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Comment: Nice idea... Won't happen. (Score 4, Insightful) 205

by Antony T Curtis (#39934989) Attached to: The Patent Mafia and What You Can Do To Break It Up

FWIW, this is my personal opinion:

It would never happen. Today's purpose of patents is different from when the concept was created. The use today is to prevent a small or single owner nimble upstart from usurping the business of an incumbent elephant and potentially gutting the cash cow of it's shareholders.

The aforementioned incumbents would fight tooth and nail, with large campaign contributions and gifts, to prevent such a law from ever passing.

Comment: Pointless (Score 3, Insightful) 311

by Antony T Curtis (#38591006) Attached to: Teachers Resist High-tech Push In Idaho Schools

The pointless application of technology just for the simple sake of technology seems a waste.

Now, a subject course where students have to buy and learn to program a $25 computer, no more expensive than a typical textbook, that would be a worthwhile application of technology in schools.

*sighs*

Oracle

Oracle RAC on RHEL6 and CentOS 6 ->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Oracle seems to be dragging its feet in certifying the Enterprise Linux 6 line (RHEL, CentOS, and similar) for use with its flagship database products even though Red Hat sent their certification information to Oracle months ago.

It would appear that some people aren't standing by idle awaiting a statement or official documentation, an Engineer from Dell has put together a nice piece on making Oracle RAC 11gR2 work with RHEL 6. Have a read over here."
Link to Original Source
Education

California State Senator Proposes Open-Source Text->

Submitted by bcrowell
bcrowell writes "Although former Governor Schwarzenegger's free digital textbook initiative for K-12 education was a failure, state senator Darrell Steinberg has a new idea for the state-subsidized publication of college textbooks (details in the PDF links at the bottom). Newspaper editorials seem positive.[1], [2].

It will be interesting to see if this works any better at the college level than it did for K-12, where textbook selection has traditionally been very bureaucratic. This is also different from Schwarzenegger's FDTI because Steinberg proposes spending state money to help create the books. The K-12 version suffered from legal uncertainty about the Williams case, which requires equal access to books for all students — many of whom might not have computers at home. At the symposium where the results of the FDTI's first round were announced, it became apparent that the only businesses interested in participating actively were not the publishers but computer manufacturers like Dell and Apple, who wanted to sell lots of hardware to schools."
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Science

Parasitic Fly Suspected Culprit in Bee's Colony Co->

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes "The latest proposed cause of colony collapse disorder has been published in PLOS ONE citing a 'new' parasitic fly that disorients bees who eventually die. Afterwards the larvae from the fly crawl out of the bee. It was accidentally stumbled upon by a professor collecting random dead bees as food for his mantis and leaving them alone long enough for the larva to 'hatch.' The published paper proposes this as the primary suspect as the bees seem to become disoriented and leave only to die off somewhere probably alone and not in clusters. This would explain why CCD has not resulted in bee graveyards surrounding hives. From the article, 'The parasitic fly lays eggs in a bee’s abdomen. Several days later, the parasitized bee bumbles out of the hives—often at night—on a solo mission to nowhere. These bees often fly toward light and wind up unable to control their own bodies. After a bee dies, as many as 13 fly larvae crawl out from the bee’s neck. The bees’ behavior seems similar to that of ants that are parasitized—and then decapitated from within—by other fly larvae from the Apocephalus genus.' What this means is that beekeepers can collect bees in a light trap at night and keep them in a jar to see if Apocephalus genus larvae emerge. Employ skepticism as Slashdot has reported on prior occasions that the confirmed culprit is anything from fungus to pesticide."
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He missed an invaluable opportunity to hold his tongue. -- Andrew Lang