It seems that the patent offices in both the US and the UK are going to be starting a little experiment, where patents that are being applied for in both countries can have the review process sped up once the patent is approved in one of the countries. Basically, this "Patent Prosecution Highway" (yes, that's what it's called) is designed to speed up the backlog of patents by allowing examiners in one country to speed up their review by simply relying on the work done in the patent office on the other side of the Atlantic. The UK patent office has already run a similar project with the Japanese patent office. It all sounds nice, and the idea of speeding up the patent granting process could ease some of the current backlog. However, it certainly seems like it could be pretty risky. If a patent is accidentally granted in one country when it shouldn't have been, doesn't that just make it easier to get approved elsewhere? Assuming that more countries get involved in this Patent Prosecution Highway... and companies begin to discover that one country's examiners are a lot more lenient than others, how long will it take for most companies to first apply in the "friendly" country and then use this system to fast track their patents everywhere else? Since patents are granting a rather complete monopoly, doesn't it make sense that they should be thoroughly reviewed before being granted?

Mental Floss has a quiz where you try to match 10 popular drug with their warning labels. Sample warnings:

"Babies born to mothers who have taken [this drug] in the latter half of pregnancy have reported complications, including difficulties with breathing, turning blue, floppiness, stiffness, irritability or constant crying."

"Vision changes, such as seeing a blue tinge to objects or having difficulty telling the difference between the colors blue and green." Also, "An erection that won't go away."

"Some patients tried to end their own lives. And some people have ended their own lives."

Link

kaufmanmoore writes "The AP reports that the National Association of Broadcasters is launching ads to target lawmakers over a push by a consortium of technology companies including Google, Intel, HP, and MSFT who want to use unused and unlicensed TV spectrum (the so-called 'white space') for wireless broadband. Broadcasters are airing concerns about the devices creating interference with broadcast television. In a statement, NAB chairman Alan Frank takes a swipe at technology companies: 'While our friends at Intel, Google and Microsoft may find system errors, computer glitches and dropped calls tolerable, broadcasters do not.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SkiifGeek brings to our attention a story that ran on space.com a few months back but didn't get much wider notice at the time. "The French have identified numerous objects in orbit that do not appear in the ephemeris data reported by the US Space Surveillance Network. Now, the US claims that if it doesn't appear in the ephemeris data, then it doesn't exist. The French insist that at least some of the objects they have found boast solar arrays. Therefore it seems that the French have found secret US satellites. While they don't plan to release the information publicly, they do intend to use it as leverage to get the US to suppress reporting of sensitive French satellites in their published ephemeris."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The media is having a field day with the news that IT consulting firm Capgemini has come to an agreement with Google to push Google's online apps into enterprise customers. It's true, as many of the stories point out, that this is a huge win for Google, and is likely to help increase adoption of its apps within the enterprise. However, what's not clear and not explained is why the two companies needed an agreement first. As the article notes, it appears that there were financial considerations in the agreement as well. If anything, this should call into question Capgemini's impartiality in recommending apps to its customers. If Google Apps is the best solution, then shouldn't Capgemini support it with or without an agreement? Waiting until the two companies have an agreement (and announcing that fact) just makes it sound like Capgemini's recommendations are going to be based on who paid them some money, rather than on what's the best solution for customers.

