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Businesses

When Patents Attack — the NPR Version 87

fermion writes "This American Life is running a story this week on Intellectual Ventures, a firm some consider the leader of the patent trolls. The story delves into the origins of the term patent troll and the rise of the patent troll industry. Much time is spent presenting Intellectual Ventures both as a patent troll firm and a legitimate business that allows helpless inventors to monetize patents. It is stipulated that Intellectual Ventures does not in fact sue anyone. It is also alleged that Intellectual Ventures creates many shell companies, presumably to hide such activity. Intellectual Ventures is compared to a Mafia protection racket that may never actually burn down a business that does not pay the dues, but does encourage such burning to occur."
Communications

Could PSTN Go Away By 2018? 305

An anonymous reader writes "If current rates hold, only 6% of the U.S. population will still be served by the public switched telephone network by the end of 2018. Tom Evslin reports that the 'Technical Advisory Council (TAC) to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recommended last week that the FCC set a date certain for the sunset of the PSTN rather than let the service fade slowly into oblivion as it is doing now.' Since doing 'nothing' isn't really possible, he suggests: (possibly) end(ing) the Universal Service Fund subsidies, ensuring PSTN-dependent services like E911 work on new technologies, and assuring that everyone who now has PSTN service has access to either a broadband or cellular communication alternative."
Open Source

Linux 2.6.37 Released 135

diegocg writes "Version 2.6.37 of the Linux kernel has been released. This version includes SMP scalability improvements for Ext4 and XFS, the removal of the Big Kernel Lock, support for per-cgroup IO throttling, a networking block device based on top of the Ceph clustered filesystem, several Btrfs improvements, more efficient static probes, perf support to probe modules, LZO compression in the hibernation image, PPP over IPv4 support, several networking microoptimizations and many other small changes, improvements and new drivers for devices like the Brocade BNA 10GB ethernet, Topcliff PCH gigabit, Atheros CARL9170, Atheros AR6003 and RealTek RTL8712U. The fanotify API has also been enabled. See the full changelog for more details."

Comment Re:Right (Score 1) 280

Exactly. When I saw the title, the first that hit me is that these two characteristics are states of mind, not a whole person. I could be narcissistic one day, and have low self esteem another day (although, wouldn't that also be characterized as a depression? ;). Most people on my FB page are just using it for games, or the occasional funny link they found. Not everybody takes it to the South Park level of commitment.

Comment Re:Opera! (Score 2, Insightful) 261

Exactly, and furthermore Mozilla and Opera have had the same struggle for a fan base in the same period. Mozilla not only did good marketing, but they also managed to create a browser, that people really wanted to use (Opera just is to weird for some people, like me, although I liked Opera Mini on my old Symbian phone).

Comment Re:It's not ending... (Score 1) 549

Sure, but where are the games for them?

I though the same thoughts when I bought my PS3 some years ago, but mainly being a strategy player, it doesn't fulfill my needs (always simplified games, with a control scheme for hardcore console users). I used mouse and keyboard since Amiga 500 for gaming, and I really like the immersion, but I do understand those who only grew up with PS1-2-Xbox, wanting something for their needs as well.
Java

Thoughts On the State of Web Development 253

rmoskal recommends his blog post up at Most Media on finding the right level of abstraction, Grails, and SOFEA. "[Three years ago] I was very excited about Apache Wicket as the way to develop line of business applications with a domain model, CRUD [create-read-update-delete] screens for maintaining the model, and in the most interesting cases, doing something else useful besides. I still like Wicket. It has, as its website says, a small conceptual surface area.' It reminds me of Python in that 'You try something it usually just works.' In many respects, though, Wicket seems to be at the wrong level of abstraction for the for the sorts of line-of-business applications described above. If your team is spending any time at all writing code to produce listing, filtering, and sorting behavior, not to mention creating CRUD screens and the back-end logic for these operations, they are probably working at the wrong level of abstraction. ... Recently I did a small project using Grails and was quite pleased. Grails uses groovy, a dynamic language compatible with Java, and is based on the proven technologies that I know and love well: Spring, Hibernate, SiteMesh, Maven, etc. ... I get all the power of the Java ecosystem without the fustiness and lack of expressivity of the core language (no more getters and setters, ever!)."

Comment Re:Still consuming (Score 1) 496

It is not like (some) Asian cultures are the only one to put bread in the context of cake. When I grew up in southern Denmark, white bread literally is called cake (though, it might be because white bread was considered a "rich man food" in the past, and not because of the concentrated carbs).

Comment Re:Its like 1000's of customers cried out (Score 4, Informative) 282

I don't know how they are doing it in the UK, but already several European countries (e.g. Denmark, Germany) also charges for an Internet connection as well. They actually found a way to tax access to the Internet, with the reason that you have the possibility to use the state radio/television online services. Many have been wondering if binoculars will be next (watching TV from your neighbor could be a possibility of use as well).

Comment Re:Queue . . . (Score 1) 542

After reading Gary Taubes "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and this I fully agree with you. I am thinking about trying the paleo diet, to compensate with some athletics (running as if it was "the hunt"), but my addiction to sugar is still at large (though, I have cut down on starches a lot).

When I was a child, soda was something you would get at a birthday party, maybe every 2nd month, but today most people I know drink at least a can of soda every day. And diet coke isn't much better (I am also aspartam intolerant, hurray :P), since it makes your stomach believe that you are hungry.
Space

Planck Mission Releases Images of Galactic Dust 40

davecl writes "The Planck satellite has released its first new science images, showing the large scale filamentary structure of cold dust in our own galaxy. This release coincides with the completion of its first survey of the entire sky a couple of weeks ago. There's lots more work to be done, and more observations to be made, before results are ready on the Big Bang, but these images demonstrate Planck's performance and capability. More information is available on the Planck mission blog (which I maintain)."

Comment Re:I'm with Nokia (Score 1) 294

Somewhat :) When the owner of Ikea got tired of Swedish taxes (1960/70s I think), he moved the company to Denmark. Denmark later on also went on the same boat with outrageous taxation, and he moved again. I guess Switzerland is probably the best place to be in Europe, if you are evading taxes (if you're rich enough, you can negotiate your own tax-rate with the local government). Placing the company in the EU, it is in a good position to the internal market.

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