On Sunday 29 May 2005 12:35, Trevor Warren wrote:

--- Kenneth Gonsalves lawgon@thenilgiris.com wrote:

...

keep it on list - i for one am enjoying it

[snip]

No offence meant. But just cause we do not see eye to eye on an issue however frivilous it may be we choose to take it offline.

In days when as a group we learnt.....we did toy around with a lot more frivlous issues and that too with no [ot] tags.

Come on boys...rock and troll....oopsy..roll.

Puneet and I agreed to disagree with two mails (offlist) of I-said-u -said and closed the thread.

And actually GNU/Linux is becoming a bit too reliable (boring?). All my systems continue to roll without touching them. Hardly any tech issues. However the future is fraught with extreme danger due to proprietary companies - particularly M$ - lobbying for laws assigning themselves rights which usurp rights of the commons or fences off large areas of technology simply because somebody else got to filing patents first. Even worse fencing of technology which could be used for illegal acts in spite of the fact that such users are a microscopic subset of legit users, and the affected parties are big companies on a death spiral. They are equating knowledge with limited + non replicable resource - property. In reality the value of knowledge lies in it's non expendability and replicability. The original patent laws were created to benefit individuals by providing them a time limited period of monopoly, so that society and the creator could benefit from the IMPLEMENTATION of knowledge AND that knowledge become public. Patent law required that the patent be described in detail and with specificity. Over a period of time the whole system was turned on it's head so that companies became it's primary beneficiary and the patent paper itself was anything but detailed and specific. This bad situation was further twisted to patent business processes, software and algorithms (knowledge) thus trying to interfere with ones thought process. You can't think an alternate algo producing the same result. If you think this is idiotic be assured it IS NOT there are case against two doctors for discussing Hormone Replacement Therapy, which is patented by some company (HRT that is ). The excuse made by companies is that it costs a lot of money to create knowledge - which is directly contradicted by the evidence in the case of software. In the case of other knowledge like pharmaceuticals it could be shown that the major cost of identifying promising directions of research are borne by public bodies like universities. It's only the commercialization which is expensive, again much of that expense is marketing, distribution and legal costs - nothing to do with knowledge creation. The evidence is low cost drug mfgs in baruch / ankleshwar area often as low as 1/20th the cost of a branded equiv. The fight by the commons relies in the main on taking the moral high ground. Compromise this by condoning or justifying illegal behaviour and you will be delivering yourself a k.o. . In essence it's a slow slide to the Feudal age where a tyrant king and his overlords simply annexed large parts of the commons and made it private property and you paid a tithe to farm, or became a serf. Their power derived from wealth largely obtained by plundering peaceful wealthy communities. Sounds familiar?.

rgds jtd