J Cardella writes "On August 31, Jatol.com — a hosting company that had operated for five years, providing excellent support and reasonable prices — disappeared, leaving hundreds, if not thousands of people without access to their Web content and email. There is speculation that Jatol may have stopped paying their host, Fastservers. The evidence is that Fastservers has been turning off the machines with Jatol's customers' content. Jatol had already collected September hosting fees from their customers (including myself). The story gets stranger. The owner of Jatol.com, Tim Tooley, has also disappeared. He was apparently very ill for some time, and speculation on the thread goes from his skipping the country to lying dead in his home. Fastservers apparently is unwilling to turn the machines back on, so people could get their content, without authorization from Tooley."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As the best thinkers are discussing the future of AI at the Singularity Summit, perhaps we shouldn't just be looking at ways to create better computer artificial intelligence, but at ways to more efficiently make use of human intelligence that's available all the time. For example, take a look at the technologies being used to harness human cognitive abilities to help in the search for Steve Fossett's plane in the vast desert of Nevada. Searchers are leveraging Amazon's Mechanical Turk community to quickly scan through Google Earth satellite imagery to flag areas where the plane might have crashed or eliminate barren areas where rescue pilots shouldn't focus on. At the time of this post, there are still over 100,000 blocks to be looked over with each block representing a 278x278 sq ft. area. At what appears to be a scanning rate of about 10-20 square grids/sec by the Turk community, the entire area of interest could theoretically be searched in less than 5 hours -- assuming that the system isn't showing the same photo to multiple people (as appears to be the case). Contrast that to the (super)computing resources required to process an equivalent image of more than 8 billion pixels (img dimension(256x256) x (numOfImgs)100k), on top of the difficult task of defining the object-of-interest to a computer (what does a plane wreck look like to a computer?).

In this instance, using simple coordination mechanisms, human intelligence becomes an economic way to solve a hard problem -- which is exactly the rationale behind Amazon's Mechanical Turk. We have seen projects using other hooks and mechanisms to leverage human intelligence, like Recaptcha for OCRing books, and the ESP game for tagging images -- and even the Techdirt Insight Community, which is bringing you this post. On a grander scale, Amazon's Mechanical Turk is trying to be a platform for "artificial artificial intelligence", though so far the success stories for MTurk have been minor. Even in this case, it's not entirely clear how useful it is (or how they got the latest satellite imagery ready to go for this task). In fact, while there are fairly stunning reports that, in searching for Fossett, the remains of eight other plane crashes have been discovered -- it doesn't sound like any of them were found via Mechanical Turk and Google Earth. Still, with all this talk about mashing up web services and better artificial intelligence, perhaps it's time we start thinking about more effective and efficient ways of leveraging human intelligence?

Teck Chia is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Teck Chia and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

10 Zen Monkeys has a great interview with marijuana growing guru, Ed Rosenthal. From the introduction:

From a certain perspective, Ed Rosenthal may have caught a break when Judge Breyer sentenced him to just one day in prison plus time served when he was convicted for growing hundreds of marijuana plants in Oakland, California. But it would be difficult to argue that his trial was anything short of Kafkaesque. Rosenthal had been deputized by the City of Oakland to grow medical marijuana. But after being busted by the Feds, he was not even allowed to mention his relationship to the lawful government of Oakland nor was he allowed to present witnesses who could talk about it.

So after his conviction, Rosenthal took his case to the 9th Circuit of the Supreme Court and won. His conviction was overturned, but it was overturned on a technicality. Then, in a clear case of vengeful prosecution, the D.A. in the case decided to bring up charges again, adding new charges to the original. Again Rosenthal was not allowed to present the obvious defense — his deputization with the City of Oakland — and he was re-convicted.

Link to transcript | Audio link

Eero Saarinen couldn't have come up with a nicer-lookiing ceiling design than this one, created by water damage. Link

you-bet-it's-not-out-of-context writes "A blogger on KDE Developer's Journal has found an interesting post by Miguel de Icaza, the founder of GNOME and Mono, in a Google group dedicated to the discussion of his blog entries. Six days ago Miguel stated that 'OOXML is a superb standard and yet, it has been FUDed so badly by its competitors that serious people believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with it.' In the same post he says that to avoid patent problems over Silverlight, when using or developing Mono's implementation (known as Moonlight), i's best to 'get/download Moonlight from Novell which will include patent coverage.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

