Posted in Europe, Patents at 12:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another word of caution about the “Peer to Patent” effort in the United Kingdom
When the initiative known as “Peer to Patent” just stayed in the United States (the origin country) it did not make too much sense as the approach was not eliminating software patents; it ended up managing to legitimise them, or at least some of them (which it failed to stop or simply overlooked). According to this, we continue to see more evidence that the initiative spreading to the UK is not helping much [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. “The UK Intellectual Property Office has launched a pilot scheme to collect comments over the Internet on patent applications before they are granted,” says an official site.
“Peer to Patent belongs to a different strand with a different goal, funded largely by IBM (at least at the moment), a software patents proponent.”To quote one person from Twitter, Gérald Sédrati-Dinet, Peer to Patent allegedly “admits to allow #swpat when information is transferred more efficiently between processor and memory http://ur1.ca/4wbps”
We have written about this initiative many times before and based on what we see it still cannot be supported by abolishment proponents. In fact, unless it gets renamed “Peer NOT to Patent”, it will stay incompatible with the goal of groups like the FFII. Peer to Patent belongs to a different strand with a different goal, funded largely by IBM (at least at the moment), a software patents proponent. █
Summary: The patent office which is more picky about what’s patentable and what is not scores better than the breeding ground of software patents and lobbyists for software patenting
THE president of the FFII, Benjamin Henrion, warns that according to this page, it is fair to say that the “EPO [is going] to organise propaganda meetings to explain people how to patent software in Europe”
A subject we have covered here many times before is the set of loopholes that the EPO leaves open to make software patenting more or less possible (just not formally). The more patents the EPO grants, the more ‘business’ it will have. So this system is primed for abuse. Having said that, it is nowhere as disastrous as the USPTO.
“The more patents the EPO grants, the more ‘business’ it will have.”To say more about the EU situation (not individual member nations), a lawyers’ blog criticises a study from Europe, saying that “it makes no sense to use surveys to compare how the different systems are doing on those metrics. So, for example, the report goes out of its way to emphasize how poorly the U.S. office is doing on timeliness as compared to the EU – 81% of respondents rate the EU well on timeliness but only 51% rate the US well. But why should we care about a survey on timeliness, when actual data is available? Although reasonable minds could differ on exactly what the right metric for timeliness is, how comparable the two systems are and what the optimal pendency time would be, it is easy to obtain reliable quantitative data on the existing situation. And the data show pretty definitively that however concerned the PTO and US patenters are about pendency time in the US, it is even longer in the EU (almost 50% longer in fact).”
Needless to say, this blog is American, so this apologism for the USPTO is very much guaranteed. What we might be able to conclude from the above is that the system with software patents and patent trolls is a lot less popular than that which does not encourage those, at least based on the aforementioned criteria. █
No illnesses have been reported in the club’s 12-year history. And if a problem were to occur with the club’s food, members say, they would be able to quickly figure out the source. This was the second such raid on Rawesome, the first having happened in June of 2010.
160,000 independent cattle producers in the past 15 years [have been driven out of business] … Most poultry processors operate under take it or leave it contracts … companies have retaliated against farmers that complain. … The survival of small and midsize family farms is essential for our access to more healthy, sustainable and local meat. … [exploitative rules favor] factory farms which practice environmentally damaging practices, animal cruelty, and the overuse of antibiotics.
American specialists have become especially proficient at forging the onscreen cyber-trademarks used by Al Qaeda to certify its Web statements, and are posting confusing and contradictory orders, some so virulent that young Muslims dabbling in jihadist philosophy, but on the fence about it, might be driven away… And in a classified tactic used multiple times across the Middle East, American military and intelligence officers have hacked the cellphones of terrorist leaders to lure them into an ambush or spread the word that fellow cell members were embezzling money or plotting against their comrades. Distrust of secure communications disrupts and even deters action.
HB Gary wanted to do these things to US political activists on behalf of big companies in the US Chamber of Commerce. Astroturfing is aggression and, in this case, an act of war.
[visit the new NRDC map which] shows the areas where two key mosquito species are known and projected to live. These two species are the ones that can carry Dengue fever. Dengue (also known as “Breakbone Fever”) causes a characteristic triad of high fever, horrible body aches, and a rash. Last year, there was an outbreak in Florida, and there are frequent small outbreaks along the Texas border
US states are subsidizing risky and dirty energy projects. The most expensive and foolish ones are nuclear plants but the immediate health costs of coal are not factored in.
A string of warehouses in Detroit, most of them operated by Goldman, has stockpiled more than a million tonnes of the industrial metal aluminium, about a quarter of global reported inventories. … Also pushing aluminium costs higher are bank financing deals, which are estimated to have locked up about 70 percent of the 4.4 million tonnes of the metal sitting in LME-registered warehouses around the world.
This article is by a Microsoft booster but the announcement is inline with previous CEO statements and is the predictable shutdown of a major competitor. Nokia’s partnership with Microsoft has cost the company dearly
second quarter losses have widened to $523 million or a loss of 10 cents per share compared with a net income of $323 million or 9 cents per share in the prior-year quarter … operating income was approximately $556 million, down 41% year over year …
Nokia’s market share fell to 22% from 41% [in smart phones] … Overall, Nokia sold 97.9 million mobile devices in the second quarter, down from 111.47 million units a year earlier. Its overall market share fell to 22.8% from 30.3%. … Worldwide handset sales totaled 428.7 million units in the second quarter, up 16.5% from a year earlier. Smartphone sales grew much faster–by 74%–and accounted for a quarter all handset sales.
filing over a hundred lawsuits, each of which was followed up almost immediately with offers to settle at fees much cheaper than it would cost to fight, has the ‘indicia of extortion.’
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals last week reversed a district court and reinstated a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) claim brought by an employer against a labor union for “bombarding” the computer systems of its sales and executive offices with emails and voicemails making it impossible for the company to communicate with its customers and vendors.
The employer’s problems are mostly self inflicted. They had an arbitrary limit on the number of emails any employee could have in their “inbox” and used Microsoft for service, which performs poorly at best. The court, however, found evidence of intentional computer damage because the union urged fired employees to “fight back”. If we followed the court’s logic, I’d be liable for damages if I asked readers to email the court and tell them that they are wrong and enough people agreed that it overwhelemed the court’s poorly configured mail server and the judge’s even poorer mail client. An HB Gary type company can easily abuse this ruling.
