We've all read about some of the dumber patents issued recently by the United States Patent and Trademark Office [USPTO]. The Slashdot community is full of talent and creativity, so why not come up with our own stupid patent ideas instead of waiting for Amazon or Priceline or some other company to come up with something amusing? First prize is a $50 ThinkGeek Gift Certificate that I am paying for out of my own pocket, and will personally sign. The winner will be chosen on the basis of originality, believability, and humor value. To start things off, I will describe my own personal contribution to the Stupid Patent Pool: Zero Click Shopping.

So, as today is a somewhat slow day, and I've had the galling experience of dealing with the phone system today, I thought I'd give a small piece of my mind about that wonderful practice known as phone slamming, and what wonderful practices Big Business likes to engage in.

Berkeley scholar Joseph Lockard (a doctoral candidate in English Literature) claims the idea of the virtual community is a Ponzi scheme, promoted by benighted utopians and elitists who equate access to the Net and the Web with social and democratic enlightenment. This myth has been virtually unchallenged for years, he says, and in a provocative and interesting essay called Progressive Politics, Electronic Individualism, and the Myth of Virtual Community, Lockard claims that it's nothing more than a bunch of hooey. Does anybody out there think virtual communities are real?

The Luddites have returned, dominating the presidential campaign, attacking technology and culture on many fronts, from ruining work to despoiling the environment to endangering children. Although the term "Luddite" gets kicked around a lot, few people understand who the first Luddites really were. Compared to the current crop of moral poseurs and wannabe anti-technology intellectuals, the originals were genuine heroes. They were fighting for a way of life, not for moral control or cultural power.

(Note: First in a series.)Maybe those manifesto-spouting Wired gurus were right after all. The modern political campaign as an entity is increasingly surreal and remote, especially from the perspective of this corner of the world, where nobody seems to be paying any attention and virtual reality is taking on a whole new meaning. Are these the last days of politics? I think so, and I'll be posting (with permission) your e-mail and threads responses and thoughts in subsequent columns.

Temporary staffing positions have tripled in the last decade, according to an MIT/CDI study, which suggests IT workpractices are mainstreaming, spreading well beyond Silicon Valley.

The iBiblio.org domain name is so new that Google still doesn't show it, but a search for the site's previous name, MetaLab.unc.edu, turns up over 600,000 responses. To Linux users, it is the home of the Linux Documentation Project and the world's largest repository of downloadable Linux and Open Source software, but that is not what it started out to be and it is still not iBiblio's primary purpose, although Linux and Open Source and the community concepts behind them are integral to iBiblio in many ways.

A new survey in Business Week , of all places, finds that Americans are getting ticked off about corporate power. In fact, a whopping 72% of Americans feel that big businesses have gained too much control over many aspects of their lives.In a variety of ways, abuse of technology is the reason for their unease, the Net the vehicle by which they're expressing it.

New York's big multinationally-owned publishing houses have been waving wolfbane and crosses at the Net for a decade. Now they've started hyping their e-book offerings as proof that they are becoming hip, responsive, interactive. "E-books" is the latest buzzword in publishing, made up of companies that are about as open as the NSA. Maybe the publishers ought to consider the real lessons of Net and try being as open and innovative as some of their successful young interactive writers. After all, there's money in it.

In their book Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition To the Information Age, authors James Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg predict the inevitable rise of merchant republics in cyberspace, functioning largely beyond the control or taxing powers of nation-states. A few years ago, this might have seemed loopy; today it seems almost inevitable. (Note: Second in a series.)

It's amazing to encounter so prescient, political and imaginative a worldview as was brought us some years ago in -- of all things -- a paper-and-paper game called "Mage The Ascension." Like "Shadowrunner" and other compelling works, "Mage" is one of the memorable folktales of this culture, the sort of tales which now mostly seem to have taken sophisticated electronic form.

First in a series of columns inspired by the The Sovereign Individual: Mastering The Transition To the Information Age, by authors James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. As the Information Revolution picks up steam and supplants the Industrial Age for good, will it undermine the great civic myths of the 20th century? This book argues that individuals are going to be liberated at the expense of the increasingly fatigued nation-states that have governed for centuries. (Part two upcoming: Virtual Merchant-States).

On Aug. 30 several folks who have written Linux drivers and apps relating to the free barcode scanner mentioned here a few days ago were sent cease and desist orders demanding that they stop distributing the code. [updated by timothy 20:00 GMT: Please note that what flyingbuttmonkeys received is not officially a "cease and desist" letter; instead, it merely says that the longer the drivers are available, the "longer damages will accrue," citing "intellectual property rights owned by Digital Convergence." ] The barcode scanner is called a CueCat (with some lame marketroid colons that I'm not using because it irritates me when people name things like that). The code included a device driver written by Pierre-Philippe Coupard and a reader/decrypter written by Michael Rothwell. The code is afaik unavailable, but hopefully folks who downloaded it will have mirrors soon. I asked Michael to describe to me what his decoder did, and a few other questions.

A few years ago, more than 90% of all American households halted work and play every evening to catch the evening news. Now, millions of younger Americans never watch a commercial TV newscast, and are turning to new forms of media, many generated on the Net. Cable and newspapers haven't been hit as hard as commercial TV yet, but the generational media divide is now measurable. The Net is redrawing the mediascape.

Every once in awhile I enjoy posting a feature on the subject of software freedom. Many of us just take this stuff for granted, but as Slashdot has grown, many new readers come along who don't have the history with the subject that the old school has. This one talks about proprietary licenses and related subjects, and would be cool for a lot of the newer readers out there to check it out (I know you're out there! You email me and ask 'What's an RMS?'!)

Americans used to love both politics and technology. That's no longer true, and the latter is being blamed for citizen disconnection from the former. But is it the fault of technology that fewer Americans are voting all the time? It was impossible to pay much attention to the pre-installed political conventions which concluded last week, hard to imagine a more anti-democratic, less interactive gathering. Now that these awful hypefests are over, it's time to ask one of the most interesting questions in contemporary politics: Can technology be used to promote democracy?

The ongoing debate between KDE and GNOME has calmed down a lot in the last year as each system became stable and usable. Recent announcements regarding the Gnome Foundation has caused some tension (ranging from words to DNS hijaacking). Kurt Granroth, a KDE Core Team Member, and the KDE US Press Rep has submitted his opinions on the subject, are in some cases very good points, and in other cases extremely inflammatory, but in both cases, worth reading.

ICANN's elections are now underway. (We've covered this before.) ICANN's Nominating Committee has picked several candidates for each of the five open seats in a closed primary process; now there is a "member nomination" process underway where several more candidates will be selected to run for each seat. Civil liberties groups are actively attempting to promote democratic involvement in ICANN, such as the Civil Society Democracy Project being spearheaded by CPSR. We've asked each of the people seeking to be candidates for the North American region board seat to answer one question; here are the responses we've received. Update: 08/17 14:04 by michael : Two more responses added.

Until recently, we clung to the notion that some institutions -- journalism, politics, academe, art and culture -- stood somewhat outside of the marketplace, keeping a check on the freedom and prosperity brought us by forces like technology and capitalism. We've already lost politics, media and much of culture. Now, academe is biting the dust, with significant consequences for the credibility and future of academic technological research.

For the duration of the Republican National Convention last week, the City of Philadelphia played host to delegates, members of the media, and thousands of protesters ranging from equal rights organizations to anti-poverty coalitions. This story is told by Vergil Bushnell, an e-commerce policy analyst who took part in the protest as a private citizen. In a few days, his story will be displayed in its entirety with photographs at http://www.hackedtobits.com.