Legal battles can sometimes make strange bedfellows. Microsoft announced today that they've filed an antitrust suit against Motorola Mobility in the European Union charging that the company (which is being purchased by Google) is abusing the standard-essential patents that it owns. Apple also filed a complaint a few days ago on the same topic -- that Motorola Mobility is attempting to illegally block sales of others company's products by leveraging patents that should be offered with Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Descriminatory (FRAND) licensing.

Standard-essential patents are patents held by companies like Motorola Mobility that become part of industry standards like Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11n, for example) and the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard. Since they're part of industry standards, companies are obligated to use the patented intellectual property in creating their products. If the patent owner attempts to coerce companies to either stop using technology that is part of a standard or to pay exorbitant licensing fees, lawsuits like those filed by Apple and Microsoft are the result.

Dave Heiner, vice-president and deputy general counsel for Microsoft's Corporate Standards and Antitrust Group, was quoted as saying that "Motorola has broken its promise. Motorola is on a path to use standard essential patents to kill video on the Web, and Google as its new owner doesn't seem to be willing to change course."

Florian Mueller, patent expert at FOSS Patents, believes that Microsoft joining Apple with a lawsuit against Motorola Mobility will improve the odds that the European Commission will investigate Motorola's alleged abuses of FRAND patents in Europe.

Microsoft joins Apple in FRAND patent fight with Motorola Mobility originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Your favorite mobile apps should soon be making it a lot more clear when they intend to use your data.

The Attorney General of California, Kamala D. Harris, announced Wednesday a deal with Amazon, Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Research in Motion; the companies agreed to strengthen privacy protection for users that download third-party apps to smartphones and tablet devices.

In the deal, the companies said they would require app developers to clearly spell out what data their apps can access and what the app or company does with that data. The deal also makes app store custodians such as Apple and Google, who run the App Store and Android Market, set up a way for users to report apps that don’t provide a clear-cut explanation of their privacy policies.

According to a statement from Attorney General Harris’ office, if an app developer doesn’t meet these new privacy-policy requirements, they could be charged with a crime under California law.

“California has a unique commitment to protecting the privacy of our residents,” said Harris. “Our constitution directly guarantees a right to privacy, and we will defend it.”

Android users are well aware that developers on the platform are required to ask them for permission before accessing their personal data, but they’re not told how or why their data is being accessed. Apple also doesn’t allow any software on its App Store that takes personal information without asking, but developers haven’t been transparent on that platform, either.

In fact, Harris’ office says, only five percent of all mobile apps offer a privacy policy. And developers across both platforms have come under fire recently for coding software that transmits users’ personal data unbeknownst to them.

That controversy managed to pique the interest of some members of Congress, who sent a letter of inquiry to Apple.

Should lawmakers intervene when the creators of popular platforms like Android and iOS may not be doing enough to protect the privacy of their users? Sound off in the comments below.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, TommL

More About: amazon, android, apple, blackberry, Google, Hewlett-Packard, iOS, microsoft, privacy, research in motion, RIM, webOS, windows phone

NECA and BigBadToyStore have announced a forthcoming line of Portal toys, including this awesome Portal Gun replica.

Aperature Studios Portal Gun Prop Replica (via Super Punch)

Lukas Mathis touts many webOS features that he wants other vendors to steal. All this stuff just makes me more sad I never got to try webOS on anything because nobody gives a rat's bum about The Netherlands. WebOS never came to market here. Especially its multitasking with cards looks so much more elegant than the horrible "multi"tasking implementations on Android and iOS. Hopeful note: Matias Duarte now heads the UX team for Android.

One of the things I've never liked about copyright is its potential to be the functional equivalent of censorship. Sometimes this censorship comes about because an author didn't get permission to create his work in the first place (see: Richard Prince, JD California). While this unfortunately turns judges into cultural gatekeepers, it's been deemed a necessary balance between copyright law and the First Amendment, and harm to the public is arguably lessened by the fact that we don't know what we're missing; because the censored work is never able to reach and impact us, we've only lost the potential of its cultural contribution.