[the Boston Consulting Group] bluntly praises Mississippi’s “flexible unions/workers, minimal wage growth, and high worker productivity,” estimating that in four years, workers in China’s fast-growing Yangtze River Delta will cost only 31 percent less than Mississippi workers. That’s before you figure in shipping, duties, and possible quality issues. Add it all up, says BCG, and “China will no longer be the default low-cost manufacturing location.” … Plenty of factory jobs in Northern states — even in the former high-wage stronghold of auto — are already “competitive.”
Some people don’t even want to come out of their homes; some don’t even want to report crime. There’s a fear of being arrested; people are not driving. The kids are not even playing in the neighborhood. They’re targeting predominantly Latino areas. We hear about something happening every day. Some of our community leaders are getting calls three times a day about arrests. What is very astonishing is that the law hasn’t even gone into effect yet.
[the Daily Show] painted the situation in Danville as an example of the U.S. turning into “Europe’s Mexico.” … IAM says Danville’s plant is the most dangerous furniture factory in the U.S., with 1,536 days lost from work due to injury since 2007.
It is clear to me that retail outlets in North America tend to comply with M$’s wishes when it comes to allowing real competition in operating systems on retail shelves. Here are some compelling evidences:
1. The standard argument is that retailers should supply what their customers want. Why is it that Walmart.com‘s customers want 70 books on Linux but only 2 PCs, and then only very low-end devices? That other OS finds 470 books and 426 computers. If 7:1 is the ratio of interest, should there not be 60 GNU/Linux PCs on those shelves?
2. If a customer wants Linux and searches BestBuy’s site they are given M$’s and Apple’s products to install their operating systems and nothing Linux-like at all.
While Mesa won’t have OpenGL 4.2 support for some time, NVIDIA released an OpenGL 4.2 preview driver on Monday as soon as the Khronos Group had published the new specification. AMD yesterday has now released a beta Linux driver (of their Catalyst blob, nothing to do with open-source) that provides OpenGL 4.2 support.
With the release this week of the OpenGL 4.2 specification (and accompanying GL Shading Language 4.20 revision), the TODO list for the open-source Mesa developers just got a bit longer. Mesa / Gallium3D still lacks full support for OpenGL 3.0 and all of the revisions since that 2008 specification release.
The OpenGL 3.0 support in this open-source OpenGL library is slowly coming together (see the many Phoronix articles), but the GL Shading Language 1.30 support is incomplete along with other key areas. Some of the functionality is also limited “out of the box” due to patent / IP restrictions.
Here is a really fun, kid-friendly application that is not only great for taking notes in class, but it’s also an easy pdf annotator for filling out those fancy forms (college or employment applications) that expect you to fill in tiny little spaces with legible writing. Now when the teacher draws a diagram on the chalkboard and you need to copy it down, you can do it on your laptop or netbook instead of a piece of paper that can blow away when you drop your books (I’m clumsy and lose alot of stuff that way, lol) or get lost among all the other stuff you have to carry around in your backpack.
Here’s a chance to show off your talent using a great drawing program made especially for kids. Tux Paint is an award-winning drawing program you can download to your computer. Tux Paint was recently awarded SourceForge.net Project of the Month. It will run on all versions of Windows (including Tablet PC), Mac OS X 10.4 and up, Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. And it’s FREE!
As usual, Desktop Summit 2011 has been a lot of fun. I’ve been to most of the GUADEC and aKademy free desktop events in the past few years, but this was the first time I didn’t give a talk. Even that way, it was definitely worth spending a week in Berlin.
Desktop Summit 2011 continues. On Tuesday, GNOME and KDE had their annual meetings, with KDE e.V. managing to finish in time for lunch. However, many members came back after lunch to continue discussion in a BoF about challenges and opportunities for KDE. Over the past few days, the University has been busy with four tracks of BoFs, workshops and meetings – enough to keep most attendees checking their schedules and the building maps.
One of the last talks I attended on Desktop Summit was “Swimming upstream or downstream? Both!”. Announced as speaker was Vincent Untz, but he didnt the talk alone, there was also Allison Randal, Harald Sitter and our own Jaroslav Řezník.In this talk came up the problem with the branding.
Desktop Summit 2011 continues. On Tuesday, GNOME and KDE had their annual meetings, with KDE e.V. managing to finish in time for lunch. However, many members came back after lunch to continue discussion in a BoF about challenges and opportunities for KDE. Over the past few days, the University has been busy with four tracks of BoFs, workshops and meetings – enough to keep most attendees checking their schedules and the building maps.
In this week’s KDE Commit-Digest Artem Serebriyskiy introduces the new Nepomuk Web Extractor in a featured article. The list of changes include:
* Desktop layout control moves from pager to KWin
* OwnCloud gets instant search and sees many smaller commits which bring minor new features and work on the user interface
* An asynchronous Nepomuk resource retriever is implemented in KDE PIM to improve performance
* Rekonq receives a synchronisation feature
* Early version of Dolphin 2.0 comitted
* OpenVPN configuration import/export is now possible in Network Management
* Kate now supports local folding
* In Calligra there is work on caching and multiple bugfixes, Krita gets an update of undo support.
I am about to leave Berlin to go back home for almost an entire week before heading off agian to Taiwan. While visiting wiht my good friends Marco and Sebas over beer I finished installing Synchrotron on the server the amazing (and award winning!) KDE sys admin team allocated it for.
Wow, what a week! It’s just great to be at Desktop Summit again and meeting all those KDE people again and also the GNOME people which gives the event a different and pleasant touch.
A couple of weeks ago I posted some information about the Department of Defense releasing its Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) Linux distribution aimed at giving remote workers a more secure way to access government networks — but also available to the public for anyone’s use who wants a little extra security.
Well ladies and gents we now have Ultimate Edition 3.0 Lite. Please do not make this into what it is not. This is a lite edition made for computers with low resources. It is in no way even close to what the non lite Ultimate Edition 3.0 will be. This is specifically designed for computers with low resources IE notbooks etc. You can read more about that here.
I am pleased to announce the release of ConnochaetOS 0.9.0. After one year of development and after three years after the last release of it’s predecessor DeLi Linux, this the first stable release of ConnochaetOS.
Linux is a godsend for many, including those obsessed about the professional breakup of Tiger Woods and former caddie Steve Williams.
