Loony alert!

Proving that there is no limit to stupidity and rapaciousness, some loony Russian woman is sueing NASA for $300 million for screwing up her astrological future by knocking a little tiny divot off a comet she probably wouldn't even have known was there if not for the news publicity over Deep Impact.  Her equally-loony lawyer claims that "The impact changed the magnetic properties of the comet, and this could have affected mobile telephony here on Earth."

Let's see you prove that claim in court, asshat.  We'll wait while you travel in person out to the comet to measure its changed magnetic field.  Better take REALLY sensitive instruments with you; neither water-ice nor methane are ferromagnetic materials.  Oh, by the way -- how long can you hold your breath?

The logic of children

Playing BrainQuest with Wen the Eternally Surprised, who just turned three.  The card has a picture of a table with only three legs instead of four.

Me:  "What's missing from this table?"

Wen:  "Chairs."

Well, she's right....

Because Johnny can't read

(Snagged from james_nicoll)

CBC reports that Toyota will be building a new 1,300-worker auto manufacturing plant in Woodstock, Ontario, starting in 2008, instead of in the US, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies offered by several US states.  Why?

"[Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association president Garry Fedchun] said Nissan and Honda have encountered difficulties getting new plants up to full production in recent years in Mississippi and Alabama due to an untrained - and often illiterate - workforce. In Alabama, trainers had to use "pictorials" to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech plant equipment."

Hey, is that the sound of pigeons coming home to roost that I hear?

Fedchun also commented that Ontario workers are $4 to $5 per hour cheaper to employ because they're covered by Canada's socialized healthcare system, instead of by the US morass of health-insurance-for-profit.

"What we have done for auto we would like to be able to do for biotech," he said. "That's where we're lending some real focus to at the present time."

Similarly, Emmerson said Ottawa is looking to help out industries that create "clusters" of jobs around them - such as in aerospace, shipbuilding, telecommunications and forestry - where supply bases build around a large manufacturer.

I don't know about you, but this sounds like Canada's fixing to eat America's economic lunch.

EU rejects software patents [updated]

The EU Parliament has rejected proposed legislation that would allow unrestricted patenting of software implementations and methods such as is currently being allowed by the US Patent and Trademark Office.  This should means that software innovation remains alive and well in Europe, even if it gets stifled here by stupid patents on software implementations that are neither innovative nor non-obvious.

Update:

This is a clearer and less ambiguous article on the same subject, from the BBC.  As it makes clear, the decision does not eliminate patentability of common or trivial software algorithms, but at least it does not legitimize the practice and lead the EU down the path of US patent legislation (under which, it seems, you could now probably get away with patenting the use of a Q-Tip to clean your ears, if you could find a way to justify describing it as a "business method").

There are between 150,000 and 300,000 registered software patents in the US and open source developers argue that many should never have been granted.  (Quoted from another BBC article)

The EFF has begun a campaign to counter these patents, and has identified a "Most Wanted" list of the top 10 most egregious software patents (see the bottom of the article), on which it is now doing prior-art research in the hope of overturning them.

Counter to the trend of many large high-tech companies supporting software patent schemes, IBM recently released 500 of its own software patents to the open source community.

IBM described the step as a "new era" in how it dealt with intellectual property and promised further patents would be made freely available.

IBM was granted 3,248 patents in 2004 and 25,772 over the last 12 years.  It reportedly has more than 40,000 current patents in all.

"Devastating urge to do good"

From Der Spiegel:  Kenyan economist James Shikwati explains why, for Africa's own good, the West should cease all economic aid to Africa.  (Found by fruitylips)