The part that I think the parent finds objectionable - and I tend to agree - is the suggestion that they're actually removing features from already-sold devices. I don't think it's reasonable to remove functionality from a device after selling it, unless it's absolutely necessary to prevent damage to the device or danger to the user. They're welcome to remove it from devices that haven't yet sold, so long as people are clear what they're getting when they do purchase those devices.

I think the fact that Samsung would prefer not to have sold the functionality, in hindsight, shouldn't give them the right to remove it from their existing customers' private devices. If they are encouraged (for instance, via a class action) not to view this as a quick and simple solution then hopefully it will not become their first answer to future problems of this type.

This is the kind of article I'm always glad to see on Slashdot; emacs is cool, Lisp is cool, an article on something that's genuinely hardcore nerdy is always good to see! With the Linux on 8-bit micro article also posted today it feels like the nerd coefficient is running high today! Good!

Embedded has become a rather broad space these days as the range of computing hardware that's built into other devices gets more powerful at the high end.

Like the GP I think I'd usually prefer to think of a "systems language" as something that's suitable for kernel programming and for the low cost / simple CPU end of embedded work, where things can still be very highly resource constrained. But I can see why they're calling Go one, since I'd also expect a "systems language" to be suitable for writing OS utilities, servers, databases, etc - which Go probably is indeed suited to.

I do still hope we'll one day see a favoured C replacement emerge - one that has similar characteristics and abilities but which is nicer to code in. Not that C is bad at what it does - for the sorts of tasks it's good at it's still really quite good...

The hardware acceleration for video on the board is actually quite impressive. It can apparently decode 1080p video in real time, so even if it can't run a modern desktop very fast it can still be useful; there's a port of XMBC so you can use it as a media centre. You have to have proprietary drivers for the graphics acceleration but it's still cool. I'm not sure how integrated into the normal X11 stack these drivers are by now, earlier on in the project you'd just use the graphics library provided and drive the screen without X (as I understood it).

Yes - this! Actually, I'm not bothered about money staying in my own country or region so long as I know it's eventually going to people who play fair with their workforce. We've had a Fairtrade movement for things like coffee and chocolate - and it's starting to become more mainstream for things like clothing. But it's *very* difficult to find anything technology-wise that has any such guarantees.

I bought a cute little webcam from these guys: http://www.unitedpepper.org/ because they claimed to make it under fair trade-type conditions. It's maybe not the most technically sophisticated but it's a nice little thing and I really wanted to support a company that was trying to make a positive change.

Either way, I've got the money and I'd pay any reasonable premium for an ethically manufactured product, possibly a quite significant premium as long as they didn't make a shoddy device to cut costs elsewhere. But the industry currently isn't giving me the chance to give them that extra money, which seems a great shame.

I do make a point of researching welfare conditions before buying electronics and I often also write to companies before buying Far East manufactured goods. Often they don't respond - but at least they see some public interest. Plus I know that the ones who do get back to me with useful information are worth giving money to.

Maybe publishers should start paying gamers royalties for second hand sales? Every time a gamer manages to sell a second hand copy of a game with one-use DLC, that's a sale that the publisher hasn't had to spend money marketing. The friend he sold to will buy the DLC, so the original owner should get a cut of the marketing money saved.

That's on top of a discount for single-use games, obviously - and the right to compensation for time wasted when buyers find out their game has single-use content and return it for a refund.

I don't really think freedom of contract is sufficient to justify what the publishers are doing in this instance - for general societal well-being, there is law in place that governs contracts in ways that minimise what you might call consumer "surprise". So there are some things you can't put in contracts, a general principle that the party has to know they're signing up for it, etc. Enforcing these helps us in ways including having a freer market because companies can't use the legal system as an alternative to in-market competition. As this practice becomes widespread I think it's certainly inviting heavier government regulation - and I hope lawmakers will make steps towards intervention if it carries on, at least so that the industry makes a more serious choice about what's best.

As described there, doesn't that primarily involve border crossing? Or does it authorise the police to check anyone's origin in case someone's managed to sneak over the border illegally?

There's a campaign to help this man: https://peoplewithoutnation.wordpress.com/

Most recently, there's an appeal to write to the Prime Minister of Canada, who hasn't yet spoken out in support of Saeed:
https://peoplewithoutnation.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/take-action-write-a-letter-to-stephen-harper-canadas-prime-minister/

The death sentence could be carried out imminently.

Saeed Malekpour was in Iran to visit his gravely ill father. He was waiting for Canadian citizenship and the Iranian regime are aiming to make an example of him, having tortured him and denied him due process. I think the Canadian government does have a particular moral duty to stand up for him under the circumstances, although really all democratic governments ought to oppose this sort of thing.

