intend to violate it.
Indeed, that's how I read it too. But the evidence seems pretty damning. Particularly how the strings appear after the executable is unzipped.
My guess, without any inside knowledge, is that the frontman in the interview doesn't have a clue and is just going on what his programmers told him - but they lied. They ripped code from mplayer to make their own job easier, and passed it off to their superiors as their own work.
If there's one thing living in Sweden has taught me it's that translation is an inexact art.;)
Your Swedish is doubtless better than mine, so I hesitate to disagree with you, but I don't think games is a perfect translation of spel, from how I've seen it used it seems like play (the noun, not the verb) is at least as good a translation as games. Of course it can be 'game' and now that I think about it, with spelar as the verb, the plural would be a null-transform (i.e. no change, still spel) so I guess I'll have to back off from that even - games.now is a perfectly good translation I guess, but I think so is play.now. Remember that play can be a noun in English too.
'Nu' is also the scandinavian word for 'now' so you see it used a lot by people and businesses in this area too - i.e 'spel.nu' which would be 'play.now' in English.
Seemed to me that he was a bit ambiguous, and left his statements open to either interpretation. Got a quote to show that the way you read it is the only possible way?
You can see KDE go the same way as netscape if UserLinux ever becomes popular.
If you can, there's something wrong. You can't kill a free software project like that. It only dies if it no longer serves the developers goals.
Personally, I'd rather see them adopt GNUStep than either one - and if enough folk agree with me we might see another project taking that route. I'm sure there will continue to be other distros that choose to support KDE. It's not the end of the world, because free software is not the same world as the one where your expectations were formed.
And if you are correct, that just means the patent was filed more years after the fact than it does if you're wrong. We're not disagreeing on much, if anything, yet you keep repeating the BillG phrase like a machine. I think I may have been trolled.
Once again, slowly, for those that are afflicted by false expert syndrome.
Ok, not once again, because you didn't actually raise this objection prior to now, but excuse the rhetorical flourish as you are obviously not shy about such flourishes yourself.
Paterson (ONE T) devised the FAT system now known, in retrospect, as FAT12, but known simply as FAT until the introduction much later of the derived work known now as FAT16. He did so, as I said, undeniably under the influence of previous and well known systems already common knowledge in computer science circles, and yes that emphatically includes the unnamed file system used by MicroSoft Stand Alone Basic, which may have been coded personally by Bill Gates (I wasn't there and don't know.) But this was not a revolutionary advance suitable for a patent, it was simply one point along the continuous progression of computer science reaching back into the last century at the very least (and quite possibly the last millenia, I would argue) and it was Mr. Patersons code and file system which is the genetic ancestor in a readily verifiable and documented way that was used under license and eventually bought outright, and modified at a few points to create FAT16, VFAT, and FAT32.
The patent was filed many years after this system was widely known, widely understood, widely implemented (hell I wrote an implementation myself to bypass system calls for a common function so my program ran faster back about the time I was 16, and I was far from the only one) and widely used long before the patent was even applied for.
I'll repeat once again, I see no reason why this sort of thing should be eligible for patent, rather than copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
The other poster is correct. You don't understand this. I'll try to be more helpful and actually explain it though.
The GPL is BSD compatible in the same sense as the BSD license is GPL compatible. You can combine code under both licenses.
You cannot take GPL code and release it under a BSD license, no. You also can't take BSD code and put it under the GPL. You can combine the two, both licenses allow it, but the actual code remains under their respective licenses.
Which no one was doing anyway, since all the of the earlier Apache licenses were clearly and uncontroversially non-GPL-compatible.
The Apache Foundation does not and has never used the GPL on any of their work.
I'm rolling on the floor laughing at the mods that fell for this.
It sort of comes under caveat emptor. If you're stupid enough to buy this thing, you deserve it.
Can't see it giving you any advantages, but it sure does a lot for them. If you buy one, you have a contract with them so they can still sue you after the courts rule they don't own squat.
