On Mon, 2003-11-17 at 01:25, Sandip Bhattacharya wrote: > > I personally would love to see what happens to the world if India > decides to patent '0'. :-D > > "Half the computing base belong to us"! :-P > > - Sandip
yup! china, india, egypt, greece, italy, and the indigenous civilizations of brazil and others have contributed significantly to the knowledge of the world. in modern times, countries across mainland europe pushed the frontiers of knowledge. an inventor in germany sold the 'computer' invention to IBM nearly a century ago. the renaissance era was a flowering of european learning and knowledge. almost all the serif fonts you see used in the latin and related scripts, were also designed at that time. i provoke a rather deep thought and insight here. which is why this thought experiment haunts me all the time. tell me, how does any civilization decide at which point-in-time does knowledge become a 'property' owned by one civilization, by its own laws, and imposed on others? for how much time-duration? more importantly, how come indigenous knowledge of other civilizations can be borrowed and incorporated into the legal ownership of another civilization as well? at the expense of the original civilization? in hindi, this is called: he who wields the stick, owns the buffalo. hope china, india, and other civilizations of the world, wake up and create a world of their own laws of ownership of their knowledge. i would love to live in this kind of a world then. where *every* civilization stakes claims, and counter-claims, for all knowledge since ancient times, and a new trade and economy grows out of governments patenting and licensing knowledge across countries and continents. sco, ibm, m$, et al, will feel like small fry. :-) LL _______________________________________________ ilugd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
