It won’t come as news to many of you that I’m no fan of Microsoft — their long his­tory of sub-​​standard soft­ware com­bined with eco­nomic dom­in­a­tion and anti­com­pet­it­ive beha­viour just doesn’t do it for me — but even I can’t bring myself to see this pat­ent rul­ing as a good thing. Funny per­haps, and cer­tainly karm­icly appeal­ing, but ulti­mately it does no-​​one but i4i any good whatsoever.

Soft­ware pat­ents do noth­ing but limit com­pan­ies’ abil­ity to innov­ate and develop qual­ity soft­ware, and this an ideal example of that. Microsoft Word is one of the few genu­inely good products MS has ever pro­duced, and their move to an XML file format in office 2007 was both a huge improve­ment in file size and pro­cessing speed, and an import­ant step towards open-​​formats and inter­op­er­ab­il­ity from a com­pany that had his­tor­ic­ally seen those things as an ana­thema. Obvi­ously, it’s not per­fect, and there were already open XML formats they could have adop­ted rather than rolling their own, but it’s a step in the right dir­ec­tion and it bene­fits every user of MS Word. We should not be dis­cour­aging Microsoft from mak­ing these kinds of change, yet that’s exactly what the recent East-​​Texas court rul­ing ban­ning the sale of Word due to pat­ent infringe­ment does — and in the strongest pos­sible way.

But it’s worse than that; not only does this dis­cour­age fur­ther good beha­viour on the part of MS, but it dir­ectly impacts thou­sands of com­pan­ies all over the world; Word is crit­ical to the func­tion­ing of a huge num­ber of busi­nesses, and not being able to buy new licenses, even for a short while, could be a ser­i­ous prob­lem for some of them. If they’re left with less licenses than they have employ­ees, then some of those employ­ees might not be able to work, or have to do so on illegal soft­ware. In this fin­an­cial cli­mate, no com­pany wants to have to make that choice. It’s true that there are altern­at­ives (even free ones,) but any­one who thinks that’s a solu­tion has never had much con­tact with cor­por­ate IT departments.

The whole situ­ation seems like utter non­sense to me. Microsoft fol­lowed a totally obvi­ous course of action, which benefited pretty much every­one, when it switched its file formats to XML, and yet because some other com­pany had the idea first, they’re fined $277,000,000.00 in “damages” — someone will have to explain to me how Microsoft improv­ing their office suite cost i4i $240 mil­lion — and the rest of us are pre­ven­ted from buy­ing the soft­ware we want to use.

In case any­one needed fur­ther proof that soft­ware pat­ents (and pat­ents in gen­eral) do more to harm to innov­a­tion and com­pet­i­tion than they do to pro­tect invent­ors, I think this is a prime example.

I’ve just fin­ished read­ing about the death of Scott Norberg and, to be hon­est, I’m lost for words. I feel a strangely potent mix of numb­ness and out­rage, but I have no way to express it.

One thing I can say is that there is no way this should have been an insur­ance pay­out; people should be doing time for murder.

Appar­ently, in Sweden, people are gran­ted the human right to be invited to any birth­day party they want. Bur­eau­cracy ftw!

Jok­ing asside, this is a symp­tom of some­thing we’re see­ing more and more; this per­vas­ive idea that people have the right not to be offen­ded. Yes, it’s pretty harsh not to be invited to a party that every­one else is going to, but that doesn’t mean you have the right to go. You have the right to call the kid a jerk for not invit­ing you, and you have the right to recip­roc­ally not invite him to your party, but that’s it. It’s his party and it’s his right to decide who’s invited. It’s a pretty stu­pid, trivial example, but it’s just a symp­tom of the same sort of think­ing that leads people to think they have a right not to have their beliefs chal­lenged or their stu­pid­ity ridiculed. It’s a dan­ger­ous trend, because often one person’s “right” not to be offen­ded is indir­ect oppos­i­tion to someone else’s actual rights. In this case it’s the right of a child to not invite people he doesn’t like into his house, which is import­ant enough, but in more extereme case, it might be someone’s free­dom of speech or of expres­sion that’s being sup­pressed to keep people from being put out, and I don’t care how you dress it; free­dom of speech is more import­ant than anyone’s sensibilities.

