Phones are the least of the worries IMO. There are so many internet connected consumer electronics devices around that are based on some lightweight linux stack - SmartTVs, home routers, set-top boxes, NAS boxes, IP security cameras etc come to mind. These things will NEVER get patched because the development teams that put together the original firmware for the last years model are often even not around anymore. "Install Cyanogenmod" is not an option either.
With the "Internet of Things" wave raising, this will only get worse.

I'm not sure there is a reasonable solution there, zero day exploits will continue to be around, and companies will continue to build "embedded" devices that are not really designed to take frequent software updates.

Maybe there is a room on market for consumer oriented security certification brand, which basically tells the buyer - yes, we have reviewed and tested the software stack on this device, and its reasonably safe and sound and the company behind it is reasonably committed to keeping it secure ?

Anonymous posting on Slashdot could give an explanation to supersymmetry, detail a working cheap fusion reactor or do any number of more critical things than do another iteration of "ooh ooh baby". More likely it will be about hot grits though

Exactly. Whatever can "manage" between a single terminal, browser and editor window each with a bunch of tabs fast and stable is fine

Yep, thats what they were saying on Venus and Mars just a billion years ago.

You'll be guaranteed to have WebDirectX of some sort, and two very "popular" game publishers will immediately announce support for it for their two upcoming titles. My money is on Electronic Arts

Failing that, PowerShell has Invoke-WebRequest which can be aliased to look like wget. Now all we need is a permanent web address that is easy and quick to type that downloads both .. say http://save.me/

Right, UAC all over again !

They bought Bungie for Halo in 2000 already, lots of kids were running to BestBuy it

He is probably still in charge, he simply outsourced his chair throwing to an .. oh, well.

Also, it would be against Geneva convention

First properly documented interplanetary flight sent by us, with biological specimens on board ! Pity we didnt measure the effect of zero-g or deep space radiation on these.

Next up, amoebas and molluscs to mars ! With the current pace, maybe in next couple thousand years we'll send rhesus monkeys at some point.

Of course we know that too much competition is just CONFUSING to an average american. Thats why everything is bound to converge around two "choices" of everything. Demolicans or republicrats, Lockheed or Boeing, AT&T or Verizon, Intel or AMD ..
Its all free market, yes ?

"It's pretty amazing to me that they count every electron on a particle," Shinbrot says. The tally showed that the beads start out with far too few trapped electrons to explain the static buildup,

They probably did not count every electron, then.