[...]
Gredenhag said reliability and suppot for XFS were key factors for selecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It was implemented on RHEL 5, which does not incorporate XFS per se, but Red Hat offered support for it as an option and CDW did the implementation of the feature. XFS — which is very fast file system for very large video files, such as 40 gigabyte files — is now in Red Hat Linux 6 and will eventually be implemented by PGA Tour, said Gredenhag.
CentOS, Community ENTerprise Operating System, is a Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not many would consider it a desktop distribution, but it could be configured as one, though it requires a bit more tweaking than other well known desktop distributions to just work. The latest stable version, CentOS 6, was released on July 10, 2011.
[...]
This was just an excursion to determine whether CentOS 6 could be a good candidate as a desktop distribution for non-experts, or new users. The verdict: Unless you do not mind getting digital grease on your hands, there are better RPM-based distributions available. Fedora or any Fedora Spin, makes a better desktop distribution than CentOS 6.
Klaus Knopper has released version 6.7 of his Debian-based live-CD Linux distro. Again employing the LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment), it is also said to include version 3.3.3 of the LibreOffice suite, the Chromium 12 web browser, and a new version of ADRIANE (Audio Desktoop Reference Implementation And Network Environment) for partially-sighted users.
Package management in Linux is great, but unfortunately, it comes with a few cons. Granted, most distributions keep all your software, not just system software like Apple and Microsoft, updated. The downside is that software packages aren’t always the latest versions. Whatever is in the repository is what you get. Another frustration is when the software you want to install isn’t in the distribution repositories at all.
The unity shell and the top panel was always a design headache for those who behind the development. The design in its current form itself was criticized by many and was one of the reasons why many people hated unity. The daily builds of the unity 2D had a new iteration of the design apparently trying to solve some of the issues associated with the desktop shell. The new design now is now causing far more criticism than the current version.
After all the controversy that followed the release of Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal,” it’s hard not to anticipate with at least some anxiety the upcoming debut of version 11.10, also known as “Oneiric Ocelot.”
Mark Shuttleworth: The patent system is often misunderstood. It’s sold as a way of giving the little guy an opportunity to create something big … when in fact patents don’t really work that way at all.
What they do very well is keep the big guys entrenched and the little guys out. For example, it’s very common in established industries for all of the majors to buy up or file as many patents as they can covering a particular area. They know and accept that the other majors are all in the same industry and essentially cross-license each other to keep the peace within that defined market. But they use that arsenal to stop new entrants coming in and disrupting the market.
ComScore’s second-quarter U.S. smartphone study shows that Android went up two percent in June to 40.1 percent share, while Apple’s iOS remained steady at 26.6 percent. Meanwhile, Jumptap released a study comparing usage state-by-state, showing iOS’ strength in New England and the upper Midwest and Android’s greater popularity in the South and West.
Elektrobit Corp. (EB) announced a Android reference platform for vertical-market smartphones and tablets. The EB Specialized Device Platform is available now with a Texas Instruments OMAP3 processor — an OMAP4 version is coming next year — and a 4.0- or 4.3-inch WVGA capacitive touchscreen, plus a wide variety of wireless and sensor options including 4G LTE.
Google Wallet and other mobile payment providers, coupled with Near Field Communcation-enabled smartphones, are stimulating the production of contactless technology in cash registers, says ABI Research. Some 85 percent of Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminals that ship in 2016 will be “contactless-enabled,” up from 10 percent in 2010, says the research firm.
As we’ve reported, free training and documentation resources for open source projects have proliferated in recent years. Likewise, organizations like The Linux Foundation and commercial open source companies such as Red Hat offer substantial training resources, many of them free. Still, InfoWorld cites niche security applications in conjunction with a lack of in-house skills at many companies, and this is a good point.
Open source research often paints the community as a homogeneous landscape. I have collected stories from open source contributors to begin constructing a new narrative of diverse experience. These contributors are 20 women and men, living in seven countries.
Dedicated people have enacted some impressive initiatives, but a deep gender gap still exists. You may have heard recent conference sessions about increasing diversity in open source, seen the anti-harassment policies, or noticed the women’s groups in large open source projects.
Welcome to another edition of Take Five. In today’s edition I talk open source software development in today’s enterprise world with Clay Loveless, currently founder at Jexy and formerly of Mashery (where he was a co-founder).
Stephen Wellman (SW): Hello, Clay, welcome to Take Five, a new feature on the SourceForge blog where we discuss the pressing issues facing today’s IT professionals. It’s a pleasure to have with us. As someone who works with developers, how has the role of open source software development changed in today’s business world? Are larger businesses more amendable to open source now than they were a few years ago?
…like the Javascript Version (pyjs), the “Desktop Version” (pyjd) is actually available for multiple platforms as well: Windows (all versions dating back even to Windows 2000), Apple (tablets as well as laptops and desktops), Android (all versions), GNU/Linux (all versions), GNU/FreeBSD (all versions) – about the only modern platforms the Desktop version isn’t available for is for Blackberry OS and Symbian, because they’re proprietary.
While the Berlin Desktop Summit is still happening this week, happening next week in Vancouver, Canada is the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon North America 2011 event. This event is special, in particular, for it being the 20th anniversary of Linux.
For well over a year now, Google has been hyping up something called Native Client. It’s an open source technology that allows a web browser to run compiled native code. In other words, it’s a potential missing link between native apps and web apps. And now it’s finally getting baked into Chrome.
I quite like Google’s Chrome operating system (OS)–a Linux variant that use the Chrome Web browser as its interface–but as it’s being shipping today, Chrome OS has problems. Fortunately, in the latest Chrome OS stable channel release, Google is finally addressing some of these rough spots.
To put it to the test, I installed the new Chrome OS, Chrome version 13.0.782.108, to my Samsung Chromebook. It took a while to install-not the installation itself, that took about a minute-but to get it going. I had to click the update button several times to get things going. I’m not the only one who found that to be the case.
We’ve written about how a bad economy is indeed good for open source software. We’ve also recognized that with open source software’s maturity and place at the enterprise software table, a bad economy can be a double-edged sword for open source since the failure or fade of large enterprise customers, say big banks, hurts open source vendors right alongside traditional software providers.