However, other times a work is created with the initial blessing of copyright, makes its mark on the public, then becomes effectively censored down the line due to licensing restrictions (see: The Wonder Years, Werewolf). This is much more culturally pernicious because it deprives the public of a work already in its lexicon, and the sense of loss is far more palpable as a result. Often, the only way to get the work back in the public's hands is to perform triage, excise the no-longer-licensed content, and try to be happy with a bastardized version of the work (see: WKRP in Cincinnati, The State).

What's interesting, however, is how we've seen the Internet step up to effectuate cultural preservation, when copyright law stands in the way. I recently picked up a DVD collection of Daria, one of the last good things MTV ever produced. The show had an immense impact on my childhood, in no small part because of how it helped frame pop culture for me with its liberal use of MTV-placed contemporary music, and I was incredibly excited to relive that experience. When I opened up the DVD case, however, I was greeted with the following message: For those who can't see the note, it says in the pertinent part:

"So let's answer the big question right away: 99 percent of the music has been changed, because the cost of licensing the many music bites we used would have made it impossible to release the collection (and for many years did). So no, these aren't the shows as aired, but more like one of those astronauts in a TWILIGHT ZONE episode who returns from space and his wife can't figure out what's changed about him, until it slowly dawns on her that instead of a cool song from 1997 playing when he walks into the room, it's some tune she's never heard. Yeah, it's just like that."

Needless to say, I was disappointed. As I Googled around for more information, I could see many other fans of the series felt the same, opining that, "when I watch the show without proper music it feels as though one of the main characters is missing," and "even to those who say they didn't pay much attention to the music, I think you'll still sense an absence." Then I stumbled across something else entirely. Something called "The Daria Restoration Project." Essentially, certain Daria fans had taken to combining the high-quality video and spoken audio of the official DVDs with the music that accompanied the original broadcasts, either sourced from old television recordings or by manually inserting the pertinent songs. They're doing their best to preserve the fidelity of a major piece of culture that is currently only legally available to the public in crippled form.

And of course, their curating efforts are 100% illegal, punishable by hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars in fines.

To be sure, copyright owners are supposed to be able to control how their works are used to create new works outside the bounds of ideas and fair use (though we don't always get that right). However, allowing copyright licensing to prevent the public from accessing the proper versions of culturally-significant media, after their creation and initial publication has already been sanctioned, almost smacks of a marketplace parallel to the European "right of withdrawal." It not only presents a huge hurdle to the preservation of certain works, but robs the public of the value they placed in that media while it was available to them.

While the Internet is not nearly as "lawless" as many would like us to believe, there are certainly pockets of it where the traditional rule of law is less readily applied. And though this poses a challenge to society in some aspects, there is also undoubted utility in having these pockets able to function in the interest of the public, the proper beneficiaries of copyright law, when the legal state of play so radically conflicts with that interest. As a law student, I'm not happy when I see pirates doing a better job than copyright owners at preserving and spreading culture; after all, the Supreme Court recently noted in its Golan decision that copyright law can serve its core purpose not only by incentivizing the creation of works, but the dissemination of them as well. Yet here we see copyright hurdles completely inhibiting the proper dissemination of legally-created works through economic censorship.

Well, as John Gilmore once said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." So until copyright law manages to untangle itself and properly serve its own fundamental purpose, I'm glad we can rely on pirates to do its job for it.

