Thanks for some sense here. However this is still a poor piece of legislation. It makes it illegal for me to show others how to mod DVD players (which I've done) so they can play and rip DVDs from around the world. DVDs and DVD players which they've bought ...

Rich.

I'm a subscriber to the Economist too, but the reason I think it works is their content is not just warmed-over daily news. It's a collection of well-researched, unique and interesting weekly essays. Murdoch is never going to be able to do the same thing with the Times.

Rich.

"Mr Jones? Sure, I'll just go and get him." [leave the phone under the sofa cushion]

And you're right, they blacklist your number after you do this, so it works out well.

Rich.

This hoping the Supreme Ct will invalidate software patents is clutching at straws anyway. Go and ask your lawmakers to explicitly write a law to exclude software patents.

Rich.

Most of what you think you know about this case is wrong. Forget about UFOs.

Also, what Gary did is trivial, barely even worth the term "hacking" (summary: he used an off-the-shelf product called RemotelyAnywhere to access completely open internet-connected Windows desktops that had the default password set).

If you want to go back to the source legal materials, this set of articles is particularly interesting:

Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

There is a final part coming too.

Patents also used to be beneficial to the public. It used to be that guilds would control trade and monopolize the market effectively with "trade secrets" that would stay in the guild. Patents helped change this because the guild would disclose information while granted a temporary monopoly to use it [...]

The technology for reverse engineering stuff has also moved on greatly since the Middle Ages. It's very hard to keep something a trade secret if you don't physically control it. Which means that as soon as you release a drug, software, or a technical gizmo, someone will start working on reverse engineering it. This is an argument against patents on these things because if they can be easily reverse engineered then there's no public benefit to granting a patent on it.

Rich.

If it really is "the oldest mainframe on earth", well let's say for the sake of argument from the 1960s or 1970s or 1980s, then it's no longer covered by any patents.

Rich.

I think the unfortunately difference here is that patents are legal monopolies. You're meant to use them anti-competitively and against the interests of the free market.

Rich.

Hercules is a nice bit of software, but it's very slow. (Supposedly something like 50x slower than the real thing). There's no way I can see that someone would be using Hercules to run their payroll software, and every reason to think that it's mainly used for interop testing. Which is the reason I occasionally use it, to test Red Hat's software on S/390{x]. Foot, meet gun.

Rich.