IANAL, but ... I don't see the patent as being the property. I see the original idea as being the property (if anything is). The Patent is a right granted by society on certain terms. Society can dictate those terms. To put in real property terms it may be more like you have a river or stream flowing through your property. The stream may in fact be yours while it is inside your boundaries, but the state has the right to dictate how you use the water, by setting quotas or not allowing you to divert it to the detriment of people downstream etc.

Better communication leads to better understanding. The original tower of Babel story, is that mankind was punished by being divided by many languages.
True a dangerous enemy can unite a tribe, but it is much easier to paint an unknown group as dangerous than one that you can communicate with.
Witness the story of the first world war where the Allied and German rank and file started exchanging Christmas gifts and singing carols. This so scared the officers (on both sides?) that they deliberately broke the truce by starting a shelling campaign. It is harder to paint someone as evil and dangerous when the rank and file can check the propaganda for themselves.

How do you propose to log into a website with your fingerprint? Put it on the reader and send it to the website? Unencrypted? Oh Oh now instead of just a password compromised, if it is intercepted, your fingerprint is out there for anyone to use
And what makes you think the websites will be any more diligent about safeguarding your fingerprint (or the encrypted version thereof) than they are about safeguarding your password (or an encrypted version thereof)?

Using biometrics as a 'login' device is an insanely crazy idea. The only reason people are sort of accepting it is because the flaws have not been exposed by the constant attacks of millions of cyber criminals.
Once your digitized fingerprint or face has been stolen you are in a world of trouble, worse than if your Equifax data were stolen.

If MS released the GVFS under an Open Source License, then MAYBE their recent posturing re Open Source and Linux has some sincerity to it.
If they did not then it is probably more Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
softcodeer

I get SOOOOO annoyed at these hardware announcements from micro to super computer that make no mention of the OS to be used.
If ASUS will only support Windows on this board, then what is the price point? Is Windows included?
If ASUS will be supporting Linux on this board, then why cant they support Linux on their OTHER Mobos, the desktop ones that are used for gaming, etc.
If they are not supporting ANY software then what community do they expect to step up? Martians?
softcoder

If you thought botnets of WebCams were bad, wait till you have botnets of hacked self driving vehicles. Sounds like something out of Stephen King!
And Ransomeware galore.
The mind boggles at what Organized Crime or Immigration 'Coyotes' can do with a fleet of hacked self driving vehicles.
Does no one else see this? I feel like Will Smith in 'i Robot', "Now we have Robots building robots. Wonderful!"

I am not an expert coder or sysadmin, but a quick read of SOLARIS SMF feature it would seem to address all the needs of a robust init system, without the many concerns of a too powerful/critical PID 1.
Since SMF is CDDL (I think), and an init process is not part of the kernel, why is it not possible to use a well developed and debugged (since 2006?) alternative to the legacy SYSV init method?
pgmer6809

The Conservancy seem to have glossed over this point. It is not obvious to me. If Canonical were to distribute two, CDs, tarballs, whatever, with Linux on one and ZFS.ko on the other, with a script to load ZFS.ko at install time would _that_ be different?

How about if they distribute Ubuntu on one CD, the ZFS source on the other and a script that builds and loads ZFS.ko at install time? Would _that_ be legal?

If you can distribute linux with binary blob graphics drivers I don't see a big difference with a filesystem module.

softcoder

Yes and Transmeta were not particularly successful in spite of the promise the technology showed.

The in the story has a typo. It is not 50MW as stated, but 50KW.
Also the diagram on the page the link points to has the Anode emitting electrons (to go through the load) which are then collected by the Cathode.
I thought that it was the Cathode that emitted the electrons, which were then collected by the Anode.

You might investigate Project Gado.
A free open source robot for taking pictures of documents without exposing them to danger.
Not sure if it has all the software you want, but there is an open source community developing for it, the Univ of Finland seems to be the hub.

http://projectgado.org/2015/07...

I know that you asked for Open Source tools, but if others are going to propose Notepad and Microsoft products, let me mention Notecase Pro.
It comes in flavors for windows, Linux, and Mac. There are constant updates. There is a user community developing plugins. You can write in different fonts, with font colors and background colors. You can embed screenshots.
It is a hierarchical note manager. The price is reasonable, you can get a single user (any number of computers) perpetual license, or pay more and get a multiuser license.
It is not open source though.
pgmer6809

When I was learning Celestial Navigation, there were two sets of 'Almanacs' we had to use. One was the Nautical Almanac which gave the positions of the stars, the Sun and the Moon for each minute of each day of the year. These were issued every year by some National Observatory. The other set was just a cookbook of spherical trigonometry. Obviously you can program any modern calculator with the appropriate trig formulas so the Midshipmen would not have to waste time looking up those numbers in the books. I am pretty sure that with modern memory you could put the entire almanac for the year on a USB stick, and so you would not need to look up those numbers either. Add the two together and you can have a rugged, solar powered device that can do the calculations for you. Now all you need to do is get out your sextant and clock, take the sights, plug in the time, the readings and the corrections, and let the pocket calculator do the grunt work.
pgmer6809

There is no mention in the article of Sen Rand's filibuster opposing the bill.
I presume that when the article says that they could not get enough Republican votes they mean they did not get enough to override the filibuster?

(I'm Canadian and so not as knowledgeable about american political procedures as I could be.)

I have a recent 3800. I got it with Ubuntu, no Windows.Mine does not have the 4K screen. All the hardware I have tested works well with it, which is unusual for laptops in my experience.
The media keys work. Sleep/resume works. The camera works. It will boot in UEFI mode, secure boot ON of OFF (i.e it comes preloaded with a shim that allows secure boot). The trackpad works. Two finger scrolling works. Wireless works with no hassle. The RJ11/USB dongle works. Have not tested Thunderbolt.
I think Dell could have done a much better job with the documentation (there is none that is not Windows releated) and the startup screen where you install Ubuntu, has an 'EULA' that is obviously a Windows artifact (and probably illegal under the GPL). Further given that mine came with an SSD Dell could have fixed the fstab to make some of the filesystems as type "tmpfs".
But overall I am quite impressed and happy.
pgmer6809