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If you're like most people, photography boils down to automatic mode paired with luck. Not for US Army officer Alex Jansen, who wrote up a massive guide to crisp low-light photography based on "the four fundamentals of marksmanship. Snap, headshot. More »

Late last week, the Washington Post reported that The Smithsonian had acquired "tapes, documentation, copyrights, and over 50,000 lines of code from V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who both the Smithsonian and the Washington Post insisted was the "inventor of e-mail." There's just one problem with this: It's not actually true. Lots of internet old-timers quickly started to speak out against this, especially on Dave Farber's Interesting People email list, where they highlighted how it's just not true. As is nicely summarized on Wikipedia's talk page about Ayyadurai, he was responsible for "merely inventing an email management system that he named EMAIL," which came long after email itself. The Washington Post eventually offered the following "clarification":

Clarification: A number of readers have accurately pointed out that electronic messaging predates V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai’s work in 1978. However, Ayyadurai holds the copyright to the computer program called "email," establishing him as the creator of the “computer program for [an] electronic mail system” with that name, according to the U.S. Copyright Office.

Except... that "clarification" seems to confuse copyright with patents. Copyright is only over the specific copyrightable work created -- which would be the specific code he used. It does not, in any way, establish him as "the creator" of "the" electronic mail system -- merely an electronic mail system -- and hardly the first one. I could write some sort of email management software tomorrow and copyright that... and it would no more make me an "inventor" of email than Ayyadurai.

There's a detailed history of email over at the NetHistory site, and you'll note that Ayyadurai doesn't warrant a mention -- which isn't surprising since his work comes way after most of the important stuff was done. Thomas Haig sent a detailed email to the SIGCIS list, breaking down what happened. Apparently, Time Magazine ran a profile of Ayyadurai a few months back, calling him "the man who invented email," which resulted in the Smithsonian's interest. But even that article notes at the beginning that Ayyadurai actually just holds a copyright on EMAIL, rather than email itself. It even asks about the fact that Ray Tomlinson is often credited as being the inventor of email -- and his efforts came much earlier.

Either way, it appears that Ayyadurai has played up this idea that he's the inventor of email, despite little to back that up (apparently frustrating many people who actually know the history). Yes, he copyrighted a particular bit of code, but there's little to support the idea that he had very much to do with "the invention of email" in any way. But, that's not what the Washington Post (or, apparently, the Smithsonian) will tell you...

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Being unceremoniously dumped online isn't the only indignation made easier by social networks. For the first time, lawyers in the UK have been granted permission to serve a legal suit via Facebook. Traditionally, documents must be delivered physically, be it in person, by post or even fax. But, in a pretrial for a commercial dispute, these old-fashioned methods proved fruitless. The prosecuting team then decided to check online, and noticed recent updates on defendant Fabio De Biase's profile. Satisfied it was currently active, they sought permission to send documents via the website, with Justice Nigel Teare duly obliging. Wondering what that noise is? That's the sound of millions of mice clicking on "privacy settings" all at once.

Man gets served on Facebook, literally originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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File-sharing site Pirate Bay vows to carry on after the High Court lays the foundations for its closure.

March 14 is the big day for Game Gear on Virtual Console, with a trio of titles headed to Japanese 3DS owners, Nintendo announced this morning. Unsurprisingly, Sega leads the lineup with three classics: Sonic (Sonic and Tails 2), Shinobi (GG Shinobi), and Dragon Crystal. The titles will cost ¥300 ($3.75) apiece, and no word was given as to when they'd head Stateside.

Of course, Sonic Triple Trouble and Shinobi were rated by the ESRB for 3DS back in February, and we were last told that Game Gear (as well as TurboGrafx-16) games would arrive on the handheld's Virtual Console store in "late May." So, uh, they're coming to North America, just not quite yet. We'll also venture a wild guess that Dragon Crystal will end up in the US as well. Sure, why not?

