20 Jan 2005
Cigar nation faces smoking curbs

What's next? Will Scotland demand that all whiskey be blended, diluted or served on the rocks? But really, this move by Cuba doesn't surprise me - tightly controlling and regulating individual freedom is endemic in totalitarian societies. Just look at New York and California.

Cigar-producing Cuba says a ban on smoking in some public places will come into force in February.

(link) [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

00:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Google, Cisco fail to win patent reform bid

Get this:

The justices on Tuesday refused to hear a hotly contested patent case involving drive shafts of "substantially uniform wall thickness" that pitted American Axle and Manufacturing against Dana Corp.

So they let a ruling from an appeals court stand, saying that "thickness" is a patentable attribute - despite the fact of different design and materials.

This has huge implications for software patents, because it basically allows the patenting of an effect, rather than an inventive cause. Intellectual property lawyers routinely target these so-called "copycat" patents. If my software does the same thing as your code, and your code is patented, I could be held liable for infringment even though the code is completely different! This really could kill the goose laying all those golden eggs in Silicin Valley: any programmer will tell you there's a nearly unlimited number of ways to code a sort (or anything else, for that matter), but all could be construed as illegal if some company managed to get a patent on "substantially uniform sorting parameters" or some other such baloney.

Companies couldn't convince Supreme Court to hear a case they argue is key to preserving a "balanced" patent system.

(link) [CNET News.com]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

Nazis 'gassed Hitler's relative'

How ironic. So mental illness ran in Hitler's family ... I never would've guessed.

A member of Adolf Hitler's own family was killed in the Nazi campaign to wipe out the mentally ill, historians say.

(link) [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

00:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link