Software patents: the UK Patent Office pleads its case | The Register

The Register has this report from todays meeting between Patent Office officials and members of the public. The future of software patents in the UK and in Europe is still very much in the balance.

Here is a thought provoking piece at wired.com on a radical approach to road safety. The article is about Hans Monderman, a traffic engineer who hates road signs. He has implemented road schemes in Holland that completely do away with road signs and markings. The use of these is for Monderman an admission of failure on the part of the road architect.

In place of signs, Monderman's strategy is to actually increase risk such that the responsibility is clearly on each road user.

The article is well worth a read, but it has set me thinking about the explosion of social regulation in Europe. The concern that we learn from accidents is perfectly commendable, but to encode such learning in regulations may in fact lead to us becoming more vulnerable to human error. The great danger of rules is that they relieve us of thinking. If everything were to remain the same from one day to the next then presumably we could one day attain a perfectly comprehensive set of rules for living. Not that it needs saying, but life isn't like that. This is a problem faced by legislators, which is why in many politcial systems there is a separation between law makers and those that interpret and apply the law.

For any organisation, being an organism of human interrelationships, there is a balance to be found between regulation and personal responsibility. The correct alignment of this balance is crucial to the ability of the organisation both to perform optimally today in the context of what is known and to respond adequately tomorrow in the context of that which is not yet known.

Yesterday I had the privilege of hearing Tony Benn being interviewed at the South Bank Royal Festival Hall about his new book "Dare to be a Daniel". Embedded in Benn's political approach is his awareness of the Old Testament biblical tension between kings and prophets. Benn himself stands quite consciously on the side of the prophets, who are often a thorn in the side of incumbent rulers. Whilst it is frequently necessary for prophets, whether they be journalists, opposition politicians, or members of the public, to expose the failings of "kings", I am not sure that I would want to be ruled by a "prophet". Part of the success and vibrancy of Western liberal democracies is this very tension between rulers and those that hold them to account, a tension that prevents the excessive roll-out of state rule and structure. Too much structure and regulation threatens life even when intended to preserve it. Too little leads to unproductive anarchy. The balance is where we find healthy social organisms.

I am left wondering how Monderman's approach would work in another cultural context. The extent to which complex individual interactions can provide the level of regulation desired by a particular society must depend heavily upon their cultural and ethical values. As an example, if London were to win the Olympic bid for 2012, it would be judged a scandal if the number of workmen losing their lives during building work were to equal the number of Albanian workers that died in Athens. Would such a British response reflect our stricter regulations or would it reflect our culture? In fact the two are closely interconnected. The challenge we are left with is how to nurture those values that facilitate the kind of environment and behaviour patterns that we desire. Laws no doubt influence social values, but only to a limited extent. Law enforcers know very well that ultimately rule is by consent. My own conclusion is that values are primary, laws are secondary. In which case, the success of Monderman's experiments depend upon values already in place.

My question about cultural context is not to point out differences between cultures, but rather to remind that culture is highly determinative of social behaviour. If our goal is to bring into being a certain kind of organisation, or a certain kind of organisational behaviour, whether it be political, social or business, we also need to be intentional about the culture and values that are the bedrock for that way of being. Once we have a clearer awareness of our culture and values we are in a better position to manage the balance between structure and freedom necessary for a healthy and growing social organism.

I'm not sure I could get away with wearing these, but here are the shoes I bought in Camden Town to my daughters specification. Anyway, they might raise a smile if I get stopped at customs on the way back to Basel!

Setting up MySQL following initial installation:
->mysql mysql -this gets us into mysql
mysql> delete from user where host='localhost' and user='';
mysql> quit

then
-> mysqladmin reload
-> mysqladmin -u root password my_password_here

now we reconnect to mysql
-> mysql -h localhost -u root -p
mysql> grant all priveleges on *.* to my_user_name@localhost identified by 'my_user_password';

Now we have a user with full privileges on the database.

To set up the connection between MySQL and OpenOffice I used myODBC, which has a config program called as "ODBCConfig". Run this as root (in KDE use alt-F2 and select options to run as root). Then set a driver and a user or system DSN

On a SuSE 9.1 system,
The driver is: /usr/lib/unixODBC/libmyodbc3-3.51.06.so
The setup is /usr/lib/unixODBC/libodbcmyS.so.1

In OpenOffice, under Tools, Data Source, we can then select the ODBC database type, and then select the available data sources.

To make sure we can edit tables, there is a macro that needs to be run (see under "more").
I found the following sites helpful in getting to this point:

Sourceforge:setting up OOo with MySQL and Openoffice.org howto IgnoreDriverPrivileges

I have mainly used a GUI based FTP program (gftp), but while debugging my website I find it more effective to use FTP in a shell script.

The script I use takes one argument: the file to be transferred.

#! /bin/sh
echo -use a "here" document to embed ftp commands in the script
# Begin of "here" document
ftp <<**
open ftp_site
cd the_target_directory
lcd /.../the_local_source_directory
put $1
bye
# End of "here" document
echo ftp transfer ended

The settings of username, password and destination ftp site must be in the .netrc file in the home directory. The format is as follows:

machine your_ftp_site login your_login password your_passwd

Things are certainly becoming more straightforward with Linux and hardware. I have managed to install an HP 5510 printer/scanner/fax/copier without too many setbacks.


SuSE 9.1 has an hp-officejet package that has the necessary software. Rather than using YasT to install, I used CUPS and the ptal utility.
One idiosyncracy is that after using the xsane scanner utility I have to switch the printer off and on again in order to print again.