What is interesting is that after a couple of years of economic rebuilding, we’ve seen recently how open source is being driven by innovation, particularly in cloud computing, where open source is prevalent and disruptive, and also mobile computing, which continues to be impacted by openness.
This is to announce diffutils-3.1, a stable, bug-fix release. There have been more than 50 build, test and portability-related changes in diffutils proper, as well as over 2100 in gnulib. In spite of all that, there have been only a few bug fixes, and only one that was worthy of a NEWS entry (below).
Bristol City Council’s failure to deliver on its open source strategy is beginning to make the coalition government’s manifesto commitment on open source look incontinent.
The council’s own open source strategy is looking ineffectual. Bristol Council cabinet committed to an open source infrastructure a year ago – as long as it was doable. It ordered a pilot but that was discredited by an allegation that it had been fixed. Now the council has refused to release the suspect pilot reports under Freedom of Information, it is time to look at those allegations in full.
Mark Taylor, CEO of Sirius, told MPs in May how, left to establishment suppliers Capgemini and Computacenter, the open source strategy got caught in a thicket of indifference and vested interests.
Bristol set an original deadline for its open source strategy to be costed and risked by November 2010. They told Capgemini to get on with it, said Taylor, but Capgemini did nothing. Bristol told Capg to work with Sirius, who were experienced implementing open source infrastructures for companies like SpecSavers. They ignored Surius, said Taylor in a letter to MPs on the Parliamentary Administration Select Committee (PASC).
The council meanwhile tendered for an open source infrastructure using the £6bn Buying Solutions Framework for Commodity IT Hardware and Software (CHITS). Thus it would be ready to roll when the pilot produced its recommendations.
Unfortunately, the way to answer this question is to follow the money. Most companies have coders sign intellectual property-focused and Fair Use-focused agreements that make clear that code produced while working for (and being paid by) the company belongs to the company. If the coder was being paid a salary while contributing to an open source project, the company almost always has the right to claim ownership of the code.
I attended the 6th ODF Plugfest took place in Berlin a few weeks ago, hosted by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) and the Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi). It followed the pattern of previous events, a two-day event, with the first day dedicated to technical interop activities among implementors, followed by a day of public presentations.
The Gnumeric Team is pleased to announce the availability of Gnumeric version 1.10.17. This should be used together with the concurrently released goffice 0.8.17. This is most likely the last release in the stable 1.10.x series.
Our friends at Skype have added support for one-to-one VP8 video calling in Skype 5.5 for Windows. If both users in a Skype video call are using Skype 5.5, the call will use VP8 to encode the video streams for optimum transmission across the Internet. Skype also uses VP8 for group video calling.
Pharmaceutical companies are carrying out fake, pseudo-studies on humans as a marketing devices to get doctors familiar with new drugs. In such studies, called “seeding trials,” drug companies invite hundreds of doctors to take part in a research study by asking them to recruit patients to serve as subjects.
We just wrote about a GAO report showing how the Defense Department is somewhat incompetent at dealing with online threats. Of course, it’s not clear that anyone else in the government is any better. The GAO is back with yet another report, dinging the State Department for its dreadful computer security monitoring program. In this case, it’s talking about threats to the State Department’s network, rather than to third parties. And while the State Department spent a whopping $1.2 billion of taxpayer money on a fancy computer system, called iPost, to monitor everything, it turns out that it only works on Windows machines:
But the iPost service only covers computers that use Microsoft’s Windows operating system, not other assets such as the roughly 5,000 routers and switches along State’s network, non-Windows operating systems, firewalls, mainframes, databases and intrusion detection devices, GAO auditors said.
Nicolas Robinson, 23, of Borough, south-east London, carried out the “opportunistic” theft at a Lidl supermarket in Brixton as he walked home from his girlfriend’s house.
Robinson threw away the water and ran when he was confronted by police but was arrested and quickly admitted what he had done.
Media attention has focused, understandably enough, on the “nouveau poor” — formerly middle and even upper-middle class people who lost their jobs, their homes, and/or their investments in the financial crisis of 2008 and the economic downturn that followed it, but the brunt of the recession has been borne by the blue-collar working class, which had already been sliding downwards since de-industrialization began in the 1980s.
In 2008 and 2009, for example, blue-collar unemployment was increasing three times as fast as white-collar unemployment, and African American and Latino workers were three times as likely to be unemployed as white workers. Low-wage blue-collar workers, like the people I worked with in this book, were especially hard hit for the simple reason that they had so few assets and savings to fall back on as jobs disappeared.
How have the already-poor attempted to cope with their worsening economic situation? One obvious way is to cut back on health care. The New York Times reported in 2009 that one-third of Americans could no longer afford to comply with their prescriptions and that there had been a sizable drop in the use of medical care. Others, including members of my extended family, have given up their health insurance.
Food is another expenditure that has proved vulnerable to hard times, with the rural poor turning increasingly to “food auctions,” which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates. And for those who like their meat fresh, there’s the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by “shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked, and grilled.” In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.
London Metropolitan police has allowed the public to use weapons against suspected rioters and looters if households or businesses “honestly” believe they pose a threat.
In a document sent to businesses in the British capital, the Scotland Yard authorized the use of what is known as “reasonable force” saying people can defend themselves in their homes or businesses by weapons if they believe they could be attacked.
Perez and his partner Mike Gomez, a bodyguard resembling The Sopranos’ Silvio, finally track down their client at a Barnes & Noble. Two of the countersurveillance guys go back to scouting for menaces, while Perez and Gomez, both of whom are trained sharpshooters and martial-arts experts, step in as the Primary’s “close protection” team. Shoppers stare at the entourage, straining to recognize someone famous.
A Toronto judge has ruled that “adrenalized” police officers acted as aggressors at a peaceful political rally that led to dozens of arrests during last year’s G20 summit.
“The only organized or collective physical aggression at that location that evening was perpetrated by police each time they advanced on demonstrators,” Justice Melvyn Green ruled on Thursday. He was referring to a demonstration at Queen St. and Spadina Ave. on Saturday, June 26, 2010.
Green stated police criminalized political demonstration, which is “vital” to maintain a “viable democracy.”
David Cameron is on a collision course with the police after the government used an emergency Commons debate on the English riots to issue a point-by-point dissection of the police’s “insufficient” tactics during the week.
