Wednesday February 19, 2014 the astronaut Dale Gardner passed away due to a brain aneurysm. During his career as an astronaut, he flew on the Space Shuttle Challenger in mission STS-8 and on the Space Shuttle Discovery in mission STS-51-A. In his last mission, he recovered two satellites placed in the wrong orbit using a jetpack.
In June 2013, the President of the U.S.A. Barack Obama announced measures to limit the phenomenon of “patent trolling”, which is the use of patents for the sole purpose of restricting competition and to obtain money through legal action or through agreements following threats of such actions. Yesterday came the announcement of the opening of a section of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) website, which is the organism that handles patents, containing information useful for anyone who has been accused of violating someone else’s patents.
Facebook has announced the acquisition of WhatsApp, the famous instant messaging application for mobile devices. The price that Mark Zuckerberg’s social network will pay is $16 billion of which $4 billion in cash and $12 billion in Facebook shares. An additional $3 billion in restricted Facebook shares will be paid as a bonus tied to WhatsApp’s founders and employees that will vest over four years subsequent to closing. WhatsApp Inc. CEO Jan Koum will enter Facebook’s board of directors.
Jonathan Allen Lethemwas born on February 19, 1964, in Brooklyn, New York. Jonathan Lethem manages to mix various literary genres in a truly unique way. It’s therefore impossible to predict what his next novel will be like. Being surprised is part of the pleasure of reading this author.
In the course of his life, Jonathan Lethem has been married three times: with the artist Shelley Jackson from 1987 to 1997, with Julia Rosenberg from 2000 to 2002 and from 2004 with Amy Barrett, with whom in 2007 he had a son, Everett Barrett Lethem.
