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.

Ever since the Qt acquisition by Nokia, Qt on the desktop has been neglected in favour of the latest shiny mobile thing. Now that commercial customers finally get someone to talk to who do not have years to catch up on their competition (and are understandably a bit busy), we might expect desktop features to move forward as well.

Granted, some of the things that is coming out of the mobile efforts also do greatly benefit the desktop side, but still, the focus has clearly been elsewhere.

Also, what is up with that grossly misleading headline, Taco? I haven't seen any others yet go that much overboard on the hyperbole on this. And this is part of a trend here that has been getting increasingly bad lately, with misleading headlines and submissions become more and more the norm. I've been with Slashdot since the beginning, but I think it is soon time to part ways...

While Kinect looks really cool, I am impatiently awaiting the Asus Xtion, which is the same hardware as the Kinect except it is not an XBox accessory, and you do not have to give any money to Microsoft for it. The developer version , the Xtion Pro, should be out any time now according to their official schedule. There is also now an OpenNI API for communicating with Kinect family devices, which is available for Linux as well. Hobby robotics vision never seemed as promising as now.

I used to have some respect for Florian Mueller, but this article is a piece of trash. You absolutely cannot measure the impact or worth of a patent portfolio in a patent war in terms of a sheer number of patents. Especially when all parties involved have enough money to burn in the judicial system to contest any weak patents at will. In theory you only need one strong patent that can shut down your competitor as a deterrence. On the other hand, you can have a thousand patents yet lose a patent stand off if they can all be contested in court or easily worked around. To get an idea of who has actual patent strength, you need to read the patents. But I guess that takes actual work.

Nice post. Just thought I'd point out one small mistake -- Mercury does have a magnetic field, despite its tiny size! Even though it is only 1% of the strength of Earth's, it envelops the entire planet and shields it from the solar wind, just like on Earth, and so much unlike the Moon, Mars and Venus.

Unfortunately, Linux in this respect is not a "Modern OS". The ability to sandbox user applications is extremely poorly developed. I have been looking at portable sandboxing lately, and it is a horrible nightmare. The Chrome developers created some fancy hacks for each OS, and they have pulled it off quite nicely, but they remain hacks, not elegant designs. The platform with the best current sandboxing API is, ironically, Windows Vista/7, with their configurable integrity levels. An API dubbed "Seatbelt" is being developed on MacOSX, but it is still in its barely-can-walk infancy, and the Chrome devs used undocumented parts of the API to make it all work. On LINUX there is a set of competing security modules for the kernel, with SELinux being the most used. Unfortunately, not only do some distros not use it, but a lot of users who have it disable it immediately (or set it to permissive mode, which from a sandboxing point of view is the same thing). And SELinux is a horrible beast to program for. It is insanely complex, and has non-existent documentation on how to use it to confine user programs.

What is needed is some generally agreed upon extension to POSIX on how to easily allow a user process to drop privileges it does not need. One experimental OS I looked at once (VSTa) had the ability for all users to create subgroups to their GID by adding more numbers. If your UID.GID was 500.500, you could create a new directory owned by 500.500.2, and allow the process owned by 500.500.2 only to access to this directory (some documentation on this is still up at http://www.vsta.org:8080/VSTa_2fDocumentation_2fCapabilities). I wish some similar, dead simple scheme could be created for Linux that ordinary users could understand themselves. Only a dedicated security elite could possibly wrap their heads around the SELinux rules -- everyone else just turn it off as soon as it gets in the way.

Malaria is only transferred by some species of mosquito. One thing governments in affected regions have been doing is to release mosquitoes from species that can out-compete the malaria-carrying species. These are typically larger and bite harder, but it is still better than being infected by malaria. I visited one such region recently, and while the larger mosquitoes are more frightening, they are still nothing compared to the horror that is tsetse flies.

That made my day. I work in a highly regulated industry, and buying anything with the right standards conformance paperwork costs many times the standard cost, even when we get exactly the same item that is sold to ordinary consumers for the fraction of the price. You want a small batch with special paperwork from a large supplier? Be prepared to pay a ridiculous amount of money. A normal certificate of conformity usually lists only the absolutely minimal amount of safety claims, both to reduce liability and to force those who need more to pay up for it. Since I suspect science kit makers are not exactly thriving these days, this is the kind of thing that would put them out of business. It would probably be cheaper for them to set up a testing and validation framework for off-the-shelf products, but depending on the standards they have to conform to, they may not be allowed to go that route.

Not to mention that the non-gratis android market still has not been rolled out to a lot of countries yet. And I am talking about first-world countries here, like the Scandinavian countries.

I wanted to keep an open mind, even though going by previous ventures anything labelled "micro-payments" seem doomed to failure. So I went looking for information. But there is hardly any useful info to be found, at least not on their home page. The link that advertises "selling digital content easier and faster" for vendors leads not to any information... but to an email address. Yay for simplicity!

Also, take a look at their page for sellers. Would you buy from this shady looking guy? What are these people thinking.

When only patent trolls use patents, the patent law will be changed. The problem now is that the big corporations are lobbing for the insane patent system because they think it is a net benefit to them. If this new license pool can make it not in their interest to do so, we all win.

I guess it depends on the charity. I know that some of the largest medical charities here in Norway channel a lot of money to research projects, I have seen some of it, really good stuff. They also spend money on educating patients about their disease and their rights, which too seems a good idea. Not sure if that is what parent posters mean by money going to 'awareness'.

Both Maemo and Moblin started off Gtk-based, using the Clutter toolkit on top of Gtk. Now both have switched over to Qt. Are there any other serious users of Clutter left?

I hear lots of projects starting with or switching to Qt these days, and none that switch to or start with Gtk. Having programmed in both Gtk and Qt, I have to say I understand why. Qt is hands down the better and more elegant toolkit, despite my preference for C over C++. Qt also makes it easier than Gtk to port between Linux, Mac and Windows. Gtk on the other hand is stuck with a horrible dependency hell that prevents using it for anything serious on non-Linux platforms.

I think the way forward for Linux on the desktop is to standardize on one GUI toolkit, and there is no doubt that this toolkit would have to be Qt. It is a bit sad, because I always like Gnome better than KDE, and I see no easy way for Gnome to convert over to Qt.

The document has an EULA. While that is bad enough on its own, in it you find this gem: "The term of this Agreement is one year. Agent in its sole discretion may terminate or extend this Agreement at any time and without prior notice. Upon expiration or termination of this Agreement, You shall immediately destroy and cease all use of the Specification Portion and all materials and information related to the Specification Portion." To add insult to injury, they also slap an indemnification clause to the document's EULA.

So, you agree to not distribute it and to destroy the document after one year. If they are sued for whatever reason, and they can blame it on you, you agree to cover all their expenses. Yay for openness!

To deal with a cease and desist action you need to have guts, means, and rights - pick any two, and it may do. If you have the guts and the means you can make a lot of smoke, and they may decide it is not worth fighting you. If you the guts and are in the right, you can explain to them that you are in the clear and answer their letters through an expensive lawyer as a bluff to make them think you have the financial means to fight. If you have the means and the rights, you do not need guts (but then you would not be asking slashdot for advice, would you). However, if you have less than two of those things, you need to be aware that you are going to fold the moment that you receive a cease and desist, and decide now if that means the risk and potential cost of losing is too high to get started.

IANAL but I've been in this situation myself, and had to deal with a cease and desist at one time.