Actually, it's not - large amounts of it are licensed from 3rd parties - as is the way with all ARM SoC devices - which Samsung then fabricates using its process.

I'd personally consider myself to be a Engineer rather than a programmer (to be precise, I'm a professionally qualified electronics engineer who engages in software and hardware engineering). Cutting the code is a small fraction of what I do, and I tend to do it a variety of programming languages on multiple platforms.

I'm really not in the business of having a dick-waving contest about how hardcore my tools are (an argument that is usually advanced in terms of their lack of features). Instead I expect them to help me along the way.

Modern, commercially developed IDEs genuinely improve my productivity, and I really notice their absence when working for platforms without them.

VxWorks used to - and possibly still does - use a *BSD network stack. Like to hazard a guess how many embedded devices this is in?

It's entirely necessary if using the compiler to drive code completion, syntax highlighting and in-edtior display of compiler errors and warnings. All of these are things are highly interactive and users will notice the lag of GCC getting invoked every time they type a character in their editor. GCC's clunky pre-compiled header support really doesn't help matters.

Of course, as I said earlier, lots of tools have provided this kind of functionality without deep integration of the compiler into the editor, but ultimately to do it properly, you'd still be looking at a great deal of effort to implement the first couple of stages of the compiler pipe-line and get an AST (or equivalent).

There is another excellent reason why the Linux Kernel is staying on GPLv2: a very large proportion of Linux's market share these days is on ARM SoC in mobile devices. There is truckloads of IP in these devices, and right now the chipset vendors are able to keep this closed and compartmentalised.

It's not a case of these chipset vendors wanting to keep their own IP private - often it's not theirs to start with, having been licensed - probably several times already - from other parties.

You can bet that a GPL3 kernel would cause an enormous fork - or even an industry-wide platform switch to something else.

There's also the awkward truth that the vast majority of Linux run-times sold are in mobile phones and other embedded devices and a very, very long way from being 100% open source software.

Precisely who do you think has done a lot of the development on Clang/LLVM over the last few years and contributed it to the wider community?

One of the key design objectives of Clang is that it is highly modular, and implemented in such a way that various compilation stages are self-contained, and have clean APIs and data structures. This allows development tools such as IDEs to link directly against the stages of the compilation pipeline then need to implement syntax highlighting, code completion, refactoring tools and so on.

Apple's XCode does precisely this, and licensing and lack of modularity in the GCC source tree would have been major factors in their choice to support Clang and LLVM development.

The traditional way of implementing these functions in IDEs has been to effectively re-implement the front-end of the compiler (often not completely). This is a big deal when developing in C++ against the STL/Boost/TR1 when you find that code completion can't grok template properly. This is something that XCode and Visual Studio (which takes a similar approach) are both capable of doing.

I'd imagine that under the zero-tolerance policing strategy in many US cities, people engaged in almost all of these activities would simply get arrested for petty criminal offences and cleared off the streets.

The point of anti-social behaviour orders is that they are executed under civil - rather than criminal - law. The idea being that a lower burden of proof is required in court to obtain the order in the first place. In practice, the evidence usually consists of a long record of low-level criminality - a possible example being an individual who is clearly dealing drugs, but who the police have never managed to catch with any.

Of course things on in the realm of the criminal law once the order is breached.

This is what we used to do to pirates in the UK

Execution dock.

It's still there, but has laid unused or quite some time.

I found it distinctly unpleasant to work in too. It is said that one can acclimatise to it though. Be warned though - the evenings are not necessarily cooler than Western room-temperature.

The Japanese have been very successful in curbing demand. I was over in Japan for a week on a business trip last year, and it was interesting to see how they did it. This included absolutely all hand-driers in toilets being switched off, less air-conditioning (room temperature was set for 28C in the office), the business week of large corporations shifted to reduce peak-week-time demand and increase that on the weekend, and a move to more relaxed corporate dress-code - which included in many cases, a small towel attached to the waistband with which to mop off the sweat form the oppressive environment. There were no doubt more measures that I wasn't aware of, but life definitely carries on as normal without power cuts.

Our suspicion is that this state of affairs will become the norm.

I think the point here is that whilst applications do indeed have access, this is often mediated through Apple's user-interface in each case - which I suspect you'll find is actually provided by another process within a different sandbox. This means that rogue applications are not hoovering up your data without user-interaction.