The EU parliament decides that software patents are a good thing, but in what way? It seems that the draft directive that was actually passed had been declawed somewhat, relying on the phrase “true inventions” to come to the aid of the OSS community and others. Sounds like it’s not as bad as it could have been, but that the end result is probably a fair amount of confusion. Weird.

That and I’m not eschewing Lisp yet. Scary. I download Paul Graham’s On Lisp in PDF form. I just read the introduction and I think I’m starting to get it. I think the thing that everybody loves is that Lisp is programmable. Instead of writing a program in it, you end up customising the language until that program is trivial. This is demonstrated by Graham by implementing Prolog in 200 lines. I wonder how many brackets he used. Fuck loads probably.