Councilman Booted For His Farmville Obsession

Councilman Booted For His Farmville Obsession: "Bulgarian Dimitar Kerin won't have to decide if he should tend his crops or pay attention to Plovdiv City Council business anymore. The committee voted him off 20-19, saying that he obviously 'needs more time for his virtual farm.' From the article: 'Kerin was not alone in his obsession among council members. Council chairman Ilko Iliev had previously warned several of them that the new wireless network and laptops provided to all 51 council members were not to be used for playing games on social media sites during budget meetings. Kerin was singled out for continuing to manage his farm and milk his cows despite Iliev's warnings. '

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"

Amazon patents packaging surveillance, says it's for our own good

Amazon patents packaging surveillance, says it's for our own good: "

So here's the sales pitch: Amazon wants to film the packaging and preparation of your goods as they get ready to ship out in order to make sure your order is properly fulfilled and addressed. Stills or the whole video are then forwarded along to you, so you can check 'em out. Granted yesterday, the patent for this oh-so-complex monitoring system is actually quite specific -- it's only operative if your order includes 'at least one book, food item, bottle of wine, flowers, or jewelry,' so it's not like Amazon can keep everyone else from doing this -- but hey, it also references verification of 'collateral items,' which is a fancy way of saying it'll be used to make sure third party fliers and advertisements make it into the box along with the stuff you actually want, so it's not all roses and sunshine.



[Thanks, JagsLive]

Amazon patents packaging surveillance, says it's for our own good originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 09:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink CNET | USPTO | Email this | Comments"

Patents Roundup: Several Defeats for Bad Types of Patents, Apple Risks Embargo, and Microsoft Lobbies Europe Intensely

Patents Roundup: Several Defeats for Bad Types of Patents, Apple Risks Embargo, and Microsoft Lobbies Europe Intensely: "

Summary: News from around the world about government-approved monopolies on general banking methods, human genes, computers, and even mathematics (encoded in the form of algorithms)

BLOG POSTS have been very scarce and rare over the past few days because we rearrange the Web site to better fit our scope of coverage (Boycott Novell becomes just a subset). We kindly ask for some patience from readers. The logo above is only temporary as one contributor works on a permanent one.

So, what has happened all this time? The big story is about SCO (more on that later), but equally important there’s this old patent issue that Novell made worse when it signed the 2006 deal with Microsoft. The following post only looks at patents.

In Re Bilski (Business Method Patents)

Let’s begin with the impending ruling on Bilski — an important decision that has been escalated to the Supreme Court. From the EE Times we have:

The Supreme Court could issue a decision any day on a controversial case limiting business method and software patents. Legal experts expect the court will uphold the Bilski decision but may call for the Federal Circuit court broaden a test of what can be patentable it set in that case.

In 2008, the Federal Circuit Court upheld a decision from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejecting a 1997 patent application filed by Bernard Bilski on a business method for hedging financial trades. In its decision, the Federal court laid down a controversial test for any patent: it has to be tied to a device or transform something physical.

Gene Patents

How about patents on life? The encouraging news is that scope of patents seems to be narrowed rather than broadened now that gene patents may die, leading to the suspicion that invalidation of software patents in the United States is reachable (Bilski already shatters business method patents and sometimes software patents too).

There’s been an important development in the world of US patents:

Patents on genes associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer are invalid, ruled a New York federal court today. The precedent-setting ruling marks the first time a court has found patents on genes unlawful and calls into question the validity of patents now held on approximately 2,000 human genes.

That’s notable because it asserts definitively (well, subject to appeals) that genes are not patentable matter – overturning decades of practice. Here’s what the judge said on the issue:

Judge Sweet, however, ruled that the patents were “improperly granted” because they involved a “law of nature.” He said that many critics of gene patents considered the idea that isolating a gene made it patentable “a ‘lawyer’s trick’ that circumvents the prohibition on the direct patenting of the DNA in our bodies but which, in practice, reaches the same result.”

Note that it singles out “a ‘lawyer’s trick’ that circumvents the prohibition on the direct patenting of the DNA in our bodies but which, in practice, reaches the same result”. That’s interesting, because it is essentially the same technique that is used in the world of software patents.

Here is what ACLU had to say on the case:

Patents on genes associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer are invalid, ruled a New York federal court today. The precedent-setting ruling marks the first time a court has found patents on genes unlawful and calls into question the validity of patents now held on approximately 2,000 human genes. The ruling follows a lawsuit brought by a group of patients and scientists represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), a not-for-profit organization affiliated with Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Apple & Embargo

From Bloomberg we now learn that Apple gets hit with an embargo attempt similar to the one it tried to pull against Android/Linux when suing HTC [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. Irony at its best.

Elan Microelectronics Corp., a Taiwanese maker of chips and touch-screens, asked a U.S. trade agency to ban the import and sale of some Apple Inc. products, including the forthcoming iPad, because of alleged patent infringement.

