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A few months ago, the US Supreme Court said it would take up a controversial and divided case regarding software patents. Now, the high court has agreed to take up two more patent cases—both of which could potentially overturn current rules that many in the tech sector see as too lenient for patent owners.

In Zen Buddhism the concept of Shoshin, or "Beginner’s Mind," teaches us to approach learning with openness and a lack of preconceptions. Zen Monk and teacher, Shunryu Suzuki famously wrote: "In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few." When we cast aside that which we think we know, or that which we believe to be true, we can embrace new insights and ideas. As we climb to levels of expertise in our careers and work, we sometimes disconnect from the intense experiences of unknowing and the creative discovery inherent in being a novice. Children wholly embody a beginner’s mind and naturally exhibit an inquisitiveness and passion to explore the world around them.

Last week, we wrote about the MPAA joining the W3C almost certainly as part of its ongoing effort to push for DRM to be built into HTML5. Cory Doctorow has a beautifully titled blog post about all of this, saying that "we are Huxleying ourselves into the full Orwell." It's a great way to think about it, and Cory's quite pessimistic about the outcome:

For the benefit of those class of users, this very brief article summarizes the key difference between these two desktop environments. Nothing technical, just basic stuff that will help those users to better understand what their options are.

New support in libvirt for Xen Project's xl (xenlight) toolstack

The Linux Foundation has made a name for itself, not just as the home of Linus Torvalds and Linux development, but as the premier organizer for open-source collaboration. It's a fact that the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has also realized and after 14 years of producing their own ApacheCon conferences, the ASF is leaning on the Linux Foundation to product the next one.

Thanks to the help of a few, proud Fedora users, I was able to install the AMD Catalyst 13.11 beta (version 9.95 to be exact) driver on my Xfce-running Fedora 20 system.bAnd thus the long local (as opposed to national) nightmare of poor video performance and a CPU running 30 to 40 degrees hotter is over.

Canonical's UK-based operations earned $65.7 million in revenue during fiscal 2013, a significant boost over the previous year's revenue of $56.8 million.

Back in the mid-1990s, a college friend (hi Russ!) and I would put our old 8088 computers to work rendering ray-traced images for days - literally. The end result would be, by today's standards, incredibly low resolution and not terribly interesting. Still, the thought of a computer system creating realistic photos from nothing more than math equations was fascinating.

Fernando Russ from Groundworks Technologies reported a buffer overflow flaw in srtp, Cisco's reference implementation of the Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP), in how the crypto_policy_set_from_profile_for_rtp() function applies applies cryptographic profiles to an srtp_policy. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to crash an application linked against libsrtp, resulting in a denial of service.

Linux Educacional 5.0 is available. Linux Educational is a government-sponsored project based in Brazil. The distribution comes with educational tools and is designed for use in schools.

Multiple Denial of Service vulnerabilities have been found in libxslt.

In 2014, Fedora could be in store for its biggest evolution since the project's creation, with fewer releases and even a new naming strategy.

Typically, the Fedora project has had two releases in any given year: one in the early spring, the other early winter. For 2014, that likely won't be the case.

Not really one for gamers, but this is important for developers to know that changes are heading your way.

This tutorial will discuss how to set up a working mail server in Ubuntu or Debian. As we know, the two major protocols used in a mail server are SMTP and POP/IMAP. In this tutorial, postfix will be used for SMTP, while dovecot will be used for POP/IMAP. Both are open source, stable and highly customizable.

Today in Open Source: Is the iPhone losing ground to large screen Android phones? Plus: Build an open source laptop, and six Linux distros for netbooks.

Easily benchmark your network connection between Linux boxes by using the netcat tool - you'll get reliable results in just a few seconds.

The acid test was not how much we liked it but on whether our Reglue Kids liked it. Working with a small sampling of 14 installations and different partition boot options, we gauged how well our KDE version did when compared against GNOME 3/GNOME Shell and Cinnamon. Each one of the 14 kids were asked to use all three environments and give us some feedback.

A few days before the announcement for the end of life of Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail), Canonical has released the last major update of its soon to be unsupported Ubuntu operating system, fixing no more than nine vulnerabilities discovered by various developers in the upstream kernel packages.

The Intense PC forms the basis for a MintBox2 computer, jointly offered with the Linux Mint project, and it’s also available directly from CompuLab in a variety of customizable models. The Intense PC2 moves up from Intel’s 3rd Generation “Ivy Bridge” Core processors to the 4th Gen “Haswell”. The high-end model offers a quad-core Intel Core i7-4600U, clocked at 2.1GHz, with turbo mode reaching up to 3.30GHz. Other “Haswell” options are also available, including Core i5 and i3 chips, and the Intel Celeron 2955.