The only question I can legitimately ask is: why is this happening? Mark Duggan’s death has been badly handled but no one is contesting that is a reason for these conflagrations beyond the initial flash of activity in Tottenham. I’ve heard Theresa May and the Old Etonians whose hols have been curtailed (many would say they’re the real victims) saying the behaviour is “unjustifiable” and “unacceptable”. Wow! Thanks guys! What a wonderful use of the planet’s fast-depleting oxygen resources. Now that’s been dealt with can we move on to more taxing matters such as whether or not Jack The Ripper was a ladies’ man. And what the hell do bears get up to in those woods?
However “unacceptable” and “unjustifiable” it might be, it has happened so we better accept it and, whilst we can’t justify it, we should kick around a few neurons and work out why so many people feel utterly disconnected from the cities they live in.
According to new research from MIT, the most recent global climate report fails to capture trends in Arctic sea-ice thinning and drift, and in some cases substantially underestimates these trends….
After comparing IPCC models with actual data, [lead author Pierre] Rampal and his collaborators concluded that the forecasts were significantly off: Arctic sea ice is thinning, on average, four times faster than the models say, and it’s drifting twice as quickly.
The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do now?
A “radical, possibly deranged, truthteller” will be the 2012 GOP presidential candidate, said political commentator Tucker Carlson at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in New Orleans. Speaking between workshops on the benefits of carbon emissions and task force meetings where corporations and politicians vote on “model bills,” Carlson joined right-wing leaders who sang the praises of the Tea Party and “sticking to your guns,” cursed Obama and other “big government liberals,” and praised the same “cut, cap, and balance” agenda manifest in the ALEC bills and pushed by national politicians in Washington D.C.
The fight against global warming pollution requires the investment of everyone, including the world’s multinational corporate giants. Many companies have taken official stances on climate pollution, pledging to reduce their greenhouse footprint in order to reduce the threat of a destabilized climate.
Seeking to boost Hispanic consumption, liquor giant Diageo is turning to TV, making a major upfront buy on Univision Communication’s Galavision cable network as well as on every owned and operated Univision station.
The year-long deal represents the first time a liquor company has bought upfront time — the period in which marketers buy up available commercial inventory from networks before the fall season — on every Univision station, Univision told Ad Age. The piecemeal purchase was necessary because Univision does not accept national liquor buys on the network.
Bahrain is in the news again, this time for what appears to be the comically evil persecution of the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders.
So, naturally, the ruling monarchy of the Gulf nation has hired a top Washington public relations firm to burnish (or attempt to salvage) its image, according to a new foreign agent registration filing. Qorvis Communications will be paid $40,000 per month, plus expenses, for the public relations work, according to a contract submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Take a moment and let that sink in. Randi Zuckerberg doesn’t just think that you should be using your real name on Facebook or Google+ or LinkedIn — she thinks pseudonyms have no place on the Internet at all. And why should we take the radical step of stripping all Internet users of the right to speak anonymously? Because of the Greater Internet F***wad Theory, or the “civility argument,” which states: If you allow people to speak anonymously online, they will froth at the mouth, go rabid, bully and stalk one another. Therefore, requiring people to use their real names online should decrease stalking and bullying and generally raise the level of discourse.
After several days of destructive riots throughout the UK, British Prime Minister David Cameron is practically tripping over himself in his eagerness to sacrifice liberty for security.
Here’s another one for our lists of government-less Internets: MondoNet. According to the MondoNet website: “The purpose of this project is to study the technological, social and regulatory feasibility of developing a peer-to-peer mesh networking protocol.”
MondoNet was founded by academics at Rutgers University, and the university is supporting the team’s research. The project is close to being able to test its mesh networking protocol in actual, real-life communities.
Some people have called for temporary suspension of services; David Cameron appeared to suggest suspension of Facebook and Twitter in some circumstances (TBC). We do not believe this should be given any serious consideration. Clearly, a service will be used by people for legitimate activities, some of which will in fact be to mitigate or deal with the problem encountered. In any case, innocent people should not be punished for the actions of others.
If you are a Kindle user disappointed by the lack of a dedicated desktop application for Linux, there’s good news for you. Amazon.com has just launched their new HTML5-powered cloud-based web app called Amazon Cloud Reader. The webapp runs flawlessly on Linux with support for offline reading and much much more. Here’s what it has to offer.
The European Parliament Trade Committee operates as secretive as Navy Seals. In the last year, the Committee commissioned a study and requested a Legal Service opinion on ACTA. While these were official decisions the Committee made, there is no record on this at all. The Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) seems to make a distinction between public minutes and non public coordinators’ notes. The Register maintains everything is published. See our letter to the Parliament’s Register.
It may seem silly to compare the work of a parliamentary committee to Navy Seals operations. Of course, it is silly. The EU foreign intellectual property policy is much more deadly.
The fantasy depends on unlimited energy and the Star Trek replicator which produces an unlimited supply of whatever goods are desired. The dream becomes a nightmare when intellectual property is introduced, followed by lawyers, and bureaucrats to enforce these rights.
The fantasy originated in Peter Frase’s blog, where he writes, “In the process of trying to pull together some thoughts on intellectual property, zero marginal-cost goods, immaterial labor, and the incipient transition to a rentier form of capitalism, I’ve been working out a thought experiment: a possible future society I call anti-Star Trek. Consider this a stab at a theory of posterity.”
In a much anticipated decision, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has rejected the Southern District of New York’s court’s holding that could have rendered invalid all patents claiming isolated forms of naturally occurring DNA molecules. However, the decision is somewhat nuanced and will be appealed.
In an unprecedented, though much delayed, decision, the National Biodiversity Authority of India (NBA) has decided to initiate legal action against M/s Mahyco/Monsanto and their collaborators for accessing and using local brinjal varieties in developing Bt Brinjal without prior approval of the competent authorities. The official resolution giving effect to this decision was taken in the NBA’s meeting of 20th June 2011, the minutes of which were released only on 11 August 2011.
http://www.nbaindia.org/meetings/meeting.htm
The decision of the NBA reads as follows:
“A background note besides legal opinion on Bt brinjal on the alleged violation by the M/s. Mahyco/M/s Monsanto, and their collaborators for accessing and using the local brinjal varieties for development of Bt brinjal with out prior approval of the competent authorities was discussed and it was decided that the NBA may proceed legally against M/s. Mahyco/ M/s Monsanto, and all others concerned to take the issue to its logical conclusion.” (Emphasis supplied)
Rhianna and Def Jam Music must stand trial for being inspired by David LaChappelle’s ideas regarding photographic images.
