And one less machine to buy when your company becomes a target of an SEC investigation! Just put the paper into the printer, hit "Erase", and the evidence is gone! It's like Magic! [/infomercial]
Not only can you not save arbitrary files (mp3s included), you couldn't use an Amazon-specific downloader app, because Apple would have to approve it through the App Store, which, let's face it, is not going to happen (unless the Justice Department goes all Sherman act on their asses, but they're too impotent to ever do that, just ask the 'Corporations are People Too' Supreme Court). So no MP3 purchases from an iPhone for you. Sorry for your troubles.
Does anybody think Barnes and Noble would be willing to post a sign saying your book was #38 in its category on Amazon?
No, but I see all the time people with stickers on their book covers indicating their position on the New York Times Best Sellers list, or the Oprah Bookclub.
You can't expect to place ads for a competing store's award in another retail store.
This isn't that. This is advertising that you won a Fields Metal at a Nobel Consortium (with an enormous pinch of salt).
I just love how everyone on Slashdot thinks that they know what some alien race is thinking, as if they themselves were from some alien race and have the key to their rationale.
What if the race is on a generation ship and just so happens to stumble across us on its interstellar cruise? "Hey, there's a planet with a whole lot of tasty looking critters and a chance for us to resupply" would be my inevitable first guess.
And that's just one of a quadrillion different scenarios we could postulate for an alien encounter. You should put away your absolutes and your thoughts that 'humanity is superior', because we have no evidence to either. We can make plenty of good guesses, but if the Hungry Hippos of Halcyon 9 arrive on the cruise ship Horatio and they have a taste for the flesh of mammals, I hope they eat you first.
Even though the price of optical equipment is drastically dropping, it's still quite a bit more expensive than your regular ol' Al/Cu-wire-to-chip solution. Until data volumes become so immense that the noise level for even those connections is unacceptable, so too will the price of optical connections.
Just look at the optical audio equipment; unless you're a middle-to-high end user, you probably still use the ol' copper wires to hook up your receiver rather than the fancy $20 optical digital audio cable.
Not really. The shuttle is like the ultimate dragster; it uses literal tons of fuel to get up to speed, but once it's there, it just coasts for thousands of miles.
I mean really, how many other reusable vehicles out there can accelerate from zero to almost 18,000MPH in 8 minutes flat? Where else are you going to get the Mach 25 experience?
Antibiotics don't prevent organ rejection, that would be immunosuppressant drugs.
You get an infection, your immune system goes into overdrive to beat it and will soon start attacking the transplanted organ. You will soon afterwards reject the organ. Case and point, you can't do an organ transplant without antibiotics, whether or not you consider it a proximal or distal necessity. Organ transplant patients are often drowned in antibiotics if they get so much as a fever, since their immunosuppressant drugs prevent their bodies from overreacting to infection.
if your sore throat (throat ache, whatever) is actually strep throat you need antibiotics to prevent rheumatic fever
No you don't. You may need antibiotics if your infection doesn't go away on its own, but most people's immune systems are active enough to beat a mild strep infection. The main reason we have rapid strep infections and copious azithromycin prescriptions is that the people who most often get strep infections are students and office workers, neither of which will take the necessary time off when they get ill, and therefore need to get over the illness as fast as possible to prevent spreading it. If the same sick people stayed at home, it's far less likely they'd spread the infection, and they'd (most likely) get over it on their own. This is precisely what Norway has implemented.
It's the same reason everyone wants the 'cure to the common cold' and the reason flu shots are becoming much more common in school aged children. If there was a drug that effectively treated the flu, you can rest assured it'd fly off the shelves in America, and people would stay right at work, spreading the flu on to other coworkers instead of just taking a sick day or a few and getting over it on their own.
dog bites are much cleaner than human bites and usually don't require prophylactic antibiotics
While they're 'cleaner' than human bites, meaning that dog's mouths have more active immune systems and thusly carry less nasty, disease causing germs, the fact remains that they do carry germs, and many dogs are carriers of much nastier bacteria than the human mouth contains, for example Strep A which can cause "the flesh eating" disease necrotizing fasciitis. If you get a dog bite, you absolutely want to wash the area thoroughly and at least treat the wound with a topical antibiotic solution as a prophylactic ("neosplorin" as many people in America know it). In fact, broken skin is probably the best overall reason to use antibiotics, as even relatively simple skin infections can quickly jump to the bloodstream and cause quick onset sepsis and death, sometimes even in healthy individuals.
