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.

It was only 3 years ago when I gave up on ATI and switched to NVidia because ATIs drivers could not handle bad inputs, and would crash the entire system. So I had to write my own abstraction layer to ensure that no bad point coordinates and so on could be sent to the driver. I also filed kernel crash bugs with ATI that took forever to get fixed. After I switched to NVidia, I have yet to see a single kernel failure due to programming mistakes. Their drivers are just rock solid. So much better to develop on that it would take a lot to go back. I also had much the same bad experience with the open source Intel drivers.

The debate has been ranging here in Norway lately, since we hold a lot of the world's known reserves of the stuff (as opposed to many wild guesswork assumptions about possible reserves around the world). The reason why not more reactors are built is quite simply because the technology is not there yet. By most accounts, a functional prototype reactor is 20 years away. It is a very complicated technology, and more difficult to engineer safely than uranium reactors that we currently know a lot about. Several studies, for instance from MIT, cast doubt on whether thorium reactors will even be cost effective. Extracting thorium from the ground is harder than for uranium, and the enrichment process is more difficult and costly. Thorium will also produce dangerous, radioactive by products, and if you have enrichment capabilities for thorium, it is not a far step further to produce weaponized plutonium.

So it may be the future, but apparently no silver bullet.

All this is IANANP (I Am Not a Nuclear Physicist) so I guess someone reading ./ can answer this better than me.

That is way too much hyperbole. None of the recognized mass extinction events were caused by Yellowstone or Toba eruptions. A supervolcanic eruption would be really bad news for humanity, but it would not be a mass extinction event on the scale you are talking about. Such supervolcanic events happen quite frequently, from an evolutionary and geological perspective, with several occurring each million years, while mass extinctions are quite rare.

From the linked article, it seems the theory both predicts the heat death of the universe (continued accelerated expansion) and that our universe started from a "Big Crunch" scenario (gravity had pulled everything back again). This seems quite strange (although of course nature can be quite strange at times). Anyone know this theory any better and can provide some enlightenment?

It is not only the estimates of temperature increase that are rising, but so are the uncertainties. We know very little about how the feedback cycles work once the temperature changes so many degrees, and we know next to nothing about how they work when faced with such quick changes. We do not know how much methane hydrate there is stored on the ocean floor, but we do know there is a lot of it and that an eruption of it 55 million years ago was at least in part responsible for a 6 degree C rise in global temperatures. It is also thought that the biggest mass extinction event ever was caused by massive volcanism and methane hydrate release. There is plenty of evidence that large parts of the ocean can and have previously become anoxic during climate changes. This is really bad news not only for everything that lives in the ocean, but also for us since a large part of our food supply comes from the ocean.

Basically, we are getting into a territory where all bets are off, and it is not good news for humanity. I am linking to wikipedia since that is good place to start to read up on this stuff and find links to the actual research.