M$ patents PgDn & PgUp - (seriously: no joke)

Oh, dear: that's 2 posts today based on the same source. For some reason Linux Journal is now following me on Twitter, and co-incidentally I took a look at a couple of their articles as one appeared on Google Reader, my key news aggregator. Here is my 2nd post today, again copied from a comment to an article, this time one I first read last week and marked in Google Shared. (I seem to live inside Google these days: Reader, Mail, Igoogle, Docs, Groups, Photos, Image, Maps, this Blogger, Earth and more)

If I had a gazillion dollars to protect I would not muck around: I would patent the SpaceBar, or perhaps the letters M,I,C,R,O,S,F & T, oh and the $ key of course.

Anyway, on to:

Pointless Patents

September 8th, 2008 by David Lane

and my comment:
Look at the big picture

If this is true, it just confirms 2 things to me:

1. How corrupt and bereft of any value the entire patenting system is, and has been for many years now. Do you wonder why the likes of China, and most of the rest of us in the rest of the world simply pirate stuff now? But why does the USA support patents? Because you do not produce and export goods anymore, so you need royalties and patents in software and medicine etc to try in vain to prop up your economy and help pay for your immense debt and military forays. The business and economic aspects to the Great American Dream are bankrupt, and now so is America. Your housing crisis, stock market woes, and forced bail-out of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac are no more than symptoms of this. It does not take a genius to see this: its blindingly obvious. In a nutshell the wealth that the USA gained from the 2nd World War has run out.

2. Microsoft's strategic business philosophy of screwing money from everywhere it can, by whatever means it can. This great capitalist dinosaur, whose old leader rightly said that 'Linux is Un-American', is a dying part of a dying system. That system, capitalism, is based on supposedly open competition but in fact has led to the subversion of freedom, commercial viability based on obfuscation (partly stripped away by the internet), greed, and propping up the established and the rich via patents and royalties at the expense of everyone else.

OK, that's more than enough for the day. Time to go and either shovel some more real dirt at the neighbour's or go have a quiet lie-down.

The Death of the Letter?

I read this short interesting article :
The Death of the Letter?
August 26th, 2008 by David Lane

and added a comment as per below, repeated here.

Your homework, after you read this: do a search on 'deforestation' at Google Images. Go on, its not hard, it will not take any time, and you can just take a quick look at the pictures.

"Mailbox = paper = chop trees = end of human race"

The sooner people start looking at the big picture the better.

Its pathetic really. Everyone ohs and ahs and tut tuts about the environment's problems, and then promptly forgets it and starts prattling on about mailboxes and what a problem it is that they are disappearing. Wake up people. Try to connect a few dots: its not hard. Then tell whoever that you do not deal in paper. Don't read them. Don't mail them. Don't pay with them. If you do you are yet one more agent of the planet's destruction. You are part of the problem, not the solution. Outside of the dunny, I see little reason to have ANY paper in your house, or your business, unless its a legal document that requires a signature, and even that is debatable. Of course the old dinosaurs in corporate institutions will choke on their soup at this thought, but then again, we do all know where dinosaurs end up anyway... same place the entire human race will be within 150 years if we keep thinking like this.

You choose: the death of the letter or the death of the human race.