It's no more rocket science than the other stupid, ridiculous and trivially obvious patents out there like the "one click" patent. Just pointing out that, in theory, it is indeed patentable in many countries.
...because the dogbite was infected (as they usually are)?
And this is an exception to the rule. Another obvious exception is surgery, where antibiotics are used to prevent postoperative infections and organ rejection.
The idea is that your sniffles don't require azithromycin, that your cough and throat ache don't need penicillin, and that your fever doesn't need ampicillin.
Technically this is a business method, which is patentable in most locales. It's not surgery to not give patients antibiotics when they've got a throat ache.
It'd never work because different pieces of software have different kinds of capabilities. You could eventually reach some shared common functionality, but the edge cases (and the effort to bring it up that far) would most likely piss off users more than any utility it brings.
There have been some efforts towards moving to a unified settings system (see DConf/GSettings), but even then, each application is responsible for its own settings.
view generate thumbnails of all kind of files that nautilus can (PDFs, videos, etc)
With GIO, the file chooser can load any thumbnails that are available, but Gtk+ doesn't actually have the architectural pieces for doing thumbnailing itself (since it's quite a lot of specialized code that's not widely needed). But in most cases, Nautilus has already generated the thumbnails you require anyways.
Pretty much so, there is a major push to switch Gnome to C#
[citation needed]. There's exactly a single GNOME desktop dependency using C#, Tomboy, and even that's been cloned in C++ (GNote). and is gaining adoption instead of the Mono-based variant by many major distros including Fedora. I really wouldn't be surprised to see it proposed to replace Tomboy in the upcoming months.
Furthermore, if GNOME's heading in any direction on the desktop, it's towards enabling 3D, networking, web and presence technologies through the stack. There has been a heavy push to add networking to the lower libraries so that libraries above can take advantage without reinventing the wheel. A D-Bus layer is merging into GLib next. GNOME Shell is written mostly in Javascript with Clutter being used as a 3D toolkit, after Gtk+ itself was extensively modified for better offscreen rendering support. Webkit replaced Mozilla's Gecko, and is being used by more up-and-coming GNOME projects. Telepathy and Empathy were adopted into GNOME and gives us an instant messaging client. There are half a dozen new projects around the rather small-but-growing geography and cartography communities. GNOME technologies are also heading towards the more-deeply embedded direction, with Clutter-GTK+ pushing Moblin to new heights and products like the Litl webbook (which is also very heavily Javascript-based).
There have been no new.NET components accepted or even proposed to be included in GNOME in years. The Mono fear is a sound one, but it's not one you realistically have to worry about today as a GNOME user. With the recent improvements in GThumb and newer photo cataloging apps like Shotwell, not even F-Spot can be considered a 'killer app' for Mono anymore. That community has long since left GNOME along with Miguel.
Red Hat is currently in the process of consolidating all its community
hosted servers to a single hosting facility. As part of that,
the gnome.org servers are being moved *this weekend*.
You plan on doing something other than working on GNOME this weekend, or
find a programming task that doesn't rely on access to GNOME servers.
Time
====
Start: Sat, Dec 12 approx. 1200 UTC
End: on or before Mon, Dec 14
The plan is for a 48 hour outage window; we would hope to have major
services back up and functional sooner than that.
