Sign Of The Times??

‘Look right’ sign on London crossing points left

As if a busy dual carriageway in north London wasn’t difficult enough to cross in the first place, bungling workmen from Islington council have painted a sign telling pedestrians to ‘look right’ – with an arrow pointing left.
The confusing signage has appeared at the corner of Holloway Road and Tufnell Park Road after council workers found there was no sign for pedestrians on one side of the crossing.
However, after painting such a contradictory instruction it seems to be causing more problems than when there was nothing there at all.
Local Gina Turner, who works in an electrical store near the crossing, said: ‘I went out and as I crossed I thought “oh they’ve repainted the road”, then I looked again and I couldn’t believe it – I thought I was seeing things.
‘Someone’s going to be looking right and get knocked down and killed. I’ve already heard car horns going off and seen people having to jump back out of the road – it’s really dangerous.’
The speed limit on the busy trunk road into the centre of the capital is 30mph, although it is known as something of an accident black spot.

A Spot Of Tar Trouble?

Council workers resurfacing road laid tarmac around car

Council workers resurfacing a road laid tarmac around someone's car.

Contractors had put up notices and wrote to residents weeks in advance warning them works were about to begin.
But when they arrived at the street they found one driver had forgotten to move their vehicle.
Workmen were unable to find the owner of the Peugeot 206 so they worked around it.
They re-laid the 600ft street but left the car in a neat square of unsurfaced road.
The workers plan to go back to finish the job as soon as they can track down the sheepish owner, who has not yet been identified.
Local John Nicholas, 49, spotted the car rooted to the spot when he drove past on Tuesday on Starpitten Lane West in Torquay, Devon,
He said: "I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw it. There were signs up for weeks saying the road was going to be resurfaced so there was plenty of warning."
A Torbay Council spokesman said: "Signs were placed out on site two weeks in advance of the surfacing works, and a letter drop was made to all residents.
"Unfortunately the contractor was unable to identify the owner of the car and get it removed on the day of the works.
"Improvements of this type require significant plant and materials which are ordered in advance, so the decision was made to continue with the surfacing.
"The contractor will return to complete the works when the car is moved, at no extra cost to the council."

An Artist??

Botched fresco changes fortunes of Spanish town

The botched restoration of a religious fresco by an elderly parishioner that invited ridicule and made headlines the world over a year ago has changed the fortunes of a Spanish town.

"After everything that happened, we can say that the balance has been positive. It has brought tourists from all over the world, been a boost to the economy of local restaurants and raised money for charity," said Francisco Arilla, the mayor of Borja. "It has put the town on the map."
When 82-year old widow, Celia Gimenez, picked up her artist's brushes to spruce up Ecce Homo, a century old fresco of Christ at her local church, she could have had no idea of the furore it would cause.
The painting of Christ with a crown of thorns was in dire need of repair after years of humidity and salt residue had taken its toll but her amateur restoration efforts transformed it into a laughing stock.
Images of the icon before and after spread like wildfire over social networks and it was dubbed Ecce Mono for its likeness to a monkey.
Local authorities said they would sue Mrs Gimenez for destroying the mural and vowed to call in the best professional restorers to undo the damage.
However, a year on and the town is celebrating its unlikely windfall and the embarrassed pensioner who put it on the map.
Some 70,000 tourists have been drawn to the unremarkable town of Borja, near Zaragoza in the Spanish region of Aragon, to view the disfigured fresco in situ at the Sanctuary of Mercy Church.
Since church authorities started charging an entrance fee of one euro, some 50,000 euros has been raised that is destined for a local charitable care home with 60 residents.
Now the council has establish copyright and drawn-up merchandising agreements that will see the Ecce Mono image printed on plates, tea-towels, postcards, mugs and T-shirts.
The image has even been used on a label to promote the local wine.
Plans to restore the original image have been shelved and Mrs Gimenez has become a local celebrity with the town council putting on a special exhibition of her other artworks.
Mrs Gimenez believes her paintings, which mainly comprise romantic representations of local landscapes, show her true talent as an artist and hopes that she will become famed for more than just her mistake with the Ecce Homo.
"As an artist, one wants to be known, but not for creating something one isn't proud of, not for being a joke," she said.

An Apple For The President?