So, it went through the Com­mons, after some wheeler-​​dealing, and now has to get through the Lords.

At the risk of sound­ing like someone writ­ing to The Times, I am appalled and dis­gus­ted that it’s got this far. There is no jus­ti­fic­a­tion for hold­ing mem­bers of the pub­lic for so long. A week sounds about right to me, any more than that is simply wrong. Whatever happened to “inno­cent until proven guilty”?

Right now, I’m ashamed that I ever voted Labour, and I never will do again.

Excel­lent news! The Com­mons has voted in sup­port of research on hybrid embryos. Need­less to say, the unin­formed are up in arms about the “army of Frankesteins” about to be unleashed, but I think every­one who under­stands the issues knows this is the right outcome.

So, the votes on the Human Fer­til­isa­tion and Embry­ology Bill are tak­ing place over the next couple of days, with the big one — hybrid embryos — hap­pen­ing today.

The BBC has sum­mar­ised the key points on both sides of the debate:

What are the argu­ments in favour of this process?

Sci­ent­ists who advoc­ate the work say the cells would allow them to study how genetic defects, which cause dis­eases such as Parkinson’s, develop.

They also say that stem cells’ abil­ity to develop into dif­fer­ent tis­sues mean it could be pos­sible to use cells formed in this pro­cess to cure diseases.

Using animal eggs would enable sci­ent­ists to over­come the prob­lem that human eggs are in short supply.

What are the argu­ments against?

Oppon­ents say it is tam­per­ing with nature, and is unethical.

On the one hand we have a set of reasoned argu­ments detail­ing spe­cific pre­dicted health bene­fits for thou­sands of people, and on the other we have “eewwww!”.

I really wish people would stop con­flat­ing their own squeam­ish­ness with their eth­ical pos­i­tion; it clouds import­ant issues, like this, where the eth­ical pos­i­tion is surely the one that saves lives.

Oh look, Church lead­ers are up in arms about some new piece of legis­la­tion. Are we really sur­prised? After so many thou­sands of years of them pro­claim­ing that any­thing which makes them, per­son­ally, feel uncom­fort­able is evil, how can we be any­thing but bored when they keep at it in the present time? Last year it was equal rights for homo­sexu­als, this year it’s advanced research into human genet­ics. Before long it’ll be arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, neur­os­cience, or some other thing which chal­lenges, and advances, our view of ourselves.

Oh, and of course the cries are going to be led by the Cath­olic Church this time; they’re the ones with a huge theo­lo­gical invest­ment in the sub­ject. We’re talk­ing about a cult whose insane super­sti­tions about human genetic mater­ial lead them to declare male mas­turb­a­tion a “sin against God”, and to deduce that tens of mil­lions of people in the third world dying of AIDS and hun­dreds of mil­lions more liv­ing in miser­able, starving poverty due to over­pop­u­la­tion is prob­ably OK com­pared to the much greater sin of let­ting them use con­doms. These are people whose core val­ues are utterly incom­pat­ible with the human rights and human dig­nity they claim to be the guard­i­ans of, and our response to their claims of being some sort of author­ity on eth­ics (espe­cially bioeth­ics) should be to laugh dis­dain­fully and get on with try­ing to make the world a bet­ter place.

This speaks for itself really. How can any­one who claims to stand for free­dom, demo­cracy and human rights, veto a demo­crat­ic­ally passed law that would have pre­ven­ted inno­cent people from being tor­tured? I think we all know the answer.

The guy makes my skin crawl.

I gather this isn’t exactly news, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it.

The Lords have just approved the change, by a sig­ni­fic­ant major­ity. I couldn’t be hap­pier; blas­phemy is a ridicu­lous, archaic offence that has no place being enshrined in the law of a civ­il­ised nation. In fact I’ll call it the first good news about the Brit­ish legal sys­tem I’ve heard in a long time.

Turns out that the Sadui author­it­ies aren’t above per­se­cut­ing young men for behav­ing like young men any more than they are above oppress­ing women for being women.

Of course, there is still a dif­fer­ence; I doubt these men are going to be pub­licly beaten for their actions.

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