Farmer Bill, on the other hand, saw an opportunity to turn this into a feature that could protect his sheep and draw some sheep from other farms, since so many sheep jumped his fence to go to the nicer pastures of Firefox Ranch and Chrome Acres.

You're saying that IE having DNT on by default is a feature that could win users over from other browsers. However, if a user is aware of and cares about DNT, they would never switch to IE just because it's enabled there by default. It's easier to just enable it in their existing browser than it is to switch to another browser that has it on by default.

Also, yes, the idea of advertisers voluntarily respecting a flag like this is ludicrous, but it's in their best interests to do it. The alternative for them is technical measures like adblock that completely cut them out of the picture. However, I think their historical behaviour implies that they do whatever they can get away with, so any measure that relies on voluntary good behaviour from them is destined to fail.

I have to say, having scrolled through all of these negative comments, I really feel for you for trying to respond to so many of them without losing your head. Not all of us readers feel the need to put down the little guy just because you got some attention on Slashdot. I'm saddened that so many are taking the time to do this instead of just skipping over the article.

If you're interested in the sort of immortality research you mention, there's this guy named Aubrey de Grey who has kind of made it his mission in life to push that cause forward. See Wikipedia for a good starting place:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey

For clarity regarding the original post, this means that Qt has been freely available for commercial use for the last few years.The LGPL is the same license that is used by glibc on Linux, so if you release commercial software for Linux, you will be using LGPL code anyway unless you deliberately avoid it. Unless you statically link an LGPL-licensed library, the licensing requirements are pretty easy to fulfill.

You wouldn't just tax energy usage, you'd cut something similar, like sales taxes, in exchange for the tax increase, and then explain to the public that it's really an opportunity to lower their taxes if they use energy more efficiently (i.e. find and replace inefficient appliances, and shift as much usage as possible into off-peak hours). It would still get stiff resistance from anyone in the energy supply chain, but that's pretty standard for public politics.

Maybe your cost of living isn't actually relatively high after all.

Yeah, I should have changed the wording there to be slightly less flattering, considering that last time I needed to put music on an iPod ("I'm telling you, it's not mine! Those things aren't my bag, baby!"), I ended up using RhythmBox. Clementine's support for it was pretty broken.

In case you didn't follow the rest of the thread, I wanted to let you know that you should try Clementine. It's basically Amarok 1.4 ported to Qt, although they're still catching up on some less essential features.

I started reading this thread hoping for actual examples of prior art, but the examples people are mentioning aren't actually prior art (or infringing) unless they do everything in one of the independent claims, including stuff like "modifying the corresponding application user interface to include a switch application icon that is not displayed in the corresponding application user interface when there is no ongoing phone call". I'd still love to see examples of prior art, but it looks like it's fairly easy to work around this patent.

In the future, it may be useful to read the following or something equivalent:
Andrew Tridgell on Patent Defence for FOSS Developers

See Citizens United v. FEC for the First Amendment right the Supreme court recently ruled that corporations have.

Rob, is that you?

Actually, on Maemo devices before the N900 (I'm assuming that's what you're talking about), there was a hardware button by default, which is probably why someone felt the need to write software to replicate this on the N900.

I really liked Maemo, but as far as I can tell, it has a glaring weakness compared to other mobile OSes, in that it doesn't seem to have a sandboxing mechanism to run untrusted applications in. If it ever achieved the sort of mainstream success that Android has, it would have been hard to feel safe installing untrusted software onto it. Then again, it sounds like the sandboxing in Android doesn't have enough granularity in permission granting to prevent malicious software from secretly invading your privacy, so I wouldn't feel safe about that either.

No.

Haven't you heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment? Most of us are pretty wild by nature, so this is most definitely a nurture problem.

http://villagetelco.org/ have wireless mesh based phone networks called Village Telcos in Dili, East Timor, and several places in South Africa (and maybe elsewhere in Africa), using a custom device called the Mesh Potato, which has a wireless SoC, FXS port, and outdoor enclosure. It runs custom OpenWRT-derived firmware and Asterisk, and is set up so they're basically plug and play at deployment time. They don't have very up-to-date details on their website, but the mailing list is responsive, and you should check them out if this sort of thing interests you.