MishMash

Thank You Poland!

It seems that, thanks to Polish courage, an attempt to slide the controversial software patent directive through without debate in a session of the Council of Agriculture and Fisheries has been abandoned. Some breathing space, at least, if not yet one in the eye for the BigCos.

A happier Christmas to anyone trying or planning to make money from innovation rather than litigation in software.

So farewell then, Blunkett

So after all this silence, I can't let this momentous event pass without comment. Sadly, Blunkett has been pushed — and what should have been a time of debate has been totally suppressed by — an utterly insignificant (ab)use of power, while his programme of turning the UK even further into a police state is not to be modified. Still, perhaps Clarke won't make public plans to undermine one of the fundamental safeguards of the justice system while well out of earshot abroad. Maybe. We'll see. Meanwhile, YudelLine independently invented the name that Pete coined last year. There must be a Platonic Form out there.

C'mon Clarke. If the mechanisms are implemented perfectly, ID cards can't do what is offhandedly claimed for them. It's a lie. And the mechanisms, we all know perfectly well, won't be implemented perfectly. It's based, at bottom, on the idea of a perfect database: a repository of manifestations of — again — Platonic Forms of identity. Get real. Drop it.

All we can hope now is that they employ EDS to implement the thing (here's why, if you don't know already).