You are over-optimistic -- arguably, the Soviet Union was 20 years behind SpaceX when they tried to launch shuttle 'Buran' in 1984-85. The program was not successful and was abandoned. Russia's current space program is 20 years behind that of the Soviet Union.

That is because our laws these days are written mostly by failed patent lawyers.

He did not want to use it against NATO troops, what is even stupider, he wanted to use it against Ukrainian troops. Considering how close Luhansk and Donetsk to Russian territories including quite a big city of Rostov, if there were fallout, good chance it would be also over Russia.

As for defending the Ukraine in return of becoming non-nuclear state, it was not NATO, it was US, GB and Russia in Budapest Memorandum of 1994. After taking over the Crimea peninsula, Russian Premier Medvedev effectively reneged of their responsibilities, stating that the memorandum meant to protect the Ukraine against the third countries and not the guarantors themselves.

What are you talking about? It is PI with a period.

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the-internet-and-pornography-prime-minister

Do not tell me this is his official title

If you look where we are, it is about on the same level as if there was no protection at all.

What it means, is that the current system exists solely for the benefits of the patent lawyers. Moreover, if the protection is strengthened it will reduce the innovation further and thus diminish lawyers' area of application. If the protection is relaxed the innovation will boost but it also will leave some money on the table to be converted into actual innovator's revenue.

So the level of protection is stabilized at the level where all the innovation benefits are fully converted into patent lawyer's benefits thus maximizing their revenue from bang for buck perspective without being actually beneficial to a patent holder.

But that conclusion should be pretty obvious, is not it?

This is not a question of preventing patent trolls from patenting the same thing.

Firstly, because AMQP has hundreds or thousands of areas that could be similarly patented: failover, federation, many types of exchange, remote administration, etc. It only takes one patent to hold the whole standard to ransom. Red Hat would have to patent every single technical aspect of the standard, which would be impossible in practical terms.

Secondly, because there are much cheaper ways of stopping patent trolls from patenting obvious things: publish them, register them as prior art at the USPTO.

It's naive to think that the only way patents are used is to 'go after' projects. 99% of the time, patents of this sort are used in discrete discussions with potential clients. "You know, we hold a patent on that... (hint hint)". This is enough to scare the customer into at least not using a rival product, open source or not. Indeed, patents that make it to court tend to die rather faster than patents used under the table.

The irony of this patent is that technically, it's not that interesting. Dynamic message routing on XML is not difficult, but not efficient. It's much faster to pre-calculate routing keys and indices, as the existing AMQP exchanges do.

So I think Red Hat are simply playing the game of collecting software patents like points.

However, I really expected better from Red Hat.

All patenting around open standards is a concern, both to developers of the standards, and users. A patent holder's intentions may, and often do, change over the course of the 20 years the patent may exist.

In this case, Red Hat seem to be seeking "ownership" of areas around the standard. They don't need to sue anyone to establish this, that is a straw man. The simple fact of owning patents is enough to scare potential customers away from competitors.

I've personally worked with Red Hat in fighting software patents in Europe but would not consider this story to be a troll. Any FOSS firm that is willing to spend money on patents, but not the fight against software patents (and I can tell you that to the best of my knowledge RHAT are not funding the main European groups against software patents), is working the wrong side.

So this story seems relevant if only to highlight how behaviour changes when money is involved.

When Red Hat seek software patents around an open standard, that's news.

This makes me really, really furious. Patents on open standards are evil, just a way of taxing those who make products on those open standards. I happen to know the background to AMQP really well. Most of what Red Hat has contributed is utter crap (read the 0-10 spec to get an idea of how poor!) The real work is done by others. Yet Red Hat want to claim patents on extensions of AMQP that should be standardised. Why? So they can collar clients and say, "we own the patents, buy our licenses or we'll sue you." Just like any common or garden patent troll.

I'm boycotting Red Hat as long as they pull stunts like this, and advising my clients and partners to do the same. Firms that deliberately create patent thickets around open standards do not deserve to get support from the FOSS community.

It's not Red Hat's Novell moment, it's their Unisys moment. Remember GIF? Remember Unisys's attempts afterwards to build a FOSS business?

Robocop would be impervious to a cutlass, a katana, AND feces.

But I bet he's not impervious to a kernel hack! They are software pirates after all.

Therefore, if/when the base potential of the space-time continuum drops, all of a sudden we have some energy surplus which could be converted to matter. So with each cycle we are descending deeper and deeper into potential (not gravitational) well. However, since this well is bottomless we can apply/rinse/repeat the whole procedure indefinitely.