Elan’s complaint filed yesterday with the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington claims Apple “knowingly and deliberately” used Elan’s technology, while continuing to introduce infringing products, the company claims in the complaint. The petition also seeks to ban imports of the iPhone and iPod Touch products, Elan said in the complaint.

“Our goal is to protect our technology and to stop sales of those products in the U.S.,” Dennis Liu, spokesman for Hsinchu, Taiwan-based Elan, said by phone today.

Microsoft & EIF

Earlier on we wrote about allegations (from a reliable source) that Microsoft had a “coup in process” at the European Commission [1, 2]. The head of the FSFE has responded to that as follows:

The European Commission started updating the EIF in 2006, and called for public comments in the summer of 2008. Then, the document was still very strong on Open Standards, and gave clear directions to the European member states that wanted their public sector IT to be more efficient and vendor-independent.

Until the Business Software Alliance (BSA) got its hands on it.

The Business Software Alliance is a lobby group of proprietary software vendors, backed above all by Microsoft. FSFE has prepared an overview page showing how the BSA’s demands are reflected in the latest draft of EIFv2.

[...]

In its current state, EIFv2 would do only one thing: Cement the vendor lock-in and network effects that are keeping too many public bodies from migrating to Free Software and Open Standards. FSFE is not the only group with serious concerns about the text. Open Forum Europe has written a strongly worded letter (.pdf) to Member States and the European Commission, calling for the document to be rejected.

There is also this article in German about the subject. Even the Document Freedom Web site could not help remarking on that.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Open Standards are a rather dull topic. Specifications are probably the most boring kind of reading known to man.Who will be able to read what you wrote? Who can you share documents with? Will you be able to read your own writings in the future, or will it all be locked into proprietary file formats developed by companies that have long since disappeared, leaving you sitting on a pile of digital toxic waste?

[...]

As far as we know, this sort of thing doesn’t sit well with everyone in the European Commission. DG INFSO appears to be under huge pressure from other DGs to remove the reference to Open Standards from the text, and make it less ambitious overall.

FSFE is active on both issues, talking to policy makers and calling public attention to the problem. What’s at stake here is the fate of Open Standards in Europe’s public sector in the coming years.

Open Invention Network (OIN) Grows

The patent pool that’s designed to protect Linux by hoarding patents just keeps growing with the addition of Guest-tek.

Open Invention Network (OIN), the company formed to enable and protect Linux, today extended the Linux ecosystem with the signing of Guest-tek™ as a licensee. By becoming a licensee, Guest-tek™ has joined the growing list of companies that recognize the importance of participating in a substantial community of Linux supporters and leveraging the Open Invention Network to further spur open source innovation.

Software Patents Suffer a Blow in New Zealand

A few months back we wrote about the terrifying possibility that New Zealand may authorise the patenting of software [1, 2, 3] (like Australia, for example). If the press from New Zealand (IDG in this case) is reporting accurately, then local supporters of Free software have been rather successful at defending their country’s software industry.

Open source software champions have been influential in excluding software from the scope of patents in the new Patents Bill.

Clause 15 of the draft Bill, as reported back from the Commerce Select Committee, lists a number of classes of invention which should not be patentable and includes the sub-clause “a computer program is not a patentable invention.”

“We received many submissions concerning the patentability of computer programs,” says the committee in the preamble to the Bill. “Under the Patents Act 1953, computer programs can be patented n New Zealand, provided they produce a commercially useful effect.

More here:

So, there you are. New Zealand MPs of all parties are to be congratulated on recognising, what to many, for many years, has been patently obvious. There are some members of that committee that paid particular attention to the detail of the debate, there were also lots of submissions made be patent lawyers in favour of patents.

The issue is also being discussed in Slashdot. The assessment from the FFII’s president, who looked at the “Patents Bill” draft, says concisely that New Zealand is “trying to exclude software patents, not an easy task, confused by the embedded software trick” (as posted in Twitter). █

"

Before and After

Before and After: "

Just tell the kids the emu’s sleeping.

Submitted by: dunno source via Submission Page

"

Shut Down Fail

Shut Down Fail: "

Shut Down Fail

Picture by: dunno source Submitted by: dunno source via Fail Uploader

"

Kompozer – Free Web Design Software To Whip Together Webpages

Kompozer – Free Web Design Software To Whip Together Webpages: "

While I love blogging, there are times when I just want to whip together a simple webpage straight out of HTML. Of course, there is a lot of basic HTML coding that you really don’t want to have to deal with over and over, such as creating tables, inserting images, creating forms and other common webpage components.

Sometimes it’s easier to make use of free web design software that can do all of that coding for you. In particular, I’d like to cover the free web authoring application called KompoZer. I like Kompozer because it’s a very small, lightweight application. While many people like the popular app Dreamweaver, it’s not free. And CoffeeCup is popular software too, but it’s a bit of a larger application than KompoZer. In the case of KompoZer, you could copy the files onto your memory stick and take it anywhere you want to go. Want to quickly whip up an HTML page, just launch the KomoZer executable and you’re good to go!

