While the article doesn't mention the tobacco lobby being behind it, it would be incredibly easy to see.

After all, the companies that are being hit primarily make non-brand pods for Juul. Of course Altria (for example) would want to shut that down.

the tobacco lobby has been VERY active over recent years at a national level trying to get the FDA to crack down on vaping, so that only things like Juul and other "buy at the convenience store disposable" brands are available... the market which is pretty much completely dominated by the big four companies.

They would love to to get rid of off brands and local mom and pop shops.

Yeah, we might not have said too clearly that the whole thing is a prototype made for other hackers. The code has been through a long journey, so we know pretty well how the foundations will look, but there is quite a lot of work to get the server into a good shape security-wise. Then, we need to work a lot on Developer Experience and then User Experience. But we're attracting people now, which is good.

We're not married to any particular coin, but we have people working on stuff like that. One project alumni is working on Filecoin, and we are talking a lot with the people of Safecoin. I'm pretty sure we can have stuff like in near future.

Whoooah! No, it is not. DRM is fundamentally broken, so, that's not what we're aiming for. Indeed, if you trust your data with someone who is not worthy of your trust, then there is very little technology can do to fix that broken trust. Then, it becomes a really difficult social, psychological and legal problem, where technology can only play a very minor part.

So, what we're doing here is to ensure that you can store stuff on a web server you control. Then, the intelligence sits on your client, so the apps you use will be restricted by the security model of your device, and therefore should not send your data off without your consent.

WebID currently builds on OIDC (because we couldn't get browser makers support WebID-TLS, which is much simpler), but I think you'll find that it doesn't have the same problems: https://github.com/solid/webid...

But the server is pretty simple, and can and will be implemented in many different languages. People are working on a Go implementation too. The nice thing about JS is that much of the same logic is both on the server and the client side, and so it is actually the same code. That's pretty nice for consistency and cost of implementing it.

I'm myself not really impressed with the security of the Node.js landscape, but that's what we decided to do first.

Basically all the stuff around it. First, you have the permission stuff that allows you to share those pics with the people you want, without uploading it somewhere totally beyond any reasonable control. Then, others are welcome to provide apps around it, so your pics could be part of somebody's feed, like instagram, only, those pics are never uploaded to somebody else's server.

But overall, the server side is intended to be pretty simple.

You make the stuff that we do sounds really simple, but yeah. That's pretty much it. :-)

But note that in spite of Tim having read-write capability in his first browser, it really never took off. And then we had this document web, when we also wanted a data web and an applications web. So, I guess we got the applications web, but just pretty primitive and constrained ones.

So, yeah, the server side is really very simple. It is like, the UNIX of the Web. But in terms of all the stuff that has been around for 25 years without taking off, there is really a lot to do...

Ah, but you are pinpointing it right there! It is more hassle than you want, why? If we could fix that problem, so that it wouldn't be more hassle to have it on your own webserver, then what would you do? And that's like iteration 1 of Solid, we're separating those apps from the data, so that you can have your data on your webserver, but you can use any calendar app you want. That way, companies will be competing to create the best apps, not to suck your data out of you. So, Solid is about making the infrastructure and the ecosystem to make sure that all those things aren't a hassle, they will be your preferred way to do it.

Right, good question, because that is the essence. But first of all, they are not running on a server you don't control, they are running on your client. So, Solid is doing a massive shift on where the intelligence will be. It will be mostly on the client. The server side will be pretty simple.

But the rest of the question is still interesting. It is a fairly long and intricate answer, but some of the short story here:

So, in the way it is working in browsers now, is the simple CORS restrictions. It is pretty broken, but it is what we have. So, we're making some hacks to identify web apps. And then, you can assign privileges to them. Since they are running on your device, the security of your browser applies to them.

Still, it doesn't mean that you can necessarily trust them, of course, but then, this is a social technology, so we could establish a Web of Trust around that. We're thinking a lot about that.

So, we don't know that yet. There are a few no-brainer business models of course, but we don't expect them to last long. But we have some really good people on the team, we'll figure it out.

I don't know about the rest of the country, but since I'm currently sitting in the EPB market that was one of the two area submitted to the FCC I'll have to disagree with you.

Our entire local service area is (more or less) fiber ready, with full speed access available from office complexes down to lower-income residential areas. The sections that initially rolled out weren't "Come to our city" showplaces, but instead established areas both commercial and residential.

At my home (in an average suburban neighborhood) I pay _I believe_ $70/mo for gigabit access (which btw is bidirectional... I test out at around 930mbps both upstream and downstream to the EPB central servers).

And since this is Chattanooga, there are plenty of backwoods trailers and rural houses that are really enjoying their new high speed access without having to be in a "highly profitable" section of town.

And believe me, the areas here and there that don't have access yet are pretty much champing at the bit to get it and be able to drop Comcast like a hot potato. (Which might I add, you should see the Comcast ads around here. They almost seem desperate, but that might just be personal bias) ;)

For that reason I used to send my course work as pdfs. I used Libre Office or Google Docs for editing and converted final documents to pdf format.

So MS Word couldn't change layout when document was opened by the teacher.

It might surprise you, that some environmentalists are engineers. I did take one environmental course during my B. of Science studies, that was toughest course I did during my studies.

On that course I learned that there are alternatives, all alternatives have their own problems, but solutions exist.

Main alternative is reducing power consumption on consumer products, then comes renewable energy sources and hybrid power production.

I think that graphs are often quite misleading. Especially when they are used to show statistical information. You can make very different graphs from same base data. One chooses the graph trying to get best propaganda value.

That is why we have the phrase "Lies, damned lies, and statistics"

If you look original EE Times link and read the article, you will see that the love for Android is dropping:

However, despite pulling ahead of FreeRTOS and Ubuntu Linux, the news is not all good for Android in embedded applications. Whereas a year before 34 percent of users thought they would be using Android during the following 12 months that percentage dropped to 28 percent in the latest survey.

After all, used OS is mostly hardware dependent, is it a low end or high end embedded platform.

Low end you do in the house, middle range applications you use some RTOS, in the high end you use those Linuxes and Android.

Disclaimer: I am currently evaluating OS that did leap from 0 to 4% in its first year of use.