Obama Favours Apple over Samsung

President Barack Obama has announced that every time Samsung wins a lawsuit against Apple he will veto the decision. However, it is unclear what will happen when Apple beats Samsung.
Victory by Samsung would have protected it from the iPhone 4 and some iPads entering the United States from China if they used technology which stole Samsung’s ideas. Local media revealed that it’s the first time since 1987 that a US President has interfered with an ITC order. In response, the White House claimed that it was an important element of the Administration’s policy of promoting innovation and economic progress.

The veto means that Apple will be allowed to keep importing and selling the above mentioned gadgets in the United States, but the White House pointed out that the veto will in no way address the legal merit of Samsung’s claims. Obama’s decision to disapprove that determination won’t mean that the patent owner in this case isn’t entitled to a remedy. On the contrary, the South Korean giant may continue to pursue its rights through the courts. The President administration is eager to see itself as trying to shut down the use of import bans as a weapon for patent trolls. Obama has indicated that the White House will prevent the ITC from awarding product bans in the future in lawsuits involving essential patents. However, it is unclear whether this will apply to non-US companies.

Of course, the South Korea is furious with the news, because the White House has just taken away its bargaining chip to stop Apple doing the same trick to it. Samsung’s spokesperson admitted that the ITC’s decision recognized that the company has been negotiating in good faith and that Apple remains unwilling to take a license.

In response, Apple really rubbed it in, claiming that it invented everything and all competitors should be exterminated. In the worst case of hypocrisy that the industry has ever seen from Apple, its spokesperson claimed that thanks to the Obama administration standing up for innovation in this landmark case, Samsung was efficiently ruled wrong to abuse the patent system in that way.

In the meantime, Apple recognizes itself as a company which has never abused the patent system by trolling its rivals off the shelf… Bla-bla-bla.

Handwriting!….What’s That?

Texting Spoils Handwriting

The experts confirmed that handwriting skills have progressively dropped with technology increasing communication speeds. For example, the observers noticed a dramatic downturn in the legibility of handwritten court documents.
In addition, the experts admit that the loss of handwriting skills “comes at the price of a rotting of the mind”. Texting is believed to be part of the problem, as people have lost the knack of writing long sentences. As a result, people are not using their minds but instead are relying on technology which can decide for them.

The experts point out that cursive writing uses mental and physical processes that involve both left and right side of the brain. However, cursive writing decreases with technology becoming the most dominant means of communication. Indeed, typing or texting is only a matter of punching and finger-moving, where people don’t care much about doing any thinking because they are not allowing their brain to form neural processes.

According to a 2012 study, 33% of people experience difficulty with reading their own handwriting. For example, Docmail, a British printing and mailing firm, has revealed that 30% of participants hadn’t been required to produce something in handwriting for more than six months. It turned out that updating calendars, phone books and reminder notes is more likely to be done without even using a pen or a pencil. Moreover, over 50% of participants admitted that their handwriting was poor.

Australia = Expensive!!

Australia Pays 68% More for Software

The Australian government has been investigating unfair electronics pricing in the area for a while now. Unfortunately, it turned out that the Aussies have really got a raw deal.
Unsurprisingly, such corporate giants as Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe weren’t very keen on the inquiry, because the Australians pay about 66% more for Microsoft products and 42% more for Adobe software than the rest of the world.

It turned out that games cost 84% more than in the United States, music 52% more and hardware 46% more. Apparently, inflated prices were only part of an added cost of business to trade in the country, but it doesn’t actually hold up to scrutiny while considering digital downloads.

According to the recent report, the investigating committee claimed it has no idea why it’s “almost invariably cheaper” for Australian games to buy and ship physical media from the United Kingdom to Australia than to get a copy of the same game.

Taking into account the evidence presented to the Committee of very large price differentials, it turned out too difficult for it to avoid the conclusion that such practices lead to international price discrimination to the clear disadvantage of local consumers and companies. Therefore, the Australian Bureau of Statistics was recommended to work on a program that would monitor the price of IT products, hardware and software in Australia and everywhere else in the world.

While universities were encouraged to investigate the needs and costs for education, the Committee suggested to enforce a federally mandated IT procurement policy as well. The most interesting fact is that Australians can get a “right of resale” legislation which would allow them to sell on old digital music and ebooks.

Go Away Troll!!

