Fudgiepoos

VoipSpeak - O’Reilly Asterisk Book Available For Free Download

> O’Reilly Media’s latest book, Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, written by Jim Van Meggelen, Jared Smith, and Leif Madsen is the most complete book on the Asterisk PBX system to date. The new book, announced at Astricon 2005 covers many of the new features of Asterisk 1.2. In the spirit of open source, O’Reilly has licensed the book under the creative commons license making it free to download and distribute. If you are looking for the ultimate Asterisk book, you can now download the entire book as a PDF file!

Grab it here!

Search for the most prolific inventors is a patent struggle: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

> What living person holds the most U.S. patents? In this era of information and lightning searches - when patents are both more valuable than ever and a source of raging controversy - you’d think such a simple question would be easy to answer.

> You’d think somebody could push a button and get a list. But, uh, no.

> America cannot identify its most prolific living inventors. We can’t single out these people who should be considered national treasures.

It seems the US patent office hasn’t had the time to generate those kinds of statistics since 1997, and there’s no easy way of getting the information from the database due to different people having the same names, and the problem of weighing a secondary submitter verses a primary submitter.

More and more people are waking up to the patent problem in the US, and it’s only a question of time before something has to happen. It’s really getting silly.

The Guardian has a good story on where intellectual property is heading, with references to well-known cases most people know about.

> Even facts about the world can, in some cases, become the property of commercial companies. It was the promise of gaining patents on the human genome that lured investors into the private consortium that attempted to sequence it in competition with the public effort. Laboratory animals have already been patented, starting with the OncoMouse, an animal whose genome has been manipulated to ensure that it develops cancer.

The patent office in the USA is rapidly turning into a joke, patents are really hurting us all, while making a few companies filty rich. Finding prior art is getting increasingly difficult, and in loads of cases, the patent office is granting patents for stuff that has been used for ages by loads of people prior to the filing of the patent. Don’t even get me started on software patents.