Blackmoor Vituperative

Red Hat has filed an amicus curiae brief in a major Supreme Court case. In the brief, Red Hat makes a strong case against software patents, arguing that the legal reasoning that led to software patents was flawed and that the pending Bilski case provides the Supreme Court with an important opportunity to rectify this long-standing problem with the patent system.

[…]

“Far from encouraging innovation, this proliferation of patents has seriously encumbered innovation in the software industry. Software is an abstract technology, and translating software functions into patent language generally results in patents with vague and uncertain boundaries,” wrote Red Hat VP Rob Tiller in the brief. “Under the Federal Circuit’s previous erroneous approach, the risk of going forward with a new software product now always entails an unavoidable risk of a lawsuit that may cost many millions of dollars in legal fees, as well as actual damages, treble damages, and an injunction that terminates a business. Only those with an unusually high tolerance for risk will participate in such a market.”

(from Red Hat tells Supremes: software patents stifle innovation, Ars Technica)

The issuing of patents was an experiment. That experiment has unequivocally failed. Getting rid of software patents is a good start.

I think I may get out of IT.

I am tired of Windows and the poor decisions it encourages. I am tired of companies that ostensibly hire you for your competence and professionalism, and then micromanage your software choices and filter your internet access. I am tired of companies that make ritual humiliation part of the interview process. I am tired of competing with people from India who are just as smart as I am and who will put up with more BS.

Most of all, I am tired of companies that see IT workers as little more than D-cell batteries of knowledge — just as disposable, and just as easily replaced.

Maybe I am just tired.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is displaying an astonishing — I am tempted to say “unprecedented” — amount of good sense on the topic of “net neutrality”. This is not a criticism of the FCC, per se: it is a criticism of every government bureaucracy.

I am utterly flabbergasted… and delighted.

Well done, Mr. Genachowski!

As a computer guy and a gun owner, I thought this idea was brilliant: packing your laptop with a pistol in order to keep your laptop safe while traveling via airplane.

Of course, it is vital to know all of the rules and laws when one is transporting a firearm, on an airplane or anywhere else. So do your homework first.

Then again, gun ownership in the USA is rather like an intelligence test: if you own one (or more), and stay out of jail, you pass.

The Free Software Foundation has a new educational campaign, and in a shift from previous efforts, it is more openly negative about the costs and morality (or lack thereof) of closed-source software. This is the Windows 7 Sins campaign, and it looks like the mainstream media might actually be picking up on it (if only to heckle).

Personally, I think this is an interesting effort, and I hope that it achieves positive results. I define “positive results” as an increase in the number of people who convert to Linux (what the FSF stubbornly persists in calling “GNU/Linux”), and a decrease in the number of people who continue to blindly hand Microsoft their money.

According to the site TorrentFreak:

The ISP that supplied much of The Pirate Bay’s bandwidth before cutting them off yesterday, is reporting that it has been sabotaged. Calling in experts and the police, Black Internet says the attack on them is intentional and has caused substantial damage.

This makes me sad. It certainly does not reflect well on those who would see our current cartel-controlled copyright system reformed. Why attack Black Internet? They’re a victim of these thugs just as much as The Pirate Bay.

According to a new report on ZDNet, the SCO group won an appeal in its copyright case. In case you are wondering if this will halt or reverse the inexorable death spiral of SCO, or if it has any repercussions for the Unix/Linux world… it won’t, and doesn’t. All this means is that SCO owes money to Novell, and that SCO should have had a trial before they lost in Utah, rather than a summary judgment.

Bottom line: SCO will waste more of its investors money beating this dead horse. For Novell, it means a few more pennies, and for the rest of the Linux world, it’s a footnote in the history books.

An amusing anecdote from the department head of the Computer Science department of Purdue University, one of the world’s experts on network security:

Bottom line: providing Facebook any access to email addresses at all is like Roach Motel — they go in, but there is no way to get them out. And Facebook’s customer service and interfaces leave a whole lot to be desired. Coupled with other complaints people have had about viruses, spamming, questionable uses of personal images and data, changes to the privacy policy, and the lack of any useful customer service, and I really have to wonder if the organization is run by people with any clue at all.

I certainly won’t be inviting anyone else to join Facebook, and I am now recommending that no one else does, either.

(from More customer disservice—This time, Facebook, CERIAS)

Makes me glad that I do not have a Facebook account.

If you would like aliases to work when you use sudo (for example, so that when you type sudo ls, your directory listings are in color, assuming you set up an alias for ls="ls --color=auto"), add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc:

# Enable aliases when using sudo.
alias sudo='sudo ' # Note the trailing space.

Credit for this goes to Curtis Free. Thanks, Curtis.

I discovered why the tabs in Firefox suddenly started moving themselves to new windows — and I found an addon to disable this annoying new feature.