All that would be needed to complete the coup would be for India to announce Elop had been secretly lined up to be India's Minister for Communication at some exhorbitant salary a year ago, and the long game of establishing TNC (Tata Nokia Communications) has finally fallen into place.

Phillip.

"No sane system" is your opinion and that's fine. "Only in the US" is a mistatement of fact. That's not true.

It's not just my opinion, but that of most of the world. And even then that of many within the USA. The only exceptions I think are Japan and South Korea (well that's what Wikipedia tells me).

The law is that new machines can be patented and it doesn't matter if the multiplication operation is done by a lever, a gear, on an X86 instruction.

There is a difference. A lever says apply force at this vector and this physical object will produce X result. An X86 instruction, which is just an abstraction of machine code, simply toggles 0 and 1s and is completely generic.

Don't think about it as "changing the law", think about it as harmonising it with the rest of the world. As for the consequences (or traps), you can see that Europe has actually benefited rather than suffered since the inception of software so you don't need to worry that much.

Phillip.

"Most games are 95% art, 5% math, and 100% software."

You know it should add up to 100%? The game is generally a user taking the part of a character in a story. The storyline cannot be protected, but the diaglogue can be copyrighted. The art is also copyrighted so nobody else can copy the characters you created. The math cannot be protected, but your actual bytecode implementation of that math can be copyrighted.

No patents are necessary for software, and haven't been since software was invented.

"Gravity isn't patentable. An elevator is."
"Momentum isn't patentable. A brake system is."

As long you have a novel mechanical effect that nobody has ever thought of. However, the important bit is the "including mathematics"

"Division isn't patentable. eBay's feedback system is."

No sane system would allow such a patent. Only in the US.

"Light reflection isn't patentable. The way Blender simulates reflection is, if it's novel."

Again it breaks down into two parts: the mathematical algorithms used and the software written to implement those algorithms. Neither should be patentable. The latter is copyrighted and protected under the GPL.

Phillip.

Why isn't this comment already rated -5 Troll? Pathetic even for a troll, 1 second Google search shows it is BSD licensed.

Phillip.

So true. Whilst companies put in draconian DRM there will always be superior pirate versions out there, and the risk to the companies is that otherwise legitimate users then 'forget' to then buy a copy to put straight into the bottom of their cupboard. Remember those games where you had to have the original CD in to play it? A real pain. Or the one that tied a game to a specific CPU, meaning if you put in a faster processor you had to buy a new copy of the game? Or the one where you needed to be connected to the Internet to play offline games, meaning you can't play on your laptop on those long boring travels. 9/10 the pirate version is better.

This is where Steam got it right. It's easier to buy the game officially than it is to pirate it. Click click, play. If I change computer then one click on my games library and it's installed again. It took a while to earn people's trust but now they have it I hope they continue.

Phillip.

Exactly. 14 years, as envisaged by everybody that put in place the framework for copyright, is perfect. I don't think Origin would have a problem having exclusivity on Battlefield 4 for the next 14 years. Valve might still be selling the original Counterstrike 1.6 in a box set but it hardly sustains their company any more.

The perversion of copyright law is quite tragic, and definitely detrimental to our society.

Phillip.

Unity is getting slow. I get crash errors ever 10 mins, no idea what is crashing but it doesn't affect my usage apart from having to keep closing those error boxes. I would LOVE to get involved and try the latest Ubuntu but I really don't want to install spyware on my machine.

Remember all those Ubuntu apologists before? "Why worry about it, it's as simple as apt-get remove somewierdname". Next version is suddenly more integrated and you can no longer simply apt-get remove the package. Gullible fools.

However KDE looks awful. It is so unpolished. And there are loads of UI bugs that make it unpleasant to use. The final straw for me was double-clicking on a movie residing on my NAS, and KDE deciding to spend 5 mins copying the whole thing to /tmp before attempting to play it.

So far XFCE is shaping up to be the next popular desktop. I've moved several people to it and they love it. It feels a little basic for me but then what is the alternative?

