Except the Ubuntu phone is on to a fairly good concept here: smartphones are getting powerful enough to become desktop PCs. This is an obvious area where you'd actually want a desktop OS running - or at least very compatible - with the phone.

Where they may get tripped up is the trend towards augmented reality type systems, but that's a ways off and there's plenty of low-level work to be done (since AR falls more into the desktop OS design scale then the phone one).

Yeah I love this concept. With the dock for my S4, I can plug in all the peripherals just fine - what I need is the OS support to run full desktop apps on it in this mode. An Ubuntu-like OS would be ideal (though I'd probably try to run Cinnamon or something instead for a DE).

With the point being, that it's not a problem with either approach since it depends on an app developer thinking "I should monitor my configuration for changes".

It does it when something is a "remove" and not an upgrade operation I've found. apt treats a remove and install for two packages that provide the same dependency as two separate operations - it tries to remove and normalize the system, before it installs the new one. So when it's something like xscreensaver it tries to remove the entire DE.

Isn't there a D-Bus interface specifically for doing "root-less" installations of new packages - i.e. you say "install this!" and it can check if you're allowed to, then do it?

Also isn't this an app-problem? There's no specific reason any Windows app will actually re-read a changed registry key. It's easy enough to stick an inotify on your config files (and tons of daemons do exactly this).

apt still has a tendency to create circular rings of dependencies ("remove one package, watch as it tries to remove your entire desktop environment"). Although within that context, this still feels like the wrong answer since the real issue is apt can be very silly about inspecting the operation you ask it to perform and concluding that everything will be fine (and there's no decent user tools to say "I'm breaking this, it's ok, let it stay broken").

Online dedup is the wrong solution to the problem since you have to keep the hash tables in memory. All you need is some install-time intelligence to reference count the files.

Pulse drives aren't exactly that efficient anyway. For the effort and manpower to build one (probably already in space) we could also develop suitable reactors for an nuclear thermal-lightbulb type engine (Project Pluto). That's also old technology, by and large - the engine was tested and functioned, and the principles of operating it with monopropellant in space are hardly an insurmountable challenge and essentially related to other technology (the Skylon engine or any of the other types of scramjets the US military is building)

HTTP submission is pretty common, since it's structurally easier to manage then SSL. You just use RSA encrypted payloads instead.

The point of the law is to shutdown the "notified of security flaw, did nothing" issue which shows up on /. repeatedly often in relation to things like banks.

You notify the company, if they do nothing you notify the government, who in turn now have the power to fine the company if they get breached. Cue companies actually reacting to security-flaw notifications rather then ignoring them till something happens.

Well the working idea is you take a wormhole that pops into existence due to quantum foaminess, stabilize it and blow it up to a usable size - and yeah, deal with the tidal forces by kind of the same means. I'm not sure anyone regards the process as especially likely or easy, but still.

Implanted Contact Lenses are the way to go IMO. 20 minute procedure, removable and replaceable if your eyes change substantially. Expensive though - but I'm looking into getting them since my own eyes are starting to fall on the "really can't see" side of things.

Though I suspect I'll be doing the augmented for technology thing soon: my new S4 has NFC and the first thing I looked up for it was how I could have an NFC activated lockscreen. You can buy the implantable chips for that cheaply, and with that and device encryption it would be an incredibly convenient solution.

There's a fair amount of effort focused this way, but the punchline is that you're not going to see 50% efficiency easily. Then you've got waste heat, fire-hazard issues and at that level of effort and expense you're better off going full on with methanol fuel cells (which can do 80%+ efficiency fairly easily).

A battery around the neck is not going to be light. Most of the weight of current-gen devices is now tied up in the batteries.

I think a better solution would be for us to actually put some thought into workflow of hot-swapping rechargeable batteries for a device used for long periods - the iPaq had this with a secondary NiMH cell so you could swap the Li-Ion battery way back in 2000. Surely, with some attention paid to design, the swap action etc. this could actually be made smoothly usable.