They didn’t copy a damned thing. They were only inspired by someone else’s work which influenced they way in which they created a new work – the same way all creation happens on some level.
Canadian copyright law prevents me from posting examples of my ‘published’ work, that is to say, produced television episodes that I wrote, on my own web page on the Internet.
Because I don’t control the copyright.
The same holds true for all the other creative professionals whose creative input went into the work, because a corporate entity holds the rights to all of our combined creativity. As near as I can tell, the corporation owns these rights by virtue of picking up the tab.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday he would soon submit his proposals on intellectual property rights and copyright regulation on the Internet.
“I have commented on intellectual property right issues more than once recently,” he said at a media briefing at the RIA Novosti newsroom.
At the G8 summit in France last month and the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last week, Medvedev said the advent of the Internet means that traditional approaches toward intellectual property rights need to be changed.
The European Parliament Committee on International Trade requested the Parliament’s Legal Service an opinion on ACTA (pdf). Compared with the request US Senator Wyden made, and seen the European academics Opinion on ACTA, the questions are very narrow. The questions seem carefully designed to minimize damage to ACTA.
Senator Wyden has asked in an October 8, 2010 letter that the American Law Division of the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress undertake and provide to Congress: “a written, independent determination of whether the commitments put forward in the agreement diverge from our domestic laws or would impeded legislative efforts that are currently underway. I ask the Division pay particular attention to the provisions relating to injunctions, damages, and intermediary liability.” It is an open question and includes whether ACTA would impeded legislative efforts that are currently underway. This is important for finding a solution for access to orphaned copyrighted works and patent reform.
“I see Linux going into a smaller, simpler OS, with a good base of apps integrated to the web,” predicted Mobile Raptor blogger Roberto Lim. “The standard for ease of use won’t be how close it is to MS Windows and Office, but how similar it is to the iPhone or Android.” The home desktop is “soon to be extinct,” Lim concluded. “So, Linux in a decade: ‘Android’ on a laptop. Somewhere between Chrome OS and Windows.”
You may remember that Google recently added “badges” to Google News. While some blogs poked fun at that (“We Don’t Need No Stinking Google News Badges”), these things are probably just part of Google’s “Reputation” efforts.
While EXT4 and Btrfs are the most talked about file-systems on Phoronix, there are certainly many more out there, especially when it comes to distributed file-systems and those largely only targeting enterprise environments. One example is XtreemFS, which is an open-source file-system that is distributed with support for clients and servers from any location and connected together using the Internet. This GPLv2-licensed file-system is also meant to easily replicate data across data-centers to reduce latency and network traffic.
Most Linux system administrators are familiar with sar for collecting system status data. However, there’s a few ways that sar shows its age and doesn’t quite live up to expectations. If you’re looking for a newer utility that also handles NFS, Slab data and sub-second intervals, collectl may better fit the bill.
Dragon Player is a multimedia player where the focus is on simplicity, instead of features. Dragon Player does one thing, and only one thing, which is playing multimedia files. It’s simple interface is designed not to get in your way and instead empower you to simply play multimedia files.
Wineskin 2.4 update is available. You should see it available in Wineskin Winery, as well as the manual install version at the MediaFire download location
First off, i’d like to award BEEP the prestigious award of “The only game that I haven’t had to go digging for dependencies and that works right off the bat”. After downloading the game from Gameolith (more on that later), BEEP ran flawlessly, and rather smoothly on my laptop also. This being said, the graphics are totally 2D, and theres no complexity to them either, but in a good way.
Sorry, I haven’t blogged for a while, but rest assured that I’m still alive and coding. I passed the midterm evaluation, and the final evaluation is approaching. So what do we have in the store?
MeegoExperts has done an interview here at the Desktop Summit in Berlin with Fania and Marco. The video explains concepts and user experience in Plasma Active‘s Contour Shell. Have a look yourself to learn about this next-generation user experience for consumer devices, based on our beloved Free Software stack.
the adjustment wasn’t as painful as i imagined. i used xfce for a while before jumping into gnome 3. i even toyed around with fluxbox as an alternative. in the end, i gave it a shot. i mean, c’mon! it’s not like it’s kde or os x.
* Improved my spam filtering in Thunderbird, saves me quite a bit of time
* More research into Fedora branded keyboard possibilities
* Finished xmedcon review (bz714328)
This means that the current Debian Testing release, which is Wheezy, is set to be frozen at that time (no new versions of packages, just bug fixes) in preparation for the next stable release.
Debian finally takes the plunge to offer multi architecture support with its to-be release Wheezy. This means that Debian users can now run the software of theirchoice, in a machine and version of their choice. This is a feature that is already supported by most open source distros and there is high expectation from what Wheezy can offer. However, since it is most likely to be released only by 2013, doubts of its relevance then are being raised.
Changes to the way the Unity Dash looks and behaves in Ubuntu 11.10 are on the way. In the Unity 2D development branch some of the reworking is already available to see.
Samsung announced its first Android smartphone based on the Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. Available now in Sweden and heading for Europe and Asia “soon,” the 4.2-inch Samsung Galaxy R offers Android 2.3, the TouchWiz UI, 8GB of flash storage, and both five- and two-megapixel cameras.
The trend toward open source software has many benefits when creating applications. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for example retains the benefits of enterprise application level components such as security and web services without the prohibitive license costs.
A new survey says open source solutions are being considered for the majority of enterprise IT projects. The survey, by FuseSource Corp., an open source integration firm, outlines deciding factors leading organizations to chose and open source solution.
Twitter has announced that it will be open sourcing Storm, its stream processing framework, in September, at the Strange Loop conference. Storm was developed by BackType, a company that Twitter acquired in July. At the time, Nathan Marz, BackType’s lead engineer, said that the company’s plans to open source the technology had not changed. Now Twitter has put a date on those plans in a blog posting.
The Firefox extension HTTPS Everywhere, designed to automatically navigate users to HTTPS-secured versions of sites by rewriting requests, has reached version 1.0. The project was started in June 2010 with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and The Tor Project collaborating on creating the extension which has been refined and tuned over the past year with an improved UI and better performance.
