Cody Taylor

I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “Lawyer Scott Harris, one of the inventors of the concept of a ‘marketing company devoted to selling/marketing products produced by other companies in return for a share of their profits,’ is appealing the USPTO’s rejection of US Patent Application No. 09/387,823 which was intended to patent that ‘invention.’ This court action is important because it directly challenges the In Re Bilski ruling, which tightened the rules to get rid of most so-called ‘business method’ patents. One of Mr. Harris’s legal theories is that a ‘company is a physical thing, and as such analogous to a machine.’ If the name seems familiar, it’s because Mr. Harris has a long history of inventive legal maneuverings. I’m honestly surprised that SCO never tried to hire or sue him.”

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Owen Goss writes “Everyone is familiar with the story of the iPhone developer who spends two weeks of spare time making a game that goes on to make them hundreds of thousands of dollars. The reality is that with the App Store now hosting over 25,000 apps, the competition is fierce. While it’s true that a few select apps are making developers rich, the reality is that most apps don’t make a lot of money. In a blog post I take a hard look at the first 24 days of sales data for the first game, Dapple, from Streaming Colour Studios. The post reflects what is likely the norm for developers just getting into the iPhone development game.”

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Wolfram Alpha has been covered recently by everyone from ZDNet’s own Larry Dignan, to Techmeme, to Ars Technica, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and skepticism.

ColdWetDog writes “It’s not Sigourney Weaver tossing aliens about, but The Register has an interesting blurb about a real human-capable exoskeleton that looks pretty cool (Lockheed-Martin press release). Runs for three hours at 3 mph on internal batteries; max speed is 7 mph. Of course, no price is listed but I suppose if you have to ask you can’t afford it. Team this up with a Big Dog and you’ve got the ultimate high-tech cross-country team. Bring your own batteries. Or just wait for your jetpack to arrive.”

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David Gerard writes “The Microsoft Certified Partner model is: an MCP buys contracts from Microsoft and sells them to businesses as a three-year timed contract, payable in annual installments. Iceland’s economy has collapsed, so 1500 businesses have gone bankrupt and aren’t paying the fees any more. But Microsoft has told the MCPs: ‘Our deal was with you, not them. Pay up.’ The MCPs that don’t go bankrupt in turn are moving headlong to Free Software, taking most of the country with them. (Warning: link contains strong language and vivid imagery.)”

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Glyn Moody writes “Not content with snooping on all Internet activity, the UK government now wants to introduce changes to the contentious EU Telecoms Package, which will kill net neutrality in the EU: ‘Amendments to the Telecoms Package circulated in Brussels by the UK government, seek to cross out users’ rights to access and distribute Internet content and services. And they want to replace it with a “principle” that users can be told not only the conditions for access, but also the conditions for the use of applications and services. The amendments, if carried, would reverse the principle of end-to-end connectivity which has underpinned not only the Internet, but also European telecommunications policy, to date.’ To add to the irony, an accompanying text cuts and pastes from Wikipedia, without attribution.”

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supermehra writes “How do you move 300 desktops, locked down with Windows ADS Group Policies (GPO), over to Ubuntu desktop? We have tried Centrify, Likewise, Gnome Gconf, and the like. Of course, we evaluated SuSe Desktop Enterprise and RedHat Desktop. Samba 4.0 promises the server side, however nothing for desktop lockdown. And while gnome gconf does offer promise, no real tools for remotely managing 300 desktops running gnome + gconf exist. All the options listed above are expensive, in fact so expensive that it’s cheaper to leave M$ on! So while we’ve figured out the Office suite, email client, browser, VPN, drawing tools, and pretty much everything else, there seems to be no reasonable, open source alternative to locking down Linux terminals to comply with company policies. We’re not looking for kiosk mode — we’re looking for IT policy enforcement across the enterprise. Any ideas ladies & gentlemen?”

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A British physicist has revealed his plan to launch a new Internet search engine so powerful that one expert has suggested it “could be as important as Google”.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is supposed to balance the rights of copyright holders and online authors, while protecting Internet service providers from getting caught in the crossfire. But Google’s policy for handling DMCA notices seems to leave bloggers with scant hope of getting improperly removed content restored.

Several sources are reporting that in spite of LHC hype, Fermilab’s Tevatron has produced another feat for scientific discovery. Currently the world’s most powerful operating particle accelerator, the Tevatron has allowed researchers to observe a rare single Top Quark. “Previously, top quarks had only been observed when produced by the strong nuclear force. That interaction leads to the production of pairs of top quarks. The production of single top quarks, which involves the weak nuclear force and is harder to identify experimentally, has now been observed, almost 14 years to the day of the top quark discovery in 1995.”

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