Affected systems
================
Most gnome.org services other than ftp.gnome.org and irc.gnome.org. This
includes:
www.gnome.org
master.gnome.org
bugzilla.gnome.org
git.gnome.org
mail.gnome.org
live.gnome.org
IP Changes
==========
The gnome.org servers will all be moving to new IP addresses; in general
this will be invisible to users, but you might notice messages from SSH
in some cases. Selected new IPs:
master.gnome.org: 209.132.180.167
git.gnome.org: 209.132.180.173
GSM phones can be turned on remotely by a probe from the network by a qualified entity[1]. Your phone isn't communicating to the cell towers when it's off, this is very much true. However, it just takes someone in the government high enough up the food chain and a judge's okay to boot up your phone.
I really wouldn't worry about it unless you're a mobster, an agent for a foreign government, or a terrorist, but they definitely have the capability to be rather scary, which is precisely why those latter entities have moved on to "burn phones" and older, more reliable methods of message passing.
I can't believe people buy operating systems and software from a two-decade old, twice-convicted and twice settled-out-of-court, unrepentant monopolist. And it amuses me deeply when one monopolist fights with another over who's to blame for putting out crap that the other has to deal with.
However, the problem doesn't exist in their competitor's products and Intel's errata clearly spells out why it wouldn't work, so why Microsoft tried to get away with it is anyone's guess.
They're all evil. Every single one of them. Even the ones you consider to be perfect for you are evil to others. There is no absolute empirical measure of evil, thusly one man's good is another man's supreme evil.
Refusing to vote because someone's evil is like refusing to breathe because there are toxins in the air. While it's true and maybe 'noble', it's absolutely stupid and you're likely to die because of it... okay maybe that's stretching the metaphor a bit much, but there are plenty of historical examples.
This is the US Government we're talking about. One of the few entities on the planet where "Budget" is virtually meaningless. Someone sneezes funny and a million dollars goes out the door. How much do you think it'd cost to financially compel Sony to enabling Linux installs on their machines? Exactly how much does a PS3 dev-kit license cost again? How hard to do you think it'd be to get a judge to sign some order compelling Sony to releasing the schematics to the US Government under NDA, so that they can write and maintain their own Linux loader for the machine?
Even if the cost of the above was in the lower 8-digit range without the machines included, which I really doubt, it'd likely be cheaper to source these machines than it would be to develop your own hybrid compute node and software for it (or nVidia's crazy-expensive, less mature solution).
Sony doesn't support Linux on these machines, which makes it practically impossible for the home user to boot Linux on them. (Well, tbh, 'improbable', look at how much reverse engineering has happened with the GameCube & Wii). But for someone with deep enough pockets, like say a government agency, it's almost trivial.
There is a way to know explicitly where the minerals came from. The unfortunate part is, it's very expensive and revealing the fact that you know where the minerals came from is only more likely to cause you trouble, rather than solving a problem.
Scientists figured out years ago that different parts of the earth have different concentrations of radioisotopes and impurities. Those are more than enough to geolocate the source of any number of mineral supplies. It's virtually the same way scientists can know if a sample of rock is really a meteorite or if a sample of drugs came from someone's backyard methcook or some superlab in Mexico. Measuring the amount of tantalum-180 vs -181 will tell you whether or not it came from Africa or China, and as any nuclear engineer will tell you, separating two isotopes that close in weight is extremely difficult, so it's hard to disguise.
Still, stopping the world so you can test someone's ore isn't really going to solve any problems. You might stop buying from one company because of it, but since every other company will still use the conflict ore, and the ones that don't will charge more, simple economics will force this stuff to be used as long as it is created. Not buying it simply isn't a realistic option; even if we started mining the minerals that we could (like tungsten) here in the States, it'd still cost a fortune more than importing it (at least in the beginning), which is enough to keep people from doing it here.
You don't really still need the spinning media. There's a cheap, incredibly easy, fast and inexpensive media that's perfect for booting your computer, and your computer is loaded with ports for it. It's called a USB thumbdrive.
It's pretty simple actually: they're cheap and easily available in all kinds of different sizes ranging from "I just need to boot Linux" (256MB) to "I want all of my apps on it too" (32GB+), they're writable so you can update the OS, and you've likely got a multitude of ports inside of your computer that go completely wasted because they're not connected to anything (and a pigtail for one of these is a nickel at a computer store, if your motherboard didn't come with a few in the box). Just plug it in, plug in the USB drive, install your OS on it, and be done. You can choose to swap to it or the faster media at your own discretion.
