There'll be no way to recover those social graces, but six researchers at the University of Calgary have developed a software technique, Fat Thumb, that should at least keep the contortions and dropped phones to a minimum.

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The Supreme Court did uphold a patent on a software-controlled rubber-curing machine in 1981, but its ruling emphasized that this was because the patent covered a physical machine that happened to have a software component, rather than claiming a software technique by itself.

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The software lets the fire brigade use a technique known as modelling regression to target places that register as at high risk for fire.

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This technique works regardless of the presentation software you choose to use: PowerPoint or Apple Keynote.

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These companies are either adding support services to an existing open source project or creating software and using open source as a marketing technique.

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The technique was invented by IBM back in the 1960s, when software was relatively cheap and hardware incredibly expensive.

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