Well let me first say I'm not a specialist in those languages, and I don't speak any of them, so all I can say is what I've heard and read. Furthermore, it's an issue of some debate among those who are specialists in it, it seems.
So, my understanding is that there isn't much direct evidence for it, but that most of those who focus on it think they are probably very distantly related. Let me explain how we get to that conclusion with very little direct evidence.
It's not established beyond controversy that the Uralic family (Finno-Ugric and Samoyed languages) are related to the Altaic group, first off. The majority of folks that have studied the problem enough to really have an opinion on it seem to think that they are, but it's not at all beyond controversy. There are a number of common features, for instance vowel harmony systems, and some reconstructed root words in each family seem to be related. On the other hand, bring it up with a group of linguists who specialise in one group or the other and I'm sure you'll find some that will argue vociferously that there is no connection and that these similarities are just coincidence.
The second point of contention here is whether Korean really belongs in the Altaic group. If it does, and if the Uralic-Altaic hypothesis is correct, then Korean is very distantly related to the Uralic languages, even though it's so distant there's little to no apparent sign of such a relation, but both of those propositions are controversial.
The non-controversial members of the Altaic family include the Turkic family (Turkish, Kazakh, Uzbek, etc.) the Mongolic family (a number of languages spoken in and around Mongolia and obviously related) and the Tungus (another group spoken now in part of Siberia, and once in a much wider area, including Manchuria.) There are quite a few signs that this family might well be related to the Uralic family -
Now, Korean from what I've read is a very difficult case. So is Japanese. Although it's controversial, a number of people do think that they are related to each other, and to the Tungus languages, moreso than any other group. If so then they're Altaic languages, and then if the Uralic-Altaic hypothesis is correct - voila, there's your link to the Ugric languages, albeit a very distant one.
To give you an idea of how distant, Uralic and Altaic are each roughly at the same level of abstraction as Indo-European, which includes every major European language except Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and Basque (a few other Finno-ugric languages exist in Europe but usually aren't considered 'major', Saami for instance) PLUS Persian and many of the languages of India, and that's just the living languages. That's a language family, and the ancestor language here probably split into separate groups roughly 8-10,000 years ago. That's about the limit to the non-controversial use of Historical linguistics - in fact if we hadn't deciphered some dead languages like Hittite that conformed to what the Indo-European hypothesis lead us to believe should be there that family relationship might still be controversial today. When you talk about linking Korean to Ugric, basically you're talking about linking languages last spoken somewhere in the same neighborhood of time, with the common ancestor perhaps last spoken 20,000 years or so, and no decipherable links like Hittite available at the moment to confirm it.
Hope that helps.
That would be Ugric or Ugrian you are referring to I believe. Wouldn't be 'Ugyric and Hungarian' however, because Hungarian is Ugric, that is Ugric isn't a language, but a language family, one which includes Hungarian along with a couple of West Siberian languages.
Anyway, I'm not sure if this is a vague recollection of something serious or if you've just been reading something from the tin-hat brigade, I've seen a bit from both on the subject. There are actually very few possible cognates between the two groups that can be taken seriously - (remember that we expect a few by sheer chance even if they aren't related) - but it's not entirely an unserious idea that there might be some relationship. Not with Finno-Ugric per se, but with the larger Ural-Altaic family which includes them. If there is a link, it's an incredibly ancient (and thus obscure) one, something like the proposed linkage between Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic languages, which is still nothing more than an interesting theory at best after many years of work by its proponents.
A lot of people assume that the Harrapans spoke some sort of proto-Dravidian, but their is really no evidence to back it up, it's just an assumption, and I think in many cases it springs from the visions brought to peoples minds by the (long since discredited) Aryan invasion theory. It's possible they did, it's possible their language was completely unrelated. At least until and unless someone deciphers those seals, their is just no way to know.
My first thought on reading the article, was another, more sinister, purpose for obfuscating client-side apps, and I can't believe no one else thought of this but I haven't seen a comment mention it.
The sort of morphing obfuscation routines he mentions would make virus detection a hell of a lot harder, don't you think?
Umm no. You're way off, sorry.
