An anonymous reader writes "The Debian Project is pleased to announce the availability of the Community Distribution Patent Policy FAQ, a document meant to educate Free Software developers, and especially distribution editors, about software patent risks. The FAQ has been prepared by lawyers at Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) at the request of and with input from the Debian Project. While the document does not constitute legal advice, it provides insights on dealing with software patents, which might be applicable to other community-driven Free Software distributions. The Debian Project maintains a critical stance towards software patents: we consider software patents a threat to Free Software and we believe they provide no advantages in promoting software innovation."

SpuriousLogic writes "There's been another delay in the schedule announced for getting the Large Hadron Collider switched back on — now it's September 2009, a year after it shut down due to a malfunction. Scientists had said they expected the $5.4B machine to be repaired by November 2008, but then pushed the date back to June 2009, before the latest delay."

Barence writes "The deplorable speed of British broadband connections has been revealed in the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, which show that 42.3% of broadband connections are slower than 2Mb/sec. More worryingly, the ONS statistics are based on the connection's headline speed, not actual throughput, which means that many more British broadband connections are effectively below the 2Mb/sec barrier. Better still, a separate report issued yesterday by Ofcom revealed that the majority of broadband users had no idea about the speed of their connection anyway."

An anonymous reader writes "I received a state university degree in Computer Science. After graduation, I immediately took jobs in QA to pay the bills while waiting for other opportunities, which of course turned out to be as naive as it sounds. I've been working QA for several years now and my resume does not show the right kind of work experience for programming. On the whole I'm probably no better as a a candidate than a CS graduate fresh out of college. But all of the job postings out in the real world are looking for people with 2-5 years of programming work experience. How do you build up those first 2 years of experience? What kinds of companies hire programmers with no prior experience?"

How Appealing reports that a court has struck down age verification requirements for porn sites, as a First Amendment violation. Here is the ruling (PDF). While the average reader here has never been to such a site, porn has been a driving force in the economics and technology of the Net. The age verification requirements of U.S.C. Title 18, Section 2257 were yet another attempt to regulate to death what the government can't outright prohibit. The requirements intruded on the privacy and safety of performers and created headaches for sites like flickr and photobucket that host images. It is has long been thought that the requirements wouldn't hold up in court, but this is the first actual ruling.