There is a... um, little known company, don't know if you ever heard of it, called Research in Motion, that has been making security on their smartphones their main priority SINCE 1999.

The "cloud" is just another type of server. The client/server paradigm has always existed in computing. MS Outlook and Lotus Notes are just sophisticated clients. What you are saying is that very thin clients, like the Web browser, will replace current desktop applications. I doubt the Web browser can provide the complex GUI that some of the specialized applications require, particularly if more than text data entry and retrieval is involved.

It's funny that scientists try to create ion transistors and DNA-based computers. Nature has found other ways to process information, though. Trying to "replicate" electronic circuitry using biologic systems has all the drawbacks of both approaches and little if any of the benefits. Biologic systems are based on chemical diffusion in water solutions, therefore they are slower than electronic systems. However, they are massively parallel, self-organizing, self-repairing, swarm-like, use built-in negative and positive selection, and have a propensity for learning at all structural levels. More importantly, they mix "hardware" and "software" in a way that still escapes human understanding. But then again, why not...

How many of the posters here have developed software solutions that actually sell, that help make money? Being for open standards is great but if you want to put food on the table and gas in the car then you need to get paid. In a business environment it makes sense to choose the dominant platform and the development tools that are optimized for it. These happen to be MS Windows and Visual Studio. For a rich GUI application you can choose WPF for desktops and Silverlight for mobile. There is still Adobe Flash out there but its size and the Apple effect on smartphones/tablets have all but made it irrelevant on mobile. De Icaza and the gang opened up the iOS and Android platforms to .NET devs, which decreased the MS dominance to some extent. If you are an exclusive Java/C/C++ fan then you can just ignore the 8% .NET developers but that number is not so far from the 9.8% C++ developers. And BTW, I have developed and published Web apps (HTML5/CSS/JavaScript) for mobile and then I decided to stop wasting my own time.

Oh, and Objective-C at 8.3% but, unless and until the business world switches to Mac OS X/iOS, I think it's fair to label it as "entertainment".

"The Mono project is about the only group of people actively talking up .NET" -- You made this up, right? tiobe.com shows C++ at 9.8% and C# at 6.8%.

"KDE is an international free software community" -- Yes, well, when I install Linux it asks me whether I want a Gnome or a KDE desktop. Never thought I was choosing between two "international free software communities" ;) The second link you provided is great news. I always liked the KDE smooth look and feel, I always hated its sluggishness when compared to Gnome. Again, that seems to be in the past now. Thanks.

Both KDE and Gnome are hardware-intensive desktops. There is a reason why Canonical switched to Unity. A KDE powered tablet? With KDE on a diet, maybe.

The relevant part in this shocking news is "0.77 millimeters per year", not "42% of recent sea level rise". How on earth does one measure 0.77 mm per year? When I watch the waves breaking against the sea shore this seems so far fetched.

Right, but then they should stamp the same browser release number on all platforms only if and when the same full API is supported on all platforms.

In more recent news, computer scientists determined that monkeys can get the same job done even faster, and by using even less power, and by making, um... a lot more mistakes.

Hm, my comment is now rated as "flamebait". Fact: Apple changed an objective response based on actual market data to a false answer with the purpose of increasing their profits. Rate that.

If they do that the what else are they willing to do? Can you trust an answer from Apple?

I thought that Web App = platform independence? If it's not not then what's the point of developing Web Apps?

If one has something to say (i.e., in a protest) then they should identify themselves. This is consistent with the election system in North America: you want to see/know the person you vote for, who will represent you; then you should not hide.