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Friday, November 13, 2009

Wikinews interviewed author Marc Headley about his new book Blown for Good, and asked him about life inside the international headquarters of Scientology known as “Gold Base“, located in Gilman Hot Springs near Hemet, California. Headley joined the organization at age seven when his mother became a member, and worked at Scientology’s international management headquarters for several years before leaving in 2005.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Ronald Howes died at the age of 83 on Tuesday. Howes was best known for his invention of the Easy-Bake Oven. As director of research and new product development for Cincinnati-based Kenner Products, Howes made his famous invention in the early 1960s. The inspiration came from hearing the sentiment of a Kenner salesman returning from a trip to New York City. Kenner engineers concluded that the safest and most practical method of heating the Easy-Bake would be to use a light bulb. The bulb was later replaced by a heating element.

Howes was raised by his German grandmother and her American husband, as his mother died soon after his birth. He attended Walnut Hills High School but left during World War II to enlist in the United States Navy. Nancy Howes remarked that his grandmother assisted him in, “fib[bing] about his age”. Howes later attended the University of Cincinnati. According to Christopher Howes, his son, one of his first jobs at Kenner was to remove potentially poisonous chemicals from the toy Play-Doh. Howes also contributed to what would later become a modern version of the Spirograph.

Christopher Howes said, “He had a fondness for the innocent, simple things in life.” Howes continued to consider possible product designs even outside of work. His wife remarked, “We no longer have a garage in our house – it’s a physics lab”. Howes was also a spiritual man and often taught Catechism classes for the Catholic Church. He had six children and fourteen grandchildren during his lifetime.

A memorial will be held in his honor next Monday, at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church.

Tuesday, January 25, 2005 A process that would normally take millions of years, scientists have mimicked within a couple of days. Today, researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have turned wood mineral by the process of soaking poplar and pine in a chemical mix and then cooking them. The team of scientists accomplishing this feat, led by Yongsoon Shin, bought pine and poplar boards and performed a series of steps. The first step leading to the petrifying of the wood is thinly cutting it, then soaking it in acids and a silica solution, after that, heating it, and lastly, cooling the product in argon. Silica takes up a bond with the carbon left in the wood’s cellulose, creating silicon carbide, widely known as a ceramic.

Monday, January 16, 2006

The Free Software Foundation released the first draft for the next version of the GNU General Public License at the International Public Conference for GPLv3 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, today. The revisions mark the first changes to the GPL since the second version was released in 1991.

According to Richard M. Stallman, the president of the Free Software Foundation, the most significant change to the license are changes to allow GPLv3 to be compatible with other popular free software licenses, notably the Apache Software License 2.0 and the Eclipse license. A second significant change, according to Stallman, is the addition of a clause prohibiting the use of GPL software for Digital rights management (DRM), “something for which there can never be toleration.”

As of noon EST today, the license is available in draft form on the Free Software Foundation’s website. The conference about the license, which continues now and into Tuesday, is being held in Building 10, Room 250, on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Approximately 200 people attended the morning session of the conference, during which Eben Moglen gave what he called a “quick” 90 minute overview of the license changes.

While Moglen’s presentation covered a great deal of legal detail, it was not without levity. When the cell phone of Dave Turner, an FSF staff member sitting in the front row, rang during Moglen’s speech, Stallman broke in, requesting of the audience, “If you have brought in a portable tracking and surveillance device, you should turn it off,” before making other remarks about the police.

The crowd at the conference included a large number of free software celebrities, including Bruce Perens, Andrew Tridgell, and Chris diBona. According to Wikinews reporter Brandon Stafford, it seemed that IBM and Sun were the corporations with the most employees present. Representing the companies were Bob Sutor, Craig Cook, and Mark Brown from IBM and Simon Phipps and Doug Johnson from Sun. Also in attendance were representatives from Intel, Redhat, MySQL AB, Hitachi, and Qualcomm, among others.

Saturday, January 15, 2005

United States —”IBM hereby commits not to assert any of the 500 U.S. patents listed below, as well as all counterparts of these patents issued in other countries, against the development, use or distribution of Open Source Software.” [1]

So begins the pledge IBM has made to “any individual, community, or company” writing or using software defined as “open source” by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

The patents include software for text recognition and database management.[2]

“True innovation leadership is about more than just the numbers of patents granted. It’s about innovating to benefit customers, partners and society”, said Dr. John E. Kelly, IBM senior vice president, Technology and Intellectual Property. “Our pledge today is the beginning of a new era in how IBM will manage intellectual property.”[3]

“This is not a one-time event”, said Dr. Kelly. “While IBM will continue to demonstrate leadership in patent output, through measures such as today’s pledge, we will increasingly use patents to encourage and protect global innovation and interoperability through open standards and we urge others to do so as well.”

Lawrence Lessig, law professor at Stanford Law School and free software proponent commented: “This is exciting. It is IBM making good on its commitment to encourage a different kind of software development and recognizing the burden that patents can impose.”[4]

Not all are confident of IBM’s motives, though.

Florian Mueller, campaign manager of anti-patent website,NoSoftwarePatents.com, accused IBM of hypocrisy because of lobbying in the European Union to push through theComputer Implemented Inventions Directive.

“IBM is just being hypocritical because they want to appease the open source community and make themselves popular,” said Mueller.

“In Europe, IBM is a driving force behind the extension of the scope of patentability with respect to software. If IBM wants to assume the role of a post-Christmas benefactor, they’d better stop their aggressive patent lobbying in the EU and their shameless squeezing of small and medium-sized companies with its patent portfolio.” [5]

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Numerous men have been charged in Canada and the United States with various crimes related to a plot to arm the Tamil Tigers who are listed as a terrorist organization in both countries. Some are accused of plotting to buy surface-to-air missiles and AK-47 rifles that would have been sent to the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Eight people, including three Canadian citizens, were charged in Brooklyn, New York yesterday with various offences. At the same time the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested a 26-year-old in Ontario in relation to the plot. He faces extradition to the United States.

Charges against the nine include fundraising and money laundering through US bank accounts and charitable organizations for the Liberation Tigers of Talim Eelam, or Tamil Tigers, who have been fighting the Sri Lankan military in a civil war since 1983.

Two of the men allegedly tried to bribe undercover US State Department officials with $1 million in order to remove the Tigers from the official list of terrorist organizations which bars the group from raising money, obtaining weapons or lobbying. A more extensive investigation ensued involving the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The RCMP was brought in when the FBI learned of a Canadian allegedly being involved. Ultimately, the three Canadians arrested in the United States are accused of travelling to New York to purchase the military equipment including 50 to 100 SAM missiles, assault rifles, truck mounted missiles, aerial vehicles for jamming radio transmissions and radar, submarine design software as well as flight lessons and military training.

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