Month: December 2016

Enlarge / Here, the Three Wise Men prepare to engage in feats of strength.

Christmas day has come and gone. The cards and presents have been opened, the dinners have been eaten, the trash has been hauled, and now we settle into that weird post-Christmas week where some folks are back at work and others are still lazing around on vacation until after New Year's. Which am I? Clearly, I'm here working—somebody's got to keep the lights on here, after all.

Aside from Christmas, though, one other major holiday that's come and gone is Festivus, the secular parody holiday from the TV show Seinfeld. Traditionally celebrated on December 23, Festivus calls for (among other things) an airing of grievances—on the show, this usually just involves George's father yelling at everyone, but here at Ars we also have some stuff we want to get off our collective chest. Keeping our nose to the tech news all year long means we see and deal with a lot of trends in technology that annoy us—from stupid printers to dumb Android OEMs to just about anything else. Even though Festivus is passed, we asked the Ars staff to write down their grievances for airing anyway—because who doesn't love reading about someone else's angst?

Presented below, in alphabetical order, is the Ars Technica staff's 2016 airing of techno-grievances.

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Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games. Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

Do you get unhealthy levels of enjoyment from unwrapping decks of cards, punching out cardboard tiles, and evaluating the heft and finish of wooden cubes? We do, too—we're gamers, after all—and 2016 was a tremendous year for tabletop gaming. The tireless members of the Ars Cardboard crew spent a lot of time playing, replaying, and dissecting the year's new titles, and we're ready to tell you what we enjoyed most.

A caveat: because so many games appear each year, and because the board game release calendar is so heavily weighted toward the latter half of the year, we didn't (and simply couldn't) play absolutely everything. But we gave it a good shot!

SpaceX

It has been quite a year for rocket launches—to say nothing of landings. As we approach the end of 2016, Ars thought it might be worthwhile to revisit the year in rockets, from attention-getting SpaceX launches to less appreciated but still impressive liftoffs from Russia, Kazakhstan, China, and elsewhere.

In our view, the most picturesque rocket launch came in June, when United Launch Alliance's Delta IV Heavy rocket hefted a US spy satellite into space. The Delta IV, the most powerful rocket in operation with a capacity of 28.4 tons to low-Earth orbit, blasted off from Florida under sunny skies and looked like something Vincent van Gogh might have painted had he lived in the 21st century.

For software patent defenders, Planet Blue's patent on lip synchronization in animated characters was their last, great hope. (credit: McRO, Inc.)

In 2014, the US Supreme Court dealt a major blow to software patents. In their 9-0 ruling in Alice Corp v. CLS Bank, the justices made it clear that just adding fancy-sounding computer language to otherwise ordinary aspects of business and technology isn't enough to deserve a patent.

Since then, district court judges have invalidated hundreds of patents under Section 101 of the US patent laws, finding they're nothing more than abstract ideas that didn't deserve a patent in the first place. The great majority of software patents were unable to pass the basic test outlined by the Supreme Court. At the beginning of 2016, the nation's top patent court had heard dozens of appeals on computer-related patents that were challenged under the Alice precedent. DDR Holdings v. Hotels.com was the only case in which a Federal Circuit panel ruled in favor of a software patent-holder. The Alice ruling certainly didn't mean all software patents were dead on arrival—but it was unclear what a software patent would need to survive. Even DDR Holdings left a teeny-tiny target for patent owners to shoot at.

That all changed in 2016. Judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found three more cases in which they believe that software patents were wrongly invalidated. What once looked like a small exception to the rule now looks like three big ones. The results of those cases could portend a coming year that will be friendlier to patent owners than the past few have been. As 2016 winds down, let's take a closer look at the details of these three software patent battles and how patent-holders kept their patents alive through the appeals court.