In Bruges rulz. That’s a movie. ZOMG.

Aleja needs this: Car for Disabled Drivers from Quovis too.

Annals of Invention: The Flash of Genius: The New Yorker is a scary article. Of course we know about the horror stories of corporations stealing inventions. And we know what happened to Mr. Gates just because he was able to keep ownership of his work.

In November, 1962, Bob Kearns was driving his Ford Galaxie through the streets of Detroit when it started to rain lightly. Kearns turned the wipers on low. In those days, even the most advanced wipers had just two settings, one for steady rain and one for heavy rain; in a mizzling rain, they screeched back and forth across the glass, mesmerizing the driver, and occasionally causing accidents. Kearns’ vision was already impaired as a result of an accident nine years earlier, when, on his wedding night, he was hit in the left eye by a flying champagne cork. Now, straining to see through the windshield, half thinking about his lousy wipers and half thinking about his bad eye, Kearns had what the Wall Street Journal later called “the kind of inspiration that separates inventors from ordinary people.” He thought, Why can’t a wiper work more like an eyelid? Why can’t it blink? The idea for the intermittent windshield wiper entered his mind.
Sometime this year, a little more than three decades after his good idea came to him, Kearns will go to trial in a suit he has brought against General Motors. Kearns, who is sixty-five years old, has already defeated Ford and Chrysler in court, and he stands to collect more than twenty million dollars from them for infringing his patents on the intermittent windshield wiper…. His remarkable success has made him one of the most famous inventors in the country, a hero to thousands of inventors with their own patent-infringement horror stories to tell….
There is widespread feeling in patent departments of corporations around the country that Kearns’ case represents a frightening precedent…. “The story today is not the big company screwing the little guy but the little guy screwing the big company. It’s getting easier and easier for the little guy to do it.”
The United States patent system is designed for the independent inventor—for the person whom Nikola Tesla described as “the lone worker who follows the fleeting inspiration of a moment and finally does something that has not been done before….” Now most inventors work in huge corporate research centers. Individuals surrender their ideas to the corporation, and for doing so they receive regular salaries. But the patent system, together with the law that has accrued around it, still rests on the eighteenth-century idea of the inventor, and in court a lone inventor with a patent is a formidable opponent for any corporation to face. (emphasis added)

What scares me is the tone of the article. It is like this is a bad thing. We’re not talking about shady companies who buy patents and try to put the pressure on big companies. We’re talking about stealing ideas. Is complaining about the theft of your intellectual property by corporations a problem?

Oh, and there’s a movie coming out about it that I probably won’t see.

Announcing Apples 33 Percent Off Sale!: Tech Ticker, Yahoo! Finance… and that’s the stock, not the product Gotcha!

Jeremy points us to OpenHuddle:

Each room in OpenHuddle is designed to give you the freedom to interact with as many or as few people as you would like, in whatever way you want! Our Video, Audio, Text Chat and Drawing Board tools are available for you to use in whatever way you see fit. Just invite your friends into a Huddle and start interacting…discuss your new clothes, adorable cat, or anything else with as little as a webcam and a headset/microphone.

I can’t imagine it is his idea of a good time, but it certainly will allow me to share things with some of my PC friends, so I’m wiling to give it a try.

This is a great new site coming from research by faculty from our school.
Listening to Families

In Canada today a significant number of families and young children (0-9 years) are living in circumstances that put the child’s healthy development and learning success at risk.

Nearly one in six of Canada’s children live in poverty;
An estimated 5-7% of children and youth have developmental disabilities;
Over 22% of newcomers to Canada every year are children under 9.

These categories of disadvantage often overlap, compounding their impact on young children.
The primary purpose of this project is to increase the capacity of providers of public services to engage with and respond to the needs of families who live in poverty, are newcomers to Canada, or have a child with a disability.

Palin e-mail hack details emerge talks about how Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account was hacked. This is interesting… can you trust someone to run a country who uses Yahoo (gov.palin@yahoo.com and gov.sarah@yahoo.com)? I feel bad for her as a person, that her email was hacked. I don’t wish that sort of thing on anyone (for the record and I mean it). What I’m talking about is professionalism. Yahoo? Remember that this means a brutish lout, a philistine, yokel. Why would anyone in their right mind want an email address gov.sarah@brutishlout.com? It flies in the face of reason. Of course this is happening around discussions as to whether she used personal email accounts for state business, and these accounts are ex officio official cause they claim that they are gov.palin and gov.sarah, right? So someone’s really perplexing me here. Is it possible in this day and age for someone in a position of power to not at least have some hangers-on with the wherewithal to say “Yo. You really think we should be using a commercial email site, and then to have hackable password recovery?” even before they muse as to whether they should be doing government business on a commercial web site (which may or may not have happened). See the time magazine article on wikileaks, if you want to get some more intel and info.

It is unfortunate when someone’s privacy is compromised. It is scary that politicians can be not just irresponsible, but so creatively foolish on so many levels.

Grateful Dead Reunite for Barack Obama Benefit Show

Official Google Blog: Google in one more language: “It recently came to our attention that Google was not accessible to a large, influential, and notoriously quick-tempered community: Pirates. As of today we are proud and rather relieved to announce that Google Search is available in Pirate.”