Free Web Design Software With Everything You Need

The first thing you’ll notice about KompoZer is that the user interface is very straightforward and easy to use. Everything is laid out on the main page, and what isn’t on the main page is well organized within the sub-menus for each object – like tables, forms and links. The entry screen is laid out into a site explorer pane and a composer pane, so your entire web design project stays well organized and within reach on one screen.

Of course, KompoZer wouldn’t be useful if it wasn’t up to Web 2.0 standards, but with the CSS Stylesheets wizard, you can create the style rules for your headers, paragraphs, text and other elements of your page without any knowledge of CSS scripting (although a bit of knowledge would help). Just select the element type you want to configure and create the rules on the various tabs – text, background, borders, etc.

For example, here I’m configuring all of my H3 headers to use the Arial font and medium font size. As you can see, the style configurations that you can make are detailed, and you don’t need to know a single lick of CSS code.

If you’re writing a webpage that’s set up like a typical blog entry, where you have a header image with text wrapped around it on the right, then you’ll need an easy way to import that image into a local directory that your webpage can refer to, as well as a simple way to format and insert the image with that formatting. Kompozer makes this process about as easy as it could possibly be with a single image configuration section.

When you browse to and select an image on your computer that you want to use in your webpage, it places a picture of that image in a local “Pictures” directory within the local folder that you’re working in (if you select to make the URL relative to page location). The screen has a field for alternative text, and even any popup “tooltip” that you’d like to include.

My favorite part of the image insertion process in Kompozer is the fact that I don’t have top open up the picture in an image editor in order to resize the way I would like. Kompozer has a built in area (much like Wordpress) where you can simply set the width and height – and bast of all a “Constrain” option so that your image doesn’t get warped.

The table wizard is insanely simple. While most web designers today focus on using CSS to format pages, tables still occasionally have a place when you want to quickly create in-page formatting. Once you’ve chosen the table type you want, configuring the table is a breeze on the table properties screen.

As a guy who has programmed some pretty complicated tables, I’m impressed by the ease with which you can just toss together a table with this software. Configure borders, alignment and other formatting choices in the tool and voila – your table is done! No complicated HTML code, and no trying to keep track of table, row and cell tags!

Forms are pretty simple to insert as well – but you’ll need to have an “action URL” that you can submit the form information to for processing. A form configuration wizard lets you choose from standard form elements – text fields, buttons, etc – in order to piece together your form on the page.

Once I finished creating my simple test page, the moment of truth for me was checking the code in the background. Doing so is as easy as selecting the “source” tab at the bottom of the screen. One of the reasons I’ve always avoided using free (or paid) web design software is that I would always have to deal with a terrible mess of code on the back end whenever I wanted to “tweak” anything. If you’ve ever seen the junk that Microsoft Word creates when you “save as HTML” then you know what I mean. However, clicking on “source” revealed the following code.

The first thing I noticed is how wonderfully clean and well formatted the code is. Only the basic scripting is included that will accomplish the configuration choices you selected for each object. As you can see, there’s no confusing HTML with the img code or with the table – it’s what you’d expect if someone had gone in and typed it up themselves. The formatting is also laid out in a way that’s easy to read and simple to follow.

Want to quickly see what your new web page looks like? Just click the “Preview” button at the bottom of the page and you get a preview of what it will look like in the web browser. Here is my page with an image, simple headers and an invisible table that I used to format and align text, seemingly in the middle of empty space. The preview looked exactly as I laid out on the page in the design view, no alteration of spacing or weird indents – the sort of things I became accustomed to, and frustrated with, in the old versions of FrontPage (a nightmare web editor!)

All in all, I think I’ve fallen in love with Kompozer. There are times when I put together very fast and simple web pages for new domains that I start up, and this tool allows the speed and flexibility to create some well designed websites utilizing CSS in a fraction of the time it would take to put together the code by hand.

Do you use any free web design software? Have you ever tried Kompozer? Share your insight in the comments section below.

Follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Includes cool extras.

Similar MakeUseOf Articles

• The Best Freeware To Do An Easy Wordpress Auto Install (22 comments)


• iWeb – Build A Quick, Easy & Beautiful Website [Mac only] (35 comments)


• 2 Websites With The Coolest Free Web Page Templates (13 comments)


• Top 7 Easy and Free Web Hosting Services (162 comments)


• Top 4 Web Tools to Create Free Websites Instantly (32 comments)


• Top 10 Professional Sample Code Websites For Programmers (35 comments)


• Preview a Web Page in Multiple Browsers with BrowserShots (7 comments)


• How To Install Firebug on IE, Safari, Chrome & Opera (38 comments)


• How To Create An RSS Feed For Your Site From Scratch (7 comments)


• Flavorsme – Create Your Own Free Personalized Webpage (19 comments)

"