Update
Following a request for more detail on how to setup the Officejet, I will try and provide that below. I didn't do it this time, but usually I keep notes on what I have done in order to get something working, otherwise I completely forget [not sure whether this is due to a sieve like memory, or a high level brain function that discards redundant information ;-) ] Anyway, here is my best recollection:


For SuSE 9.1 users, go to YaST and search for and install the hp-officejet package. This contains the ptal utilities required by the hpoj driver.


Documentation should then be found in file:/usr/share/doc/packages/hp-officeJet/ .
As explained in file:/usr/share/doc/packages/hp-officeJet/ptal-init.html you need to run ptal-init setup. Run ptal-init as root. This I seem to remember takes you through all the necessary setup, probing for USB devices etc.


After this, use CUPS to install the printer. To use CUPS, make sure it is installed and running. The runlevel utility in YaST-System can start the service if not already running.


As root you will also need to execute the command lppasswd -g sys -a root The root password is requested which you should enter. This gives root access to the CUPS utility. In a browser window then go to http://localhost:631/admin and enter the root password. I am not sure, but you may also be able to set CUPS to run with a different user.


It should then be possible to add a printer, and "ptal" will be one of the device options. This is the one to use.


If anyone follows this and is either successful, or finds that I have missed something, please let me know (leave a comment) and I will amend the instructions above so that we have a reliable resource for others.

One final thing, the /etc/sane.d/dll.conf file must be edited to enable the hpoj driver.

One of the really useful features of SuSE 9.1 Linux is the Network Browser icon on the desktop. This gives immediate network access to Shared Folders on Windows PCs, without any hacking of configuration files.

However, it seems that it only works correctly if your PC is LAN connected during the original installation of the operating system. Because my laptop has a wireless card that needed some special attention to get it working I installed without being on a network. The result was that I got an error each time I clicked on the Windows Network icon in the Network Browser.

The solution I discovered on this thread was by reinstalling some RPM packages. The one that made the difference was:
libsmbclient-3.0.4-1..> 14-May-2004 19:37 526k
...although someone else installed a list of others.

Oh.. and I also had to reinstall cups off the DVD in order to get the printer connection working (I have a printer on one of the Windows PCs). I discovered that CUPs was not functioning correctly when I accessed localhost:631/admin through my browser.

I think this is something SuSE need to fix. It shouldn't be necessary to go through so many problems to just because the LAN was not connected.

I have installed a Samsung ML 1510 printer on a Windows 2000 PC and had some problems printing to it from a Linux SuSE 9.1 machine.

The network was accessible, file shares could be seen, but for the printer it was"access denied".

There are a couple of things that I had to do to get this working.

The first step is as root to execute the command:
lppasswd -g sys -a root
The root is password is requested.

Next using kprinter, I had to scan as anonymous in order to see the machines on the network, then go back to the previous kprinter page to add the name and password of the Windows user with admin rights. I went on again to the page showing the network, and added the printer.

See here for an explanation from SuSE re. 9.1

Then I could print. :-)

Printer configuration is kept in /etc/cups/printers.conf

Just came across again an essay by Pamela Samuelson, Professor of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley, Toward a new politics of intellectual property, in which she points out the difficulty of getting the general public to be concerned about issues of copyright and intellectual property. (other articles by Pamela here)

On the other hand, copyright industry groups (media and software) have been diligent to cultivate influential relationships with policymakers.

A parallel can be drawn with the extremely powerful political concept of ecology. If we look back to the 1950's, there was no concept of the environment. Now, it is no longer possible for commercial ventures to ignore the effect of their activities on natural resources. (This parallel was drawn by James Boyle in his essay Environmentalism for the Net)

What is needed is a public awareness of the environment of the internet. The web has become the primary vehicle for the expression of human culture, and therefore it is in the interests of us all to maintain a balanced information ecology. This balance could be threatened by the trend towards overly developed intellectual property rights and the technical measures to enforce them.

Verna Allee's The
Future of Knowledge, published by Butterworth-Heinemann,
September 2002, lays out a conceptual framework for the use and value
of knowledge in a networked economy. In her view knowledge is a
social process that emerges in and travels through networks,
communities, and webs of conversations. The foundation she builds
on is systems thinking as put forward by Peter Senge in The Fifth
Discipline: The Arts & Practices of The Learning Organisation.

Allee points out that success in
business is all about relationships: "business is about
exchanges and transactions that happen between real people."
It is also built on intangibles: "enduring business
relationships are rarely built solely on tangible transactions,
especially when dealing with sophisticated or complex products and
services."

Respect, integrity and trust are all
part of Allees' vocabulary. Systems thinking leads to a recognition
of the need for respect. No individual part can function in
isolation. It needs the other members of the system in order to
funtion. Trust is an integral part of respect: "Knowledge and
other intangible exchanges become richer and more frequent where
there is trust. Trust widens the pipeline. " The converse is
certainly the case in organisations short on trust in which knowledge
is seen to be power. This can apply to colleagues in the same office
as well as to relationships with customers. In order for knowledge to
be shared it must be seen as strengthening the value chain, or
rather, the value network. Here it is a lack of systems thinking that
prevents people from seeing their own value gain in sharing
knowledge.

Allee herself recognises that it is
controversial to apply living systems and complexity theory to
business practice, but it is a controversy that is at the crux of
current battles over copyright, software patents, intellectual
property and digital protection.

I wonder whether for some the
conceptual and philosophical divide is to great to be bridged.

Other
books recommended by Verna Allee in the area of knowledge and
business.