You could tweak an existing keyboard layout definition to do this -- it's easy on Linux, and there is (or at least used to be) a tool to do it for Windows.

Good UIs should be designed to work with a single mouse button, because that means that they'll also work well with a touchscreen. There's nothing wrong with making some things faster with the right mouse button, which is how most Mac applications work. The right mouse button for the context menu was inherited from NeXTSTEP, where the 'normal' menu was a floating version and you could cause a copy of it to pop up wherever the mouse was with the right mouse button (RISC OS took this further and didn't have any kind of menu bar, using the middle mouse button to produce the menu on demand. Using RISC OS with a touchscreen or pen tablet was... interesting, and it only just counted as discoverable because the machines shipped with a mouse with the buttons labelled).

When I'm reading a document, I'll do two-fingered scrolling on the trackpad to navigate. I only use home/end and page up/down when I'm typing, to navigate within the document, and then I already have both of my hands on the keyboard. The function key can be pressed with the knuckle of the little finger of the left hand, so is pretty easy to hit.

Windows-R brings up the run dialog, which will autocomplete program names and used to be the fastest way of launching programs on Windows (it's well over 10 years since I last regularly used Windows, so I don't know if this has changed). Windows-D showed the desktop and Windows-F the system find dialog. All of these were pretty useful, but the key was still quite under-utilised.

Control and alternate already have well-defined meanings. Control is for entering control characters, alternate is for entering alternate characters. OS X uses both. UNIX keyboards used to come with a meta key, but this fell out of use as software was written for PCs without such a key. On OS X, the usage of the command key is inherited from classic MacOS: It's the modifier that you hold for commands. This means that the OS X terminal is the only graphical terminal that I've come across that doesn't suck for copy and paste. On OS X, every single program including the terminal uses command-C for copy and command-V for paste. The terminal is therefore free to use control-C for sending the character that they terminal recognises for SIGINT. Windows overloaded the alternate key for opening menus, which meant that it is no longer a convenient key if you need to enter non-ASCII characters (for example, a Euro symbol or a letter with an accent, which are both easy to enter on a Mac). Most desktop environments for Linux inherited a load of bad UI design from Windows before adding their own mistakes.

If a stranger wanders onto your property carried along on the back of a foot long drone, then I think any reasonable person would assume an alien invasion by really tiny people (or ants) is in progress and do their patriotic duty and start shooting.

In the words of the wise: "How can you be expected to teach children to read if they can't fit inside the building?"

And that was one of the charges. I think the facts of the particular case are important rather than the principles at stake. Of course he had an expectation of privacy and below a certain height (I think it is 500 feet or so) the other person was trespassing with the drone. Did shooting it out of the sky reasonably endanger anyone... How far from the property line was it? What direction did he shoot? This was a shotgun, so pellets generally have a shorter range than a rifle or hand gun. The fact that only the drone was damaged and no one was actually hurt should count for a lot.

A young woman was elected as an MP in Scotland, regardless of the "colourful" Tweets she'd written since she was 14: http://www.express.co.uk/news/...

Wikipedia says "as most of them were a few years old they were generally ascribed to immaturity and did not appear to do any significant damage": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The difference between persistent and temporary storage is important. Being able to have 128GB of RAM in a laptop that consumes no power when not being read or written would be a huge win (one of the reasons phones have limited RAM is that DRAM draws power all the time) would be very nice.

Oh, I agree - you'd have added a lot of hardware complexity and probably more than you'd be able to fit if you wanted to keep 7 of them in the thermal envelope of the Cell.

It's mostly opinion, formed from watching Google's interaction with standards processes and browser development communities.

If people can't write good commit messages, what makes you think that they'll write good commit messages in a separate document?

An increasing number of phones now come with mini-HDMI (or some kind of external HDMI adaptor). If you travel a lot, then being able to hook it up to a hotel room TV and watch a film can be quite nice.

On the plus side, it does have more space than a Nomad.

An alarming number of those hold for Chromium and they all stem from one core issue: Google developers do not understand how to design APIs. A lot of the bundled projects could be entirely separate repositories and shipped as shared libraries if they did, but gratuitous API churn means that they have to keep copies of things like v8 and Skia for Chrome and build the whole thing at once. It's fine to do the aggregate build thing if you want LTO, but it should be a performance optimisation, not a requirement of the software engineering workflow.