Well that's a pretty weak argument.

Linux has always featured choice. Personally I dislike KDE and I am critical of it but I'm not required to use it so I don't. Nor are you required to use Wayland. Stick with X for as long as you like. Gather a core of likeminded people and produce a dist that suits your requirements. I'm sure Amish Linux will be a huge hit.

And every software is "unstable untried" until it is. I'm quite certain Wayland will have bugs in it and will fail to function in certain configurations. And those bugs will be fixed, either in Wayland itself or in the code it depends on, e.g. Mesa or display drivers. If it bothers you, don't use it until the bugs are fixed.

And what "missing features" are you talking about? Part of X's problem is it is a veritable kitchen sink of features, most of which are obsolete, inefficient or an impediment to be worked around. And that's the point - Wayland is not attempting to reimplement everything in X. I also hope you're not going to say remoting because that's the compositor's job, not Wayland's and there is a reference remoting implementation in Weston that uses RDP.

And just "some X11 developers"? The most prominent supporters of Wayland are major X11 developers who know how broken X is. Name any prominent X11 developer who is in favour of maintaining the status quo, who thinks X is perfect in its present form or can be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility or without making a complex tangle of obsolete code and extensions even more complex.

It's hard to see why anybody with an interest in Linux would hope it be dropped.

And Mir is for Linux too. What's your point? The Linux kernel just happens to provide the event and display hooks that these display server layers need to work efficiently. I'm quite certain that this would not stop Wayland being ported to other kernels or environments should there be reason to. Or just use X. Big deal.

Wayland will still be experimental in Fedora 21 and turned on in 22. That means it will have possibly 12 months on Mr but it's still away from any sort of widespread use.

I don't see Mir as being in much competition though. Canonical have hobbled interest in it due to the restrictive licence and contributors agreement and most people regard it as divisive. I will be interested to see what the gubuntu dist do when GNOME shell is fully Wayland compatible - whether they intend to use it or if they will be constrained by Canonical and leave GNOME using X until they can port it to Mir.

There's nothing to stop you picking an OpenGL profile and using that but obviously if you expect your code to be portable then you're going to have choose very carefully. And if portable includes handheld or mobile devices then the profile has to be ES 2.x or 3.x or you have to write two backends (with all the pain that goes with that). So its not all plain sailing. If you have an existing app then porting it may involve considerable effort.

OpenGL is definitely more portable than DirectX but that's not to say it's portable with a few modifications. There are various OpenGL and OpenGL ES profiles, and while they are related they can be radically different in important ways. For example OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 are totally incompatible despite what you might think - 1.1. uses a fixed function pipeline and 2.0 expects you to write shaders for basically everything. OpenGL ES 2.x is roughly but not completely a subset of OpenGL 2.1. Every version of OpenGL supports a different selection of extensions.

Aside from the differences on paper, the actual implementations can be broken, buggy or inefficient. e.g. Some older desktop drivers might not offer an ES 2.x profile, or it could be hopelessly crap.

There is no GLU / GLUT either for ES 2.x and every platform implements its own equivalent but proprietary set of APIs. So you may discover a lot of work is required to fix that. Then you may discover that one platform or language's bindings are different from another in subtle but annoying ways, e.g. there are several OpenGL ES 2.x bindings for Java and one might return a handle in an int[] array while another expects you to supply a 1-element sized IntBuffer. Annoyances which add up.

In summary, yes you can port code, and OpenGL is definitely one family of APIs that offers support across a wide selection of devices. But it's not guaranteed to be simple and probably won't be. The best bet is use a good third party library (e.g. libgdx) and let the library hide as much of the work as possible.

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. Perhaps it was an inside job but MtGox was always a cowboy operation and it wasn't the only service to be hit with the same hack.

I wonder how many people would have had second thoughts about investing if they'd seen the corpulent greaseball they were entrusting their money to.

What on earth are you gibbering about?

No dipshit, I'm saying education should be secular (like in France) which means the standard of education and curriculum are standard and that it doesn't favour one religion or tolerate religious interference within that framework. It doesn't stop parents from indoctrinating their kids outside of school if they so wish.

Sadly rights holders own the data. When you "buy" music, books, videos or apps on a device you are only buying the license to use said content. If the license says "non transferable" then that's the end of the discussion.