Qt's "Core" library is a pretty solid platform shim. Plain GLib is also (somewhat easier to port due to no C++ ABI differences, but no native C++ api makes it less attractive to you).
Being a type 1 diabetic myself, I have fought to get one of these myself but the powers-that-be here in Norway seem to think there are no advantages to having your blood glucose measured every 1-2 to 5 minutes for 3-7 days (depending on which monitor you get), at least not compared to the price of these gadgets. Pretty insanely ignorant, as having this info available would let me easily have perfect blood glucose levels at all times. Hell, some of these meters even come with an optional automatic insulin pump!
No offense, but the powers that be are right, for now. The advantages of these devices are vastly outweighed by the current comparative price of these devices. Monitoring your blood sugar often is good, but if you can only buy a thousand of these meters and treat a few thousand people, verses buying millions of other, vastly cheaper, but otherwise perfectly good meters and treating millions, from the view point of "the powers that be" the millions are better served. Right now they are essentially high-tech biogadgets, and even from the way you evangelize it in your post, you and they both know it. The cheapest one of those continuous-monitoring meters costs better than nine times what I paid for my standard "finger-prick" meter, and the sensors are even more expensive on top of that.
Besides, you're diabetic. If you've got the money for one of these things, get your doctor to write you a Rx saying you need one, then go to the company and buy one. If you were even smarter, you'd ask one of these companies to give you one for free, and they'd probably go for it since you're particularly vocal on the issue (and do the whole "human review"/"tech review" thing in trade).
Be overjoyed your national health care gets you diabetic testing supplies. Hell, be glad you have healthcare at all, that your government cares enough to make sure you can test your blood sugar as often as you need.
Slashdot Mirror
And one less machine to buy when your company becomes a target of an SEC investigation! Just put the paper into the printer, hit "Erase", and the evidence is gone! It's like Magic! [/infomercial]
Not only can you not save arbitrary files (mp3s included), you couldn't use an Amazon-specific downloader app, because Apple would have to approve it through the App Store, which, let's face it, is not going to happen (unless the Justice Department goes all Sherman act on their asses, but they're too impotent to ever do that, just ask the 'Corporations are People Too' Supreme Court). So no MP3 purchases from an iPhone for you. Sorry for your troubles.
Does anybody think Barnes and Noble would be willing to post a sign saying your book was #38 in its category on Amazon?
No, but I see all the time people with stickers on their book covers indicating their position on the New York Times Best Sellers list, or the Oprah Bookclub.
You can't expect to place ads for a competing store's award in another retail store.
This isn't that. This is advertising that you won a Fields Metal at a Nobel Consortium (with an enormous pinch of salt).
Curie named Polonium after Poland ("Polonia"). So the whoosh goes to you, coward.
I just love how everyone on Slashdot thinks that they know what some alien race is thinking, as if they themselves were from some alien race and have the key to their rationale.
What if the race is on a generation ship and just so happens to stumble across us on its interstellar cruise? "Hey, there's a planet with a whole lot of tasty looking critters and a chance for us to resupply" would be my inevitable first guess.
And that's just one of a quadrillion different scenarios we could postulate for an alien encounter. You should put away your absolutes and your thoughts that 'humanity is superior', because we have no evidence to either. We can make plenty of good guesses, but if the Hungry Hippos of Halcyon 9 arrive on the cruise ship Horatio and they have a taste for the flesh of mammals, I hope they eat you first.
Even though the price of optical equipment is drastically dropping, it's still quite a bit more expensive than your regular ol' Al/Cu-wire-to-chip solution. Until data volumes become so immense that the noise level for even those connections is unacceptable, so too will the price of optical connections.
Just look at the optical audio equipment; unless you're a middle-to-high end user, you probably still use the ol' copper wires to hook up your receiver rather than the fancy $20 optical digital audio cable.
