It is easy to promise that later presidents or governments will do something, then do nothing except watch the divide between the emissions and the emissions target grow larger every day. What mythical president is it that will slash emissions by 20% + whatever increase there has been between 2005 and whatever year the reductions will start? If we can't start now, what makes anyone think we can start later, when the costs will be even greater?

Note that China has not even promised to reduce its total emissions. As long as its GDP is growing by double digits every year, reducing the intensity of the emissions even with 80% won't reduce their total emissions by 2020.

And meanwhile the scientists are debating whether we are passing the threshold of catastrophic changes the next few years, or if we already have passed it.

We are so screwed.

It is nice out of the box thinking, but seriously, a glass roof with people walking around on it? First, the angle from the sun into that hole is so bad, you will only have sunlight at the lower end for ... what? a few minutes a day? You need mirrors with that stuff. Second, that glass roof is crying out for disaster. An earthquake or a terrorist bomb would shatter and send it like machine gun fire down at the heads of everyone living below. The glass area needs to be cordoned off totally from anyone and anything on basic safety concerns. Let alone due to the glass losing its translucency as people, you know, make it dirty, scratch it, and generally mess things up. Third, you really want some plan for controlling flooding. Sooner or later it will happen, and you need some way to deal with it. Not sure if they have thought about it, but the design looks pretty intimidating in that respect (one big hole).

We need to start building in depth, but I think the way to go is rather to use mirrors or artificial sunlight, and build many more but smaller structures that are easier to secure against natural and man-made disasters.

Sweden has no oil. You must be thinking about Norway.

As for being on a right track, the current craze of de-regulation does not seem to be helping anything.

"Our Mobile Devices business segment will have approximately 14,600 granted patents and 6,700 pending patent applications, worldwide. Our patent portfolio includes numerous patents related to various industry standards, including 2G, 3G, 4G, H.264, MPEG-4, 802.11, open mobile alliance (OMA) and near field communications (NFC)." ( http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/About_Motorola/Technology/Approach )

Given that Google's number of patents was previously estimated to be around 700 something, this is a huge step up in the patent war - or a way to end it.

Motorola Mobile also invested in a lot of interesting startup companies. One of them was Danger, which MS bought and then lost its founders to Google, where they came to lead its Android project -- it is a small world. I wonder if Google will pick up those investments as well.

Another interesting twist is that this means that Google is now suddenly throw into a lawsuit with Apple. Hopefully some of these lawsuits will now be settled with cross-licensing without costing the consumer any more.

So it tries to be relevant by breaking de facto code standards and trying to shove needless fixes on other people's code?

In this case, all it will accomplish is this:

#ifndef PATH_MAX
#define PATH_MAX some_arbitrary_value
#endif

How does that improve "the overall software quality a lot"?

No, the system was originally designed to encourage innovation. Today, the competitive pressure in the IT sector is what is driving innovation, and patents are used to lock down parts of the industry to reduce the competitive pressure, which will slow down innovation. The system is therefore working exactly opposite of how it was intended.

Giving a company in the IT sector a 20 year state enforced monopoly on any technology is totally absurd, and not in the public interest.

According to the press release itself: "Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms." However, this is Microsoft, and we know how they operate. This is unlikely to be anything but a ploy to avoid objections from the authorities to the purchase. Once it is too late to stop it, I predict not a single update will go into the Linux and Android versions, and the Mac and iPhone versions will lag behind in features. So the question is what alternatives there are now.

Another question is what Google, Facebook and Cisco will do now. If I were on the board of any of them, I'd certainly be pushing for pooling resources to create a joint venture to compete with Skype on all fronts. Could set up quite the consortium for the money they intended to spend buying Skype themselves.

Interesting times.

Oh, but this has already happened, only with different people than those you mentioned. Take a look at Go.

Dying from smoking tends to be very expensive. It is not like dying from a car accident or bungee jumping, where you either die or cost a fortunate in medical expenses due to long rehabilitation, but you die and it costs a fortunate to keep you hospitalised while you cough your lungs out or wither away to chemo/radiation therapy. I was in a lung ward for two weeks and saw enough of that stuff to be permanently immunized to the idea of taking up smoking for whatever reason.

Selling smoke to people under 18 + N years should be illegal, where N is increased every year. There is no excuse to keep that substance legal, except that it is sometimes too hard to stop for some people already hooked on it.

Ever since the Qt acquisition by Nokia, Qt on the desktop has been neglected in favour of the latest shiny mobile thing. Now that commercial customers finally get someone to talk to who do not have years to catch up on their competition (and are understandably a bit busy), we might expect desktop features to move forward as well.

Granted, some of the things that is coming out of the mobile efforts also do greatly benefit the desktop side, but still, the focus has clearly been elsewhere.

Also, what is up with that grossly misleading headline, Taco? I haven't seen any others yet go that much overboard on the hyperbole on this. And this is part of a trend here that has been getting increasingly bad lately, with misleading headlines and submissions become more and more the norm. I've been with Slashdot since the beginning, but I think it is soon time to part ways...

While Kinect looks really cool, I am impatiently awaiting the Asus Xtion, which is the same hardware as the Kinect except it is not an XBox accessory, and you do not have to give any money to Microsoft for it. The developer version , the Xtion Pro, should be out any time now according to their official schedule. There is also now an OpenNI API for communicating with Kinect family devices, which is available for Linux as well. Hobby robotics vision never seemed as promising as now.

I used to have some respect for Florian Mueller, but this article is a piece of trash. You absolutely cannot measure the impact or worth of a patent portfolio in a patent war in terms of a sheer number of patents. Especially when all parties involved have enough money to burn in the judicial system to contest any weak patents at will. In theory you only need one strong patent that can shut down your competitor as a deterrence. On the other hand, you can have a thousand patents yet lose a patent stand off if they can all be contested in court or easily worked around. To get an idea of who has actual patent strength, you need to read the patents. But I guess that takes actual work.

Nice post. Just thought I'd point out one small mistake -- Mercury does have a magnetic field, despite its tiny size! Even though it is only 1% of the strength of Earth's, it envelops the entire planet and shields it from the solar wind, just like on Earth, and so much unlike the Moon, Mars and Venus.

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.