Richtig said Fred!

It would appear so according to a funny net quiz. I wonder how the founders of Google would score with their “Don’t be evil!” motto.

Test your Evilness on http://home.att.net/~slugbutter/evil/

According to Yahoo News, the European Commission has determined that computer programs won’t be patentable and that the European Patent Office will be bound by the new law. This is indeed a great victory for everyone involved in computer software (except for programmers in the US) and it will probably give an edge to companies both small and large who are based in Europe compared to their US counterpart which will get dragged in futile lawsuits related to software patents.

Read all about it on Yahoo! News.

Here’s a funny picture about an anti-DRM protest that was held in front of Microsoft’s WinHEC conference yesterday. The protesters were wearing Hazmat Suits to demonstrate their slogan “Defective by Design!”.

You can visit the Free Software Foundation’s information page on DRM.
If you want to see more information about the protest you can visit www.defectivebydesign.org.
If you want to see more pictures of Hazmat suits and the protest, visit their page on Flickr.

Paul Graham has just published a great essay on Software Patents. He writes: “One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you’re against software patents, you’re against patents in general.” Paul Graham also does a fair comparison of the laws passed that gave Hollywood Studios fairly strong enforcement power over copyrighted works:

The most memorable example of medieval industrial secrecy is probably Venice, which forbade glassblowers to leave the city, and sent assassins after those who tried. We might like to think we wouldn’t go so far, but the movie industry has already tried to pass laws prescribing three year prison terms just for putting movies on public networks. Want to try a frightening thought experiment? If the movie industry could have any law they wanted, where would they stop? Short of the death penalty, one assumes, but how close would they get?

He ends his essay by concluding:”they don’t affect innovation much, one way or the other.”

I think software patents are probably granted too easily and too overly broad which means they do not function as intended and on the same topic of dysfunctional laws I would like to point that since new laws like the DMCA have passed they have brought new kinds of lawsuits that were inexistent before. If software patents do not work as expected right now in the USA, thus not preventing anyone from copying software patents and yet only get used in cases like NTP Software suing RIM for a lot of money, then what improvements have software patents brought us? My guess would be very little, I would also like to mention something I heard from Richard Stallman last year in a presentation he gave in Montreal (Canada), he compared software to cooking and when you think about it it makes a lot of sense, take something like bread, or pies or word processors and you will see it it applies in most cases.

1.- Everyone can purchase a commercial product or try to make his own similar product using the same ingredients.

2.- Everyone has access to the same “ingredients”: flour, oil, eggs, code examples, FAQs, white papers, RFCs

3.- Everyone has access to the same “tools”: oven, bowls, pans, compilers, google searches, code libraries

4.- Everyone can tweak a “recipe” & try to improve it: adding butter, spices, changing icons, adding options

And yet, you would not like to have your Grandma collect 10% of the flour and butter you are using in your recipes because she was making bread years before you… …accepting that software patents can exist in their present form is a bit like promoting individual WMD, since everyone is potentially dangerous now, now one dares using it!

To read Paul Graham’s essay on Software Patents click here.

You can read Wikipedia’s article about the DMCA here.

There is also another important article from Paul Graham: “A Plan for Spam”, it has started the Bayesian Filtering trend among ANTI-SPAM Circles. You can read “A Plan for Spam” here.

Yahoo has a frightening story about a teacher at Englewood Elementary who apparently asked plain clothed officers from the Department of Homeland Security to move their car because they were parked in a school bus unloading zone. The result was that this teacher was handcuffed and slammed against a car, he was then released after 30 minutes.

There is an article on Wikipedia about the DHS here.
You can read Yahoo’s article about this story here.

Well according to an article from DefenseLINK News there is a new device that can sense “activity” through concrete walls…

You can read the article here

Well according to my post on Thu 16 Dec 2004 named (Terminator, here we come!), I had predicted the army would have gun wielding robots within 10 years, that 2014… Well I was right about the gun wielding robots according to an article published in The Korean Times, but I was too pessimistic… The date has been announced and it’s in 2010… Scary stuff if you ask me, I don’t feel safe having gun wielding bots around the corner, they have been programmed by humans after all…

“We’re sorry about killing your wife sir, that robot killed her because we do not have time to put that latest microsoft patches…”

If you want to read the article click here

According to an article on IsraCast a nano technology based armour will be: “Five times stronger than steel and at least twice as strong as any impact-resistant material currently in use as protective gear”. They also mention “The material withstood the shock pressures generated by the impacts of up to 250 tons per square centimeter.”

This material is so tough that any body armour made of that would be bullet proof I guess, unless they used that material to make super-bullets… Hmmm…

You can read the article here