Not really. The shuttle is like the ultimate dragster; it uses literal tons of fuel to get up to speed, but once it's there, it just coasts for thousands of miles.
I mean really, how many other reusable vehicles out there can accelerate from zero to almost 18,000MPH in 8 minutes flat? Where else are you going to get the Mach 25 experience?
Antibiotics don't prevent organ rejection, that would be immunosuppressant drugs.
You get an infection, your immune system goes into overdrive to beat it and will soon start attacking the transplanted organ. You will soon afterwards reject the organ. Case and point, you can't do an organ transplant without antibiotics, whether or not you consider it a proximal or distal necessity. Organ transplant patients are often drowned in antibiotics if they get so much as a fever, since their immunosuppressant drugs prevent their bodies from overreacting to infection.
if your sore throat (throat ache, whatever) is actually strep throat you need antibiotics to prevent rheumatic fever
No you don't. You may need antibiotics if your infection doesn't go away on its own, but most people's immune systems are active enough to beat a mild strep infection. The main reason we have rapid strep infections and copious azithromycin prescriptions is that the people who most often get strep infections are students and office workers, neither of which will take the necessary time off when they get ill, and therefore need to get over the illness as fast as possible to prevent spreading it. If the same sick people stayed at home, it's far less likely they'd spread the infection, and they'd (most likely) get over it on their own. This is precisely what Norway has implemented.
It's the same reason everyone wants the 'cure to the common cold' and the reason flu shots are becoming much more common in school aged children. If there was a drug that effectively treated the flu, you can rest assured it'd fly off the shelves in America, and people would stay right at work, spreading the flu on to other coworkers instead of just taking a sick day or a few and getting over it on their own.
dog bites are much cleaner than human bites and usually don't require prophylactic antibiotics
While they're 'cleaner' than human bites, meaning that dog's mouths have more active immune systems and thusly carry less nasty, disease causing germs, the fact remains that they do carry germs, and many dogs are carriers of much nastier bacteria than the human mouth contains, for example Strep A which can cause "the flesh eating" disease necrotizing fasciitis. If you get a dog bite, you absolutely want to wash the area thoroughly and at least treat the wound with a topical antibiotic solution as a prophylactic ("neosplorin" as many people in America know it). In fact, broken skin is probably the best overall reason to use antibiotics, as even relatively simple skin infections can quickly jump to the bloodstream and cause quick onset sepsis and death, sometimes even in healthy individuals.
It's no more rocket science than the other stupid, ridiculous and trivially obvious patents out there like the "one click" patent. Just pointing out that, in theory, it is indeed patentable in many countries.
...because the dogbite was infected (as they usually are)?
And this is an exception to the rule. Another obvious exception is surgery, where antibiotics are used to prevent postoperative infections and organ rejection.
The idea is that your sniffles don't require azithromycin, that your cough and throat ache don't need penicillin, and that your fever doesn't need ampicillin.
Technically this is a business method, which is patentable in most locales. It's not surgery to not give patients antibiotics when they've got a throat ache.
It'd never work because different pieces of software have different kinds of capabilities. You could eventually reach some shared common functionality, but the edge cases (and the effort to bring it up that far) would most likely piss off users more than any utility it brings.
There have been some efforts towards moving to a unified settings system (see DConf/GSettings), but even then, each application is responsible for its own settings.
view generate thumbnails of all kind of files that nautilus can (PDFs, videos, etc)
With GIO, the file chooser can load any thumbnails that are available, but Gtk+ doesn't actually have the architectural pieces for doing thumbnailing itself (since it's quite a lot of specialized code that's not widely needed). But in most cases, Nautilus has already generated the thumbnails you require anyways.
Pretty much so, there is a major push to switch Gnome to C#
[citation needed]. There's exactly a single GNOME desktop dependency using C#, Tomboy, and even that's been cloned in C++ (GNote). and is gaining adoption instead of the Mono-based variant by many major distros including Fedora. I really wouldn't be surprised to see it proposed to replace Tomboy in the upcoming months.
