Is there a video version of this post? They were very well appreciated in the past here on Slashdot.

This is really getting my hopes up for Firefly --- it's not impossible. I want to believe.

Yes, but is it 3D printed?

I definitely would. Who wouldn't?

What comes next, a thread on "is Emacs better than Vi"?

If you look carefully, I didn't say "use it", I said "keep an eye on it" and "it's promising". I realize it's far from being production-ready.
I am not involved in the Julia development, and I wouldn't describe myself as "FOSS people".

Keep an eye on Julia, it's a very promising project.

If the system required you to enter the FDE-password whenever you open up the screen then how would background-processes, like e.g. SMS-receiving, chat and such stuff work? They'd only be able to access the disk when you have the display open and that'd obviously make the whole thing unuseable as a smartphone in the first place.

I get your point, but I disagree on the part where you write that background operations need the disk or else they can't possibly work at all. Current smartphones are not designed to work without accessing the disk, that's true, but in theory 1GB of RAM is plenty for processes like polling a chat server or SMS to run entirely in it.

So the protection is only effective if someone steals my phone while it's turned off, which is, like, 0.1% of the time?

Jolla phone user here. The killer feature for me, besides the ability to run Android apps, is the security aspect (none of the Big Three mobile OS makers gets my data). (And, on top of it, I can brag "my mobile phone arrived with vim and git preinstalled".) I am pretty satisfied with the OS as it is, but it could use a few more quality-of-life improvements and native features (the mail app mainly). This new project is good news, because it will help them grow, gain popularity and find a niche to fill in the mobile OS market, but I hope this won't take resources away from the regular development.

MAybe HDD manufacturers should ship a hash in print along with their drives which can be then tallied with the one on the website .. they cant hack every hard disk shrinkwrap can they ?

At this point, they could simply ship their public key in print and sign all present and future versions.

He didn't die; the great Enterprise in the sky beamed him up.

Personally, I give much importance to the presence of a physical keyboard. Keyboards are what makes the students able to create original content and tinker with a device. They make the difference between a machine that you can use to write essays, program, communicate... and a device that is only able to play Angry Birds and send short KTHXBYE messages on Whatsapp.

Interesting (in a scaring way). I wish I had mod points.

Adblock, Flashblock, uBlock, Ghostery all pick up slightly different items to block which combined do a pretty good job of breaking things like Facebook

Breaking Facebook is a feature, not a bug, right?