Mozilla’s mission is to bring openness, interoperability and user sovereignty to Internet life. We should do this in the apps world. We should embrace some aspects of the current app model as a complement to the browser model. We should also provide an alternative to aspects of the current app model that aren’t so open to interoperability and user sovereignty.
So you wanted to play with hadoop to crunch on some big-data problems, except that, well getting a hadoop cluster up and running in not exactly a one minute thing! Let me show you how to make it “a one minute thing” using Ensemble! Since Ensemble now has formulas for creating hadoop master and slave nodes, thanks to the great work of Juan Negron. Spinning up a hadoop cluster could not be easier! Check this video out
Distributed infrastructures for enterprise search and indexing are becoming the norm, but what can small businesses do?
Hadoop, HDFS and the MapReduce algorithm are becoming as popular as searching for celebrity gossip, and this surge in interest says a lot about the changing nature of enterprise infrastructure and data and application requirements.
We all know that search engines and databases have completely different requirements. With most databases, you have a single persistent copy of the data that is backed up and can be restored. With search engines – Google’s MapReduce technology is the basis of Hadoop – much of the data is often transient and can be re-collected.
Percona, a MySQL consulting and support company, has announced that it will run a MySQL conference in the traditional location, Santa Clara, and at the traditional time, 10-12 April 2012. There had been a lack of clarity, according to Percona, as to whether anyone was planning a MySQL conference, so, after several months of planning, it has announced the “Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo”.
I have already written about BSD-based systems several times. I reviewed FreeSBIE and PCBSD.
They were system based on XFCE and KDE. These are more or less modern looking operating systems. Could I imaging myself back into 1990s when I was downloading another BSD-based system?
The NHS technology environment could be described as a giant hairball – a Gordian knot of past policies, established practices, new initiatives and government objectives and an ever changing landscape of opportunity from new technology.* Openness, in all its many forms, offers a way to escape from the hairball.
Openness comes in many forms: open source, open standards, open data, open publishing – the list goes on. Openness is growing. Open source and open standards are in the ICT strategy documents of the Cabinet Office, the Welsh Government and in some form in the NHS IT Strategy too.
Coincidentally, a few days before my dad’s diagnosis, I published a study which found that cancer datasets are less likely to be widely available for further research than similar datasets outside cancer.
Server-side developers have long experienced the benefits of automated testing solutions, taking advantage of testing frameworks such as RSpec for Ruby, PHPUnit for PHP, and JUnit for Java. If you fall into this crowd but are starting to spend more time with JavaScript, chances are you’re fretting over how to apply similar techniques on the client (or or server!) side. Not to worry, as several interesting JavaScript testing frameworks exist, perhaps chief among them Jasmine, a popular open source behavior-driven development framework.
With Google, Pandora, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Vudu, and even Microsoft embracing HTML5, these are exciting times for vendors, developers and consumers
Apple and a group of book publishers were accused in a lawsuit today of illegally fixing e-book prices to “boost profits and force e-book rival Amazon to abandon its pro-consumer discount pricing.”
The lawsuit (PDF), which was filed today in U.S. District Court in Northern California, alleges Apple, HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group, and Simon & Schuster “colluded to increase prices” on popular books. (Simon & Schuster is owned by CBS. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)
By combining a clever physical interface with computer-vision algorithms, researchers in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences have created a simple, portable imaging system that can achieve resolutions previously possible only with large and expensive lab equipment. The device could provide manufacturers with a way to inspect products too large to fit under a microscope and could also have applications in medicine, forensics and biometrics.
The heart of the system, dubbed GelSight, is a slab of transparent, synthetic rubber, one of whose sides is coated with a paint containing tiny flecks of metal. When pressed against the surface of an object, the paint-coated side of the slab deforms. Cameras mounted on the other side of the slab photograph the results, and computer-vision algorithms analyze the images.
Officially, Adobe’s current update for Flash Player has closed only 13 holes, but unofficially it is said to have closed several hundred. Security specialist Tavis Ormandy, who works for Google, claims that he discovered 400 holes and notified Adobe of them. The specialist has now complained that, while the holes have been closed, they haven’t been mentioned in the official advisory, and he hasn’t been given credit for their discovery.
I hate broken links, so I try to avoid linking to The Globe and Mail, for instance, because they started locking older articles behind a paywall. That deliberately breaks links that work when I post the article [unless the reader pays ransom].
I am quite certain that I’ve linked to Wikipedia more than any other website, and so I worry because deleted Wikipedia articles will result in broken links.
Broken links are bad for blogs, and while online news outlets often don’t understand this, Wikipedia ought to. As a blogger, when I link to something, I expect it to stay there. As an Internet user, it is annoying to follow a link to get more information, only to discover that the original article has been removed. The only time any Wikipedia entry should be deleted is if it is fraudulent.
The Wikipedia page Death of Mark Duggan is flagged for deletion. There is a huge argument raging about whether or not Mark Duggan’s death is notable.
The group is reacting to the networking firm’s earlier announcement that it would help the Chinese government build up an extensive camera surveillance network in Chongqing. This, as well as its assistance in building the Great Firewall of China, should give it enough leverage to convince its new friend to stop abusing its citizens’ human rights.
“This is the same company that sold equipment to China to build the Great Firewall, which prevents Chinese Internet users from accessing much of the Internet, including online references to the Tiananmen Square protests, information on China’s human rights abuses, and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter,” wrote the EFF’s Jillian York in a blog post.
One of the two houses of the Indian Parliament, Rajya Sabha, has decided go for the paperless office. The house is adopting tablet PCs instead of papers. The members will be using either the iPad 2 or the Samsung Galaxy Tab, according to reports.
Should Indian parliament even consider Apple’s iPad? No. Apple is an American company and the iPad uses proprietary technologies to which Indians will not have any access. The ministers will have to use Apple’s iTunes software to transfer data to the iPad – which means Apple will have access to all the ministerial and governmental data, without informing the Indian government.
Chances are that these ministers may also use the iCloud, and as we know since Apple is an American company, all the data on the cloud will be accessible by the US authorities. Apple will hand over that data if the US government demands so.
In an age where business dominates our governments and writes our laws, every technological advance offers business an opportunity to impose new restrictions on the public. Technologies that could have empowered us are used to chain us instead.