.NET components accepted or even proposed to be included in GNOME in years. The Mono fear is a sound one, but it's not one you realistically have to worry about today as a GNOME user. With the recent improvements in GThumb and newer photo cataloging apps like Shotwell, not even F-Spot can be considered a 'killer app' for Mono anymore. That community has long since left GNOME along with Miguel.
Furthermore, if GNOME's heading in any direction on the desktop, it's towards enabling 3D, networking, web and presence technologies through the stack. There has been a heavy push to add networking to the lower libraries so that libraries above can take advantage without reinventing the wheel. A D-Bus layer is merging into GLib next. GNOME Shell is written mostly in Javascript with Clutter being used as a 3D toolkit, after Gtk+ itself was extensively modified for better offscreen rendering support. Webkit replaced Mozilla's Gecko, and is being used by more up-and-coming GNOME projects. Telepathy and Empathy were adopted into GNOME and gives us an instant messaging client. There are half a dozen new projects around the rather small-but-growing geography and cartography communities. GNOME technologies are also heading towards the more-deeply embedded direction, with Clutter-GTK+ pushing Moblin to new heights and products like the Litl webbook (which is also very heavily Javascript-based).
There have been no new
Red Hat is currently in the process of consolidating all its community hosted servers to a single hosting facility. As part of that, the gnome.org servers are being moved *this weekend*. You plan on doing something other than working on GNOME this weekend, or find a programming task that doesn't rely on access to GNOME servers. Time ==== Start: Sat, Dec 12 approx. 1200 UTC End: on or before Mon, Dec 14 The plan is for a 48 hour outage window; we would hope to have major services back up and functional sooner than that. Affected systems ================ Most gnome.org services other than ftp.gnome.org and irc.gnome.org. This includes: www.gnome.org master.gnome.org bugzilla.gnome.org git.gnome.org mail.gnome.org live.gnome.org IP Changes ========== The gnome.org servers will all be moving to new IP addresses; in general this will be invisible to users, but you might notice messages from SSH in some cases. Selected new IPs: master.gnome.org: 209.132.180.167 git.gnome.org: 209.132.180.173
[Titan is] definitely larger than both Earth or Mercury (thou only by ~1000km on its diameter)
No it isn't.
GSM phones can be turned on remotely by a probe from the network by a qualified entity[1]. Your phone isn't communicating to the cell towers when it's off, this is very much true. However, it just takes someone in the government high enough up the food chain and a judge's okay to boot up your phone.
I really wouldn't worry about it unless you're a mobster, an agent for a foreign government, or a terrorist, but they definitely have the capability to be rather scary, which is precisely why those latter entities have moved on to "burn phones" and older, more reliable methods of message passing.
I can't believe people buy operating systems and software from a two-decade old, twice-convicted and twice settled-out-of-court, unrepentant monopolist. And it amuses me deeply when one monopolist fights with another over who's to blame for putting out crap that the other has to deal with.
However, the problem doesn't exist in their competitor's products and Intel's errata clearly spells out why it wouldn't work, so why Microsoft tried to get away with it is anyone's guess.
They're all evil. Every single one of them. Even the ones you consider to be perfect for you are evil to others. There is no absolute empirical measure of evil, thusly one man's good is another man's supreme evil.
Refusing to vote because someone's evil is like refusing to breathe because there are toxins in the air. While it's true and maybe 'noble', it's absolutely stupid and you're likely to die because of it... okay maybe that's stretching the metaphor a bit much, but there are plenty of historical examples.
Therefore all votes are evil? So we shouldn't express an opinion at all then?
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
This is the US Government we're talking about. One of the few entities on the planet where "Budget" is virtually meaningless. Someone sneezes funny and a million dollars goes out the door. How much do you think it'd cost to financially compel Sony to enabling Linux installs on their machines? Exactly how much does a PS3 dev-kit license cost again? How hard to do you think it'd be to get a judge to sign some order compelling Sony to releasing the schematics to the US Government under NDA, so that they can write and maintain their own Linux loader for the machine?