Finnish and Hungarian are related, but not very closely. They're both Finno-Ugric languages, but the relation is roughly as distant as that between, say, German and Greek for instance. And probably less apparent, since German has quite a few Greek loan-words, particularly in scientific fields, but Hungarian and Finnish don't borrow from each other noticeably.
Other Finno-Ugric languages include Mansi, Khanty, Udmurts, and Mordvin, the balto-finnic languages (or dialects, depending on who you ask) which includes Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, Izhora, Veps, Vod, and Liv; and the closely related Saami languages spoken in the far north of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and northwest Russia.
This group is in turn more distantly related to the Samoyedic languages spoken in parts of Siberia.
Basque isn't closely enough related to any of these for linguists to have established any relationship, although many have suspected there was one and put a lot of time and energy into trying to find evidence of one.
Well I think it's clear that it does indeed violate the US Constitution, which in line with very long and well-established caselaw means that it is not, in fact, "illegal not to identify yourself..." in Nevada or any other State in the US. A statute which conflicts with a higher law, such as the Constitution of the State or the US Constitution, is null and void, completely as if it were never passed to begin with.
Umm no. There was no "probable cause." Again, not even the State is claiming that there was.
There was "reasonable suspicion." These are quite distinct, legally defined terms.
Neither of them gives an officer authority to "do whatever he feels necessary" - only to do investigate within the paramaters the law allows. The police enforce the law, they don't make it up on the spot - or at least, when they do, they are no longer police, but criminals.
No he didn't. The state isn't even claiming he did.
To ask for an ID? Don't need any reason at all. I can ask you for your ID anytime I want, without even being a cop.
The point is that refusing to supply ID is not a crime, nor is it probable cause. Anyone can ask you for ID, but you are not under any obligation to supply it. This guy was arrested on a thinly veiled charge of failing to supply ID, and failing to supply ID is not a crime - in fact it's a constitutionally protected right.
Hippies? What does hippies have to do with anything? I work for a living. I get 14 channels of TV for free with my apartment (and in this part of the world, that's a lot) but I haven't turned the thing on for 2 days now anyway. I have, you may have heard of the thing, a life. That means things to do besides sit in front of the box and live my life vicariously through some stupid sitcom. TV of any kind is not a necessity, and in fact it's a pretty sorry excuse for a luxury as well.
Oh yeah, so multiple TV channels are a necessity of life now are they? Please. TV is shit anyway. You are willing to compromise your principles and support such evil with your own money to get... TV? Come on. You're the one that needs to think before you get on your soapbox.
Of course not. But, like I said, take a look at IBMs wares if you need that sort of capability.
In the old days that was all true. It's less so now. Particularly with models like this one. Linux and *BSD have progressed to the point they're better for most purposes than Solaris. And the new low end Suns give up most of the advantages Sun machines traditionally hold. This one, for example, has less I/O bandwidth than many Intel boxes, can't take huge amounts of memory, uses a cheap IDE hard drive, doesn't support multiple processors, etc. I wouldn't bet on it lasting forever like old Sun boxes do either, though that's just a guess. But if you look at Suns low end offerings, they definately seem to be cheap.
There are still good reasons to go with something besides x86 architecture, to be sure. But I'd have to say that IBM and Apple look like better bets than Sun these days.
Actually they did just that. There's a protective order on it, of course, and IBM simultaneously told the court that they didn't think they should have to do this, but they did anyway to make it clear that they're approaching discovery in good faith. TSG of course immediately complained that what was produced wasn't sufficient because they wanted every development version, released or not.
Obviously we've been trolled. However the troller is better than I thought. I checked up on it, and the 'standard' norwegian word for now is n*oa* with the *oa* being replaced of course with the proper 'a with an o on top' character that for some reason slashdot won't print whether I enter it directly or use html escape codes for. One of the fairly rare cases where Norwegian disagrees with both Danish and Swedish usage.
