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Submission + - EU central court could validate software patents (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by protoshell
protoshell writes: "Software patents in Europe could be validated with a central patent court", warns Richard Stallman in an article published in the Guardian. After the rejection of the software patent directive in 2005, large companies has shifted their lobbying towards the validation of software patents in Europe through a central patent court, which is foreseen with the Unitary Patent project. Even if the European Patent Convention literally excludes software from patents, the European Patent Office and the German courts interprets the exclusion narrowly, which makes software patents valid at the end.
Caldera

Novell Wins vs. SCO 380

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-wait-a-minute dept.
Aim Here writes "According to Novell's website, and the Salt Lake Tribune, the jury in the SCO v. Novell trial has returned a verdict: Novell owns the Unix copyrights. This also means that SCO's case against IBM must surely collapse too, and likely the now bankrupt SCO group itself. It's taken 7 years, but the US court system has eventually done the right thing ..." No doubt this is the last we will ever hear of any of this.
Space

Planck Mission Releases Images of Galactic Dust 40

Posted by Soulskill from the break-out-the-galactic-pledge dept.
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)."
Patents

Is Microsoft About To Declare Patent War On Linux? 204

Posted by Soulskill from the looking-for-an-excuse dept.
Glyn Moody writes "Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, has just published a piece called 'Apple v. HTC: A Step Along the Path of Addressing IP Rights in Smartphones.' In it, he notes that today's smartphones are all about the 'software stack,' not the 'radio stack,' and that 'as the IP situation settles in this space and licensing takes off, we will see the patent royalties applicable to the smartphone software stack settle at a level that reflects the increasing importance software has as a portion of the overall value of the device. In the interim, though, we should expect continued activity.' That 'activity' obviously means lawsuits against those producing those software stacks, and Gutierrez seems to be hinting strongly that Microsoft intends to join in. So where does that leave all the Linux-based stacks such as the increasingly-popular Android? Is this just a clever way for Microsoft to start a patent war on Linux without appearing to do so?"
Education

PA Laptop Spying Inspires FSF Crowdsourcing Effort 135

Posted by timothy from the inspiration-comes-from-many-places dept.
holmesfsf writes "Creeped out by the Lower Merion School District's remote monitoring of students? Check out the Free Software Foundation's response to the laptop spying scandal and help build a wiki listing of school districts that provide students with laptops, so that the FSF can campaign against mandatory, proprietary laptops."
Mozilla

Firefox Faster In Wine Than Native 493

Posted by timothy from the that-sounds-hard-to-swallow dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Tuxradar did some benchmarks comparing Firefox's Windows and Linux JavaScript performance. 'We did some simple JavaScript benchmarks of Firefox 3.0 using Windows and Linux to see how it performed across the platforms — and the results are pretty bleak for Linux.' Later on, they tried Wine. 'The end result: Firefox from Mozilla or from Fedora has almost nil speed difference, and Firefox running on Wine is faster than native Firefox.'"
The Courts

Pirate Bay Operators Stand Trial On Monday 664

Posted by timothy from the stay-warm-date-a-swede dept.
Anonymous Pirate writes "Operators of The Pirate Bay stand trial on Monday in Stockholm. The four defendants from the popular file-sharing web site are charged with being accessories to breaking copyright law and may face fines or up to two years in prison if found guilty. The four defendants have run the site since 2004 after it was started in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån. The Swedish public service television announced that they are going to send a live audio stream from the trial. It will be broadcast without editing or translation."
Security

The Real Risks of Obama's BlackBerry 273

Posted by timothy from the for-certain-values-of-real dept.
An anonymous reader writes "When the mainstream media first announced Barack Obama's 'victory' in keeping his BlackBerry, the focus was on the security of the device, and keeping the US president's e-mail communications private from spies and hackers. The news coverage and analysis by armchair security experts thus far has failed to focus on the real threat: attacks against President Obama's location privacy, and the potential physical security risks that come with someone knowing the president's real-time physical location. In this article, a CNET blogger digs into the real risks associated with the President carrying around a tracking device at all times."
Medicine

Court Rules Autism Not Caused By Childhood Vaccine 1056

Posted by timothy from the thanks-court dept.
wiredog writes "From The Washington Post comes word that three special masters have decided that MMR vaccines do not cause autism. 'Special master George Hastings said the parents ... had "been misled by physicians who are guilty, in my view, of gross medical misjudgment." ... "the evidence advanced by the petitioners has fallen far short of demonstrating ... a link."'
United States

Iowa Seeks To Remove Electoral College 1088

Posted by CmdrTaco from the not-cancelling-their-caucus-i-bet dept.
Zebano writes "Since changing the US constitution is too much work, the Iowa senate is considering a bill that would send all 7 of Iowa's electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote in a presidential election. This would only go into affect after enough states totaling 270 electoral votes (enough to elect a president) adopted similar resolutions."
Social Networks

A Quantitative Study of How Memes Spread 219

Posted by CmdrTaco from the please-no-more-25-things dept.
rememberclifford writes "A survey of about 3,000 people who were tagged in a '25 Random Things About Me' note on Facebook found that memes spread through social networks in a remarkably similar way as diseases do. A biologist who looked at the data says that '"25 Things" authors can be seen as "contagious" under what's known as a "susceptible-infected-recovered" model for the spread of disease,' with a propagation factor of 0.27 in this case. But like an infection, the whole thing died out as quickly as it exploded once the number of 'victims' — people who were willing to write 25 things about themselves — was depleted." The '25 Things' meme was at least as annoying as a light flu.
United States

Submission + - Help Find Steve Fossett (avweb.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: DigitalGlobe, one of Google's imaging partners, as acquired new high-resolution satellite imagery of the area where adventurer Steve Fossett disappeared on Monday. Using the Amazon Mechanical Turk, the public can now, go through this imagery and quickly flag any images which might contain Fossett's plane. Images which are flagged will receive further review by Search and Rescue experts.
Microsoft

Submission + - ISO says "No" to Microsoft's OOXML standar (noooxml.org)

Submitted by qcomp
qcomp writes: The votes are in and Microsoft has lost for now, reports the FFII's campaign website OOXML. The 2/3 majority needed to proceed with the fast-track standarization has not been achieved. Now the standard will head to the ballot resolution meeting to address the hundreds of technical commentsa submitted along with the "no" (as well as some "yes" votes.

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