Even if the cost of the above was in the lower 8-digit range without the machines included, which I really doubt, it'd likely be cheaper to source these machines than it would be to develop your own hybrid compute node and software for it (or nVidia's crazy-expensive, less mature solution).
Sony doesn't support Linux on these machines, which makes it practically impossible for the home user to boot Linux on them. (Well, tbh, 'improbable', look at how much reverse engineering has happened with the GameCube & Wii). But for someone with deep enough pockets, like say a government agency, it's almost trivial.
There is a way to know explicitly where the minerals came from. The unfortunate part is, it's very expensive and revealing the fact that you know where the minerals came from is only more likely to cause you trouble, rather than solving a problem.
Scientists figured out years ago that different parts of the earth have different concentrations of radioisotopes and impurities. Those are more than enough to geolocate the source of any number of mineral supplies. It's virtually the same way scientists can know if a sample of rock is really a meteorite or if a sample of drugs came from someone's backyard methcook or some superlab in Mexico. Measuring the amount of tantalum-180 vs -181 will tell you whether or not it came from Africa or China, and as any nuclear engineer will tell you, separating two isotopes that close in weight is extremely difficult, so it's hard to disguise.
Still, stopping the world so you can test someone's ore isn't really going to solve any problems. You might stop buying from one company because of it, but since every other company will still use the conflict ore, and the ones that don't will charge more, simple economics will force this stuff to be used as long as it is created. Not buying it simply isn't a realistic option; even if we started mining the minerals that we could (like tungsten) here in the States, it'd still cost a fortune more than importing it (at least in the beginning), which is enough to keep people from doing it here.
You don't really still need the spinning media. There's a cheap, incredibly easy, fast and inexpensive media that's perfect for booting your computer, and your computer is loaded with ports for it. It's called a USB thumbdrive.
It's pretty simple actually: they're cheap and easily available in all kinds of different sizes ranging from "I just need to boot Linux" (256MB) to "I want all of my apps on it too" (32GB+), they're writable so you can update the OS, and you've likely got a multitude of ports inside of your computer that go completely wasted because they're not connected to anything (and a pigtail for one of these is a nickel at a computer store, if your motherboard didn't come with a few in the box). Just plug it in, plug in the USB drive, install your OS on it, and be done. You can choose to swap to it or the faster media at your own discretion.
Qt's "Core" library is a pretty solid platform shim. Plain GLib is also (somewhat easier to port due to no C++ ABI differences, but no native C++ api makes it less attractive to you).
Either one is an exceptional choice.
Being a type 1 diabetic myself, I have fought to get one of these myself but the powers-that-be here in Norway seem to think there are no advantages to having your blood glucose measured every 1-2 to 5 minutes for 3-7 days (depending on which monitor you get), at least not compared to the price of these gadgets. Pretty insanely ignorant, as having this info available would let me easily have perfect blood glucose levels at all times. Hell, some of these meters even come with an optional automatic insulin pump!
No offense, but the powers that be are right, for now. The advantages of these devices are vastly outweighed by the current comparative price of these devices. Monitoring your blood sugar often is good, but if you can only buy a thousand of these meters and treat a few thousand people, verses buying millions of other, vastly cheaper, but otherwise perfectly good meters and treating millions, from the view point of "the powers that be" the millions are better served. Right now they are essentially high-tech biogadgets, and even from the way you evangelize it in your post, you and they both know it. The cheapest one of those continuous-monitoring meters costs better than nine times what I paid for my standard "finger-prick" meter, and the sensors are even more expensive on top of that.
Besides, you're diabetic. If you've got the money for one of these things, get your doctor to write you a Rx saying you need one, then go to the company and buy one. If you were even smarter, you'd ask one of these companies to give you one for free, and they'd probably go for it since you're particularly vocal on the issue (and do the whole "human review"/"tech review" thing in trade).
Be overjoyed your national health care gets you diabetic testing supplies. Hell, be glad you have healthcare at all, that your government cares enough to make sure you can test your blood sugar as often as you need.