Nonetheless, the line about there being no such language as Scandinavian is clearly crud. I've been to two linguistics conferences up here, and I haven't met a single linguist that would disagree that Swedish/Danish/Norwegian are dialects of Scandinavian, in scientific terms if not political ones. People from all three countries converse in their native languages and understand each other fine (although there are the occasional jokes, particularly about the Danes with their glottalisations.) Even I, with my limited Swedish, can and have communicated with Danes and Norwegians just fine without resorting to English. The differences between spoken Swedish Danish and Norwegian don't seem to be any more drastic than between many dialects of spoken English - but of course the written forms tend to converge in English and diverge in Scandinavia.
BTW, the 'reconstructed and now dead language' would be Old Norse, and it's so close to modern Icelandic that I know a few linguists would argue it's not, in fact, dead. But it is significantly different from the language(s) spoken in Scandinavia today, in particular it preserves a rich inflectional system that's almost completely extinct in modern Swedish/Norwegian/Danish.
The Mac version has been intentionally not upgraded, as well, so it won't play WMA files.
Indeed, that's how I read it too. But the evidence seems pretty damning. Particularly how the strings appear after the executable is unzipped.
My guess, without any inside knowledge, is that the frontman in the interview doesn't have a clue and is just going on what his programmers told him - but they lied. They ripped code from mplayer to make their own job easier, and passed it off to their superiors as their own work.
Hmm, no, in Swedish at least the imperative would be spela.
If there's one thing living in Sweden has taught me it's that translation is an inexact art. ;)
Your Swedish is doubtless better than mine, so I hesitate to disagree with you, but I don't think games is a perfect translation of spel, from how I've seen it used it seems like play (the noun, not the verb) is at least as good a translation as games. Of course it can be 'game' and now that I think about it, with spelar as the verb, the plural would be a null-transform (i.e. no change, still spel) so I guess I'll have to back off from that even - games.now is a perfectly good translation I guess, but I think so is play.now. Remember that play can be a noun in English too.
'Nu' is also the scandinavian word for 'now' so you see it used a lot by people and businesses in this area too - i.e 'spel.nu' which would be 'play.now' in English.
Seemed to me that he was a bit ambiguous, and left his statements open to either interpretation. Got a quote to show that the way you read it is the only possible way?
If you can, there's something wrong. You can't kill a free software project like that. It only dies if it no longer serves the developers goals.
Personally, I'd rather see them adopt GNUStep than either one - and if enough folk agree with me we might see another project taking that route. I'm sure there will continue to be other distros that choose to support KDE. It's not the end of the world, because free software is not the same world as the one where your expectations were formed.
SCO? Where the hell did that come into this?
And if you are correct, that just means the patent was filed more years after the fact than it does if you're wrong. We're not disagreeing on much, if anything, yet you keep repeating the BillG phrase like a machine. I think I may have been trolled.
Once again, slowly, for those that are afflicted by false expert syndrome.
Ok, not once again, because you didn't actually raise this objection prior to now, but excuse the rhetorical flourish as you are obviously not shy about such flourishes yourself.
Paterson (ONE T) devised the FAT system now known, in retrospect, as FAT12, but known simply as FAT until the introduction much later of the derived work known now as FAT16. He did so, as I said, undeniably under the influence of previous and well known systems already common knowledge in computer science circles, and yes that emphatically includes the unnamed file system used by MicroSoft Stand Alone Basic, which may have been coded personally by Bill Gates (I wasn't there and don't know.) But this was not a revolutionary advance suitable for a patent, it was simply one point along the continuous progression of computer science reaching back into the last century at the very least (and quite possibly the last millenia, I would argue) and it was Mr. Patersons code and file system which is the genetic ancestor in a readily verifiable and documented way that was used under license and eventually bought outright, and modified at a few points to create FAT16, VFAT, and FAT32.
The patent was filed many years after this system was widely known, widely understood, widely implemented (hell I wrote an implementation myself to bypass system calls for a common function so my program ran faster back about the time I was 16, and I was far from the only one) and widely used long before the patent was even applied for.
I'll repeat once again, I see no reason why this sort of thing should be eligible for patent, rather than copyright.