The best things that could happen:
a) Canonical back-tracks and decides not to screw over its user base
b) KDE has a massive sprint to fix UI, and forgets trying to aim for QT 8.0 which works on smart watches
c) developers shift from Unity to XFCE and it starts to take over
d) a new contender emerges

So far (d) looks the more likely, despite so much time and effort already sunk into and currently wasted in (a) and (b).

Phillip.

Er we were not fine. I'm not sure who you know that went through the post WW2 years in Britain but according to my grandparents it was pretty austere. A large chunk of debt was to the USA / Canada, and we only finally paid your WW2 loan off in 2006. If you don't mind your future generations being under the yoke of debt until 2075 or so then go ahead...

Phillip.

People staying at luxury hotels often aren't paying. If you are on a company card you don't care about phone/internet prices, and you don't bother looking at the prices on the restaurant menu. On business trips people can run up $10,000 a month on a mobile phone bill and not blink because it's the "company that pays". A company like Apple has to launder all that tax it's avoiding, so why not burn off some in 'expenses' for top executives? Luxury hotels, yacht and jet charters, etc are great black holes to throw money at whilst having an awesome time.

Phillip.

I totally agree. With the Unity spyware I will be moving away from Ubuntu, so I was trying different distros. I tried not long ago the latest KDE and the word "clunky" is so apt. It looks unpolished. There were lots of annoying quirks and bugs (I didn't make a list). It's not very nice to use. I really don't understand it. I suffered through the KDE 4.0 mess, and it rapidly improved from there into something approaching nice with 4.2... then just stagnated on the usability front. Such a waste considering the effort that has gone into the back-end.

I am moving friends and family away from Microsoft Windows and Ubuntu onto Xubuntu at the moment. Most of them are on laptops and they are impressed with the increase in speed. It does feel a little basic, but a new convert told me yesterday "it doesn't feel like I am booting a laptop, it seems like I am turning on my telly with a remote control. It loads so fast!".

I would like one of 3 things to happen:

a) KDE have a massive push on the usability front
b) Unity make the spyware opt-in rather than opt-out (though it's probably too late for many people)
c) momentum grows behind xfce4

Or maybe somebody will create a new desktop based on the QT libraries?

Phillip.

British Leyland is no longer costing the government a fortune. British Airways has gone from a loss-making airline to one that provides considerable employment. BP is doing well, as is Rolls-Royce. BT has done ok, though giving exclusive area franchises for cable providers hampered competition and this lack of competitiveness has left them still too powerful.

Phillip.

Does no damage what so ever. Making a joke is hardly being an abusive asshole. I don't think anybody talented would want to work with a sensitive flower such as yourself, but that's besides the point. It was about a 3rd party making an attack on the Linux kernel, which he refuted. If the guy isn't "ignorant" then he can prove it. Otherwise take it on the chin and admit you might be wrong. It's not like he was being rude to his colleagues.

Phillip.

I'm not an idealogue, I just buy a lot of phones. Yes I buy Android on lower spec'd hardware like that, either for holiday where I don't want a $900 phone stolen or for presents. It's slow but incredibly cheap, very good value. I gave my old S2 to my girlfriend and the battery didn't last a day. I bought a cheap battery off eBay, put a custom rom on, and now it lasts for 3 days no problem. Android isn't a flash media centre on those specs, like my Note 2, but it's perfectly usable.

Not only does Microsoft produce poor software, slow, bloated and locked down, but the Microsoft tax directly affects the prices of the device. You are trying to argue why wouldn't you buy a WinPhone, but the argument is more why would you?

Phillip.
PS yes I accidentally wrote 0.5MB instead of 0.5GB. Apologies.

Microsoft Windows 8 has mimimum requirements of 4GB of flash, 1GB of RAM, and a dual-core processor. The latest Android requires 340MB of RAM and 0.5MB of flash. Windows Phone is bloated, buggy, and an awful UI that cannot be changed (unlike Android where you can put any launcher, or indeed custom rom, instead).

People are not buying Microsoft Windows phones. The reason is that both the hardware and the software is inferior.

Phillip.

The Nokia 41Mpx with Symbian costs $480, with Windows 8 it costs $910.

You are paying the usual $200 per handset for your Windows 8 license. Where does the extra $230 go?

Phillip.