Game Gear titles head to 3DS on March 14 for ¥300 apiece originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Together! As revealed by Nintendo today, these Japanese game makers are collaborating on a mysterious project. It is for the Nintendo 3DS. More »

While Nintendo is bullish on the Kid Icarus: Uprising's multiplayer and various battle modes, sister site Kotaku Japan noticed something odd. Something familiar. Something Metroid. More »

When the French General Directorate for Armament wanted to develop an exoskeleton to aid humans in handling heavy workloads, it enlisted the help of engineering company RB3D. The result is Hercule, a robotic exoskeleton that can help users shoulder up to 220 pounds. First shown off at last year's MILIPOL exhibition, Hercule is a system driven completely by the motion of the user wearing the device: movements by the legs are monitored by the exoskeleton, and the mechanics follow suit. Designed to weigh in at under 55 pounds, the battery-powered exoskeleton can provide a range of up to 12.4 miles (at a regular walking pace) under a single charge.

Hercule does reminds us quite a bit of the early work of Berkeley Bionics (now Ekso Bionics),...

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Recently, I was at a presentation by a high-level CEO of a multinational confectionary company. The speaker said that he received helpful advice from a colleague: “fail early, fail cheap, but always fail forward.” In other words, learn from the mistakes. I talk about failing like I mean it…which also means taking on sufficient risks in order to grow professionally and personally. In the spirit of these, I decided to review some of my worst instructional designer mistakes.

People and Habituation

While much in culture suggests that one should give others plenty of chances, I would suggest that some of my worst ID mistakes have been continuing with team members that have already shown themselves to be wanting in particular aspects of their work. If an administrator tends towards callousness and political deafness, she will not necessarily change because she sees this or she has alienated various people. If a project lead is not candid about funding prior to the project, this person will not necessarily be candid once the project has started. A grand administrator who throws the instructional designer under a political bus will not necessarily restrain himself. A PI on a grant who dominates the limelight will not suddenly back off in a shared live presentation. An editor who does not show much in the way of supportiveness will not suddenly be supportive. People who do not deliver on various prior projects will not suddenly see the light and deliver.

One has to go with empirics to know what to expect from the future, in a sense. It is not going to be different this time. Further, at the risk of over-generalizing, circumstances will not necessarily improve very much from the beginning point.

I am a person who believes in second and even third chances. But I’m also a person who believes that after a certain point of endeavors, any more chances is just asking for more of the same.

The interesting thing here is that people who start out being conscientious and honest also tend to be so over time. Those who don’t “scare easy” and take new projects head-on and are open to learning and innovating…amazingly…continue on in this way. Those who tend to come through on work…amazingly…continue to do so. There are upsides to seeing the patternings to people.

Handing over the Reins

When I first started my job at K-State a little more than six years ago, I took over a documentation project that included the help files for a learning / course management system. The software was fairly complex (RoboHelp)…and it was my first time using it. I was having a hard time getting the file to output correctly, and I worked with a colleague who worked in IT but never used this technology before. His instincts were right to noodle around, but the error was noodling around in a live project that had to go out to the world in a day or two. He tried various buttons and managed to disappear all of the images. (I think it was the button for accessibility…and any images without alt-text disappeared, which explains the state of the files I inherited—with no alt-texting.)

I learned a couple lessons. One is to know what is going on first. The next is to use due caution before letting anyone deal with sensitive files. Always. Always. It’s easier to commit the gaffe oneself and then learn from it than be left without a clear sense of how one arrived at a certain point of befuddlement.

Building Redundancy

For the sake of security, it is said that one should build duplications. This extra step should be automatic and unobtrusive, in that sense. When I was writing up the steps to a process for creating an online lab, I wrote a whole duplicative step that was wholly unnecessary, with no value-add. This involved versioning images for publication—even though that event would be an anomaly (at which time a manual process could be put into place to version a few images for a respective publication). As soon as the project actually started and high-resolution images were created, I dumped that step. While I left a space (a folder) for that step if we chose to follow up, it became clear that that would just be a time waste.

Visiting a Live Lab

Another gaffe as an ID was to visit a science lab in order to try to change it into digital format. I already knew that the complexity of the learning would be too high…and that the technologies we would need do not exist yet. I thought that there might be a small element that would be possible to translate to online learning.

