Bad Day for Bad Patents: Supreme Court Unanimously Strikes Down Abstract Software Patent
Daniel Nazer, Vera Ranieri, Electronic Frontier Foundation, June 20, 2014

Nice news on the patent front. "Essentially, the Court ruled that adding “on a computer” to an abstract idea does not make it patentable. Many thousands of software patents—particularly the vague and overbroad patents so beloved by patent trolls—should be struck down under this standard."

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Washington Post, New York Times and Mozilla team up for new Web site comment system
Paul Farhi, Washington Post, June 20, 2014

I want this: "The Washington Post, the New York Times and software developer Mozilla will team up to create digital tools that will make it easier for readers to post comments and photos on news sites and to interact with journalists and each other." People complain about the gRSShopper comment system more than anything else, but I've resisted focusing my energies on developing a centralized system. But this (as compared to the extant Disqus system) might be the ticket. More commentary: “The complicated thing about this is it’s going to be a lot of different pieces that need to be interoperable, and not just once, but across the web.” Mathew Ingram writes that it "sounds a little like an open-source version of Kinja." More from Poynter, Dave Winer (who argues for a more distributed system), Denovati.

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Canadian Labour Market— The Roots of Budding Change
Benjamin Tal, Nick Exarhos, CIBC, June 20, 2014

A report from CIBC reaffirms the existence of a skills gap in Canada. "Large swaths of those unemployed are not what employers are seeking... lower levels of unemployment generally occur when there are higher levels of job vacancies. That intuitive relationship has failed to hold true in Canada since 2011, with higher vacancies and higher unemployment positively correlated. A disconnect between the types of workers desired and those that are available in the ranks of the unemployed would explain how a growing number of unfilled vacancies could co-exist with a higher level of unemployed—and potentially unemployable—individuals." Via Academica.

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