Not from some lame VR game, but because people will become disoriented, trip over something and smash their heads in.

I'm developing for Windows first where the general practice is for applications to ship with whatever DLLs they need rather than install them in shared folders, the windows\system directory or somewhere else on the PATH. Otherwise DLL-hell will surely follow.

Ultimately the application may end up an embedded device, where space is at a premium. In that instance I'll probably have to static link but it depends on licencing issues.

Is there really a large audience demand to see a dramatisation about a sociopath whose company made computers and gadgets?

It breaks down to about 25MB icu and 13 MB of QT on QT 5.4 on Windows.

Most desktop OSes would have services that could provide that information and do encodings and transformations between character sets. I don't see that QT needs to ship all of it. Aside from that my app is localizable so I can't do away with the way its implemented either.

My, aren't you the patronising one?

It's modular but it's still got bloat. I'm writing an application which has a fairly modest UI that has a main window, some tabs and dialogs. The weight of the runtime I have to ship with it - icu*, Qt5core, Qt5Guid.dll, Qt5Widgets runtimes is nearly 38MB. Most of the modular bits with the exception of webkit - (multimedia, networking, OpenGL, SVG etc.) are comparatively lightweight compared to the slab of unavoidable "core" stuff that you need whether you like it or not.

Bitcoin has repeatedly demonstrated that it's nothing more than a ponzi - stoke up fears in a currency or appeal to their greed, wait for people to buy in and then exit with the different.

No matter how bad the Greek crisis gets, no matter how much of a haircut people get on their savings from any currency swap, it will still be less risk than bitcoin.

Canonical were involved. There are vids shot in their offices demoing it.

I might not be paying them money directly but I'm certainly making them money. Developers and companies pay Oracle for tools, support, certification, training for Java and they do it because there is a demand for the language. If the brand is cheapened then ultimately it will hurt them in the wallet.

Same principle applies to Adobe and Flash. They make nothing from the Flash player but its all those eyeballs are what make professionals want to buy the dev tools that they do make money from. Cheapen the brand and it goes into decline.

The first contact many have with a new product is the installer. So what are companies doing to make a good first impression? Conning them into installing adware / crapware or changing their browser settings. It's insulting, it undermines trust and it cheapens the product by association.

I got so fed up of Adobe loading their updates will crapware like McAfee that I stopped installing it altogether. Likewise I've avoided other products which have started bundling stuff in their installers. I'm sure Oracle are compensated for promoting Yahoo from their installer but the reputational damage will suffer could be immense.

Porting a Java application from Windows to Linux is normally as simple as copying the compiled .jar / .war / .ear over and just running it. The only reason it might not be is it contained JNA or if someone had hardcoded an assumption about the OS into it. Ordinarily neither would be the case and it is not unusual for people to be developing software which ultimately runs on big iron Unix from PCs at their desk.

Porting a C++ application from Windows to Linux means writing it with portability in mind from the very outset, sourcing which libraries you use, rebuilding the code from source and screwing around with the vagaries and differences of different compilers and toolchains. Even in the best of circumstances the code is likely to be plastered with #ifdefs and conditionally compiled code to deal with differences. The best bet would be something like QT which is fairly portable and has a large support library but it's still not as simple as Java.

Yes and Canonical worked on it too.

Bzzt, wrong. Canonical did although Motorola may have licenced what they produced or cooperated.

The Atrix had a dock which turned the Android phone into an Android tablet. Ubuntu hacked it so when you docked the phone it became a proper Linux desktop. How they did it I don't know, but I assume there was some virtualization going on.