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Want to know why there are bad patents? Because there's no such thing as a true "final rejection" of a patent (i.e., you can always keep refiling and try, try, trying again and again until it's approved) and because the former head of the Patent Office, David Kappos, saw it as his main challenge to get rid of the giant backlog in getting patents approved. And thus, soon after Kappos took over the USPTO, we noted that patent approval rates started shooting upwards. Over the previous six years or so, the approval rate had been in a gradual decline, with it really starting to drop off around 2004, just as the Supreme Court started hitting back on a bunch of bad patent rulings, and making it clearer that, no, not "everything under the sun" should be patentable. However, Kappos never appeared to view patent quality as important, merely patent quantity and ending the backlog -- and thus, the patent office started to take an approve anything mentality.

The community of coders has beaten Epic Games at the porting game and has ported the Unreal Editor to Linux already.

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 3.14, saying that he was “feeling pretty good about it all”. The new 3.14 kernel includes a number of new features, among them deadline scheduling for real-time tasks. Traditional Linux systems have extended the concept of scheduling priorities to thos special tasks that run in the real-time scheduling classes. Like their non real-time brethren, real-time tasks would then be scheduled according to priority, with the highest receiving time first. Unlike regular tasks, real-time tasks running with the SCHED_FIFO class are actually able to lock up a Linux system by hogging all of the available CPU time at maximum priority, which is one reason why real- time scheduling is a privileged operation.

We only pointed Another Star out a few days ago and it has now pushed out the Linux version! The game caught my attention with its really authentic looking retro visuals, complete with a CRT screen effect.

LXer Feature: 11-May-2014

This week in the Roundup we have how to record a terminal session on Linux, Mozilla offers FCC a net neutrality plan but with a twist, 5 easy ways to make a hacker's life harder, Appeals Court declares APIs copyrightable and Carla Schroder shows us a live Linux distro that helps protect your privacy. Enjoy!

We are very happy to present to you today, straight from the LinuxTag conference in Berlin, the first integration of the shiny new LXQt desktop environment into a distribution image. This is clearly labeled as a development release, so do not trust it, it might kill your kittens, although the developers of LXQt flagged it as being beta status. The released image which is only available for 64-bit systems for now is a snapshot of Debian's 'unstable' branch from 2014-05-08. It is enhanced with the lightweight LXQt desktop environment, some useful packages and scripts, our own installer and a custom-patched version of the Linux kernel 3.14.3.

Open source news for your reading pleasure. May 3 - May 9, 2014, 2014 In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we look at the new Unreal Tournament game's collaborative development plan, a website to help voters get their voice heard, and more.

Slackel Live KDE 4.10.5 has been released. Slackel Live KDE 4.10.5 includes the current tree of Slackware Linux and KDE 4.10.5 accompanied by a very rich collection of KDE-centric software. Linux kernel is 3.10.30. Firefox 24.5.0esr is the web browser, KMail and KTorrent are the main networking applications included in this release, followed by Akregator, an RSS reader for KDE, Kopete, the KDE instant messenger and more. It comes also with OpenJRE 7u51, Rhino, IcedTea-Web, GParted. The wicd utility is used for setting up your wired or wireless networking connections. In the multimedia section, Dragon multimedia player, Clementine 1.2.1 and K3b 2.0.2 are included. The Salix codecs installer application can be used to install patent-encumbered codecs.

The focus of this article is to select the finest Erlang books which are available to read for free. Some of the books featured here are released under an open source license. All of the texts have a lot to offer for a budding Erlang programmer.

Cut out the middleman by managing your own webmail for personal accounts and avoid any unnecessary downtime

The Wine development release 1.7.18 is now available.

As Canonical announced two weeks ago, Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS is the X-Gene 1 from Applied Micro and the Thunder from Cavium Networks. Red Hat has demonstrated its Fedora development Linux on the X-Gene 1 and AMD’s “Seattle” Opteron A1150 processors, and Jon Masters, chief ARM architect at Red Hat, said at the ARM Tech Day that 98.6 percent of the packages in RHEL are “ARM clean,” and added that this is a full-on 64-bit implementation of the stack and that Red Hat would not support 32-bit code and that the support for 64KB memory pages made it impossible to do a 32-bit port.

The developers of Calibre 10 Racing Series have stated that they love Linux and a Linux version is based on how much demand there is for one.

Recently, an interaction problem between systemd and the kernel was reported. After a calm discussion, developers of both projects found ways in which behavior could be improved and set about coding up the solutions. The technical press was filled with glowing reports on another success of collaborative problem solving... or, perhaps, most of the preceding text is entirely fictional and the systemd "debug flag" problem spiraled out of control in several ways at once.

Kubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr is an official derivative of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS that uses the popular KDE desktop environment. According to information from the development team, this version offers more stability and also brings the latest apps for KDE.

We sort of expected this to happen after the appeals court for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) held its oral arguments back in December, but CAFC has now spit at basic common sense and has declared that you can copyright an API. As we noted, back when Judge William Alsup (who learned to code Java to better understand the issues in the case) ruled that APIs were not subject to copyright protection, his ruling was somewhat unique in that it was clearly directed as much at an appeals court panel who would be hearing the appeal as it was at the parties. Alsup rightly suspected that the judges on the appeal wouldn't actually understand the issues as well as he did, and tried to break it down clearly for them. Unfortunately, the three judge CAFC panel did not pay attention.

Every week brings us new reports about the destructive effect of software patents in the US, and of a patent office there that is only too willing to grant them and other undeserving patents: an excellent if depressing article by Timothy Lee points out that the "allowance rate" - the percentage of patents that are eventually granted by the USPTO - is now a staggering 92%.

There are very good grounds for fearing that the imminent new Unitary Patent system will bring exactly the same problems to Europe, and yet there has been almost no discussion about it, certainly not here in the UK. Similarly, British citizens have not been asked whether they want this new system foisted on to them. You might say that's an unreasonable thing to expect, since patents by their very nature are complex, specialised subjects. That may be true, but the fact that Denmark will be holding a national referendum on the subject in a few weeks' time, shows that it can be done.

Several security issues were fixed in cups-filters. Sebastian Krahmer discovered that cups-browsed incorrectly filtered remote printer names and strings. A remote attacker could use this issue to possibly execute arbitrary commands. (CVE-2014-2707)

Phillip Hallam-Baker discovered that window property values could be queried in rxvt-unicode, resulting in the potential execution of arbitrary commands.

This week, we look at why Oracle keeps missing the point of the cloud, an AT&T video naming the cloud from 1993 and why internet companies back net neutrality.