As a child I remember being fascinated by science, and developed an overwhelming urge to learn how everything worked. I loved science fiction, seeing authors explore the very edges of possible futures, extrapolating out the possibly feasible to its very limits.

Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone in the land of stars and stripes, it's a pretty safe bet that blood pressures are rising and tensions are high here in the Linux blogosphere.

Cisco, Nokia and Intellectual Ventures will be taking part in informal US Department of Justice and FTC hearings on how non-practising entities, aka patent trolls, distort competition in technology markets...

The founder of the Free Software Foundation proposes to defuse software patents by limiting them to "special-purpose hardware" and exempting software written for general purpose computers.