The Iranian regime seems to have an interest in intimidating the population (and making an example out of cases that are highly-publicised internally, such as this one) since there's an election coming up in March, as well as the general interest in keeping the population scared.

Amnesty also have some information on the case:
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/iran-must-halt-execution-web-programmer-2012-01-19

I'm just piecing together some information I've found here, I'm not connected to the case.

Wow, I've been a bit surprised by the criticism I've seen here. When I saw this I only thought "Getting to the pole: cool" "Riding bikes: fun and fast", so trying to combine the two just seemed like a nice idea. She's also intending to use kite skiing. It's not as impressive as trekking with less equipment, although equally it sounded like she's doing it alone, which is quite scary regardless. It will be interesting to see whether using this level of fairly basic technology helps, hinders or makes no difference.

That's true. I think there'll still be a place for these as separate boards though; for the educational and hobbyist markets (which I think is what they're targeting and expecting to be popular with) it's quite important to be able to easily replace broken devices and to be able to incorporate them into other designs.

Indeed - it looks like it's reusing a load of artwork from KDE *which is good*. With open source there's no reason not to slot in existing professional artwork straight away in a new project. They're even planning to make it easy to contribute their patches to common code back to KDE, so they're even being actively co-operative, which is always nice to see.

If they come up with something that looks nice and is lighter-weight than KDE then I might want to install it on my ancient netbook or in virtual machines. KDE is still my preference on my desktop.

Qt is a nice toolkit and it's good to see more development based on it. There's also the Trinity Desktop Environment, for folks who want a KDE-like lightweight desktop - it actually *is* KDE 3, further developed. It looks like (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Trinity#Trinity_Build_Dependency_PKGBUILDs) that's based on Qt 3, whereas Razor-Qt can presumably use newer Qt versions from the start. Variety is nice, it's all cool.

This! I live in a bicycle friendly city and generally use my bike to commute. But even here you see people on their phones in cars on a regular basis (which is actually now illegal here), plus trying all kinds of crazy driving when impatient or not thinking straight. When you're cycling it's much more easy for one of those incidents to turn into a serious injury, since you have no protection at all from other people's vehicles.

But people don't have the mindset that they're operating a dangerous machine that they need to take responsibility for, so they just carry on doing it because they don't believe they're doing anything dangerous. I wish people would be taught more explicitly just how dangerous their car is.

With cyclists the situation is complicated because there's an eternal tension between what the two kinds of vehicles think they should be allowed to do on the road. But it's the same if you're driving, no matter what you do, some other folks either think their car is a toy or that nothing could possibly happen to them.

The Island of Sark was, until fairly recently, the only remaining feudal state in Europe. Not that long ago they did have an actual referendum and decided to stay like that, rather than transitioning to democracy (some time later they had another referendum and decided to make the change after all).

Its a tiny, tiny place - cars are illegal, you use bicycle or cart - so I imagine there genuinely *is* an argument that you know the people in power personally, so why would you need elections. Presumably the first time round they just couldn't see the benefit of democracy in their particular case. Not the same scale as, say, Egypt but it is a valid case of where there were sane arguments against democracy.

Tangent: when they did switch, the democracy was apparently under immediate attack. Some UK newpaper barons from neighbouring island (the Barclay Brothers, who own the Telegraph newspaper) threw their weight behind the democracy campaign and put up a candidate. They have subsequently been accused of using their muscle as a local employer to punish and manipulate the population (who voted for someone other than the Brothers' preferred candidate). A thoroughly surreal situation and bizarre to think of a state the size of a very small town / large village immediately under attack by commercial interests and pressures!

Good point. However, I do worry that it seems like the kind of thing that sets a high barrier to entry for new competitors and could generally end up being bad for the market. The big players presumably still would compete with each other over features, but if a new company that didn't have many relevant patents themselves wanted to disruptively compete in the same market (e.g. offering something drastically different in terms of price / business model) then they might have difficulty in licensing the essentials from the big player.

Not that they couldn't already get stomped by the big players in the current circumstance but at least there's no co-ordinated way in which the big players can do so, they'd all have to decide it was worth a lawsuit.

Xonotic (successor to Nexuiz) is worth a look: http://www.xonotic.org/

I think that might actually have evolved from Quake 2 era code originally, or something crazy like that - it's a lot more advanced now.

UFO:AI uses the Quake 2 engine on some level as well I think: http://ufoai.ninex.info/wiki/index.php/News

In my experience Nexuiz and UFO:AI have both been quality Open Source games, although I think UFO:AI contains some media that are not categorised as fully Free in the strictest sense. Xonotic looks to be doing some cool new things and I hope that UFO:AI has also improved since I last played with it.