Largest Patent Troll Finally Vanquished

Industry observers point out that key patents at the centre of the Internet will now be safe from patent troll Eolas in the largest trademark payouts ever. Indeed, the Eolas patents have been so threatening to the Internet that Sir Tim Berners-Lee showed up in court in order to take on the trolls a year ago.
The case was the result of Michael Doyle’s effort to levy a vast patent tax, and its outcome was a major disappointment for the latter, because the court invalidated his patents and an appeals court agreed.

20 years ago, Michael Doyle was the director of a computer laboratory at the University of California-San Francisco and oversaw the creation of software enabling doctors to view embryos online. At the time, Doyle claimed it was the first “interactive” use of the Internet and patented the idea in 1994.

Doyle established a company called “Eolas”, but never made a product that worked – instead, he preferred to get rich off the back of settlements. The first lawsuit was filed in 1999 against Microsoft’s IE, which was accused of violating his patent on interactive features online. As a result, the company collected a $540 million jury verdict after appeals, and Microsoft chose to settle for $100 million.

However, things didn’t go well in other ways, because Eolas’ original patent was denounced by the Internet global standard-setting body a decade ago and there was a re-examination at the American Patent Office, during which Eolas’s patent wasn’t touched. Then, Doyle received another patent similar to its first in 2009 and launched some serious trolling against a number of tech giants, including Apple, eBay, Google, Yahoo, and Amazon. By 2012, he demanded over $600 million, but at the trial he was already asking for $1 billion.

So, Doyle and his lawyers made millions, but by the end of the latest jury trial, only Google, Yahoo and JC Penney refused to strike deals with the troll. Unlike other patent trolls that were happy to settle for settlements just under the cost of litigation, Doyle wanted to get millions of dollars from the defendants. Even after Eolas lost, it kept filing lawsuits against Disney, ESPN, ABC, Facebook, and WalMart. The worst part was that the University of California remained a big player in the trolling scenario.

A Lot Of Clicks??

Google Accounts for 25% of all American Traffic

A survey by online monitoring company Deepfield revealed that Google takes a quarter of American Internet traffic. Over 60% all web-enabled devices exchange traffic with Google’s servers on a daily basis. In other words, the tech giant is bigger than Facebook, Netflix, and Twitter altogether.
Experts of the monitoring firm explained that based on measurements of end device and user audience share, 60% of all web end devices and users exchange traffic with Google servers every day. The survey covers computers, mobile devices, game consoles, home media appliances, and other embedded devices. In the meantime, it isn’t just Google’s search sucking up the traffic – in fact, the tech giant also gets huge amounts of traffic via its analytics, hosting, and advertising platforms. In addition, the company harvests other sources of traffic, like its Google Global Cache servers, used by most of American Internet providers and in over 100 other countries. The experts admit that this is a huge jump on previous figure – according to the 2010 study on Google’s web traffic, the company only had 6%.

Walled Up?

Worker sent to remove graffiti finds image of himself on the same wall hours later

When a worker was called in to paint over some unwanted graffiti, he no doubt thought it was just another routine clear up job.

Little did he know that the artist was secretly photographing him to include him in his next artwork.
The stencil artist – who is known only as 'DS' – painted his first piece of 'Bad Kitty' graffiti on a wall in London in May in a piece intended to be a comment on the "squeaky clean image" of the Hello Kitty cartoon.
However, DS, 28, from London, was surprised to find the graffiti being removed just eight hours after he'd finished the work.
Wanting to document the removal, he decided to photograph the worker and use his image as inspiration for a new piece of work on the same wall.
A month later, the piece is still on the wall in Essex Road, Islington.
DS told the Daily Mail: "My reaction to it being removed was a little different than normally. Knowing a piece as been removed or painted over doesn’t bother me, it’s the name of the game in graffiti but this time was a little different as it only lasted eight hours.
"So you can imagine my frustration when coming back I found the council (or private company I’m not sure) starting the process of erasing it from the wall – which I documented.
"Looking through the images I took I saw a great one of the removals man so I wanted to put him up in the same space."
The Londoner said it should not be for the council to decide on the "legitimacy" or "worthiness" of a piece.
He said it would be better to let graffiti "run it’s natural course even if that means great art being painted over – another one will takes its place".
He said it was a strange time for street art at the moment when "Banksy does a piece and it gets protected by the council" but "another piece from a just as edgy artist ... gets taken down".