coondoggie writes to mention that a Las Vegas man faces about 20 years in prison today after pleading guilty in a case where he impersonated intellectual property lawyers and tried to bully owners out of their domain names. "According to the FBI, David Scali is charged with registering an e-mail account under an alias and then sending e-mails in which he claimed to be the intellectual property lawyer. In the e-mails, which were sent in late June and early July of 2006, Scali threatened to file $100,000 trademark infringement lawsuits against the owners of various Internet website names unless they gave up their domain name registrations within two days."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've already seen that, as with just about every other data leak, the massive data leak from clothing retailer TJX was a lot worse than originally reported. However, some are now asking whether the company also hasn't come entirely clean about when the breach occurred and when the company knew about it. The official statements from TJX suggest that the company became aware that its own horrible security was breached on December 18th, 2006, and informed the FBI by December 22nd. However, as the article above notes, there's evidence suggesting that TJX was familiar with the breach well before that. Remember that a bunch of folks had been arrested in Florida for using the TJX data in scams. The police in that case have filed some reports, noting that TJX had alerted them to a breach back in March of 2006 -- and, in fact, the Florida investigators filed reports on their investigation in November 2006... well before TJX even claims that it knew of the breach. It certainly raises some questions about when TJX really became aware of the breach, and when the company finally alerted people that their data may have been compromised.

Daniel Mantione writes "Free Pascal 2.2 has been released. Several new platforms are supported, like the Mac OS X on Intel platform, the Game Boy Advance, Windows CE and 64-Windows. Free Pascal is now the first and only free software compiler that targets 64-bit Windows. These advancements were made possible by Free Pascal's internal assembler and linker allowing support for platforms not supported by the GNU binutils. The advancement in internal assembling and linking also allow faster compilation times and smaller executables, increasing the programmer comfort. Other new features are stabs debug support, many new code optimizations, resourcestring smart-linking and more."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

C.G. Lynch writes "The computer closest to the North Pole. The most intriguing data center. The biggest scientific computing grid. The little kernel that rocked the world. CIO.com has compiled a list of Seven Wonders of the IT World, some of the most impressive and unusual systems on the planet (and beyond)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the last few years, we've all heard stories about how organized crime groups have taken to using botnets of "zombied" computers to run all sorts of scams and spam campaigns. ISPs have been somewhat slow to react. While they try to use fairly blunt instruments, like cutting off certain ports, many don't seem to have a very good process in place for tracking down and stopping customers whose machines have become unwitting members in a botnet. In fact, security researchers are growing frustrated that when they come across evidence of a hijacked computer, ISPs don't respond at all when told that a customer is causing trouble. There certainly are a few ISPs that are careful to help get rid of botnets, doing things like quarantining or cutting off certain users from their internet access until their machines are cleaned up, but most of the bigger ISPs don't appear to do very much at all. Of course, there is the other side of this story -- which is that when ISPs may be too proactive, it can often snag people whose machines aren't actually doing anything wrong. But, it certainly seems like completely ignoring reports with evidence of a botnet may be going to the opposite extreme.

An anonymous reader writes "A solar-powered, unmanned craft has flown for 54 hours — a record for both unmanned aerial vehicles and solar craft. None before has managed to store enouhh solar energy to fly through more than one night. There is also a video showing the 18m carbon fiber wing craft being launched."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BigRedFed writes "Michael Robertson, of mp3.com fame, Linspire.com fame (or infamy depending on your view point) and more recently, ajax13.com has released another interesting piece of web software. ajaxWindows they are calling it and it's an almost full fledged web based OS that you can use to transport around your documents and mp3 collection to any device with an internet connection and a full web-browser."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Luo Cuifen, 29 of Beijing, China, consulted doctors after noticing blood in her urine. Turns out she has 23 inch-long needles in her gut. Surgeons will now carefully remove the needles that allegedly were inserted by her grandparents who were hoping to kill her. From the Associated Press:

Many of the needles have worked their way into Luo's vital organs including her lungs, liver, bladder and kidneys, making their removal difficult, said Qu Rui, a spokesman for the Richland International Hospital in Yunnan province's capital, Kunming...

Qu said doctors believe the woman's grandparents may have inserted the needles long ago, hoping she would die and her parents might have a boy in her place. China limits most families to just one child, although rural Chinese may be allowed to have a second if their first is a girl, subject to the payment of fines.

It wasn't clear whether further investigations into the case were planned, with media reports saying Luo's grandparents had already died.

Link (Thanks, Jennifer Lum!)