see title

I think I should patent the binary number system. And written language, and the distinctive use of sounds to encode meaning. And the drinking of water. Sex! The right to die. The right to live. The names El Reg, BOFH....

Pay me now!

OK.

What I'd really like to see is a viable patent holder, who's been massively violated by M$ in a core technology, win a ``cease and desist'' order. Kind of like M$ NT's blatent ripoff of BSD's ipv4 stack.

``Good bye M$. And go f#$ck! yourself on the way down.''

It could happen. It should have happened. It likely will happen.

FUD back at you, M$, creeps.

"What I'd really like to see is a viable patent holder, who's been massively violated by M$ in a core technology, win a ``cease and desist'' order. Kind of like M$ NT's blatent ripoff of BSD's ipv4 stack."

Be careful what you wish for, Tampa Dave, you just might get it. :-)

For with Heavy MetAIdata, you can Rock the Establishment to ITs Cores.

IT's a TIA/New World Order thing, Registered Open Source in AI Prior Art Submissions to the World Wide Web Medium.

However, whether it happens catastrophically, depends entirely upon how well and how quickly the present State of Snoop/Phish technology in the Total Information Awareness via the Gathering of Intelligence genre recognises the Play that will replace IT.

After all, sending them [the Establishment] an e-mail advising them of the inevitability of what would be a Paradigm Shift, because of the Nature of ITs mature AIResearch and dDevelopment to which they have not been privy [notwithstanding the difficulty in deciding whom one would consider to be bankrolling the Establishment and therefore probably the most likely beneficiary for such new information, for of course, there are so many fingers in that cottage pie] would never be effective, would it......... for the very fact that it was done would indicate that they were way behind in the Game and therefore merely Followers rather than ITs Leaders. Such a Change is best fed to them from within and by their own hand, so that they can Best deal with ITs Beta.

An earlier submission to El Reg, shared with us that Communication is an Art .... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/30/amd_sse5/comments/ .... and IT is an Art at many levels with ITs Beauty, as in all works of Art, in the Eye of the Beholder. And as Bold and Strident as it may be at times, the Secret Art in Communication for Future's Needs and Feeds is that it be Subtle and Semantic for Seamless Virtualisation of Command and Control Structures.

You may like to consider here, that such Prior Art is Patently Registered on the Register.... Open Source, Copy Left. All that IT requires of you, is Imagination and IT's True........ which is a journey in Magical Mystery Turing which we have been down before, with Others who did things their Way and Differently with an Original Take on an Olde Magic Spell.

And where and with whom Better to BetaTest the Notation/IDea/Technology/Methodology than an IT Host into Registering Innovative IT.

There would be Method in such as some would say was AIMadness, which would render any and all such accusations as invalid and disproved. And sadly, for reasons best known to themselves, there will always be those who will risk their own sanity to disprove it, trying to prove ITs Negative........ although the reality would be that they would have no idea as to their reasoning other than a fear of change....... which would be their madness, as surely nothing in Life ever remains the same if we are to Grow.

Since MS successfully claimed prior art to influence the final decision, one might consider it a victory for common sense.

Now anytime MS, RIAA, BSAA or any other multinational ogre tries one on, prior art can be cited (as long as it really exists, of course) as a valid defence.

And one's lawyer could cite Micosoft vs Eolas as a part of the case history.

Hoist with one's own petard, n'est pas?

Perhaps you need to refresh your memory of the permissive terms of the BSD license? MS just did what anyone else was both allowed and encouraged to do with the BSD source code.

(Also, a quick bit of googling shows they only used it for the NT3.5 stack, then wrote their own implementation for NT4. They still use some of the BSD utilities - finger, ftp, nslookup, rcp, rsh - but the stack is their own)

There's plenty to knock MS for, but this one's a red herring.

that we can soon go back to embedding flash into HTML like in the bad ol' days pre-2005?

Wow. If our resident martian is angry about Microsoft using the BSD IP4 stack, I don't want to be around when they realise that the Mach kernel OS X uses is based on BSD software.....

And Vista has a rewritten network stack not based on the old BSD stack.

Like or hate Microsoft, this patent is simply ridiculous and should never have been granted.

As I understand it, the Eolas people behaved in a (comparatively) reasonable way here - because they agreed not to sue open-source developers.

I still don't like patents, but in this specific case, we could use the old "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" argument.