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Patents

NZ Draft Bill Rules Out Software Patents 194

Korgan writes "In what must be a first in the face of ACTA and US trade negotiations pressure, a Parliamentary select committee has released a draft bill that explicitly declares that software will no longer be patentable in New Zealand. FTA: 'Open source software champions have been influential in excluding software from the scope of patents in the new Patents Bill. Clause 15 of the draft Bill, as reported back from the Commerce Select Committee, lists a number of classes of invention which should not be patentable and includes the sub-clause "a computer program is not a patentable invention."'"

Comment Re:Dumb Government Abuse of Power (Score 1) 819

I don't think you've actually read that Wikipedia article. The authors of that book seem to follow slipperly-slope logic and confuse correlation and causation. The critics section contains information on studies which dispute your claim and appear to be more credible, offering more plausible explanations. Also, screw the neighbors. Some things are more important to money, and the way this neighbourhood association is treating people who care more about their children than money is completely ridiculous.

Comment Re:Step 1. (Score 1) 1197

This should not be +1 insightful. Suggesting the health care system in Canada prioritizes the young is absolutely ridiculous. Almost all procedures in Canada are performed in a timely manner. No one waits until they die. The more serious the matter is, the sooner it gets treated. There are examples of rarer diseases that do take longer to treat due to lack of specialist care (I mean the pop. density is much lower outside of southern Ontario / Quebec) and thus travel is often necessary to find a specialist (I suspect this is part of the reason that Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams had to go outside of his province (and country) to get treatment), however, they certainly don't make you wait until you die.

Comment Re:Son of WGA (Score 1) 819

The reason is because its a lot harder to make an illegal copy of a house or a car. Has anyone ever thought that people in business might want to make sure that the copies of Windows they have on their machines are valid and thus would want to install this patch to ensure it. I know if I was running a business and had a software audit that I'd want to make sure everything was legit.
Robotics

When Will AI Surpass Human Intelligence? 979

destinyland writes "21 AI experts have predicted the date for four artificial intelligence milestones. Seven predict AIs will achieve Nobel prize-winning performance within 20 years, while five predict that will be accompanied by superhuman intelligence. (The other milestones are passing a 3rd grade-level test, and passing a Turing test.) One also predicted that in 30 years, 'virtually all the intellectual work that is done by trained human beings ... can be done by computers for pennies an hour,' adding that AI 'is likely to eliminate almost all of today's decently paying jobs.' The experts also estimated the probability that an AI passing a Turing test would result in an outcome that's bad for humanity ... and four estimated that probability was greater than 60% — regardless of whether the developer was private, military, or even open source."
Government

80% of .gov Web Sites Miss DNSSEC Deadline 79

netbuzz writes "Eighty percent of US federal agencies — including the Department of Homeland Security — have missed a deadline to deploy DNS Security Extensions, a new authentication mechanism designed to prevent hackers from hijacking Web traffic. The deadline that whooshed by was Dec. 31, 2009. Experts disagree as to whether this level of deployment represents a failure or reasonable progress toward meeting a mandate set by the Office of Management and Budget in the summer of 2008. OMB officials declined to say why the agency hasn't enforced the DNSSEC deadline for executive branch departments."

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