Thank goodness.
Thank you, American voters!

Very very interesting, if this article indeed a true account of what happened and the new situation. Quote:

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) in Washington DC has decided that in the future, instead of automatically granting a patent for a business practice, there will be a specific testing procedure to determine how patentable is that process.

The decision is a nearly complete reversal of the court’s controversial State Street Bank judgement of 1998, which started the stampede for patenting business practices.

Perhaps in that brave new world, startup-wannabees will focus on actually getting something to market? That’d be great!

Update: Australian-based Brendan Scott of Open Source Law has written about this also: Bilski Decision Swacks Business Method Patents (US), with some additional links.

Ideas welcome!

General idea… base: Delta symbol (with thicker line on right hand side – a delta it’s not a regular triangle), plus one or more of the following:

• something depicting deltas: incremental small changes;
• something depicting a river delta: where streams come together before flowing into ocean;
• something depicting community: people working together, participating, communicating.

If you can draw even a little bit, rough scribbles are most welcome! We have a good artist who can turn that into magic. And, you don’t have to go with the above… come up with something else suitable!

See also https://bugs.launchpad.net/ourdelta/+bug/284161 where we’re tracking this; you will find other suggestions from people, including ideas that have been dismissed for visual or other reasons.

Look, this could be hilarous, or dreadful. I haven’t got the book, so I don’t know which – but couldn’t resist writing about it since someone pointed it out to me ;-)

The Manga Guide to Databases [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback) by Mana Takahashi

Yeayea, the universe does that all on its own, all the time. But on a headless box, it’s rather difficult to make tools like gpg happy (in the case of gpg, for –gen-key). While googling for a possible solution, I came across this little gem: rngd -r /dev/urandom (in the rng-tools package). Instant success, lots of entropy!