Mine actualy exploded while parsing "father of seven, socialist COBOL programmer"... Seven is coded in COBOL ???? O_o

I don't think Chrome OS is a good thing for desktop Linux. Who will develop for an OS on which you can't install any applications ? Commercial vendors won't target Chrome OS / Linux, they will target the web browsers, and that won't have any impact on the "monoculture" problem of the desktop.

Let's use a (bad) human analogy... Earth is like someone smoking, drinking alcohol, and eating junk food for ages. Of course someone like that will face some health problems sooner or latter. We are here. Now, there are these obvious alternatives: 1/ Stop smoking and drinking, get a good diet, do some sport. ( = cut CO2 emissions) or 2/ Continue with the same life-style and take tons of drugs to counter the negative effects of it. (= geo-engineering) The second solution may work for a while, but on the long run it just doesn't work, period. the only sane alternative is: 3/ Adopt a sane lifestyle AND use a moderate amount of drugs to help a little bit to go back into the limits. So, geo-engineering can't be a long-term solution.

Seeing the screenshots, I realize that displaying the tools vertically on each side of the screen is the only good way to smartly use your screen space, as long as your document is in "portrait" mode and that most of the screen these days are more large than high...