Robert Pogson

“The ‘more guns, less crime’ argument is utter nonsense. Britain, after Dunblane, introduced some of the toughest gun laws in Europe, and we average just 35 gun murders a year.

Japan, which has the toughest gun control in the world, had just TWO in 2006 and averages fewer than 20 a year. In Australia, they’ve not had a mass shooting since stringent new laws were brought in after 35 people were murdered in the country’s worst-ever mass shooting in Tasmania in 1996. Fewer guns equals less gun murder. This is not a ‘pinko liberal’ hypothesis. It’s a simple fact.”
see Piers Morgan: Deport me? If America won't change its crazy gun laws I may deport myself | Mail Online.

Piers Morgan seems not to understand the difference between a fact and an irrelevant fact. Does it matter that a murder is committed with a firearm or some other means? Ask the victims.

UN Statistics on Intentional Homicide

So, Piers Morgan is thinking of moving from USA to UK to reduce his chances of being murdered by a factor of 4. Does that small difference have anything to do with 100-round magazines or semi-auto rifles available at Wal-mart? Nope. “about 30-60 people are struck by lightning each year in Britain of whom, on average, three may be killed. This compares with about 75 deaths in the much larger USA” Population of UK is ~63million and population of USA is ~314million so he is 5 times more likely to be killed by lightning in USA than UK but he does not want to leave USA because of lightning. Does that make any sense? The USA has “tornado alleys” and hurricanes, a much more dangerous situation than UK. It’s the people who expose themselves to lightning. Laws have nothing to do with murder-rates. It’s people who commit such crimes, not laws. It’s people who play golf in lightning storms, not laws.

If Piers Morgan’s logic held, the murder rate in USA would be thousands of times larger than in UK but it is not. Does it matter that the murder rate by firearms is hundreds of times larger if the murder rate is only a few times larger? Nope. Ask the victims. The murder rate in UK may fluctuate a few times from one year to the next. The rate is of little significance. Neither is the rate in USA. Much of that is about the “drug wars”, not firearms nor laws. If drugs were legalized, drug dealers would have no reason to kill anyone. “Mass shootings” are almost irrelevant to the statistics of murders being perhaps 1%.

Conversely, the fact that the murder rate in USA is so low even with the availability of numerous and powerful firearms is a testament to the good sense of USAians. BTW, you cannot casually walk into Wal-mart and buy an armful of AR-15s. Wal-mart does not sell AR-15s. Bushmaster sells an imitation of an AR-15, a firearm exclusive to Colt, and you need a background check and a waiting period at Wal-mart …

So, Piers Morgan claims to love USA all the while being willing to lie to USAians and mislead them about the reality of firearms.

A company as productive of real inventions as IBM should be ashamed to support software-patents but that’s what they do in a recent amicus brief:
“That the vast majority of computer-implemented inventions are patent eligible is beyond debate. Computer-implemented inventions are the lifeblood of the innovations that created the Information Age and are on par with the most ingenious inventive acts that mankind has ever known.
…
if that invention’s functionality requires computer implementation, this would counsel in favor of patent eligibility”
see Groklaw – CLS Bank v. Alice – Some Amicus Briefs ~pj.

They proceed from begging the question to blatant error in logic. I hope this is just the vomit of one of their lawyers and not the philosophy of the corporation… otherwise, IBM is doomed to sue and be sued forever.

Certainly software is an important part of most modern technology but it is not an invention any more than a poem is an invention. Any sequence of characters that fits the syntax of a programming language is software but it is not patentable. It is a copyright-protected work. Just as one cannot patent a novel. One cannot or should not be able to patent software. That is an error which has cost the world’s economy many $billions for no increase in productivity whatsoever. One can neither patent the abstract ideas of a novel nor the particular text used to express those ideas.

No invention can require implementation in software. Anything that can be done in software could be done with human thought or pencil and paper given enough time. It is not patentable to claim use of computers to make processes faster because that is obvious to say the least. Neither is an “invention” using an IBM mainframe patentable because it uses a mainframe instead of a pocket calculator. That’s just silly. There’s no innovation in time. It’s just an abstract quantity. Nature does not worry about time. A billion years is the same as a nanosecond to Nature. A muscular axeman is not an innovation over a frail axeman, just an obvious choice to increase production.

It is doubtful that the present en banc hearing will accomplish much except to take the issue one step closer to serious examination by SCOTUS. I await the happy day when SCOTUS announces the emperor of software patents has no clothes, something children have known for years because children are not confused by layers of abstraction as are some lawyers considering technology. Adding layers of abstraction does not make a new process patentable. It’s still an abstract idea, explicitly excluded from patentability. Computers and software do not make new machines. That’s an old idea. We’ve been there and done that for decades.

The Internet Retailers’ amicus brief says it all:
“The mere presence in a claim-whether directed to a method, system, or storage medium-of a “computer” or “the Internet” does nothing to concretize an abstract idea. The idea of displaying photographs of products for sale adjacent to text describing those products (a/k/a a catalog) is not made less abstract by reference to implementation “on a computer” any more than it would be rendered less abstract by reference to it being implemented “on paper.” Computer implementation must add something more, and more specific, before it can be considered relevant to resolving the patent-eligibility question. In this regard, computer-implementation is neither a different nor special mode of implementation entided to greater judicial deference than others….”

There is a petition to USA/Whitehouse to promote Free Software. “SIGNATURES NEEDED BY JANUARY 16, 2013 TO REACH GOAL OF 25,000 23,437“

see promote the use of free software in our schools. Libre Office, Gimp, GNU Cash and other GPL software which is cost free | We the People: Your Voice in Our Government.

This is good for education but it should include all levels/departments of government.

“the ultra-low-voltage SoC technology is able to utilize innovations facilitating power generation via ambient energy sources, Wu pointed out. For example, thermo-electric generator SoCs can convert heat emitted from human bodies into electricity

via ITRI debuts ultra-low-voltage IC technology.

The demonstration was at 65nm. If this can be done at 14nm, the future is now. CPUs will be able to run on trivial amounts of energy available from photo-voltaic, shaking or thermo-electricity. This will allow more throughput on mobile devices or much less use of battery-power. Pick whatever combination you want. Clients will become thinner and servers much more efficient.

“There were 1.104 billion subscribers to mobile communication services in China as of the end of November 2012″

see China market: November mobile phone users grow to 1.104 billion, says MIIT.

That’s 80% of the population, folks. No longer is China a follower in IT. They are a trend-setter. The desktop/notebook/server universes are changing too. China is the single largest potential market for all of these and the whole world is seeking to supply the need for IT in China. With so many having experienced the joy of FLOSS on mobile devices, there is a huge potential for FLOSS on desktops and notebooks to grow in China. That’s where the new OEMs will go when the smartphone and tablet markets flatten out. Expect 2013 to be the year of the GNU/Linux desktop in China.

I recommend Debian GNU/Linux but Red Flag and Linpus already have a good hold in China. It’s all good.