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Did you know that vital parts of the US law are secret, and you're only allowed to read them if you pay a standards body thousands of dollars for the right to find out what the law of the land is?

"On Saturday, around 18 months after President Obama signed it into law, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act will take effect. Ostensibly, the act is designed to bring U.S. patent law in line with the rest of the world. Of course, not everybody feels it will help achieve the patent system's goal of protecting inventors while fostering innovation, and its effect could be even more pronounced on the DIY inventor."

There is no proverbial silver bullet to creating a safer city, but analytics technology is assisting law enforcement agencies all over the world to sort through information - part of the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data we create and consume every day - to get ahead of crime. Having access to all that information is an invaluable resource for law enforcement agencies, but it can also be pretty paralyzing. After all, only a fraction of the bits and bytes can actually be relevant, right? But how do you know and, more importantly, how do you find and act on it?

The smallest transistor ever built has been created using a single phosphorous atom by an international team of researchers at the University of New South Wales, Purdue University and the University of Melbourne.

Washington (CNN) -- Inside an ordinary office building six blocks from the Capitol, investigators sift through evidence of possible violations against ethics and laws committed by the nation's elected representatives. This is the Office of Congressional Ethics, also known as the OCE. It is one of the most important watchdogs in Washington. That's because the OCE is the only quasi-independent government body whose sole mandate is to formally investigate members of Congress.

At least since the followers of Ned Ludd smashed mechanized looms in 1811, workers have worried about automation destroying jobs. Economists have reassured them that new jobs would be created even as old ones were eliminated. For over 200 years, the economists were right. Despite massive automation of millions of jobs, more Americans had jobs at the end of each decade up through the end of the 20th century. However, this empirical fact conceals a dirty secret. There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.

The aim of the Askemos project is to enable reliable and justiciable data processing, with the goal of producing "Software that can last 200 years." The first implementations of an Askemos peer can be obtained from ball.askemos.org. The Askemos web site itself is served from the Askemos/BALL development network. Follow here for more details. Note that Askemos concerns the abstract specification exclusively; including data formats, protocols, service interfaces etc. - not the actual implementations. Askemos combines incorruptible privilege delegation and non-repudiable replication of communicating processes into a trustworthy network. Physical machines under control of their operators execute applications processes under permanent multilateral audit. The network's honest majority of hosts provides users with exclusive control, and thus real ownership of processes. Askemos models a kind of "virtual constitutional state" where physical hosts bear witness to the interactions of virtual agents (akin to citizens). Self verifying identifiers can confirm that original documents have not beentampered with. The real potential for using Askemos is for identity and time stamp services, informationmanagement in public administration and libraries attaching metadata and archives, with the goal of establishing robust systems that can endure for centuries. German tax law, for instance, has storage requirements, which makes Askemos interesting even for private, individual use. Also Activist groups, non-profits and people who desire privacy and reliability in a chaotic and unpredictable world have much to gain from this software.

Some probably see Sweden as a country where proper due process of law prevails, or at least exists. Others would very much like to see Sweden as such a country. One thing that this country has shown is, that when the interests of its establishment are threatened, all the branches of government fuse into one and cut any corners needed to neutralize the threat to its establishment, rules and rights be damned.

"Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has spoken out against the Draft Communications Bill, the UK government plans to monitor and store all digital communications, dubbed the "Snooper's Charter". In case Draft Communications Data Bill becomes the law, the US entrepreneur has promised to encrypt all connections between Wikipedia servers and the UK, effectively reducing the government's ability to snoop on use of Wikipedia. Wales was speaking to a  joint committee tasked with scrutinising the proposed Communications Bill before it is debated in the House of Commons."

interesting - bet law enforcement uses it to reverse engineer energy high spots - possible labs or growing dens

Under a new deal signed by the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto, the act of emailing a link will be classed as equivalent to photocopying, and each student and faculty member will cost the universities $27.50/year for this right that the law gives them for free, along with a collection of other blanket licenses of varying legitimacy. In order to enforce these licenses, all faculty email will be subject to surveillance.