"Our Mobile Devices business segment will have approximately 14,600 granted patents and 6,700 pending patent applications, worldwide. Our patent portfolio includes numerous patents related to various industry standards, including 2G, 3G, 4G, H.264, MPEG-4, 802.11, open mobile alliance (OMA) and near field communications (NFC)." ( http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/About_Motorola/Technology/Approach )

Given that Google's number of patents was previously estimated to be around 700 something, this is a huge step up in the patent war - or a way to end it.

Motorola Mobile also invested in a lot of interesting startup companies. One of them was Danger, which MS bought and then lost its founders to Google, where they came to lead its Android project -- it is a small world. I wonder if Google will pick up those investments as well.

Another interesting twist is that this means that Google is now suddenly throw into a lawsuit with Apple. Hopefully some of these lawsuits will now be settled with cross-licensing without costing the consumer any more.

So it tries to be relevant by breaking de facto code standards and trying to shove needless fixes on other people's code?

In this case, all it will accomplish is this:

#ifndef PATH_MAX
#define PATH_MAX some_arbitrary_value
#endif

How does that improve "the overall software quality a lot"?

You're just incorrect. You may have been misled by a modern American right-wing propaganda campaign. You should read what actual historians have to say about the idea that the Nazis were leftists.

If you're too busy to read the whole debate, allow me to excerpt:

Having set up distorted stereotypes of “liberalism” and “fascism” Goldberg finds them united by a host of similar projects such as campaigns against smoking (it was Nazi doctors who first established the link between smoking and cancer, and Hitler was a fanatical anti-smoker). These similarities concern peripheral matters. The foundational qualities that separate liberalism from fascism simply vanish from the analysis: political pluralism vs. single party; universal values vs. the supremacy of a master race; elections vs. charismatic leadership; fascism’s exaltation of feelings over reason.

Wrong.

Wrong. (I stopped reading there.)

Heh. I quoted statements of fact which were unsubstantiated. That's a problem. You quoted me giving an editorial opinion. That's not.

You edited out the link I provided (which, unlike Herring's, gave more information about what I was saying). And you omitted the sentence where I quoted someone to back up what I wrote.

Ooooookay.

If I'm being asked to trust what Joe Herring says because of who he is, then of course I need to know who he is. He doesn't present evidence to back up many of his assertions, he just writes stuff and hopes I'll believe it:

The Missouri River Recovery and Implementation Committee has seventy members. Only four represent interests other than environmentalism. The recommendations of the committee, as one might expect, have been somewhat less than evenhanded.

Says who?

This year, despite more than double the usual amount of mountain and high plains snowpack (and the ever-present risk of strong spring storms), the true believers in the Corps have persisted in following the revised MWCM, recklessly endangering millions of residents downstream.

Says who?

Whether warned or not, the fact remains that had the Corps been true to its original mission of flood control, the dams would not have been full in preparation for a "spring pulse." The dams could further have easily handled the additional runoff without the need to inundate a sizeable chunk of nine states.

Says who?

Who the hell is Joe Herring and why should I trust anything he writes? Did Slashdot review his scholarship here and give it a stamp of approval, or was it just put up on the website, leaving it to the readers to decide whether it's B.S. or not?

No qualifications or expertise are claimed for Joe Herring on the website. In fact no information on his background is given except that he is "from Omaha, NE." This is highly unusual for a publication that hopes to be taken seriously. We don't even know if that is his real name.

We are left to judge the value of this Joe Herring essay by his previous contributions and by the reliability and reputation of the website that publishes his work.

Joe Herring is, in short, a right-wing nut.

He claims all leftists -- all! -- want to overthrow the Constitution: "The continuum on the left that ranges from the 'wouldn't it be nice if we all just smiled' types to the hardcore authoritarian communists may disagree about methods, but sadly, all agree on one thing: if their utopia is to come about, the Constitution -- and the form of government derived from it -- must be replaced with...something."

He says the Nazis were left-wingers: "The Left will not willingly lay claim to the true legacy of socialism, so we will have to hang it around their necks."

He believes that the true goal of health care reform, renewable-energy subsidies, and regulations on Wall Street is for "the left" to seize power and exterminate half of the human race. Really: "As the federal government asserts control over health care, energy production, and the financial markets, the trinity of power is within the left's grasp. Unless driven back from their goals -- and quickly -- the likelihood grows daily that more than four billion of our 'species' will be joining the table scraps and yard clippings on the compost pile."

He thinks the problem with Politifact's 2009 Lie of the Year, "death panels," is that the right wasn't lying hard enough: "To describe this board as a 'death panel,' as Rush Limbaugh has, is to underestimate its power and misconstrue its purpose."

And five minutes with Google reveals that American Thinker is a source that, shall we say, lends no additional credibility to Joe Herring's contributions. Take global warming as a typical example. They printed essays claiming to have found a "smoking gun" that disproves global warming (wrong). Then they found another single argument that by itself disproves global warming (still wrong). They argue that global warming is a Nazi lie.

This "intentional flooding" piece looks like yet another right-wing hit job on leftism. I would be happy to entertain the idea that misguided environmentalism is partially to blame for one disaster or another, but I would like to hear a reasoned argument from someone who's not a nut.

No, the system was originally designed to encourage innovation. Today, the competitive pressure in the IT sector is what is driving innovation, and patents are used to lock down parts of the industry to reduce the competitive pressure, which will slow down innovation. The system is therefore working exactly opposite of how it was intended.

Giving a company in the IT sector a 20 year state enforced monopoly on any technology is totally absurd, and not in the public interest.

According to the press release itself: "Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms." However, this is Microsoft, and we know how they operate. This is unlikely to be anything but a ploy to avoid objections from the authorities to the purchase. Once it is too late to stop it, I predict not a single update will go into the Linux and Android versions, and the Mac and iPhone versions will lag behind in features. So the question is what alternatives there are now.

Another question is what Google, Facebook and Cisco will do now. If I were on the board of any of them, I'd certainly be pushing for pooling resources to create a joint venture to compete with Skype on all fronts. Could set up quite the consortium for the money they intended to spend buying Skype themselves.

Interesting times.

Dying from smoking tends to be very expensive. It is not like dying from a car accident or bungee jumping, where you either die or cost a fortunate in medical expenses due to long rehabilitation, but you die and it costs a fortunate to keep you hospitalised while you cough your lungs out or wither away to chemo/radiation therapy. I was in a lung ward for two weeks and saw enough of that stuff to be permanently immunized to the idea of taking up smoking for whatever reason.

Selling smoke to people under 18 + N years should be illegal, where N is increased every year. There is no excuse to keep that substance legal, except that it is sometimes too hard to stop for some people already hooked on it.