Tim Hardy

You can help bring about greater public awareness of the dangers of software patents by voting on the following two sites:

[Pasted from a ffii.org newsletter]

Today we would like to bring two more online polls to your awareness:

- Corporate Europe Observatory, an organization that keeps an eye on
questionable lobbying tactics, has nominated the so-called Campaign for
Creativity, a Microsoft/SAP pro-patent lobbying entity, for the “Worst EU
Lobbying Award”: http://www.corporateeurope.org/worstlobby/?showcontender=1
“Nominated as a fake NGO brilliantly disguising corporate demands as
grassroots concerns”

Please vote “for” the so-called Campaign for Creativity:
http://www.corporateeurope.org/worstlobby/?vote=1 If they “win”, i.e. if that
campaign is chosen as the worst lobbying initiative in the EU in 2005, then
there will be some additional attention to the methods employed by the
pro-patent lobby.

- IT website Silicon.com, which belongs to the CNET network of IT websites
(ZDNet, News.com, Builder.com etc.), recently named Florian Mueller, the
founder of NoSoftwarePatents.com, among the 50 “Silicon Agenda Setters”. As
always, Florian himself has pointed out that he owes such nominations to our
entire movement.

There is an online poll in which Silicon lets its readers determine their
own ranking among the top 50 people in the IT industry:
http://www.siliconagendasetters.com/vote.htm

Florian is #43 on the ballot, or the 8th from the bottom of the list.

Visit The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) if you’d like to know more.

Bedazzling Names
Choose variable names with irrelevant emotional connotation. e.g.:
marypoppins = (superman + starship) / god;
This confuses the reader because they have difficulty disassociating the emotional connotations of the words from the logic they’re trying to think about.

How To Write Unmaintainable Code offers amusing advice for programmers looking to guarantee a lifetime of employment maintaining their own inpenetrable code.

Amazon have taken the idea of outsourcing tasks at which a human outperforms a machine (eg image recognition) and building an API to a marketplace that makes these jobs available and retrieves the results. They call this the Mechanical Turk after Wolfgang von Kempelen’s 1769 pseudo-mechanical chess-playing automaton. Coders can call the Mechanical Turk with a query as though it were a normal RPC request.

It’s a fascinating concept with all kinds of political ramifications I don’t want to think about right now. Read more about the technology side of it here.

Seems like Sony have started shipping rootkits with their DRM protected CDs.

If a private individual tried this stunt, they’d get jail time. Somehow I don’t think anything of the sort will happen to the media giant.