It serves everyone right for blindly walking into this situation. Digital content could be regarded as property but it isn't. I suspect the argument made by content owners is that anyone make a copy of a file whereas it takes too much effort to copy a physical item and the copy is imperfect.

But that's not really a good argument. We've already seen from the likes of digital libraries, Ultraviolet etc. that DRM protecting content is viable. The problem is that the DRM is focussed on protecting the content owners, not the individual. So when I buy a video and watch through Ultraviolet, the services offers no way for me to sell my content, or loan it, or even back it up.

What is necessary is content neutral DRM that imbues digital content with characteristics similar to physical content. e.g. when I buy an e-book it should be MY book. How could it do that? Well the book could be encrypted against a key held in a token. The token is given to me and I install it onto my registered devices. I can read the book on any of those devices. If I wish to sell the book, then I transfer the token to someone else and my devices lose the ability to read the book. Now within reason it is essentially property - there is only one readable copy of the book at any given time. I can also sell, loan, donate or bequeath the book by using the service to give the token to someone else. The system could facilitate permanent or temporary transfer of tokens. It could even incorporate a form of "wear and tear" by slowing down the time taken to transfer tokens based on how much they were transferred previously, e.g. a book which has been loaned 100 times might much longer to complete transfer of ownership which would incentivize services to buy new copies.

Aside from allowing people to actually own books or other content, it has other benefits. Many countries treat a license as software and slap a tax on it that other forms of content escape. If I wasn't buying a license but the actual book then I would benefit from the lower rates of tax that apply and the store that sells those books does so for less money. I can move my content to other, better devices, or back it up or do anything else I like with it subject to normal copyright laws.

The problem of course is the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon etc. don't want people to own content and they certainly don't want people to be able to move it around. Therefore it needs someone strong like the EU to define what digital property actually is, the formats it should be in, the framework it must implement and then compel or incentivize platforms to support it.

As long as all their examination pupils forfeit the marks from those questions, and if the school's reputation suffers as it slips down the league table, and if the government withdraws all public funding from the school for failing to follow the national curriculum. So if a question was worth 30 out of 200 points then their students automatically lose 30 points, or 15%. Under no other circumstances should they be permitted to take an alternative exam, or pupils be graded for their remaining questions.

And seriously what the fuck up with the UK and this stupid policy? They could learn a thing or two from the French on this - education should be secular. There should be no religious dress, no segregation by sexes, no exemptions from subjects on religious grounds, no indoctrination into religion and no pandering to the sensibilities of religion in any way shape or form. In the long term this will mean far less religious whackaloons which can only be a good thing.

I think the storyline in Bioshock Infinite is a cut above most video games and some of the level design was amazing. But at the same time, what's the point of throwing the player into a world of time rips, alternate realities, cities in the cloud when they spend the majority of the game rooting around bins for candy bars and dollar coins?

Other game mechanics are also pretty whiffy - the expository voxophones lying conveniently around are such a lazy gaming trope (other games might use email terminals, voice mails, dictaphones etc.) that they should have been put down years ago.

Android gives people freedom of choice and some people exercise that freedom by doing really dumb things. Dumb things like downloading warez and then clicking through all the permissions. Or installing "sexy girl screensaver" which wants permission to send SMS messages. In addition there are various forks and branches of Android which point to different app stores where the quality of application vetting ranges from minimal to non existent.

That isn't to say there are some very obvious things that Android lacks which would help protect people from their own stupidity. Fine grained security permissions that can applied regardless of what the app says it needs upfront. All untrusted apps should have the most stringent set of permissions applied to them. If someone wants to go in and disable the permissions then they can do so, but defaulting to safe would prevent a lot of harm even before it could happen.

People are violently allergic to lots of things. People are allergic to soy too. I'm not sure how it matters for people who are NOT allergic and a casual reading of the evidence suggests that the CSPI is vastly inflating the risk possibly due to a conflict of interest.

If you want a chicken like texture then eat quorn. It tastes remarkably close and has a similar texture. It's not so good as a substitute for other kinds of meat though. Not that I have any qualms about eating meat but some vegetarian alternatives are quite nice in their own right and just for a bit of variety.