I came away with a sense of the daunting nature of the job. I did form a conviction to learn more about how to animate videos to portray various relationships and micro-level phenomena.

Unusable Technologies

Another mistake was that of accepting a technology that I knew I wouldn’t use. Another unit on campus had bought many seats of a particular software. Even though I received a solid tour of the software by a representative of the company, I was already hard-pressed to find a use for the software. I already had several programs I could use that would do the same thing. I thought that maybe I would end up with a project that could maybe use the technology, but it was hard to find reasons to use it. I would go with what I already knew. And that technology pretty much took up space on my working computer for years because I couldn’t dump it.

What’s worse is signing up for third-party services or software and then letting that languish. I create accounts on various social networking sites and micro-blogging sites for research. And then when people start emailing me to join networks or to follow my feeds, I realize that I’ve over-reached and messed with people’s expectations. I should just sign in using my proper email but not use my identifying information. If I’ve learned nothing else, people are very willing to add someone else to their electronic harems and followers. The problem here then is one of wanting to be forgotten. Just recently, out of all the various spaces which I’d signed into for various needs of a project at a discrete time, only one vendor knew to delete an account (this one to a blog service). I want to be forgotten if I am not active in an account, but that’s often easier to say than do.

Planning to Add to the List

So far, these are my worst ID mistakes that I can think of—to date. I hope to add more risks to this list because these are actually fairly tame. Well, it’s not that I’m pursuing mistakes. I want to take more risks in my work…to add to my learning set but also to really contribute to the field. Mistakes are to be expected. The worst mistake would be to be unambitious and non-risk-taking.

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon decides that the term "mademoiselle" should disappear from official paperwork.

Bill Maher makes no secret of his antipathy toward Newt Gingrich. He recently mocked Gingrich's attack on the New York subway-riding "elite" on his HBO show, and on "The Late Late Show" (Weeknights, 12 a.m. EST on CBS) Tuesday night he pulled no punches, comparing Gingrich to a "Batman" villain.

Maher seemed surprised when host Craig Ferguson told him that Gingrich had appeared on the show, and having already referred to the former Speaker of the House as "the biggest, fattest turd from the '90s," Maher said "Newt Gingrich is a 'Batman' villain."

No, not a Heath Ledger "Dark Knight"-style scary villain, Maher was talking old-school, Cesar Romero-type villain.

"I mean like from the old Adam West 'Batman'. ... I'm talking about a fat, over-the-hill character actor with two henchmen in dog suits in a warehouse."

Maher also poked fun at Gingrich's religious convictions: "He was born a Lutheran, then went to Baptist -- probably to win an election in Georgia -- and now he's a Catholic. I love people who have three of 'the one true faith'!"

"The Late Late Show" airs Weeknights at 12 a.m. EST on CBS.

TV Replay scours the vast television landscape to find the most interesting, amusing, and, on a good day, amazing moments, and delivers them right to your browser.

Europe's top human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe, urges Germany to end the practice of surgically castrating sex offenders.

Doesn't want to be lumped in with riffraff like Facebook, Google

Despite spending most of the past few years trying to make its services more social, Yahoo! is now claiming that it is definitely NOT a social network - and resents being lumped in with Google and Facebook to face charges in India of hosting “objectionable content” online.…

What are the odds? Cambridge boffins work it out

Four-digit banking PINs are almost as insecure as website passwords, according to a study by Cambridge University computer scientists.…

Φυσικά αυτό μπορείτε να το κάνετε και με το Preview, αλλά με κάνα δυο βήματα παραπάνω.

Το Gelatin είναι μια εφαρμογή που πιο απλή δεν γίνεται !

Ένα drag and drop στο εικονίδιο της εφαρμογής είναι αρκετό για να ενώσει δυο ή παραπάνω αρχεία pdf.

Μπορείτε να κατεβάσετε το Gelatin δωρεάν προς το παρόν από εδώ .