Harming the United States and even the entire world with monopolistic practices
Summary: The OIN grows further, providing somewhat of a defence against Microsoft’s patent cartels but not against its patent trolls, notably Intellectual Ventures (IV)
AS THE patent storm looms over more and more companies, the OIN grows bigger, pooling together an arsenal of Linux proponents that do not oppose software patents (some are actually proponents of software patents).
The latest additions are the former home of Patent Troll Tracker and also Twitter, which routinely complains about software patents. To quote SJVN:
In case you’ve been under a rock for the last decade, you might not know that today’s technology wars aren’t over who has the best prices, the most features, or the greatest quality. No, in 2011, instead of working on innovating, tech. giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle, are now wasting their resources on intellectual property (IP) lawsuits. So, perhaps it should come as no surprise that networking powerhouse Cisco and social networking force Twitter, is joining the Linux patent protection group, the Open Invention Network (OIN).
The problem with OIN is that it is not effective against trolls as it cannot strike back against them to deter or to eliminate/defuse an attack.
There is this good new article about patent trolls “in all shapes and sizes”. It also covers the cartel of Microsoft’s patent troll, IV. To quote: “In recent months, especially following a widely praised piece from This American Life on Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures, many outside the tech sector are becoming aware of the nightmare the software patent system in America has created for start-ups, inventors and even major corporations—an unfortunate development in a faltering economy where new jobs are scarce and much-needed.”
Those who benefit from software patents are lawyers, their clients, and the patent trolls. “But many of the investors and founders Betabeat spoke with said patent litigation was a costly expense,” alleges Betabeat, “one that forced tech companies to spend money on lawyers instead of hiring even more employees. “We need to face the facts: patent law is killing job creation,” wrote billionaire tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban over the weekend. “If the current administration wants to improve job creation, change patent law and watch jobs among small technology companies develop instantly.”
“And it’s not just small start-ups that are feeling the pinch. Big firms like Microsoft and I.B.M. have built up massive war chests of patents and now have as much interest in protecting the dysfunctional system as reforming it, even if Microsoft founder Bill Gates once said that “if people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.””
Well, ironically he bankrolled the world’s biggest patent troll, IV. It sometimes seems like the proprietary software cartel plans to collude against Free software not just using patent pools but also patent trolls.
Now AFAICS the main point of Apples complaint centers around the uniqueness of its design, which they registered in the US, europe and a few other places too (and trust me, if they could they would do it for the whole galaxy and all possible parallel universes).
Well, Apple’s tablet is not so different from CrunchPad/JooJoo which predates the iPad (there are even examples from the 1970s). There is a lot more prior art. Here is Apple’s itch and aggressive action, which we wrote about twice before, emphasising that Apple has become a shameless embargo company. Apple cultists are already criticising Techrights for ‘daring’ to criticise Apple for these actions.
The solution is probably to redesign the legal system associated with patents. In Yahoo! News there is currently this article calling for the end of all patents, not just software patents. Quoting the opening parts:
Apple just got an Android tablet called the Samsung Galaxy Tab banned in Australia and Europe, thanks to its supposed infringements of Apple patents. Apple’s also trying to get all Android smartphones and tablets made by HTC banned, and it’s taking potshots at the Motorola Xoom as well. All three companies are firing back with their own countersuits, giving the whole proceedings the feel of global nuclear armageddon.
How did this happen? Aren’t patents supposed to encourage innovation? I grew up being taught that inventors like Thomas Edison raced to discovery, so that they could file a patent on it. I never imagined a world where patents would be used as weapons of war, but that’s what it’s come to these days.
Here’s why the patent system as we know it is broken, and why we need to get rid of it now:
Maybe it’s only a matter of time before the US patent system revises its workings or simply collapses. If this is how business is done now, then the US will lose its ability to compete with the rest of the world. The problem is that these American multinationals also lobby to export their laws to other continents and countries, using lobbying and other forms of bribery (see what happens in New Zealand for example). There was no reason to embargo Galaxy products without hearing the other side of the story (e.g. about prior art) and this is clearly not a case of counterfeiting; no Android-based product bears an Apple logo, except maybe in rogue, unofficial markets.
Linux is winning, so Microsoft and Apple fight hard. █
Summary: Reflections on the patent deal’s transition from Novell to SUSE and what we should do in order to prevent Microsoft from taxing GNU/Linux
THERE are serious problems in SUSE not just because it fell deeper into Microsoft’s arms (see our SUSE-Microsoft deal coverage) but also because it fails technically for some. As we showed the other day, a lot of the talented developers and managers left, putting the project/company in the hands of Microsoft-friendly people. Outside the circles of SUSE, there does not seem to be much progress as there are hardly any new releases, just security releases addressing security problems [1, 2, 3, 4].
Novell’s PR team was almost entirely decimated based on the activity (or lack thereof) in the respective blogs and the scarcity of new promotional videos. There is this newly-uploaded one with Geeko in it, perhaps symbolising the company’s shift to Microsoft-taxed distro as a business model.
“Over 200 of the openSUSE Members voted, with 90% in favor of the current strategy document,” says the OpenSUSE new site, but did the OpenSUSE community get to vote regarding that recent deal with Microsoft? Or as Groklaw recently put it, did the community get involved in the press releases and blog posts from Novell’s PR blog when it speaks on behalf of SUSE? Of course not. The control by a ‘community’ is merely an illusion. Now that the deal with Microsoft binds SUSE rather than Novell, we do call for a boycott of SUSE. Novell is no more. We’ll close with this new autotuned video of Novell because it is quite neat and merely a remnant of a now-defunct company. █
A look at some of the latest spin and the latest shaming courtesy of the patent microcosm, which behaves so poorly that one has to wonder if its objective is to alienate everyone
In defiance of common sense and everything that public officials or academics keep saying (European, Australian, American), China's SIPO and Europe's EPO want us to believe that when it comes to patents it's "the more, the merrier"
The problem associated with Battistelli's strategy of increasing so-called 'production' by granting in haste everything on the shelf is quickly being grasped by patent professionals (outside EPO), not just patent examiners (inside EPO)
Free/Open Source software in the currency and trading world promised to emancipate us from the yoke of banking conglomerates, but a gold rush for software patents threatens to jeopardise any meaningful change or progress
To nobody's surprise, the past half a decade saw accelerating demise in quality of European Patents (EPs) and it is the fault of Battistelli's notorious policies
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)
I passed the midterm evaluation, and the final evaluation is approaching. So what do we have in the store?
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